THE ORIGINAL POST WAS FLAMEBAIT. Altho he wasn't kidding. Rebuilding NOLA "better" means getting rid of the poor people by eliminating any safety nets left. no public schools, no public non-profit hospitals, and an unending barrage of despite against those who were bussed away at gunpoint. those who didn't die in the sewage. the master plan is to white-ify the city, and they all damned well know they are doing it. the gloating is disgusting. there are a lot of people in NOLA that HATED the poor blacks, and they are partying with the knowledge that they will rebuild without the "freeloaders" around. the suburbs will move back into the city and make it a giant mall.
and while we're at it, have citizens pay tolls to use the sidewalk, a public drinking fountain, use city hall, read a library book, see by streetlights. maybe we should eliminate streetlights, and have people rent flashlights from the electric company. oh, and only people who subscribe to security services should get assistance when they are in trouble.
wifi mesh is cheap and easy to provide. it harms no one if the city wants to provide the service. screw the comm companies. new orleans is a disaster area, and they want to rape it.
if the neocon business boys have their way, only $100K salaried people will be able to live in NOLA again. no public schools, no non-profit hospitals, hi-rise condos in the garden district... a neocon republican paradise.
The population that was removed at gunpoint, and kept out at gunpoint? You mean those people who weren't let back into the city until the landlords dumped their furniture out on the street and re-rented the apartments at twice the price? The home owners who are being dispossessed? The people who were told to get stuffed a couple of months ago when their bennies were cut off?
EVERYONE WANTS BACK IN. Those that weren't rich or connected are being robbed as we speak of their property. The city government has been taken out by neocons who have dissolved the public schools and non-profit hospitals -- the poor are NOT being let back in and it is intentional. Unions are now illegal. Slave immigrant and "guest" workers are paid pennies and are housed in tents, while NOLA residents who could have been paid to rebuild are told to get stuffed. The connected Republican contractors are using slave labor to build their profits. Tens of thousands of mobile homes are sitting out of state, rotting, because the shadowy figures making the decisions have made it so. The construction workers are fed by out-of-state caterers thru friendly connections in the congress and white house. In other words, all the money spent on new orleans is not going to the actual people who would work there if they could. the cash is going to republican out-of-state contract whores who are looting the place blind. the city will be rebuilt as a white, condo-tall, high-rise republican bastion of neo-con values (looting), and the state of Louisiana will be a republican state henceforth. mission accomplished.
Bingo. I've spent some time down there -- hell, hit any north shore suburb of Chicago, too -- and "nigger" is used for blacks constantly. More importantly, it means "low", "poor", "vile". It's just a matter of who's using it. If it's a white person, it's an uplifting experience for them, because no matter how low they think themselves to be on the food chain, there's always the "niggers" to revile. Talking about how sick "niggers" are is dinner conversation in even the nicest families I wandered into. It's just part of the culture. Hate and class and status, oh my.
Oh yes, if you're black, you know damned well what they mean when they call you "nigger". Ditto "gay".
Insults like that are primarly the favorites of the young and "rebellious". Like "gay", they think they are using the word "nigger" to spite the face of PC liberal communists. It's a mark of pride. In stupiditym I guess. Adults stop using such epithets because as they move into the real world, they find that they are no longer surrounded by like-minded people, and won't exactly move up in their field of employment. And they'll get their face kicked in by a serious teacher of manners.
The Justice Department doesn't seem to have anything to do. All the real crime in the U.S. has been eliminated, so they're moving on to thought crimes. God knows what teenagers would do if they found out sex existed.
um. Didn't this company make all the Thinkpads? Do you realize that almost ALL laptops are made by Chinese companies? Aren't you all a little late to worry about foreign companies making our equipment? Profit overrules, doesn't it? No unions, no environmental regulations, workers working for pennies an hour, isn't that the whole point of the last ten years? Corporate duty is to make profit only, not worry about people or national interests, no?
It sounds to me like the usual suspects in the U.S. right are trying to generate a Great Enemy again, after the nitwits in caves in Pakistan didn't rise to the challenge. Gotta have something for all that military and intelligence apparatus to do, something to spend all those trillions on. Otherwise, if we aren't at war with some Great Enemy, people might wonder why we're gearing up for an eternal world war if no one wants to hurt us.
