Walmart imports tons of Chinese goods because that's the country to where our manufacturing base has been transplanted by market forces for cheap labor.
Perhaps we in the US need to wonder why we cannot provide this for them, it isn't like Wal*Mart should be expected to pay more for something they can get for cheaper.
In Beijing you have the conservatives and the hard-line conservatives duking it out for control.
How in the heck is a communist party "conservative", China is still communal, they just are starting to realize how bad big government and income redistribution is.
If he is seriously suggesting that Dick Cheney is interested free markets
I notice that during the Bush/Cheney administration, the US economy is ranked as being less restricted than it was during the Clinton/Gore administration on the economic freedom scale.
why does Halliburton get no-bid contracts
Reason #1. Halliburton is far more efficient than the US government (even though Halliburton is commonly seen as inefficient, it still takes 2 to 3 Government employees to do the amount of work 1 Halliburton employee does.). #2. Halliburton does have a reasonably good company, the Left-Wing (and the media is left wing, 40% of reporters are liberal, while only 15% are conservative) media just overplays every tiny mistake they make.
oh and remember Saddam has WMD
Actually, Saddam did have WMDs. Few people heard about this, but there were hundreds of canisters of sarin and mustard gas artilery shells found in Iraq. Not as impressive as the WMDs we suspected him of having, but still WMDs none the less.
and is helping AQ
To a limited extent Saddam did provide some aid to AQ (though not much, it was mostly that Saddam knew AQ was there and offered them protection) and look who we are fighting in Iraq right now, AQ. Oh, but wait, there are no AQ in Iraq.
and global warming doesnt exist,,
Few have said that it doesn't exist, but many have said that GW is overblown. Truth is, it is extreamly overblown. Sure, the Earth is warming a little, but we aint exactly gonna melt. The earth was still in the little Ice Age less than 200 years ago. So yeah, the earth may warm up a tad. Second, we can adapt to global warming, and doing so would probably be easier than fighting it. We will have a longer growing season. We will have the Artic Ocean open during the summer for ships to cross. We will be able to live further north. So what is so horrifying? Also, do you really think we can just suddently change our entire energy economy overnight? The use of alternative fuels is too costly. Nuclear is probably the best alternative to coal, but it had gotten death by fud over the years. Ethanol may be a replacement for gas, but it will take time to develop. Hibrids may work better. They are cheaper to run (for power, florecent lights are kind of the equivolent). But hibrids are still sorta Beta technology. Hydrogen cars simply shift CO2 emmisions from gas to the coal plants we need to produce the energy to get hydrogen. Bush has also put a lot of effort into these technologies, but he is a realist. He knows this wont happen on a whim.
oil companies don't conspire with corrupt governments
And what governments don't have corruption? In the US both parties have a very long history of it. Most other nations are worse than we are. Oil prices aren't really that high. If you adjust for inflation, they were far higher in the 20s. Oil also is rediculously cheap compaired to other products when you consider the cost of making the product. Bottled water, coffee, ice cream, and many other products are pricier. Yes oil has to be discovered using very expensive equitment, then it has to be drilled for deep benieth the earth (and sometimes this is done out on the ocean were hurricanes can destroy millions worth of equipment) or in hostile areas of the middle east were you have cartels that hate America. The oil must be brough up. Shipped to a refinery at the cost of millions, then it must be refined, also costing massive amounts, then it again must be shipped in very expensive trucks at a cost of thousands more. Then gas stations must sell it and they take a cut. Then the government taxes the hell out of it. It amazes me that gas is so cheap. Starbucks overcharges you several times more than ExxonMobil.
In an ideal world we'd all be typing these messages on Slashdot on AmigaOS based PCs rather then Windows-based or 'i'd rather die then use Windows so I use Linux'-based PCs.:(
Interestingly, Linux would not exist without the PC. Linus Torvalds wrote it to learn about the 386 processor so he would never have written it (he first learned to code on an early commodore/vic model so I suspect he would not have needed to learn more about that CPU). Also, without the PC and it's stardardized hardware Linux would have died quickly. The commodore, apple, amiga, and the like were all closed hardware. Linux wouldn't have done well with having so many hardware variations. I also doubt those companies would have allowed for it with published hardware info and the like. Remember Be Inc? Apple blew them out of the water when Be left the hardware buisness and stuck with software. This forced Be to transition from the PPC to x86, but it crippled them so much that they eventually died out.
