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Daltonism? Doesn't that have something to do with eating kittens?

We`ve been hearing this same story about future Chinese domination since 1850...

Earlier than that. Wasn't it Napoleon who called China a "sleeping giant"?

Do you honestly think Chinese IT are going to beat Intel, HP, Motorola, IBM at advanced development? No. If anything, those US and EU companies will outsource some manufacturing to China.

I heard Adam Osborne say this -- before he lost his fortune building the Oborne 2 computer -- "those who ride technologies cutting edge are frequently sacrificed upon its blade..." Letting the US industries continue to break the ground, and then build joint ventures to develop them in China is a smart move. It is a good way to acquire high technology at low cost.

This is aimed more at thumbing their nose at the Russians than the Americans

Didn't they buy Soyuz technology, and update it?

China`s military cannot project power. Hell, they cannot even take back an island right off their coast.

Launching unprovoked attacks on other nations is kind of frowned upon. Yes, you can get away with it if the target of your attack is a little tiny place no one has ever heard of, like East Timor. But, when Iraq attacked Kuwait -- a tiny little place that did matter, there was an international reaction.

The USA, UK attack on Iraq eight months ago was a very provocative one. WMD ready to launch in 45 minutes? There weren't any. I never believed there were. So did much of the world. So, I think, did some of the more wily USA journalists. But few of them were prepared to say so loudly -- that "politically incorrect" host being one of the exceptions -- the USA was caught in a mad patriotic fervour.

Will the USA get away with it? Will Bush get impeached for lying?

Can the world expect to see more nations launching unprovoked attacks on other nations, if Bush gets away with it?

The actual numbers are 84.9 for women, 82.7 for men after preventable causes are excluded. The reporter screwed up.

The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information.

Agreed. Here is an interesting experiment to try. Find a major news story, preferably on Iraq or Afganistan. (It can be something else, but Iraq and Afganistan will yield more results.)

Check the story first on CNN

Then check the subtle changes in perception on the same story from these sites:

BBC NEWS
Globe and Mail

Then note the radically different opinions on:

Aljazeera
Antiwar

Note, I am not asking you to agree with any of the above opinions, or websites. Just begin to notice the different perceptions you can gain insight to on news stories on the net. This kind of insight cannot be gathered by watching local news, like NBC, CBS, or even the "most trusted" views of CNN.

The speculation that climate change could create strong hurricanes has even led to new names for these types of storms: supercanes or hypercanes.[...]According to figures from Environment Canada, there have been more tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic area in the past 10 years than in any decade on record.

Whaa? Dalton McGuinty is CEO of Both Verisign and SCO???

Whaa? Dalton McGuinty is CEO of Both Verisign and SCO???

Plus it would be chaos for the American drug control people, since it would likely flood the US with dope.

Canada already is...the RCMP (Canada's national police force) estimates that 50% of dope grown in Canada is exported to the United States. Just look at how high school students are doing.

Also, conservative esitmates in British Columbia put the dope trade at $5 billion CDN per year. That would make it the third largest industry in B.C. behind natural resources and tourism.

It's sad how many people characterize pot as worse than alcohol or any other soft drug. Governments realized after many years the revenue potential in alcohol sales far outweighed the risks involved in banning it. But with pot legal, hundreds of thousands of people would be released from jail and the "War on Drugs" would see its funding cut.

And the United States can't back down from any war, can it?

- Sherman

PS: Almost all serious studies into pot say that it should be a health system problem, not a criminal justice system problem.

"According to the article, 70 million dollars was generated with the Candanian levy. I would be willing to bet that none of that money went to any artist."

Believe it or not, you are right!
No artist have every been paid a dime from this levy. (See 2nd last paragraph)
http://globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStor y/LAC/20030913/KATE13//?query=riia

(Yes, the author is unable to spell 'RIAA' !)

The Globe and Mail is the older and generally more respected newspaper. The National Post is a recent upstart. It is generally considered much more right-wing and a bit downscale.

Here is one. Read down near the end. I once saw links to the supposed chats, but I cant find them.

The Canadian version of RIAA is pretty easy compaired to the US.

None of the suits involve Canadians and the Canadian Recording Industry Association, CRIA, says it has no plans to launch similar legal action here.

