Posted by: StrugglingInMI on Tue, 09 March 2004 14:49:15 | (2324 Reads)
http://www.itunemployed.com/xaraya/index.php?mod ul e=articles&func=display&aid=264
Elegy for a Profession
A song of the discarded
Hello, Corporate America. Do you know us? Do you remember?
We are I/T.
We are the men and women who helped you build the 21st century.
We flocked to the new technologies, taught ourselves the skills we needed when colleges could not, and forged the tools you asked for.
We signed up willingly, knowing that of all professions, ours was the one where today's knowledge would be tomorrow's obsolescence, where last week's skill is worthless now, and where falling out of touch with progress is career suicide.
And we knew, some of us, that ultimately it would be impossible to keep up with the pace of change - but we tried anyway.
We are I/T.
We are the ones who embraced the idea of 7 x 24 operations, who willingly condemned ourselves to odd hours, unpaid overtime, and ever-increasing expectations, so "expensive equipment could be used most efficiently."
We are the ones who gave up families, friends, and "life outside" to spend endless hours building, fixing, and changing the systems that kept you going and growing. We learned that the dream of a 40-hour workweek would never, ever apply to us.
We are the ones who carried pagers when they were almost exclusively the tools of doctors, pimps and drug dealers.
We are a young mother, sitting in a cubicle at 3:00am, troubleshooting a software problem while her new baby sleeps in a carryall next to her desk.
We are a husband, called from his bed in the dead of night, on call not to save a life, or rescue a trapped motorist, but to rebuild a database index, or repair a broken disk drive. And sometimes, the problem was fixed, and it was the marriage that stayed broken.
Do you know us? We are I/T, too. We are the family of a "computer geek", who learned that vacations, holidays, and sick days did not mean freedom from stress for our loved ones, or uninterrupted time with us. We watched as our parents and spouses took cell phones, laptops, terminals, and manuals with them everywhere, ready to give up our family plans on a moments notice to keep your business running. We heard the phones ring in the middle of the night, at the park, or during dinner. We tried to understand.
We are I/T.
Yes, we are the ones who listened when the siren song of ever higher salaries beckoned. Are you surprised? Do not blame us for taking the salaries you offered. Rather, look to yourselves for creating a work environment so intense, so stressful, so demanding that for ten straight years, the schools to teach the next generation found fewer and fewer applicants.
But your demands did not decrease. In desperation, you threw money at us to buy the expertise your own voracious appetite made scarce.
We are the ones who welcomed foreign workers into our midst, when things were so bad you had to recruit overseas to feed your endless demand. While other departments struggled with racism and intolerance, we became a United Nations in miniature, grateful for help from any quarter, any society that could ease the crushing workload. We built a society of equals, holding no prejudice except technical inadequacy.
We watched our budgets shrink each year, while demands for productivity soared, and our pleas for more help were ignored. And we endured the criticism when the inevitable failures occurred, as overwork, stress, and tension took their inevitable toll on our skills.
We are I/T.
We had to learn not only our profession, but yours too. We learned your business practices so well that sometimes we knew more about them than you did; and we are the ones who had to stand by and listen to your "voice of experience" while we watched you make fatal decisions.
We designed the systems you asked for, only to watch as t
Answers on Outsourcing A finance professor argues against placing blind faith in outsourcing. His views follow. March 12, 2004: 8:18 AM EST By Rory L. Terry
The following is a guest column by Rory L. Terry, an associate professor of finance at Fort Hays State University.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A great deal of effort is being expended to convince us all that the outsourcing of jobs under the rubric of free trade is a good thing. I would like to discuss some of these arguments.
Our labor force is not better trained, harder working, or more innovative than our foreign competitors. The argument that we will create new jobs in highly paying fields simply is not true. We have no comparative advantage or superiority in innovation. To assume that we are inherently more creative than our foreign competitors is both arrogant and naive. We are currently empowering our competition with the resources to innovate equally as well as we. Consider the number of new non-native Ph.D.s that leave our universities each year; consider our low rank in the education of mathematics and the sciences; and consider the large number of international students enrolled in our most difficult technical degree programs at our most prestigious universities.
Most of our best, high-paying jobs can be exported.