We have lost something though. The C64 and similar PCs had a few attributes few computers have had since. The most painful loss was all those young minds who will never be influenced to learn BASIC and take up programming. (This BTW is also what origionally got Linus into programming. His Grandfather encouraged him to learn BASIC so he would have an intrest in math. After his grandfather died, Linus kept the Commodore VIC and continued learning to code, though he obviously began to learn more programming languages. Eventually he got tired of the VIC, bought a Timex, and then later down the line an IBM clone. He learned to use Minix on the IBM clone and wanted to improve uppon its terminal emulator. After he did that, he wanted to work on fixing drivers. Gradually, he worked on a kernel and used GNU software to fill in until he had an OS. Then one day, he accedentally told the PC to access his hard disk instead of his modem, and destroyed the Minix partition. He decided to just stick with his Linux instead of reinstalling Minix and to create any features he needed as he went along. He posted Linux online and thus Linux was born.). The C64 booted into BASIC and it's manual showed you how to program. How many PCs today come with a manual telling you how to program them? Hell, most PC manuals these days don't even tell you how to use command prompt in their manual. Todays PC vendors sell PCs like kitchenware vendors sell toasters. They tell you what your PC can do, and thats that. They seem to think all people should do is use their PC to read e-mail, browse the web, write documents, and look at pictures. There is more to a PC than this. The closest thing kids like me (I am 17) have these days is a TI calculator. The TI-83 and TI-84 are of widespread use but students only learn a few things in their form of BASIC, and schools no longer have the "try it in BASIC" exercises. The C64 on the other hand was like "the glory of this is it is not a toaster, it has no predetermined task, your C64 is what you want it to be.". The other thing I miss is the lightweight, easy to store, easy to carry, design of the C64. I realize we have laptops, but to get one that has hardware that is by today's standards "powerful" is expensive. Gamers and the like want desktops. The C64 was a small desktop. All you did was plug into a TV and go. Imagine a modern computer with that mentality. All the PC would be is a keyboard, and you plug into a TV and power up. Think of how easy that would be at a LAN party. If you think about it, the commodore 64 spured the home/office computer revolution. I miss it. I might go on eBay and buy one someday.
Blizzard does not support Linux. It was great that some enterprising people got WoW working, but that doesn't mean you can complain when Blizzard does something that unintentionally breaks it.
With as popular as WoW is, it is worth porting. Hell, they could even have TransGaming do it for them for a fee. Blizzard might even be able to convince the linux users to donate enough to have it ported fully without having to even pay for it themselves.
Really, it's part of their strategy to converge the 360 and Windows gaming worlds together... witness the recent reorganization into a single games division, for instance.
The one thing I dont get about that is, if the 360 and Windows were supposed to have similar games, why use PPC processors in the 360?
and you grant us a copyright term of around 50 years?
How about 14 years or whatever it origionally was? Oh and you stop using loopholes in Fair Use and stop using technology to prohibit people from using works in whatever way they desire. We never said Fair Use covers filesharing. But it does allow for you to do things like purchase a CD and save a copy of the songs on it on all of your MP3 players, all of your PCs, and a personal CD that you burned your self. Fair use doesn't allow for me to upload a movie to youtube, but I am allowed to rip all my DVDs to my laptop hard disk and watch them on the go. I am also alowed to make backups and view my legally obtained media on a linux PC.
Those are all Blu-ray devices. At least an installed base of 25million Blu-ray players sold in a few years time. Versus how many HD-DVD players? How can HD-DVD compete with that kind of a headstart?
This may surprise you, but keep in mind, HD-DVD isn't Blu-ray's biggest competitor. DVDs are. 95% of all households had TVs that were DVD capable. Most households do not own HD-TVs, and HD is still emerging technology that is not well established. Blu-ray also is outragiously more expesnive than cheap DVDs.
I doubt anyone here is actually surprised by this. Since when has Microsoft ever done anything truly for the good of OSS?
The have done something that accedentally ended up good for OSS. If they had become a Hardware/Software company such as Amiga or Apple, Linux could never have had a standardized processor to evolve on.
Not at all, the President has the power to pardon anyone, so if he wanted to, he could pardon Rumsfeld easily. Oh and also, to be subpeonaed you normally have to commit a crime, hmm, too bad.