Another quote to ease the minds of Canadians;
Canadian legal experts say similar suits would be harder to win here mainly because Canada's copyright law permits people to make copies of music for personal use. A levy is included in the price of CDs which is supposed to cover royalties for copying.

Plus your new $20 looks pretty damned ugly!

Here's an interesting read on the canadian view of this mess.

Sympatico Globe and Mail

I found an article on this, Case of 19 terrorists unravelling, though the link to Echelon and the nuclear power plant appears somewhat tenuous.

The The press coverage from the Globe and Mail might not be quite what we want, but please remember that it's written by a non-fan, for non-fans.In my view, the nastiest thinga about it was the suggestion that the outside world has almost caught up with Science fiction. Problem is, that's pretty much true.

Think for a moment about classical science fiction: With the exception of hyper-drive and teleporters, there's very little that was thought of 30 years ago that isn't either already invented or earnedtly being developed, whereas in the golden years of science fiction, it really WAS fiction...

Space was generally considered inaccessible, pocket-sized radio phones were a dream, TVs weighed about 80pounds; The idea of a computer capable of speech fitting on your waist, much less your wrist was a pipe dream and the sound-barrier was still considered a real barrier.

Nowadays we know that Venus is hot enough to melt your lead miniatures, Mars has slightly more water than the Saharah Desert, one of Jupiters moons *might* have some liquid water on it.

I mean, if you look at the Space Family Robinson now, the least believable part of the whole thing is that all the kids are still living with both biological parents!

Age has caught up with many SF con-goers, and so has the world. Coming up with seriously fictional science fiction is now much harder than it was. In many ways, I'd say that the article is an acknowledgement of the forethought of those who were in Science fiction in the early days. That current science fiction seems paler in comparison is simply a result of the world catching up to us.

This leads to the question then: Now that the world has caught up to us, where do we go? (or, rather where are we going?) In my mind, speculative fiction has always been about the what if: What if technology was like this? What if society tilted in that direction? What if we moved to a world where the biology was just a little bit different?

The advantage of the world having caught up with us is that our market is larger.. Where the Matrix might have been a low budget film 30 years ago, they were now able to rent an Australian city.for filming. Goth culture has caught up with Buffy and Star Trek is such big business that it's almost unstoppabe.

These were things that we were fighting for a generation or so ago. Now that they've been achieved, we're upset that they're now considered almost passe. Simply put: that's part of the cost of success.

Ghyslain will be under psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time

1)The school I went to supplied the equipment, but you had to provide the video/film. Making the videotape his personal property.

2)According to the lawsuit, the video was sent out along with messages inviting people to make insulting remarks about it.

3)In the excerpts from Internet chats filed in court, the four appear to be plotting ways to get the gifts sent to another address so they can keep the iPod for themselves.

You can read more about it here

The point is that this kid was humiliated so bad he dropped out of high school and finished the session at Pavillon Arc-en-ciel, a ward specializing in child psychiatry at the Trois-Riviyres Regional Hospital Centre. I'm 32, but I remember when I was his age, a zit was the end of the world. I can't even imagine what this would be like. It's not like he could just change high schools to get away from it, or move to another town, or province, or even country. This was humiliation on a worldwide scale. Who are you to criticize how he handles it? He can't walk in to Barnes and Nobles and buy a "Handling Worldwide Humiliation in High School for dummies" book. I think he's handled it fairly well. It's not like he's going around suing everything that breaths, or the people with the deepest pockets. He could be suing the school and the websites that hosted the file, but he's only suing the four kids that actually caused his injury.

Are all lawsuits evil? According to this article these kids did a lot more than just hurt this kids feelings. They stole the video from a school filing cabnet. Posted it to the internet with messages encouraging people to make fun of it. Conspired to hide the fact they stole the tape from school officials. Plotted to have the iPod and money that were raised for him sent to a different address, so they could keep them. Ghyslain was so widely mocked at his private high school that he dropped out. He had to finish the session at Pavillon Arc-en-ciel, a ward specializing in child psychiatry at the Trois-Rivieres Regional Hospital Centre. They didn't just hurt his feelings, the tried to ruin his life. Surely theres a lawsuit in there somewhere. I hope they take these punks to the cleaners.

