If you mean that the immigrants will come in, see what needs to be done and do it, I would generally agree with you. How does that solve the problem of the portion of the population THAT IS ALREADY HERE, that doesn't seem inclined to work? Not only are they not inclined to work, they seem to have this really bad habit of having children out of wedlock. Either we adjust the behaviors of those people, or they are going to bring the system down with them.
In your plan for mass immigration, where are the immigrants going to get the resources to fix up the houses? There aren't enough jobs for the current residents.
Completely off topic here, but America needs to seriously reform the welfare system. There are significant portions of the population whose entire aspirations in life involve getting qualified for either General Relief or Social Security Insurance payments. They are content to take to their EBT coupons and subsist on whatever the government can tax the productive members of society for. Welfare should be a supplement. Welfare should be a government match against hours worked. The hours worked can be community service for all I care. But people need to be put to work if they want the state to tax people with jobs to support them. Maybe I'm a bit bitter from riding through the train South Central LA every day, but the system is broken.
As long as I'm ranting, they need to modify the welfare system and deny payments to felons and their children. That would go a long way to dealing with the "baby daddy" syndrome of stupid girls letting themselves get knocked up by the most alpha, ghetto hood thugs they can find. All of a sudden the baby of a gangster won't be a free ticket to hundreds of dollars a month and a free place to live. Require a paternity test and a valid identify for the father of the child. The government needs to start holding the people that they support accountable for the choices those people make about how they live their lives. I'm sick and tired of seeing my tax dollars disappearing into the bottomless pit that is the ghetto.
Agreed. It's definitely a site that has to be read with that bias in mind. Often times the articles read like propaganda pieces. I do find the site informative though because they provide "the other side" of the story a lot of the time. They seem to be doing a good job of covering the the SCO, and the dynamics of the political situation in Central Asia. It's nice to have a counter-balance that presents some suggestions about why America is so heavily involved in the region, beyond the party of line, "To keep the world safe from Islamic extremists."
San Francisco was the first random large city that came to mind, and I used Libertarian instead of Republican or Democrat to draw a parallel with a group that lacks a large base of support among the majority of the population is. It wasn't a very good parallel, because in Iran the challenger was endorsed by the powers that be. As another poster pointed out, John McCain would have been a better choice.
I came across another analysis of the Iranian situation, this time from GlobalResearch.ca.
In addition to quoting the authors of a poll conducted in Iran between May 11th and May 20th that showed Ahmadinejad leading by a 2 to 1 margin, even among ethnic Azeris, the analysis also touches upon the importance of the class divide, and the limited extent of the opposition party's base. Emphasis mine
"...this class divide that is largely ignored by the Western media. Mousavi's so-called reforms were pitched largely to a relatively privileged and narrow social base. The reforms themselves consisted essentially of a toning down of the rhetoric employed by Ahmadinejad in order to smooth the way to improved relations with Washington, an easing of US-backed sanctions and the opening up of the country to foreign capital. At the same time, they were identified with "free market" capitalism and opposition to the social assistance programs for the working class and rural poor. Such austerity measures hardly served as a pole of attraction for these layers, which constitute the majority of the Iranian population."
We're expected to be surprised that a country comprised of mostly rural and working poor people who depend on the government for their basic needs turned out to vote against a person who spoke openly about opposing social welfare programs? Of course, the country wouldn't be so poor if their leaders weren't carrying out programs that caused them to be sanctioned by the international community in the first place, but that is another subject entirely. I feel for the people in Iran who are striving for change, much like I feel for homosexual people in America, and people stuck in the Bible Belt of the midwest and south eastern United States. There are a lot of back asswards people in the world who put religion first and foremost. However ignorant those people may seem, in a democratic system they are entitled to their opinions and rights. If they are in the majority, things are going to suck for more liberal, open minded, freedom loving individuals.
What if instead of Iran and Tehran, it was the United States of America and San Francisco? What if instead of Iranian opposite party, it was Libertarians? What if instead of US citizens assisting Iranians dissidents, it was Chinese assisting US dissidents? Would it be a good thing, or an assault on our national sovreignty?
Until we hear otherwise, we have a violent minority who are upset about being under-represented. We also have sympathetic outsiders who are willing to support them.
The whole situation is pretty bitter sweet. On one hand, there are a group of people who are standing up for a Westernized idea of freedom. On the other hand, they are the minority voice in a country that for the most part seems okay with a pious, religious based social order. For democracy to work, the minority has to behave themselves and go along with what the majority has decided on.
I'm not a big fan of the socialization of our economic system, but you don't see me organizing violent protests in the street and demanding a return to a fiscal system more in line with what was defined in the Constitution.
Its just one more trick to trap consumers with. Beyond that, if you have a phone that you really like, you will stay with the carrier to keep it. Imagine that a person has entered into a three year contract with AT&T for an iPhone. Tomorrow, Verizon announces that they will support the iPhone on their network. The person with the contract with AT&T, no matter how much they want to go to Verizon, are SOL until the end of their contract term. AT&T will not provide the unlock code for the iPhone.
It's amazing how easily people are manipulated by the media. I'm going to paste some accurate analysis from Stratfor about the reality of politics in Iran, and why as Westerners we are getting a distorted picture (above and beyond the fact that the CIA would like to see the government of Iran overthrown).
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Stratfor
WESTERN MISCONCEPTIONS MEET IRANIAN REALITY
By George Friedman
In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.
The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch's modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years -- Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn't speak Farsi all that well.
The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising -- Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn't think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than the those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran
Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading -- because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy -- people Americans didn't speak to because they couldn't. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.
Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization -- a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook "iPod liberalism," the idea that anyone who listens to rock 'n' roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran -- a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.
