Not FoxNews or NewsMax or any of the other companies in the propaganda department of the current US administration...
Think of the children.
Which ones, the US ones that will have to deal with the huge budget deficit from the current administration or the thousands of dead Iraquis from the war and occupation you don't hear about in the US media.
Yeah, it's always easier to send somebody else to die for your ideals but in this case, it's even streching that a lit bit as I'm not sure money qualifies as an ideal...
In fact, in my previous post I wasn't thinking about the contractors in the defense industry making millions but instead of the US companies directly involved in the oil for food program. When the list was circulated, it was supposed to reveal first the international companies involved and then later on the US ones but somehow that didn't happen but the commentators (think CNN) hinted at the time that there were also a number of US companies involved. I don't have the time to research this post more at this time but it's always amazing that the foreign people are the bad guys but the US companies are squeaky clean...
Many high-profile Frenchmen have been shown to have made millions (possibly billions) off of Iraq's oil-for-food program, which has made their lack of support against Iraq seem rather duplicitous.
Do you have a credible link to back up that claim? How about the american companies that were involved as well?
You don't need any qualification to break your back 12 hours a day picking strawberries in California. How many Americans are willing to do that, even if their only alternative is welfare?
And that justifies hiring illegal immigrants instead of legal workers how?
It does not. I was just pointing out that your argument about training Americans to qualify for the jobs wasn't applicable for the majority of the jobs currently done by illegal aliens. I think you can agree with me that most jobs done by illegal aliens require little or no training. On the other hand, if you want to argue against legal immigration and work permits (H1B for instance), then your training argument makes more sense but that is not the issue discussed here.
A driver's license is a license to drive, period.
Well my friend I'm not so sure you can just slap that "period" there without more due questioning. Driver's licenses are used as a de facto identification in our daily life in contexts way beyond driving.
That is one issue, just like social security numbers. The initial intent has been perverted. Soon you'll mention that illegal aliens will be able to vote if they have driver's licenses. I would assume that on this forum people could distinguish between different forms of authentication. As long as you (the US) are not able to come up with an official ID card and the correct protections in the law to prevent abuse (data collected belongs to the individual, not the government or the corporation collecting the data,...), you will always have to deal with those issues where de facto id cards create controversies by abusing the regulations that created them.Have you never lived in the US or are you going to deny that code fact?
Well I have been a legal resident for over a decade but I'm still amazed that during the last presidential campaign, people wanted to strip me of my driver's license so that I could not register to vote... The de facto or real national ID is a mess that will not be resolved any time soon but the problems of unlicensed/uninsured drivers and the related problems of insurance cost and lawyer fees could be if not solved, greatly reduced by using rational solutions (see also http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139113&cid=116 41349 for the reduction of uninsured drivers in Utah when they dropped the SSN requirement). You know, fix the smaller problems instead of grouping them into unsolveable ones. And by the way, illegal immigration or at least the presence of current illegal aliens is not going away. Too much of the economy depends on it and until that's addressed, only populist politicians will advocate deporting all the illegal aliens.
I mean, how about making it easier to import workforce legally when needed, or how about training more Americans to qualify for the jobs, instead of this "We'll try to bust you at the door but if you manage to squeeze one foot in you are part of the family" nonsense?
You don't need any qualification to break your back 12 hours a day picking strawberries in California. How many Americans are willing to do that, even if their only alternative is welfare?
A driver's license is a license to drive, period. Allowing illegal aliens to have one will mean a) they pass basic driving tests (even if it's a joke) and b) they can get insurance. It always amaze me that people will bitch about high insurance costs but not realize that the number of uninsured/unlicensed drivers is contributing to the problem.
-grames is the French version of a common (latin?) suffix indicating something written, or a record. Program, Sonogram, Grammar, (Deutsch) Grammophon, etc.
I just looked in one of my French dictionnaries specializing in etymology: the "gramm-" suffix means "letter" or "drawing", used in crypthogramme, programme, programmable, electrocardiogramme,... So I think if they made a spelling error, it's because they used only one "m"...