Alledgedly the video was stolen out of a filing cabnet at school. The "friends" conspired to hide the fact they stole it. Then even tried to scheme to have the iPod and money that was raised for him be sent to a different address, so they could keep it. Some friends, huh? Actually in a phone interview when asked "I guess it wasn't a friend who did this, more of an enemy?" He replied, "More or less. It was someone I knew.". He should sue them, and I still want to see him in Ep. III.

Maybe if he hadn't gotten lawsuit happy, I'd still have an ounce of sympathy for him. As it stands, I couldn't care less about poor little Star Wars Kid's hurt feelings. If acting like a retard made one eligible for a Star Wars cameo, I'd be popping up the the background of nearly every scene.

Unfortunately, the smiling families were stock art, and the real life individuals lived in places such as Oregon. To my knowledge, none of the people in the ad spots were even Canadian. Oops.

Universal Music cuts CD Prices

What's most interesting here is not the price of CD's, (which at $14.95CAD is about $11 US), but that they plan to offer Canadian downloads in October for 99 cents (Canadian) a song!

It's too early to say whether any of the other labels will participate, and what kind of restrictions are going to be put on the media. Still, it looks like the Canadian industry has taken a much more concilaitory approach to the problem of filesharing, by giving up on the price, and offering additional share of downloaded fees to artists as well - so at least they're trying to adress some of the complaints on this and other forums.

Still looking for that other article...

A lot of people beleive that the power outage is related to the worm. As reported in the Globe and Mail:

...the problem appeared to have cascaded after the breakdown in the three high-voltage lines south of Cleveland in the area served by utilities owned by FirstEnergy.

FirstEnergy acknowledged that an alarm that should have flashed a red warning on computer monitors when power was being lost, did not sound in its central control room.

That warning system and the SCADA system which performs the monitoring both depend on RPC. There's been some speculation to suggest that a system admin blocked the RPC ports to protect the corporate intranet from the worm, thus causing the warning system to fail.

The warning was visible in other locations but no one bothered to pick up the phone... possibly because they believed the control centre would already have been aware of the problem.

There's something to be said for good old fashioned alarm bells.

Found a list of sites/reports about this guy, Peter Lynds. To prevent a slashdotting, I will just print them here. It was found at http://www.phy.cuhk.edu.hk/course/phy2002/forum/me ssages/299.html (remember to remove the space in the link if you MUST go /. them) but you should use the links here to prevent swamping them.

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id= 827792003

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20 030801.utime0801/BNStory/International/

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/icc -gwi072703.php

http://www.dagbladet.no/kunnskap/2003/07/31/374849 .html

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/latestnewsstory.cfm?stor yID=3515588&thesection=news&thesubsection=gene ral

http://iblnews.com/noticias/08/83260.html

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2003/08/01/ciencia/1 059697327.html

http://www.rsnz.govt.nz/

http://www.elcorreogallego.es/periodico/20030801/u ltimahora/N205769.asp

http://actualidad.eresmas.com/articulos/704306.htm l

http://brightsurf.com/news/july_03/ICC_news_073103 .php

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/ 6440571.htm

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/newswire.cgi /news/pa/2003/08/02/technology/amateurclaimssoluti ontotimepuzzle.html

http://www.diariodigital.pt/news.asp?section_id=60 &id_news=64588

Im posting at +2 to make sure they get seen, so modding them up isn't necessary (dont need the karma). There are some serious questions about the guy, both ways, according the googling _I_ did. Don't have an opinion yet...

Yes, Canadians pay less on health care than Americans. But ours is the 2nd most expensive system in the world. Australia, Sweden and much of northern Europe operates "as good or better" systems much cheaper AND most allow people some level of choice in health care (like Australia's 2 insurance systems or Sweden's private hospitals who compete for your government voucher). England is going through some serious rethinking of their "national health system" right now with people considering a change to an Australian system.

But not all is doom & gloom, some cutting edge work is being done here.

There is a good article at space.com and more details with pictures at the Eurocket site. The Globe and Mail notes that the mission set a record for having 9 payloads and placing 8 satelites in orbit.

There's another new article on this in the 'Globe and Mail'. It's a bit more indepth, and features a really, er, 'nice' picture of a seemingly shaven lady testing out the machine.

The U.S. soldier and former Iraqi officer agree on the basic facts of the incident. An initial crowd of perhaps 400 people looking for their payment gathered outside the OCPA gate early yesterday morning. When it became clear they would not get their money, they became angry, and apparently gained courage as hundreds of other protesters flocked to the intersection to join them.