But Heinlein did mention the Scientology movement kindly in "Friday". Disciplined, short-haired, and clean, which he seemed to think noteworthy. He was always a military man at heart. And he had a soft spot for con artists. If a man buys a horse from you, it's up to him to count the legs. I think he applied that to the poor goons who Lafe Ron conned. It seems a few of the more right-wing old guard has a soft spot for ol' Lafe and his money racket. "Writers of the Future" Award. Gah.
If you didn't know, Dianetics and Scientology was a BIG problem in the post-1950 science fiction fan world. A lot of people got sucked in, A.E. Van Vogt, Campbell, a lot of the fen. Dianetics was first announced to the world via Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and Scientology followed two years later when the IRS and the AMA were hot on Hubbard' ass. Dianetics was billed as a replacement for psychology, which Hubbard was terrified of, as well as a medical treatment, but Scientology was a religion, and therefore immune to the IRS -- in theory. In fact, it was 1992 when a overwhelmed (2000 individual lawsuits against IRS agents through hundreds of fake fronts, destroying agents' lives one dollar at a time) IRS finally capitulated and forgave over a billion in back taxes, and quite illegally "announced" that Scientology was a religion. Actually, the US has no such mechanism - they were just declared a, um, 507 or some such tax code for "non-profit" -- an unbelieveable lie.
But not Heinlein. If that's in Wikipeida, it's dead wrong. There are dozens of incorrect stories going around, sort of a game of Telephone. There may have been a card game, there definitely was a speech in which Hubbard said the real way to get rich was to start a religion. It is also probable he said it many times in his life. It's just that, for the last 50 years, it has not been very healthy to have a good memory about how Scientology got its start. People in the SF world didn;t want to get sued, harrassed, accused of child molestation, be followed, have pets go missing, that sort of thing. L. Sprague de Camp, after writing a warning essay about the Church Militant getting out of hand, found his neighborhood flooded with flyers stating he was a pedophile. He got them to leave him alone by simply promising never to talk about them again. I assume a lot of people were shut up this way, and others got the message and shut up as well. It's a rare bird in SF that will talk about the Hubbardites in anything but fearful and hushed tones.
Robert Heinlein wrote a novella titled "Waldo", which nailed this possibility sixty years ago. In the story, power transmission is by radio, a la Tesla. One of the keys of the story is a general rundown in the physical health and vitality of younger people due the the EM interference in synaptic communication. Widespread lethargy and weakness resulted from the saturation, but no one noticed but one doctor, Waldo's, who wore a lead-lined trenchcoat to shield himself. He was considered an eccentric.
Waldo himself was an MD patient so weak that he built himself a satellite to live in so that he could move about under his own power in microgravity. He also diagnosed the problem, created a solution, and rolled up some bucks, so there's Heinlein in a nutshell.
Heinlein wasn't trying to predict anything, but to hit a target at sixty years, now that's good.
Troll? Yes, I am trolling for a reason. Why do I or anyone else need Vista? This is a valid question. It doesn't seem to be asked. People just accept that they will spend zillions to buy new, copy controlled PCs to run the thing. But WHY?
The executives at General Motors did everything for money. They slashed jobs, aimed at profit increases, canned workers and killed pensions. They did all they could to make a touch more money.
And their company is now nearly dead.
Business isn't about just making more money. It's about building a company so you'll survive the next year. Unless the real aim is to fleece as much as possible before bailing out of the dying vehicle.
Business needs to be deprogrammed. Corporations are allowed to exist, licensed to live, to serve the common good, not just to make money. If they just funnel wealth into a little club and then bail, then perhaps some new laws need making -- or older ones enforced.
Like journalism and their delusions about dual opinions=objectivity, business students have become infused with false dogma about selfishness and profits. There is a basic failure in the business community, a moral failure. They are unable to evaluate their activities as part of a greater whole, or even to see any obligation to a greater good or at least ratchet in their greed enough to enable their companies to survive. Institutional, ideological, suicidal stupidity is not a survival trait.
We can't be a country of insanely rich corporate officers and proles. It won't happen.
I run Win2000. It doesn't phone home, doesn't copy control my media, doesn't crash, doesn't monitor my hardware with a view to shutting off my OS if it thinks I changed too many pieces of hardware. It DOES run everything in the Windows world I need to run. Oh, yes, I can make copies of the install disk. It's solid as a rock. And, oh yeah, it doesn't cost me a thing.
And I need Vista why?
