Actually, the point wasn't well made at all. Please consider:
Spray Mount, being a spray glue product (I gather; not being involved in art production, I'd never heard of it before), probably puts some glue particles in the air. Whether or not it puts significantly more in the air than rubber cement (used to cement rubbers, I suppose;-) has not been established at all. It may be true, it may not; at this point, we don't know. Having used rubber cement, I can tell you that it puts out a lot of fumes. The question, then, is how much more fumes would Spray Mount put out? The next question is, how harmful is it, really? Are the things released from rubber cement and spray mount persistent, or do they break down pretty quickly? If they're non-persistent, then it really doesn't much matter which you use, except a spray can is a bigger piece of garbage when empty.
The biggest problem with this argument, though, is the statement about Hummers. I find them to be ugly and also too large to be practical, and wouldn't want to drive one even I could have it for free. However, no one has established that a Hummer puts out significantly more emissions than, say, a picup truck or other SUV, or if it puts out any more emissions at all. I live in California, which has the toughest vehicle emissiosn standards in the United States, and Hummers pass California standards.
In light of that, I think the criticism is quite valid: he has not shown that Hummers pollute more than a pickup truck or other SUV, or that Spray Mount is a source of significantly more pollution than rubber cement. Both of those things may well be true, but no one has established that.
Plus, he couched it in language that would make a person just want to go out and use Spray Mount to spite him. Never a good move.
No, you have racism as a problem - black ghettos, far shorter life expectancy, huge numbers of black people in prison. Europe just does not have those problems.
We have poor people in all colors here, including white, and poor people all tend toward a shorter life expectancy than non-poor people who can afford better health care. That's not racism, it's just a sad fact of life.
In the particular case of the shorter life expectancy of blacks, do you know what the number one cause of that is? Black on black violence. It is absolutely not a matter of racism, it's a matter of young black males murdering other young black males.
With regard to prison statistics, here in California the prison population IIRC is about 1/3 hispanic, 1/3 black, and the rest are white and others. The population of California is not 1/3 black (although it might be in some states), and may be 1/3 hispanic or something near that. In LA it's nearly 50% hispanic. In other words, the percentage of hispanics and blacks in prison appears to exceed their percentage in society. However, that is not racism.
Those people are in prison because they committed crimes, not because of their skin color! The white people in prison are in there for committing crimes, too. The police aren't racist and the courts aren't racist; if I commit a crime and get caught, I'm going to jail; being white isn't going to get me a free ticket out. Nor is my wife, who is not white, going to be wrongly accused and sent to prison because of her skin color. It just doesn't work that way. There was a time in this country when it did, even in my lifetime (I was born in the sixties) in some places, but it just isn't like that now.
That doesn't mean everything is perfect here, but it's not nearly as bad as some Europeans would like to claim.
WRT Israel, to stray off my theme a bit, there are some things that Israel does which I think are ill-considered, and some that are just wrong, but by and large, Israel is fighting for its right to exist. I, too, eventually hope to see a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a dismantling of the west bank settlements, in exchange for an ironclad peace agreement with all parties. That could bring a just end to the conflict. However, we all need to bear in mind that the only reason Israel holds the occupied territories is because they were captured in the 1967 War, a clearcut war of aggression by Israel's neighbors, whose intent was to exterminate Israel. Things didn't go according to plan, they got their asses completely kicked, and Israel has been holding the occupied territories ever since. I don't blame them. I would, too, for as long as my enemies were still trying to destroy me. If we consider that Israel is a nuclear power and is quite capable of destroying its enemies right now, I think they've acted with a great deal of restraint, overall.
A thing we also need to keep in mind are that the Palestinian refugees are such voluntarily; they fled Israel at the creation of the state, not because they Israelis kicked them out or were going to do anything to them, but because they refused to live under an Israeli government. The ones who stayed have done all right for themselves; the ones who left created their own predicament. The Israelis didn't do it to them, they did it to themselves. Meanwhile, they teach their innocent children to grow up hating Israelis who want nothing but to exist in peace and be left alone. It is not the Israelis who are the criminals here.
The Palestinians will get their own state eventually, in return for peace. But if they violate that peace and send more terrorists into Israel thereafter to blow up innocent people with suicide bombs, I would look the other way no matter what Israel did in retaliation.
Both parties ISP's logs will have records of the transfer and they will be able to sue whoever served them the song.
You've obviously never worked for an ISP. The information contained in RADIUS logs includes the IP address, the userid, the connecting phone number (if available), connection speed, etc.
Mail logs contain a record of mail you sent. Not the mail itself, of course, but your address, the recipient, timestamp, message ID.
Other than that, your ISP has no logs of what you're doing. Granted, an ISP that really wanted to do so could create programs that would log all packets from your IP address and then massage that into usable data like what applications you were using and what files you tranferred, etc., but this would be quite expensive in terms of hardware, programming time, lost customers after your customers found out you were doing it and all left, and in defending against all the lawsuits that would probably be filed.
I worked for ISPs for years and nothing like what you describe was ever done. Nobody would even contemplate something like that, not only for reasons of the expense, but because if you had such records, you'd be getting subpoenaed all the time.
If the RIAA did what you desribe, the target's ISP could only confirm whether that person was loggeg in at the time, and on what IP address.
In terms of those suits, it's basically a matter of the RIAA's word, plus circumstantial evidence. They are saying "This person downloaded, or made available for upload, all these songs." The ISP connection logs are crucial to their case, and a reason they go after the big file sharers: the need to go to court and say "This person made these files available at the following dates and times" and that has to correlate with the ISP's logs. If an RIAA lawyer can show thirty dates and times that a song was transferred and that person was logged on at that IP address on all thirty of those occassions, that's going to be sufficient proof to win a lawsuit.
Without ISP logs, it's just the RIAA's word against someone else, and winning gets a lot tougher. Access logs are very important to the RIAA's case, but they won't contain any direct evidence that you shared or received a file.
I work for a Brightmail competitor, and I find Richter's claim of cutting a whitelist deal with Brightmail to be completely implausible. They wouldn't do anything like that for the same reasons we wouldn't do anything like that:
1) If they were ever caught (and they probably would be, because their software integrates with your MTA, which means someone could reverse-engineer it or snoop traffic between the MTA and Brightmail), their competitors' sales departments would have a field day stealing their customers. The anti-spam business is growing rapidly, but it's very competitive. If any of the companies in this field cut a whitelist deal with a spammer and got caught, the others would eat their lunch;
2) Even if they didn't get caught, lowering their spam prevention effectiveness would cause complaints from their customers and make it harder to beat the competition in comparisons and they'd lose out in the marketplace. Competition is huge, and Brightmail is somewhat limited in that their system only works with some MTAs, whereas some other systems (such as ours) are completely MTA-agnostic, which means we can sell to anyone. They wouldn't dare take such a chance, nor would they trust the spammer to keep his mouth shut if he got in a tight spot. Spammers, after all, are fundamentally unethical people, and an anti-spam company would never trust one.
Something like 49% of all litigated patents are deemed invalid by the courts.
That number doesn't surprise me. After all, anyone sued for patent infringement will not actually let the case go to litigation unless they are pretty sure they can win. If 49% ("something like" is + or - how much?), that means that slightly more often than not, the defendant in patent litigation is defeated. That is, they erred in judging that they could win.
However, whether 49% is accurate or not, it's not a useful figure. It only tells us what percentage of litigated patent cases go against the patent holder. A useful number would be the percentage of patent cases that are litigated, from which we could determine what percentage of patents are invalidated, not what percentage of litigated patents are invalidated, which is to us a fairly useless statistic.
I doubt it. Can you cite the law that says it's illegal for the president to sleep with a government employeer? I don't know if interns are really considered government employees, but either way, I rather doubt that anything illegal took place. Their relationship was consensual, so to prove any illegality, you'd have to establish that he used his office to force her into a sexual relationship. Monica Lewinsky has made no such allegation, AFAIK, so it was consensual. It was wrong, and I'm sure his wife ripped him a new orifice, but he didn't break the law when he had an affair. He broke the law when he lied under oath.
Bonus question to the/. crowd, since you brought it up, who was the only president before him who was impeached, and why was he impeached?
However, since his sex life had nothing to do with his job as President, I think he's entitled to lie about it, because IMHO the question should not have been asked.
I'm a Republican, and did think the whole impeachment thing was a waste of everyone's time and money and shouldn't have been done. Richard Nixon took actions worthy of impeachment; Bill Clinton did not.
However, I don't think it's justifiable to say that what happened with Monica Lewinsky was his own business and he had a right to lie about it.
First of all, it happened in the oval office. If I had sex with someone on my employer's premises, whether it was during business hours or not, I assure you that they would take interest in that, would have a right to question me about it, and would most likely fire me. Therefore, you can't defend his lie by saying "It was his personal life, so he had a right to lie."
If it happend in the residence section of the Whitehouse, you might be able to make that claim, but since it happened in the oval office, it means he not only had sex on company premises, but he was on duty at the time. IIRC, he even made a phone call to some member of the House or Senate while he was getting knob schlobbed under the desk by Monica. That makes it very much the public's business, and I certainly think a letter of censure was in order. It's only impeachment that was a bit much.
Umm, because he said so? The fact that the store had been in business since before either one of us had been born is another good indicator.
He was no expert at motor parts, either. He was a fool. Why is working in IT better? Well, let's see. By and large (I know, there are exceptions, don't bother quoting them; we all know or have known PHBs who are utterly overpaid for the harm they do), jobs that require more skill and intelligence, which often have fewer people who can do them because of this, have a supply and demand imbalance that makes them pay more than jobs which require less skill and intelligence. For example, what I do versus what he was doing.