The scene became violent. A Reuters television team was attacked, and one of the cameramen was taken to hospital after being struck with a piece of metal cable. A United Nations vehicle was also attacked, and some of the demonstrators began pushing themselves into the curled barbed wire in front of the U.S. positions.

Sgt. Lazore ordered his troops to fix bayonets, a threatening gesture that he said usually persuades an angry crowd to back off a few steps. This time, however, some of the Iraqi men simply tore off their shirts, as if daring the Americans to knife them. They continued to push forward.

"It was very, very tense. It was a full-court press," Sgt. Lazore recalled. It was also scorching hot. The mercury hit a high of 45 yesterday in central Baghdad, fraying nerves and fuelling tempers.

Into this edgy atmosphere drove a Humvee jeep, returning from a patrol through the neighbourhoods nearby. The driver tried to push his way through to the OCPA gate, but was stopped abruptly in the middle of the intersection outside. The crowd converged, and began to angrily pound on the jeep, some using bricks and stones. Sgt. Lazore's men fired warning shots over the heads of the crowd, some of the bullets thudding into a telephone pole and electrical box across the street.

Here the two versions, Iraqi and U.S., dramatically break. The only matter of agreement is that the gunner on top of the Humvee opened fire on the crowd, killing two Iraqis and wounding another.

Sgt. Lazore said the soldier, whose name was not released yesterday, believed the Iraqis were shooting at him. The soldier told Sgt. Lazore that he saw two muzzle flashes, and responded by pumping four rounds into the crowd. Three Iraqis, all former army conscripts, fell.

Mohammed and another man were shot Wednesday morning, when a crowd of about 2,000 protesters led by former army officers gathered in front of the US headquarters in Baghdad demanding back pay. A soldier fired his weapon after protesters began throwing rocks at troops and attempted to enter the compound, according to military spokesmen.

Members of the officers' union returned to the building yesterday, but the group was peaceful and numbered only 100. A leader, Abdul Sada Mahdi, told members that the union's representatives were inside the compound negotiating with US administrators. He told the group that outsiders had infiltrated Wednesday's protest in an attempt to destabilize the American administration.

''There are parties against the American occupation trying to tempt [former army officers] to do something,'' Mahdi said. ''These people came among us and did bad things to turn the army against us.''

'Canadians have a "socialist" government. This government "subsidizes" the activities of the "lumber" industy.'

Damm and here I though Canada was a "constitutional monarchy" silly me. To those that feel this is not applicable go fly a kite. As for the subsidizing you are comparing apples to oranges as I will explain later.

'The Canadian "government" will set the "prices" on the forestland (it owns nearly 100%) artificially "low" to "maintain full employment." This holds even when world timber prices are "low."'

Patently false but hey that is the prevailing American view. Infact it is the Provices that have control over the vast tracts of forrests designated to logging. A province is similar to a US state but in general a larger parcel of land and many less people (as an aside some states have more people than the entire country of Canada).

Now there are two costs to farming lumber in .ca land. One is getting logging rights and the other is reforestation. While the rights are indeed cheaper in general, the reforestation is in general more expensive.

So what has happened in one province (BC) did indeed lower the cost for its leases by a fraction of one percent over its already low rates (ya small I know but the next part is the real kicker) AND to encourage more investment and stability it introduced longer terms and relaxed the rules as they pertained to clumping of leases. This translated to a lock in approach that has inferiated lumber lobbiests in the US. Now the second largest producer in Canada is the province of Quebec and the federal gov of Canada is in the process of inking a deal that will knock the majority of tarrifs off of their lumber. It will hit the news anyday now give it time.

"Government "subsidies" of a product are a classic example of the reason other nations impose "counter-vailing tarriffs." A preliminary "WTO" ruling has sided with the US's case."

Huh? Got a link? I am sure I can find dozens of legit links showing a systemic US abuse of tarriffs as they apply to Candian lumber over the decades. Infact once again your cited preliminary decision is yet another loss for the US. The only thing they managed to finally salvage is that stumpage meets two key conditions of a subsidy. Canada will of course appeal and lets face it they have a better chance of appealing it because the problem is really issolated to a single province as oppossed to the illegal US tariff that applies nationwide. Also you will note that should the US not fix the mess it has created, Canada will have no choice under NAFA but to implement tarrifs on US goods.