If they start selling computers with Linux, they have to made damned sure they can support it - even if that support is a checklist leading upto a full system rebuild.
Dell could either say upfront "Ok, we don't support Linux so if you buy one of these, your not going to recieve support." Or they could simply have community support. I should be allowed to choose Linux if I know it wont be supported, and as long as Dell tells me that I am on my own upfront, I should have the right to do so.
Let me add that odds are you will agree with one candidate more than the other(s).
I would like to remind you that there is more to politics than canidits. There are referendums and issues. I would say with those, if you dont have a specific reason to vote for a reforendum, vote against it as things are probably fine as is.
One thing that could push Java is the fact that now all Linux distros can include it. Not only that, but Mozilla can include it too..NET isnt much for web apps like a good ol java app.
The earth is warming very slowly, no denying that.
And even if there is, it's not caused by humans!
We don't know if it is caused by humans or how much, but keep in mind, it was warming even before the industrial revolution because the little ice age was ending. It also would probably be warming much less, or even cooling now than it would have during the previous century, as now we pollute less and have sharply reduced CO2 emmisions.
And even if it is, there's no need to do anything about it!
Well, it is more of a matter of how should we react. It seems like it might be easier to adapt to global warming than to fight it. Think about it. We will have longer harvest seasons, it will be warm enough to grow food further north than before. How hard is it to adapt? I will use the little ice age as an example. When it cooled off, many people adapted or starved. Take the vikings that colonized Greenland. They were a powerful civilization, but when it cooled off, greenland got very cold. Their sheep died. They had trouble catching fish. The other Inuit people who lived in Greenland were able to adapt their fishing techniques and catch fish in the ice. The Vikings knew about the Inuit, but refused to adapt. In most nations, people adopted the Potato as a food as grain died or did not do quite as well in the ice as the bellow ground potato. French people refused to adopt the potato as a food, and this led to breadriots and famine, and ultimatly the French revolution. Ireland adopted the potato, but they only used one kind of potato, meaning that when desiese hit, their monoculter potato crops all died. This caused the Irish potato famine. It also played roles in military conflicts. It wiped out France's army during their attempt to invade Russia and caused Napoleon to suffer huge losses. It was so cold and French troops were so unprepaired that they were devestated by the weather.
The question is, are we Vikings or Inuits, would we rather try to fight the change or adapt to it.
Still, I'm sure there's a downside to this technology, otherwise why the fuck would people keep going on and on and on and on about it all the time, as if the presence of cameras somehow stops them from going about their lawful business.
Because some people who are paranoid of "big brother" fear any kind of servalence and spread fud. Britain is still one of the least personally restrictive nations in the world. So is the US for that matter, yet both are blasted for trying to monitor their citizens.
He has a point. Many projects let you mention who you are when you contribute. You can show your soon to be employer your contributions. I would especially recomend contributing to a project that your future employer uses. For example, lets say your employer uses WINE to run some WIndows server software on linux. Contribute some to the WINE project and show your employer in the interview. They may hire you to help them with making that app run better for them on Wine.
For all of the shortcomings of IE, Microsoft does attempt to cover its ass to some degree.
I think part of their changes in Vista (particularly the making IE and Explorer Separate, which also sort of happens with IE 7 on XP) is an attempt to stop having to cover their ass as much. IE has proven to be a lot of work for MS, and many of their employees say that the whole perpouse was to crush netscape, which they decided wasn't really worth it. Hindsight is always 20/20 I guess.
But considering their market shares, people don't really want speed. If they wanted speed, fluxbox would be worshiped. If they wanted beauty and speed, OSX would dominate, but what they want is a PC at a reasonable price (ruling OSX out). They don't like Linux because they want a PC that they don't have to set up themselves.
Interesting huh? OSX and Linux, the two alternative OS's are not as sucessful because they are too far on either side of the road. OSX has the best OEM integration of any OS, but people dislike it because that OEM charges so much. Linux has few OEMs, but even though it is cheaper, nobody wants to set it up themselves. True, Linux doesn't take much effort to set up anymore, but it still scares the consumer.
I do hope this lack of sales produces a price war. I want to buy a laptop soon.