There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand -- but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would
If anything she is too efficient because she ends up doing other people's work for them and isn't very good at saying no. FWIW, keyboard shortcuts are slightly beyond the realm of the average user. I think that they are natural for people who grew up with a CLI. For the rest of the world who have to use a mouse for everything, they are kind of like IT guy voodoo. I always try to point them out for people when the opportunity arises. For instance the other day I was helping a woman compose some emails, and I saw that whenever she needed to italicize something, she would type the word, highlight it, go up to the font menu and then select the italic version of the font. She was much happier when I introduced her to Ctrl+I, then as a bonus I wrote down that plus Ctrl+U and Ctrl+B on a sticky note and gave it to her as an early Christmas present.
Do you work for the providers? I'm sure you could safely say that they understood that some people might figure out how to use them as modems and do so. Like just about everything else when it comes to corporate America and capacity planning, they probably failed to properly estimate the magnitude of the issue.
To keep you from taking your phone to another provider before your contract expires. We buy locked Blackberry's from AT&T where I work. After the contracts are expired, we call up AT&T and get the unlock code from them. Sometimes we have to call a few times before we get connected to a customer service rep who is helpful, but it is possible to get the unlock codes from AT&T.
It's an issue of semantics. The providers thought that they were offering unlimited data plans to use with the built in web browsing capabilities of the phone. Not unlimited data plans for phones that are connected to computers and used like modems. Soon enough there will be enough of an uproar over the ambiguity and the lawyers will get together and come up with some new terms that more clearly define things in favor of the providers.
Your comment is timely because my girl friend (I know, I must be lying) just came to me yesterday and started bitching about how much she hates Office 2007 and how doing common tasks has been completely changed. First she started ranting about not being able to do a simple undo, and was only able to undo after her co-worker told her about Ctrl+Z (she never found the menu command for undo). Then she went on a long tirade about how now instead of going to the file menu, she has to use the "Disk icon".
She is what I consider a fairly average computer user. She uses Word, Excel and Powerpoint to do everything from bid quotes, to standard office paperwork, to presentations for the staff. Microsoft trotted out the "ribbon" with a campaign about how it is supposed to be more intuitive. Outside of Microsoft marketing, I haven't heard a single user in the real world do anything but complain about how jacked the "new, improved" interface is.
It's not expensive to maintain them (gravel isn't expensive)--but it is labor-intensive.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you Change(tm) based economic stimulus. All joking aside, it brings up an interesting subject. In the push toward high technology, the emphasis has been on improving efficency and reducing the number of people involved in any particular process. The down side is that a lot of people end up unemployed. I wonder if there is a balance to be struck. Given that 2/3rds of our economy is based on consumer spending, we need people who are employed. In a lot of cases, the automated and computerized way of doing things may be the most efficient. However, is it necessarily the best for the country? What if we could replace some fancy systems with a bunch of low skilled labor? It seems like going backwards, and in many ways it might be. On the other hand, it could very well make economic sense in terms of employing people versus having them unemployed and living as parasites on the tax base.
They can TRY to find something ot harass or arrest you for. If you aren't doing anything illegal, then you don't have anything to worry about. Sure they can hold you up for a little while, but so what? Life goes on. Get badge numbers and contact internal affairs and file a report. They have to take your report. If a pattern of harassment comes up, you can sue the hell out of the department on the grounds of your civil liberties being violated.
My experience with the police officers I have known is that they are much too busy dealing with every day police work (traffic stops, domestic violence, neighbors not getting along, etc). They don't have time to hassle random people for no good reason. As a kid, I got "hassled by the man" for skate boarding quite frequently but that's about it. In high school when I was raving I had to deal with the cops fairly frequently when they busted up parties. Now at 31 years old, I've found that unless I'm doing something that is pissing other people off to the point where they need to call the cops, I don't have to deal with them.
Like the person you're responding to said, why not just show the ID and save yourself some time? Often times the cops are just going to run it and check you for warrants. Do you have warrants that you're worried about? If not, then you're just setting yourself up for trouble. Not trouble that you can't get out of mind you. All you need to know is the question, "Am I free to go now officer?" Unless the police have reasonable reason to detain you, they can't detain you. If they want to search you, the phrase, "I do not consent to a search officer." will serve you well.
If you are being pulled over in your car, you have to show the officer your license because you have to have a valid license to operate a motor vehicle. Probable cause never comes into it. The only time an officer has to establish probable cause to ask you for identification is if you are doing something that does not require you to carry an identification card (like walking down the street).
In answer to your question about knowing when you can or cannot, there are some good rules of thumb. One, you can ask some variation of, "Officer, what is your cause for...?" Then you can say, "I do not consent to... (search, identification check, etc)." The important thing is to make it clear that you do not consent to what is happening, but do not resist. The time to deal with the law is in court, not with the officer. Also, let the officer tell you what is going on. Don't try to talk to them. Don't try to dispute things with them. Don't answer their questions. If possible, answer questions with a question. "What can I help you with officer?" "Am I free to go officer?" "How does that apply to me officer?" "Are you detaining me now officer?"
And why are you replying to someone who replied to someone who replied to a troll!?! Hmmmmm, I don't like the trend that could be developing here... not that it's going to stop me from posting and trying whore some +Funny karma.
They are the winner because they own the lion share of the browser market. They got there through dirty, underhanded and illegal tactics, but they came out on top. That battle has been fought and is in the past. The real question is how does bundling other browsers fix the underlying issue, and that issue is that a large portion of the net isn't coded to a consistent standard? You can point Safari, FF and Chrome at the same webpage and get different results... even if the page is written to the most current HTML standard.
How do you fix the fact that 95% of computer users don't care what browser they use, and they just want to access "the internet"? What do you do when Jane installs Opera and her brother John installs Chrome and one of them can use the latest stupid Facebook widget, and the other can't?
At this point I'm just trying to get people to see the next step. Getting rid of IE isn't going to suddenly make everything on the web peachy keen. Just like changing from Windows to OSX doesn't suddenly making using a computer a gotcha free experience. There are just a different set of challenges to overcome, and a different way to accomplish the same task.
