...and what makes a for-profit system better? What I see whenever there's a profit motive inserted in anything is the nasty tendency for big business to do _anything_ in the name of profit. That's why we have had things like plastic mini window blinds and BABY TOYS removed from the market because they were found to have LEAD in them! How any company can willingly market stuff like this is just unfathomable...how long have we known that lead is poisonous? It makes you wonder what else is out there on the market that has had corners cut so that the company involved can make just that few cents more on each item. This is before we get inside such worm cans as the tobacco industry.
As bad as government can be, I distrust big business far more! Letting market driven numpties look after our healthcare system--ANY healthcare system--is probably the worst thing they could do!
How about the recent cases in Ontario and BC in which the company that owns the patents (or whatever) on the genes, and therefore the test for the, that are supposed to be an indicator for breast cancer? Seems that their "rights" to the genetic info outweigh any patient's rights to the test itself. With privataized healthcare, expect to see much more of this sort of thing.
That has more to do with the government's unwillingness to properly fund it, than whether or not it works. Every time there's a report about the state of Canadian healthcare, it seems to come from some right wing "thinktank"--why do they call them that?--that has a vested interest in bringing down the system, so they can put a for-profit system in its place.
Masankowski's recent report had connections with the Fraser Institute idiots, for instance. Roy Romanow's full report will be interesting once it's fully released. He has already said that the system is breaking down due to very insufficient government funding on all sides.
I fail to see how, in a system that has been pared to the bone and running probably about as efficiently as it's going to, how in the world introducing a profit motive, therefore slicing the pie ever further, is going to save money! Whatare they going to do, cut the salaries of the staff? This will just drive them south, as it has already done with many of the nurses.
I saw an interesting article in (I think) the Ottawa Citizen a few weeks ago. It suggested thatif Roy Romanow wanted to see what a for profit healthcare system looked like, he should look no further than the veterinary system thathe might use to take care of a family pet. The article went on to pint out many of the parallels between vetcare and our healthcare. I wish I could dig it up.
The RAV-4 _is_ a car, nothing more nothing less. It's based on the same platform as one of their road cars, I forget if it's the Camry or the Corolla. All they did was slap a rear drive on the transaxle, change the body for something more "trucklike", and put larger rubber on it! All this piece of crap is is the old 1983 Tercel 4wd Wagon revisited.
My F250 4x4 Diesel has done 30 miles per gallon, typically 25. (That's a proper gallon, not that downsized one you Americans seem to favour.) Can the RAV4 say that? A lot of cars can't!
Does the F650 have a Cat engine, or does it have a similar engine to my Navistar Powerstroke?
I don't know about some of the larger light trucks out there, i.e. heavy duty versions of the F, C and K series, but it's the Dodge pickus that have the Cummins Diesel, and it's quite the powerplant for a six!
As for the GM engine, nice to see they finally ghot somebody reliable, other than DDA to build them a decent Diesel. Could have been worse...could have been that horrific Old 350 Diesel that they tried in the early '80's, basically a modification of the 350 gas engine that they hoped would be suitable for the extra sresses of a Diesel. Of course, it didn't work.
If they had any sense at all, they would ditch the whole notion of a gas engine--any gas engine--and slap in a tried and true Diesel. It's only screwed up North America where Diesels are not common, and, in the middle of Third World Nowhere, you are far more likely to find Diesel fuel than you are the high octane go-juice needed for that 'Vette motor, and the quality of that fuel doesn't have to be such an issue either.
Don't make it a crappy GM Diesel either. If you're going to make a high end offroader like this, based on a Mercedes G-Wagen/Unimog, don't bastardize the damn thing by slapping anything but a Mercedes motor in it.
I recall a review of a US Army HumVee in an early '80's issue of Car and Driver, in vhich one of the writers commented "It would surely take the wisdom of youth to go to war in a vehicle powered by a GM Diesel".
*****
>> And remember...Duh!bya supposedly is an Evangelical Christian. Would he allow something that could be construed as the Mark Of The Beast to be deployed on his watch? I don't think so, folks.