Government regulation on buisness is not a good thing. I say that the music industry just go the other way. Forgo the DRM and high prices and build on the cheap. Don't spend $20000 to release an album, instead spend about $3000 like the indie bands do. Joe Music can go down to his local music recording shop and produce an album with decent sound quality. It won't be CD quality, but most people will rip their music at 128 KBS, so who cares? And this way Joe can sell for cheap. Also licensing DRM is very expensive, and it might be cheaper to edure the piracy losses. Music will survive. Hell, it can take the piracy losses and still survive.
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You forgot 8, if they sue, so what? Who will they sue? OOo largly is run by Sun but the comunity has the most power. what can MS do to a comunity?
Why not just stick a cheap old x86 (or better, X86_64) chip into the thing, use OpenGL and the like? That is easy to develop on.
As for IBM, Intel, HP, AMD, Apple, and the others, they hate the high cost XP forces them to charge, but they dont want to risk loosing deals.
We have lost something though. The C64 and similar PCs had a few attributes few computers have had since. The most painful loss was all those young minds who will never be influenced to learn BASIC and take up programming. (This BTW is also what origionally got Linus into programming. His Grandfather encouraged him to learn BASIC so he would have an intrest in math. After his grandfather died, Linus kept the Commodore VIC and continued learning to code, though he obviously began to learn more programming languages. Eventually he got tired of the VIC, bought a Timex, and then later down the line an IBM clone. He learned to use Minix on the IBM clone and wanted to improve uppon its terminal emulator. After he did that, he wanted to work on fixing drivers. Gradually, he worked on a kernel and used GNU software to fill in until he had an OS. Then one day, he accedentally told the PC to access his hard disk instead of his modem, and destroyed the Minix partition. He decided to just stick with his Linux instead of reinstalling Minix and to create any features he needed as he went along. He posted Linux online and thus Linux was born.). The C64 booted into BASIC and it's manual showed you how to program. How many PCs today come with a manual telling you how to program them? Hell, most PC manuals these days don't even tell you how to use command prompt in their manual. Todays PC vendors sell PCs like kitchenware vendors sell toasters. They tell you what your PC can do, and thats that. They seem to think all people should do is use their PC to read e-mail, browse the web, write documents, and look at pictures. There is more to a PC than this. The closest thing kids like me (I am 17) have these days is a TI calculator. The TI-83 and TI-84 are of widespread use but students only learn a few things in their form of BASIC, and schools no longer have the "try it in BASIC" exercises. The C64 on the other hand was like "the glory of this is it is not a toaster, it has no predetermined task, your C64 is what you want it to be.". The other thing I miss is the lightweight, easy to store, easy to carry, design of the C64. I realize we have laptops, but to get one that has hardware that is by today's standards "powerful" is expensive. Gamers and the like want desktops. The C64 was a small desktop. All you did was plug into a TV and go. Imagine a modern computer with that mentality. All the PC would be is a keyboard, and you plug into a TV and power up. Think of how easy that would be at a LAN party. If you think about it, the commodore 64 spured the home/office computer revolution. I miss it. I might go on eBay and buy one someday.
One thing that could push Java is the fact that now all Linux distros can include it. Not only that, but Mozilla can include it too. .NET isnt much for web apps like a good ol java app.
The question is, are we Vikings or Inuits, would we rather try to fight the change or adapt to it.
He has a point. Many projects let you mention who you are when you contribute. You can show your soon to be employer your contributions. I would especially recomend contributing to a project that your future employer uses. For example, lets say your employer uses WINE to run some WIndows server software on linux. Contribute some to the WINE project and show your employer in the interview. They may hire you to help them with making that app run better for them on Wine.
Interesting huh? OSX and Linux, the two alternative OS's are not as sucessful because they are too far on either side of the road. OSX has the best OEM integration of any OS, but people dislike it because that OEM charges so much. Linux has few OEMs, but even though it is cheaper, nobody wants to set it up themselves. True, Linux doesn't take much effort to set up anymore, but it still scares the consumer.
I do hope this lack of sales produces a price war. I want to buy a laptop soon.
Government regulation on buisness is not a good thing. I say that the music industry just go the other way. Forgo the DRM and high prices and build on the cheap. Don't spend $20000 to release an album, instead spend about $3000 like the indie bands do. Joe Music can go down to his local music recording shop and produce an album with decent sound quality. It won't be CD quality, but most people will rip their music at 128 KBS, so who cares? And this way Joe can sell for cheap. Also licensing DRM is very expensive, and it might be cheaper to edure the piracy losses. Music will survive. Hell, it can take the piracy losses and still survive.