1. doctors (even surgeons)
2. mathematicians
3. accountants
4. financial analysts
5. engineers
6. computer programmers
7. architects
8. physicists
9. chemists
10. biologists
11. researchers of all types
Our trading problem is an externality
An externality exists in economics any time there is a separation of costs and benefits, and the decision maker does not have to incur the full cost but receives the full benefits of the decision. The fact is, there is no economic force, no supply and demand equilibrium, no rational decision process of either business or consumer, that will make an externality go away. Classic examples of externalities are when a business dumps toxic waste into a nearby river and the downstream residents incur the costs of cancer. The business is able to lower its costs and pass those lower costs on to its customers, and never pay for the treatment of the cancer patients. We have laws in this country against dumping and pollution because they are externalities -- they require a legislative solution.
Cost reductions and other benefits provide a strong incentive to outsource jobs. A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways, including the following:
1. Extremely low wage rates
2. The circumvention or avoidance of organized labor
3. No Social Security or Medicare benefit payments
4. No federal or state unemployment tax
5. No health benefits for workers
6. No child labor laws
7. No OSHA or EPA costs or restrictions
8. No worker retirement benefits or pension costs
Besides cutting costs, there are other benefits to exporting jobs, including the following:
1. Tax incentives provided by our government
2. Incentives from foreign governments
3. The creation of new international markets for the company's products (which ultimately empowers the company to turn a deaf ear to this country's problems and influence)
4. The continued benefits of our legal system and the freedoms that we provide
The net effect of all of this is lower costs, higher revenue, higher profits, higher stock prices, bonuses for management, and the creation of wealth for a subclass that benefits from low taxes at the expense of the rest of us.
The costs of the decision to outsource are not borne by the decision maker. As a society and as a country, we experience many costs from outsourcing, including the loss of jobs, social costs, higher costs of raw materials and loss of national s
Exporting America: false choices In none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a news organization addressed the facts. March 10, 2004: 11:12 AM EST By Lou Dobbs, Lou Dobbs Tonight
NEW YORK (CNN) - You may have noticed recently that I'm being attacked for my views on the exporting of American jobs and my calls for a balanced U.S. trade policy.
Gerard Baker of the Financial Times called me the "high priest of demotic sensationalism."
An editorial in the Economist magazine accused me of embarking "on a rabidly anti-trade editorial agenda" and "greeting every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault."
Lou Dobbs comments on recent attacks of his views on the exporting of American jobs and U.S. trade policy.
Play video (Real or Windows Media)
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal excoriated me, I must say, in high style for my troglodyte views on outsourcing by saying, "It's as if whatever made Linda Blair's head spin around in 'The Exorcist' had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich."
Washington Post columnist James Glassman has simply accused me of being a "table-thumping protectionist."
Those quotes are from some of the most respected news organizations, and there have been dozens of other articles critical of my view that outsourcing American jobs is neither sound, smart, humane nor in the national interest. Makes a fellow think
I will tell you it does make a fellow think when attacked so energetically and so personally. But in none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a single columnist or news organization seen fit to deal with the facts.
Number one: We're not creating jobs in the private sector, and that's never happened before in our history. Our economists and politicians need to be coming up with answers, not dogma.
Number two: We haven't had a trade surplus in this country in more than two decades, and our trade deficit continues to soar.
Number three: We've lost three million jobs in this country over the last three years, and millions more American jobs are at risk of being outsourced to cheap overseas labor markets.
That seems to me, at least, to be more than sufficient evidence for all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, to question critically the policies of both parties that have led us to this critical juncture in our economy and our history. Check out the "Exporting America" list
Frankly, I would love to be proved wrong in my views, and I would gladly change my position, if only my critics would answer a few questions factually, empirically and straightforwardly.
One: How many more jobs must we lose before they become concerned about our middle class and our strength as a consumer market? Two: When will the U.S. have to quit borrowing foreign capital to buy foreign goods that support European and Asian economies while driving us deeper into debt? Three: What jobs will our currently 15 million unemployed workers fill, where and when?
My critics and proponents of free trade and outsourcing suggest I'm a protectionist because I want to curtail the export of American jobs to cheap foreign labor markets just to reduce wage levels, and to eliminate our trade deficit and to pursue balanced trade policies.
