The difference is this: in the United States, prison labor may only be used to produce goods and services for the state. It is illegal for prison-produced goods to compete on the open market and it is illegal for prisons to profit off anyone but other governmental agencies.
Oregon prisoners sew jeans called "Prison Blues." Inmates are
paid anywhere from 28 cents to $8.00/hour, but 80 percent of the
higher wage is withheld.
In 1994, a local prison secretly slipped Chicago-area prisoners
into a Toys R Us store to stock shelves. Union protests stopped it.
Southern California youth offenders book flights for TWA.
Private companies hire prisoners in Ohio, California and other
states to do data processing inside prisons.
I hope you are taking personal responsibility for your retirement and socking away tens of millions of dollars for yourself, so that you will be sitting pretty when the fit hits the shan and inflation decimates the buying power of your nest egg.
It's very likely to happen. Enjoy your little bubble of illusion... while you can.
Happily, some of us out here in/.-land are, rather than isolated individuals, members of a larger society, which includes members much older than us. We can get an oral history of how things used to be, aquiring data that reaches back well before our births. And some of our societies even have a tradition of literature. Through the written word, we can know conditions long before the birth of any member of our society. It is thus that we know that SOME SHIT AIN'T RIGHT. Locally, I know that Wisconsin has had warm and/or snowless winters in the past, but not year after year, and that thunderstorms (which require warm air masses) in January used to be rare as hens' teeth, and that maybe we're not too happy about those catastrophic localized results, hey?
Gut environmental protections to benefit his wealthy benefactors... Check.
Pour federal tax money into the coffers of corporate cronies through expanded military spending... Check.
Bankrupt the federal government for generations to come, leaving the major corporations as the de facto rulers of the nation... Check.
Find a pre-text upon which to attack Iraq, which is in a stategic location to project American power into the Middle East, as outlined by the Project for a New American Century in 1998... Check
Play lap dog for Ariel Sharon to satisfy AIPAC and his evangelical Christian base... Check.
aclarke says, "If you're going to exercise your "right" to vote, please at least do so with some modicum of information beyond a vague yet undefined antipathy towards the current president."
I don't want to insult you, but I can only assume that you are not at all informed. I know that I speak for many people that I know when I say that our feeling toward the current President is well-honed, concrete, visceral, burning hate for the man and his cronies.
Why? He gave up the search for Osama bin Laden (you know, the guy who attacked us on 9/11/2001?) and let him get away, to attack a nation which posed no threat to us based on bald-faced lies and distortions, thus creating fertile ground for recruiting more terrorists, meanwhile letting nuclear materials, explosives and weapons disappear from United Nations supervision and presumably into the hands of said terrorists. He has used the war as cover for an enormous give-away of our tax money to his corporate cronies, letting American soldiers die for lack of proper equipment. And what about the 100,000 innocent Iraqis killed?
He hasn't done anything to tighten up security here in the United States, aside from some feel-good-but-mostly-useless airport security. He has shredded our proud political traditions by trashing due process, holding prisoners for years without charges, even if they are American citizens. Even if they aren't guilty of anything! He has destroyed our international credibility by authorizing torture, which was used in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq-- when 9 out of 10 prisoners were innocent but rounded up by mistake! For all that, and the awful PATRIOT Act, his administration still hasn't successfully caught or prosecuted any terrorists in this country!
He's destroying Social Security by draining the trust fund of money. He's screwing up Medicare. He's destroying the environment with the ironically-named Clear Skies and Healthy Forests Initiatives. He's leaving millions of children behind. He's run up the biggest federal deficits and debt ever! He's giving tax incentives for corporations to send jobs overseas.
Other nations are financing this federal debt and trade deficit. The US dollar is not on any fixed standard; it floats with the market and is backed only by the United States government. Once the dollar collapses, we are S-C-R-E-W-E-D. In the meantime, our investors can buy treasury notes with their currency, dumping it on the market keeping their currencies low against the dollar, and thus keeping American money flowing into their own manufacturing bases. Our national security is at risk as a result.
