except, the one that pays special interest should be fired on the spot and forbidden to join any public service any more. The government should be "for the people", not "for the bureaucracy". I live in such a country and it is pure hell.

I think that most of the problems stem from a number of issues:

1.North Korea resolutely states that what it has with south Korea is an "armistice", a temporary cessation of open hostilities which can be withdrawn on a whim, NOT a peace treaty;
2. as per 1. above, it has liberally sprinkled the south of hostile acts even recently, witness the sinking of a south Korean corvette;
3. It recently tested a long range ballistic missile by sending it flying over Japan, not the most sensible thing to do;
4.Given the UN embargo, and the geography, north Korea can only survive at the whim of two countries, neither of which is south Korea and/or the USA, namely China, and to a lesser extent, Russia.

I think that the pointy heads are not wondering if the present dictator is better or worse than his forefathers, or if he is stark raving mad. Anybody here thinking that the north Korea military is NOT thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese agents? My take is that should kim jong .3 turn mad, his life expectancy could be measured in seconds.
Another issue is closely related to point 3 above: why on earth the Chinese should have allowed the north Koreans to be so openly hostile to neighbours and the USA? it will cause trouble for them sooner or later. I am already flabbergasted that the USA, in a quiet sort of way, has not gotten to the Chinese ear that they could be apt to treat North Korea as their "renegade province" [pun intended], refuse any further contact with them, and invite all the ASEAN members to a quiet dinner somewhere. the only possibility of seeing south Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines at the same table should be sufficient to give them enough fits to squeeze north Korea into getting quiet.

probably what he meant was, depreciation is usually tax deductible, since the very concept was introduced to render a fair representation of the ability of an organization to produce earnings, irrespective of the fact that it needed inputs which lasted more than one period (i.e., machinery, buildings etc.) or not (for example, by renting all of the above).
While taxation treats depreciation in different ways depending on country and underlying asset, the concept is that in an ideal world it would render choosing between renting or buying neutral over the life cycle of the underlying asset, i.e. the reported earnings should stay constant over the life of the asset, all else being equal.

...Well, if they want to improve on that, my money says Ballmer will be on the market within 12 months. since they have less cash to burn it will take him less time to crash the company.

Do excuse me, but did you ever read the book?

Quite simple.
Do what countless users and corporations have done over the last decade: if the latest and greatest is not so much better than the existing system, do not buy it, and continue using the older system and games built for the older system.
All threats from microsoft, as in the win XP case, will come to nought. not even Ballmer, who has proved his, ah, "determination", will try to stem the flow when content designers will say: "the installed base of 360 is X million consoles, and they continue to buy both older classic games and the new ones we design. If we target only the new console with this newfangled game, we'll be lucky to sell a couple hundred thousand. No contest, babe, it's either this or Sony."

There, fixed it for you.

Do excuse me for asking, but how old are you? I was fund manager responsible for UK equity investment at the time and I can swear on my kids that:

1. the amount you was entitled to buy was affordable, imagine 2.000 shares at less than one pound original outlay [the fully paid price was in the region of three pounds];
2. if you mean "knock down prices" that the shares went down after the initial public offering, take care to correct the error. since many people in the general public and customer offer who were entitled to priority distribution bought the shares, the financial investors (me) got much less than they asked for. and the yield on the partly paid was in the region of 9%;
3.for some baffling reason which I cannot for the life of me understand, some people are convinced that water can be privatised and/or that competition can be introduced.


"non profit" does not mean free, if I pad the water company with eight layers of management made out of political cronies, the end price of water will skyrocket. Granted, I'll subsidize the water company via general taxation to hush it up, and scream from the rooftops "water is a public good which must stay in public hands", but I am only a peculiar genre of common Ponzi schemer.
AFAIK, water companies before Maggie worked on a "Cost plus" basis: whatever it costs to distribute water plus some aside for renewing the network. In what way does it guarantee that the end price will be lower? politicians generally are quite generous with other people's money. Most of the price increase in water or other utilities bills, and the biggest happen when you have to say to customers that the real job was not providing water, or electricity, but trasferring money: in Italy, electricity bills are a big medium for getting money out of small to midsize companies to solar producers, the general public, and energy intensive industries. In any "real privatization", these will win and the money getters will lose, but that has absolutely no bearing on the cost of production.