However, you mistake me if you think I'm putting him down because he was behind a counter. As I said in my original reply, we were near poor and my parents couldn't afford college. I had to manage it on my own, through financial aid and paying my own way. I worked in fast food, residence hall cafeterias, as a carpet cleaner, all sorts of work that is generally considered lowly. Some of the people doing it were intelligent, some not. Most were hard-working and did an honest day's work. And that's fine.
Later, I was able to get a job in the campus tutoring center, and could work with my brain instead of my hands, helping other students. This also paid a lot better than any of those other jobs (that supply and demand thing, again), which really helped me.
My brother managed college on his own, too. He joined the military and was in for a total of almost eight years, and got Army College fund money. After he got out, he worked as a mechanic for several years to save more money for college. Good mechanics are very sharp people, and he was an outstanding one. My brother's a very smart guy, much smarter than I am.
The thing is, I'm not putting that guy down for the job he had. I'm putting him down because he thought he was so much better than everyone else and but that job was the best he could do. I'm putting him down for being an arrogant, elitist jock/surfer/pothead prick who thought people who studied and worked hard and kept out of trouble were a bunch of losers, and he was a winner. I guess we found out who the real winners and losers are.
BTW, regarding how much money they make. Yes, I have a very good idea how much they make. Remember, my brother was a mechanic (now he's in IT, and makes more than he did as a mechanic; a good dealer mechanic with 5 - 10 years on the job probably makes more, but few others do). Parts clerks typically make more than minimum wage, but not by a lot. Garbage collectors do a lot better, ones who've been at it for a while probably make as much as I do, some may make more. Garbage collection is a poor example, though. Garbage collectors don't make money based on intelligence, or working hard (although most of them do), or any of the usual criteria. They make good money because it's a government job, and government jobs often pay more than private sector ones, and mostly because it's a smelly, dirty, and somewhat dangerous job that most people, because of the working conditions and perceived low prestige, wouldn't want (supply and demand again) unless the pay was high.
To close, I've never put down a person just because they had a blue-collar or minimum wage job. I've had lots of those myself. So has my brother. So did our parents, and their parents before them. I'm the first college graduate in my family. My brother was the second one, and we're both grateful for that opportunity, which no one in our family could ever afford before. I won't put anyone down for having a low-skill, blue collar job. But if someone's a stuck-up prick who thinks he's better than me and the best he can manage is a minimum-wage job, then yes, he's fair game.
In other words, it's not intellectual superiority that I'm really beat
Even if that happened, one fundamental fact would remain: that auto parts store was as high as my old tormentor had ever risen. So I'll still smile and feel a sense of justice, although your point is well taken.
# To appreciate and absorb our culture...they'd have to enjoy learning.
# To appreciate and absorb their culture...we'd need a head wound.
(wow...that sounded kinda bitter, huh? Sorry, I need more caffeine.)
Actually, that pretty much sounded like reality. The jocks may have all thought we were dorks because we weren't "cool" or good at sports (mostly, we didn't even care about sports), but we had a whole different definition of cool, which involved things like having a brain that worked, and we thought the jocks were dorks, too, and disliked most of them intensely. Not just because they were bullies who thought they were better than everyone else, but for the very things they liked about themselves: they were "cool" and good at sports, but for most of them, that was all they had. For being nothing but "cool" and having skill in sports, we (rightly) thought of them as people of little consequence in the scheme of things. It's not for nothing that a lot of people think of "dumb jock" as one word. I'm sure they also thought of us as people of no consequence, but I guess it's turned out that we were right and they were wrong.
A rich kid from my high school went to college for free because he was 6'10" at 15 and got a basketball scholarship. He was a total prick, and didn't need the scholarship anyway because he was a rich kid.
I was near-poor and my parents really struggled to send my to a private high school. They couldn't afford college, but I went there almost for free too (and to a better school than he went to), not because I was good at sports but because I could think.
I remember one day a few years ago I was replacing ball joints on a 1970 383 Magnum Dodge Challenger I had at the time. I broke the tip off of a Snap-On flex handle because I had a ten-foot pipe on the end of it (those ball joints were old, and really, really tight!). All Snap-On tools have a lifetime warranty, but it was Sunday afternoon and that's a hard time to find a Snap-On truck. The flex handle in question is one my dad bought used when he was young, and must have been about 40 years old at the time, I guess it was due to break a tip:-)
Anyway, I needed a flex handle, so I went to an auto parts store over on the wrong side of the tracks, because I knew they had a pretty wide selection of tools. To my delight, one of my jock/surfer tormentors was working behind the counter there as a parts clerk. I kept the smirk off my face until I was back in my car, but then I laughed my ass off.
I know I should be bigger than that, but I couldn't help enjoying seeing how low the mighty had fallen:-)
And the flex handle? I got a new tip put on by a Snap-On dealer a few days later. They don't ask questions about why a tool broke, they just repair or replace it. Period.
The rhyme above is sick and has now properly been modded down as flamebait. Now, about Rush Limbaugh. I dislike Rush Limbaugh quite strongly, and I'm a convervative. I can only imagine what liberals must thing of him. Then again, he talks like a conservative but acts like many a liberal (simply shouting down anyone with whom he disagrees, regardless of what the facts are), so I could be wrong and they might like him, or at least secretly admire him for doing their act so well. However, I think your "Why, hello there Rush Limbaugh" statement needs to be examined.
I'm not a football fan, and so don't recall the name of the quarterback in question or for which team he plays, but I do recall what Limbaugh said about him. His statement was (this is pretty close to a verbatim quote, and is certainly factually accurate) that (the quarterback) is being overrated by sports journalists because they want a black quarterback to be seen as succeeding.
This ignores some historical facts, such as the success of Warren Moon, who was an excellent quarterback and is famous enough that even I know who he is, and there have been/are other successful black quarterbacks, but again, I'm not a football fan and so can't name them.
It also impunes the journalistic integrity of the sports journalists about whom Rush was talking when he said that. He essentially stated that hsi fellow sports journalists, all of whom have far more experience in that line than he does and who probably also have more journalistic integrity than he does, would like about an athlete's skill in order to make him look good, and would do so because of his skin color. That's a pretty serious charge, and if I were one of those journalists, I would certainly take Limbaugh to task for it. For that matter, if I were one of his co-broadcasters during that game, I would have taken him to task for it right there on the air and made him defend that statement. Since Limbaugh is pretty bad at defending himself in a fair verbal fight, he probably would have fallen flat on his face.
What Limbaugh did not say, however, is "(The quarterback) is not a good quarterback because he's black" or "(The quarterback) is not as good as a white quarterback" or anything at all like that. He said that he thought (the quarterback) was overrated, and that the reason people were overrating him was that he was black. Some sort of a weird sportscaster affirmative action, effectively.
I dislike Rush Limbaugh for his hypocrisy in saying that drug users should be jailed, all the while himself he was addicted to prescription pain killers and apparently buying them illegally.
I dislike Rush Limbaugh for his hypocrisy in only allowing people to bring up opposing viewpoints on his show if those people are one or more of: A) Idiots B) Don't have their facts straight and haven't prepared for the debate at all; Rush has, and he'll eat them up and make them look like choice A; C) They may not be idiots and may know their facts, but are so poor at debating that we will still do B and make them look like A. If someone who is prepared, intelligent, and good at debate takes an opposing view and is beating Rush, the Limbaugh reaction is to just hang up on the person and often say something disparaging after the line is cut. I've heard it dozens of times, and the radio station where I listened to him only carried his show once a week for one hour. Think how often he must have done it for me to have heard it so many times.
I dislike Limbaugh for being a general self-affgrandizing blowhard and a really poor representative of conservatism, who ought to just shut up and go away.
However, I can't dislike Limbaugh for make a racist statement, because he did not make one. I don't know if he is a racist or not, but the statement was not racist. It was controversial, probably meant to be, a stupid thing to say and rude to his fellow sportscasters, so I can dislike him for those reasons, but I can't dislike him for a racist statement he did not make.
Believe me, it sticks in my throat to feel I have to defend Limbaugh for anything, but fair is fair.
Hmmm, well. I'm a conservative Republican, but not ashamed to say that Bill Clinton did a much better job than I expected. Granted, facing a hostile congress helped him immeasurably in that regard, but the fact remains that he did much better than I thought he would. I also detest Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.
However, what makes me a Republican is that much of the Democratic platform these days seems to indeed be very far from what the Founders had in mind for this country, and what is good for it. Plus, as a matter of fact, the heavily left-influenced parts of the Democratic Party do indeed come off sounding downright anti-American. I'm sure you've heard the refrain from the far left anytime the United States is involved in any war: other side good, US bad. It's about that simple. Sure, we were wrong in Viet Nam, but that doesn't mean we're always, or even mostly, wrong in war. There are wars that are justified and wars that are not. WW II and Korea clearly were. Grenada, IMO, was not. Afghanistan was fully justified. Heck, *anything* we did to AL Qaeda and the Taliban would have been justified (yes, I fully understand how broad is the scope of "anything) after Sep. 11. Iraq? I dunno. I thought it was a mistake, am still not convinced it wasn't. I don't think it was justifiable WRT international law without a further resolution from the UN Security Council. Whether anyone can pragmatically justify it will have to be judged by history. It's too soon to know right now.
Your questions regarding being unpatriotic and rendering the notion of a country meaningless are good ones, and the answers are not totally clear. Yes, there are certainly Americans who are not terribly patriotic. There are Americans, seemingly all from the far left, who genuinely seem to hate what this country is and what it stands for. The country was pretty united after Sep. 11 but has now slid back toward its more fractured self, like it was before that terrible event.
But does questioning whether or war is right or wrong, or whether we should be involved in it, make a person unpatriotic? Absolutely not. Indeed, it is the duty of a patriot to think seriously of those matters, and to consider not only whether war is right or wrong, but whether it is practically worth it even if it is justifiable.