To sum up, we face greater danger from terrorism, our economy grows weaker, we've lost our allies, and our long-term security is threatened. And to top it all off -- like a big red cherry -- George W. Bush says, "If you're not with us, you're against us." The man is fucking us over and calling us unpatriotic if we question it. I figure we ought to dole out some of that Texas justice he's so fond of: Give him a fair trial, then shoot him.
Now, does that sound like vague yet undefined antipathy?
Nader often says, half-seriously, that the Republicans and the Democrats are the same, corporate party. Before you dismiss him as glib, or an idiot, think about it. The two parties have what seems to be a gentleman's agreement to watch each other's back. Together, they run the debate commission and keep third parties out. They both oppose instant run-off voting, or fusion. And how about this? Bush might have missed the deadline to get on the Florida ballot! Read it yourself: http://sptimes.com/2004/09/11/Decision2004/Did_Bus h_camp_err_on_.shtml Here they're trying to keep Nader off the Florida ballot because they fear he'll swing the state to Bush, but the Democrats here have a chance to try to get Bush himself off the ballot, and they won't take it...
Cripes, I live in a state that's geographically larger than Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, et cetera, to say nothing of the pipsqueaks like Andorra, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Vatican City, et cetera. And it's only the 23rd largest of the 50 United States!
Heck, why fight it? I fervently hope that one day all of the European states join the EU under a federal system. Then I will be able to point at a map and say, "European Union," and not have to bother remembering all those pesky internal divisions of that specific country.
Predictably, THM, a number of other posters have tried to take you to task for this assertion. Personally, I think both this statement and the outcry from the other posters miss the truth, which is more nuanced.
The trouble is not that the Democrats and Republicans are the same, but that the political climate in this country is changing entirely in the wrong direction -- towards fascism and empire -- and that the Republicans are leading the charge, with the Democrats following closely behind. The Democrats' schtick is that awful lesser evilism: Hey, we're slightly better than the Republicans! (Funny, Kerry's position is that he'd do the same thing in Iraq as Bush, only better!) They're not trying to change the political climate back toward Constitutional, representative democracy, increasing civil rights and away from the imperial Presidency.
Basically, both parties are taking the USA in the wrong direction, the Republicans a little more quickly, and the Democrats a little more slowly.
To see how things have changed, consider a thought experiment. Who would you vote for if the race were between Democrat John Kerry and Republican Dwight Eisenhower?
Funny, THEMians criticizing the United States' legal system without understanding it. We believe the same thing here, epitomized by the famous hypothetical that you don't have the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater because of the stampede danger.
That would make sense if Saddam's threat was anything but an incredibly trumped-up lie. WMD? None. WMD deployable in 45 minutes? See above. Al-Qaeda connection? Fabricated. Uranium acquisition? Faked document. Long-range missiles? Not long-range enough to get to US! Unmanned gliders? Balsa and duct tape. Beligerant talk? None. Neighbors afraid? Nope.
Huh, so what claim of an Iraqi threat to the United States DID stand up to scrutiny?
Outsourced management. I'm sure there's a CEO over in India who'd run the company for less than a quarter the compensation an American CEO expects. Plus, he'd be close to the workers!
That'd just be too ironic. NeXT and Sun worked together to push the OpenStep standard, but Sun pulled out to focus on Java. Apple bought NeXT and turned OPENSTEP into Rhapsody, which begat MacOS X after widespread developer revolt. In the transitition, there was a big push within Apple to convert everything over to Java. (Even the Objective C syntax!) That initiative failed (performance was brutally awful), and Java is still supported but little-used. Sun and NeXT/Apple just haven't been able to get along...
I wonder about you people who can't tell the difference between a window and a Web browser. I mean, really! GNOME and KDE provide file managers, Web browsers, word processors, media players, and much more. Window managers twiddle rectangular areas of the screen. Is this really a tough concept?
We have different tastes than you do, so please stop trying to impose your "taste" on us.
In light of:
Here we go again with this taste/fashion arguement of "sprawl", that has beed defined every bit as well as "saturday night special", i.e., it is just a libel without definition.
