I'd agree with this wholeheartedly. You're even better off if you have statistics on how this would affect Florida businesses. Visit Sen. Nelson @ www.opensecrets.org to find out who's giving him money (a quick glance shows lawyers, real estate, insurance, Lockheed Martin, and SunTrust Bank, among many others). Insurance and Banking have always been IT-intensive, as has Lockheed Martin; lawyers and realtors tend to make significant IT investments as well, there are a lot of them, and many of them are politically active. CBPTDA will impose costs on them, costs which have no real connection to their doing business, and will likely make their computing environments less secure (given Microsoft's well documented problems implementing security in new products) when the new CBPTDA-compliant OS's are rolled out. If you are on a roll, you can also point out that the costs could exacerbate the digital divide by increasing costs at the consumer level and thus pricing out working-class consumers who are trying to improve their standard of living and the life chances of their children by getting onto the Information Superhighway.
Other things:
You most likely will talk to a staffer, not the Senator. If you do see the Senator, he'll most likely stick his head in the room and shake your hand. If this happens, it's a real plus to thank him for what in your mind is the best thing he's done for Florida or the Nation.
Do not assume that the Senator knows anything. A good working assumption is that the Senator needs cue cards to remember the name of his wife and children. (More true than you know.)
If you bring written material, keep it very brief; the longer something is, the less likely the staffer will read it and the less likely the Senator will get a memo from the staffer about it.
No matter what you might think of Sen. Hollings of South Carolina for introducing this turkey, attack the bill, not the Senator. "Senator Hollings may not be aware, but his bill could..."
If you are a member of industry consortia or other such in Florida, being able to speak on their behalf amplifies your voice and decreases the risk to the Senator of acting on your advice.
Hope that helps. Good luck.
Re:Good to see misinformation is alive and well.
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 1
The CIA is you? Uh, no. Not unless 'you' refers to the Ivy-League-educated, mostly White, mostly Protestant, mostly Anglo-Saxon persons who founded the CIA. If that does include you, then raise a ruckus when the CIA comes to recruit at your alma mater. But the CIA, to paraphrase our last elected President, does NOT look like America.
Re:"Islam is a peaceful religion."
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2, Informative
(KJV) Matthew 10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
(KJV) Luke 12:51-53 Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
(KJV) Luke 19:27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay [them] before me.
(KJV) 1 Peter 2:18 Servants, [be] subject to [your] masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. For "servants", read "slaves". Persons in glass houses, avoid stone throwing.
OK, here we go. Somalia was a pawn in the cold war. We gave money and arms to the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre during the period that the then-Soviet Union was arming Mengistu in Ethiopia. When the Cold War ended, we no longer had a use for Mr. Barre. However, a decade of arms shipments failed to vaporize alongside his regime's utility. His regime imploded, with great assistance from Mohammed Farah Aideed. Factional leaders, including Mr. Aideed, essentially carved Somalia into pieces. The US likes "stability" (one Ring to rule them all...) and found Mr. Aideed to be one of the obvious obstacles to such "stability." Mr. Aideed had to go; we managed to antagonize the people of Mogadishu when we went to get him, and then they made a simplistic movie (with great effects and sound) from which people are obviously getting their history of the region.
Funny, the hijackers believed in a single truth, too. But of course, your truth is the One Truth, as opposed to theirs, which was the... well, One Truth. As to how many South Asian and North African peoples speak (some) English, I'd dare say that between the BBC World Service, Voice of America, CNN, the New York/London-based exile communities, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Dynasty, and Baywatch that it is a rare person anywhere on Earth who knows no words in English. And that certainly has not changed since 11 September. Ask yourself why Kandahar airport has signs in English in it. Ask yourself why you see signs written in English at protest after protest. It may not be grammatically correct English, but neither is the average post on/.
Re:Its about -concentration- of wealth
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, Saudi Arabia is a theocracy. They are adherents of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the same sect from which the Taliban sprung. There is a Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Protection from Vice, just as was in Afghanistan. The laws the committee enforce became world-infamous when they led to the burning death of several schoolgirls who were dressed too "immodestly" to be allowed to flee their burning school.
