Compared to law school, death is a trivial matter.

To state the obvious, the US wants the upper hand in everything. That's the nature of power... doubly so for a world "super power." When you're king of the hill, you perceive everyone as a threat to your supremacy. As such, you want a defense to anything the "enemy" can throw at you. You want to always be 15 steps ahead. The government bureaucracy has always been slow on the uptake when it comes to technology. In years past when the Internet was mostly the domain of nerds and researchers, there wasn't a whole lot to perceive as a threat. Now, everyone and their mother is using email, facebook, etc. That's a lot of information that is largely bypassing the scrutiny of the powers-that-be, and now with the trend of everything being online, they are feeling the fear that the knowledge of insecurity brings.

It continues to amaze me how naive people are about how the world works, so I'm going to go ahead and break it down. This is a summary of what happens to resources in third world countries:

Because they do not possess the resources, infrastructure, or expertise to mine these minerals, they will have to contract a foreign (probably US) company to do so. To finance the operation, Afghanistan will have to take out a loan from the IMF/World Bank. The corporation(s) doing the mining will reap most of the profits, with a small percentage going to key figures in the Afghan government. The only jobs this will create for the Afghan citizens is menial labor, doing the actual mining. The resources, when gone, will only have benefited the mining/engineering firm(s) involved and the people in power in Afghanistan. Afghanistan will never be able to pay off its loan to the IMF, driving it deeper into poverty, which will, in turn, drive even more locals into the opium trade.

1. Sure, but not enough to really make a big enough impact to warrant an entirely new system. There's always going to be a bottleneck on performance somewhere, so even if they build a new system with the latest and greatest gfx technology, the visual experience is still limited by something as simple as the read speed of the disc drive. Enjoy those shiny graphics as the cutscenes sputter along...


3. Perhaps not, but it's the only way they'd advance that translates into sales. When you see marketing materials, do you see extreme closeup screenshots of the processor? No... you see screenshots of the games in action... the graphical detail. You can add gigabit ethernet to a console, but it isn't going to make online gaming any faster...the bottleneck there is the servers and ISPs, not the user's hardware. The processor is important, but not important enough to warrant a new console.

To the best of my knowledge, there has not been any new breakthroughs in television technology, so a new console wouldn't provide anything in the way of graphical advancement-- all we can really hope for is the new games would play in the higher, already existing resolutions. This Natal/Kinect stuff is about the closest thing to a "revolutionary" new control scheme, so that's another frontier that a new series of consoles wouldn't address. There's no new, revolutionary (and practical) data storage systems out there, so disc-based media and hard drives are still the best thing that is going to be incorporated into a new console design. So, I'm legitimately curious... what exactly are you hoping to see in the next generation of consoles that has you so anxious to have your current game library become "obsolete" and have to buy a new console + accessories + games, all for the thrill of having a PS4 or XBOX 720 that delivers essentially the same experience?

Absolutely. And we can do that in two ways: 1. stop giving corporations the rights of individuals, and 2. go back to the pre-Rockafeller days of 10 year corporate charters (or even less, preferably)

I am a CRM consultant; I work mostly with Dynamics CRM, but I know Salesforce.com pretty well also. Some of what you said is true, some isn't.

In Salesforce's favor, they are indeed more flexible, and they have a lot of features out of the box that Dynamics just doesn't have, or require customization to accomplish. Stuff that should be a no-brainer for a CRM system (such as dashboards) are strangely absent from Microsoft's solution (aside from some a measly recent addition to their hosted version), and 3rd party solutions or custom development is the only way you're going to get a dashboard in Dynamics. The out of the box workflow capabilities in Dynamics, though, are far superior to what Salesforce has. It also gives companies the option of going on-premise or cloud, which is important to some companies to have their data in-house. The integration between CRM and Outlook is also in Microsoft's favor, as they damn well should be, since they are both their own products.

All that said, though, Dynamics rarely competes in a "feature" war... the primary selling point for Dynamics is that a lot of their customers are already Microsoft shops, so if they don't already get the product for FREE with some kind of Enterprise licensing agreement, a lot of them still view it as a plus to stick with one vendor. Another big point is that integration with Microsoft's ERP system, GP, is relatively straightforward... a lot of my clients are companies that already had GP, and wanted a CRM for their sales team.

I've helped unhappy Salesforce customers migrate to Dynamics, and I've helped unhappy Dynamics customers migrate to Salesforce. The perception and attitude of the user's is far more a contributing factor to a CRM implementation's success than the actual product itself. It is uncool that Microsoft is having to resort to this kind of bullshittery to try to throw off SF's game, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you that you're dead wrong that Microsoft is going to try to purchase Salesforce. You may not be aware of this, but Microsoft only started developing CRM once Siebel turned down their offer to buy them out. I can guarantee you than any such offer to Salesforce would similarly get turned down.

Mike & Ike candies actually do somewhat resemble the rainbow-colored pills featured in propaganda pieces such as "Drugs Are Like That" (recently featured on Rifftrax.com). Now, granted, that has no basis in reality, but this wouldn't be the first time a school's administration has been utterly clueless.

The title of the movie made me think, "At last, we'll get a Supreme Court ruling over whether or not Han shot first."

i.e. a quarter past never

Not that I disagree with the premise of "renegotiate or leave", but it is a bit ridiculous to compare the responsibilities of an on-call tech and someone with a C-level title. As a CTO, you've got a lot more vested interest in the company than the average salaried guy who is not getting the same C-level perks.

I'm a consultant for an Microsoft Gold Partner VAR for one of the Microsoft business applications, and a lot of times the talking heads at Microsoft will go on and on about the "Microsoft Stack" and how CRM can integrate with SharePoint and all this kind of stuff, but in all the years that I have been working in this field, I have never once encountered an implementation of SharePoint at a client, nor have I had any requests to do one.

That does not mean that there isn't interest at a lot of these companies for SharePoint, though. It's just that the total cost after purchasing the licenses and then paying someone to implement it properly is too cost prohibitive for the types of companies that would benefit from using it.

Furthermore, there really are not very many "guru-level" people on SharePoint. There's barely any "adequate" talent for SharePoint... I hear it all the time from a lot of my peers that there's not even anyone out in the field trying to get a practice started up around it in this very large, very wealthy (per captia) city. Excuses range from "lack of demand" to "no one to do the work", to the ever popular "everyone is only seeing the tip of the iceberg" that Microsoft is so apt to spin.

So, that's my perspective as someone in the realm of that field... whatever that is worth.

They are too close to balaclavas for comfort.

if your conclusion to all these said problems is "everything is crap"?