Please consider that with a rising Canadian dollar and a declining American dollar it might be wise to not make your neighbors to the north avoid "buying American." Some of us remember the 76 cent US dollar compared to Canadian currency and would not be surprised if this happens again to a lesser extent.

Nice article by a Canadian conservative newspaper PS I think we should mess with that karoshi (death by overwork) poll just for the heck of it. Since no cowboyneal option is available lets go for the last one ;-)

Court Upholds Secret Detentions

US court upholds draconian law allowing secret arrests

Executions possible at Guantanamo

Big Brother - Make That Uncle Sam

Ashcroft seeks broader powers

Now shut the fuck up about your imaginary "rights". May you live in interesting times, american bastards.

You lose. Apparently you've never shopped at wal-mart, where thousands of pieces of merchandise have "made in the USA" labels on them. It means nothing because the only thing "made in the USA" is the goddamn tag. This is not even "news" - it was well proven years ago. No one believes it any more, so no one cares - simple as that.

I paid nothing to get the tranny in my car rebuilt because it was (believe it or not) still under warranty. I did pay about $300 for extra work - like putting in a high-perf clutch and throw out bearing while he had the tranny out. And yes, for a car with that many miles - and the way they were put on the car (it is, after all, a Mustang) - a transmission rebuild is not only understandable, but expected. What amazes me is how it went another 200,000 without another one.

I also used to work on them myself, but I quit because being a mechanic is not my idea of a good way to make a living. Shops charge way too much for what they pay the average (or even above average) mechanic.

And yes, virginia, cars last longer now than thirty years ago.

Interestingly, the number of old vehicles - those 13 years of age or older - increased by an average rate of 7.8 per cent between 1994 and '99, showing that vehicles are lasting longer. The report predicts that by 2004 the fastest growing segment of the fleet will be vehicles over the age of 13.

The videos are here (where the panel visibly ripples after the impact) and here.

The accompanying slide presentation has the details: the 1.7 pound foam block was fired at 531 mph and, where it struck a T-seal between two panels, displaced them and caused a 4/10 inch gap. This fake wing was made of fiberglass, but given the results, a test with actual shuttle wing material from the Space Shuttle Discovery is planned for today.

Here are some of the headlines from news.google.com:
Shuttle Wing Under Gun
Investigator Amazed by Shuttle Foam Force
Foam theory faces pivotal test
Tests Show Foam Causing Wing of Shuttle to Deform
Foam chunk was shuttle's undoing, tests indicate

Einstein was a communist, and some communists really did give the Soviets secret information about US nuclear weapons programs, and the Soviets really did want to use those weapons to kill everyone in the US. The FBI was just doing its job.

Full disclosure, Haas MBA '97 -- I had never realized until tonight that it was the school's idealism (career center listings) to blame for the dot-com bubble. Damn us farkers and our idealism!

Okay Quattrone, you're free to go home now. Okay Andersen, sorry about all that commotion.

Yeah, it was our idealism of the Berkeley Business School to blame. In the face of a history of defeats to the well heeled landlording bourgeois, we remained loyal to the underdog. Go Bears! Give 'em the AXE, Right in the Neck!

Ignore the guys from Harvard and Wall Street. Presumably Berkeley is to blame because of its location. Oh yeah, except that Berkeley isn't even in the heart of the Silicon Valley and presumably that other business school, at the Jr. University holds less than idealistic views. Or maybe they are idealistic but in ways that conform to poster Shoten's viewpoints making them non-idealistic.

Huh? WTF? I want my last five minutes back. The parent's post is one non-sequitur after another.

Insightful? Or just a full bong?

Thus there is currently no law in canada that makes posessing/smoking pot illegal! yipee! In fact there have now been several pot possesion cases thrown out of court because of this!!!

So, until this new law comes into effect pot is actually legal here. If you don't believe me here's a link to one our our most reputable newspapers: Judge strikes down pot law

this from happening.

can they really be blamed?

Can someone please append to that article's text that the story is covered by the The Globe and Mail and not the National Post (ugh) like so many readers have pointed out already. I mean for crying out loud people, you can read that yourself in the first three lines of the article! Give credit where credit is due.

Here is the original article, from the Globe and Mail.