As to that US muscle, we actually inherited the old British "Arab Facade" (of which the House of Saud is an integral part) from the UK following their effective mortgage of the British Empire to the US during WWII. The US owns them, effectively. What the US does NOT own is the allegiance of the extremely disaffected people in North Africa and Arabia. We overthrew Mossadegh, we upended Nasser, so fundamentalist Islam is all they've got left. As to concentration of wealth and rising Western standards of living, the fact that Bill Gate$ and the MS permatemps work for the same company is but one sign of the rapid rise of income and wealth disparity within the US. 40% (or so) of the US population owns stock, but 90% of that stock is owned by 10% or less of the population. We're a rich country, we've got a lot of wealthy people, but the growth of the 90's came at the expense of the folks at the bottom.
I suppose, then, that this means that NT really does mean Nice Try...
<coca-cola-rant>
Indeed, Coke decided to convince restaurants to stop automatically offering tap water to customers and convince them to push bottled water instead (mention bottled water ahead of tap, or force customer to explicitly ask for tap water).
</coca-cola-rant>
Shows just how silly it is to allow a corporation to brand water. Or, for that matter, CPU cycles. Or, really, anything at all.
Saying something is a 'matter of economics' is far different than saying it is a 'matter of physics'. Relativity and quantum mechanics (with Newtonian physics a 'good enough' approximation at human scale) are strong predictive models of physical reality. This doesn't mean that they aren't falsifiable (else they wouldn't be theories), but it does mean that these two models have a strong experimental track record of having theoretical possibilities shown to be empirical realities. Economics, were it like physics, would need to have a rigorous mathematical model of the behavior of individuals in group settings which was likewise strongly predictive. The model of Economic Man, the "rational self-maximizer," simply doesn't correspond with real people. Outside of corporate libertarian fantasies, I don't believe such people exist. Don't take my word for it? OK. You mention General Motors. GM decided to make internal combustion engines depend on leaded gasoline. They did this for profit, despite the fact that lead is poisonous to people and damaging to cars. They poisoned three generations of children. They distorted research and covered up inconvenient facts in order to keep at it. Sounds like their model is a rationalizing greedy mofo. I remain unconvinced by your argument. The FSF's argument is grounded in the history of the computing field and reflective of my own experience. Works for me.
Two things.
One, all software once was free (as in beer) and swapped freely via user groups. Why? The profit model was in hardware and support licenses. That once was taught in the CS curriculum, although I could be showing my age;-) The model of selling use-rights via EULA is within-my-lifetime new and no more a part of human nature than the use-rights selling models that the RIAA and MPAA push (sorry, Hilary, sorry, Jack). You may wish to check your employment contract to verify that you have more rights to your creations than Prince has to '1999'.
Two, I've seen more than one company left holding a tie attached to an empty suit while desperate programmers attempt to reverse-engineer a closed-source business-critical application or utility. It might not be entirely legal, but it happens.
<quote>YOUR military that has protected your rights and freedoms every day since your conception.</quote>
Actually, no. The Civil War, in which the theory was proven that the greatest danger to the United States is a band of armed racist citizens with advanced military training, did not protect (or even establish) a single right or freedom for citizens in the US. The 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution did that, and only after a century of litigation by groups such as the NAACP, Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) and Roe v. Wade (1973), Presidential initiatives such as the New Deal and the Great Society, and legislative action such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Indeed, it is civilian control of the military which has prevented the military from being the greatest obstacle to the securing of all these rights.
[BTW -- The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, while signaling Lincoln's recognition that he needed Black troops to win the war, did not extend rights to Blacks, since it only affected states and territories in armed revolt against the US, i.e. exactly those states disputing Lincoln's authority to issue executive orders they were bound to follow. It had as much legal effect as proclaiming that the Brazilian slaves of 1863 were free.]
Actually, the experiments with teaching sign language to chimpanzees and gorillas demonstrated that human language acqusition and use are different from other primates. People are specialized to learn language; a child will learn spoken language barring severe neurological damage or neglect. (Interestingly, deaf babies have been observed babble-signing with their hands.) Further, children not only acquire pronunciation and vocabulary, but are able to fit them into syntactical grammatical frameworks of arbitrary complexity. Chimpanzees can sign "give drink fruit," but cannot tell a story. "Smarter," though, is a different issue. Chimpanzees and bonobos are brilliant at being chimpanzees and bonobos. Assuming that we don't end life on our planet, we might just be brilliant at being us.
Unfortunately, during the dot-com boom pricing and billing of ISP service went nuts (along with the rest of the industry), and we still have to recover from this idea that b/w should be somehow GIVEN by the ISP at no charge to EVERYONE. Sure, I love universal service as everyone else, but the big question that we should all be asking ourselves: "for internet service, WHO should pay?" Please note, that links, routers, equipment, staff, electricity, etc... are NOT free.