If I'm forced to use XP or Vista, I'll switch to Xandros or something similar in less than four hours. I assume the corporate people have their data held hostage, so they will comply with the extortion, but I don't have to.
Washington Post? The stenographers club?
on
Al-Qaeda Hacker Caught
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It Came From the Washington Post.
Listen: the Post has swallowed the hook, line, sinker, and fishing trawler for over ten years now. They gobbled down the fake Clinton scandals verbatim from Ken Starr, and for the last four years have spectacularly slurped down every worm dangled in from of them from the faked intelligence for weapons in Iraq to aluminum tubes to Colin Powell's magnificient self destruction in front of the U.N. presenting descredited notions from Cheney's little Special Office of special intelligence.
They and the NY Times have been shown that they've been hosed like third graders accidently playing in a Vegas poker game, BUT THEY STILL KEEP SWALLOWING THE SAME LINES OF BULLSHIT FROM THE SAME DAMNED LIARS. I think they're in too deep, there at the editorial offices of WaPo. They can't admit that they've been absolutely wrong on every worshipful point in this fake "war" against a common noun. The paper of record is in too deep.
The "terrorists" from 9-11 died in the damned planes. And there weren't enough in the whole world to man the twelve planes they wanted to fly that day, according to the 911 commission. The only real terrorists left alive after 9-11 were the head of al queda and bin laden (he was the financier of the attack, not the movementleader) and these "warriors" haven't caught them after five years.
Posting stuff doesn't make you a terrorist. That's a thought crime.
This is bull. They can't get the real men who had something to do with 9-11, so they manufacture these little "victories" against no-one who get to be tortured by farmboys in gulags around the world until they die.
There is no "Terror" you can have a war against. Every stupid move against the fringe and uninvolved MAKES men and women who want to kill you. We've torrtured thousands of probably innocent people. George and the WaPo will get their "terrorists" until the end of time. Like the "war" against the idea of "communism", they define who the enemy is, make a pile of money, control the zeitgeist, and declare it over when they find some new enemy after the last enemy stronghold is a mafia-run nation whose main export is prostitutes. Drugs, communism, atheism, terrorism, whatever, they'll always find some new thing to terrify and entertain people with, until the last superhurricane wipes out Washington DC.
We can't build a working, reliable transport to earth orbit in 60+ years, but we can build superscience security in less than five years. Guess we really want to lock ourselves into prison. Not enough spirit or imagination to create a way out of the jail we were born into.
Worser result, runaway fusion reaction obliterates a section of Chicago, causing Keanu Reeves to ride a cycle really, really fast to escape the blast zone, with Morgan Freedman in hot pursuit.
I know this may be considered silly, but: I don't care to run XP. I run Windows 2000, because I own legal copies, because the OS is rock solid, because it doesn't seem to vacuum up the viruses and spyware that XP does, it doesn't spy on my system and phone home to Redmond (oh, XP will, just give it time), and finally, 2000 doesn't shut itself off I change too many hardware components, and require me to beg Redmond to turn it back on. It just works. And I really don't care about games.
Is this massive knowledge base being built for installing XP applicable or adaptable to installing 2000 on the Mac? Drivers, yup. That would be a problem. But generally?
I don't have a monthly plan because I outlasted their two year contract, then refused any new one. Feels great.
Just for the fun: I use US Cellular. I don't want a GPS phone, so I never upgrade the device. However, they sent me a letter about a month back telling me that I *had* to buy a new GPS-enabled phone 'cause the guvmint said so. And I was offered a new, discounted phone (tiny print: new 2-year contract). And here's the kicker: they intended to -perhaps- charge me a "substantial" penalty fee every month if I didn't buy myself a guvmint-sanctioned tracking device.
I called 'em up, and the rep apologized and said policy had changed since the letter went out.
Well, that was interesting. But I really don't want a tracking device on me at all times. I'd hate to give up the cell phone. And all the pay phones seemed to have disappeared.
Monopolies are legal, but they used to be controlled, when the law was actually enforced and "conservative" judges weren't appointed to short-circuit it.
Monopolies are damaging because they can leverage their overwhelming advantage (=money) into new markets, conquering one product segment after another, erecting barriers to entry to new competitors, and most importantly, monopolies can prevent new technologies from dislodging their old tech by using extortion in all sorts of ways (in the classic case, "put Linux in your boxen, in any way, and say good-bye to your Windows discount, hell, good-bye to your Windows boxen).