*****
...and you don't think that being a fundie christian will have any bearing as to whether or not Dubya will do it? These fundie types have been selectively interpreting the ByeBull for decades now in such a way that that nasty little book will always prove them "right". Just look at the whole thing about capital punishment vs. abortion...on one hand, life is sacred, and murder is a sin, but wait!...an eye for an eye and we gotta hang them criminals high! That's just scratching the surface!
I wonder what people like Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Jello Biafra would have to say about this sort of thing. One thing is certain, with a chip planted in them, there would be increasingly fewer places where they actually could think what they were thinking!
I remember having a...discussion..with a colleague about this sort of thing back in the early '90's, and his response essentially boiled down to"I have nothing to hide, so what's the problem?". I felt like asking him if he enjoyed being guilty until proven innocent. This nasty little device, ultimately, will probably be able to be tracked whenever and wherever you are, as soon as it', under your skin. It doesn't matter if you're "guilty" of anything or not, the PTB will be following you, like it or not! My colleagues response was something to the effect of the fact that the PTB can already track you based on your credit and bank cards, so why is this any different. I'm not at all impressed that I'm being tracked according to whatever financial transactions I make on either card, but fact is, I can leave said credit/debit cards safe at home if I like, and nobody really has to know where I'm going or what I'm doing if I decide to pay cash for it. As far as I'm concerned, having one of these things implanted into me would be akin to having a Nazi serial number tattooed onto my arm in a concentration camp, and, if they really mean these things to work, it had better be buried somewhat deeper than just my skin, 'cause I'll have it gouged out in an hour! Even if it was just the government I had to worry about, it's still too much, but if they would (will) allow whatever bunch of marketing subhumans to have at the data, in hopes of being able to sell me even more beer and cookies...you can see whewre this is going.
IMHO, Jefferson or Franklin of whoever the hell it was who said something to the effect that people who trade liberty for security deserve neither is RIGHT!
You can spend as little or as much on amateur radio equipment as you want. I started out with a simple 2m/70cm HT, which has served me well as both a portable, a mobile and a base. I built a 2m copper cactus for under $10 that I use as my base antenna and picked up a decent mobile antenna for well under $50 ($CDN) so I was on the air on two bands for about $400, and that was for a dual bander. You can pick up a 2m HT for much less than that, and there is so much you can do with just the 2m band. How many people spend more than that at the drop of a hat on some new piece of computer gear?
Then there's my Icom 706...
To anybody who reads these pages who still questions the validity of amateur radio, and what it can do, I suggest you look up Steve Mann (who's probably reading this), or anybody who lived through the huge ice storm that paralyzed eastern Ontario and Quebec a few years back, (cells and satellite phones weren't worth a damn because of all the freezing rain), or have a look at how greatly amateur radio emergency use was anticipated during the whole Y2K party!
BTW, I loathe the term "ham", because it makes people immediately think of the classic computer nerd. We are Radio Amateurs!
What's the difference between this and the myriads of people already who pay big bucks to wear tshirts or whatever that has a huge corporate logo on it? I've never been able to fathom that one, and have gone so far as to mention to some tshirt salesmen that, since they would have to pay to adverize on a billboard or the side of a bus, they should pay _me_ to show off their Coke logo or something.
The problem isn't that people confuse the two, it's that the globalism that is emerging is based purely on a corporate model. The rules and regulations that govern the idea make it easier for multinationals to increase profits at the expense of their employees, while those same employees are totally prevented from being able to enjoy the same benefits. Meanwhile, similar regulations there to enforce environmental regulations are circumvented by these same "global" agreements untimately at the expense of us all.
I don't think it's the concept of Globalization per se that has labour, environmentalists, human rights activists etc up in arms, it's the fact that it's the multinationals that are calling the shots, (and the corporation controlled governments that play along), are trying to put into place agreements that place profits ahead of everything else. It's really the whole free trade versus fair trade debate on a larger scale.
Think about it...which version of the future would you rather enjoy, the Federation TNG version, or the Ferengi version?
Missed it? The few examples I listed barely scratch the surface!
As for the Hunchback, while I have never read it, the people I know that have tell me that it is one of the darkest, most depressing stories anybody can read, yet here's the Disney version as some sort of happy fairy tale!