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Lou Dobbs Tonight International Trade Labor or Create your own Manage alerts | What is this?
Our principal trading partners, Canada, China, Japan and the European Union, all typically maintain annual trade surpluses and pursue balanced trade. Why don't my critics call them protectionists? Why not call them economic isolationists?
My critics, and proponents of the status quo, are offering false choices. They say we must decide between protectionism, or economic isolationism as the president said today, and free trade. I'm sure they believe those choices are the only ones available.
But maybe they also fear our policymakers may discover a middle ground for a desperately needed new U.S. trade policy: a balanced trade policy in the national interest.
Where are the new jobs going to come from? What should people train/retrain for?
You also forget to point out that most of the new jobs being created in the US to replace the outsourced jobs do not pay nearly as much nor do the have near the same level of benifits.
People who support offshoring of everything need to realize that it can not continue. The USA can not survive if most of our high paying jobs go away. Cut peoples incomes enought and they go from being tax payers to tax consumers (and they will elect people who will keep the money coming).
SAMBA had to reverse engineer quite a lot of the way windows impliments CIFS to get SAMBA to interop with Windows (PDC/BDC/Others). Using you logic, any portion of SAMBA that impliments things not in the official CIFS spec should be illegal.
Please provide me a link to this place you speak. Because the/. I know isn't full of people that think differently, if it was the moderation system would not be used to attack 'wrong' thoughts.
Before PATRIOT, the FBI could execute a search warrant for electronic evidence only within the geographic jurisdiction of the court that issued the warrant - for example, the FBI couldn't get a New York court to issue a warrant for email messages stored by your ISP in California.
After PATRIOT, courts can issue warrants for electronic evidence -- your email messages, your voice mail messages and the electronic records detailing your web-surfing -- anywhere in the country. Notably, Section 220 isn't reserved for terrorism-related investigations, despite the fact that PATRIOT was sold to the American public as a necessary anti-terrorism measure. Instead, it applies in any kind of criminal investigation whatsoever. Why Section 220 Should Sunset
Section 220 significantly increases the chances that search warrants that fail to meet Constitutional standards will be used to search and seize your electronic communications:
* Section 220 allows the FBI to pick and choose which courts it can ask for a search warrant. This means it can "shop" for judges that have demonstrated a strong bias toward law enforcement with regard to search warrants, using only those judges least likely to say no -- even if the warrant doesn't satisfy the strict requirements of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
* By allowing courts to issue warrants to be served on communications providers in far-away states, Section 220 reduces the likelihood that your ISP or phone company will try to protect your privacy by challenging the warrant in court, even if the warrant is clearly unconstitutional. A small San Francisco ISP served with such a warrant is unlikely to have the resources to appear before the New York court that issued it. Yet because you won't be notified if the FBI uses a warrant to get your electronic communications, your ISP is the only entity in a position to fight for your rights.
The FBI argues that having to secure search warrants from more than one court during an investigation is a waste of time. But local judicial oversight is a key check against unreasonable searches. Further, the FBI already has the ability to conduct emergency searches without a warrant when it doesn't have time to go to a local judge.
Even worse, Section 220 isn't necessary even to help combat terrorism -- PATRIOT section 219 already allows nationwide search warrants in terrorism-related investigations. In fact, the only practical result of Section 220 is less paperwork for the FBI -- at the expense of your Constitutional rights. Conclusion
Section 220 threatens your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. EFF strongly opposes its renewal, and we urge you to oppose it, too. We also support the Security and Freedom Ensured Act (SAFE Act, S 1709/HR 3352) and encourage you to visit EFF's Action Center today to let your representatives know you support the bill.
Fuck the difference in their platforms. I am talking about the difference in what they DO. The say they are different , but when it comes down to it, both sides are big-goverment, they just have different ideas about who should be punished by that big goverment and who should be helped.
Stem Cell: Latter. SS: Neither side will do anything thing to fix it, so that is a wash. FD: Both will spend money, but the republicans in congress don't spend as much when a D is in the white house. Abortion: Bush doesn't care. If he did he would have done more to end the practice. Banning a rarely used procedure for politcal points doesn't count.