Microsoft is building "killer" after "killer", using their infinite cash from their Office and Windows monopolies to simply underprice their products in new businesses like game machines and portable media players until their competitors, who don't have monopoly cash, fold. Then, classically, they raise their prices in their new monopoly, then use the cash to move into a new monopoly. This is why we busted the trusts after the Guilded Age. Inevitably, one company will own everything. Microsoft wants a media tax worldwide, wants a piece of every media streamed and stored. Then they'll inevitably move into media creation; hell, that's what they're doing in video games. Vertical lock.
The SF world doesn't begin and end with anime or video games, which are old bad American pre-1930's sci-fi warmed over. And over. And over. And over. And over...
If ya want to imagine coolness, picture Marvel Comic's Iron Man Armor. Now that's a fun toy. Closely related to Heinlein's Marine armor, which Lee probably never heard of. I used to dream of engineering a full suit of powered armor. (Sadly, it'll probably come into initial use intimidating protestors, as usual. We're kind of short on real enemies, so the weaponmeisters turn their gaze on dissenters within. If you don't have real enemies, make some up. If you doubt me, look at what our police wear facing down Quakers and similar madmen. They look like they are expecting rocket fire, with all that armor. Exactly why do they need military armor to face down college kids? Do they really think they're in some kind of danger, or is it just bullying?)
The weapons labs were full of comics and classic SF fans; sadly, now they will probably be anime fans, who never got the pure stuff from the original SF sources. What the old timers could have dreamed up had they known then what we see everyday. They had style and imagination. They were original.
Yup. The biggest market for Iraqi/Iranian oil is Asia, where they make the disks. The Project For the The New American Century (Cheney, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, Kristoff, and others) detailed why the US needed to take control of the Iran/Iraqi oil fields to control the political and economic destinies of our biggest future competitors, esp. China. We're building mighty military bases in Iraq now, and the PNACers are obviously building a case for whacking Iran. Oh, and I especially like the new Bush connection of Chavez in Venezuela with Iran. Talk about convenience! They're seeting up a future invasion of Venezuela, one of the biggest oil suppliers to the US itself. God, almighty. And news is so "balanced" they won't mention the obvious setup for fear of being labeled biased.
This isn't offtopic. It will be a critical factor in future pricing points of asian products. Whatever happens, someone here will make more money while we spend more.
Lemme guess. Don't know, just throwing it out there.
Once upon a time, the credit card companies employed full-time, insured people who made careers being part of the credit card industry. They worked hard, got paid an adequate salary, and in general were assets to the companies and the customers.
Then, Lo! upon a Green horse, came He who is called Company Reorganization.
He on the Horse downsized the division. He increased the workload per employee, and canned those who couldn't keep up. He dropped the salaries, converted those left to hourly.
The He on the horse made sure the employees only worked 29 hours a week, and therefore were not full-time, and needed no health insurance outlays.
After a very short time, temp employees making seven bucks an hour replaced the wage earners, and who by definition had no health insurance. And it was good, as the profits increased.
The He opened the next seal, and fired the temps and the wage earning employees, and outsourced the work to Bangalore, where the employees were paid fifty cents an hour and were told that they could be fired for looking crosseyed at a light fixture.
And the profits were even better.
And people began to notice that the employees were doing silly things that former employees had never done, such as accepting taped together paperwork that were obviously fraudulent. And they wondered, "Why aren't the employees doing their jobs?".
Some people said it was because they were poorly educated workers with bad attitudes that should be pressed even harder to do a better job, or should be fired and replaced with eager applicants, easily found. And others listened, and rejoiced that wisdom was found.
Others said: Listen, assholes, if you convert your worker pool into uninsured minimum wage drones and work them like dying mules, they won't really give a damn about the customers OR your company. And those who heard said: Get fucked, communist, and go back to Russia, we need not your kind here.
Bloody HELL, offtopic. The only reason NASA will be defunded, is being defunded, is the tax cuts and spending increasing for the war. No money, increased debt service, no NASA.
