Come to think of it, we're also kind of appaled at the fact that rebuilding Iraq has turned into a feeding frenzy for the corrupt US government. Truly, why is Halliburton and all those other companies which have ties one way or another to the US government getting those contracts? Why the fsck aren't Iraqi companies getting them?
Because there are not any Iraqi companies capable of performing the work Bechtel and Haliburton are? Both Bechtel and Haliburton will be hiring Iraqi subcontrators and workers so it's not like no Iraqis will be getting paychecks out of this.
Perhaps it would have looked better if the contracts had gone to say UK companies.
As for jealousy towards US powerprojection...yeah, we'de kind of like that...but not at the cost of !50%! of the budget. Europeans think it's better to spend that kind of money towards making human lives better than killing them.
US defense spending is only 3.2% of GDP. France spends 2.5% and the UK spends 2.3% so US spending isn't vastly different. In no way is US defense spending 50% of the Federal budget in fact it is about 18% or so.
I don't really care which side of an artificial political line a human being was born on. A dead human being is a dead human being. Your brand of nationalism is going to be what kids read about in the history books, if there are any history books after WWIII.
What about Saddam killing his own people? He's killed far more Iraqis in the years of his rule than the Americans ever did.
Allowing the majority to decide their leaders by democratic elections would never do, would it. You might end up with a leader the US government doesn't like. Better to silence all civilian media and quietly install a puppet dictator. Just to protect the minorites, you understand.
There is a difference between a democracy and mob rule. Any "democracy" that operates on a strict basis of,ajority rule with no protections for minorities or minority intrests is under mob rule and not a true democracy.
Lets not forget that many of the Shia groups protesting the US presence are currently being funded by Iran. I also don't find it hard to believe that Iran might send agents into Iraq in order to disrupt the American occupation and try to influence the eventual Iraqi government to be friendly toward Iran. I'm not sure that the protests reflect the "will of the people".
Well, I'm glad to see you had all the big guns on your side.
The problem is there aren't that many "big guns" out there any more. We had 3 of the handful of countries that could provide any useful support on our side in the UK, Australia, and Poland.
How about the cites that were absolutely wiped off the face of the earth with chemical weapons?
Chemical weapons that, as it turns out, were deployed by Iran, not Iraq.
What about the mass graves we found not too long ago with 20,000 bodies, all with chemical agents in their corpses?
Um, victims of Iraq's war with Iran? Hello? Why not consider subscribing to a newspaper or something.
Um sorry, I'm no GWB fan, but please don't try to claim that Saddam wasn't a cruel dictator.
He gassed his own people and Iranians both in violation of the Geneva conventions. He killed thousands of his own people simply because they objected to his rule.
What about the mass graves where the bodies were found with bullets in the back of their heads?
Sorry but nobody is going to convince me Saddam was some great humanitarian.
If American's got off their fat apathetic arses, and everyone became educated and actually voted, then you could have had everyone voting for Gore, instead of the red-neck gun-toting fuckers who voted for Bush.
I would have been scared had 100% or even 90% of the voters had voted for Gore. Keeping rough parity between the parties is a good thing.
As it was the vote was split almost 50/50. At least in part it was due to Gore running such a lackluster campaign and being such a lackluster canidate. During the campaign it didn't seem as there was much difference between the two. Even if Gore had won I don't know that the split vetween the US and France/Germany/Russia wouldn't have happened.
Bush I -- moderate foreign policy? I must have missed something.
Dispite whatever else you may have thought of him Bush I was an internationalist and willing to use frameworks such as provided by the UN to achieve his foreign policy goals. Contrast this to the unilateral stance of Reagan or the current president.
He does have a point. There is no single nation in Europe that can act unilaterally, which is why the Eurocrats have created a new European Army [european-defence.co.uk] (currently only 60,000 strong). We can expect to see the size and scope to expand dramatically. Couple this with the new EU constitution to have a single European Foreign Minister and Policy [bbc.co.uk] and it's not hard to see where the Eurocrats want to go...
I hope to heck the UK declines to participate in the European Army or the EU constitution.
