Microsoft cannot vote.

Okay. It's time for a reality check and/or to pull your head out of your nether regions.

A company is not a person. It is a construct created at the sufferance of the people. It exists to, among other things, limit the liability of the people who control it and, believe it or not, actually work for the good of society while making a profit.

A lot (if not most) people in this country seem to forget that, *especially* the people here who think that the "free market" is the answer to everything.

The representation granted is to the people who control the company. Ballmer and the other people who control Microsoft most certainly CAN vote provided they are citizens and have not been convicted of a felony, and most likely do so.

As for taxes, this country was founded on tax resistance. Anyone who pretends that it's unpatriotic to resist taxes today needs a remedial history course.

Actually, this country was founded on, among other things, not paying taxes to a body with which they had no representation. You remember, that whole "no taxation without representation" thing.

Guess what. Ballmer has representation in this country as he is a citizen and has the right to vote.

I think you're the one who needs a remedial history lesson.

I've seen just as crazy and worse people in large cities. The mix of crazy is slightly different in a large city, but there is plenty of crazy in any metropolis, suburb, or rural town.

Crazy does indeed exist everywhere. The concentration of it in a lot of the small towns here, however, tends to be rather higher than I have experienced in larger cities.

You also have the fact that there tends to be quite a bit of, shall we say, "shady" activity that everyone who is halfway observant knows about but nobody talks about for various reasons (one of which is that they don't want to have an "accident"). Yes, I realize that happens in larger cities as well, but believe me when I say that that sort of activity pretty much owns a lot of smaller towns in this region.

Just about any town in rural America. PA, MN, OH, NY all have these towns where you can just walk into anyone's house without a problem.

I can't speak for PA, MN, or NY, but I grew up in small rural towns in Ohio. I can assure you that people certainly *did* lock their doors and that crime, while not *insanely* rampant, was far from rare. I am, however, told that people were less likely to lock their doors when my father was a kid.

I knew a number of people whose homes were broken into while I was growing up and the thefts have only gotten worse in the last year or two as crime rates have risen due to the poor economy.

Add to this the fact that there is a prevailing sentiment in a lot of the smaller rural communities here that the entire world should be Christian (and they are willing to trample the civil rights of others to that end), that anyone less conservative than W is causing the ruin of this country, that all Muslims are evil and want to destroy America (I kid you not. Actual comments from the local paper), and, frankly, that if you're not a white, "God fearing", good ol' boy that you should just get out.

Sadly, I'm not kidding and I'm not exaggerating. I will readily admit that there are many good people in this area, but there are also a very large number of people who display the behaviors and prejudices that I have listed above (as well as more than a few others). It's enough to give you a headache purely from trying to not scream in frustration.

Don't try to idolize the small towns as bastions of everything good in the country, because it's just not true.

Besides, given that knowing something is a kind of power in and of its self ("knowledge is power" and all that), omniscience could be considered a subset of omnipotence

Not quite. Being omniscient means that you *do* know everything.

Being omnipotent means that you can *do* anything, but not that you have to exercise that ability. Therefore you may have the *ability* to know everything, but you don't have to *exercise* it.

For example, I am perfectly capable of hurting people (as most people are), but being a fairly nice guy, I choose not to.

Appalachian people are generally pretty tough to get along with.

Yeah, they tend to be rather closed minded and isolationist. Out of curiosity, what part of Southern Ohio were you from? (I'm here myself at the moment)

Considering that "today" is a member of the set "every day", the statement would be logically correct =]

I agree, especially for my CS classes (we had our own CS labs full of Sun boxes while most of the rest of the campus labs were windows only). It was nice to be able to sit there with other people and work on things, sometimes bouncing ideas off of each other.

At one point, a friend and I ended up finding a bug in some provided code that was tripping everyone up. Once we found and dealt with it, everyone in the room (at the time, probably half of the class) knew what was going on and what the fix was. A lot of people would have lost a lot of working time due to tracking down the same bug if it weren't for the lab.

I still went to the labs sometimes even after I got my laptop because it was nice to be around other people that were doing the same things I was. It fostered a nice sense of camaraderie between people who would probably never have even gotten to know each other if it weren't for the shared workspace.

When I was in high school I got "written up" by a teacher for using my asthma inhaler. It went something like this.

I was in a number of similar situations. One or two of them because the teacher in question either didn't like me or some random member of my family (no joke).

They got told point blank first by me and then by my parents when they were called that they were by no means going to take the medication away from me (and that in a situation or two that didn't involve necessary medication, that their behavior would not be tolerated).

They eventually backed down, but it took making one heck of a scene to get them to do it. Of course, one of them also got raked over the coals for paddling me as a kid literally without being able to state a reason for doing it to my parents.

Sometimes school officials get way too drunk on the "power" that they have.

(Now if our government would just let capitalism do it's job, we would see this happen in the financial and automotive industries as well.)

I hate to burst your bubble, but those two things are very very different.

The dot com bubble impacted, for the most part, one sector (and a small one at that). The current economic crisis is taking its toll on the entire economy, and not just for this country, but for the world as a whole.

Because of how interconnected the whole thing is, it's not a matter of good companies will survive and bad ones will fail. Good companies can, in some way, depend on bad companies (say, by needing a loan or some similar situation). When the bad companies go under, they can drag the good ones down with them.

That's why it's a bad idea to simply let the banks fail. If the banks fail, loans dry up (not to mention the possibility of losing the money you have in them if it is greater than the sum that FDIC insures as well as other problems), and when that happens, business as a whole suffers.

I know the feeling. I ended up doing a 72+ hour coding marathon to get a couple of university projects out of the door. I made use of a case and a half or so of soda and several calls to the local pizza place.

I think I slept for 18 hours afterward.

Knowing that they require glow plugs, I would have asked for those instead. Then again, that's just me...

Some are not, like Dune. I can't help myself. I'm nitpicky. Occasionally very nitpicky.

As a stand alone film, Dune was alright. For its time, it was actually pretty decent.

However, if you want something that follows the book a bit more, the mini series was quite good.

Cookies are always nice unless they're the browser kind or have something in them that you're allergic to. Many problems could be solved with them =]

As for my patronizing manner, having been the editor of an OSS mag, I've seen my fair share of zealot email, comments, etc on both sides of the debate. It burns you out after a while - especially when you're a pragmatic person who sees benefits to both open and closed source solutions in various situations.

You've never had fun until you've been at a conference and had someone come up to you and basically start yelling at you because your banner has a technology listed on it (it was on one of the covers) that "cost them business" because people moved to it from what they were doing.

Believe me, it's a surreal experience. After a while, you start to doubt that "subtle humor" is actually meant as humor with that sort of thing because you see it used in a serious manner far too often...

To be honest, the response you gave to my first post is really easy to mistake for actual zealotry. I've gotten real comments (both in person and online) that were just like it.

Open Source is pretty good for that, too.

Is this where I give you a cookie?

It is completely possible to write open source programs on Microsoft platforms and with Microsoft technologies. Open source happens on more than just Linux.

What we're talking about here is "complexity" in a group of libraries for a programming language family/common runtime.

The thing is that that "complexity" is optional. You only have to use the parts of it that you want. The rest you can ignore and the sky won't fall down, just like with every other "large" language platform (such as Java).