Slashdot Mirror
THE ORIGINAL POST WAS FLAMEBAIT. Altho he wasn't kidding. Rebuilding NOLA "better" means getting rid of the poor people by eliminating any safety nets left. no public schools, no public non-profit hospitals, and an unending barrage of despite against those who were bussed away at gunpoint. those who didn't die in the sewage. the master plan is to white-ify the city, and they all damned well know they are doing it. the gloating is disgusting. there are a lot of people in NOLA that HATED the poor blacks, and they are partying with the knowledge that they will rebuild without the "freeloaders" around. the suburbs will move back into the city and make it a giant mall.
and while we're at it, have citizens pay tolls to use the sidewalk, a public drinking fountain, use city hall, read a library book, see by streetlights. maybe we should eliminate streetlights, and have people rent flashlights from the electric company. oh, and only people who subscribe to security services should get assistance when they are in trouble.
wifi mesh is cheap and easy to provide. it harms no one if the city wants to provide the service. screw the comm companies. new orleans is a disaster area, and they want to rape it.
if the neocon business boys have their way, only $100K salaried people will be able to live in NOLA again. no public schools, no non-profit hospitals, hi-rise condos in the garden district... a neocon republican paradise.
i'm not kidding. read nola.com.
"that the folks that are here are intent on rebuilding the city better than it was. "
White, Republican, rich. No public schools, no charity hospitals. A necon Stalinist dream. Wyoming on the Mississipi.
god. it's so obvious. remove the poor, and you have paradise.
I will never see new orleans again. the crackers took over. It's dead. The best city we had will now be another gated racist suburb.
Jesus, bring on the global warming. Let's see the neocons drown in sewage next time.
The population that was removed at gunpoint, and kept out at gunpoint? You mean those people who weren't let back into the city until the landlords dumped their furniture out on the street and re-rented the apartments at twice the price? The home owners who are being dispossessed? The people who were told to get stuffed a couple of months ago when their bennies were cut off?
EVERYONE WANTS BACK IN. Those that weren't rich or connected are being robbed as we speak of their property. The city government has been taken out by neocons who have dissolved the public schools and non-profit hospitals -- the poor are NOT being let back in and it is intentional. Unions are now illegal. Slave immigrant and "guest" workers are paid pennies and are housed in tents, while NOLA residents who could have been paid to rebuild are told to get stuffed. The connected Republican contractors are using slave labor to build their profits. Tens of thousands of mobile homes are sitting out of state, rotting, because the shadowy figures making the decisions have made it so. The construction workers are fed by out-of-state caterers thru friendly connections in the congress and white house. In other words, all the money spent on new orleans is not going to the actual people who would work there if they could. the cash is going to republican out-of-state contract whores who are looting the place blind. the city will be rebuilt as a white, condo-tall, high-rise republican bastion of neo-con values (looting), and the state of Louisiana will be a republican state henceforth. mission accomplished.
Only solution:
throw away disk drive.
install new one.
Bingo. I've spent some time down there -- hell, hit any north shore suburb of Chicago, too -- and "nigger" is used for blacks constantly. More importantly, it means "low", "poor", "vile". It's just a matter of who's using it. If it's a white person, it's an uplifting experience for them, because no matter how low they think themselves to be on the food chain, there's always the "niggers" to revile. Talking about how sick "niggers" are is dinner conversation in even the nicest families I wandered into. It's just part of the culture. Hate and class and status, oh my.
Oh yes, if you're black, you know damned well what they mean when they call you "nigger". Ditto "gay".
Insults like that are primarly the favorites of the young and "rebellious". Like "gay", they think they are using the word "nigger" to spite the face of PC liberal communists. It's a mark of pride. In stupiditym I guess. Adults stop using such epithets because as they move into the real world, they find that they are no longer surrounded by like-minded people, and won't exactly move up in their field of employment. And they'll get their face kicked in by a serious teacher of manners.
The Justice Department doesn't seem to have anything to do. All the real crime in the U.S. has been eliminated, so they're moving on to thought crimes. God knows what teenagers would do if they found out sex existed.
I, for one, welcome our aimless overlords.
um. Didn't this company make all the Thinkpads? Do you realize that almost ALL laptops are made by Chinese companies? Aren't you all a little late to worry about foreign companies making our equipment? Profit overrules, doesn't it? No unions, no environmental regulations, workers working for pennies an hour, isn't that the whole point of the last ten years? Corporate duty is to make profit only, not worry about people or national interests, no?
It sounds to me like the usual suspects in the U.S. right are trying to generate a Great Enemy again, after the nitwits in caves in Pakistan didn't rise to the challenge. Gotta have something for all that military and intelligence apparatus to do, something to spend all those trillions on. Otherwise, if we aren't at war with some Great Enemy, people might wonder why we're gearing up for an eternal world war if no one wants to hurt us.
ummmmmm.
no.
that would be L. Ron Hubbard.
