Fine, Read Blackhawk Down!
on
Electric Armor
·
· Score: 1
If you read the book, a major reason everything went south was the numerous RPGs the Somalis had. The choppers that went down were hit by RPGs on the back tail rotor.
French court rules Yahoo can't host auctions for nazi memorabilia... Yahoo says it can't tell who is French...
Australian individual sues the Wall Street Journal (in Austrlia) for libel over an American news story on an American web server...
I'm all for anti-spam, but I would be more cautious before rooting states on in trying to assert their jurisdiction over the Internet.
If US states can pass anti-spam legislation, sales tax laws won't be THAT far off. Just be careful what you wish for.
They're alleging that this rock from the Apollo 17 mission is stolen property; ironic considering that NASA took something that wasn't under U.S. jurisdiction.
So If I go to the Smithsonian, open a display case with moon rock and just take it, and if the govt sued me to try to get it back, it would be "ironic?"
If you can't tell 256kbps from CD, you will NOT be able to tell cd from this new standard.
Convert a 256kbps mp3 (lame codec) to wav and burn the that wav and the original onto a cd. Unless you're an audiophile with incredible equipment, I HIGHLY doubt you will be able to do better than random guessing. (eg. get better than a standard dev away from 50-50.)
Before all you audiophiles flame me, go try it and have a friend test you. (And no looking at which song is which before you test. It's easy as hell to bogusly justify a decision if you know the answer beforehand.) Even on nice equipment, I doubt you will be able to tell a difference.
This is loose reasoning to be sure, but the differences between cd quality and whatever this new standard is are going to be FAR MORE SUBTLE than the differences between cd and 256 kbps mp3. Selling this new standard based upon "higher quality" will be a complete fallacy even IF YOU ARE an insane audiophile.
Music companies have to love it when audio standards and equipment shifts over. People use to have lps, then they bought all the same damn music over on tape, then they bought the same damn music over on cds...
I personally see NO point in spending X hundreds of dollars so I can do the exact same thing I currently do, but in a more copy protected environment.
I don't really see consumers going for this... and I don't know why any hardware makers would go down this path either...
A cd pirate goes to Virgin records, buys a cd, and pays in cash. He goes home and starts making copies...
I really don't see what putting an ID code is going to do here. Sony music traces pirated CD key to Virgin records... what then?
The only way I think it could be useful is if you have readers/cd players which also keep track of the keycode, maybe are hooked up to the Internet etc.. and report you...
I think it's an interesting question, if you were the HEAD of a record company what would you do? If you embraced the Internet and mp3s, are you a visionary or are you just openning yourself to rampant piracy and going to get burned? Does copy-protection technology actually work? or does it only play into Orwellian fears? I've thought about it at times, if you had the intellectual property rights to all of Frank Sinatra's songs for example, what do you do??????
People like this will always keep doing shit like this as long as there are enough morons out there to manage to give this dude $1.8 million.
That's precisely the problem, people out there really do call Miss Cleo, buy "make my penis 25% larger" products etc... These schemes are nothing but looting of dumb people.
Just because there is no shortage of dumb people, I don't think we all have to resign ourselves to death by porn spam. Maybe this actually exists, but I'd like to see some online division at the FBI or FTC which aggressively goes after SPAM groups which don't honor remove requests, and scams designed just to take people's money. I'd really like to see Miss Cleo, fake human growth hormone pseudoscience, etc.... all put out of business. I wonder what percent of the American economy is just bs scams.
This may be an impossible problem, given it's global nature, but there is so much **** just in the US, there's plenty that could be done.
You can levy taxes on interstate commerce, but I don't think it could levy taxes on purely instate affairs. Thus if you lived in New York and purchased a book printed in New York, I dont' see how it could be taxed.
So no, I don't think they could do a general sales tax.
