You cannot name ONE. from Arbenz' terror state (in which parties other than his own were outlawed) to Allende who enforced his rule with the Soviet army to the Sandinistas (who physically assaulted those who dared run against them in 1984).
may i refer you to my website i find what you just say incredible. i don't mean to be rude, but your views can only be a product of propaganda. arbenz, allende, the sandinistas all represented, for their respective countries, the best thing that had happened to them. just look at what came before and after in every case!
the russians also had nothing to do with events in latin america in this period. communism was the US's excuse of course, but there was very little russian involvement.
Why not hold those guilty responsible
you're incredible! so you are a better judge of this than the world court???
You have it backwards. The Soviets waged war against this country during the 1980s. All the U.S. did was help keep Nicaraguan nationalism alive until the democratic process could actually overcome the Sandinista's rigged elections.
what can i say? please look at my site. the sandinistas were the best thing to happen to nicaragua. the illegal attacks + sanctions by the usa caused them to limit some civil liberties (as any country does in war), but they were 100x better than somoza, who the US had supported b4 them. if you can't be bothered looking at the facts then i'll quote my site -
An Oxfam report entitled 'The Threat of a Good Example' (which sums up precisely the threat posed to the US by Nicaragua) on the Sandinistas concludes 'in Oxfam's experience of working in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the strength of that government commitment [to meeting the basic needs of the poor majority]'. This should be contrasted with Nicaragua's neighbours at the time (Guatemala and El Salvador) who had 'military dictatorships responsible for the sheer institutionalisation of state terror, installed and propped up by the US. Tens of thousands of civilians were regularly slaughtered by government death squads trained and armed by the CIA. The vast majority of the populations were impoverished'.
or how about this regarding arbenz and his 'terror state'
The dictator Ubico is overthrown and Guatemala enjoys the 'Ten Years of Spring' with two popularly elected and reformist Presidents. President Arbenz permits free expression, legalized unions and diverse political parties, and initiates basic socio-economic reforms. One key program is a moderate land reform effort aimed at alleviating the suffering of the rural poor, by which only plantations of very high acreage are affected, and only in cases where a certain percentage of such acreage is in fact lying unused. In these extreme cases, the unused portions of the land are not expropriated, but simply purchased by the Guatemalan government at the same value declared on the owner's tax forms. The property is then resold at low rates to peasant cooperatives. To set an example, President Arbenz starts with his own lands.'
do you prefer the civil war, terror, and 100,000 civilian deaths that followed the CIA's removal of him???? or perhaps you prefer US-backed pinochet to allende???
need i repeat - everything i say here is well backed up by reliable sources at my website
Unfortunately I don't know Spanish. However, from what I've read I have the impression that the Venezuelan media is controlled by the opposition to Chavez - I don't know if the local venezuelen news you quote falls under that category? I would very much like to get some more reliable (English) sources on the matter if you know of any. I assume you're not referring to the BBC,CNN,NY-Times when you criticise my sources?
The only other, questionable, source I thought I used was regarding what impact Chavez has had. I can't find any major media providing any decent analysis of this, but would be interested if you could provide any accurate articles. Has he really not made significant improvements to the situation of the poor majority as my source claimed?
btw, am I to assume from what you say that you are actually in Venezuela? Then I would interested to hear more of your opinion. Do you think the US was really behind the coup?
What I should have said is that US media is owned by large corporations (i.e. Fox News by Rupert Murdoch (who owns a lot of media all over the world), NBC by General Electric, ABC by Walt Disney, CBS+MTV by Viacom (another huge conglomerate), and whats worse is that the government is looking at removing some monopoly controls which would only make the situation worse.
BBC in contrast is independent, while admittedly a corporation.
Amusing. While your general point is correct, I would have to disagree with a few things you say there.
'This does NOT matter'
So endless rants on DMCA, Microsoft's evils, the latest tech toy matter more than issues like war and the exploitation of the third world? Maybe this stuff doesn't belong on slashdot, but that it doesn't matter????
'If i wanted to read about the failure of modern civilization to provide resources for its citisens, i'd read stuff at CNN/BBC/Local papers.'