But Heinlein did mention the Scientology movement kindly in "Friday". Disciplined, short-haired, and clean, which he seemed to think noteworthy. He was always a military man at heart. And he had a soft spot for con artists. If a man buys a horse from you, it's up to him to count the legs. I think he applied that to the poor goons who Lafe Ron conned. It seems a few of the more right-wing old guard has a soft spot for ol' Lafe and his money racket. "Writers of the Future" Award. Gah.
If you didn't know, Dianetics and Scientology was a BIG problem in the post-1950 science fiction fan world. A lot of people got sucked in, A.E. Van Vogt, Campbell, a lot of the fen. Dianetics was first announced to the world via Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and Scientology followed two years later when the IRS and the AMA were hot on Hubbard' ass. Dianetics was billed as a replacement for psychology, which Hubbard was terrified of, as well as a medical treatment, but Scientology was a religion, and therefore immune to the IRS -- in theory. In fact, it was 1992 when a overwhelmed (2000 individual lawsuits against IRS agents through hundreds of fake fronts, destroying agents' lives one dollar at a time) IRS finally capitulated and forgave over a billion in back taxes, and quite illegally "announced" that Scientology was a religion. Actually, the US has no such mechanism - they were just declared a, um, 507 or some such tax code for "non-profit" -- an unbelieveable lie.
But not Heinlein. If that's in Wikipeida, it's dead wrong. There are dozens of incorrect stories going around, sort of a game of Telephone. There may have been a card game, there definitely was a speech in which Hubbard said the real way to get rich was to start a religion. It is also probable he said it many times in his life. It's just that, for the last 50 years, it has not been very healthy to have a good memory about how Scientology got its start. People in the SF world didn;t want to get sued, harrassed, accused of child molestation, be followed, have pets go missing, that sort of thing. L. Sprague de Camp, after writing a warning essay about the Church Militant getting out of hand, found his neighborhood flooded with flyers stating he was a pedophile. He got them to leave him alone by simply promising never to talk about them again. I assume a lot of people were shut up this way, and others got the message and shut up as well. It's a rare bird in SF that will talk about the Hubbardites in anything but fearful and hushed tones.
Robert Heinlein wrote a novella titled "Waldo", which nailed this possibility sixty years ago. In the story, power transmission is by radio, a la Tesla. One of the keys of the story is a general rundown in the physical health and vitality of younger people due the the EM interference in synaptic communication. Widespread lethargy and weakness resulted from the saturation, but no one noticed but one doctor, Waldo's, who wore a lead-lined trenchcoat to shield himself. He was considered an eccentric.
Waldo himself was an MD patient so weak that he built himself a satellite to live in so that he could move about under his own power in microgravity. He also diagnosed the problem, created a solution, and rolled up some bucks, so there's Heinlein in a nutshell.
Heinlein wasn't trying to predict anything, but to hit a target at sixty years, now that's good.
I watched a digitallife episode a week or so ago with a Slashdot god who said that they were almost ready with the new SuperSlashdot. It's a-comin'.
Troll? Yes, I am trolling for a reason. Why do I or anyone else need Vista? This is a valid question. It doesn't seem to be asked. People just accept that they will spend zillions to buy new, copy controlled PCs to run the thing. But WHY?
The executives at General Motors did everything for money. They slashed jobs, aimed at profit increases, canned workers and killed pensions. They did all they could to make a touch more money.
And their company is now nearly dead.
Business isn't about just making more money. It's about building a company so you'll survive the next year. Unless the real aim is to fleece as much as possible before bailing out of the dying vehicle.
Business needs to be deprogrammed. Corporations are allowed to exist, licensed to live, to serve the common good, not just to make money. If they just funnel wealth into a little club and then bail, then perhaps some new laws need making -- or older ones enforced.
Like journalism and their delusions about dual opinions=objectivity, business students have become infused with false dogma about selfishness and profits. There is a basic failure in the business community, a moral failure. They are unable to evaluate their activities as part of a greater whole, or even to see any obligation to a greater good or at least ratchet in their greed enough to enable their companies to survive. Institutional, ideological, suicidal stupidity is not a survival trait.
We can't be a country of insanely rich corporate officers and proles. It won't happen.