What I REALLY DOUBT they can do is leverage a tax based upon content distinctions. That seems to run smack against the first amendment. Imagine it, a 50% tax on books about abortion... 50% tax newspapers with a conservative bent... This looks BLATANTLY unconstitutional to me
All of the useful and cool science Nasa is doing is coming from the satellites and other unmanned mission Nasa is doing. The cheap satellites going to Mars, the mission to an asteroid, detailed observations of Earth are all unmanned missions. Unmanned missions can be launched with a FRACTION of the cost of manned missions.
On the other hand, the space station has been nothing beyond a giant cost overrun, and the wobbles of station have the possibility of throwing off even the few semi-useful microgravity experiments you can think of.
To put it plainly, putting men in space has little value other than novelty appeal, and given that cold war jockeying with Russia is over, we should send the billions spent on manned flight somewhere useful.
Whenever an item becomes more expensive, less of it will be consumed. Do we want fewer people reading science books!?!?!??!?
Taxing based upon book content sounds highly suspicious. If there were a 20% tax on books with native american characters, that would NOT pass constitutional muster (in addition to being just a plain horrible idea).
This is a fairly obvious statement, but I've noticed that people are far more aggressive and willing to criticize and be utterly cruel online as opposed to face to face.
Face to face communication, and even voice communication enforces a certain degree of civility, but online, there is a great degree of abstraction between the real person you're talking to and the Internet handle you're writing to.
If you encrypt your files with 168 bit triple DES (eg. PGP), I think it's going to be a good number of years before those encrypted files could be decrypted. And if your files are so sensitive, that you can't have them accessible just protected by heavy duty encryption, you probably shouldn't be e-mailing them, transferring them over the Internet etc... anyway.
I'd like to preface that my knowledge of oceanstore is limitted to one talk I heard at Stanford last year, but oceanstore and something like AFS or fundamentally different propositions structures. AFS is a distributed filesystem, but a subset of a system is only as reliable as the AFS servers they run on. AFS is also hierarchal and directory based. And I doubt AFS would scales up to hundreds of thousands of different 'cells' AFS isn't persistent. (once a file is updated, the old versions are lost etc...)
The theme of OceanStore is increased reliability through statistics. Files would propogate out to different oceanstore servers and so a single file could be stored in multiple places. To commit a new version of a file, a secure 3rd party would be needed (a majority of computers at the 3rd party datacenter would agree based upon encryption technology that this is a valid update), and then the file would propogate out to other servers.
They have an interesting method of retrieving files from arbitrarily connected oceanstore servers. (Something about each individual hash defining a root node computer where some computer along the path to it would have the file). Check the website because what I said is from memory about a year ago. It seems pretty cool though
There probably isn't any real threat from everyday hackers, but even though it's pretty far out, messing with satellites using security flaws wouldn't be out of reach of well funded terrorist or rogue states. I mean, I think the chance of this is remote, but it would be pretty ugly if some group/rogue state managed to disable/fry a bunch of satellites.
Let the technicians rise up and overthrow the reign of the marketting and accounting global hegemony!
All will code according to their ability and run programs according to their need!
And while we're at it:
"As long as the app fires up, it can be released. We'll let the customers be beta testers."
Isn't that the whole way OPEN SOURCE works??!?!? Open source releases software with numerous more bugs but has a very broad test cycle. I feel confident with open-source solutions with the commonly used apps, but to be honest (and maybe it's just me) I don't have that much confidence at all in some of the most obscure and rarely used packages that hang around in woody or potato.
I would be highly skeptical of a project like this. It has a huge initial price tag, even if EVERYTHING goes according to plan. What if it doesn't go according to plan? With it so high up, maintenance costs could be extraordinary if anything went wrong. This is a zero emissions plant, but it won't actually have lower emissions than a comparable fossil fuel powerplant until TWO AND A HALF YEARS later because of all the CO2 emissions created during construction?!?!? What would the lifetime of this project be?
Spending a sizable fraction of a billion dollars to reduce co2 emissions by what appears to be an inconsequential amount doesn't appear to me to be a brilliant idea. Maybe it has some value as a test example, but if so, WHY does it have to be that big and cost near half a billion dollars.