There is, however, a great disconnect between much of the Democratic platform and much of the US electorate (in California, at least, I think Schwarzenegger's showing in the recall election indicates that there may be a disconnect with most of the electorate). The problem comes, in part, from the fact that the Democrats don't seem to know when to stop moving left. All they seem to know is that they want to be somewhere to the left of the Republicans.
The founders of this country were, for their time, flaming liberals, probably more relatively radical in their time than Marx was in his. Democracy? Unheard of? Rebel against the crown and secede from the British Empire to become an independent nation? Unthinkable? Freedom of speech? No taxation without representation? Absurd! Yet that's exactly what they did, and with some help from Britain's European enemies of the day, they pulled it off despite that fact that only about 1/3 of the colonials were really behind them, with 1/3 supporting the British and another 1/3 being uncommitted. They were the flaming radicals of their day.
It is that disconnect with the values held by so many people, not just political and religious values, but sometimes even values of common decency, that I think makes some, especially among the Republican right, question the loyalty of Democrats. What the Democratic party really needs to take from the great popularity of conservative talk radio and other manifestations of support for conservative Republicanism, is that they've slid way too far to the left, and if they want to be a serious contender they need to move back a lot farther toward the middle.
Dead on. If "Fsck MS" meant the same as "Fsck the US" well, that'd make the Microsoft Passport a bit to real for my tastes, I'll tell you that right now. Not that Bill and Monkeyboy haven't thought along those lines, I'm sure:-)
As anyone who has been to VN can attest, America, Americans, and American goods are pretty popular there. The government even likes America. Granted, I'm sure the fact that they need economic development and America has lots of money factors into the government's desire for good relations with the United States, but there's more than that. People really and truly do not hold the war and the things we did against us; it's like with the United States and Japan: that was then, and this is now. Also, as like with the United States and Japan, it's a lot easier for the winner to be magnanimous; the US held things against VN a lot longer than they held things against us after the war ended.
I've been to some pretty remote parts of Viet Nam, even in very rural areas in the far north. One project I was involved in took me to a place where - I'm not kidding - I might have been the first westerner to set foot there since the French were driven out in the 1950s. I was a bit apprehensive of how people would think of me, a person from a former enemy state, up there. However, it was nothing to worry about. People of all ages were friendly and curious, moreso when they found out I was an American. Even the people at the local People's Committee office (the town hall) were friendly. And when they found out that my wife back home was an overseas VNese and that we had kids, they just had to see pictures. They thought our daughers were so cute as they passed the photos around that I got some inkling of what it must feel like to be a rock star:-)
Most definitely, neither the VNese government nor the people have an anti-US attitude. I don't know they necessarily even have an anti-MS attitude (not that it would be a bad thing if they did, mind you:-) ), but that they do need to get software piracy under control to meet trade agreement obligations, and realistically, the only way they can do that is to promote the use of Free Software.
You can't keep a dark secret hidden for ever:-) Now, Australia does have an absolutely wonderful brew called Cooper's, to which I was introduced in Japan by an Aussie friend there. Absolutely terrific stuff, and unfiltered, so that you get some yeast in the bottle. I've yet to find it back here in LA - just one of the many reasons I more than slightly regret leaving Japan - but if I do, I'll bring home at least a case of it.
Some people in VN have them, but not many. Most people ride scooters. People with more money have Japanese ones of 125 CC or greater (the latest ones run from 150 - 200 CC, are watercooled, and are styled much like a sportbike), people without much money ride smaller (110 CC or less) scooters, much more basic and often Chinese-made. In the south, Japanese scooters are predominant; in the north, which is less economically developed, Chinese and Russian ones (still with Cyrillic writing on them!) are predominant. I never saw a Russian scooter in the south, which tells you all you need to know about the quality of Russian scooters:-)
You also see a lot of Russian trucks in the north, but never in the south. They look like they were built around WW II, and while it's possible some of them really were, I suspect that probably the factory just never changed its tooling, and the tooling does go back about that far.
Computer ownership is pretty common in VN. I wouldn't say that most people have one, but in Ho Chi Minh City, the most prosperous area of the country, a lot of people have them and there is a bustling computer store district with lots of parts shops. I wish American cities tended to have all the computer stores clustered together like Japan and VN do; it's fun and cool and convenient, and a great way to spend a few hours on a computer shop crawl. The VNese shops aren't as good for a crawl as the ones in Tokyo's Akihabara area, though.
On a side note WRT eastern languages, there is a company in Ha Noi that did a localized Red Hat clone called CMC Linux. I don't know if they're still around or not, I'm sure it must be really hard to sell even a single boxed set there, just like it is for MS. Unless they could build a consulting-based business, they'd never survive, I think.
Of course not. In the case of the H-1B, we have little or need for foreign tech workers right now; companies just want them because they will work for slave wages. Since there is no legitimate need, and they have no right to come here, under our laws, their laws, or international laws, suspend the program. Don't issue any new H-1Bs and don't renew any current ones when they expire.
How is doing away with the H-1B and not exporting jobs different? I think I've covered the H-1B, and not exporting jobs has nothing to do with the WTO or any other trade agreement. We have no agreement with India or any other country regarding free trade in jobs, nor should we have. When Americans are hurting for work and unemployment is high, we should be keeping our jobs at home and taking care of our own first. If we are at or near full employment and are truly hurting for workers, then we can talk about outsourcing or H-1Bs. However, nursing is the only field that comes to mind offhand where that is actually true; about a third of the nurses in California are from the Philippines, and if they weren't here those positions would simply go unfilled. I was unemployed for about three months earlier this year, and I remember being at a job fair and seeing a health care recruiting company with a sign on their booth that said that if you were an RN or LVN, show them your pay stub and they would beat that price by 20%, right there on the spot. IT was never like that, not even at the height of the dot-com bubble. The market was hot for a while, but not that hot. You could possibly argue that if not for the H-1B it would have been about the same, and you might be right. However, those days are past, and it's time for the H-1B to pass along with them.
In the case of the catfish, it's not that I necessarily think we *should* be importing them without protecting our domestic industry through tariffs, quotas, or both, it's that we did enter into that agreement and I believe that we must live up to both the letter and the spirit of it. If we don't like the agreement, then fine, repeal it. But if we're not going to repeal it, then as a matter of honor we'd better live up to it. We might have fewer enemies in the world if we lived up to the letter and spirit of our agreements and of the principles upon which this country was founded.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I was a strong free-trader myself, or that I believe everything the government says about it. Rather, what I meant to say was that the US government is the world's greatest public drumbeater for free trade. There is a significant gap between what they talk and what they walk.
Free trade agreements have their place, but I believe that place is between countries that are economic peers. For example, in North America there is a free trade agreement called NAFTA (Noth American Free Trade Agreement) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This is the agreement about which Ross Perot famously said, "Do you hear that great sucking sound? It's the sound of your jobs going south." (a near quote, possibly not exact). That's pretty much the way it turned out. All sorts of companies that didn't make things in Mexico before moved their manufacturing operations either wholly or partly to Mexico to take advantage of NAFTA and the cheaper labor there. Result: lots of American jobs went south. If Mexico would do something about the relentless tide of illegal aliens (maybe put their army on the border; if not, I'd be willing to put ours there instead of in Iraq) I might not quibble so much about that, but that's another topic.
There hasn't been much of a great sucking sound of American jobs going north to Canada, though, although prices are lower there by dint of the lower relative value of the Canadian dollar. The reason this hasn't happened is that Canada and the United States are economic peers: countries with advanced economies and equal standards of living. This has two effects: one, there isn't a large amount of immigration from one to the other, and what immigration does occur is generally not economically drive; two, companies do not tend to move their manufacturing operations from the United States to Canada, because while costs may be a little lower there, they aren't lower by a sufficient amount to justify moving the factory. Plus, unless the factory is in a northern area of the U.S., they would have to deal with a longer, colder, snowier winter, which means more days of weather-related plant closure because employees can't get to work, and less productivity. Because of those factors, a free trade agreement that only included the United States and Canada would work fine. So would free trade agreements between the US and Japan, and the US and the EU.
A free trade agreement between the US and a poor country, however, doesn't work so well. Lots of American jobs go there. It raises their boat, but lowers ours a good deal, which is not a good deal for us. We should seek to bring other countries up to our standard of living, not us down to theirs.
Actually, it's probably true. Remember that he is Irish. Trout and Salmon are indigenous in large numbers, but catfish, mostly a warm water fish, may not be. There are no snakes in Ireland, maybe no catfish either:-)
I'm not familiar with the ALCOA case. Was it truly dumping, or was it simply a case of Russian companies having lower costs and being able to undercut Alcoa? If Russian manufacturers were in fact dumping aluminum (or aluminium, for those of you across the water, where they spell it correctly:-) ), then government action to protect American companies would be wholly justified. Indeed, the government would be remiss in its duty if it failed to act. If it was just a matter of competition under a free trade agreement that we had not only signed, but pushed, that would be another matter.
Quickly changing horses, or at least racetracks, to farm subsidies now. I actually have no real problem with farm subsidies. Why? Well, I lived in Japan for a long time, and the Japanese government has a policy of rice self-sufficiency. This policy exists, to the best of my knowledge, for no other crop.
When I moved to Japan in 1994, it was the year following a very poor rice crop, and the government took the unusual step of importing Thai rice to make up for a shortfall. Some very good rice is grown in Thailand, but that stuff was horrid. My girlfriend and I had to mix it with Japanese rice to make it palatable. Do I think they imported the worst rice they could find, just to make sure that people didn't develop a taste for foreign rice? Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, could be.
Normally, foreign rice just wasn't seen in Japan back then. It was a closed market. That's how extraordinary the importation of Thai rice was.