There are going to be many unhappy kids that grow up with this total lie of a film that are going to be sadly disappointed when they have to study it in high school! (Of course, I had to study Death of a Salesman, Heart of Darkness, Hamlet etc...decay decay decay!
This "innovation" will disappear as quickly as the video screens and dashboards, (for some reason, GM still seems to like these...), that infected cars in the eighties, not to mention "Bitchin Betty" that kept telling you "Your door is ajar!"
I can only hope the same thing happens for car-based cellphones...
I remember DL. The first of the few laserdisk games that were made. The only other one I remember other than this involved flying a fighter/bomber aircraft. "Take out that bridge!" Anybody remember that game?
Who wrote Winnie the Pooh?
Who wrote Peter Pan?
Who wrote Alice in Wonderland?
Who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, (and what is the proper title of the book)?
How many kids these days are going to grow up thinking that these stories, and many others, were all written by Walt Disney?
A. A. Milne, James Barrie, Lewis Carroll and Victor Hugo, (author of Notre Dame de Paris) probably turn in their graves every time one of these Disneyized corruptions of their work is screened.
Whenever Disney gets it's hands on something you can count on a good deal of the story being changed, and any history corrupted. While many Hollywood productions seem to do this with any given novel turned screenplay, Disney films, for some reason, "redefines the standard", (where have we heard that term before?), and what is presented in the Disney film becomes the norm. For instance, the Seven Dwarves did not have names until the Disney flick, it's Disney's Pooh that kids picture, not the Ernest Shepard drawings.
I realize that much of this can be put down as "artistic license", but consider that Disney is so big, so powerful, that many kids don't even realize that the books exist, let alone what the original plot was, or how old the book really is. Does that remind anybody of another huge monopolistic company that hates it when facts get in its way?
Ahh, Disney! The Micro$oft of kidlit!
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
...and if the human that the computer notifies turns out to be a racist cop on a power trip, the poor guy will probably have the crap beaten out of him, especially if he's black, hispanic etc, even if he _was_ wiping birdshit off the car!
I'd feel a little better if the PTB had been a little more open about it, i.e. a disclaimer on the tickets and at the door, indicating what was going on and that anybody who didn't want to submit to it didn't have to enter. I still fail to see how it doesn't fall under illegal search and seizure laws, though. Makes you wonder whose increasingly narrow definition of what constitutes a public place. Where will it end?
I suspect there are quite a few 727s that have that capability, as some are configured for mass drops of skydiving loonies at airshows etc. As for the 747s being able to accept military cargo, I suspect that would have more to do with the military adapting to existing civie cargo containers than the airlines reconfiguring to accept military cargo as it sits.
It wouyldn't be anywhere near the first time that an aircraft designed for civilian purposes was converted for use as a military platform. From the DC-3/C-47 to the DC-10/KC-10 and onwards, this has been going on for decades, and I don't think that using a 747 for a test bed suddenly means the equipping of all civvie airliners with weapons, although all those old CCCP badged aircraft could easily be converted into bombers, complete with a plexiglass nose cone for the bomb aimer, during the cold war.
Re:Why is the war still raging?
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 1
You forgot one biggie...
Besides all the extra cash flow going towards idiots that already have more cash than they know what to do with, the War on Drugs is primarily an attack on civil rights.
Why else would the Constitution in the US and the Charter of Rights in Canada not matter a damn when you can be randomly made to pee in a jar to prove that you are, indeed, drug free, at least at work, anyway.
I'm pretty damn sure that one of the primary rules the justice system in Canada and the States
follows is that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, so being forced to pee in a jar means the PTB are assuming you're a junkie, and you now have to prove otherwise.
That's just the start of it. There's other stuff going on such as what would otherwise be illegal search and seizure, wiretapping, overzealous border checks, all the extra surveillance cameras required just about everywhere to patrol streets to try and prevent addicts from stealing to get cash to pay the Mob's high drug prices...and then there's Three Strikes You're out!
I think the attack on civil rights is more important to the PTB than extra cash for large corporations, since that can be done by simply brainwashing us all with television!