I'm not an Australian taxpayer, so I don't care if you go ahead and do it, but if I were, I would be highly skeptical...
It never ceases to amaze me how a conservative statement always ends up with a "troll" marking while leftist "all software should be free" propaganda gets marked "interesting"
I think the poster is thinking about this the wrong way. When it comes down to it, if no one visits your website, it means that nearly no one WANTS to visit your website. This either means it sucks, is on some topic nobody cares about, or is a mixture of the two.
Even if it's on an obscure topic, it eventually will pick up search engine hits etc... I have friends who ran sound mixing websites and even an RV parts store. They do nothing for advertising and started having all kinds of hits in the first case and orders in the second (very different types of websites).
Anyway, if your site is dying, it's because of a more fundamental problem.
My initial impression is that the net would be less prone to complete shutdown than other infastructure. The net still is sort of a wild wild west, and everybody from skript kiddies to hackers are continually trying to break in and DOS various different sections of the Internet. It's hard to imagine how any group (unless it was some massive government funded operation) could be more disruptive than what currently takes place. Radical islamic fundamentalists dont' seem THAT tech savvy.
Airports thought about security a bit, but really serious measures generally weren't taken. However, security has been one of THE TOP issues for the Internet for a long time. Kerberos, ssh, bastille linux etc... there are a lot of tools out there to lock systems and networks down.
That said the government is probably getting hacked all the time now. Really critical systems probably should physically seperated from the net. One aspect of security that is the most difficult is human error. Sure a system can provide ssh and kerberized login, but if people use the same password for their yahoo games account, all the encryption in the world doesn't appear to do a lot of good.
I would still say that the anti-globalization movement does not have a coherent message. I would likely to briefly examine the so called fair trade slogan and then compare the effects of globalization to those of technology.
The movement is an amalgam of the old socialist left, environmentalists, unions, and a variety of groups focussed on different kinds of "rights." You mentioned "Fair Trade," decent labor laws, debt relief, and transparency of negotiations. I would like to agree that transparency in trade talks is a good idea, and one would be hardpressed to find good reasons against it. That said, the other terms are massively unclear. Each group has their own agenda (and often disproved, especially in the case of the old socialist left). Their conjunction is in fact literally a baseless jumble. I remember listenning during the election to an African American member of Congress at the Democratic Convention. He was fairly critical of the protests and rememberred back to the civil rights movement. His comment was that the civil rights movement had a base, it had support in communities, it gatherred this local support for larger things, but it was always present and had a coherent and undeniable message. The current anti-globalization protests can not come together except for large trade talks and then can only really agree to disagree. They do not have "a base" of support.
I don't think fair trade has much actual usefullness other than as a catchy buzzword. From a union standpoint, the gameplan is obvious. Increase trade barriers so as to make importation of textiles and other products unattractive. Call it fair trade, call it whatever, just try to sell it. Other groups might advocate "fair trade" plainly for the benefit of the people supposedly being taken advantage of. The two man problems with this is that Rome wasn't built in a day and that the people supposedly being helped don't want the trade restrictions. The reasons people would be willing to work for low wages in Vietnam is because among options, the foreign factory is the best. Call it unfair, but if Nike had to pay the same wages in Vietnam as in the US, Nike obviously would never go to Vietnam. The next and even greater problem is that the nations themselves want free trade. I believe it was Zedillo, the former President of Mexico, who said something along the lines of, "The developped world is full of people trying to save the undevelopped world from development." It is no coincidence that northern Mexico is far more developped and richer than southern Mexico. If free trade really were the scourge, one would expect a different outcome.
And from an environmental standpoint, people begin to care about the environment when they get rich. When a family is trying to get food just for the next day, they could care less about the forest and the water. However, once someone is wealthy enough so that food, shelter, and simple pleasures aren't an issue, he/she will begin to care a great deal more about the environment. Again it's no concidence that the world's environmentalists by far reside in Europe, Canada, and the United States. If one wants Mexico to care too, the solution is to make the Mexicans rich, and do it as fast as possible.