What I'm saying is that the horse is out of the barn at this point. What they have done in the past WAS illegal. I was a staunch Netscape user up until I didn't have a choice and had to start using IE6. Unfortunately that is all water under the bridge at this point. The EU is attempting to right a wrong that has already gone so wrong that it is unable to be fixed at this point.
I try to be as pragmatic as possible. With Windows in its current incarnation, a user can download an alternate browser and there isn't anything to keep it from functioning. That being said, Microsoft is still doing dirty things. For example, with IE as my default browser I can click Start > Run and type in a www. prefixed URL and it will launch the browser. If FF is my default browser and I type in a www. prefixed URL, it throws up an error message, then launches FF. There are little annoyances like that, and it does raise suspicions. Maybe the FF dev team hasn't hooked the right API, and MS is doing them a favor by throwing the error before launching their browser... Anyway...
Whether or not Windows 7 comes with alternate browsers available from the get-go doesn't fix the problem that you've identified. The problem is that a large portion of the net is coded at IE6, and Microsoft's bastardization of the standards. In my view of the world, it isn't the job of the government to step in an make Microsoft offer alternate browsers. What I think should happen is that webmasters should grow a pair and write standards compliant code. To go back to my Wells Fargo example... the CFO at my organization is an OSS geek, he hates Microsoft. But when I told him that we had to use IE to access the Wells Fargo sites, he saw the logic. I can assure you, if it was reversed and we had to use FF to access a business critical site, it would happen.
Businesses drive technology and innovation. As soon as a business comes up with a killer app that only works in FF, there will be adoption. It's just like how how many people are using VMWare, running a custom Linux kernel, to virtualize Windows server instances. When the business need arises to use an alternative, people will go that way. No government intervention necessary.
To sum it up more clearly, I don't think anti-trust law should be used in this instance because doing so won't fix the underlying issue. At this point (in the present time, right now, 2009) Microsoft isn't doing anything different than Apple or Red Hat. They are providing an OS with a pre-packaged browser that can be uninstalled and replaced by a half dozen other alternatives. I think it's perfectly fine that they are being forced to present the user with alternatives. The alternative isn't going to do the user any good when they point Opera at Jane's Online Knitting Shop that was written with FrontPage 2003 and it fails to render. If you have some thoughts about how to fix that clusterfuck, I'm all ears.
What do you think about this... in 15 years this conversation is going to be mostly irrelevant. There are so many free and nearly free alternatives coming up that companies being formed now, without the overhead of Microsoft licenses, are going to be at a competitive advantage when competing against companies who are spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in Microsoft tax. The market place will decide if the advantages offered by proprietary tools offset their cost.
I have to admit a bias because of my own narrow way of thinking about computers. Everything that I have ever needed to do with a computer, I was able to do with a Microsoft product. Microsoft won the desktop war, despite there being alternatives. It is only natural that the company that controls ~90% of the desktop space is going to influence what the users of those desktops can do when they get online.
Let me ask you a question. What is it that you want to do, right now, that you can't do because Microsoft is bundling IE with their OS? Is there some killer app that you want to write, but can't because Microsoft is limiting you? Is there an awesome service that you could provide, if only it weren't for that darn IE and its lack-luster feature set and sub-par standards implementations?
The fact of the matter is that computers are complex. Operating systems are extremely complex, multi-faceted bundles of inter-operating code. Back in the 1990s, Microsoft (along with other companies) saw that technology was moving toward a web centric world and they jumped in both feet. Even in the 1990s, there were alternatives. My first web browsing experience was on a BSD box running X-windows and Netscape. It's not like there weren't other alternatives out there.
The "problem" if you will is that Microsoft is such a behemoth. They control the entire stack. Pretty much anything that you'd want to do with a computer can be done with Microsoft software. There are always new markets emerging. Just the other day, there was the talk of Google Wave, and the need for organizations to have multiple people working on the same document. Microsoft filing locking sucks. Trying to make concurrent changes to live documents absolutely blows. There is a niche there, and odds are the same thing will happen there as everywhere else... someone else will come up with a solution, then Microsoft will copy it and offer it to their customers.
Like I said, I'm biased. I don't think that their "illegal" behavior is harming me. There are alternatives out there if I want to pursue them. I use a mix of Windows, OSX and Linux at my job. You can go meta, and talk about how Microsoft is harming us collectively, in that their software is exploitable, and spam spewing zombie bots make the internet less nice than it could be. I'd agree with that.
In my mind, it all revolves around the question of, "What can't I do with a computer because Microsoft is preventing it." For me, the answer is "nothing" but I will use the caveat that my field of vision is pretty narrow. I'm just an IT guy who currently serves a user base of a little over a hundred. As a consultant, I had a user base of a couple thousand spread across just about every industry imaginable. In fifteen years, I've only come across two real complaints against Microsoft in the real world.
1.) The Windows/Microsoft software does X, but we need it to do X+Y and do Z slightly differently. In that case, you need access to the source code and with the Windows and other third party APIs, the code isn't there to be had.
2.) The Windows/Microsoft software costs more than we want to pay for it. I agree, and that is why I think competition is a good thing. The more alternatives that there are, the more affordable Microsoft has to price their software to compete.
In my mind, the difficulty in beating Microsoft with the anti-trust club has to do with the newness of the internet and computers as tools in society. It's not like Microsoft is the phone company, and they control the lines and make you rent your telephone from them. It's not like they the railroads controlling inter-contental travel, or Standard Oil with a lock on the commodities market. You can plug an Apple box into the internet just as easily as a Windows box. You can buy a white box computer and put Linux on it just as easily as you can Windows. Microsoft didn't implement TCP/IP, in fact they were late into the game... they were running their own POS network protocol for the lo
Are you talking about kids who are disruptive in the class room, or are you talking about full on, dual diagnosed, developmentally disabled kids? My girlfriend's brother is the latter, and he lives in a state facility and you're right, he won't ever be very economically productive (he works at the Salvation Army) and happiness with his situation given the shitty hand that God dealt him is pretty much the best that he can hope for. To fault the educational system for having to devote resources to the poor souls who were screwed by the genetic lottery isn't very fair, or even on target. Of course they are going to require more care and attention and resources. It's a fact of life. What's the alternative? Gas chambers for "the good of society" so that they don't disadvantage the smart kids by absorbing more than the statistically average of educational resources?