I run Win2000. It doesn't phone home, doesn't copy control my media, doesn't crash, doesn't monitor my hardware with a view to shutting off my OS if it thinks I changed too many pieces of hardware. It DOES run everything in the Windows world I need to run. Oh, yes, I can make copies of the install disk. It's solid as a rock. And, oh yeah, it doesn't cost me a thing.
And I need Vista why?
If I'm forced to use XP or Vista, I'll switch to Xandros or something similar in less than four hours. I assume the corporate people have their data held hostage, so they will comply with the extortion, but I don't have to.
It Came From the Washington Post.
Listen: the Post has swallowed the hook, line, sinker, and fishing trawler for over ten years now. They gobbled down the fake Clinton scandals verbatim from Ken Starr, and for the last four years have spectacularly slurped down every worm dangled in from of them from the faked intelligence for weapons in Iraq to aluminum tubes to Colin Powell's magnificient self destruction in front of the U.N. presenting descredited notions from Cheney's little Special Office of special intelligence.
They and the NY Times have been shown that they've been hosed like third graders accidently playing in a Vegas poker game, BUT THEY STILL KEEP SWALLOWING THE SAME LINES OF BULLSHIT FROM THE SAME DAMNED LIARS. I think they're in too deep, there at the editorial offices of WaPo. They can't admit that they've been absolutely wrong on every worshipful point in this fake "war" against a common noun. The paper of record is in too deep.
The "terrorists" from 9-11 died in the damned planes. And there weren't enough in the whole world to man the twelve planes they wanted to fly that day, according to the 911 commission. The only real terrorists left alive after 9-11 were the head of al queda and bin laden (he was the financier of the attack, not the movementleader) and these "warriors" haven't caught them after five years.
Posting stuff doesn't make you a terrorist. That's a thought crime.
This is bull. They can't get the real men who had something to do with 9-11, so they manufacture these little "victories" against no-one who get to be tortured by farmboys in gulags around the world until they die.
There is no "Terror" you can have a war against. Every stupid move against the fringe and uninvolved MAKES men and women who want to kill you. We've torrtured thousands of probably innocent people. George and the WaPo will get their "terrorists" until the end of time. Like the "war" against the idea of "communism", they define who the enemy is, make a pile of money, control the zeitgeist, and declare it over when they find some new enemy after the last enemy stronghold is a mafia-run nation whose main export is prostitutes. Drugs, communism, atheism, terrorism, whatever, they'll always find some new thing to terrify and entertain people with, until the last superhurricane wipes out Washington DC.
We can't build a working, reliable transport to earth orbit in 60+ years, but we can build superscience security in less than five years. Guess we really want to lock ourselves into prison. Not enough spirit or imagination to create a way out of the jail we were born into.
"Who would you hire"?
Keannu, of course. Mad machinist skills. (The U.S. has machinists? Do we make anything anymore?)
Worser result, runaway fusion reaction obliterates a section of Chicago, causing Keanu Reeves to ride a cycle really, really fast to escape the blast zone, with Morgan Freedman in hot pursuit.
You don't want to see it. Trust me.
I know this may be considered silly, but: I don't care to run XP. I run Windows 2000, because I own legal copies, because the OS is rock solid, because it doesn't seem to vacuum up the viruses and spyware that XP does, it doesn't spy on my system and phone home to Redmond (oh, XP will, just give it time), and finally, 2000 doesn't shut itself off I change too many hardware components, and require me to beg Redmond to turn it back on. It just works. And I really don't care about games.
Is this massive knowledge base being built for installing XP applicable or adaptable to installing 2000 on the Mac? Drivers, yup. That would be a problem. But generally?
I don't have a monthly plan because I outlasted their two year contract, then refused any new one. Feels great.
Just for the fun: I use US Cellular. I don't want a GPS phone, so I never upgrade the device. However, they sent me a letter about a month back telling me that I *had* to buy a new GPS-enabled phone 'cause the guvmint said so. And I was offered a new, discounted phone (tiny print: new 2-year contract). And here's the kicker: they intended to -perhaps- charge me a "substantial" penalty fee every month if I didn't buy myself a guvmint-sanctioned tracking device.
I called 'em up, and the rep apologized and said policy had changed since the letter went out.
Well, that was interesting. But I really don't want a tracking device on me at all times. I'd hate to give up the cell phone. And all the pay phones seemed to have disappeared.
Monopolies are legal, but they used to be controlled, when the law was actually enforced and "conservative" judges weren't appointed to short-circuit it.