Which is a valid complaint, assuming that
your company is not a regulated monopoly, and further
your company is not a regulated monopoly required to provide universal access.
The RBOCs and the Cable providers both have the ability to guarantee themselves profit margins by setting rates for users in their geographic areas, the better to pay for the links, routers, equipment, staff, electricity, &c. They also have the power to purchase^H^H^H lobby members of Congress and pull the strings of FCC commissioners and yer friendly neighborhood county supervisors and city councils to make those rates stick. With that power comes an obligation, in my view, to provide good service to customers, and charging extra for additional PCs, set-top boxes, etc. is BAD service. Especially when that extra money is funneled to local officials as kickbacks^H^H^H per-capita taxes.
Globalism is Imperialism
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Every empire, from the Egyptian to the Chinese to the Roman, Spanish, British, French, and American empires have all believed that they were global systems which were an essential aspect of existence (they framed human existence and gave it meaning). The Egyptian, Chinese, and Roman empires believed that their emporers were literally gods; later empires have claimed their superiority over previous ones in part by limiting the divine claims of their rulers and hence the arbitrariness of their rule. More recent empires, the British, French, and American empires, have extensively used the corporate form to administer their colonial possessions. The East India Company was a corporation chartered by the British Crown to seek profits for the Empire, as was the Virginia Company. All this is not to say that things haven't changed; World Wars I and II essentially wrecked European imperialism and allowed the American empire to pursue global ambitions. Hence the sight of a British Prime Minister acting as an advance man for an American President. Instead of the East India Company, we have General Electric and other such behemoths. Instead of industrial production centralized in the home country, it is dispersed widely and interconnected with sea, road, rail, and air transport. But the end result is the same: the colonies (now designated as "free trade zones" and "developing countries" and "emirates" and "commonwealths" and "districts") supply raw resources (oil, diamonds, gold, timber) and tribute (foreign debt, denominated in home country currency/dollars) to the metropole. We have difficulty seeing what globalization is ("Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is... you have to see it for yourself") because we take the empire for granted. Most Americans, including many who will read this post, do not believe that there is such a thing as an American empire, despite the presence of permanent garrisons on every continent save Antarctica, warships on every ocean, and a "defense" budget larger than our potential rivals combined. Take the red pill. The forms may have changed, become more efficient; Harvard and Wharton MBA's replace hereditary Lords, the Chinese innovation of Civil Service Examinations being reborn as SAT's, baccalaureate degrees, technical certifications and other such tests, networked relational databases handling human resources, financial transactions, and accounting, and an emporer whose rule is checked by the favor of corporate heads, legislators, judges, a constitution, and treaties. It's a long way from divinity, but it is still an empire.
Oh, yes -- someone mentioned Japan's experiences with globalization. We went to war with Japan in World War II to prevent them from consolidating their gains in the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (i.e., the Japanese Empire) and rebuilt Japan specifically so that they could run their area for our benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
202-395-1148 gives a "You have reached a non-working number" message when you call it. They're watching you, Neo...
Other things:
- You most likely will talk to a staffer, not the Senator. If you do see the Senator, he'll most likely stick his head in the room and shake your hand. If this happens, it's a real plus to thank him for what in your mind is the best thing he's done for Florida or the Nation.
- Do not assume that the Senator knows anything. A good working assumption is that the Senator needs cue cards to remember the name of his wife and children. (More true than you know.)
- If you bring written material, keep it very brief; the longer something is, the less likely the staffer will read it and the less likely the Senator will get a memo from the staffer about it.
- No matter what you might think of Sen. Hollings of South Carolina for introducing this turkey, attack the bill, not the Senator. "Senator Hollings may not be aware, but his bill could..."
- If you are a member of industry consortia or other such in Florida, being able to speak on their behalf amplifies your voice and decreases the risk to the Senator of acting on your advice.
Hope that helps. Good luck.The CIA is you? Uh, no. Not unless 'you' refers to the Ivy-League-educated, mostly White, mostly Protestant, mostly Anglo-Saxon persons who founded the CIA. If that does include you, then raise a ruckus when the CIA comes to recruit at your alma mater. But the CIA, to paraphrase our last elected President, does NOT look like America.
(KJV) Matthew 10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
(KJV) Luke 12:51-53 Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
(KJV) Luke 19:27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay [them] before me.
(KJV) 1 Peter 2:18 Servants, [be] subject to [your] masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.
For "servants", read "slaves". Persons in glass houses, avoid stone throwing.