Unfortunately it seems the chattering classes of France, Belgium, and to a lesser extent Germany are hell bent on making sure they run the show once the dust settles on European integration. The EU as currently structured or as proposed in the EU constitution is extremely anti-democratic. In a few years I suspect people in Europe might wake up and wonder what they were thinking when they gave up much of their sovereignty to unelected beaurocrats in Brussels.
Why, today I heard a senator describe Canada as a 'safe haven for terrorists', demanding that something should be done to 'force' the Canadians into taking their 'duty to world peace and security' seriously. Goddamn if it didn't sound like some asshole prepping the ground work for a fucking invasion...if Americans could accept *that* then I'd say the world is well and truly screwed.
Just what are those sneaky Cannucks up to? Look at all of the admitted Canadians in our media, and those are just the ones we know about. Who knows how many Canadian sleeper agents are here right now forming a fifth collumn?
Sorry that only works when both sides want to play nice. For an EU treaty, NAFTA, or similar you can have true win-win as both sides have something to offer and a genuine willingness to make things work.
In the case of countries like North Korea or Syria they are going to ask for the moon, refuse to bargan if they don't get it, and use every excuse in the book to avoid holding up their end of the bargan. In order to get them to the table and to avoid being made a patsy you have to have a credible threat of force.
Assuming North Korea has nuclear weapons what do you suppose keeps them from using them on people they don't like? The fact that the US has made it pretty clear to every country with nuclear weapons that if they actually use them we will massively retaliate.
This is one of the main reasons why things manufactured outside the US is cheaper than things manufactured in the US. The employers have to pay a lot less to the workers than they would have to do in the US.
Unfortunately this point gets lost in the debate in the US when we talk about moving manufacturing offshore.
For some reason the critics here believe that US companies are "exploiting" workers overseas if they pay those workers less than US minimum wage. The current US minimum wage is roughly $5/hour or $200/week assuming a 40 hour work week. In many countries this would make one rich due to the low cost of living. If the prevailing wage in a country is $0.25/hour Nike paying $0.50/hour to make shoes is a VERY good wage by local standards.
Something to think about the next time you hear the AFL-CIO chattering on about overseas "sweatshop" labor.
India's biggest issues are mostly political. I don't hold much hope for India getting a fair shake from any corporations looking to do cellphone service there.
More likely the corporations looking to do cellphone service in India are going to have a hard time getting a fair shake from the Indian government.
The problem is the north american numbering plan. In the US there is a fairly rigid number plan where you have AAA PPP-NNNN. AAA == Area Code, PPP == Prefix and NNNN == Number. Any extra prefixes on the front indicat either a toll call or an international call. To put a prefix such as 044 on the front for mobiles would require reprogramming LOTS of equipment to deal with it. Just the switch to allowing 0 and 1 as the middle number of prefixes and numbers other than 0 and 1 as the middle number of area codes caused all sorts of problems. For years there was plenty of equipment out there that couldn't handle the new numbers.
Second, due to the fact that GSM is an open standard you can mix equipment from different vendors without a problem. And don't forget that due to the fact that there is one common standard you don't get a situation like the US where every vendor uses its own non-standard system. The biggest problem with the US nowadays is that they still suffer the "not invented here syndrom".
Huh? what are you smoking? CDMA is as much of a standard as GSM, same think for TDMA. Providers here can mix and match equipment from any number of vendors. Each vendor does not "use its own non-standard system". Don't forget that there are GSM providers here as well.
Perhaps you are thinking of the IDEN system Nextel uses? All of the equpiment on the Nextel network is made by Motorola, but that is the exception not the rule.
It's not unusual for Americans to have a flawed view of what happens in Europe (the reverse is also true). GSM is not a government mandated standard. It was developed by a consortium of commercial companies.
As far as I know in many European countries the grant of licenses for digital service mandated the use of GSM. A similar situation is developing with 3G as several countries have mandated W-CDMA.