Slashdot Mirror
...and what makes a for-profit system better? What I see whenever there's a profit motive inserted in anything is the nasty tendency for big business to do _anything_ in the name of profit. That's why we have had things like plastic mini window blinds and BABY TOYS removed from the market because they were found to have LEAD in them! How any company can willingly market stuff like this is just unfathomable...how long have we known that lead is poisonous? It makes you wonder what else is out there on the market that has had corners cut so that the company involved can make just that few cents more on each item. This is before we get inside such worm cans as the tobacco industry.
As bad as government can be, I distrust big business far more! Letting market driven numpties look after our healthcare system--ANY healthcare system--is probably the worst thing they could do!
How about the recent cases in Ontario and BC in which the company that owns the patents (or whatever) on the genes, and therefore the test for the, that are supposed to be an indicator for breast cancer? Seems that their "rights" to the genetic info outweigh any patient's rights to the test itself. With privataized healthcare, expect to see much more of this sort of thing.
That has more to do with the government's unwillingness to properly fund it, than whether or not it works. Every time there's a report about the state of Canadian healthcare, it seems to come from some right wing "thinktank"--why do they call them that?--that has a vested interest in bringing down the system, so they can put a for-profit system in its place.
Masankowski's recent report had connections with the Fraser Institute idiots, for instance. Roy Romanow's full report will be interesting once it's fully released. He has already said that the system is breaking down due to very insufficient government funding on all sides.
I fail to see how, in a system that has been pared to the bone and running probably about as efficiently as it's going to, how in the world introducing a profit motive, therefore slicing the pie ever further, is going to save money! Whatare they going to do, cut the salaries of the staff? This will just drive them south, as it has already done with many of the nurses.
I saw an interesting article in (I think) the Ottawa Citizen a few weeks ago. It suggested thatif Roy Romanow wanted to see what a for profit healthcare system looked like, he should look no further than the veterinary system thathe might use to take care of a family pet. The article went on to pint out many of the parallels between vetcare and our healthcare. I wish I could dig it up.
...at least in this case, if it hasn't already been suggested...
Why not just order the parts individually, and build the damn cable yourself? Can't be that difficult!
The RAV-4 _is_ a car, nothing more nothing less. It's based on the same platform as one of their road cars, I forget if it's the Camry or the Corolla. All they did was slap a rear drive on the transaxle, change the body for something more "trucklike", and put larger rubber on it! All this piece of crap is is the old 1983 Tercel 4wd Wagon revisited.
My F250 4x4 Diesel has done 30 miles per gallon, typically 25. (That's a proper gallon, not that downsized one you Americans seem to favour.) Can the RAV4 say that? A lot of cars can't!
Does the F650 have a Cat engine, or does it have a similar engine to my Navistar Powerstroke?
I don't know about some of the larger light trucks out there, i.e. heavy duty versions of the F, C and K series, but it's the Dodge pickus that have the Cummins Diesel, and it's quite the powerplant for a six!
As for the GM engine, nice to see they finally ghot somebody reliable, other than DDA to build them a decent Diesel. Could have been worse...could have been that horrific Old 350 Diesel that they tried in the early '80's, basically a modification of the 350 gas engine that they hoped would be suitable for the extra sresses of a Diesel. Of course, it didn't work.
If they had any sense at all, they would ditch the whole notion of a gas engine--any gas engine--and slap in a tried and true Diesel. It's only screwed up North America where Diesels are not common, and, in the middle of Third World Nowhere, you are far more likely to find Diesel fuel than you are the high octane go-juice needed for that 'Vette motor, and the quality of that fuel doesn't have to be such an issue either.
Don't make it a crappy GM Diesel either. If you're going to make a high end offroader like this, based on a Mercedes G-Wagen/Unimog, don't bastardize the damn thing by slapping anything but a Mercedes motor in it.
I recall a review of a US Army HumVee in an early '80's issue of Car and Driver, in vhich one of the writers commented "It would surely take the wisdom of youth to go to war in a vehicle powered by a GM Diesel".
*****
>> And remember...Duh!bya supposedly is an Evangelical Christian. Would he allow something that could be construed as the Mark Of The Beast to be deployed on his watch? I don't think so, folks.