A country's single strongest determinant of corruption perception is its per capita income. Nigerians' incomes rank among the poorest 6% of the world population. Nigeria's rock-bottom corruption perception rating by the international community masks a cohort of 17 nations, with one-seventh of the world's population, who are statistically just as corrupt. Unfortunately, this willful prejudice isolates the nation from receiving the direct foreign investment and development cooperation it deserves.
Overview
This CHRRD Research Review, the first in a series of literature and statistical reviews, places emphasis on the collection of primary source materials from a variety of perspectives from the global to the local. It examines and excerpts historical and current surveys, data and analyses concerning Nigeria's corruption and related business and governance rankings among nations. Empirically-determined correlates and consequences of corruption are reviewed and analysed within the Nigerian context. Reasons, mainly Western trade interests, behind the current drive towards global value (or behavioural) convergence are surveyed. Finally, the broad spectrum of recommendations for improving Nigeria's corruption reputation are examined. Formatting of quoted excerpts (highlighting, emboldened fonts, etc.) are the work of the compilers of this review, except where noted otherwise.
Summary Points
u Nigeria's corruption-prone image is significantly worse internationally than domestically. Only four percent of two thousand Nigerians polled by Afrobarometer in 2001 considered corruption to be "Nigeria's leading problem". More pressing in their minds were unemployment (39%), poverty (14%), food shortages (9%), and economic management (7%). Forty-two percent regard democratic rule as "less corrupt" than military rule, 29% "more corrupt" while a perhaps cynical 27% believed the incidence of corruption to be "the same" under either regime (Lewis, 2002).
u In a July 2002 "Global Corruption Barometer Survey" done for Transparency International, Nigerians viewed their police force as the most corrupt institution in the country. When asked which, among eleven public and private institutions, they would most like corruption eliminated from, 32.1% answered "Police", followed by 27.0% for "Political parties" and 26.0% for the "Education system". Nearly equal numbers of Nigerians expect corruption levels to increase in the next three years (44.5%) as those who expect a decrease (38.6%).
u The country is saddled with two distinct sets of corruption-related pathologies. The global anti-corruption regime specifically focuses on restraining senior public officialdom from the temptation of accepting bribes from rich nations' firms ("facilitation payments" to minor officials are exempt). This regime severely ostracizes Nigeria. But Nigeria also faces debilitating and vertically co-extensive levels of domestic corruption, deeply embedded in a culture of patronage politics that goes hand in hand with its natural resource "curse", oil-dependency. Transecting and conflating the domestic and international reputations in a sort of feedback loop are Nigeria's fabled practitioners of transnational business fraud and illicit trafficking.
u Transparency International (TI) has persistently set Nigeria among the bottom five nations in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) since 1995. This "poll of polls" captures perceptions of corrupt tendencies in broad terms. In 2002, Nigeria's index value was 4.7% of the entire country range. Its penultimate ordinal rank persists even when 54 countries' CPI not on the official list are included. Statistically, however, this placement is both meaningless to potential foreign investors and reputationally damaging to low-ranking nations. By virtue of the 90% confidence limits established in TI's sampling, Nigeria's "true" corruption perception is indistinguishable from any of the bottom seven
Well , the can. All they have to do is 'pinky swear' that it is part of a National Security Matter. Just like they said the USA PATRIOT act would be used only against terrorists. Well, till they used it against that strip club owener is Vegas who has NO TERRORIST TIES>
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by: StrugglingInMI on Tue, 09 March 2004 14:49:15 | (2324 Reads)
http://www.itunemployed.com/xaraya/index.php?mod ul e=articles&func=display&aid=264
Elegy for a Profession
A song of the discarded
Hello, Corporate America. Do you know us? Do you remember?
We are I/T.
We are the men and women who helped you build the 21st century.
We flocked to the new technologies, taught ourselves the skills we needed when colleges could not, and forged the tools you asked for.
We signed up willingly, knowing that of all professions, ours was the one where today's knowledge would be tomorrow's obsolescence, where last week's skill is worthless now, and where falling out of touch with progress is career suicide.
And we knew, some of us, that ultimately it would be impossible to keep up with the pace of change - but we tried anyway.
