The Brazilian government is really good in announcing things, but not really good in making them happen.
PP said:
Ethanol.
Wonderfully understated. But in this case, taking it further is interesting. So here I go...
Brazil's government has achieved a bunch of really aggressive goals in recent years. Let's start with the ones in energy independence...
* Ethanol is a viable fuel, being based on sugar cane and not corn. It's been that way for a while now.
* New cars in Brazil are now sold with engines that are equally happy burning gasoline or ethanol or a mix (or, with a conversion, natural gas - see below)
* Natural gas, originally imported via a pipeline from Bolivia, and now with big reserves found in Brazil, presents another alternative fuel with environmental, financial, and geopolitical advantages over petroleum. The pipeline was announced and then successfully executed. Exploiting Brazil's own natural gas was a new challenge. The programs were announced and then successfully executed.
* Over 95% of Brazil's electrical energy comes from hydroelectric plants. Hydroelectric projects were announced and then executed successfully.
* Total independence from foreign petroleum. Planned, announced, done.
Changing from energy, there are other things, like the...
* massive migration to FOSS going on since the early days of the Lula government (2003-present). I saw with my own two eyes huge numbers of Linux desktops at ITI (Information Technology Institute) and other government offices in 2005-2007. This one is still in the process of happening, and faces very well-funded opposition (from MS and friends), but despite that, it's been successful. Announced and made to happen.
* A more stable (and, not coincidentally, better-regulated) banking system than the one in the USA
* Health care policy that has basically done away with the black market for transplant organs, maintained the viability of what is widely considered the best AIDS policy in the world, and brought the benefits of generic drugs to the Brazilian people. All planned, announced, and executed successfully.
* A GROWING middle class. Tens of millions of people have joined the middle class of Brazil in the last several years. Growing the middle class is often a stated goal, but rarely achieved as spectacularly as it has been in Brazil in recent years
* I would also mention that the Brazilian government paid off close to $20B in loans early just in the year 2005, meeting the goal of reducing foreign debt, which the previous governments seemed to love, and saving something on the order of 10^9 dollars in interest payments. Goal announced, goal achieved.
Every place has its advantages and disadvantages, and wherever you go, the deal is the same: you've got to try to make the most of the advantages and minimize the effects of the disadvantages. Brazil's advantages and disadvantages are different from those of the US. But to say the Brazilian government isn't good at making things happen is just wrong. I hate to pull out a mean word, but here it is: saying the Brazilian government, especially in the last several years, isn't good at making things happen, is just plain ignorant.
In early 2003, the US invaded Iraq to save the world from Saddam Hussein's supposed stocks of weapons of mass destruction, and to fight a war against terrorism and bring peace, stability, and democracy to the Middle East. I remember the announcements. I also remember announcements of how the economic policy would continue US economic dominance into the 21st Century. I'm a US citizen, so I know the answer to this question as I ask it: how are those goals workin' out for ya? Is terrorism down in the last several years? Was the haul of WMDs worth the multi-trillion dollar cost of the stupidest war ever, plus the destabilization of the region? I guess by mentioning the destabiliz
Already the currency makes a difference and adding the fact that IBM is known to be very cheap in pay here makes a great savings plan..
IBM is known for paying relatively low salaries in other places. In Brazil, even IBM employees will tell you their salaries are lower than what they could get in the market. Some are there because they like the "security" of a big company. But most are there because IBM gives them a lot of training. A lot of people make references to "faculdades IBM" (something like "IBM University"). A lot of people go there, get training and work experience, and then go and find other jobs or start businesses with their beefed-up resumes.
I mentioned that to a friend of a friend who was working at IBM somewhere in California. He told me it was the same thing for him and a lot of his coworkers. They knew they could get better salaries in the market than they were getting at IBM at the time, but all the training and experience they got at IBM made it worthwhile as a stepping stone to other positions at other companies.
The point is that IBM paying relatively low salary is by no means unique to Poland. But depending on the cost (in, say, dollars) of things like development of software of the same quality that would be developed elsewhere, there could be some growth in places where salaries and the overall quality of available developers in the market can make it worthwhile to have development done there.
Also, in places where IBM's business is growing quickly, for whatever reason, there could be growth even when jobs are being cut overall.
I always love to see people with an axe to grind against the United
States so eager to so utterly trivialize the Japanese. They are not
a people to be trifled with, especially in war. All of this historical
revisionist nonsense about how they were all ready to give in is so
disrespectful to them individually and as a separate and independent
culture and nation.
The Germans didn't give in so easily. They were fighting street to
street all the way to Berlin even when all that was left were old
men and boys. Why should we expect any less of the Japanese?
You're like some fundie that selectively chooses what part of scripture they will acknowledge.
Funny you should say that about the selective quotation of scripture. Your "analysis" ignores the United States Army Air Forces' own Strategic Bombing Survey on the atomic attacks, which produced a report that stated, among other things, the following (boldface emphasis mine):
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion (of Japan) had been planned or contemplated.
Further, it is clear that leaders in the US had signs of this before the Strategic Bombing Survey was completed. Japanese codes had been cracked, and messages were being intercepted. The Allies knew that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow had been ordered to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had been talking about surrendering a year before that, and the Emperor himself had started suggesting in June of 1945 that alternatives to fighting to the end should be considered.
Interesting fact: the Russians had agreed to declare war on Japan 90 days after the end of the European war. The actual date of the end of the European war meant that the Russians were due to declare war on Japan on the 8th of August of 1945.
I RTFA (I know, right? I must be new here), and the story does go into the possibility of the government using more "open source" software, but it also goes into how the Obama Administration will be more "open source" in other ways.
Errol Louis of the New York Daily News... described Mr Obama as "our first open source President, a leader willing to let anybody and everybody figure out how, when and where they want to get involved."