OK, here we go. Somalia was a pawn in the cold war. We gave money and arms to the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre during the period that the then-Soviet Union was arming Mengistu in Ethiopia. When the Cold War ended, we no longer had a use for Mr. Barre. However, a decade of arms shipments failed to vaporize alongside his regime's utility. His regime imploded, with great assistance from Mohammed Farah Aideed. Factional leaders, including Mr. Aideed, essentially carved Somalia into pieces. The US likes "stability" (one Ring to rule them all...) and found Mr. Aideed to be one of the obvious obstacles to such "stability." Mr. Aideed had to go; we managed to antagonize the people of Mogadishu when we went to get him, and then they made a simplistic movie (with great effects and sound) from which people are obviously getting their history of the region.
Funny, the hijackers believed in a single truth, too. But of course, your truth is the One Truth, as opposed to theirs, which was the... well, One Truth. As to how many South Asian and North African peoples speak (some) English, I'd dare say that between the BBC World Service, Voice of America, CNN, the New York/London-based exile communities, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Dynasty, and Baywatch that it is a rare person anywhere on Earth who knows no words in English. And that certainly has not changed since 11 September. Ask yourself why Kandahar airport has signs in English in it. Ask yourself why you see signs written in English at protest after protest. It may not be grammatically correct English, but neither is the average post on /.
Actually, Saudi Arabia is a theocracy. They are adherents of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the same sect from which the Taliban sprung. There is a Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Protection from Vice, just as was in Afghanistan. The laws the committee enforce became world-infamous when they led to the burning death of several schoolgirls who were dressed too "immodestly" to be allowed to flee their burning school.
As to that US muscle, we actually inherited the old British "Arab Facade" (of which the House of Saud is an integral part) from the UK following their effective mortgage of the British Empire to the US during WWII. The US owns them, effectively. What the US does NOT own is the allegiance of the extremely disaffected people in North Africa and Arabia. We overthrew Mossadegh, we upended Nasser, so fundamentalist Islam is all they've got left.
As to concentration of wealth and rising Western standards of living, the fact that Bill Gate$ and the MS permatemps work for the same company is but one sign of the rapid rise of income and wealth disparity within the US. 40% (or so) of the US population owns stock, but 90% of that stock is owned by 10% or less of the population. We're a rich country, we've got a lot of wealthy people, but the growth of the 90's came at the expense of the folks at the bottom.
I suppose, then, that this means that NT really does mean Nice Try...
<coca-cola-rant>
Indeed, Coke decided to convince restaurants to stop automatically offering tap water to customers and convince them to push bottled water instead (mention bottled water ahead of tap, or force customer to explicitly ask for tap water).
</coca-cola-rant>
Shows just how silly it is to allow a corporation to brand water. Or, for that matter, CPU cycles. Or, really, anything at all.
Saying something is a 'matter of economics' is far different than saying it is a 'matter of physics'. Relativity and quantum mechanics (with Newtonian physics a 'good enough' approximation at human scale) are strong predictive models of physical reality. This doesn't mean that they aren't falsifiable (else they wouldn't be theories), but it does mean that these two models have a strong experimental track record of having theoretical possibilities shown to be empirical realities. Economics, were it like physics, would need to have a rigorous mathematical model of the behavior of individuals in group settings which was likewise strongly predictive. The model of Economic Man, the "rational self-maximizer," simply doesn't correspond with real people. Outside of corporate libertarian fantasies, I don't believe such people exist. Don't take my word for it? OK. You mention General Motors. GM decided to make internal combustion engines depend on leaded gasoline. They did this for profit, despite the fact that lead is poisonous to people and damaging to cars. They poisoned three generations of children. They distorted research and covered up inconvenient facts in order to keep at it. Sounds like their model is a rationalizing greedy mofo. I remain unconvinced by your argument. The FSF's argument is grounded in the history of the computing field and reflective of my own experience. Works for me.
Two things. ;-) The model of selling use-rights via EULA is within-my-lifetime new and no more a part of human nature than the use-rights selling models that the RIAA and MPAA push (sorry, Hilary, sorry, Jack). You may wish to check your employment contract to verify that you have more rights to your creations than Prince has to '1999'.
One, all software once was free (as in beer) and swapped freely via user groups. Why? The profit model was in hardware and support licenses. That once was taught in the CS curriculum, although I could be showing my age
Two, I've seen more than one company left holding a tie attached to an empty suit while desperate programmers attempt to reverse-engineer a closed-source business-critical application or utility. It might not be entirely legal, but it happens.
