All I see is:

This move is designed to 'allow us to use bait-and-switch tactics to make a metric fuck-ton of money by screwing our customer base in ways we hope they won't notice overly much'

Maybe I'm just jaded ...

...

That'll teach me to open multiple stories in multiple tabs and wander away halfway through reading them >.<

yup

... and it has nothing to do with the complexity of the STRATEGY.... it's meant to give commanders an indication of the insanely-complex interrelations between various factors/actions. It's actually designed to represent the SITUATION in Afghanistan and to illustrate that simple notions of cause and effect aren't quite as simple as you'd like to believe. The slide is nothing more than a model of a very complex situation.... and it's actually a damned good one too.

Check out the larger version of the picture and take a look at some of the headings.

Look at the top right of the dark blue portion, where it says "targeted strikes", if you start following some of the arrows, you see (as you should expect) that targeted strikes will have an effect on "Insurgent Damages and Casualties" and that such an effect will also have an effect on "Fear of ANSF/Coalition Repercussions", which will also have an effect on "Insurgent recruiting/manpower".

There's no description of strategy there, and if you sat down and tried to think about the repercussions of specific actions taken in an area filled with insurgents and a populace that is sometimes sympathetic and sometimes not sympathetic to both the coalition and insurgents, a lot of the interrelations would seem pretty obvious - ie. if you spend too much effort killing insurgents, you run the risk of increasing their ability to recruit, because the population will begin to fear and resent you.

Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.

Agreed. Toyota put in the time and effort into building production hybrid vehicles before any of the other automakers gave a rats ass about the technology. They spent the R&D money and the money to put out a product that saw very limited acceptance (the first prius). They've now learned a lot from that (again at a huge cost) and have gone through their "lessons learned" to develop more robust tech. For the other automakers to profit off that initial investment of time and money by Toyota, without having to pay licencing fees, would be wrong.

I'm typically not a fan of the patent system, but this is definitely one case where I support its application.

Simple: Is one of the products made by Norton? If so, pick the other.... I'll never get over buying a gaming rig in the late 90s, solely for the purpose of playing Quake and another FPS whose name escapes me, and having to spend hours wiping and reinstalling everything on the computer, simply because Norton AV had decided that it should consistently use over 80% of the system resources, and refuse to turn off for any period.

That damned program was more invasive and crippling than the vast majority of the viruses it was designed to protect against >.<

QFT. Everyone who claims "stop hating on Microsoft simply because an incredibly loosely related product sucks" (or words to that effect) needs to reread the AC's above post. Given the apparently level of involvement Microsoft had with the LSE and the creation of TradElect, they either screwed up using their own products, *or* pushed their own product while knowing that it wouldn't fit the bill. Neither of those absolve the company from deserving every ounce of flak they're taking over this.