The reality is that gifted education classes don't need the same level of resources because the kids are bright. They don't need TAs to push their wheelchairs to the bathroom so that they can use the facilities. They just need good teachers who care about learning and care about teaching. They just need an environment free from distractions where they can focus on their studies and excel.
Why do you think advanced education and GATE are a joke? I started college as a sophomore because of all the AP tests that I passed. Other kids in my same school didn't even graduate. How much more of a head start on adult life should I have expected? Heck, I had my Novell CNA my junior year in high school and that laid the foundation for me to get my CNE not long after I started working in the real world. That wasn't even an advanced placement program... it was ROP. That was back in 1994, when a lot of people were still using Novell Netware.
Before answering your final question (and it is a good one), I'm just going to comment about Opera on the mobile phone. I downloaded Opera on my own because the bundled version of mobile IE sucked. It was practically unusable. The phone marker didn't give Opera a penny and there wasn't any cost to me to get Opera on the phone.
I'm all for anti-trust law. In a completely open and free market, monopolies are the natural outcome of human instinct. Humans will form a large, powerful group and then club, undermine or otherwise limit the ability of anyone else to come near the resources controlled by that group. Anti-trust law is a good tool to use to give society as a whole options, and to make sure that innovations continue to be made.
In the subject of Microsoft and the web browser wars, I think the horse is already out of the barn on this one. As numerous people have already observed, Microsoft fell behind and sat on their laurels with IE6 for too long. They failed to integrate new features, and it was a security nightmare. It came back to bite them in the ass, and created a niche for FireFox and other browsers to fill. Once Microsoft started losing significant market share, they had to step up their game and copy (in most cases) and innovate in new ways to either match or beat what the competition was doing. They did that with IE7 and 8.
The argument that I give the most weight to from the anti-IE camp is that IE isn't standards compliant. I completely agree. I was futzing around with HTML code in the days of Netscape and IE3. I've never been a programmer, and the idea of having to write two versions of code even back then irked me. I went into networking and system administration rather than beat my head up against standards compliance and vendor specific implementations. I remember when Netscape supported "mouseover" but IE would freak on the same piece of code. Anyway...
I think at this point we are going to have to take two steps backward to take one forward. Major websites that are rely on IE are going to need to be rewritten. In most cases, companies aren't going to invest the resources to do so, and consumers won't care. Where I work, FF is the default browser, but our bank (Wells Fargo) requires IE for some of their corporate portals so the people in the finance department have an IE icon too.
I can't really hate Microsoft too much because they gave people the tools that they needed to get the job done. In the case of Wells Fargo, Microsoft technology allowed Wells Fargo to give their customers access to their data. If there was an OSS alternative, do you think that Wells Fargo, a huge bank that thrives on pinching pennies, would have gone the most cost effective route? I can almost guarantee that their backend databases aren't running on Microsoft SQL Server, so it probably wasn't a "Lets stick with Microsoft since they do everything else for us." decision.
I think Microsoft made some big mistakes. With ActiveX, they got things backward. The trend turned out to be sharing parts of your computer onto the web, not bringing the web onto your computer. However they saw where the trend was going, world wide collaboration and easy access to resources. They just blew the implementation, and made it a huge security hole. That's the problem with Microsoft, they seem to focus on features and functionality before they focus on stability, reliability or security.
But back to anti-trust law and Microsoft browsers. The market has pressured Microsoft to incorporate better standards compliance into their browser. That's the end goal, right? To make sure that the monopolist supports what the people say that they want.
There are other companies out there who are making their own browser, and leveraging different ways of doing things (Google specifically). I can picture a time sometime soon when a "web browser" isn't much more than a sandbox for Java or some similar technology to run in and access code from a pre-determined subset of server resources
I often read similar statements about how (paraphrasing here), the "dumb kids hold back the smart kids". Here in California, they have the GATE (Gifted And Talented Education) program. All of the high functioning kids got involved in GATE, and all of them had to be tested to get in (IQ tests and the like). Aren't there similar programs in other states? For elementry school, I was bused to a magnent school where the district gathered all of the bright kids together. For middle and high school, I was in honors and advanced placement classes. The district did a good job of targeting the kids who had potential and creating an environment for them to thrive in. Now granted, that was over fifteen years ago, and things might have changed considerably since then.
I don't feel bad for the bright kids because they can succeed despite the odds. I feel bad for the average kids who get dragged down by the rest of herd. The average kids who could understand most of the same concepts and materials that the bright kids do, if only they had more time with it.
The Web browser market qualifies as such a market.
Is there really a "web browser market" when only one of the four major players are actually trying to charge for their product? IE, FF and Chrome are free. The only company out there trying to make money by selling a web browser is Opera. Opera may be a nice web browser. When I was using a WinCE phone, Opera Mobile was absolutely the best browser for that platform. Despite whatever technical merits their browser might have, I think Opera is looking to the government to create a market for them that in a truly free market, wouldn't exist.
Nah, we can't even conquer Iraq properly, much less the world. At best we can hope to be the world destabilizers. Our appetite for drugs and power has already given us a huge infrastructure to utilize for those purposes. Look at what a great job we've done in Central and South America. Hell, we had a direct hand in building the biggest "terrorist" menance to date, al Qaeda. The CIA and their friends at DIA, DEA and all the other ??A's seem to be damn good a destabilizing things.
If anyone should be the world police, I'm going to nominate the Dutch. They might not have the uber-paramilitary, population supressing tactics that Americans are proud of, but they do seem to be seriously nice people... and they speak a whole slew of languages. Of course the "problem" with having a bunch of well educated people doing police work is that they tend to ask too many questions. Policing takes a certain herd mentality, an "us against them" mindset that is the antithesis of a well rounded educational process.