The roots are greek, from gramma, grammatos (letter) and gramme^ (drawing).
Reuters says France gave 15m euros (20m$). You should switch to a channel that broadcasts news, not hate.
Thanks for the link. From that Reuter article: Lundi, le ministère des Affaires étrangères avait débloqué 100.000 euros pour subvenir aux besoins les plus pressants des victimes en Thaïlande.
A rought translation is: "Monday, the Foreign Ministry Office allocated 100.000 euros for the immediate needs of the victims in Thailand". I would assume that this would be in part to rappatriate the wounded (or dead) French nationals. Of course the US media, including CNN, took that opportunity to bash the French. The way I see it, it went like this: the UN official made some comment about the foreign help, the press mentionned the $15 million from the US and then added the 100.000 euros with the idea: see, we're not that bad, look at the French...
BTW, official French disaster relief teams are on the ground there.
Thanks for the info. I got business and personal accounts with them and didn't see any offer about it. My international transfers are only incoming so that may be why...
Unfortunately, the attitude expressed in the parent comment is part of the problem that was expressed by Bush/Ashcroft/Tenet/Ridge -- "not a matter of IF there will be another terrorist attack on USA soil, but of WHEN".
Let me just first say that I have absolutly no sympathy for the current US administration. Now that that's out of the way, the above statement is one of the few accurate truths coming out of this administration. If you believe otherwise, i.e. that there is a way to prevent all terrorist attacks against the US, you are following the same kind of logic that brought us the missile shield system and are not dealing with reality. There may be ways to reduce significantly the risk of future attacks but there is no doubts in my mind that the US will be attacked in the future.
So, in the most optimal case, terrorism could be greatly reduced and could then be viewed only a nuisance instead of a major issue like it is at the moment. Wait a second, that sounds familiar. I think I heard a presidential candidate formulate somthing similar not too long ago...
I do not see the H1B as a proper channel to enter the US
With the current delays in green card processing, H1-B is almost the only way you could get an employment based green card. No company is going to keep a position open for 2-4 years and wait for the immigrant to get his green card. Until the US adopt a system similar to the point based canadian immigration, people will still use H1-Bs as the first step towards permanent status.
Yes, H1 holders pay income taxes. But no, they don't pay social security or medicare taxes
As a former H1-B visa holder and current permanent resident (i.e. green card holder), this is incorrect. As a H1-B employee, you do pay social security and medicare taxes. For some countries, there are agreements where, when you go back to your country, you could get some credits for the contributions made in the US and before people say it's just another way they're stealing from the US, those agreements work both ways, a US citizen working in a foreign country would be credited when back in the US.
the German unheimlich for instance. Even the French uncanny doesn't quite do it justice.
I think you mixed up your translations as uncanny isn't really a French word... From the German word, I get "énormément" in French and "terribly" in English based on Google's translating tools which in some contexts could mean the same thing. Sorry I don't really know German so I cannot understand the true meaning of unheimlich, I know I should have been paying attention to my third language classes back in France...
http://www.wiktionary.org/ has been doing this for a long time, what's wrong with them?
Before reading your post, I wasn't aware of the project. Taking one word at random, "dog", I was surprised by the number of missing entries in the links: canine, pup, dogs, domesticated are amongst the dozens of undefined entries. I don't know exactly how long you mean by a long time but it sure looks incomplete to me...
There doesn't seem to be a version of Enigmail that works with 1.0!!!
If you go to http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download.html, you'll see that at the top of the download table, version v0.89.5 is for Thunderbird 1.0. I've installed it and it seems to be working just fine...
TM: Hello, can I speak with [horrible attempt to pronounce my name]--"
click!
While that may work for most American sounding names, what if your name is unusual and/or foreign? Your strategy would block legitimate calls as well. And I'm speaking from experience as a French living in the US and used to all sorts of variations of my last name, the funnier ones being morphings into some sort of Russian last name...