> Kurdish (that's the ethnic group in Northern Iraq) refugees in Germany have been
> holding massive anti-war demonstrations. That's right -- the oppressed people
> are against the war.

Most of the Kurds still in northern Iraq apparently support war. I don't know why they're more optimistic about the chance of something good happening, whether they just don't have good media sources to give them the idea that most who oppose war still don't like Saddam, and would like to see him removed. (Personally, I think a firing squad would be too good for Saddam, but starting a war was the wrong thing to do. Now that it's started, the damage is done with displaced refugees and destruction of stuff, and I couldn't see the US pulling out now being good for the Iraqi people, so I hope the "good guys" win soon and send Saddam to the international criminal court. I also hope that now that the American people have had a good look at what Bush is like, they won't vote for him, and will never again elect a president who would let a bunch of military goons run the show.)

Anyway, read about Iraqi Kurds in the Globe and Mail.

> Kurdish (that's the ethnic group in Northern Iraq) refugees in Germany have been
> holding massive anti-war demonstrations. That's right -- the oppressed people
> are against the war.

Most of the Kurds still in northern Iraq apparently support war. I don't know why they're more optimistic about the chance of something good happening, whether they just don't have good media sources to give them the idea that most who oppose war still don't like Saddam, and would like to see him removed. (Personally, I think a firing squad would be too good for Saddam, but starting a war was the wrong thing to do. Now that it's started, the damage is done with displaced refugees and destruction of stuff, and I couldn't see the US pulling out now being good for the Iraqi people, so I hope the "good guys" win soon and send Saddam to the international criminal court. I also hope that now that the American people have had a good look at what Bush is like, they won't vote for him, and will never again elect a president who would let a bunch of military goons run the show.)

Anyway, read about Iraqi Kurds in the Globe and Mail.

the globe and mail is another good canadian based news site

Some other nice canadian news sites are The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail.

I'm really amazed at the number of people on all sides of the political spectrum who can't figure out what's going on around them. Foriegn outsourcing is not about corporate survival except in companies with a historic record of mismanagement. Let's say you're making millions of units of almost any mass market item a year. The difference between the cost of doing R&D here and in India spread over X-million units is fairly trivial. A recent article quotes a CEO as saying that he expects a problem with Indian competition 10 years from now, but this is saving him money now... what's implied is that 10 years from now will be someone else's problem.

This is about notching up earnings in a down economy so CEOs can make the profit targets which will enable their next batch of stock options. It's the same sort of thing that has produced Enron-style shell games to inflate reported profits.

Like just about everything else that's been going on in the last few years at the large corporate level, it's about short-term maximation of profits. Not for the stockholders, for the CEOs themselves. The stockholders aren't going to know when to dump their stock to get maximum value for it. The CEOs don't have the slightest interest in their employeess, the health of the nation or the communities in which they're doing business, profit for the stockholders or building good companies anymore. "The commons" is just something to privatise a chunk of and strip-mine that chunk until it's worthless.

This is hardly surprising. When one's main form of compensation is based on meeting quarterly profit or stock price targets, one doesn't want to invest in long-term R&D or employees or anything that might conceivably interfere with making the next batch of stock options kick in. Doing anything interesting and creative that doesn't show an immediate return is the sort of thing that makes investment analysts who generally don't understand what the companies that they advise about do real unhappy. Make them unhappy and the stock price drops. The stock one previously got in compensation drops in value... along with the CEO's personal net worth.

Why hasn't private industry built a space infrastructure capable of supporting things like a powersat network supplying enough energy to make Middle East oil permanently obsolete? In general, the present corporate business model can't support major projects that would take 10 years to provide a return on investment. A typical Fortune 500 CEO isn't going to start a project that's going to do nothing for him but make a successor look real good.

The funniest part about this is that the CEOs doing this appear to be under the impression that India is just another bunch of burbs whose residents talk funny, have an interesting ethnic cuisine and work real cheap.

[Note 1] They are normally on the edge of nuclear war with their Muslim neighbor, Pakistan, mainly over religious hostility. The dominant religious grouping (Hindus) is calling for the expulsion of Muslims. Poor Muslims are being physically pushed into Bangladesh.