I think if you read the stuff at CNN, local papers etc you won't really be getting much of the story. Want to read why Latin America really is screwed up? Why the CIA overthrew so many democratic governments there (thus explaining why the idea that it tried to otherthrow the Venezuelan govt. is at least plausible), or (just as an example) why the US waged covert war on Nicaragua and still refuses to honour the World Court ruling adjudging it to owe Nicaragua $17 billion in damages, and instead sucks the life out of Nicaragua by strangling it with debt payments. Or a real discussion regarding the war on Iraq. Try finding that on US media etc with their 'selective amnesia'. I do admit however that BBC, which you also mention is better (not being corporate owned always helps).
As far as I've read, Chavez is not objecting to the scheduled referendum, just the opposition's demands that he immediately hold one - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2724855.stm .
'The Venezuelan Government has rejected an opposition call for a vote on a constitutional amendment to allow the term of President Hugo Chavez to be cut short.'
'However, the government said it endorsed another plan - to hold a binding referendum on Mr Chavez's presidency after August.'
'We're proposing what we always have: referendum after 19 August as laid down in the constitution," Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel said.'
I don't believe that Chavez is perfect, but he has done a lot of good for the poor majority of the country, and he did win the last election with a landslide. He is also lot preferable to the people trying to replace him (i.e. the coup leaders, who in the three days they had in power managed to establish a dictatorship).
If people in America started demanding Bush hold an election tommorrow would it make him a dictator to say 'wait till the next scheduled elections'?
there was an attempted coup, in which the US was allegedly involved.
whether involved or not, Bush was pretty delighted at the replacement of the elected president with a dictator. and there were at least talks between the white house and the coup plotters in which the white house obviously didn't do a very good job in discouraging the coup plotters.
for a collection of references to articles giving a good background on this issue, see my website (comments, additional info much appreciated).
also provided on the same page is a history of similar coups over the past 50 years in Latin America which occurred to governments in response to actions similar to what Chavez has been doing (land reform, nationalisation of oil/industries). basically anything to alleviate the poor majority. it is this historical pattern which gives the biggest indication that the CIA may be behind it. however, the difference in venezuela is that the CIA supposedly stopped performing these coups.
perhaps the failure of the coup indicates how much harder it is for them to pull them off today (they have to be much more careful to leave no fingerprints, as the public is much less likely to support them without the cold war excuse).
b) i also oppose what bin laden stands for and disagree with what he does and why he does it.
c) you ask for a proper course of action? i might suggest one that obeys international law. also, one that actually succeeds in capturing the perpertrator (i.e. i would have accepted the taliban's offers to hand over bin laden to pakistan for trial by court, rather than taking war to an innocent people and failing to catch the alleged culprit)
if you truly do care for the few thousand people who died in sept 11th (and perhaps also for the millions who have died as a result of flawed US foreign policy), you might want to look at both why these fanatics as well as millions of non-fanatics hate the US so much (i.e. what actions of the us have caused this hate) and what is the best way to cure this, rather than the current course of action which can only exacerbate the problem.
sorry, not sure what you're getting at there. by 'facts' i mean information as opposed to opinions/speculation.
and no, i'm not a journalist. one doesn't have to be a journalist to do research. the reporter's / journalist's job is to report events and perhaps give an opinion on them. the researcher's job (what i have tried to do a little of with regards to this topic) is to compile/bring together information relating to the topic they are researching (i.e. from journalist's writings / official documents). is that clear enough for you?
refreshing to see slashdot address some real issues rather than 'dmca is evil take 1024'. i must've downloaded the video a couple of months back though so i don't know how its news - quite funny but of course lacking in any hard facts so not going to really convert anyone but the converted. the GNN also has a series of videos on 'unanswered questions about sept 11' which are interesting and more informative but rather conspiracy theorist.
in my search for a bit of truth about the whole matter, i've put together a small set of actual facts about sept 11 + american foreign policy in general and thrown them on my website www.bevin.de/usa/ . every fact/claim is linked to relatively credible documents / news stories. i'd like to hear some slashdotters' opinions - the site is pretty anti us-foreign-policy in its leaning but like i said, nothings there thats not well backed up, which is in contrast to everything else i've been able to find on the web.
one useful feature mono will hopefully provide is the ability to run.net programs on older _windows_ systems.
thats right:) - microsoft doesn't support.net on windows 95 (presumably as part of their overall strategy to force upgrades by making their old os versions obselete).
having written a windows forms application (the decision to use windows forms based on the fact that it really is one thousand times nicer than win32/mfc to create gui applications with), i was a bit shocked to find out that my application won't run under windows 95 at all, and that for other old microsoft OSes a TWENTY megabyte download is required to support it! (a bit of a jump from the one or two megabytes for the visual basic dlls).
and one further note - about 'pure'.net applications (ones that don't call the win32 api and are thus potentially more portable) - the inability to do any multimedia stuff (even a simple beep) without resorting to win32 calls, makes it pretty much impossible for any reasonably large application:).