Here you're telling somebody that they don't really mean what they mean. I'm sure SubtleNuance knew what he/she meant by "sprawl," I know what he/she meant by "sprawl;" everybody I've ever talked to about the subject shares the same meaning of "sprawl," as well as all the literature I've read on the topic. It's a fairly well-defined word for a large number of people in the United States. Perhaps it means something different to you, but don't impose your standards on us, please!
Believe it or not, many people do not want to live in large cities. We have different tastes than you do, so please stop trying to impose your "taste" on us.
Believe it or not, many people also do not want to live in suburban hell. Many people would like to live in human-scale neighborhoods where they can walk in safety and comfort. Many people do not like the assholes in automobiles threatening their lives if they, God forbid, want to get around by bicycle. Many people do not like the strip-mall blight, destruction of farmland and wilderness, air and water pollution, 12-lane highways and the requirement that one have a car to get anywhere.
Unfortunately, we can't have sprawl and compact communities in the same place since they're mutually exclusive. If people working to effect compact communities and human-scale (versus auto-scale) development are considered to be imposing their tastes on others, then the current physical environment is the result of other people imposing their tastes on them. Fair is fair.
Why should the people on the receiving end of a screw-job sit down and shut up, as you're telling them to do? If you don't like it, don't impose your tastes. Move.
(For what it's worth, anti-sprawl people don't want to live in big cities, either, which is why they oppose the big cities gobbling up so much land.)
Believe it or not, many people do not want to live in large cities. We have different tastes than you do, so please stop trying to impose your "taste" on us.
That sentence won the NPR Challenge for 12/22 and 12/29/2002. The object of the contest was to devise the most interesting sentence that can be typed with only one hand in normal position on a QWERTY keyboard. Successive keystrokes likely to be pressed by alternate hands, eh?
Methinks you need to study some history. Man, or homo sapiens sapiens, originated between 350,000 to 150,000 years ago, and achieved world-wide distribution about 50,000 years ago. Modern civilization is considered to be about 10,000 years old. And it was only in the 20th century that the population passed the billion mark.
What you're missing: Unorganized, individual Americans with guns are only a threat to each other and not the government military. If we were allowed private communication, we would have a chance to organize an effective militia.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, no longer true. Excerpt:
Check out the soil conditions before you buy.
(Hint: There's hardly any.)
I hope you are taking personal responsibility for your retirement and socking away tens of millions of dollars for yourself, so that you will be sitting pretty when the fit hits the shan and inflation decimates the buying power of your nest egg. It's very likely to happen. Enjoy your little bubble of illusion... while you can.
Happily, some of us out here in /.-land are, rather than isolated individuals, members of a larger society, which includes members much older than us. We can get an oral history of how things used to be, aquiring data that reaches back well before our births.
And some of our societies even have a tradition of literature. Through the written word, we can know conditions long before the birth of any member of our society.
It is thus that we know that SOME SHIT AIN'T RIGHT. Locally, I know that Wisconsin has had warm and/or snowless winters in the past, but not year after year, and that thunderstorms (which require warm air masses) in January used to be rare as hens' teeth, and that maybe we're not too happy about those catastrophic localized results, hey?
There's five, do I get a lollipop?
aclarke says, "If you're going to exercise your "right" to vote, please at least do so with some modicum of information beyond a vague yet undefined antipathy towards the current president."
I don't want to insult you, but I can only assume that you are not at all informed. I know that I speak for many people that I know when I say that our feeling toward the current President is well-honed, concrete, visceral, burning hate for the man and his cronies.
Why? He gave up the search for Osama bin Laden (you know, the guy who attacked us on 9/11/2001?) and let him get away, to attack a nation which posed no threat to us based on bald-faced lies and distortions, thus creating fertile ground for recruiting more terrorists, meanwhile letting nuclear materials, explosives and weapons disappear from United Nations supervision and presumably into the hands of said terrorists. He has used the war as cover for an enormous give-away of our tax money to his corporate cronies, letting American soldiers die for lack of proper equipment. And what about the 100,000 innocent Iraqis killed?