Message: 10
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 11:08:10 -0500 (EST)
From: "IntellNet"
Subject: News Flash: Ten killed as bomb rips rail coach in Bombay

Ten people were killed and 75 hurt yesterday when a bomb blew up on a train packed with homebound commuters in Bombay, the deadliest in a spate of blasts in India's financial capital in recent months.

Note 1 - to read this kind of happy fun news yourself, subscribe to OSINT-L, the Open Sources Intelligence mailing list.

What I describe is business as usual.

Third World generally translates as "powder keg".

However, the CEOs who are doing this know that if they lose their bet and one of their call centers disappears in a conve

Yesterday's news about Dell seems relevant to your point.

An excerpt from the above link:

In particular, Dell appears to be part of the explanation for the recent poor performance by Sun, the leading provider of network servers. For years, the company's systems -- running a proprietary version of Unix -- have been the market leader, but lately servers from Dell and others running Windows or open-source Linux have been eating into Sun's market. Dell said its server shipments rose by 28 per cent, more than five times the growth experienced by the server market overall.

Although it's true that Dell had an exceptional quarter and most of its growth came from non-server related services, the continuoous erosion of the Sun's hold on the server market is indicated by Dell's (and others') stronger performance in the same sector. But, hey, if Cringley is right, Sun still has five more years to recapture their market share and introduce technological innovations other than Java.

Wait wait! Don't shut science down yet! We still haven't discovered how to make a tasty diet soda! Oh wait. Shit. Forget i said anything.

There is still dissent left in Canada. As Barlow quoted the Navajo "It's impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep." Canada has yet to pretend to be asleep, but for how long can Canadians afford to be awake?

How can they really tell which computer plays better chess?

Read the second to last paragraph of this. Or just read "Deep Junior is a three-time world champion and won the last official world chess championship for computers in July".

Are you really serious? Rwanda is a member of the UN too, but that did not save 800,000 Tutsis from being massacred by the Hutus despite advance warnings and pleas for help. In fact, if you dig into the record, the UN (deliberately, thanks to certain *cough* France *cough* member states) turned a deaf ear to the situation. Relying on the UN for military assistance is suicidal.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Hutu-led Rwandan government the one _doing_ the killing (see summary here)? I agree that the UN should have done more, but comparing this to what would happen if the US was attacked makes no sense.

Either way, time for a reality check. Small African nations are not treated the same as nations which are important enough to be members of the Security Council. It's sad but true. You say below that the UN is dependant on the US for defense, yet you also think that they wouldn't come to our aid? If nothing else, our economic ties to the rest of the world would assure that UN nations would come to our aid, at least in a defensive war (an offensive war is obviously another story!)

Both of those states are NATO members are rely ultimately on the United States for their defense. They could not defend themselves without the US. That's how they pull that trick off.

Defend themselves from who? Who exactly is going to invade Canada in the near future? Remember where I said that you should think about "what's _actually_ going on"? This is what I'm talking about. The enemies of the UN are a few individual nations, not a superpower (a la the Cold War). Some nations actually act like this is the case.

Besides, I've argued that the US military could afford to shrink. I didn't say that it should go away entirely!

Because US allies with the exception of the UK lack the capability to even deploy their forces abroad. Also, they increasingly lack the ability to operate with US forces due to antiquated command, control and communications systems.

Personally, I think that is so wrong it's laughable. You really think that no other military in the world is capable of sending troops abroad except the US and (conveniently) it's one major ally?

So, why do I think you're wrong. Here's a list of UN peacekeeping operations as of Mid 2002 and the percentage of US troops involved in each. Notice that the US supplies an average of 1.5% of troops to these operations. If this article is correct, then even some smaller nations supply thousands of UN Peacekeepers. There's my proof that other nations can deploy their forces. They could do it last year, and I assume that they can still do it now!

Now, where's your proof to back up your claim that only the US and England can deploy forces abroad?

Because it takes a long time to acquire modern warfighting capability.

Actually, I agree with this whole bit, but I was talking about the US gearing _itself_ up for war, by calling up reserves (or instituting a draft), building more weaponry, etc. We're talking about two different things here.

From the points you made, it seems you need to do a lot more informed thinking about modern military affairs.

I hate to tell you this pal, but unsubstantiated claims and misunderstanding what I'm talking about aren't exactly convincing me to listen to you.

The Globe and Mail also has an article about this.

Check out the scary "John Doe" clause.