When I left Japan in 2002, things had changed somewhat. You could buy California-grown Japanese rice varieties at a price lower than natively grown rice, but it wasn't common and most supermarkets didn't have it. Rice from other countries was rarer still. If you went to a Thai restaurant, you might get Thai rice (or not; the more expensive ones might have it), but you'd never see it in a store.
Why is this so? Well, Japan still maintains a nearly closed rice market. The entire rice crop every year is bought by the government and re-sold to commercial dealers. Rice is heavily subsidized, and the subsidy works by the government paying a figure many times higher than world market rate (I've heard 20 times, but can't confirm whether or not that figure is accurate; however, at a Nijiya supermarket here in LA, I saw 25 lb. bags of California-grown short-grain rice selling for about what you'd pay for a 2 kg (4.4 pound) bag of good Japanese rice in Japan). This allows Japanese rice farmers to make a profit where they otherwise almost certainly wouldn't, and allows Japan to sustain rice self-sufficiency.
Which brings me to why I support farm subsidies. The United States imports, of course, a great deal of its food products, and is nowhere near agriculturally self-sufficient. However, if all of our sea lanes were cut off and/or other countries just wouldn't sell us food because of , we could get by without starving, even if belts would be tight for a while, and agricultural production could be quickly ramped up under a declared state of emergency which would allow for expansion of farmlands without regard to environmental laws.
To sustain that level of domestic food production and that ability to rapidly increase it in time of need (such as a major, protracted world war), farm subsidies are necessary. An enemy cannot use the threat of starvation against us as long as we grow our own food.
There is also another, more humane, reason for farm subsidies. If the United States scrapped all subsidies and nearly all farmers quit farming because they couldn't make a living at it, our food imports would soar until we were importing nearly all our food. We could and would pay to dollar for it, of course. What choice would there be? Seeing that crops could be exported to the United States far more profitably than they could be kept at home, many farmers in poor countries would be growing cash crops for the export market rather than food crops for their o
I think it's pretty safe to assume that you have never been to either Viet Nam or China. If you had, you would know that a lot of American and other foreign goods are purchased there. I'll speak mostly of Viet Nam, because I know it well. My wife is a VNese-American, and my work took me to VN for the best part of a year.
What do you see on the streets of Viet Nam? Foreign motor vehicles, everywhere. Mostly Korean or Japanese, along with some European ones (chiefly Mercedes Benz) and a few American ones, including Harley Davidson motorcycles. Buy a cell phone there? It will be a foreign brand; they don't have any domestic ones. Coke and Pepsi and their assorted brands are big there. IBM, HP, and Cisco are all there, and they all sell hardware. All the other computer hardware in VN is foreign, too. There are no domestic makers. I bought my first Philips monitor there, and it was great. Philips became my brand of choice in monitors, edging out even the Japanese makers.
VN mostly exports raw materials and semi-finished products to the US, not finished products. They import finished products back.
If you want to talk about fairness, ask me about the catfish debacle. Thanks, I'm glad you asked.
Viet Nam has lots of catfish. There is a big domestic market, and they have plenty to spare, so they developed an export market, and a lot of those fish go to the United States, where they sell at a very good price. So, what happens next in the US, that great advocate of international free trade? Well, US catfish farmers cry foul, and cry it loud and long to their representatives in government.
In response, the government, that great advocate of free trade, tries to accuse VN of dumping catfish. Ridiculous. Viet Nam is a poor country, and many of the people raising and selling those catfish are themselves poor, and the rest are far from rich. They can't afford to dump. Viet Nam either has to sell a product at a profit or not even produce it. The dumping ploy fails, so guess what they try next?
They pass a law that says you can't call it a catfish unless it is a member of one of the indigenous North American catfish species, such as a Channel Catfish. The VN catfish must now be labeled as "Basa." As a fisherman and person who just tries to be fair, this makes me want to puke. I know perfectly well what a catfish looks like, and I have seen the ones in VN. They are definitely catfish. Any icthyologist could tell you the same, so I'm sure many of them are also busy staring into the porcelain aquarium.
I'm embarrased that my government, arguably the world's greatest proponent of free trade and the WTO, only wants to play by the rules it forces onto others when it feels like it. If WTO rules would ever not be advantageous to the United States, the government will cook up some scheme to make an end run around them. I don't believe they are alone in this, but as the world's greatest economic power and greatest advocate of free trade, the violations and hypocrisy seem particularly egregious.
The reasons the United States has trade deficits with Viet Nam, China, Japan, Taiwan, and a host of other places, include simple economics (the United States is rich and things are relatively expensive; Viet Nam is poor and things are dirt cheap, so we can afford to buy their stuff a lot more than they can afford to buy ours), and the fact that US companies voluntarily "outsourced" (a code word for "screwed American workers and the U.S. industrial base by sending their jobs and our manufacturing capacity overseas") production of practically everything they sell to China and other countries with low labor costs. No foreign government, democratic or otherwise, bears any blame for this; it was entirely voluntary. Go into a US store and try to buy some electrical or mechanical appliance that wasn't made in China. In the event that you should succeed, try to find one that was made in the USA. You will almost certainly fail. If it was made here, it was probably onl
Just one question: which was there first, the chicken farm or your house? If your house was there first, go after the guy to get his ducks in a row (sorry, couldn't help it). If the chicken farm was there first, you have no cause for complaint.
There's a chicken farm near where my brother lives (Lakeside, California). It's been there for decades, since there was nothing but other farms and open land within a mile or more of the place (it's a small one, only a few thousand chickens, tops, and some Emus). So genius developer buys a piece of land immediately adjacent to the chicken farm and builds condos on it. The farmer puts up a huge sign on his land warning of the occassional stench (cleaning up the chicken poop or something) and that he was there first, so if you're considering buying one of the condos, understand that he has no intention of moving or closing his farm, and you have no cause for complaint, so either don't buy or just deal with it.
Needless to say, a bunch of the wankers who bought condos there anyway are trying to get his farm shut down. It's a shame the Cedar fire didn't get to them, while so many decent people lost their homes.
Okay, it is just barely possible that a failure by the Free Software Foundation to enforce the GPL on works that the FSF holds the copyright to bars the FSF, as a matter of equity, form enforcing it on FSF-copyrighted works. "[M]atter of equity" is a rather broad argument, and a judge can drive a truck through it if he is so inclined, though it ups his chance of being reversed on appeal.
IANAL, blahblahblah, however, I really doubt if selective enforcement bars the FSF, or any other GPL licensor, from much of anything. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in East Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, knows that illegally copied software is the exception, not the rule. It's not easily found in Japan, and Singapore has cleaned it up a lot so that it's underground now (in 1998, there was a large bootleg CD shop in the Singapore's largest computer & electronics mail, and street vendors sold them all over the place from long tables; in 2000 when I was there, that shop was gone and so were the street vendors. I'm sure some are still there, but it's been driven largely underground.
In many countries - I can cite Vietnam as one example, because I lived there, bootleg software is the rule, rather than the exception. I would estimate that (much) less than 10% of the installed basis of Windows (all versions) and MS Office is legitimately licensed. The percentage for any other applications, including Photoshop, Corel Draw, Norton AV, etc., etc., must be much closer to zero. I don't know if it's even possible to buy legit copies of them. I never saw a shop selling legit copies of anything, including Windows, although you can probably get that in some places; Microsoft does have a business presence in Vietnam. You can, though, buy bootleg CDs chock full of anything you want, including Exchange Server, IIS, etc., for about $1 a piece.
Microsoft, being one of most astute companies ever for business sense and marketing, is surely aware of this and is just as surely turning a blind eye to it. They know the masses, many of whom make $100 a month or less, can't afford MS license fees, and rigorous enforcement attempts would only drive people to Linux, if those enforcement attempts were really successful. As it is, Linux has very tough sledding in Vietnam because hardly anyone sees a cost benefit in it b/c Windows, Exchange, MS SQL Server, etc., are essentially free (as in beer). Linux is present in Vietnam, but it's not well known outside of a small niche.
However, this utter lack of enforcement throughout much of the world - if you take into account how many countries have computer users who can't really afford MS license fees, there may be more illegal than legal installs of Windows out there - doesn't seem to prevent Microsoft in any way from enforcing its license terms in countries where copyright law is strong and enforceable, and people have money to pay for the licenses.
In short, no one, not even SCO, could take that argument against the GPL seriously.
On a lighter note, I have a friend who works in Salt Lake City. Every day on his commute, my friend passes the SCO offices. Every day on the commute, the bird is flipped to SCO. My friend has an acquaintance who works in a customer service job at SCO, and that person (sorry, can't even reveal gender here) says that it's hell. All customers do is bitch about SCO's suit against Linux. Apparently, they are not only angering the entire Linux community and playing chicken with a semi truck while driving a moped themselves, but they're not making themselves too popular even with their own customers.
After IBM crushes SCO like a bug in court, then buys the company for pennies on the dollar in the Chapter 11 sale and fires good ol' Darl, he's going to have really trouble finding a job:-) Granted, he won't need one b/c he has enough money from exercising SCO stock options that he could walk away right now and never work again and it wouldn't matter. But still, he'll be virtually unemployable when IBM is finished.
Absolutely correct, this PITA from Adobe will do nothing to stop illegally copying of their products.
I lived in Viet Nam for a while and did some consulting there, and I noticed a very peculiar thing. Everywhere I went, installed versions of Windows, Photoshop, MS Office, Exchange, whatever, almost always had the same serial number. If a new version was released, regardless of any protection that version might have, a crack was on the street at CD shops in no time. People tell me China is the same way, and most of the stuff in Viet Nam probably actually comes from China, at least orginally. Then it gets locally duplicated. The better ripoffs actually have the manufacturer's art duplicated on the CD. The cheaper ones were just plain old CDRs.
If you can't already buy cracked versions of this latest scheme there, I'm sure they'll be available shortly, and as with most anti-copying schemes, this one will only inconvenience the legit users, while bothering copyright violaters (those aren't pirates; pirates hijack ships, for crying out loud) not in the least.