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If you mean that the immigrants will come in, see what needs to be done and do it, I would generally agree with you. How does that solve the problem of the portion of the population THAT IS ALREADY HERE, that doesn't seem inclined to work? Not only are they not inclined to work, they seem to have this really bad habit of having children out of wedlock. Either we adjust the behaviors of those people, or they are going to bring the system down with them.
In your plan for mass immigration, where are the immigrants going to get the resources to fix up the houses? There aren't enough jobs for the current residents.
Completely off topic here, but America needs to seriously reform the welfare system. There are significant portions of the population whose entire aspirations in life involve getting qualified for either General Relief or Social Security Insurance payments. They are content to take to their EBT coupons and subsist on whatever the government can tax the productive members of society for. Welfare should be a supplement. Welfare should be a government match against hours worked. The hours worked can be community service for all I care. But people need to be put to work if they want the state to tax people with jobs to support them. Maybe I'm a bit bitter from riding through the train South Central LA every day, but the system is broken.
As long as I'm ranting, they need to modify the welfare system and deny payments to felons and their children. That would go a long way to dealing with the "baby daddy" syndrome of stupid girls letting themselves get knocked up by the most alpha, ghetto hood thugs they can find. All of a sudden the baby of a gangster won't be a free ticket to hundreds of dollars a month and a free place to live. Require a paternity test and a valid identify for the father of the child. The government needs to start holding the people that they support accountable for the choices those people make about how they live their lives. I'm sick and tired of seeing my tax dollars disappearing into the bottomless pit that is the ghetto.
Agreed. It's definitely a site that has to be read with that bias in mind. Often times the articles read like propaganda pieces. I do find the site informative though because they provide "the other side" of the story a lot of the time. They seem to be doing a good job of covering the the SCO, and the dynamics of the political situation in Central Asia. It's nice to have a counter-balance that presents some suggestions about why America is so heavily involved in the region, beyond the party of line, "To keep the world safe from Islamic extremists."
I came across another analysis of the Iranian situation, this time from GlobalResearch.ca.
In addition to quoting the authors of a poll conducted in Iran between May 11th and May 20th that showed Ahmadinejad leading by a 2 to 1 margin, even among ethnic Azeris, the analysis also touches upon the importance of the class divide, and the limited extent of the opposition party's base. Emphasis mine
"...this class divide that is largely ignored by the Western media. Mousavi's so-called reforms were pitched largely to a relatively privileged and narrow social base. The reforms themselves consisted essentially of a toning down of the rhetoric employed by Ahmadinejad in order to smooth the way to improved relations with Washington, an easing of US-backed sanctions and the opening up of the country to foreign capital. At the same time, they were identified with "free market" capitalism and opposition to the social assistance programs for the working class and rural poor. Such austerity measures hardly served as a pole of attraction for these layers, which constitute the majority of the Iranian population."
We're expected to be surprised that a country comprised of mostly rural and working poor people who depend on the government for their basic needs turned out to vote against a person who spoke openly about opposing social welfare programs? Of course, the country wouldn't be so poor if their leaders weren't carrying out programs that caused them to be sanctioned by the international community in the first place, but that is another subject entirely. I feel for the people in Iran who are striving for change, much like I feel for homosexual people in America, and people stuck in the Bible Belt of the midwest and south eastern United States. There are a lot of back asswards people in the world who put religion first and foremost. However ignorant those people may seem, in a democratic system they are entitled to their opinions and rights. If they are in the majority, things are going to suck for more liberal, open minded, freedom loving individuals.
What if instead of Iran and Tehran, it was the United States of America and San Francisco? What if instead of Iranian opposite party, it was Libertarians? What if instead of US citizens assisting Iranians dissidents, it was Chinese assisting US dissidents? Would it be a good thing, or an assault on our national sovreignty?
Until we hear otherwise, we have a violent minority who are upset about being under-represented. We also have sympathetic outsiders who are willing to support them.
The whole situation is pretty bitter sweet. On one hand, there are a group of people who are standing up for a Westernized idea of freedom. On the other hand, they are the minority voice in a country that for the most part seems okay with a pious, religious based social order. For democracy to work, the minority has to behave themselves and go along with what the majority has decided on.
I'm not a big fan of the socialization of our economic system, but you don't see me organizing violent protests in the street and demanding a return to a fiscal system more in line with what was defined in the Constitution.
Its just one more trick to trap consumers with. Beyond that, if you have a phone that you really like, you will stay with the carrier to keep it. Imagine that a person has entered into a three year contract with AT&T for an iPhone. Tomorrow, Verizon announces that they will support the iPhone on their network. The person with the contract with AT&T, no matter how much they want to go to Verizon, are SOL until the end of their contract term. AT&T will not provide the unlock code for the iPhone.
It's amazing how easily people are manipulated by the media. I'm going to paste some accurate analysis from Stratfor about the reality of politics in Iran, and why as Westerners we are getting a distorted picture (above and beyond the fact that the CIA would like to see the government of Iran overthrown).
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Stratfor
WESTERN MISCONCEPTIONS MEET IRANIAN REALITY
By George Friedman
In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.
The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch's modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years -- Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn't speak Farsi all that well.
The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising -- Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn't think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than the those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran
Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading -- because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy -- people Americans didn't speak to because they couldn't. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.
Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization -- a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook "iPod liberalism," the idea that anyone who listens to rock 'n' roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran -- a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.
There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand -- but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would
If anything she is too efficient because she ends up doing other people's work for them and isn't very good at saying no. FWIW, keyboard shortcuts are slightly beyond the realm of the average user. I think that they are natural for people who grew up with a CLI. For the rest of the world who have to use a mouse for everything, they are kind of like IT guy voodoo. I always try to point them out for people when the opportunity arises. For instance the other day I was helping a woman compose some emails, and I saw that whenever she needed to italicize something, she would type the word, highlight it, go up to the font menu and then select the italic version of the font. She was much happier when I introduced her to Ctrl+I, then as a bonus I wrote down that plus Ctrl+U and Ctrl+B on a sticky note and gave it to her as an early Christmas present.