We are I/T.
We are the ones who embraced the idea of 7 x 24 operations, who willingly condemned ourselves to odd hours, unpaid overtime, and ever-increasing expectations, so "expensive equipment could be used most efficiently."
We are the ones who gave up families, friends, and "life outside" to spend endless hours building, fixing, and changing the systems that kept you going and growing. We learned that the dream of a 40-hour workweek would never, ever apply to us.
We are the ones who carried pagers when they were almost exclusively the tools of doctors, pimps and drug dealers.
We are a young mother, sitting in a cubicle at 3:00am, troubleshooting a software problem while her new baby sleeps in a carryall next to her desk.
We are a husband, called from his bed in the dead of night, on call not to save a life, or rescue a trapped motorist, but to rebuild a database index, or repair a broken disk drive. And sometimes, the problem was fixed, and it was the marriage that stayed broken.
Do you know us? We are I/T, too. We are the family of a "computer geek", who learned that vacations, holidays, and sick days did not mean freedom from stress for our loved ones, or uninterrupted time with us. We watched as our parents and spouses took cell phones, laptops, terminals, and manuals with them everywhere, ready to give up our family plans on a moments notice to keep your business running. We heard the phones ring in the middle of the night, at the park, or during dinner. We tried to understand.
We are I/T.
Yes, we are the ones who listened when the siren song of ever higher salaries beckoned. Are you surprised? Do not blame us for taking the salaries you offered. Rather, look to yourselves for creating a work environment so intense, so stressful, so demanding that for ten straight years, the schools to teach the next generation found fewer and fewer applicants.
But your demands did not decrease. In desperation, you threw money at us to buy the expertise your own voracious appetite made scarce.
We are the ones who welcomed foreign workers into our midst, when things were so bad you had to recruit overseas to feed your endless demand. While other departments struggled with racism and intolerance, we became a United Nations in miniature, grateful for help from any quarter, any society that could ease the crushing workload. We built a society of equals, holding no prejudice except technical inadequacy.
We watched our budgets shrink each year, while demands for productivity soared, and our pleas for more help were ignored. And we endured the criticism when the inevitable failures occurred, as overwork, stress, and tension took their inevitable toll on our skills.
We are I/T.
We had to learn not only our profession, but yours too. We learned your business practices so well that sometimes we knew more about them than you did; and we are the ones who had to stand by and listen to your "voice of experience" while we watched you make fatal decisions.
We designed the systems you asked for, only to watch as t
Answers on Outsourcing
A finance professor argues against placing blind faith in outsourcing. His views follow.
March 12, 2004: 8:18 AM EST
By Rory L. Terry
The following is a guest column by Rory L. Terry, an associate professor of finance at Fort Hays State University.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A great deal of effort is being expended to convince us all that the outsourcing of jobs under the rubric of free trade is a good thing. I would like to discuss some of these arguments.
Our labor force is not better trained, harder working, or more innovative than our foreign competitors. The argument that we will create new jobs in highly paying fields simply is not true. We have no comparative advantage or superiority in innovation. To assume that we are inherently more creative than our foreign competitors is both arrogant and naive. We are currently empowering our competition with the resources to innovate equally as well as we. Consider the number of new non-native Ph.D.s that leave our universities each year; consider our low rank in the education of mathematics and the sciences; and consider the large number of international students enrolled in our most difficult technical degree programs at our most prestigious universities.
Most of our best, high-paying jobs can be exported.
1. doctors (even surgeons)
2. mathematicians
3. accountants
4. financial analysts
5. engineers
6. computer programmers
7. architects
8. physicists
9. chemists
10. biologists
11. researchers of all types
Our trading problem is an externality
An externality exists in economics any time there is a separation of costs and benefits, and the decision maker does not have to incur the full cost but receives the full benefits of the decision. The fact is, there is no economic force, no supply and demand equilibrium, no rational decision process of either business or consumer, that will make an externality go away. Classic examples of externalities are when a business dumps toxic waste into a nearby river and the downstream residents incur the costs of cancer. The business is able to lower its costs and pass those lower costs on to its customers, and never pay for the treatment of the cancer patients. We have laws in this country against dumping and pollution because they are externalities -- they require a legislative solution.