A far better approach, if practical, is to isolate the real performance sucking areas (encryption, xor routines, float ops, etc), and write these sections in assembly. Those sections will become platform specific, but will smoke any compiler output.
I use the Intel compiler on Linux. The program I work on when compiled with it runs around 50% faster than gcc. But in general, use whatever suits your particular needs, and just make sure you use standard C/C++ and it'll still be compatible. If you're not sure, check occasionally that it still compiles with other compilers.
Personally theres no way I'd go near assembly. That pretty much guarantees unmaintainability, unreadability, platform-dependance. I don't know how many hours I've had to waste working out what someone else's assembly is doing, converting it to readable C, and then having understood what its doing, optimised the C algorithm to make it faster than the assembler ever was.
I've also used the Intel Compiler's Intrinsics to MMX-optimise my code without a line of assembler. I've tested the code to be just as fast as hand-coded assembly equivalents. I also always create an identical pure-C/C++ function, so its clear exactly what is being done, and can still be compiled on other compilers/platforms. This is necessary in any case so that the code will run on non-mmx (pre P-III) systems.
I'm looking forward to testing the version 7.0 Intel compiler - my experience with version 6.0 was that it made programs faster than gcc but still slower (and a lot bigger) than Visual Studio.net. If 7.0's better I might be able to leave Microsoft behind:).
Frankly, the fact that there is an exploit to reformat peoples hard drives is a GOOD thing IMHO. As a matter of fact, I hope it bites tons of people. The fact that "the average user" doesn't check for updates and maintain their machine NEEDS TO CHANGE.
The auto is a great example. If you didn't maintain your car (change the tires, fix the brakes, etc.) when it needed to be done, YOU are a danger to yourself and others around you.
thats not a very fair analogy. in maintaining a car i might expect to go for a check up once a year, and otherwise when somethings not working take it to the garage. this is more analogous to running say a hard-drive checking tool + virus scanner once a year, and ringing tech support if somethings not working.
no one expects me to 'upgrade' my car once or twice a month, and similarly its ridiculous to expect joe bloggs to go to the effort of updating his windows/linux every month.
people not maintaining their machines are thus not the problem - the problem is the deplorably badly written software they are forced to use, imho. your wanting the problem to 'bite people' is like wanting people who don't 'upgrade' their mercedes every month to crash and die.
the difference from 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz and from 16- to 32-bit is very minute by comparison
minor nitpick - sacd's are not 96 khz / 32 bit.... instead they're a completely different system which is 1 bit and some insane number of hz which works quite differently.
thus its plausible that the difference is more significant, although people have also claimed to detect areas in which it sounds worse even than cds (mathematically the system used by sacd can't represent certain waveforms as well as a 16 bit signal... whether it matters or not is something the audophiles can argue about for the next few decades, along with whether records are better than cds etc etc, while the rest of us can concentrate on actually listening to the damn music).
yeah, so i agree with your main point, and i seriously doubt 99% of people will hear a difference except for on specially selected samples. its all about hype, and anyone with more brains than money will hopefully realise that.
In Europe we don't quite reach US levels of pollution mostly because we are not as wealthy - but we obviously would like to catch you up.
i think theres a bit more to it than that....
for example, the average new car in germany has over double the mileage per gallon than in america.
why? because the government taxes petrol heavily to encourage this. not only does this help the environment, but it also reduces their dependence on arab oil (i.e. they don't have to start wars to gaurantee an oil supply), and causes them to develop cars a significantly ahead technologically (at least in fuel consumption, but also in safety and a few other areas) than what america produces.
just one of many reasons....
i think the average western european is pretty much as wealthy as the average american... and of course, being more socialistic, the poor european is a hell of a let better off than the poor american. theres a lot more to it than average per capita income.
besides, it would be a lot cheaper, for example, for many european countries to use nuclear power than invest heavily in wind turbines etc, so i don't think that the american's wealth can be used as an _excuse_ for their environmental poisoning.
developing countries may have a reasonable excuse to pollute excessively as they go through the process of industrialisation (and all developed countries have been through that phase so aren't really in a position to criticise), but america's wealth provides no such excuse, rather the opposite.