Do you work for the providers? I'm sure you could safely say that they understood that some people might figure out how to use them as modems and do so. Like just about everything else when it comes to corporate America and capacity planning, they probably failed to properly estimate the magnitude of the issue.
To keep you from taking your phone to another provider before your contract expires. We buy locked Blackberry's from AT&T where I work. After the contracts are expired, we call up AT&T and get the unlock code from them. Sometimes we have to call a few times before we get connected to a customer service rep who is helpful, but it is possible to get the unlock codes from AT&T.
It's an issue of semantics. The providers thought that they were offering unlimited data plans to use with the built in web browsing capabilities of the phone. Not unlimited data plans for phones that are connected to computers and used like modems. Soon enough there will be enough of an uproar over the ambiguity and the lawyers will get together and come up with some new terms that more clearly define things in favor of the providers.
Your comment is timely because my girl friend (I know, I must be lying) just came to me yesterday and started bitching about how much she hates Office 2007 and how doing common tasks has been completely changed. First she started ranting about not being able to do a simple undo, and was only able to undo after her co-worker told her about Ctrl+Z (she never found the menu command for undo). Then she went on a long tirade about how now instead of going to the file menu, she has to use the "Disk icon".
She is what I consider a fairly average computer user. She uses Word, Excel and Powerpoint to do everything from bid quotes, to standard office paperwork, to presentations for the staff. Microsoft trotted out the "ribbon" with a campaign about how it is supposed to be more intuitive. Outside of Microsoft marketing, I haven't heard a single user in the real world do anything but complain about how jacked the "new, improved" interface is.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you Change(tm) based economic stimulus. All joking aside, it brings up an interesting subject. In the push toward high technology, the emphasis has been on improving efficency and reducing the number of people involved in any particular process. The down side is that a lot of people end up unemployed. I wonder if there is a balance to be struck. Given that 2/3rds of our economy is based on consumer spending, we need people who are employed. In a lot of cases, the automated and computerized way of doing things may be the most efficient. However, is it necessarily the best for the country? What if we could replace some fancy systems with a bunch of low skilled labor? It seems like going backwards, and in many ways it might be. On the other hand, it could very well make economic sense in terms of employing people versus having them unemployed and living as parasites on the tax base.
Think "food rationing" due to climate change and/or complete collapse of the dollar as the world reserve currency and you're not too far off the mark.
They can TRY to find something ot harass or arrest you for. If you aren't doing anything illegal, then you don't have anything to worry about. Sure they can hold you up for a little while, but so what? Life goes on. Get badge numbers and contact internal affairs and file a report. They have to take your report. If a pattern of harassment comes up, you can sue the hell out of the department on the grounds of your civil liberties being violated.
My experience with the police officers I have known is that they are much too busy dealing with every day police work (traffic stops, domestic violence, neighbors not getting along, etc). They don't have time to hassle random people for no good reason. As a kid, I got "hassled by the man" for skate boarding quite frequently but that's about it. In high school when I was raving I had to deal with the cops fairly frequently when they busted up parties. Now at 31 years old, I've found that unless I'm doing something that is pissing other people off to the point where they need to call the cops, I don't have to deal with them.
Like the person you're responding to said, why not just show the ID and save yourself some time? Often times the cops are just going to run it and check you for warrants. Do you have warrants that you're worried about? If not, then you're just setting yourself up for trouble. Not trouble that you can't get out of mind you. All you need to know is the question, "Am I free to go now officer?" Unless the police have reasonable reason to detain you, they can't detain you. If they want to search you, the phrase, "I do not consent to a search officer." will serve you well.
If you are being pulled over in your car, you have to show the officer your license because you have to have a valid license to operate a motor vehicle. Probable cause never comes into it. The only time an officer has to establish probable cause to ask you for identification is if you are doing something that does not require you to carry an identification card (like walking down the street).
In answer to your question about knowing when you can or cannot, there are some good rules of thumb. One, you can ask some variation of, "Officer, what is your cause for ...?" Then you can say, "I do not consent to ... (search, identification check, etc)." The important thing is to make it clear that you do not consent to what is happening, but do not resist. The time to deal with the law is in court, not with the officer. Also, let the officer tell you what is going on. Don't try to talk to them. Don't try to dispute things with them. Don't answer their questions. If possible, answer questions with a question. "What can I help you with officer?" "Am I free to go officer?" "How does that apply to me officer?" "Are you detaining me now officer?"
And why are you replying to someone who replied to someone who replied to a troll!?! Hmmmmm, I don't like the trend that could be developing here... not that it's going to stop me from posting and trying whore some +Funny karma.
They are the winner because they own the lion share of the browser market. They got there through dirty, underhanded and illegal tactics, but they came out on top. That battle has been fought and is in the past. The real question is how does bundling other browsers fix the underlying issue, and that issue is that a large portion of the net isn't coded to a consistent standard? You can point Safari, FF and Chrome at the same webpage and get different results... even if the page is written to the most current HTML standard.
How do you fix the fact that 95% of computer users don't care what browser they use, and they just want to access "the internet"? What do you do when Jane installs Opera and her brother John installs Chrome and one of them can use the latest stupid Facebook widget, and the other can't?
At this point I'm just trying to get people to see the next step. Getting rid of IE isn't going to suddenly make everything on the web peachy keen. Just like changing from Windows to OSX doesn't suddenly making using a computer a gotcha free experience. There are just a different set of challenges to overcome, and a different way to accomplish the same task.
What I'm saying is that the horse is out of the barn at this point. What they have done in the past WAS illegal. I was a staunch Netscape user up until I didn't have a choice and had to start using IE6. Unfortunately that is all water under the bridge at this point. The EU is attempting to right a wrong that has already gone so wrong that it is unable to be fixed at this point.