Cost reductions and other benefits provide a strong incentive to outsource jobs. A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways, including the following:
1. Extremely low wage rates
2. The circumvention or avoidance of organized labor
3. No Social Security or Medicare benefit payments
4. No federal or state unemployment tax
5. No health benefits for workers
6. No child labor laws
7. No OSHA or EPA costs or restrictions
8. No worker retirement benefits or pension costs
Besides cutting costs, there are other benefits to exporting jobs, including the following:
1. Tax incentives provided by our government
2. Incentives from foreign governments
3. The creation of new international markets for the company's products (which ultimately empowers the company to turn a deaf ear to this country's problems and influence)
4. The continued benefits of our legal system and the freedoms that we provide
The net effect of all of this is lower costs, higher revenue, higher profits, higher stock prices, bonuses for management, and the creation of wealth for a subclass that benefits from low taxes at the expense of the rest of us.
The costs of the decision to outsource are not borne by the decision maker. As a society and as a country, we experience many costs from outsourcing, including the loss of jobs, social costs, higher costs of raw materials and loss of national s
Exporting America: false choices
In none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a news organization addressed the facts.
March 10, 2004: 11:12 AM EST
By Lou Dobbs, Lou Dobbs Tonight
NEW YORK (CNN) - You may have noticed recently that I'm being attacked for my views on the exporting of American jobs and my calls for a balanced U.S. trade policy.
Gerard Baker of the Financial Times called me the "high priest of demotic sensationalism."
An editorial in the Economist magazine accused me of embarking "on a rabidly anti-trade editorial agenda" and "greeting every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault."
Lou Dobbs comments on recent attacks of his views on the exporting of American jobs and U.S. trade policy.
Play video
(Real or Windows Media)
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal excoriated me, I must say, in high style for my troglodyte views on outsourcing by saying, "It's as if whatever made Linda Blair's head spin around in 'The Exorcist' had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich."
Washington Post columnist James Glassman has simply accused me of being a "table-thumping protectionist."
Those quotes are from some of the most respected news organizations, and there have been dozens of other articles critical of my view that outsourcing American jobs is neither sound, smart, humane nor in the national interest.
Makes a fellow think
I will tell you it does make a fellow think when attacked so energetically and so personally. But in none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a single columnist or news organization seen fit to deal with the facts.
Number one: We're not creating jobs in the private sector, and that's never happened before in our history. Our economists and politicians need to be coming up with answers, not dogma.
Number two: We haven't had a trade surplus in this country in more than two decades, and our trade deficit continues to soar.
Number three: We've lost three million jobs in this country over the last three years, and millions more American jobs are at risk of being outsourced to cheap overseas labor markets.
That seems to me, at least, to be more than sufficient evidence for all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, to question critically the policies of both parties that have led us to this critical juncture in our economy and our history.
Check out the "Exporting America" list
Frankly, I would love to be proved wrong in my views, and I would gladly change my position, if only my critics would answer a few questions factually, empirically and straightforwardly.
One: How many more jobs must we lose before they become concerned about our middle class and our strength as a consumer market? Two: When will the U.S. have to quit borrowing foreign capital to buy foreign goods that support European and Asian economies while driving us deeper into debt? Three: What jobs will our currently 15 million unemployed workers fill, where and when?
My critics and proponents of free trade and outsourcing suggest I'm a protectionist because I want to curtail the export of American jobs to cheap foreign labor markets just to reduce wage levels, and to eliminate our trade deficit and to pursue balanced trade policies.
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS
Lou Dobbs Tonight
International Trade
Labor
or Create your own
Manage alerts | What is this?
Our principal trading partners, Canada, China, Japan and the European Union, all typically maintain annual trade surpluses and pursue balanced trade. Why don't my critics call them protectionists? Why not call them economic isolationists?
My critics, and proponents of the status quo, are offering false choices. They say we must decide between protectionism, or economic isolationism as the president said today, and free trade. I'm sure they believe those choices are the only ones available.
But maybe they also fear our policymakers may discover a middle ground for a desperately needed new U.S. trade policy: a balanced trade policy in the national interest.