It's
<quote>YOUR military that has protected your rights and freedoms every day since your conception.</quote>
Actually, no. The Civil War, in which the theory was proven that the greatest danger to the United States is a band of armed racist citizens with advanced military training, did not protect (or even establish) a single right or freedom for citizens in the US. The 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution did that, and only after a century of litigation by groups such as the NAACP, Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) and Roe v. Wade (1973), Presidential initiatives such as the New Deal and the Great Society, and legislative action such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Indeed, it is civilian control of the military which has prevented the military from being the greatest obstacle to the securing of all these rights.
[BTW -- The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, while signaling Lincoln's recognition that he needed Black troops to win the war, did not extend rights to Blacks, since it only affected states and territories in armed revolt against the US, i.e. exactly those states disputing Lincoln's authority to issue executive orders they were bound to follow. It had as much legal effect as proclaiming that the Brazilian slaves of 1863 were free.]
Actually, the experiments with teaching sign language to chimpanzees and gorillas demonstrated that human language acqusition and use are different from other primates. People are specialized to learn language; a child will learn spoken language barring severe neurological damage or neglect. (Interestingly, deaf babies have been observed babble-signing with their hands.) Further, children not only acquire pronunciation and vocabulary, but are able to fit them into syntactical grammatical frameworks of arbitrary complexity. Chimpanzees can sign "give drink fruit," but cannot tell a story. "Smarter," though, is a different issue. Chimpanzees and bonobos are brilliant at being chimpanzees and bonobos. Assuming that we don't end life on our planet, we might just be brilliant at being us.
Which is a valid complaint, assuming that
- your company is not a regulated monopoly, and further
- your company is not a regulated monopoly required to provide universal access.
The RBOCs and the Cable providers both have the ability to guarantee themselves profit margins by setting rates for users in their geographic areas, the better to pay for the links, routers, equipment, staff, electricity, &c. They also have the power to purchase^H^H^H lobby members of Congress and pull the strings of FCC commissioners and yer friendly neighborhood county supervisors and city councils to make those rates stick. With that power comes an obligation, in my view, to provide good service to customers, and charging extra for additional PCs, set-top boxes, etc. is BAD service. Especially when that extra money is funneled to local officials as kickbacks^H^H^H per-capita taxes.Every empire, from the Egyptian to the Chinese to the Roman, Spanish, British, French, and American empires have all believed that they were global systems which were an essential aspect of existence (they framed human existence and gave it meaning). The Egyptian, Chinese, and Roman empires believed that their emporers were literally gods; later empires have claimed their superiority over previous ones in part by limiting the divine claims of their rulers and hence the arbitrariness of their rule. More recent empires, the British, French, and American empires, have extensively used the corporate form to administer their colonial possessions. The East India Company was a corporation chartered by the British Crown to seek profits for the Empire, as was the Virginia Company. All this is not to say that things haven't changed; World Wars I and II essentially wrecked European imperialism and allowed the American empire to pursue global ambitions. Hence the sight of a British Prime Minister acting as an advance man for an American President. Instead of the East India Company, we have General Electric and other such behemoths. Instead of industrial production centralized in the home country, it is dispersed widely and interconnected with sea, road, rail, and air transport. But the end result is the same: the colonies (now designated as "free trade zones" and "developing countries" and "emirates" and "commonwealths" and "districts") supply raw resources (oil, diamonds, gold, timber) and tribute (foreign debt, denominated in home country currency/dollars) to the metropole. We have difficulty seeing what globalization is ("Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is... you have to see it for yourself") because we take the empire for granted. Most Americans, including many who will read this post, do not believe that there is such a thing as an American empire, despite the presence of permanent garrisons on every continent save Antarctica, warships on every ocean, and a "defense" budget larger than our potential rivals combined. Take the red pill. The forms may have changed, become more efficient; Harvard and Wharton MBA's replace hereditary Lords, the Chinese innovation of Civil Service Examinations being reborn as SAT's, baccalaureate degrees, technical certifications and other such tests, networked relational databases handling human resources, financial transactions, and accounting, and an emporer whose rule is checked by the favor of corporate heads, legislators, judges, a constitution, and treaties. It's a long way from divinity, but it is still an empire.
Oh, yes -- someone mentioned Japan's experiences with globalization. We went to war with Japan in World War II to prevent them from consolidating their gains in the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (i.e., the Japanese Empire) and rebuilt Japan specifically so that they could run their area for our benefit.