I try to be as pragmatic as possible. With Windows in its current incarnation, a user can download an alternate browser and there isn't anything to keep it from functioning. That being said, Microsoft is still doing dirty things. For example, with IE as my default browser I can click Start > Run and type in a www. prefixed URL and it will launch the browser. If FF is my default browser and I type in a www. prefixed URL, it throws up an error message, then launches FF. There are little annoyances like that, and it does raise suspicions. Maybe the FF dev team hasn't hooked the right API, and MS is doing them a favor by throwing the error before launching their browser... Anyway...
Whether or not Windows 7 comes with alternate browsers available from the get-go doesn't fix the problem that you've identified. The problem is that a large portion of the net is coded at IE6, and Microsoft's bastardization of the standards. In my view of the world, it isn't the job of the government to step in an make Microsoft offer alternate browsers. What I think should happen is that webmasters should grow a pair and write standards compliant code. To go back to my Wells Fargo example... the CFO at my organization is an OSS geek, he hates Microsoft. But when I told him that we had to use IE to access the Wells Fargo sites, he saw the logic. I can assure you, if it was reversed and we had to use FF to access a business critical site, it would happen.
Businesses drive technology and innovation. As soon as a business comes up with a killer app that only works in FF, there will be adoption. It's just like how how many people are using VMWare, running a custom Linux kernel, to virtualize Windows server instances. When the business need arises to use an alternative, people will go that way. No government intervention necessary.
To sum it up more clearly, I don't think anti-trust law should be used in this instance because doing so won't fix the underlying issue. At this point (in the present time, right now, 2009) Microsoft isn't doing anything different than Apple or Red Hat. They are providing an OS with a pre-packaged browser that can be uninstalled and replaced by a half dozen other alternatives. I think it's perfectly fine that they are being forced to present the user with alternatives. The alternative isn't going to do the user any good when they point Opera at Jane's Online Knitting Shop that was written with FrontPage 2003 and it fails to render. If you have some thoughts about how to fix that clusterfuck, I'm all ears.
What do you think about this... in 15 years this conversation is going to be mostly irrelevant. There are so many free and nearly free alternatives coming up that companies being formed now, without the overhead of Microsoft licenses, are going to be at a competitive advantage when competing against companies who are spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in Microsoft tax. The market place will decide if the advantages offered by proprietary tools offset their cost.
I have to admit a bias because of my own narrow way of thinking about computers. Everything that I have ever needed to do with a computer, I was able to do with a Microsoft product. Microsoft won the desktop war, despite there being alternatives. It is only natural that the company that controls ~90% of the desktop space is going to influence what the users of those desktops can do when they get online.
Let me ask you a question. What is it that you want to do, right now, that you can't do because Microsoft is bundling IE with their OS? Is there some killer app that you want to write, but can't because Microsoft is limiting you? Is there an awesome service that you could provide, if only it weren't for that darn IE and its lack-luster feature set and sub-par standards implementations?
The fact of the matter is that computers are complex. Operating systems are extremely complex, multi-faceted bundles of inter-operating code. Back in the 1990s, Microsoft (along with other companies) saw that technology was moving toward a web centric world and they jumped in both feet. Even in the 1990s, there were alternatives. My first web browsing experience was on a BSD box running X-windows and Netscape. It's not like there weren't other alternatives out there.
The "problem" if you will is that Microsoft is such a behemoth. They control the entire stack. Pretty much anything that you'd want to do with a computer can be done with Microsoft software. There are always new markets emerging. Just the other day, there was the talk of Google Wave, and the need for organizations to have multiple people working on the same document. Microsoft filing locking sucks. Trying to make concurrent changes to live documents absolutely blows. There is a niche there, and odds are the same thing will happen there as everywhere else... someone else will come up with a solution, then Microsoft will copy it and offer it to their customers.
Like I said, I'm biased. I don't think that their "illegal" behavior is harming me. There are alternatives out there if I want to pursue them. I use a mix of Windows, OSX and Linux at my job. You can go meta, and talk about how Microsoft is harming us collectively, in that their software is exploitable, and spam spewing zombie bots make the internet less nice than it could be. I'd agree with that.
In my mind, it all revolves around the question of, "What can't I do with a computer because Microsoft is preventing it." For me, the answer is "nothing" but I will use the caveat that my field of vision is pretty narrow. I'm just an IT guy who currently serves a user base of a little over a hundred. As a consultant, I had a user base of a couple thousand spread across just about every industry imaginable. In fifteen years, I've only come across two real complaints against Microsoft in the real world.
1.) The Windows/Microsoft software does X, but we need it to do X+Y and do Z slightly differently. In that case, you need access to the source code and with the Windows and other third party APIs, the code isn't there to be had.
2.) The Windows/Microsoft software costs more than we want to pay for it. I agree, and that is why I think competition is a good thing. The more alternatives that there are, the more affordable Microsoft has to price their software to compete.
In my mind, the difficulty in beating Microsoft with the anti-trust club has to do with the newness of the internet and computers as tools in society. It's not like Microsoft is the phone company, and they control the lines and make you rent your telephone from them. It's not like they the railroads controlling inter-contental travel, or Standard Oil with a lock on the commodities market. You can plug an Apple box into the internet just as easily as a Windows box. You can buy a white box computer and put Linux on it just as easily as you can Windows. Microsoft didn't implement TCP/IP, in fact they were late into the game... they were running their own POS network protocol for the lo
Are you talking about kids who are disruptive in the class room, or are you talking about full on, dual diagnosed, developmentally disabled kids? My girlfriend's brother is the latter, and he lives in a state facility and you're right, he won't ever be very economically productive (he works at the Salvation Army) and happiness with his situation given the shitty hand that God dealt him is pretty much the best that he can hope for. To fault the educational system for having to devote resources to the poor souls who were screwed by the genetic lottery isn't very fair, or even on target. Of course they are going to require more care and attention and resources. It's a fact of life. What's the alternative? Gas chambers for "the good of society" so that they don't disadvantage the smart kids by absorbing more than the statistically average of educational resources?