O you think thats bad. I go to a small Private school with only about 100 students. [...] Im constantly being brought out of class to fix the principles printer [...]
Maybe your parents should ask for a refund of the tuition for being yanked out of English class too many times...
Seriously guys, we can restart this in another 4 years, or 2 if you actually care about the house/senate.
Don't you think now is the oportunity to improve the system so that when election time comes in two or four years, the system has already been improved. Starting to discuss this again two months before the next election will not allow the system to be fixed/improved.
It's a deliberate feature of our voting system that after you leave the voting booth, there is no way that anyone can gain knowledge of how you voted. This enables people to vote their concience. It makes it almost impossible to harass or reward someone based on how they voted. To change this would be a disaster.
I agree entirely that the secrecy of the vote should be maintained and in fact probably improved: I've never understood before the current US elections why it was so hard in France to get absentee ballots but now I see that it's to protect the secrecy of the votes. In France, you need a medical reason or planned business trip with proofs to get an absentee ballot. This means that each time I want to vote, I have to drive 100 miles to the Los Angeles consulate as distance from the polling place itself is not enough even for expatriates. With the raise of absentee ballots in the 2004 US elections, I've been wondering what impact that would have on vote buying. And of course, there's the case of Oregon where everybody votes by mail...
"As a Canadian, I would add: Make the presidential voting day only about electing the president. I.e. no other votes on bills or other referenda. Save those for a different day. I would allow, perhaps, votes for Congress/Senate seats, but that's about it. Don't mix up the issues."
Why?
Because otherwise you end up with a referendum on gay marriage and not an assessment of the merits of the incumbent and challenger...
but probably a solid 90% of the bill accomplished SORELY needed reforms. [...] The rest of the bill that you hear so much about is what really burns most civil libertarians.
It was also an agregation of various security ammendments grouped together by staffers without any serious review or discussion by the House or Senate in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. That's why there was a sunset provision in it to make sure it could be adapted later on. But I guess that's the kind of John Kerry nuances that proponents of making the Patriot Act permanent cannot understand or refuse to debate for political reasons...
Proving once again that Googling for the wrong thing will get you the wrong thing. The oil-for-food scandal is about (among other things) France's Interior Minister getting oil voucher bribes in exchange for France blocking actions against Iraq in the UN security council (not resolutions in the general assembly, actually acting on the resolutions in the security council.)
Can you provide any credible link then detailing this and the various countries involved?
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what you mean by credible
Not FoxNews or NewsMax or any of the other companies in the propaganda department of the current US administration...
Think of the children.
Which ones, the US ones that will have to deal with the huge budget deficit from the current administration or the thousands of dead Iraquis from the war and occupation you don't hear about in the US media.
Yeah, it's always easier to send somebody else to die for your ideals but in this case, it's even streching that a lit bit as I'm not sure money qualifies as an ideal...
In fact, in my previous post I wasn't thinking about the contractors in the defense industry making millions but instead of the US companies directly involved in the oil for food program. When the list was circulated, it was supposed to reveal first the international companies involved and then later on the US ones but somehow that didn't happen but the commentators (think CNN) hinted at the time that there were also a number of US companies involved. I don't have the time to research this post more at this time but it's always amazing that the foreign people are the bad guys but the US companies are squeaky clean...
Do you have a credible link to back up that claim? How about the american companies that were involved as well?
And that justifies hiring illegal immigrants instead of legal workers how?
It does not. I was just pointing out that your argument about training Americans to qualify for the jobs wasn't applicable for the majority of the jobs currently done by illegal aliens. I think you can agree with me that most jobs done by illegal aliens require little or no training. On the other hand, if you want to argue against legal immigration and work permits (H1B for instance), then your training argument makes more sense but that is not the issue discussed here.
A driver's license is a license to drive, period.
Well my friend I'm not so sure you can just slap that "period" there without more due questioning. Driver's licenses are used as a de facto identification in our daily life in contexts way beyond driving.