Just for the sake of argument, and because I am decidedly grumpy these days, I'll let you search for the privatization prospectus for the water companies. Go check the limits . It was a painstakingly difficult formula built to ensure that companies would not increase prices if they could not account for them in investment in the water network and quality, and all capped at consumer price inflation minus 2%. The prospectus was big as a moderate size telephone book. the water authority had limited power, in that a company better managed would earn more, but that power was enough. To top it off, in the initial public offering the general public, and especially customers, got a fantastically good deal. Not only they had priority up to 2.000 shares each, but they were partly paid, i.e. in the first year they had a full dividend on half the capital.
So, sorry to shake your comfortable beliefs, but no, it was not dear old Maggie who "ushered in the era of zero accountability for the rich and corporations". for these you had to wait for the same Brussels Burocracy she railed against to no avail.

She was full of common sense. contrary to public perceptions, she maintained rather strict regulations on the economy. Only, laws were fewer.

No, I read: extra Herschey mission

That may not be true. It all depends on relative productivity and transport costs, even for quasi commodity product, and tyres are one such product: whilst the likes of Michelin and Pirelli are out in front in the production technology, the end product per se has been around since the late 1800. What I find galling is that the lesson of "dune" is lost on the French: if anything, Michelin has been the real factor in rendering that plant unable to go on, not the Chinese. They eat off the same plate.

Having said that, I must say that French economic policy has wavered between "Baffling" and "hopeless" this past 20 years, so I cannot blame Mr. Montebourg for continuing a noble tradition of expedience over realism. After all, here in Europe we have TWO seats of European government because the French Governments, since the beginning and continuing now, are constitutionally unable to say "Oui" to countless proposal of scrapping Strasbourg.
One of the key issues here is this, and it is not a French problem, it is general: if you are working for a company that is able to make money competing on goods in international markets, and you are reasonably sure you earn your bread, you are rather safe. Otherwise not, you are in a sense a "welfare recipient", i.e. someone else is paying the piper for you. sooner or later, he will not be able to do it any more.

They were also made in the Central Pacific, to very good effect, while MacArthur leapfrogged in a predictable way from island to island north of Australia. To be fair, landmass dictated the strategy: the nuisance value of a Japanese garrison in a speck of land in central pacific was practically nil, while leaving for example the whole of Rabaul unscathed would have posed problems and risks best left to the enemy.

I am familiar with the Sicily campaign, and it was not the high note of Patton's career: a significant proportion of forces were allowed to repair to Calabria, since the Allies were unable to plug the small sea lane between Sicily and the continent.

the radar equivalent surface of a drone is a very small fraction of the radar cross section of a general aviation aircraft. moreover, most if not all the radar available are 2D, which means they do not provide the altitude of the target. that's one of the original reason for the use of transponders in general aviation: even if a Radar got an echo off an aircraft, it did not provide the altitude data, and so it would not serve to enforce vertical separation.

The main weakness of a "passive only" approach is that it provides with a single point of failure, i.e. the ability of the system managers of GPS, Galileo and Glonass to degrade the accuracy of the signal. radars instead could overlap. if you simply cut and paste a naval frigate system of the 90s, it usually had a 2D Radar and a 3D Radar. the only caveat is that the liberal upper crust would look askance at somebody microwave frying his pancakes from two miles away.

I have to concur... but nothing takes out of my mind that somebody would have smoked the move if the Spruance - Fletcher team had been there. Let's face it, that landing was not in character.