The reality is that gifted education classes don't need the same level of resources because the kids are bright. They don't need TAs to push their wheelchairs to the bathroom so that they can use the facilities. They just need good teachers who care about learning and care about teaching. They just need an environment free from distractions where they can focus on their studies and excel.
Why do you think advanced education and GATE are a joke? I started college as a sophomore because of all the AP tests that I passed. Other kids in my same school didn't even graduate. How much more of a head start on adult life should I have expected? Heck, I had my Novell CNA my junior year in high school and that laid the foundation for me to get my CNE not long after I started working in the real world. That wasn't even an advanced placement program... it was ROP. That was back in 1994, when a lot of people were still using Novell Netware.
Before answering your final question (and it is a good one), I'm just going to comment about Opera on the mobile phone. I downloaded Opera on my own because the bundled version of mobile IE sucked. It was practically unusable. The phone marker didn't give Opera a penny and there wasn't any cost to me to get Opera on the phone.
I'm all for anti-trust law. In a completely open and free market, monopolies are the natural outcome of human instinct. Humans will form a large, powerful group and then club, undermine or otherwise limit the ability of anyone else to come near the resources controlled by that group. Anti-trust law is a good tool to use to give society as a whole options, and to make sure that innovations continue to be made.
In the subject of Microsoft and the web browser wars, I think the horse is already out of the barn on this one. As numerous people have already observed, Microsoft fell behind and sat on their laurels with IE6 for too long. They failed to integrate new features, and it was a security nightmare. It came back to bite them in the ass, and created a niche for FireFox and other browsers to fill. Once Microsoft started losing significant market share, they had to step up their game and copy (in most cases) and innovate in new ways to either match or beat what the competition was doing. They did that with IE7 and 8.
The argument that I give the most weight to from the anti-IE camp is that IE isn't standards compliant. I completely agree. I was futzing around with HTML code in the days of Netscape and IE3. I've never been a programmer, and the idea of having to write two versions of code even back then irked me. I went into networking and system administration rather than beat my head up against standards compliance and vendor specific implementations. I remember when Netscape supported "mouseover" but IE would freak on the same piece of code. Anyway...
I think at this point we are going to have to take two steps backward to take one forward. Major websites that are rely on IE are going to need to be rewritten. In most cases, companies aren't going to invest the resources to do so, and consumers won't care. Where I work, FF is the default browser, but our bank (Wells Fargo) requires IE for some of their corporate portals so the people in the finance department have an IE icon too.
I can't really hate Microsoft too much because they gave people the tools that they needed to get the job done. In the case of Wells Fargo, Microsoft technology allowed Wells Fargo to give their customers access to their data. If there was an OSS alternative, do you think that Wells Fargo, a huge bank that thrives on pinching pennies, would have gone the most cost effective route? I can almost guarantee that their backend databases aren't running on Microsoft SQL Server, so it probably wasn't a "Lets stick with Microsoft since they do everything else for us." decision.
I think Microsoft made some big mistakes. With ActiveX, they got things backward. The trend turned out to be sharing parts of your computer onto the web, not bringing the web onto your computer. However they saw where the trend was going, world wide collaboration and easy access to resources. They just blew the implementation, and made it a huge security hole. That's the problem with Microsoft, they seem to focus on features and functionality before they focus on stability, reliability or security.
But back to anti-trust law and Microsoft browsers. The market has pressured Microsoft to incorporate better standards compliance into their browser. That's the end goal, right? To make sure that the monopolist supports what the people say that they want.
There are other companies out there who are making their own browser, and leveraging different ways of doing things (Google specifically). I can picture a time sometime soon when a "web browser" isn't much more than a sandbox for Java or some similar technology to run in and access code from a pre-determined subset of server resources
I often read similar statements about how (paraphrasing here), the "dumb kids hold back the smart kids". Here in California, they have the GATE (Gifted And Talented Education) program. All of the high functioning kids got involved in GATE, and all of them had to be tested to get in (IQ tests and the like). Aren't there similar programs in other states? For elementry school, I was bused to a magnent school where the district gathered all of the bright kids together. For middle and high school, I was in honors and advanced placement classes. The district did a good job of targeting the kids who had potential and creating an environment for them to thrive in. Now granted, that was over fifteen years ago, and things might have changed considerably since then.
I don't feel bad for the bright kids because they can succeed despite the odds. I feel bad for the average kids who get dragged down by the rest of herd. The average kids who could understand most of the same concepts and materials that the bright kids do, if only they had more time with it.
Is there really a "web browser market" when only one of the four major players are actually trying to charge for their product? IE, FF and Chrome are free. The only company out there trying to make money by selling a web browser is Opera. Opera may be a nice web browser. When I was using a WinCE phone, Opera Mobile was absolutely the best browser for that platform. Despite whatever technical merits their browser might have, I think Opera is looking to the government to create a market for them that in a truly free market, wouldn't exist.
Nah, we can't even conquer Iraq properly, much less the world. At best we can hope to be the world destabilizers. Our appetite for drugs and power has already given us a huge infrastructure to utilize for those purposes. Look at what a great job we've done in Central and South America. Hell, we had a direct hand in building the biggest "terrorist" menance to date, al Qaeda. The CIA and their friends at DIA, DEA and all the other ??A's seem to be damn good a destabilizing things.
If anyone should be the world police, I'm going to nominate the Dutch. They might not have the uber-paramilitary, population supressing tactics that Americans are proud of, but they do seem to be seriously nice people... and they speak a whole slew of languages. Of course the "problem" with having a bunch of well educated people doing police work is that they tend to ask too many questions. Policing takes a certain herd mentality, an "us against them" mindset that is the antithesis of a well rounded educational process.