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Actually, the point wasn't well made at all.
;-) has not been established at all. It may be true, it may not; at this point, we don't know. Having used rubber cement, I can tell you that it puts out a lot of fumes. The question, then, is how much more fumes would Spray Mount put out? The next question is, how harmful is it, really? Are the things released from rubber cement and spray mount persistent, or do they break down pretty quickly? If they're non-persistent, then it really doesn't much matter which you use, except a spray can is a bigger piece of garbage when empty.
Please consider:
Spray Mount, being a spray glue product (I gather; not being involved in art production, I'd never heard of it before), probably puts some glue particles in the air. Whether or not it puts significantly more in the air than rubber cement (used to cement rubbers, I suppose
The biggest problem with this argument, though, is the statement about Hummers. I find them to be ugly and also too large to be practical, and wouldn't want to drive one even I could have it for free. However, no one has established that a Hummer puts out significantly more emissions than, say, a picup truck or other SUV, or if it puts out any more emissions at all. I live in California, which has the toughest vehicle emissiosn standards in the United States, and Hummers pass California standards.
In light of that, I think the criticism is quite valid: he has not shown that Hummers pollute more than a pickup truck or other SUV, or that Spray Mount is a source of significantly more pollution than rubber cement. Both of those things may well be true, but no one has established that.
Plus, he couched it in language that would make a person just want to go out and use Spray Mount to spite him. Never a good move.
No, you have racism as a problem - black ghettos, far shorter life expectancy, huge numbers of black people in prison. Europe just does not have those problems.
We have poor people in all colors here, including white, and poor people all tend toward a shorter life expectancy than non-poor people who can afford better health care. That's not racism, it's just a sad fact of life.
In the particular case of the shorter life expectancy of blacks, do you know what the number one cause of that is? Black on black violence. It is absolutely not a matter of racism, it's a matter of young black males murdering other young black males.
With regard to prison statistics, here in California the prison population IIRC is about 1/3 hispanic, 1/3 black, and the rest are white and others. The population of California is not 1/3 black (although it might be in some states), and may be 1/3 hispanic or something near that. In LA it's nearly 50% hispanic. In other words, the percentage of hispanics and blacks in prison appears to exceed their percentage in society.
However, that is not racism.
Those people are in prison because they committed crimes, not because of their skin color! The white people in prison are in there for committing crimes, too. The police aren't racist and the courts aren't racist; if I commit a crime and get caught, I'm going to jail; being white isn't going to get me a free ticket out. Nor is my wife, who is not white, going to be wrongly accused and sent to prison because of her skin color. It just doesn't work that way. There was a time in this country when it did, even in my lifetime (I was born in the sixties) in some places, but it just isn't like that now.
That doesn't mean everything is perfect here, but it's not nearly as bad as some Europeans would like to claim.
WRT Israel, to stray off my theme a bit, there are some things that Israel does which I think are ill-considered, and some that are just wrong, but by and large, Israel is fighting for its right to exist. I, too, eventually hope to see a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a dismantling of the west bank settlements, in exchange for an ironclad peace agreement with all parties. That could bring a just end to the conflict. However, we all need to bear in mind that the only reason Israel holds the occupied territories is because they were captured in the 1967 War, a clearcut war of aggression by Israel's neighbors, whose intent was to exterminate Israel. Things didn't go according to plan, they got their asses completely kicked, and Israel has been holding the occupied territories ever since. I don't blame them. I would, too, for as long as my enemies were still trying to destroy me. If we consider that Israel is a nuclear power and is quite capable of destroying its enemies right now, I think they've acted with a great deal of restraint, overall.
A thing we also need to keep in mind are that the Palestinian refugees are such voluntarily; they fled Israel at the creation of the state, not because they Israelis kicked them out or were going to do anything to them, but because they refused to live under an Israeli government. The ones who stayed have done all right for themselves; the ones who left created their own predicament. The Israelis didn't do it to them, they did it to themselves. Meanwhile, they teach their innocent children to grow up hating Israelis who want nothing but to exist in peace and be left alone. It is not the Israelis who are the criminals here.
The Palestinians will get their own state eventually, in return for peace. But if they violate that peace and send more terrorists into Israel thereafter to blow up innocent people with suicide bombs, I would look the other way no matter what Israel did in retaliation.
Both parties ISP's logs will have records of the transfer and they will be able to sue whoever served them the song.
You've obviously never worked for an ISP. The information contained in RADIUS logs includes the IP address, the userid, the connecting phone number (if available), connection speed, etc.
Mail logs contain a record of mail you sent. Not the mail itself, of course, but your address, the recipient, timestamp, message ID.
Other than that, your ISP has no logs of what you're doing. Granted, an ISP that really wanted to do so could create programs that would log all packets from your IP address and then massage that into usable data like what applications you were using and what files you tranferred, etc., but this would be quite expensive in terms of hardware, programming time, lost customers after your customers found out you were doing it and all left, and in defending against all the lawsuits that would probably be filed.
I worked for ISPs for years and nothing like what you describe was ever done. Nobody would even contemplate something like that, not only for reasons of the expense, but because if you had such records, you'd be getting subpoenaed all the time.
If the RIAA did what you desribe, the target's ISP could only confirm whether that person was loggeg in at the time, and on what IP address.
In terms of those suits, it's basically a matter of the RIAA's word, plus circumstantial evidence. They are saying "This person downloaded, or made available for upload, all these songs." The ISP connection logs are crucial to their case, and a reason they go after the big file sharers: the need to go to court and say "This person made these files available at the following dates and times" and that has to correlate with the ISP's logs. If an RIAA lawyer can show thirty dates and times that a song was transferred and that person was logged on at that IP address on all thirty of those occassions, that's going to be sufficient proof to win a lawsuit.
Without ISP logs, it's just the RIAA's word against someone else, and winning gets a lot tougher. Access logs are very important to the RIAA's case, but they won't contain any direct evidence that you shared or received a file.
I work for a Brightmail competitor, and I find Richter's claim of cutting a whitelist deal with Brightmail to be completely implausible. They wouldn't do anything like that for the same reasons we wouldn't do anything like that:
1) If they were ever caught (and they probably would be, because their software integrates with your MTA, which means someone could reverse-engineer it or snoop traffic between the MTA and Brightmail), their competitors' sales departments would have a field day stealing their customers. The anti-spam business is growing rapidly, but it's very competitive. If any of the companies in this field cut a whitelist deal with a spammer and got caught, the others would eat their lunch;
2) Even if they didn't get caught, lowering their spam prevention effectiveness would cause complaints from their customers and make it harder to beat the competition in comparisons and they'd lose out in the marketplace. Competition is huge, and Brightmail is somewhat limited in that their system only works with some MTAs, whereas some other systems (such as ours) are completely MTA-agnostic, which means we can sell to anyone. They wouldn't dare take such a chance, nor would they trust the spammer to keep his mouth shut if he got in a tight spot. Spammers, after all, are fundamentally unethical people, and an anti-spam company would never trust one.
I don't believe his claim at all.
Something like 49% of all litigated patents are deemed invalid by the courts.
That number doesn't surprise me. After all, anyone sued for patent infringement will not actually let the case go to litigation unless they are pretty sure they can win. If 49% ("something like" is + or - how much?), that means that slightly more often than not, the defendant in patent litigation is defeated. That is, they erred in judging that they could win.
However, whether 49% is accurate or not, it's not a useful figure. It only tells us what percentage of litigated patent cases go against the patent holder. A useful number would be the percentage of patent cases that are litigated, from which we could determine what percentage of patents are invalidated, not what percentage of litigated patents are invalidated, which is to us a fairly useless statistic.
That's illegal!
I doubt it. Can you cite the law that says it's illegal for the president to sleep with a government employeer? I don't know if interns are really considered government employees, but either way, I rather doubt that anything illegal took place. Their relationship was consensual, so to prove any illegality, you'd have to establish that he used his office to force her into a sexual relationship. Monica Lewinsky has made no such allegation, AFAIK, so it was consensual. It was wrong, and I'm sure his wife ripped him a new orifice, but he didn't break the law when he had an affair. He broke the law when he lied under oath.
Bonus question to the
Hint: !Watergate
However, since his sex life had nothing to do with his job as President, I think he's entitled to lie about it, because IMHO the question should not have been asked.
I'm a Republican, and did think the whole impeachment thing was a waste of everyone's time and money and shouldn't have been done. Richard Nixon took actions worthy of impeachment; Bill Clinton did not.
However, I don't think it's justifiable to say that what happened with Monica Lewinsky was his own business and he had a right to lie about it.
First of all, it happened in the oval office. If I had sex with someone on my employer's premises, whether it was during business hours or not, I assure you that they would take interest in that, would have a right to question me about it, and would most likely fire me. Therefore, you can't defend his lie by saying "It was his personal life, so he had a right to lie."
If it happend in the residence section of the Whitehouse, you might be able to make that claim, but since it happened in the oval office, it means he not only had sex on company premises, but he was on duty at the time. IIRC, he even made a phone call to some member of the House or Senate while he was getting knob schlobbed under the desk by Monica. That makes it very much the public's business, and I certainly think a letter of censure was in order. It's only impeachment that was a bit much.
How do you know that he didn't own the place?
Umm, because he said so? The fact that the store had been in business since before either one of us had been born is another good indicator.
He was no expert at motor parts, either. He was a fool. Why is working in IT better? Well, let's see. By and large (I know, there are exceptions, don't bother quoting them; we all know or have known PHBs who are utterly overpaid for the harm they do), jobs that require more skill and intelligence, which often have fewer people who can do them because of this, have a supply and demand imbalance that makes them pay more than jobs which require less skill and intelligence. For example, what I do versus what he was doing.