I'm writing this in IE because after installing Phoenix my Mozilla become rather screwed - a lot of pictures for some reason don't show. Just wondering if anyone else has had this happen?
Btw, I'm no idiot - I didn't install Phoenix in the same directory as Mozilla, and I've checked all my preferences etc etc.
I also was unable to get Phoenix working with my proxy even though I copied and pasted the settings directly from Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot name ONE. from Arbenz' terror state (in which parties other than his own were outlawed) to Allende who enforced his rule with the Soviet army to the Sandinistas (who physically assaulted those who dared run against them in 1984).
may i refer you to my website i find what you just say incredible. i don't mean to be rude, but your views can only be a product of propaganda. arbenz, allende, the sandinistas all represented, for their respective countries, the best thing that had happened to them. just look at what came before and after in every case!
the russians also had nothing to do with events in latin america in this period. communism was the US's excuse of course, but there was very little russian involvement.
Why not hold those guilty responsible
you're incredible! so you are a better judge of this than the world court???
You have it backwards. The Soviets waged war against this country during the 1980s. All the U.S. did was help keep Nicaraguan nationalism alive until the democratic process could actually overcome the Sandinista's rigged elections.
what can i say? please look at my site. the sandinistas were the best thing to happen to nicaragua. the illegal attacks + sanctions by the usa caused them to limit some civil liberties (as any country does in war), but they were 100x better than somoza, who the US had supported b4 them. if you can't be bothered looking at the facts then i'll quote my site -
An Oxfam report entitled 'The Threat of a Good Example' (which sums up precisely the threat posed to the US by Nicaragua) on the Sandinistas concludes 'in Oxfam's experience of working in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the strength of that government commitment [to meeting the basic needs of the poor majority]'. This should be contrasted with Nicaragua's neighbours at the time (Guatemala and El Salvador) who had 'military dictatorships responsible for the sheer institutionalisation of state terror, installed and propped up by the US. Tens of thousands of civilians were regularly slaughtered by government death squads trained and armed by the CIA. The vast majority of the populations were impoverished'.
or how about this regarding arbenz and his 'terror state'
The dictator Ubico is overthrown and Guatemala enjoys the 'Ten Years of Spring' with two popularly elected and reformist Presidents. President Arbenz permits free expression, legalized unions and diverse political parties, and initiates basic socio-economic reforms. One key program is a moderate land reform effort aimed at alleviating the suffering of the rural poor, by which only plantations of very high acreage are affected, and only in cases where a certain percentage of such acreage is in fact lying unused. In these extreme cases, the unused portions of the land are not expropriated, but simply purchased by the Guatemalan government at the same value declared on the owner's tax forms. The property is then resold at low rates to peasant cooperatives. To set an example, President Arbenz starts with his own lands.'
do you prefer the civil war, terror, and 100,000 civilian deaths that followed the CIA's removal of him???? or perhaps you prefer US-backed pinochet to allende???
need i repeat - everything i say here is well backed up by reliable sources at my website
Unfortunately I don't know Spanish. However, from what I've read I have the impression that the Venezuelan media is controlled by the opposition to Chavez - I don't know if the local venezuelen news you quote falls under that category? I would very much like to get some more reliable (English) sources on the matter if you know of any. I assume you're not referring to the BBC,CNN,NY-Times when you criticise my sources?
The only other, questionable, source I thought I used was regarding what impact Chavez has had. I can't find any major media providing any decent analysis of this, but would be interested if you could provide any accurate articles. Has he really not made significant improvements to the situation of the poor majority as my source claimed?
btw, am I to assume from what you say that you are actually in Venezuela? Then I would interested to hear more of your opinion. Do you think the US was really behind the coup?
Very good point there :)
What I should have said is that US media is owned by large corporations (i.e. Fox News by Rupert Murdoch (who owns a lot of media all over the world), NBC by General Electric, ABC by Walt Disney, CBS+MTV by Viacom (another huge conglomerate), and whats worse is that the government is looking at removing some monopoly controls which would only make the situation worse.
BBC in contrast is independent, while admittedly a corporation.
Amusing. While your general point is correct, I would have to disagree with a few things you say there.