*****
...and you don't think that being a fundie christian will have any bearing as to whether or not Dubya will do it? These fundie types have been selectively interpreting the ByeBull for decades now in such a way that that nasty little book will always prove them "right". Just look at the whole thing about capital punishment vs. abortion...on one hand, life is sacred, and murder is a sin, but wait!...an eye for an eye and we gotta hang them criminals high! That's just scratching the surface!
I wonder what people like Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Jello Biafra would have to say about this sort of thing. One thing is certain, with a chip planted in them, there would be increasingly fewer places where they actually could think what they were thinking!
I remember having a...discussion..with a colleague about this sort of thing back in the early '90's, and his response essentially boiled down to"I have nothing to hide, so what's the problem?". I felt like asking him if he enjoyed being guilty until proven innocent. This nasty little device, ultimately, will probably be able to be tracked whenever and wherever you are, as soon as it', under your skin. It doesn't matter if you're "guilty" of anything or not, the PTB will be following you, like it or not! My colleagues response was something to the effect of the fact that the PTB can already track you based on your credit and bank cards, so why is this any different. I'm not at all impressed that I'm being tracked according to whatever financial transactions I make on either card, but fact is, I can leave said credit/debit cards safe at home if I like, and nobody really has to know where I'm going or what I'm doing if I decide to pay cash for it. As far as I'm concerned, having one of these things implanted into me would be akin to having a Nazi serial number tattooed onto my arm in a concentration camp, and, if they really mean these things to work, it had better be buried somewhat deeper than just my skin, 'cause I'll have it gouged out in an hour! Even if it was just the government I had to worry about, it's still too much, but if they would (will) allow whatever bunch of marketing subhumans to have at the data, in hopes of being able to sell me even more beer and cookies...you can see whewre this is going.
IMHO, Jefferson or Franklin of whoever the hell it was who said something to the effect that people who trade liberty for security deserve neither is RIGHT!
You can spend as little or as much on amateur radio equipment as you want. I started out with a simple 2m/70cm HT, which has served me well as both a portable, a mobile and a base. I built a 2m copper cactus for under $10 that I use as my base antenna and picked up a decent mobile antenna for well under $50 ($CDN) so I was on the air on two bands for about $400, and that was for a dual bander. You can pick up a 2m HT for much less than that, and there is so much you can do with just the 2m band. How many people spend more than that at the drop of a hat on some new piece of computer gear?
Then there's my Icom 706...
To anybody who reads these pages who still questions the validity of amateur radio, and what it can do, I suggest you look up Steve Mann (who's probably reading this), or anybody who lived through the huge ice storm that paralyzed eastern Ontario and Quebec a few years back, (cells and satellite phones weren't worth a damn because of all the freezing rain), or have a look at how greatly amateur radio emergency use was anticipated during the whole Y2K party!
BTW, I loathe the term "ham", because it makes people immediately think of the classic computer nerd. We are Radio Amateurs!
First thing I would have done after pulling into the Walmart? Go in a buy something, of course!
A map and a pair of sidecutters.
What's the difference between this and the myriads of people already who pay big bucks to wear tshirts or whatever that has a huge corporate logo on it? I've never been able to fathom that one, and have gone so far as to mention to some tshirt salesmen that, since they would have to pay to adverize on a billboard or the side of a bus, they should pay _me_ to show off their Coke logo or something.
...and 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
The problem isn't that people confuse the two, it's that the globalism that is emerging is based purely on a corporate model. The rules and regulations that govern the idea make it easier for multinationals to increase profits at the expense of their employees, while those same employees are totally prevented from being able to enjoy the same benefits. Meanwhile, similar regulations there to enforce environmental regulations are circumvented by these same "global" agreements untimately at the expense of us all.
I don't think it's the concept of Globalization per se that has labour, environmentalists, human rights activists etc up in arms, it's the fact that it's the multinationals that are calling the shots, (and the corporation controlled governments that play along), are trying to put into place agreements that place profits ahead of everything else. It's really the whole free trade versus fair trade debate on a larger scale.
Think about it...which version of the future would you rather enjoy, the Federation TNG version, or the Ferengi version?