However, you mistake me if you think I'm putting him down because he was behind a counter. As I said in my original reply, we were near poor and my parents couldn't afford college. I had to manage it on my own, through financial aid and paying my own way. I worked in fast food, residence hall cafeterias, as a carpet cleaner, all sorts of work that is generally considered lowly. Some of the people doing it were intelligent, some not. Most were hard-working and did an honest day's work. And that's fine.
Later, I was able to get a job in the campus tutoring center, and could work with my brain instead of my hands, helping other students. This also paid a lot better than any of those other jobs (that supply and demand thing, again), which really helped me.
My brother managed college on his own, too. He joined the military and was in for a total of almost eight years, and got Army College fund money. After he got out, he worked as a mechanic for several years to save more money for college. Good mechanics are very sharp people, and he was an outstanding one. My brother's a very smart guy, much smarter than I am.
The thing is, I'm not putting that guy down for the job he had. I'm putting him down because he thought he was so much better than everyone else and but that job was the best he could do. I'm putting him down for being an arrogant, elitist jock/surfer/pothead prick who thought people who studied and worked hard and kept out of trouble were a bunch of losers, and he was a winner. I guess we found out who the real winners and losers are.
BTW, regarding how much money they make. Yes, I have a very good idea how much they make. Remember, my brother was a mechanic (now he's in IT, and makes more than he did as a mechanic; a good dealer mechanic with 5 - 10 years on the
job probably makes more, but few others do). Parts clerks typically make more than minimum wage, but not by a lot. Garbage collectors do a lot better, ones who've been at it for a while probably make as much as I do, some may make more. Garbage collection is a poor example, though. Garbage collectors don't make money based on intelligence, or working hard (although most of them do), or any of the usual criteria. They make good money because it's a government job, and government jobs often pay more than private sector ones, and mostly because it's a smelly, dirty, and somewhat dangerous job that most people, because of the working conditions and perceived low prestige, wouldn't want (supply and demand again) unless the pay was high.
To close, I've never put down a person just because they had a blue-collar or minimum wage job. I've had lots of those myself. So has my brother. So did our parents, and their parents before them. I'm the first college graduate in my family. My brother was the second one, and we're both grateful for that opportunity, which no one in our family could ever afford before. I won't put anyone down for having a low-skill, blue collar job. But if someone's a stuck-up prick who thinks he's better than me and the best he can manage is a minimum-wage job, then yes, he's fair game.
In other words, it's not intellectual superiority that I'm really beat
Even if that happened, one fundamental fact would remain: that auto parts store was as high as my old tormentor had ever risen. So I'll still smile and feel a sense of justice, although your point is well taken.
# To appreciate and absorb their culture...we'd need a head wound.
(wow...that sounded kinda bitter, huh? Sorry, I need more caffeine.)
Actually, that pretty much sounded like reality. The jocks may have all thought we were dorks because we weren't "cool" or good at sports (mostly, we didn't even care about sports), but we had a whole different definition of cool, which involved things like having a brain that worked, and we thought the jocks were dorks, too, and disliked most of them intensely. Not just because they were bullies who thought they were better than everyone else, but for the very things they liked about themselves: they were "cool" and good at sports, but for most of them, that was all they had. For being nothing but "cool" and having skill in sports, we (rightly) thought of them as people of little consequence in the scheme of things. It's not for nothing that a lot of people think of "dumb jock" as one word. I'm sure they also thought of us as people of no consequence, but I guess it's turned out that we were right and they were wrong.
A rich kid from my high school went to college for free because he was 6'10" at 15 and got a basketball scholarship. He was a total prick, and didn't need the scholarship anyway because he was a rich kid.
I was near-poor and my parents really struggled to send my to a private high school. They couldn't afford college, but I went there almost for free too (and to a better school than he went to), not because I was good at sports but because I could think.
I remember one day a few years ago I was replacing ball joints on a 1970 383 Magnum Dodge Challenger I had at the time. I broke the tip off of a Snap-On flex handle because I had a ten-foot pipe on the end of it (those ball joints were old, and really, really tight!). All Snap-On tools have a lifetime warranty, but it was Sunday afternoon and that's a hard time to find a Snap-On truck. The flex handle in question is one my dad bought used when he was young, and must have been about 40 years old at the time, I guess it was due to break a tip :-)
Anyway, I needed a flex handle, so I went to an auto parts store over on the wrong side of the tracks, because I knew they had a pretty wide selection of tools. To my delight, one of my jock /surfer tormentors was working behind the counter there as a parts clerk. I kept the smirk off my face until I was back in my car, but then I laughed my ass off.
I know I should be bigger than that, but I couldn't help enjoying seeing how low the mighty had fallen :-)
And the flex handle? I got a new tip put on by a Snap-On dealer a few days later. They don't ask questions about why a tool broke, they just repair or replace it. Period.
Oops, that should have been "would lie about an athlete's skill" not "would like." That'll teach me to submit without previewing. Doh!
The rhyme above is sick and has now properly been modded down as flamebait. Now, about Rush Limbaugh. I dislike Rush Limbaugh quite strongly, and I'm a convervative. I can only imagine what liberals must thing of him. Then again, he talks like a conservative but acts like many a liberal (simply shouting down anyone with whom he disagrees, regardless of what the facts are), so I could be wrong and they might like him, or at least secretly admire him for doing their act so well. However, I think your "Why, hello there Rush Limbaugh" statement needs to be examined.
I'm not a football fan, and so don't recall the name of the quarterback in question or for which team he plays, but I do recall what Limbaugh said about him. His statement was (this is pretty close to a verbatim quote, and is certainly factually accurate) that (the quarterback) is being overrated by sports journalists because they want a black quarterback to be seen as succeeding.
This ignores some historical facts, such as the success of Warren Moon, who was an excellent quarterback and is famous enough that even I know who he is, and there have been/are other successful black quarterbacks, but again, I'm not a football fan and so can't name them.
It also impunes the journalistic integrity of the sports journalists about whom Rush was talking when he said that. He essentially stated that hsi fellow sports journalists, all of whom have far more experience in that line than he does and who probably also have more journalistic integrity than he does, would like about an athlete's skill in order to make him look good, and would do so because of his skin color. That's a pretty serious charge, and if I were one of those journalists, I would certainly take Limbaugh to task for it. For that matter, if I were one of his co-broadcasters during that game, I would have taken him to task for it right there on the air and made him defend that statement. Since Limbaugh is pretty bad at defending himself in a fair verbal fight, he probably would have fallen flat on his face.
What Limbaugh did not say, however, is "(The quarterback) is not a good quarterback because he's black" or "(The quarterback) is not as good as a white quarterback" or anything at all like that. He said that he thought (the quarterback) was overrated, and that the reason people were overrating him was that he was black. Some sort of a weird sportscaster affirmative action, effectively.
I dislike Rush Limbaugh for his hypocrisy in saying that drug users should be jailed, all the while himself he was addicted to prescription pain killers and apparently buying them illegally.
I dislike Rush Limbaugh for his hypocrisy in only allowing people to bring up opposing viewpoints on his show if those people are one or more of: A) Idiots B) Don't have their facts straight and haven't prepared for the debate at all; Rush has, and he'll eat them up and make them look like choice A; C) They may not be idiots and may know their facts, but are so poor at debating that we will still do B and make them look like A. If someone who is prepared, intelligent, and good at debate takes an opposing view and is beating Rush, the Limbaugh reaction is to just hang up on the person and often say something disparaging after the line is cut. I've heard it dozens of times, and the radio station where I listened to him only carried his show once a week for one hour. Think how often he must have done it for me to have heard it so many times.
I dislike Limbaugh for being a general self-affgrandizing blowhard and a really poor representative of conservatism, who ought to just shut up and go away.
However, I can't dislike Limbaugh for make a racist statement, because he did not make one. I don't know if he is a racist or not, but the statement was not racist. It was controversial, probably meant to be, a stupid thing to say and rude to his fellow sportscasters, so I can dislike him for those reasons, but I can't dislike him for a racist statement he did not make.
Believe me, it sticks in my throat to feel I have to defend Limbaugh for anything, but fair is fair.
Hmmm, well. I'm a conservative Republican, but not ashamed to say that Bill Clinton did a much better job than I expected. Granted, facing a hostile congress helped him immeasurably in that regard, but the fact remains that he did much better than I thought he would. I also detest Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.
However, what makes me a Republican is that much of the Democratic platform these days seems to indeed be very far from what the Founders had in mind for this country, and what is good for it. Plus, as a matter of fact, the heavily left-influenced parts of the Democratic Party do indeed come off sounding downright anti-American. I'm sure you've heard the refrain from the far left anytime the United States is involved in any war: other side good, US bad. It's about that simple. Sure, we were wrong in Viet Nam, but that doesn't mean we're always, or even mostly, wrong in war. There are wars that are justified and wars that are not. WW II and Korea clearly were. Grenada, IMO, was not. Afghanistan was fully justified. Heck, *anything* we did to AL Qaeda and the Taliban would have been justified (yes, I fully understand how broad is the scope of "anything) after Sep. 11. Iraq? I dunno. I thought it was a mistake, am still not convinced it wasn't. I don't think it was justifiable WRT international law without a further resolution from the UN Security Council. Whether anyone can pragmatically justify it will have to be judged by history. It's too soon to know right now.
Your questions regarding being unpatriotic and rendering the notion of a country meaningless are good ones, and the answers are not totally clear. Yes, there are certainly Americans who are not terribly patriotic. There are Americans, seemingly all from the far left, who genuinely seem to hate what this country is and what it stands for. The country was pretty united after Sep. 11 but has now slid back toward its more fractured self, like it was before that terrible event.
But does questioning whether or war is right or wrong, or whether we should be involved in it, make a person unpatriotic? Absolutely not. Indeed, it is the duty of a patriot to think seriously of those matters, and to consider not only whether war is right or wrong, but whether it is practically worth it even if it is justifiable.