Where are the new jobs going to come from?
What should people train/retrain for?
You also forget to point out that most of the new jobs being created in the US to replace the outsourced jobs do not pay nearly as much nor do the have near the same level of benifits.
People who support offshoring of everything need to realize that it can not continue. The USA can not survive if most of our high paying jobs go away. Cut peoples incomes enought and they go from being tax payers to tax consumers (and they will elect people who will keep the money coming).
SAMBA had to reverse engineer quite a lot of the way windows impliments CIFS to get SAMBA to interop with Windows (PDC/BDC/Others). Using you logic, any portion of SAMBA that impliments things not in the official CIFS spec should be illegal.
Oh, like slashdot where if you mention Jesus and/or God in a post some people go insane and mod you down for that reason only?
"Or when my boyfriend (no longer the same guy as above...of course) makes us late because he hasn't found a friggin' save point yet."
:->
Now you see how men feel when women make them late because of [hair,makeup,that time of the month, the moon, the color of you nails, etc]
Do you think that Microsoft should go after Samba?
Please provide me a link to this place you speak. Because the /. I know isn't full of people that think differently, if it was the moderation system would not be used to attack 'wrong' thoughts.
They have higher AD COSTS then they have R&D costs. The drug cos also get quite a lot of 'free' research that the US taxpayers fund.
Explain Samba.
Wyatt Earp died on January 13, 1929. It is US goverment policy to seach all undead that board aircraft.
How Section 220 Changed the Law
Before PATRIOT, the FBI could execute a search warrant for electronic evidence only within the geographic jurisdiction of the court that issued the warrant - for example, the FBI couldn't get a New York court to issue a warrant for email messages stored by your ISP in California.
After PATRIOT, courts can issue warrants for electronic evidence -- your email messages, your voice mail messages and the electronic records detailing your web-surfing -- anywhere in the country. Notably, Section 220 isn't reserved for terrorism-related investigations, despite the fact that PATRIOT was sold to the American public as a necessary anti-terrorism measure. Instead, it applies in any kind of criminal investigation whatsoever.
Why Section 220 Should Sunset
Section 220 significantly increases the chances that search warrants that fail to meet Constitutional standards will be used to search and seize your electronic communications:
* Section 220 allows the FBI to pick and choose which courts it can ask for a search warrant. This means it can "shop" for judges that have demonstrated a strong bias toward law enforcement with regard to search warrants, using only those judges least likely to say no -- even if the warrant doesn't satisfy the strict requirements of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
* By allowing courts to issue warrants to be served on communications providers in far-away states, Section 220 reduces the likelihood that your ISP or phone company will try to protect your privacy by challenging the warrant in court, even if the warrant is clearly unconstitutional. A small San Francisco ISP served with such a warrant is unlikely to have the resources to appear before the New York court that issued it. Yet because you won't be notified if the FBI uses a warrant to get your electronic communications, your ISP is the only entity in a position to fight for your rights.
The FBI argues that having to secure search warrants from more than one court during an investigation is a waste of time. But local judicial oversight is a key check against unreasonable searches. Further, the FBI already has the ability to conduct emergency searches without a warrant when it doesn't have time to go to a local judge.
Even worse, Section 220 isn't necessary even to help combat terrorism -- PATRIOT section 219 already allows nationwide search warrants in terrorism-related investigations. In fact, the only practical result of Section 220 is less paperwork for the FBI -- at the expense of your Constitutional rights.
Conclusion
Section 220 threatens your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. EFF strongly opposes its renewal, and we urge you to oppose it, too. We also support the Security and Freedom Ensured Act (SAFE Act, S 1709/HR 3352) and encourage you to visit EFF's Action Center today to let your representatives know you support the bill.
Fuck the difference in their platforms. I am talking about the difference in what they DO. The say they are different , but when it comes down to it, both sides are big-goverment, they just have different ideas about who should be punished by that big goverment and who should be helped.
Stem Cell: Latter.
SS: Neither side will do anything thing to fix it, so that is a wash.
FD: Both will spend money, but the republicans in congress don't spend as much when a D is in the white house.
Abortion: Bush doesn't care. If he did he would have done more to end the practice. Banning a rarely used procedure for politcal points doesn't count.