In the US while the providers did have to pay for licences on PCS spectrum the FCC didn't mandate what standard providers had to use. This is why you see TDMA, CDMA, GSM, and IDEN here. Now that 3G is emerging you are seeing providers make the same choice between CDMA2000 and W-CDMA. The current CDMA providers seem to be the first out of the gate as CDMA2000 is working now and is compatible with the older CDMA standard. Not having to buy new licences is letting them upgrade faster.
Indeed I think/hope that GSM will eventually take over in the US. Its advantages weren't so obvious when cells were just for voice calls. But now that wireless connectivity is all the rage, the shortcomings of CDMA and TDMA, where you have to stop and establish a connection every time you want to go online, will be unavoidable.
WTF are you talking about? I will agree that TDMA sucks but you are sorely misinformed about CDMA.
There is nothing inherent to the CDMA standards that make it less suitable to text messages GSM. If anything CDMA is more suitable for data transport since it is a data network that happens to support voice. For that matter there is nothing to prevent integrating a CDMA network with SMS.
Almost every provider in the US I am aware of supports email messages to phones. Many support sending it as well. While I relize this is not the same thing as SMS it is more useful in many ways since you can send and receive with anyone with internet email.
Secondly there is nothing with CDMA that would prevent having an always on connection. A friend of mine has a recent CDMA PDA/phone and it behaves in an "always on" manner. Again the CDMA network is far better for data transport than GSM.
I seriously doubt GSM will "take over" in the US, Sprint and Verizon are unlikely to do anything other than upgrade to CDMA2000. The TDMA and GSM providers in the US face a much tougher transition to 3G technology since neither WCDMA nor CDMA2000 are compatible with the curent GSM standard. CDMA providers can swap out equipment on a tower by tower basis and the older CDMA phones will continue to work on the CDMA2000 network.
That's becouse to get a phone here in the states they do credit checks and all that. In Europe most people have pay-as-you-go and you can buy a phone at the gass station for $40.
You can get pay-as-you-go in the US and even buy a phone in a gas station. Ever hear of "prepaid celluar"?
The downside is most providers have high per-minute charges and the minutes expire if you don't use them.
Even with the credit checks it only takes about 30 minutes to set up a standard cell phone account and walk out of the store with a working phone.
It looks like South America has gone CDMA as well.
Of the areas with both CDMA and GSM I would suspect GSM has the most market share in Europe and Asia while CDMA has the most in North and South America.
Care to back that up? Where is CDMA better than GSM?
CDMA allows more active phones to use the same cell and scales much better. With CDMA it is possible to have very large cells for covering sparsely populated rural areas and to easily drop new cells in the middle of a downtown to ease network congestion. Due to the modulation techniques used you don't have to worry about adjacent towers stepping on each other.
I had a Nextel, a TDMA phone with Rogers and GSM (in Europe and in Canada) and I take the GSM any day.
None of those are CDMA providers. Nextel uses some bizzare Motorola system that operates on commercial UHF radio frequencies. I believe it is an offshoot TDMA for modulation technique. TDMA is a predicessor of GSM and uses a fairly similar modulation.
SonyEricsson T68i and my iBook and thanks to GPRS I get my email anywhere.
There is similar service on CDMA networks. In fact it is easier to provision data over a CDMA network than a GSM network. CDMA is designed as a data network that happens to be able to carry digitized voice, GSM is designed as a digital voice network that happens to be able to carry data.
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Bullshit, if you think that 911 was unprovoked, then you are dumber than you sound.
Ok so we should just be really nice Osama bin Ladin and people like him, do what they ask us to, and we can have "peace in our time"?
I suppose this would be a good approach with North Korea as well?
Come to think of it, we're also kind of appaled at the fact that rebuilding Iraq has turned into a feeding frenzy for the corrupt US government. Truly, why is Halliburton and all those other companies which have ties one way or another to the US government getting those contracts? Why the fsck aren't Iraqi companies getting them?
Because there are not any Iraqi companies capable of performing the work Bechtel and Haliburton are? Both Bechtel and Haliburton will be hiring Iraqi subcontrators and workers so it's not like no Iraqis will be getting paychecks out of this.