He hasn't done anything to tighten up security here in the United States, aside from some feel-good-but-mostly-useless airport security. He has shredded our proud political traditions by trashing due process, holding prisoners for years without charges, even if they are American citizens. Even if they aren't guilty of anything! He has destroyed our international credibility by authorizing torture, which was used in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq-- when 9 out of 10 prisoners were innocent but rounded up by mistake! For all that, and the awful PATRIOT Act, his administration still hasn't successfully caught or prosecuted any terrorists in this country!
He's destroying Social Security by draining the trust fund of money. He's screwing up Medicare. He's destroying the environment with the ironically-named Clear Skies and Healthy Forests Initiatives. He's leaving millions of children behind. He's run up the biggest federal deficits and debt ever! He's giving tax incentives for corporations to send jobs overseas.
Other nations are financing this federal debt and trade deficit. The US dollar is not on any fixed standard; it floats with the market and is backed only by the United States government. Once the dollar collapses, we are S-C-R-E-W-E-D. In the meantime, our investors can buy treasury notes with their currency, dumping it on the market keeping their currencies low against the dollar, and thus keeping American money flowing into their own manufacturing bases. Our national security is at risk as a result.
To sum up, we face greater danger from terrorism, our economy grows weaker, we've lost our allies, and our long-term security is threatened. And to top it all off -- like a big red cherry -- George W. Bush says, "If you're not with us, you're against us." The man is fucking us over and calling us unpatriotic if we question it. I figure we ought to dole out some of that Texas justice he's so fond of: Give him a fair trial, then shoot him.
Now, does that sound like vague yet undefined antipathy?
Nader often says, half-seriously, that the Republicans and the Democrats are the same, corporate party. Before you dismiss him as glib, or an idiot, think about it. The two parties have what seems to be a gentleman's agreement to watch each other's back. Together, they run the debate commission and keep third parties out. They both oppose instant run-off voting, or fusion.s h_camp_err_on_.shtml Here they're trying to keep Nader off the Florida ballot because they fear he'll swing the state to Bush, but the Democrats here have a chance to try to get Bush himself off the ballot, and they won't take it...
And how about this? Bush might have missed the deadline to get on the Florida ballot! Read it yourself: http://sptimes.com/2004/09/11/Decision2004/Did_Bu
Cripes, I live in a state that's geographically larger than Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, et cetera, to say nothing of the pipsqueaks like Andorra, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Vatican City, et cetera. And it's only the 23rd largest of the 50 United States!
Heck, why fight it? I fervently hope that one day all of the European states join the EU under a federal system. Then I will be able to point at a map and say, "European Union," and not have to bother remembering all those pesky internal divisions of that specific country.
It's been done; slashdot write-up here.
Predictably, THM, a number of other posters have tried to take you to task for this assertion. Personally, I think both this statement and the outcry from the other posters miss the truth, which is more nuanced.
The trouble is not that the Democrats and Republicans are the same, but that the political climate in this country is changing entirely in the wrong direction -- towards fascism and empire -- and that the Republicans are leading the charge, with the Democrats following closely behind. The Democrats' schtick is that awful lesser evilism: Hey, we're slightly better than the Republicans! (Funny, Kerry's position is that he'd do the same thing in Iraq as Bush, only better!) They're not trying to change the political climate back toward Constitutional, representative democracy, increasing civil rights and away from the imperial Presidency.
Basically, both parties are taking the USA in the wrong direction, the Republicans a little more quickly, and the Democrats a little more slowly.
To see how things have changed, consider a thought experiment. Who would you vote for if the race were between Democrat John Kerry and Republican Dwight Eisenhower?
Funny, THEMians criticizing the United States' legal system without understanding it. We believe the same thing here, epitomized by the famous hypothetical that you don't have the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater because of the stampede danger.
That would make sense if Saddam's threat was anything but an incredibly trumped-up lie.
WMD? None.
WMD deployable in 45 minutes? See above.