There is, however, a great disconnect between much of the Democratic platform and much of the US electorate (in California, at least, I think Schwarzenegger's showing in the recall election indicates that there may be a disconnect with most of the electorate). The problem comes, in part, from the fact that the Democrats don't seem to know when to stop moving left. All they seem to know is that they want to be somewhere to the left of the Republicans.
The founders of this country were, for their time, flaming liberals, probably more relatively radical in their time than Marx was in his. Democracy? Unheard of? Rebel against the crown and secede from the British Empire to become an independent nation? Unthinkable? Freedom of speech? No taxation without representation? Absurd! Yet that's exactly what they did, and with some help from Britain's European enemies of the day, they pulled it off despite that fact that only about 1/3 of the colonials were really behind them, with 1/3 supporting the British and another 1/3 being uncommitted. They were the flaming radicals of their day.
It is that disconnect with the values held by so many people, not just political and religious values, but sometimes even values of common decency, that I think makes some, especially among the Republican right, question the loyalty of Democrats. What the Democratic party really needs to take from the great popularity of conservative talk radio and other manifestations of support for conservative Republicanism, is that they've slid way too far to the left, and if they want to be a serious contender they need to move back a lot farther toward the middle.
People want less rules and regulations, not mor
Dead on. If "Fsck MS" meant the same as "Fsck the US" well, that'd make the Microsoft Passport a bit to real for my tastes, I'll tell you that right now. Not that Bill and Monkeyboy haven't thought along those lines, I'm sure :-)
:-)
:-) ), but that they do need to get software piracy under control to meet trade agreement obligations, and realistically, the only way they can do that is to promote the use of Free Software.
As anyone who has been to VN can attest, America, Americans, and American goods are pretty popular there. The government even likes America. Granted, I'm sure the fact that they need economic development and America has lots of money factors into the government's desire for good relations with the United States, but there's more than that. People really and truly do not hold the war and the things we did against us; it's like with the United States and Japan: that was then, and this is now. Also, as like with the United States and Japan, it's a lot easier for the winner to be magnanimous; the US held things against VN a lot longer than they held things against us after the war ended.
I've been to some pretty remote parts of Viet Nam, even in very rural areas in the far north. One project I was involved in took me to a place where - I'm not kidding - I might have been the first westerner to set foot there since the French were driven out in the 1950s. I was a bit apprehensive of how people would think of me, a person from a former enemy state, up there. However, it was nothing to worry about. People of all ages were friendly and curious, moreso when they found out I was an American. Even the people at the local People's Committee office (the town hall) were friendly. And when they found out that my wife back home was an overseas VNese and that we had kids, they just had to see pictures. They thought our daughers were so cute as they passed the photos around that I got some inkling of what it must feel like to be a rock star
Most definitely, neither the VNese government nor the people have an anti-US attitude. I don't know they necessarily even have an anti-MS attitude (not that it would be a bad thing if they did, mind you
You can't keep a dark secret hidden for ever :-) Now, Australia does have an absolutely wonderful brew called Cooper's, to which I was introduced in Japan by an Aussie friend there. Absolutely terrific stuff, and unfiltered, so that you get some yeast in the bottle. I've yet to find it back here in LA - just one of the many reasons I more than slightly regret leaving Japan - but if I do, I'll bring home at least a case of it.
Some people in VN have them, but not many. Most people ride scooters. People with more money have Japanese ones of 125 CC or greater (the latest ones run from 150 - 200 CC, are watercooled, and are styled much like a sportbike), people without much money ride smaller (110 CC or less) scooters, much more basic and often Chinese-made. In the south, Japanese scooters are predominant; in the north, which is less economically developed, Chinese and Russian ones (still with Cyrillic writing on them!) are predominant. I never saw a Russian scooter in the south, which tells you all you need to know about the quality of Russian scooters :-)
You also see a lot of Russian trucks in the north, but never in the south. They look like they were built around WW II, and while it's possible some of them really were, I suspect that probably the factory just never changed its tooling, and the tooling does go back about that far.
Computer ownership is pretty common in VN. I wouldn't say that most people have one, but in Ho Chi Minh City, the most prosperous area of the country, a lot of people have them and there is a bustling computer store district with lots of parts shops. I wish American cities tended to have all the computer stores clustered together like Japan and VN do; it's fun and cool and convenient, and a great way to spend a few hours on a computer shop crawl. The VNese shops aren't as good for a crawl as the ones in Tokyo's Akihabara area, though.
On a side note WRT eastern languages, there is a company in Ha Noi that did a localized Red Hat clone called CMC Linux. I don't know if they're still around or not, I'm sure it must be really hard to sell even a single boxed set there, just like it is for MS. Unless they could build a consulting-based business, they'd never survive, I think.
Of course not. In the case of the H-1B, we have little or need for foreign tech workers right now; companies just want them because they will work for slave wages. Since there is no legitimate need, and they have no right to come here, under our laws, their laws, or international laws, suspend the program. Don't issue any new H-1Bs and don't renew any current ones when they expire.
How is doing away with the H-1B and not exporting jobs different? I think I've covered the H-1B, and not exporting jobs has nothing to do with the WTO or any other trade agreement. We have no agreement with India or any other country regarding free trade in jobs, nor should we have. When Americans are hurting for work and unemployment is high, we should be keeping our jobs at home and taking care of our own first. If we are at or near full employment and are truly hurting for workers, then we can talk about outsourcing or H-1Bs. However, nursing is the only field that comes to mind offhand where that is actually true; about a third of the nurses in California are from the Philippines, and if they weren't here those positions would simply go unfilled. I was unemployed for about three months earlier this year, and I remember being at a job fair and seeing a health care recruiting company with a sign on their booth that said that if you were an RN or LVN, show them your pay stub and they would beat that price by 20%, right there on the spot. IT was never like that, not even at the height of the dot-com bubble. The market was hot for a while, but not that hot. You could possibly argue that if not for the H-1B it would have been about the same, and you might be right. However, those days are past, and it's time for the H-1B to pass along with them.
In the case of the catfish, it's not that I necessarily think we *should* be importing them without protecting our domestic industry through tariffs, quotas, or both, it's that we did enter into that agreement and I believe that we must live up to both the letter and the spirit of it. If we don't like the agreement, then fine, repeal it. But if we're not going to repeal it, then as a matter of honor we'd better live up to it. We might have fewer enemies in the world if we lived up to the letter and spirit of our agreements and of the principles upon which this country was founded.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I was a strong free-trader myself, or that I believe everything the government says about it. Rather, what I meant to say was that the US government is the world's greatest public drumbeater for free trade. There is a significant gap between what they talk and what they walk.
Free trade agreements have their place, but I believe that place is between countries that are economic peers. For example, in North America there is a free trade agreement called NAFTA (Noth American Free Trade Agreement) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This is the agreement about which Ross Perot famously said, "Do you hear that great sucking sound? It's the sound of your jobs going south." (a near quote, possibly not exact). That's pretty much the way it turned out. All sorts of companies that didn't make things in Mexico before moved their manufacturing operations either wholly or partly to Mexico to take advantage of NAFTA and the cheaper labor there. Result: lots of American jobs went south. If Mexico would do something about the relentless tide of illegal aliens (maybe put their army on the border; if not, I'd be willing to put ours there instead of in Iraq) I might not quibble so much about that, but that's another topic.
There hasn't been much of a great sucking sound of American jobs going north to Canada, though, although prices are lower there by dint of the lower relative value of the Canadian dollar. The reason this hasn't happened is that Canada and the United States are economic peers: countries with advanced economies and equal standards of living. This has two effects: one, there isn't a large amount of immigration from one to the other, and what immigration does occur is generally not economically drive; two, companies do not tend to move their manufacturing operations from the United States to Canada, because while costs may be a little lower there, they aren't lower by a sufficient amount to justify moving the factory. Plus, unless the factory is in a northern area of the U.S., they would have to deal with a longer, colder, snowier winter, which means more days of weather-related plant closure because employees can't get to work, and less productivity. Because of those factors, a free trade agreement that only included the United States and Canada would work fine. So would free trade agreements between the US and Japan, and the US and the EU.
A free trade agreement between the US and a poor country, however, doesn't work so well. Lots of American jobs go there. It raises their boat, but lowers ours a good deal, which is not a good deal for us. We should seek to bring other countries up to our standard of living, not us down to theirs.
Actually, it's probably true. Remember that he is Irish. Trout and Salmon are indigenous in large numbers, but catfish, mostly a warm water fish, may not be. There are no snakes in Ireland, maybe no catfish either :-)
I'm not familiar with the ALCOA case. Was it truly dumping, or was it simply a case of Russian companies having lower costs and being able to undercut Alcoa? If Russian manufacturers were in fact dumping aluminum (or aluminium, for those of you across the water, where they spell it correctly :-) ), then government action to protect American companies would be wholly justified. Indeed, the government would be remiss in its duty if it failed to act. If it was just a matter of competition under a free trade agreement that we had not only signed, but pushed, that would be another matter.
Quickly changing horses, or at least racetracks, to farm subsidies now. I actually have no real problem with farm subsidies. Why? Well, I lived in Japan for a long time, and the Japanese government has a policy of rice self-sufficiency. This policy exists, to the best of my knowledge, for no other crop.
When I moved to Japan in 1994, it was the year following a very poor rice crop, and the government took the unusual step of importing Thai rice to make up for a shortfall. Some very good rice is grown in Thailand, but that stuff was horrid. My girlfriend and I had to mix it with Japanese rice to make it palatable. Do I think they imported the worst rice they could find, just to make sure that people didn't develop a taste for foreign rice? Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, could be.
Normally, foreign rice just wasn't seen in Japan back then. It was a closed market. That's how extraordinary the importation of Thai rice was.