'This does NOT matter'
So endless rants on DMCA, Microsoft's evils, the latest tech toy matter more than issues like war and the exploitation of the third world? Maybe this stuff doesn't belong on slashdot, but that it doesn't matter????
'If i wanted to read about the failure of modern civilization to provide resources for its citisens, i'd read stuff at CNN/BBC/Local papers.'
I think if you read the stuff at CNN, local papers etc you won't really be getting much of the story. Want to read why Latin America really is screwed up? Why the CIA overthrew so many democratic governments there (thus explaining why the idea that it tried to otherthrow the Venezuelan govt. is at least plausible), or (just as an example) why the US waged covert war on Nicaragua and still refuses to honour the World Court ruling adjudging it to owe Nicaragua $17 billion in damages, and instead sucks the life out of Nicaragua by strangling it with debt payments. Or a real discussion regarding the war on Iraq. Try finding that on US media etc with their 'selective amnesia'. I do admit however that BBC, which you also mention is better (not being corporate owned always helps).
Forgotten History
As far as I've read, Chavez is not objecting to the scheduled referendum, just the opposition's demands that he immediately hold one - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2724855.stm .
'The Venezuelan Government has rejected an opposition call for a vote on a constitutional amendment to allow the term of President Hugo Chavez to be cut short.'
'However, the government said it endorsed another plan - to hold a binding referendum on Mr Chavez's presidency after August.'
'We're proposing what we always have: referendum after 19 August as laid down in the constitution," Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel said.'
I don't believe that Chavez is perfect, but he has done a lot of good for the poor majority of the country, and he did win the last election with a landslide. He is also lot preferable to the people trying to replace him (i.e. the coup leaders, who in the three days they had in power managed to establish a dictatorship).
If people in America started demanding Bush hold an election tommorrow would it make him a dictator to say 'wait till the next scheduled elections'?
Again, for more info see my website.
there was an attempted coup, in which the US was allegedly involved.
whether involved or not, Bush was pretty delighted at the replacement of the elected president with a dictator. and there were at least talks between the white house and the coup plotters in which the white house obviously didn't do a very good job in discouraging the coup plotters.
for a collection of references to articles giving a good background on this issue, see my website (comments, additional info much appreciated).
also provided on the same page is a history of similar coups over the past 50 years in Latin America which occurred to governments in response to actions similar to what Chavez has been doing (land reform, nationalisation of oil/industries). basically anything to alleviate the poor majority. it is this historical pattern which gives the biggest indication that the CIA may be behind it. however, the difference in venezuela is that the CIA supposedly stopped performing these coups.
perhaps the failure of the coup indicates how much harder it is for them to pull them off today (they have to be much more careful to leave no fingerprints, as the public is much less likely to support them without the cold war excuse).
ok, just to clarify.
a) i'm not a european.
b) i also oppose what bin laden stands for and disagree with what he does and why he does it.
c) you ask for a proper course of action? i might suggest one that obeys international law. also, one that actually succeeds in capturing the perpertrator (i.e. i would have accepted the taliban's offers to hand over bin laden to pakistan for trial by court, rather than taking war to an innocent people and failing to catch the alleged culprit)
if you truly do care for the few thousand people who died in sept 11th (and perhaps also for the millions who have died as a result of flawed US foreign policy), you might want to look at both why these fanatics as well as millions of non-fanatics hate the US so much (i.e. what actions of the us have caused this hate) and what is the best way to cure this, rather than the current course of action which can only exacerbate the problem.
sorry, not sure what you're getting at there. by 'facts' i mean information as opposed to opinions/speculation.
and no, i'm not a journalist. one doesn't have to be a journalist to do research. the reporter's / journalist's job is to report events and perhaps give an opinion on them. the researcher's job (what i have tried to do a little of with regards to this topic) is to compile/bring together information relating to the topic they are researching (i.e. from journalist's writings / official documents). is that clear enough for you?
refreshing to see slashdot address some real issues rather than 'dmca is evil take 1024'. i must've downloaded the video a couple of months back though so i don't know how its news - quite funny but of course lacking in any hard facts so not going to really convert anyone but the converted. the GNN also has a series of videos on 'unanswered questions about sept 11' which are interesting and more informative but rather conspiracy theorist.
in my search for a bit of truth about the whole matter, i've put together a small set of actual facts about sept 11 + american foreign policy in general and thrown them on my website www.bevin.de/usa/ . every fact/claim is linked to relatively credible documents / news stories. i'd like to hear some slashdotters' opinions - the site is pretty anti us-foreign-policy in its leaning but like i said, nothings there thats not well backed up, which is in contrast to everything else i've been able to find on the web.
one useful feature mono will hopefully provide is the ability to run .net programs on older _windows_ systems.