Far too often, I think the environmentalist movement behind the scenes attempts to retard development from the cynical standpoint that if Mexicans lived better and had cars, they would consumer more gas, emit more CO2. The solution from this false viewpoint is to erect barriers to development. Whether this enters the minds of those opposing trade or not, it is the effect.
The most important issue in the globalization basket I think is free trade. Much of the selling of free trade is done on grounds that aren't quite honest. Does free trade create jobs? yes, but it destroys some too, the net effect is probably close to a wash. What free trade does though is allow people to give up less of what they have to get more of what they want. Like technology, it is an amplifier. And indeed free trade's effects are remarkably close to those of technology from an economic standpoint. I do not think it is unfair to say that one cannot be both against free trade and for technology and still be intellectually consistent.
Technology allows the creation of more goods/value given the same input. 200 years ago, a man with a plow could grow so much wheat. Nowadays, using tractors, modern fertilizers, etc... the output is orders of magnitude higher. With his larger amount of wheat, the farmer can buy a much larger array of goods. Free trade has almost precisely the same effect. With free trade, a national market becomes a world market, and comparative advantage enters into play. Like technology, it amplifies output. Like technology, it also creates winners and losers. The luddites of the industrial revolution opposed it for many of the same reasons that today's anti-globalization protestors oppose free trade. "exploitation of workers" "unfair wages" "evil corporations" all should ring a bell. The industrial revolution did create winners and losers, and though certain aspects were painful, the world is a better place for it. The luddite argument was thoroughly discreditted.
This was a bit of a ramble, anyway, thanks for the indymedia.org, I'll glance it occasonally to fuel my conservative flames:)
Your comment does not actually rebut my analysis =)
microsoft.com is trademarked by Microsoft and is understood as such. The Microsoft trademark conveys certain information on a products quality and stability, which for you apparently means blatantly destructive (not sure I agree here but you're entitled to your opinion).
When you download a package from microsoft.com, you are NOT being fooled.
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If you read the book, a major reason everything went south was the numerous RPGs the Somalis had. The choppers that went down were hit by RPGs on the back tail rotor.
French court rules Yahoo can't host auctions for nazi memorabilia... Yahoo says it can't tell who is French...
Australian individual sues the Wall Street Journal (in Austrlia) for libel over an American news story on an American web server...
I'm all for anti-spam, but I would be more cautious before rooting states on in trying to assert their jurisdiction over the Internet. If US states can pass anti-spam legislation, sales tax laws won't be THAT far off. Just be careful what you wish for.
So If I go to the Smithsonian, open a display case with moon rock and just take it, and if the govt sued me to try to get it back, it would be "ironic?"
color GUIs are for wusses
Convert a 256kbps mp3 (lame codec) to wav and burn the that wav and the original onto a cd. Unless you're an audiophile with incredible equipment, I HIGHLY doubt you will be able to do better than random guessing. (eg. get better than a standard dev away from 50-50.)
Before all you audiophiles flame me, go try it and have a friend test you. (And no looking at which song is which before you test. It's easy as hell to bogusly justify a decision if you know the answer beforehand.) Even on nice equipment, I doubt you will be able to tell a difference.
This is a fairly well documented fact :
This is loose reasoning to be sure, but the differences between cd quality and whatever this new standard is are going to be FAR MORE SUBTLE than the differences between cd and 256 kbps mp3. Selling this new standard based upon "higher quality" will be a complete fallacy even IF YOU ARE an insane audiophile.
I personally see NO point in spending X hundreds of dollars so I can do the exact same thing I currently do, but in a more copy protected environment.
I don't really see consumers going for this... and I don't know why any hardware makers would go down this path either...
I really don't see what putting an ID code is going to do here. Sony music traces pirated CD key to Virgin records... what then?
The only way I think it could be useful is if you have readers/cd players which also keep track of the keycode, maybe are hooked up to the Internet etc.. and report you...