When I left Japan in 2002, things had changed somewhat. You could buy California-grown Japanese rice varieties at a price lower than natively grown rice, but it wasn't common and most supermarkets didn't have it. Rice from other countries was rarer still. If you went to a Thai restaurant, you might get Thai rice (or not; the more expensive ones might have it), but you'd never see it in a store.
Why is this so? Well, Japan still maintains a nearly closed rice market. The entire rice crop every year is bought by the government and re-sold to commercial dealers. Rice is heavily subsidized, and the subsidy works by the government paying a figure many times higher than world market rate (I've heard 20 times, but can't confirm whether or not that figure is accurate; however, at a Nijiya supermarket here in LA, I saw 25 lb. bags of California-grown short-grain rice selling for about what you'd pay for a 2 kg (4.4 pound) bag of good Japanese rice in Japan). This allows Japanese rice farmers to make a profit where they otherwise almost certainly wouldn't, and allows Japan to sustain rice self-sufficiency.
Which brings me to why I support farm subsidies. The United States imports, of course, a great deal of its food products, and is nowhere near agriculturally self-sufficient. However, if all of our sea lanes were cut off and/or other countries just wouldn't sell us food because of , we could get by without starving, even if belts would be tight for a while, and agricultural production could be quickly ramped up under a declared state of emergency which would allow for expansion of farmlands without regard to environmental laws.
To sustain that level of domestic food production and that ability to rapidly increase it in time of need (such as a major, protracted world war), farm subsidies are necessary. An enemy cannot use the threat of starvation against us as long as we grow our own food.
There is also another, more humane, reason for farm subsidies. If the United States scrapped all subsidies and nearly all farmers quit farming because they couldn't make a living at it, our food imports would soar until we were importing nearly all our food. We could and would pay to dollar for it, of course. What choice would there be? Seeing that crops could be exported to the United States far more profitably than they could be kept at home, many farmers in poor countries would be growing cash crops for the export market rather than food crops for their o
I think it's pretty safe to assume that you have never been to either Viet Nam or China. If you had, you would know that a lot of American and other foreign goods are purchased there. I'll speak mostly of Viet Nam, because I know it well. My wife is a VNese-American, and my work took me to VN for the best part of a year.
What do you see on the streets of Viet Nam? Foreign motor vehicles, everywhere. Mostly Korean or Japanese, along with some European ones (chiefly Mercedes Benz) and a few American ones, including Harley Davidson motorcycles. Buy a cell phone there? It will be a foreign brand; they don't have any domestic ones. Coke and Pepsi and their assorted brands are big there. IBM, HP, and Cisco are all there, and they all sell hardware. All the other computer hardware in VN is foreign, too. There are no domestic makers. I bought my first Philips monitor there, and it was great. Philips became my brand of choice in monitors, edging out even the Japanese makers.
VN mostly exports raw materials and semi-finished products to the US, not finished products. They import finished products back.
If you want to talk about fairness, ask me about the catfish debacle. Thanks, I'm glad you asked.
Viet Nam has lots of catfish. There is a big domestic market, and they have plenty to spare, so they developed an export market, and a lot of those fish go to the United States, where they sell at a very good price. So, what happens next in the US, that great advocate of international free trade? Well, US catfish farmers cry foul, and cry it loud and long to their representatives in government.
In response, the government, that great advocate of free trade, tries to accuse VN of dumping catfish. Ridiculous. Viet Nam is a poor country, and many of the people raising and selling those catfish are themselves poor, and the rest are far from rich. They can't afford to dump. Viet Nam either has to sell a product at a profit or not even produce it. The dumping ploy fails, so guess what they try next?
They pass a law that says you can't call it a catfish unless it is a member of one of the indigenous North American catfish species, such as a Channel Catfish. The VN catfish must now be labeled as "Basa." As a fisherman and person who just tries to be fair, this makes me want to puke. I know perfectly well what a catfish looks like, and I have seen the ones in VN. They are definitely catfish. Any icthyologist could tell you the same, so I'm sure many of them are also busy staring into the porcelain aquarium.
I'm embarrased that my government, arguably the world's greatest proponent of free trade and the WTO, only wants to play by the rules it forces onto others when it feels like it. If WTO rules would ever not be advantageous to the United States, the government will cook up some scheme to make an end run around them. I don't believe they are alone in this, but as the world's greatest economic power and greatest advocate of free trade, the violations and hypocrisy seem particularly egregious.
The reasons the United States has trade deficits with Viet Nam, China, Japan, Taiwan, and a host of other places, include simple economics (the United States is rich and things are relatively expensive; Viet Nam is poor and things are dirt cheap, so we can afford to buy their stuff a lot more than they can afford to buy ours), and the fact that US companies voluntarily "outsourced" (a code word for "screwed American workers and the U.S. industrial base by sending their jobs and our manufacturing capacity overseas") production of practically everything they sell to China and other countries with low labor costs. No foreign government, democratic or otherwise, bears any blame for this; it was entirely voluntary. Go into a US store and try to buy some electrical or mechanical appliance that wasn't made in China. In the event that you should succeed, try to find one that was made in the USA. You will almost certainly fail. If it was made here, it was probably onl
Shouldn't that be a Beowulf cluster of pigs? :-)
Just one question: which was there first, the chicken farm or your house? If your house was there first, go after the guy to get his ducks in a row (sorry, couldn't help it). If the chicken farm was there first, you have no cause for complaint.
There's a chicken farm near where my brother lives (Lakeside, California). It's been there for decades, since there was nothing but other farms and open land within a mile or more of the place (it's a small one, only a few thousand chickens, tops, and some Emus). So genius developer buys a piece of land immediately adjacent to the chicken farm and builds condos on it. The farmer puts up a huge sign on his land warning of the occassional stench (cleaning up the chicken poop or something) and that he was there first, so if you're considering buying one of the condos, understand that he has no intention of moving or closing his farm, and you have no cause for complaint, so either don't buy or just deal with it.
Needless to say, a bunch of the wankers who bought condos there anyway are trying to get his farm shut down. It's a shame the Cedar fire didn't get to them, while so many decent people lost their homes.
IANAL, blahblahblah, however, I really doubt if selective enforcement bars the FSF, or any other GPL licensor, from much of anything. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in East Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, knows that illegally copied software is the exception, not the rule. It's not easily found in Japan, and Singapore has cleaned it up a lot so that it's underground now (in 1998, there was a large bootleg CD shop in the Singapore's largest computer & electronics mail, and street vendors sold them all over the place from long tables; in 2000 when I was there, that shop was gone and so were the street vendors. I'm sure some are still there, but it's been driven largely underground.
In many countries - I can cite Vietnam as one example, because I lived there, bootleg software is the rule, rather than the exception. I would estimate that (much) less than 10% of the installed basis of Windows (all versions) and MS Office is legitimately licensed. The percentage for any other applications, including Photoshop, Corel Draw, Norton AV, etc., etc., must be much closer to zero. I don't know if it's even possible to buy legit copies of them. I never saw a shop selling legit copies of anything, including Windows, although you can probably get that in some places; Microsoft does have a business presence in Vietnam. You can, though, buy bootleg CDs chock full of anything you want, including Exchange Server, IIS, etc., for about $1 a piece.
Microsoft, being one of most astute companies ever for business sense and marketing, is surely aware of this and is just as surely turning a blind eye to it. They know the masses, many of whom make $100 a month or less, can't afford MS license fees, and rigorous enforcement attempts would only drive people to Linux, if those enforcement attempts were really successful. As it is, Linux has very tough sledding in Vietnam because hardly anyone sees a cost benefit in it b/c Windows, Exchange, MS SQL Server, etc., are essentially free (as in beer). Linux is present in Vietnam, but it's not well known outside of a small niche.
However, this utter lack of enforcement throughout much of the world - if you take into account how many countries have computer users who can't really afford MS license fees, there may be more illegal than legal installs of Windows out there - doesn't seem to prevent Microsoft in any way from enforcing its license terms in countries where copyright law is strong and enforceable, and people have money to pay for the licenses.
In short, no one, not even SCO, could take that argument against the GPL seriously.
On a lighter note, I have a friend who works in Salt Lake City. Every day on his commute, my friend passes the SCO offices. Every day on the commute, the bird is flipped to SCO. My friend has an acquaintance who works in a customer service job at SCO, and that person (sorry, can't even reveal gender here) says that it's hell. All customers do is bitch about SCO's suit against Linux. Apparently, they are not only angering the entire Linux community and playing chicken with a semi truck while driving a moped themselves, but they're not making themselves too popular even with their own customers.
After IBM crushes SCO like a bug in court, then buys the company for pennies on the dollar in the Chapter 11 sale and fires good ol' Darl, he's going to have really trouble finding a job :-) Granted, he won't need one b/c he has enough money from exercising SCO stock options that he could walk away right now and never work again and it wouldn't matter. But still, he'll be virtually unemployable when IBM is finished.
Absolutely correct, this PITA from Adobe will do nothing to stop illegally copying of their products.
I lived in Viet Nam for a while and did some consulting there, and I noticed a very peculiar thing. Everywhere I went, installed versions of Windows, Photoshop, MS Office, Exchange, whatever, almost always had the same serial number. If a new version was released, regardless of any protection that version might have, a crack was on the street at CD shops in no time. People tell me China is the same way, and most of the stuff in Viet Nam probably actually comes from China, at least orginally. Then it gets locally duplicated. The better ripoffs actually have the manufacturer's art duplicated on the CD. The cheaper ones were just plain old CDRs.
If you can't already buy cracked versions of this latest scheme there, I'm sure they'll be available shortly, and as with most anti-copying schemes, this one will only inconvenience the legit users, while bothering copyright violaters (those aren't pirates; pirates hijack ships, for crying out loud) not in the least.