Corruption in Nigeria: A Review
A country's single strongest determinant of corruption perception is its per capita income. Nigerians' incomes rank among the poorest 6% of the world population. Nigeria's rock-bottom corruption perception rating by the international community masks a cohort of 17 nations, with one-seventh of the world's population, who are statistically just as corrupt. Unfortunately, this willful prejudice isolates the nation from receiving the direct foreign investment and development cooperation it deserves.
Overview
This CHRRD Research Review, the first in a series of literature and statistical reviews, places emphasis on the collection of primary source materials from a variety of perspectives from the global to the local. It examines and excerpts historical and current surveys, data and analyses concerning Nigeria's corruption and related business and governance rankings among nations. Empirically-determined correlates and consequences of corruption are reviewed and analysed within the Nigerian context. Reasons, mainly Western trade interests, behind the current drive towards global value (or behavioural) convergence are surveyed. Finally, the broad spectrum of recommendations for improving Nigeria's corruption reputation are examined. Formatting of quoted excerpts (highlighting, emboldened fonts, etc.) are the work of the compilers of this review, except where noted otherwise.
Summary Points
u Nigeria's corruption-prone image is significantly worse internationally than domestically. Only four percent of two thousand Nigerians polled by Afrobarometer in 2001 considered corruption to be "Nigeria's leading problem". More pressing in their minds were unemployment (39%), poverty (14%), food shortages (9%), and economic management (7%). Forty-two percent regard democratic rule as "less corrupt" than military rule, 29% "more corrupt" while a perhaps cynical 27% believed the incidence of corruption to be "the same" under either regime (Lewis, 2002).
u In a July 2002 "Global Corruption Barometer Survey" done for Transparency International, Nigerians viewed their police force as the most corrupt institution in the country. When asked which, among eleven public and private institutions, they would most like corruption eliminated from, 32.1% answered "Police", followed by 27.0% for "Political parties" and 26.0% for the "Education system". Nearly equal numbers of Nigerians expect corruption levels to increase in the next three years (44.5%) as those who expect a decrease (38.6%).
u The country is saddled with two distinct sets of corruption-related pathologies. The global anti-corruption regime specifically focuses on restraining senior public officialdom from the temptation of accepting bribes from rich nations' firms ("facilitation payments" to minor officials are exempt). This regime severely ostracizes Nigeria. But Nigeria also faces debilitating and vertically co-extensive levels of domestic corruption, deeply embedded in a culture of patronage politics that goes hand in hand with its natural resource "curse", oil-dependency. Transecting and conflating the domestic and international reputations in a sort of feedback loop are Nigeria's fabled practitioners of transnational business fraud and illicit trafficking.
u Transparency International (TI) has persistently set Nigeria among the bottom five nations in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) since 1995. This "poll of polls" captures perceptions of corrupt tendencies in broad terms. In 2002, Nigeria's index value was 4.7% of the entire country range. Its penultimate ordinal rank persists even when 54 countries' CPI not on the official list are included. Statistically, however, this placement is both meaningless to potential foreign investors and reputationally damaging to low-ranking nations. By virtue of the 90% confidence limits established in TI's sampling, Nigeria's "true" corruption perception is indistinguishable from any of the bottom seven
Well , the can. All they have to do is 'pinky swear' that it is part of a National Security Matter. Just like they said the USA PATRIOT act would be used only against terrorists. Well, till they used it against that strip club owener is Vegas who has NO TERRORIST TIES>
In short, they lie.
If you paid for you computer system then, yes, you did pay for that software. It will not work without it.
They are doors. I can't say that I have every really given them much thought.
What about the software that runs your mouse, keyboad, bios, harddrive, modem???
Remind me again what the differences are between Bush and Kerry.
My wife looked at the printer and said it was the dumbest looking thing in the world. She thought the handle was the stupidest thing in the world.
She also had no trouble fitting thru doors when she was pregnant.
Freazing Goldfish in LOX. Just how much adult beverages had you and your fellow 'science' researchers drank? :->
What did I do to rate foe status?
Thanks!
But you can be damn well sure they won't charge the 'update' price, no they will charge the 'brand new version with lots of new featurs' price.