Perhaps it would have looked better if the contracts had gone to say UK companies.
As for jealousy towards US powerprojection...yeah, we'de kind of like that...but not at the cost of !50%! of the budget. Europeans think it's better to spend that kind of money towards making human lives better than killing them.
US defense spending is only 3.2% of GDP. France spends 2.5% and the UK spends 2.3% so US spending isn't vastly different. In no way is US defense spending 50% of the Federal budget in fact it is about 18% or so.
I don't really care which side of an artificial political line a human being was born on. A dead human being is a dead human being. Your brand of nationalism is going to be what kids read about in the history books, if there are any history books after WWIII.
What about Saddam killing his own people? He's killed far more Iraqis in the years of his rule than the Americans ever did.
The strongest opponents to the Iraq war are the thousands of human beings who watched their life drain into the ground on the Iraq soil.
And you don't think more would have died had Saddam been left in power? I'm sorry the guy doesn't have a great track record.
Allowing the majority to decide their leaders by democratic elections would never do, would it. You might end up with a leader the US government doesn't like. Better to silence all civilian media and quietly install a puppet dictator. Just to protect the minorites, you understand.
,ajority rule with no protections for minorities or minority intrests is under mob rule and not a true democracy.
There is a difference between a democracy and mob rule. Any "democracy" that operates on a strict basis of
Lets not forget that many of the Shia groups protesting the US presence are currently being funded by Iran. I also don't find it hard to believe that Iran might send agents into Iraq in order to disrupt the American occupation and try to influence the eventual Iraqi government to be friendly toward Iran. I'm not sure that the protests reflect the "will of the people".
Well, I'm glad to see you had all the big guns on your side.
The problem is there aren't that many "big guns" out there any more. We had 3 of the handful of countries that could provide any useful support on our side in the UK, Australia, and Poland.
Don't forget Japan. They supported us in Afghanistan, Iraq, and fully support US policy toward N. Korea.
There is a reason the Japanese PM was invited to the ranch last weekend.
How about the cites that were absolutely wiped off the face of the earth with chemical weapons?
Chemical weapons that, as it turns out, were deployed by Iran, not Iraq.
What about the mass graves we found not too long ago with 20,000 bodies, all with chemical agents in their corpses?
Um, victims of Iraq's war with Iran? Hello? Why not consider subscribing to a newspaper or something.
Um sorry, I'm no GWB fan, but please don't try to claim that Saddam wasn't a cruel dictator.
He gassed his own people and Iranians both in violation of the Geneva conventions. He killed thousands of his own people simply because they objected to his rule.
What about the mass graves where the bodies were found with bullets in the back of their heads?
Sorry but nobody is going to convince me Saddam was some great humanitarian.
If American's got off their fat apathetic arses, and everyone became educated and actually voted, then you could have had everyone voting for Gore, instead of the red-neck gun-toting fuckers who voted for Bush.
I would have been scared had 100% or even 90% of the voters had voted for Gore. Keeping rough parity between the parties is a good thing.
As it was the vote was split almost 50/50. At least in part it was due to Gore running such a lackluster campaign and being such a lackluster canidate. During the campaign it didn't seem as there was much difference between the two. Even if Gore had won I don't know that the split vetween the US and France/Germany/Russia wouldn't have happened.
Bush I -- moderate foreign policy? I must have missed something.
Dispite whatever else you may have thought of him Bush I was an internationalist and willing to use frameworks such as provided by the UN to achieve his foreign policy goals. Contrast this to the unilateral stance of Reagan or the current president.
Compared to the prior 20 or so years yes.
Nixon pulled the US out of Vietnam.
Nixon opened up to China.
Nixon was responsible for de-escalating the cold war during the era of "detante".
He does have a point. There is no single nation in Europe that can act unilaterally, which is why the Eurocrats have created a new European Army [european-defence.co.uk] (currently only 60,000 strong). We can expect to see the size and scope to expand dramatically. Couple this with the new EU constitution to have a single European Foreign Minister and Policy [bbc.co.uk] and it's not hard to see where the Eurocrats want to go...
