Virtual, but permanent.
Hamas says Abbas accidentally paid its fighters | International | Reuters
The phrase itself is an oxymoron, “Palestinian Winner”. Unlike any other political race in the world, Palestinian politics is a race composed entirely of losers. Whether it’s the Palestinians choosing Hamas, or the US and Israel choosing Abu Mazen’s Fattah party, nobody can find a winner. Or even a party that is not a horrible, wretched loser.
Dell Answers Customer Calls For Linux In Europe
Those who keep denigrating government regulation really must take note of this major announcement by Dell in Europe: Dell is now selling Linux PCs to consumers at large. Unlike Dell US, which sells Linux on some its top of the line servers only, Dell Europe now has the freedom to sell operating systems other than Windows to anyone.
Why is this important? Because it means that, at least in Europe, Dell has the freedom to sell the systems that it wants to customers. If Dell wants to bundle its own music service, or its own software with the systems, it can now do that, just as Apple has been doing all along. It has this freedom in Europe because the European Union has put Microsoft on a very short leash. Consequently, Dell can move away from Microsoft without any fear of retribution from Microsoft.
This is not the case in the United States, of course. The US government has relaxed its controls on Microsoft’s monopoly power. Consequently, Dell, HP, Gateway and other computer manufacturers have little freedom to promote or to include services that compete with the services that Microsoft promotes through its Windows operating system. This means that Dell, HP and Gateway cannot compete with Apple! They cannot promote or sell services (such as a music store) on computers that they sell! In effect, Microsoft has enslaved these large corporations, and has relegated them to purveyors of commodity computers that net little profit.
So, if you’re wondering why Dell and HP are not offering digital music stores even when Microsoft’s store is clearly failing, look no further than Microsoft and the ridiculous lack of regulations in the American marketplace. In this absurd environment, an inept competitor like Microsoft is suppressing all competition and allowing Apple to run away with the booty. As an Apple stockholder, I don’t mind, but perhaps Dell stockholders should.
Best (and worst) beaches in the U.S. – Today Show – MSNBC.com
The primordial soup prides itself on being a heavenly place, a paradise of a big city by virtue of its location on the Pacific coast, its eternally sunny climate and its “casual” attitude.
Look closely, however, and you will see that the “casual” attitude is a ploy to hide the aggression that roils inside everyone, and that the city’s largest tourist attraction and crown jewel, Venice Beach, remains one of the nation’s filthiest. Considering the fact that, after 50 years of operation, the Hyperion Treatment Plant has not managed to remove this stigma from the promordial soup’s beaches, one begins to grasp neglect that the prevailing “casual” attitude has cultivated in this city.
And, just to think that it used to be worse.
Interesting news about the office workaholics | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com
This fact alone can potentially explains so much about the primordial soup: the long work hours, the unnerving sexual frustration that everybody exudes, the practice of sexual predation that passes for “dating” in this city and the emergence of the largest pornography industry on the planet. Yes, people work very hard in the primordial soup because hardly anything else ever works here.
VMWare, the operating system virtualization powerhouse has just released Fusion, their virtualization machine for OS X. To my mind, this is huge news for Apple, Inc., because this means that Apple is gaining market share rapidly.
It also means that the suspicions of many that Apple has been gaining market share from the Unix/Linux segment of the market is also true. VMWare is clearly betting that OS X will be the dominant Unix flavor in a very short time. VMWare’s entry into the OS X market also means that they fully expect Apple to gain market share from the Windows segment of the market as well, and VMWare is all too happy to make quite a few bucks in this process.
The list of features in Fusion is impressive. Seamless integration with existing Boot Camp Windows installations, full Directx support for games, full USB device support, full networking, and seamless integration of Windows into OS X. It’s almost as if they figured out how to do what neither Windows nor Apple could do: tame Windows!
If you are holding AAPL, as I am, hold on a while longer. The next few months are going to be very interesting. In fact, Apple’s announcement of new iMacs tomorrow (August 7, 2007) promises to be very interesting.
I’m not the only one who thinks this is big. Check this out.
Bad bosses get promoted, not punished? | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com
By nearly all accounts, this is the standard M.O. in the primordial soup.
And, this begs the question in the title of this post. Or is it the case that the primordial soup acquired its ways from Cheney’s ilk?
Ving Rhames’ Dogs Kill His Maid
The primordial soup is the mother liqueur that gives rise to sensational lives and deaths. It is with some frequency that the sensational lives are intertwined with sensational deaths, and on this day, Ving Rhames’ quote about his special breed of slave-keeping dogs is raising the mauling of his housekeeper by his dogs to the level of a sensation so powerful that it just might overshadow the misfortunes of Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie.
The primordial soup changes everyone. Once immersed, no mortal can survive its influence.
State decides to secure electronic voting machines – Los Angeles Times
It seems as if Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, is screaming “Damn it! We can be a greater laughing stock than Florida, and we ain’t gonna quite until we are!”
White House Budget Director Portman Resigns – washingtonpost.com
Sobering feedback based on the best available economic data was never welcome at the Bush White House according to the Treasury Secretaries (Paul O’Neill and John Snow) who have resigned after discovering that they were playing ceremonial roles in the Bush Cabinet. This latest resignation (article above) reaffirms the intense politicization of everything that is under way in the Bush Administration.
The funniest aspect, or the most vexing aspect depending on one’s point of view, is that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has consistently shown that the federal deficit 1) resulted from the Bush tax cuts and 2) the federal deficit will disappear as soon as the Bush tax cuts expire in both its July 2006 (pdf) economic forecast and its January 2007 (pdf) economic forecast. The summary, page IX, of the 2006 projection states quite flatly:
After 2010, it [the federal deficit] would decline sharply, reflecting the rapid increase in tax revenues that would occur after provisions initially enacted in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) expired. By 2016, the deficit would decline to 0.4 percent of GDP, according to CBO’s baseline projections.
Mindful of the fact that the CBO is, historically, the most nonpartisan and the most reliable economic forecasting institution, public or private, in the US, one can hardly refrain from rendering the most damning judgment against the Bush and Republican budgetary process, and this damning judgment is what this budgetary process merits.
But, perhaps the ultimate blame in all of this lies at the doors of voters who fail to realize that economics is a numbers game, and that numbers matter more in a numbers game than ideology.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Game Over | PBS
Robert Cringely is not a guy to be taken lightly. He has been the authoritative voice on technology issues for over a decade. He has literally written the history, and his predictions are the most reliable anywhere. It should be of concern to everyone when he declares the US’s communications infrastructure a lost cause, when compared with other industrial countries.
If you don’t believe Cringely when he says that America’s pathetic communications infrastructure is reducing business competitiveness, listen to UPS’s CEO, Michael Eskew, saying the same thing.
And, if you still have any doubts about how poor America’s infrastructure has become, listen to this fantastic nugget to find out how pathetic our infrastructure spending is, and which party keeps infrastructure spending so pathetic.
And, if these facts do not impress upon you the horrendous toll that the Iraq military campaign has exacted on the American economy, consult a psychiatrist or revisit elementary math.