I think it's an interesting question, if you were the HEAD of a record company what would you do? If you embraced the Internet and mp3s, are you a visionary or are you just openning yourself to rampant piracy and going to get burned? Does copy-protection technology actually work? or does it only play into Orwellian fears? I've thought about it at times, if you had the intellectual property rights to all of Frank Sinatra's songs for example, what do you do??????
That's precisely the problem, people out there really do call Miss Cleo, buy "make my penis 25% larger" products etc... These schemes are nothing but looting of dumb people.
Just because there is no shortage of dumb people, I don't think we all have to resign ourselves to death by porn spam. Maybe this actually exists, but I'd like to see some online division at the FBI or FTC which aggressively goes after SPAM groups which don't honor remove requests, and scams designed just to take people's money. I'd really like to see Miss Cleo, fake human growth hormone pseudoscience, etc.... all put out of business. I wonder what percent of the American economy is just bs scams.
This may be an impossible problem, given it's global nature, but there is so much **** just in the US, there's plenty that could be done.
You can levy taxes on interstate commerce, but I don't think it could levy taxes on purely instate affairs. Thus if you lived in New York and purchased a book printed in New York, I dont' see how it could be taxed.
So no, I don't think they could do a general sales tax.
What I REALLY DOUBT they can do is leverage a tax based upon content distinctions. That seems to run smack against the first amendment. Imagine it, a 50% tax on books about abortion... 50% tax newspapers with a conservative bent... This looks BLATANTLY unconstitutional to me
All of the useful and cool science Nasa is doing is coming from the satellites and other unmanned mission Nasa is doing. The cheap satellites going to Mars, the mission to an asteroid, detailed observations of Earth are all unmanned missions. Unmanned missions can be launched with a FRACTION of the cost of manned missions.
On the other hand, the space station has been nothing beyond a giant cost overrun, and the wobbles of station have the possibility of throwing off even the few semi-useful microgravity experiments you can think of.
To put it plainly, putting men in space has little value other than novelty appeal, and given that cold war jockeying with Russia is over, we should send the billions spent on manned flight somewhere useful.
Whenever an item becomes more expensive, less of it will be consumed. Do we want fewer people reading science books!?!?!??!?
Taxing based upon book content sounds highly suspicious. If there were a 20% tax on books with native american characters, that would NOT pass constitutional muster (in addition to being just a plain horrible idea).
This is a fairly obvious statement, but I've noticed that people are far more aggressive and willing to criticize and be utterly cruel online as opposed to face to face.
Face to face communication, and even voice communication enforces a certain degree of civility, but online, there is a great degree of abstraction between the real person you're talking to and the Internet handle you're writing to.
If you encrypt your files with 168 bit triple DES (eg. PGP), I think it's going to be a good number of years before those encrypted files could be decrypted. And if your files are so sensitive, that you can't have them accessible just protected by heavy duty encryption, you probably shouldn't be e-mailing them, transferring them over the Internet etc... anyway.
I'd like to preface that my knowledge of oceanstore is limitted to one talk I heard at Stanford last year, but oceanstore and something like AFS or fundamentally different propositions structures. AFS is a distributed filesystem, but a subset of a system is only as reliable as the AFS servers they run on. AFS is also hierarchal and directory based. And I doubt AFS would scales up to hundreds of thousands of different 'cells' AFS isn't persistent. (once a file is updated, the old versions are lost etc...)
The theme of OceanStore is increased reliability through statistics. Files would propogate out to different oceanstore servers and so a single file could be stored in multiple places. To commit a new version of a file, a secure 3rd party would be needed (a majority of computers at the 3rd party datacenter would agree based upon encryption technology that this is a valid update), and then the file would propogate out to other servers.
They have an interesting method of retrieving files from arbitrarily connected oceanstore servers. (Something about each individual hash defining a root node computer where some computer along the path to it would have the file). Check the website because what I said is from memory about a year ago. It seems pretty cool though
"Bug found in open source software"
And so Microsoft gets ranted against?