I hope to heck the UK declines to participate in the European Army or the EU constitution.
Unfortunately it seems the chattering classes of France, Belgium, and to a lesser extent Germany are hell bent on making sure they run the show once the dust settles on European integration. The EU as currently structured or as proposed in the EU constitution is extremely anti-democratic. In a few years I suspect people in Europe might wake up and wonder what they were thinking when they gave up much of their sovereignty to unelected beaurocrats in Brussels.
Why the hell do you think we want ballistic missile defense? We'll shoot down your puny euro missles then nuke you back to the stone age.
Why, today I heard a senator describe Canada as a 'safe haven for terrorists', demanding that something should be done to 'force' the Canadians into taking their 'duty to world peace and security' seriously. Goddamn if it didn't sound like some asshole prepping the ground work for a fucking invasion...if Americans could accept *that* then I'd say the world is well and truly screwed.
Just what are those sneaky Cannucks up to? Look at all of the admitted Canadians in our media, and those are just the ones we know about. Who knows how many Canadian sleeper agents are here right now forming a fifth collumn?
Heck they're not even a real county!
What happened to win-win negotiation?
Sorry that only works when both sides want to play nice. For an EU treaty, NAFTA, or similar you can have true win-win as both sides have something to offer and a genuine willingness to make things work.
In the case of countries like North Korea or Syria they are going to ask for the moon, refuse to bargan if they don't get it, and use every excuse in the book to avoid holding up their end of the bargan. In order to get them to the table and to avoid being made a patsy you have to have a credible threat of force.
Assuming North Korea has nuclear weapons what do you suppose keeps them from using them on people they don't like? The fact that the US has made it pretty clear to every country with nuclear weapons that if they actually use them we will massively retaliate.
This is one of the main reasons why things manufactured outside the US is cheaper than things manufactured in the US. The employers have to pay a lot less to the workers than they would have to do in the US.
Unfortunately this point gets lost in the debate in the US when we talk about moving manufacturing offshore.
For some reason the critics here believe that US companies are "exploiting" workers overseas if they pay those workers less than US minimum wage. The current US minimum wage is roughly $5/hour or $200/week assuming a 40 hour work week. In many countries this would make one rich due to the low cost of living. If the prevailing wage in a country is $0.25/hour Nike paying $0.50/hour to make shoes is a VERY good wage by local standards.
Something to think about the next time you hear the AFL-CIO chattering on about overseas "sweatshop" labor.
For those unaware, Issa is trying to force CDMA into Iraq by passing a bill in Congress, despite the fact that the rest of the Middle East uses GSM.
Wrong, Yemen and a couple of North African countries are CDMA.
India's biggest issues are mostly political. I don't hold much hope for India getting a fair shake from any corporations looking to do cellphone service there.
More likely the corporations looking to do cellphone service in India are going to have a hard time getting a fair shake from the Indian government.
The problem is the north american numbering plan. In the US there is a fairly rigid number plan where you have AAA PPP-NNNN. AAA == Area Code, PPP == Prefix and NNNN == Number. Any extra prefixes on the front indicat either a toll call or an international call. To put a prefix such as 044 on the front for mobiles would require reprogramming LOTS of equipment to deal with it.
Just the switch to allowing 0 and 1 as the middle number of prefixes and numbers other than 0 and 1 as the middle number of area codes caused all sorts of problems. For years there was plenty of equipment out there that couldn't handle the new numbers.
Second, due to the fact that GSM is an open standard you can mix equipment from different vendors without a problem.
And don't forget that due to the fact that there is one common standard you don't get a situation like the US where every vendor uses its own non-standard system.
The biggest problem with the US nowadays is that they still suffer the "not invented here syndrom".
Huh? what are you smoking? CDMA is as much of a standard as GSM, same think for TDMA. Providers here can mix and match equipment from any number of vendors. Each vendor does not "use its own non-standard system". Don't forget that there are GSM providers here as well.
Perhaps you are thinking of the IDEN system Nextel uses? All of the equpiment on the Nextel network is made by Motorola, but that is the exception not the rule.
