And your solution is to do away with the government because you imagine that this imaginary construct called 'the market' will do your bidding. Like health insurance, telephone, electric companies? I'm not convinced that's a better way to go.

thanks all the same. I bet your FB page is the shit though.

Yes let's review. I'll go from west to east:

Morocco, ruled by Spain, not the US

Algeria, ruled by France, not the US

Tunisia, ruled by France and Turkey, not the US

Libya, ruled by Italy, not the US

Egypt, ruled by France, Turkey and England, not the US

Lebanon, ruled by France, not the US

Syria, ruled by England, not the US

Saudi Arabia, ruled by England, not the US

Yemen & Oman, ruled by England, the Saudis and Egypt not the US

The GCC, ruled by England, not the US

Iraq, ruled by England not the US

Iran, ruled by Iran, not the US

Afghanistan, ruled by Afghanis not the US

Pakistan, ruled by Pakistanis, England and India, not the US

the -Stans, ruled by the CCCP not the US

Yes clearly the stomping bootprint of McDonalds and Ten Gallon hats is everywhere.

Again, though, try oh try to lift your heavy head from your latest monograph on Aspergers and it's effect on blogging for a moment and point me to the nearest stable vaguely democratic Arab/Muslim state in that general region. It encompasses about 600 million people, I'm sure you could find one. Broaden the definition of democratic as you wish. Then stack your selection up against Pakistan and show me where they're materially different. Extra points for those states where the head of state has been in charge for fewer than 20 years.

I don't. All I care about is ease of use and the amount of time it takes to maintain and manage it. Macs generally win that battle. PC's on the other hand make 'operating' your PC a task and virtue unto themselves. If you're the kind of person who enjoys having your equipment get in your way, then buy a PC and have at it.

XP will be the last turn of Redmond crank here. And when it's time to junk everything it will be replaced with Macs (BSD based OsX) of some kind or Ubuntu or Linspire.

Diseases do in fact kill people as do plagues. There's bound to be a trade off between yields, disease and resistance. I'm not sure people would be better off eating beef that's never been 'treated' as it were, and, I'm not sure they'd pay the price (real dollar price) of food products brought to market that way. This is the same trade off, ecologically with GMO - if you want to use fewer and less toxic pesticides then you go the GMO route - but then there's a potential trade off in that too.

After all, people who you portray as fat rich rednecks will, in the end be better able to weather the very financial storm you gleefully champion. And loyal noble lumpenproles at the bottom, will, as always, get screwed.

We had county elections yesterday - that is, elections at the local and county level for some counties. And in every single one there were multiple bond issues. And for every bond issue the excuse is the same "Better Schools". That's the catch all for everything. Give us money or your kids will be stupid. We just voted in two back to back billion dollar bond issues 'For the Children'. Our school age population is growing 7-8%/year. About 1/4th of that is illegal aliens. The Schools set 1/4 of what we call the floor population to be students with no or almost no command of English. The School budget - which is regulated at the county level, has been growing at 12-16%/year every year for a decade. How many more schools do they need? 40? 93? Infinity? I'm not buying it. The counties need to held responsible for this funding because I swear to god the only thing they use it for is to hire more cops. Everything is cloaked in this eery "You don't HATE children, do you?" message. Gimme gimme gimme. Well screw you. Try improving outcomes first.

No one thinks about anything. They blog and hit submit. There are no new ideas, there aren't even useful discussions of old ideas. There is just ranting. In the end, the Internet becomes a weapon of tyranny because it leads down a rathole of selfinvolved hate speech.

At the endpoints which are little more than little dumb boxes. Of course the server's rather pricey. But since I get to manage everything one time one place the cost to ME, my time, is far less. See hardware is for crap. It's disposable. And Farhad - PC's or Macs really aren't resellable. Just junk them and move on. But across the financial life of a computer asset about 75% of the total cost is labor. Assign a dollar value to your own time and apply it. You'll find that the easier it is to run your stuff the cheaper it is to own. That's kind of why FASB 3 year depreciation is trivial. Sure you can write down the box to zero in 36 months, but not only will you probably keep it that 4th year, you have to maintain it all 4 years. That's the expensive part.