Monopolies are damaging because they can leverage their overwhelming advantage (=money) into new markets, conquering one product segment after another, erecting barriers to entry to new competitors, and most importantly, monopolies can prevent new technologies from dislodging their old tech by using extortion in all sorts of ways (in the classic case, "put Linux in your boxen, in any way, and say good-bye to your Windows discount, hell, good-bye to your Windows boxen).
Microsoft is building "killer" after "killer", using their infinite cash from their Office and Windows monopolies to simply underprice their products in new businesses like game machines and portable media players until their competitors, who don't have monopoly cash, fold. Then, classically, they raise their prices in their new monopoly, then use the cash to move into a new monopoly. This is why we busted the trusts after the Guilded Age. Inevitably, one company will own everything. Microsoft wants a media tax worldwide, wants a piece of every media streamed and stored. Then they'll inevitably move into media creation; hell, that's what they're doing in video games. Vertical lock.
The SF world doesn't begin and end with anime or video games, which are old bad American pre-1930's sci-fi warmed over. And over. And over. And over. And over...
If ya want to imagine coolness, picture Marvel Comic's Iron Man Armor. Now that's a fun toy. Closely related to Heinlein's Marine armor, which Lee probably never heard of. I used to dream of engineering a full suit of powered armor. (Sadly, it'll probably come into initial use intimidating protestors, as usual. We're kind of short on real enemies, so the weaponmeisters turn their gaze on dissenters within. If you don't have real enemies, make some up. If you doubt me, look at what our police wear facing down Quakers and similar madmen. They look like they are expecting rocket fire, with all that armor. Exactly why do they need military armor to face down college kids? Do they really think they're in some kind of danger, or is it just bullying?)
The weapons labs were full of comics and classic SF fans; sadly, now they will probably be anime fans, who never got the pure stuff from the original SF sources. What the old timers could have dreamed up had they known then what we see everyday. They had style and imagination. They were original.
Yup. The biggest market for Iraqi/Iranian oil is Asia, where they make the disks. The Project For the The New American Century (Cheney, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, Kristoff, and others) detailed why the US needed to take control of the Iran/Iraqi oil fields to control the political and economic destinies of our biggest future competitors, esp. China. We're building mighty military bases in Iraq now, and the PNACers are obviously building a case for whacking Iran. Oh, and I especially like the new Bush connection of Chavez in Venezuela with Iran. Talk about convenience! They're seeting up a future invasion of Venezuela, one of the biggest oil suppliers to the US itself. God, almighty. And news is so "balanced" they won't mention the obvious setup for fear of being labeled biased.
This isn't offtopic. It will be a critical factor in future pricing points of asian products. Whatever happens, someone here will make more money while we spend more.
Lemme guess. Don't know, just throwing it out there.
Once upon a time, the credit card companies employed full-time, insured people who made careers being part of the credit card industry. They worked hard, got paid an adequate salary, and in general were assets to the companies and the customers.
Then, Lo! upon a Green horse, came He who is called Company Reorganization.
He on the Horse downsized the division. He increased the workload per employee, and canned those who couldn't keep up. He dropped the salaries, converted those left to hourly.
The He on the horse made sure the employees only worked 29 hours a week, and therefore were not full-time, and needed no health insurance outlays.
After a very short time, temp employees making seven bucks an hour replaced the wage earners, and who by definition had no health insurance. And it was good, as the profits increased.
The He opened the next seal, and fired the temps and the wage earning employees, and outsourced the work to Bangalore, where the employees were paid fifty cents an hour and were told that they could be fired for looking crosseyed at a light fixture.
And the profits were even better.
And people began to notice that the employees were doing silly things that former employees had never done, such as accepting taped together paperwork that were obviously fraudulent. And they wondered, "Why aren't the employees doing their jobs?".
Some people said it was because they were poorly educated workers with bad attitudes that should be pressed even harder to do a better job, or should be fired and replaced with eager applicants, easily found. And others listened, and rejoiced that wisdom was found.
Others said: Listen, assholes, if you convert your worker pool into uninsured minimum wage drones and work them like dying mules, they won't really give a damn about the customers OR your company. And those who heard said: Get fucked, communist, and go back to Russia, we need not your kind here.
And so it went...
Bloody HELL, offtopic. The only reason NASA will be defunded, is being defunded, is the tax cuts and spending increasing for the war. No money, increased debt service, no NASA.