That is one issue, just like social security numbers. The initial intent has been perverted. Soon you'll mention that illegal aliens will be able to vote if they have driver's licenses. I would assume that on this forum people could distinguish between different forms of authentication. As long as you (the US) are not able to come up with an official ID card and the correct protections in the law to prevent abuse (data collected belongs to the individual, not the government or the corporation collecting the data, ...), you will always have to deal with those issues where de facto id cards create controversies by abusing the regulations that created them.Have you never lived in the US or are you going to deny that code fact?
Well I have been a legal resident for over a decade but I'm still amazed that during the last presidential campaign, people wanted to strip me of my driver's license so that I could not register to vote... The de facto or real national ID is a mess that will not be resolved any time soon but the problems of unlicensed/uninsured drivers and the related problems of insurance cost and lawyer fees could be if not solved, greatly reduced by using rational solutions (see also http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139113&cid=116 41349 for the reduction of uninsured drivers in Utah when they dropped the SSN requirement). You know, fix the smaller problems instead of grouping them into unsolveable ones. And by the way, illegal immigration or at least the presence of current illegal aliens is not going away. Too much of the economy depends on it and until that's addressed, only populist politicians will advocate deporting all the illegal aliens.
You don't need any qualification to break your back 12 hours a day picking strawberries in California. How many Americans are willing to do that, even if their only alternative is welfare?
A driver's license is a license to drive, period. Allowing illegal aliens to have one will mean a) they pass basic driving tests (even if it's a joke) and b) they can get insurance. It always amaze me that people will bitch about high insurance costs but not realize that the number of uninsured/unlicensed drivers is contributing to the problem.
I just looked in one of my French dictionnaries specializing in etymology: the "gramm-" suffix means "letter" or "drawing", used in crypthogramme, programme, programmable, electrocardiogramme,
The roots are greek, from gramma, grammatos (letter) and gramme^ (drawing).
Thanks for the link. From that Reuter article: Lundi, le ministère des Affaires étrangères avait débloqué 100.000 euros pour subvenir aux besoins les plus pressants des victimes en Thaïlande.
A rought translation is: "Monday, the Foreign Ministry Office allocated 100.000 euros for the immediate needs of the victims in Thailand". I would assume that this would be in part to rappatriate the wounded (or dead) French nationals. Of course the US media, including CNN, took that opportunity to bash the French. The way I see it, it went like this: the UN official made some comment about the foreign help, the press mentionned the $15 million from the US and then added the 100.000 euros with the idea: see, we're not that bad, look at the French...
BTW, official French disaster relief teams are on the ground there.
Thanks for the info. I got business and personal accounts with them and didn't see any offer about it. My international transfers are only incoming so that may be why...
I totally agree with the parent poster, there's no way people would get as low as to post messages to this thread begging for references.
Wells Fargo issues the RSA SecurID devices for security. Not a test, not a trial, My wife and I each have one.
How did you manage to get one? Did you ask for it or did they contact you? Is it specific to some account types?
parent comment is part of the problem that
was expressed by Bush/Ashcroft/Tenet/Ridge --
"not a matter of IF there will be another
terrorist attack on USA soil, but of WHEN".
Let me just first say that I have absolutly no sympathy for the current US administration. Now that that's out of the way, the above statement is one of the few accurate truths coming out of this administration. If you believe otherwise, i.e. that there is a way to prevent all terrorist attacks against the US, you are following the same kind of logic that brought us the missile shield system and are not dealing with reality. There may be ways to reduce significantly the risk of future attacks but there is no doubts in my mind that the US will be attacked in the future.
So, in the most optimal case, terrorism could be greatly reduced and could then be viewed only a nuisance instead of a major issue like it is at the moment. Wait a second, that sounds familiar. I think I heard a presidential candidate formulate somthing similar not too long ago...
With the current delays in green card processing, H1-B is almost the only way you could get an employment based green card. No company is going to keep a position open for 2-4 years and wait for the immigrant to get his green card. Until the US adopt a system similar to the point based canadian immigration, people will still use H1-Bs as the first step towards permanent status.