:) - microsoft doesn't support .net on windows 95 (presumably as part of their overall strategy to force upgrades by making their old os versions obselete).
.net applications (ones that don't call the win32 api and are thus potentially more portable) - the inability to do any multimedia stuff (even a simple beep) without resorting to win32 calls, makes it pretty much impossible for any reasonably large application :).
thats right
having written a windows forms application (the decision to use windows forms based on the fact that it really is one thousand times nicer than win32/mfc to create gui applications with), i was a bit shocked to find out that my application won't run under windows 95 at all, and that for other old microsoft OSes a TWENTY megabyte download is required to support it! (a bit of a jump from the one or two megabytes for the visual basic dlls).
and one further note - about 'pure'
I use the Intel compiler on Linux. The program I work on when compiled with it runs around 50% faster than gcc. But in general, use whatever suits your particular needs, and just make sure you use standard C/C++ and it'll still be compatible. If you're not sure, check occasionally that it still compiles with other compilers.
Personally theres no way I'd go near assembly. That pretty much guarantees unmaintainability, unreadability, platform-dependance. I don't know how many hours I've had to waste working out what someone else's assembly is doing, converting it to readable C, and then having understood what its doing, optimised the C algorithm to make it faster than the assembler ever was.
I've also used the Intel Compiler's Intrinsics to MMX-optimise my code without a line of assembler. I've tested the code to be just as fast as hand-coded assembly equivalents. I also always create an identical pure-C/C++ function, so its clear exactly what is being done, and can still be compiled on other compilers/platforms. This is necessary in any case so that the code will run on non-mmx (pre P-III) systems.
I'm looking forward to testing the version 7.0 Intel compiler - my experience with version 6.0 was that it made programs faster than gcc but still slower (and a lot bigger) than Visual Studio
thats not a very fair analogy. in maintaining a car i might expect to go for a check up once a year, and otherwise when somethings not working take it to the garage. this is more analogous to running say a hard-drive checking tool + virus scanner once a year, and ringing tech support if somethings not working.
no one expects me to 'upgrade' my car once or twice a month, and similarly its ridiculous to expect joe bloggs to go to the effort of updating his windows/linux every month.
people not maintaining their machines are thus not the problem - the problem is the deplorably badly written software they are forced to use, imho. your wanting the problem to 'bite people' is like wanting people who don't 'upgrade' their mercedes every month to crash and die.
minor nitpick - sacd's are not 96 khz / 32 bit
thus its plausible that the difference is more significant, although people have also claimed to detect areas in which it sounds worse even than cds (mathematically the system used by sacd can't represent certain waveforms as well as a 16 bit signal
yeah, so i agree with your main point, and i seriously doubt 99% of people will hear a difference except for on specially selected samples. its all about hype, and anyone with more brains than money will hopefully realise that.
i think theres a bit more to it than that
for example, the average new car in germany has over double the mileage per gallon than in america.
why? because the government taxes petrol heavily to encourage this. not only does this help the environment, but it also reduces their dependence on arab oil (i.e. they don't have to start wars to gaurantee an oil supply), and causes them to develop cars a significantly ahead technologically (at least in fuel consumption, but also in safety and a few other areas) than what america produces.
just one of many reasons
i think the average western european is pretty much as wealthy as the average american
besides, it would be a lot cheaper, for example, for many european countries to use nuclear power than invest heavily in wind turbines etc, so i don't think that the american's wealth can be used as an _excuse_ for their environmental poisoning.
developing countries may have a reasonable excuse to pollute excessively as they go through the process of industrialisation (and all developed countries have been through that phase so aren't really in a position to criticise), but america's wealth provides no such excuse, rather the opposite.
just my 2 cents worth.
I'm writing this in IE because after installing Phoenix my Mozilla become rather screwed - a lot of pictures for some reason don't show. Just wondering if anyone else has had this happen?
Btw, I'm no idiot - I didn't install Phoenix in the same directory as Mozilla, and I've checked all my preferences etc etc.
I also was unable to get Phoenix working with my proxy even though I copied and pasted the settings directly from Mozilla.