It's not unusual for Americans to have a flawed view of what happens in Europe (the reverse is also true). GSM is not a government mandated standard. It was developed by a consortium of commercial companies.
As far as I know in many European countries the grant of licenses for digital service mandated the use of GSM. A similar situation is developing with 3G as several countries have mandated W-CDMA.
In the US while the providers did have to pay for licences on PCS spectrum the FCC didn't mandate what standard providers had to use. This is why you see TDMA, CDMA, GSM, and IDEN here. Now that 3G is emerging you are seeing providers make the same choice between CDMA2000 and W-CDMA. The current CDMA providers seem to be the first out of the gate as CDMA2000 is working now and is compatible with the older CDMA standard. Not having to buy new licences is letting them upgrade faster.
Indeed I think/hope that GSM will eventually take over in the US. Its advantages weren't so obvious when cells were just for voice calls. But now that wireless connectivity is all the rage, the shortcomings of CDMA and TDMA, where you have to stop and establish a connection every time you want to go online, will be unavoidable.
WTF are you talking about? I will agree that TDMA sucks but you are sorely misinformed about CDMA.
There is nothing inherent to the CDMA standards that make it less suitable to text messages GSM. If anything CDMA is more suitable for data transport since it is a data network that happens to support voice. For that matter there is nothing to prevent integrating a CDMA network with SMS.
Almost every provider in the US I am aware of supports email messages to phones. Many support sending it as well. While I relize this is not the same thing as SMS it is more useful in many ways since you can send and receive with anyone with internet email.
Secondly there is nothing with CDMA that would prevent having an always on connection. A friend of mine has a recent CDMA PDA/phone and it behaves in an "always on" manner. Again the CDMA network is far better for data transport than GSM.
I seriously doubt GSM will "take over" in the US, Sprint and Verizon are unlikely to do anything other than upgrade to CDMA2000. The TDMA and GSM providers in the US face a much tougher transition to 3G technology since neither WCDMA nor CDMA2000 are compatible with the curent GSM standard. CDMA providers can swap out equipment on a tower by tower basis and the older CDMA phones will continue to work on the CDMA2000 network.
That's becouse to get a phone here in the states they do credit checks and all that. In Europe most people have pay-as-you-go and you can buy a phone at the gass station for $40.
You can get pay-as-you-go in the US and even buy a phone in a gas station. Ever hear of "prepaid celluar"?
The downside is most providers have high per-minute charges and the minutes expire if you don't use them.
Even with the credit checks it only takes about 30 minutes to set up a standard cell phone account and walk out of the store with a working phone.
I found a nifty map of CDMA vs. GSM at http://www.gsmcoverage.co.uk/maps/europe/gsm_cdma_ map.jpg.
It looks like South America has gone CDMA as well.
Of the areas with both CDMA and GSM I would suspect GSM has the most market share in Europe and Asia while CDMA has the most in North and South America.
They seem to have left off the rather large CDMA deployments in the US and Canada.
On the other hand I had no idea that IDEN (Nextel's system) was that widely deployed.
Care to back that up? Where is CDMA better than GSM?
CDMA allows more active phones to use the same cell and scales much better. With CDMA it is possible to have very large cells for covering sparsely populated rural areas and to easily drop new cells in the middle of a downtown to ease network congestion. Due to the modulation techniques used you don't have to worry about adjacent towers stepping on each other.
I had a Nextel, a TDMA phone with Rogers and GSM (in Europe and in Canada) and I take the GSM any day.
None of those are CDMA providers. Nextel uses some bizzare Motorola system that operates on commercial UHF radio frequencies. I believe it is an offshoot TDMA for modulation technique. TDMA is a predicessor of GSM and uses a fairly similar modulation.
SonyEricsson T68i and my iBook and thanks to GPRS I get my email anywhere.
There is similar service on CDMA networks. In fact it is easier to provision data over a CDMA network than a GSM network. CDMA is designed as a data network that happens to be able to carry digitized voice, GSM is designed as a digital voice network that happens to be able to carry data.