As a former H1-B visa holder and current permanent resident (i.e. green card holder), this is incorrect. As a H1-B employee, you do pay social security and medicare taxes. For some countries, there are agreements where, when you go back to your country, you could get some credits for the contributions made in the US and before people say it's just another way they're stealing from the US, those agreements work both ways, a US citizen working in a foreign country would be credited when back in the US.
I think you mixed up your translations as uncanny isn't really a French word... From the German word, I get "énormément" in French and "terribly" in English based on Google's translating tools which in some contexts could mean the same thing. Sorry I don't really know German so I cannot understand the true meaning of unheimlich, I know I should have been paying attention to my third language classes back in France...
Before reading your post, I wasn't aware of the project. Taking one word at random, "dog", I was surprised by the number of missing entries in the links: canine, pup, dogs, domesticated are amongst the dozens of undefined entries. I don't know exactly how long you mean by a long time but it sure looks incomplete to me...
There doesn't seem to be a version of Enigmail that works with 1.0!!!
If you go to http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download.html, you'll see that at the top of the download table, version v0.89.5 is for Thunderbird 1.0. I've installed it and it seems to be working just fine...
TM: Hello, can I speak with [horrible attempt to pronounce my name]--"
click!
While that may work for most American sounding names, what if your name is unusual and/or foreign? Your strategy would block legitimate calls as well. And I'm speaking from experience as a French living in the US and used to all sorts of variations of my last name, the funnier ones being morphings into some sort of Russian last name...
O you think thats bad. I go to a small Private school with only about 100 students. [...] Im constantly being brought out of class to fix the principles printer [...]
Maybe your parents should ask for a refund of the tuition for being yanked out of English class too many times...
Seriously guys, we can restart this in another 4 years, or 2 if you actually care about the house/senate.
Don't you think now is the oportunity to improve the system so that when election time comes in two or four years, the system has already been improved. Starting to discuss this again two months before the next election will not allow the system to be fixed/improved.
It's a deliberate feature of our voting system that after you leave the voting booth, there is no way that anyone can gain knowledge of how you voted. This enables people to vote their concience. It makes it almost impossible to harass or reward someone based on how they voted. To change this would be a disaster.
I agree entirely that the secrecy of the vote should be maintained and in fact probably improved: I've never understood before the current US elections why it was so hard in France to get absentee ballots but now I see that it's to protect the secrecy of the votes. In France, you need a medical reason or planned business trip with proofs to get an absentee ballot. This means that each time I want to vote, I have to drive 100 miles to the Los Angeles consulate as distance from the polling place itself is not enough even for expatriates. With the raise of absentee ballots in the 2004 US elections, I've been wondering what impact that would have on vote buying. And of course, there's the case of Oregon where everybody votes by mail...
"As a Canadian, I would add: Make the presidential voting day only about electing the president. I.e. no other votes on bills or other referenda. Save those for a different day. I would allow, perhaps, votes for Congress/Senate seats, but that's about it. Don't mix up the issues."
Why?
Because otherwise you end up with a referendum on gay marriage and not an assessment of the merits of the incumbent and challenger...
I agree with you but I thought we were discussing the initial Patriot Act not its extension...
but probably a solid 90% of the bill accomplished SORELY needed reforms. [...] The rest of the bill that you hear so much about is what really burns most civil libertarians.
It was also an agregation of various security ammendments grouped together by staffers without any serious review or discussion by the House or Senate in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. That's why there was a sunset provision in it to make sure it could be adapted later on. But I guess that's the kind of John Kerry nuances that proponents of making the Patriot Act permanent cannot understand or refuse to debate for political reasons...
(Let's not even call it the "internet" anymore, please. It's just a network for sending and receiving IP packets)
That's fine and dandy but do you know what IP stands for? It's Internet Protocol...
Can you provide any credible link then detailing this and the various countries involved?