I know Microsoft has lots of security flaws, but subscribe to bugtraq, debian security etc... and linux has a LOT of bugs too. Seriously people...
There probably isn't any real threat from everyday hackers, but even though it's pretty far out, messing with satellites using security flaws wouldn't be out of reach of well funded terrorist or rogue states. I mean, I think the chance of this is remote, but it would be pretty ugly if some group/rogue state managed to disable/fry a bunch of satellites.
It's INCREDIBLY easy to make debs from mplayer source.
.deb package.
If I remember correctly, all one has to is a dpkg-buildpackage from the main source directory and you get a nice
Only thing is is that it's illegal to distribute these.... =)
Let the technicians rise up and overthrow the reign of the marketting and accounting global hegemony!
All will code according to their ability and run programs according to their need!
And while we're at it:
"As long as the app fires up, it can be released. We'll let the customers be beta testers."
Isn't that the whole way OPEN SOURCE works??!?!? Open source releases software with numerous more bugs but has a very broad test cycle. I feel confident with open-source solutions with the commonly used apps, but to be honest (and maybe it's just me) I don't have that much confidence at all in some of the most obscure and rarely used packages that hang around in woody or potato.
I would be highly skeptical of a project like this. It has a huge initial price tag, even if EVERYTHING goes according to plan. What if it doesn't go according to plan? With it so high up, maintenance costs could be extraordinary if anything went wrong. This is a zero emissions plant, but it won't actually have lower emissions than a comparable fossil fuel powerplant until TWO AND A HALF YEARS later because of all the CO2 emissions created during construction?!?!? What would the lifetime of this project be?
Spending a sizable fraction of a billion dollars to reduce co2 emissions by what appears to be an inconsequential amount doesn't appear to me to be a brilliant idea. Maybe it has some value as a test example, but if so, WHY does it have to be that big and cost near half a billion dollars.
I'm not an Australian taxpayer, so I don't care if you go ahead and do it, but if I were, I would be highly skeptical...
It never ceases to amaze me how a conservative statement always ends up with a "troll" marking while leftist "all software should be free" propaganda gets marked "interesting"
Why don't people visit my website?
Why don't people want to help code my open source project?
Why don't people want to help test my program?
Why don't people go all ga ga over what I'm excited about?
Why doesn't want to go on a date with me?
I think the poster is thinking about this the wrong way. When it comes down to it, if no one visits your website, it means that nearly no one WANTS to visit your website. This either means it sucks, is on some topic nobody cares about, or is a mixture of the two.
Even if it's on an obscure topic, it eventually will pick up search engine hits etc... I have friends who ran sound mixing websites and even an RV parts store. They do nothing for advertising and started having all kinds of hits in the first case and orders in the second (very different types of websites).
Anyway, if your site is dying, it's because of a more fundamental problem.
My initial impression is that the net would be less prone to complete shutdown than other infastructure. The net still is sort of a wild wild west, and everybody from skript kiddies to hackers are continually trying to break in and DOS various different sections of the Internet. It's hard to imagine how any group (unless it was some massive government funded operation) could be more disruptive than what currently takes place. Radical islamic fundamentalists dont' seem THAT tech savvy.
Airports thought about security a bit, but really serious measures generally weren't taken. However, security has been one of THE TOP issues for the Internet for a long time. Kerberos, ssh, bastille linux etc... there are a lot of tools out there to lock systems and networks down.
That said the government is probably getting hacked all the time now. Really critical systems probably should physically seperated from the net. One aspect of security that is the most difficult is human error. Sure a system can provide ssh and kerberized login, but if people use the same password for their yahoo games account, all the encryption in the world doesn't appear to do a lot of good.
Just some random musings.
I would still say that the anti-globalization movement does not have a coherent message. I would likely to briefly examine the so called fair trade slogan and then compare the effects of globalization to those of technology.