Al-Qaeda connection? Fabricated.
Uranium acquisition? Faked document.
Long-range missiles? Not long-range enough to get to US!
Unmanned gliders? Balsa and duct tape.
Beligerant talk? None.
Neighbors afraid? Nope.
Huh, so what claim of an Iraqi threat to the United States DID stand up to scrutiny?
It ain't the hands which cause the problem.
What about my mailserver with the 16MHz processor and 24MB of RAM? Can it keep up with the P4 with this technique?
Freedom hens, Freedom fries, Freedom toast...
I think I want to go live in Freedom.
Outsourced management. I'm sure there's a CEO over in India who'd run the company for less than a quarter the compensation an American CEO expects. Plus, he'd be close to the workers!
A little touchy about Java performance claims, eh? Google it or compare the Java apps in MacOS X Server then versus MacOS X now.
That'd just be too ironic. NeXT and Sun worked together to push the OpenStep standard, but Sun pulled out to focus on Java. Apple bought NeXT and turned OPENSTEP into Rhapsody, which begat MacOS X after widespread developer revolt. In the transitition, there was a big push within Apple to convert everything over to Java. (Even the Objective C syntax!) That initiative failed (performance was brutally awful), and Java is still supported but little-used.
Sun and NeXT/Apple just haven't been able to get along...
I wonder about you people who can't tell the difference between a window and a Web browser. I mean, really! GNOME and KDE provide file managers, Web browsers, word processors, media players, and much more. Window managers twiddle rectangular areas of the screen.
Is this really a tough concept?
First of all, I was responding to this statement:
We have different tastes than you do, so please stop trying to impose your "taste" on us.In light of:
Here we go again with this taste/fashion arguement of "sprawl", that has beed defined every bit as well as "saturday night special", i.e., it is just a libel without definition.Here you're telling somebody that they don't really mean what they mean. I'm sure SubtleNuance knew what he/she meant by "sprawl," I know what he/she meant by "sprawl;" everybody I've ever talked to about the subject shares the same meaning of "sprawl," as well as all the literature I've read on the topic. It's a fairly well-defined word for a large number of people in the United States. Perhaps it means something different to you, but don't impose your standards on us, please!
Believe it or not, many people do not want to live in large cities. We have different tastes than you do, so please stop trying to impose your "taste" on us.Believe it or not, many people also do not want to live in suburban hell. Many people would like to live in human-scale neighborhoods where they can walk in safety and comfort. Many people do not like the assholes in automobiles threatening their lives if they, God forbid, want to get around by bicycle. Many people do not like the strip-mall blight, destruction of farmland and wilderness, air and water pollution, 12-lane highways and the requirement that one have a car to get anywhere.
Unfortunately, we can't have sprawl and compact communities in the same place since they're mutually exclusive. If people working to effect compact communities and human-scale (versus auto-scale) development are considered to be imposing their tastes on others, then the current physical environment is the result of other people imposing their tastes on them. Fair is fair.
Why should the people on the receiving end of a screw-job sit down and shut up, as you're telling them to do? If you don't like it, don't impose your tastes. Move.
(For what it's worth, anti-sprawl people don't want to live in big cities, either, which is why they oppose the big cities gobbling up so much land.)
Pot. Kettle. Black.
ZipCar
Brett Favre rates better.
_ ru nnersup.html
That sentence won the NPR Challenge for 12/22 and 12/29/2002. The object of the contest was to devise the most interesting sentence that can be typed with only one hand in normal position on a QWERTY keyboard.
Successive keystrokes likely to be pressed by alternate hands, eh?
http://www.npr.org/programs/wesun/puzzle/puzzle
Methinks you need to study some history. Man, or homo sapiens sapiens, originated between 350,000 to 150,000 years ago, and achieved world-wide distribution about 50,000 years ago. Modern civilization is considered to be about 10,000 years old. And it was only in the 20th century that the population passed the billion mark.
What you're missing: Unorganized, individual Americans with guns are only a threat to each other and not the government military. If we were allowed private communication, we would have a chance to organize an effective militia.