Missed it? The few examples I listed barely scratch the surface! As for the Hunchback, while I have never read it, the people I know that have tell me that it is one of the darkest, most depressing stories anybody can read, yet here's the Disney version as some sort of happy fairy tale! There are going to be many unhappy kids that grow up with this total lie of a film that are going to be sadly disappointed when they have to study it in high school! (Of course, I had to study Death of a Salesman, Heart of Darkness, Hamlet etc...decay decay decay!
This "innovation" will disappear as quickly as the video screens and dashboards, (for some reason, GM still seems to like these...), that infected cars in the eighties, not to mention "Bitchin Betty" that kept telling you "Your door is ajar!" I can only hope the same thing happens for car-based cellphones...
I remember DL. The first of the few laserdisk games that were made. The only other one I remember other than this involved flying a fighter/bomber aircraft. "Take out that bridge!" Anybody remember that game?
Who wrote Winnie the Pooh? Who wrote Peter Pan? Who wrote Alice in Wonderland? Who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, (and what is the proper title of the book)? How many kids these days are going to grow up thinking that these stories, and many others, were all written by Walt Disney? A. A. Milne, James Barrie, Lewis Carroll and Victor Hugo, (author of Notre Dame de Paris) probably turn in their graves every time one of these Disneyized corruptions of their work is screened. Whenever Disney gets it's hands on something you can count on a good deal of the story being changed, and any history corrupted. While many Hollywood productions seem to do this with any given novel turned screenplay, Disney films, for some reason, "redefines the standard", (where have we heard that term before?), and what is presented in the Disney film becomes the norm. For instance, the Seven Dwarves did not have names until the Disney flick, it's Disney's Pooh that kids picture, not the Ernest Shepard drawings. I realize that much of this can be put down as "artistic license", but consider that Disney is so big, so powerful, that many kids don't even realize that the books exist, let alone what the original plot was, or how old the book really is. Does that remind anybody of another huge monopolistic company that hates it when facts get in its way? Ahh, Disney! The Micro$oft of kidlit!
...and if the human that the computer notifies turns out to be a racist cop on a power trip, the poor guy will probably have the crap beaten out of him, especially if he's black, hispanic etc, even if he _was_ wiping birdshit off the car!
I'd feel a little better if the PTB had been a little more open about it, i.e. a disclaimer on the tickets and at the door, indicating what was going on and that anybody who didn't want to submit to it didn't have to enter. I still fail to see how it doesn't fall under illegal search and seizure laws, though. Makes you wonder whose increasingly narrow definition of what constitutes a public place. Where will it end?
I don't know about you, but right now, I'm sure glad I hung onto my old C=64, GEOS and all!
I suspect there are quite a few 727s that have that capability, as some are configured for mass drops of skydiving loonies at airshows etc. As for the 747s being able to accept military cargo, I suspect that would have more to do with the military adapting to existing civie cargo containers than the airlines reconfiguring to accept military cargo as it sits.
...and just about every other use that the old 707/C137 has had for the military. The list is just about endless!
It wouyldn't be anywhere near the first time that an aircraft designed for civilian purposes was converted for use as a military platform. From the DC-3/C-47 to the DC-10/KC-10 and onwards, this has been going on for decades, and I don't think that using a 747 for a test bed suddenly means the equipping of all civvie airliners with weapons, although all those old CCCP badged aircraft could easily be converted into bombers, complete with a plexiglass nose cone for the bomb aimer, during the cold war.
You forgot one biggie... Besides all the extra cash flow going towards idiots that already have more cash than they know what to do with, the War on Drugs is primarily an attack on civil rights. Why else would the Constitution in the US and the Charter of Rights in Canada not matter a damn when you can be randomly made to pee in a jar to prove that you are, indeed, drug free, at least at work, anyway. I'm pretty damn sure that one of the primary rules the justice system in Canada and the States follows is that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, so being forced to pee in a jar means the PTB are assuming you're a junkie, and you now have to prove otherwise. That's just the start of it. There's other stuff going on such as what would otherwise be illegal search and seizure, wiretapping, overzealous border checks, all the extra surveillance cameras required just about everywhere to patrol streets to try and prevent addicts from stealing to get cash to pay the Mob's high drug prices...and then there's Three Strikes You're out! I think the attack on civil rights is more important to the PTB than extra cash for large corporations, since that can be done by simply brainwashing us all with television!