:)
The movement is an amalgam of the old socialist left, environmentalists, unions, and a variety of groups focussed on different kinds of "rights." You mentioned "Fair Trade," decent labor laws, debt relief, and transparency of negotiations. I would like to agree that transparency in trade talks is a good idea, and one would be hardpressed to find good reasons against it. That said, the other terms are massively unclear. Each group has their own agenda (and often disproved, especially in the case of the old socialist left). Their conjunction is in fact literally a baseless jumble. I remember listenning during the election to an African American member of Congress at the Democratic Convention. He was fairly critical of the protests and rememberred back to the civil rights movement. His comment was that the civil rights movement had a base, it had support in communities, it gatherred this local support for larger things, but it was always present and had a coherent and undeniable message. The current anti-globalization protests can not come together except for large trade talks and then can only really agree to disagree. They do not have "a base" of support.
I don't think fair trade has much actual usefullness other than as a catchy buzzword. From a union standpoint, the gameplan is obvious. Increase trade barriers so as to make importation of textiles and other products unattractive. Call it fair trade, call it whatever, just try to sell it. Other groups might advocate "fair trade" plainly for the benefit of the people supposedly being taken advantage of. The two man problems with this is that Rome wasn't built in a day and that the people supposedly being helped don't want the trade restrictions. The reasons people would be willing to work for low wages in Vietnam is because among options, the foreign factory is the best. Call it unfair, but if Nike had to pay the same wages in Vietnam as in the US, Nike obviously would never go to Vietnam. The next and even greater problem is that the nations themselves want free trade. I believe it was Zedillo, the former President of Mexico, who said something along the lines of, "The developped world is full of people trying to save the undevelopped world from development." It is no coincidence that northern Mexico is far more developped and richer than southern Mexico. If free trade really were the scourge, one would expect a different outcome.
And from an environmental standpoint, people begin to care about the environment when they get rich. When a family is trying to get food just for the next day, they could care less about the forest and the water. However, once someone is wealthy enough so that food, shelter, and simple pleasures aren't an issue, he/she will begin to care a great deal more about the environment. Again it's no concidence that the world's environmentalists by far reside in Europe, Canada, and the United States. If one wants Mexico to care too, the solution is to make the Mexicans rich, and do it as fast as possible.
Far too often, I think the environmentalist movement behind the scenes attempts to retard development from the cynical standpoint that if Mexicans lived better and had cars, they would consumer more gas, emit more CO2. The solution from this false viewpoint is to erect barriers to development. Whether this enters the minds of those opposing trade or not, it is the effect.
The most important issue in the globalization basket I think is free trade. Much of the selling of free trade is done on grounds that aren't quite honest. Does free trade create jobs? yes, but it destroys some too, the net effect is probably close to a wash. What free trade does though is allow people to give up less of what they have to get more of what they want. Like technology, it is an amplifier. And indeed free trade's effects are remarkably close to those of technology from an economic standpoint. I do not think it is unfair to say that one cannot be both against free trade and for technology and still be intellectually consistent.
Technology allows the creation of more goods/value given the same input. 200 years ago, a man with a plow could grow so much wheat. Nowadays, using tractors, modern fertilizers, etc... the output is orders of magnitude higher. With his larger amount of wheat, the farmer can buy a much larger array of goods. Free trade has almost precisely the same effect. With free trade, a national market becomes a world market, and comparative advantage enters into play. Like technology, it amplifies output. Like technology, it also creates winners and losers. The luddites of the industrial revolution opposed it for many of the same reasons that today's anti-globalization protestors oppose free trade. "exploitation of workers" "unfair wages" "evil corporations" all should ring a bell. The industrial revolution did create winners and losers, and though certain aspects were painful, the world is a better place for it. The luddite argument was thoroughly discreditted.
This was a bit of a ramble, anyway, thanks for the indymedia.org, I'll glance it occasonally to fuel my conservative flames
Your comment does not actually rebut my analysis =)
microsoft.com is trademarked by Microsoft and is understood as such. The Microsoft trademark conveys certain information on a products quality and stability, which for you apparently means blatantly destructive (not sure I agree here but you're entitled to your opinion).
When you download a package from microsoft.com, you are NOT being fooled.