He noted that the strategy popularised by computer software companies in giving away software to get others to improve on it has now been applied to politics.
Indeed the new Change.gov website is said to be a portal for "interactive government" and "open source democracy."
OSI President Michael Tiemann says:
"I think what we will see now is a maturation in America and around the world of an understanding of the open source model."
This article suggests that Obama's style of governing will employ lessons learned from FOSS, and this will improve the prospects for FOSS because people will come to understand the open source model as part of the Obama Administration's way of doing business. Additionally, the government actually using a lot more FOSS would add to the credibility of FOSS solutions among the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft)" crowd, and any cost savings actually achieved by the government can only make risk-averse decision-makers more likely to give FOSS solutions a shot. All these factors would be very good for FOSS adoption, greatly helping FOSS developers and vendors of FOSS-based solutions. In return, in addition to the model being applied to opening the government and seeking suggestions and solutions in the community, the cost savings could be significant enough to help with the serious budget problems coming in the next few years.
The US Federal government already had huge budget problems, with enormous structural deficits that will only get worse as health care costs, and therefore Medicare spending, continue to grow. Additionally, the handouts to financiers who caused the economic crisis have added $700 billion to the deficit, and an economic stimulus plan will add hundreds of billions more. Even with a 16-month withdrawal from Iraq, the costs of continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the deployment of more resources in Afghanistan, can add hundreds of billions more.
Health care reform will probably involve, in addition to bigger changes, the standardization of electronic formats and computer systems to generate administrative cost savings, another opportunity for FOSS solutions using open formats to be used, further bolstering the image of open formats and open (source) software. Further, the cost of proprietary software in the Federal government is large enough that cost savings from using FOSS, even after training and migration costs are considered (support costs should be similar or cheaper, given that there can be actual competition among providers of support for FOSS), could be significant, helping the Obama Administration with the challenge of starting to cut the deficit in 2011 and 2012, after the bank handouts and economic stimulus, temporary and huge increases, come out of the budget.
Good tip for folks in the US, but I'm an expat and Hulu won't let me see videos, but will be happy to let me know by e-mail if and when they make a deal to allow US TV shows to be shown in my region.
I agree with the parent post's basic point, but disagree on terminology. It was better marketing that made the iPod dominate the portable digital music player market in a way that still seems difficult to believe.
The thing is that most people use the term "marketing" as a synonym for "advertising," which it isn't. The most important work done by good marketers is in identifying and understanding the target market segment and developing products that will sell. Many people seem to associate "marketing" with convincing people to buy something, which can often be evil if it's something harmful or crappy. But proper marketing work in the development of products is not only not evil, it's good! That kind of work allows for the development of products that people actually want to buy and that give them satisfactory experiences. Apple has been great at that kind of marketing in the second Jobs era, and that's why it has had so many "hits" and some of them have been so huge. The iPod is not the digital music player with the most features and doesn't support music file formats like Vorbis, and Apple doesn't make iTunes for Linux. But for out-of-the-box ease of use, nothing comes close to an iPod, especially for non-geeks. Apple saw that there was a large potential for a simple player with a decent storage capacity, simple controls, and easy music management and synchronization. It's easy to come up with features you wish the iPod-iTunes combo had, but iPods continue to dominate the market even after others have had opportunities to copy what's good about the iPod and iTunes and add whatever features they thought would make their offerings "iPod killers."
With the iPod and iTunes, Apple hit the "sweet spot" where the player was just good enough technically and had just enough features, and the set was easy enough to use that everyone except the most rabid anti-Apple zealots found something to like. I have a friend who still carries an irrational hatred for Apple, left over from the days of 6502 machines in the 1980s (C=64 owner who for some reason felt he had to hate Apple machines), and even he has an iPod. He, like me, is a nerd, and he did try some other digital music players, but the iPod-iTunes experience is sufficiently better that even he had to swallow bile and buy an iPod. And the thing is that while I don't know how much of this is because of Jobs, Apple has hit that "sweet spot" repeatedly with different products since Jobs returned.
I wasn't saying anyone should say that to somebody who figures there has to be a "catch" if something is free. I just question whether one should tell the skeptical party something incorrect about FOSS, and I made the point to the person who posted that his or her assertion about the "catch" of FOSS was incorrect. I'm pretty sure the poster knew that and completely sure the poster can understand that while the basic idea is good, he or she might look for an accessible argument that is factually correct.
I think other posters, when they have mentioned things like charity or helping neighbors or kids, have gotten closer to an easily accessible argument about how something free can be worthwhile without misrepresenting what FOSS is and how it works. When talking to a business-minded person, one can talk about the business model being different from the one used by proprietary software companies and even get into terms like "commoditization" that such people enjoy hearing.
If he asks for the catch, tell him where the catch is.
When you improve the software even a tiny bit, you have to give it away for free too.
Not necessarily. You can make whatever changes you want to GPL software without having to "give away" the modified version (i.e., distribute source code) as long as you don't distribute the binary based on the modified code. The GPL only requires the modified source code to be distributed if the modified executable is distributed. An "in-house" application can use GPL code without having to distribute the alterations.
And you can modify BSD-licensed code and include it even in distributed binaries without having to distribute the modified code. All you have to do is be sure the distributed binary reproduces the copyright notice and disclaimer from the original code.
Would love to save $$$ with OSS, but the software I need (robust, full-featured POS system) is non-existent. Bummer.
That's weird. Here in Brazil, most POS solutions (that's "Point of Sale," not "Piece of $#!+") are Windows-based, but I found a few Linux-based solutions, of which some were Free Software and some were proprietary. The best one, called Stoq, does everything I want, and it's real Free Software, so if I want to have it modified or customized, I can get the source code and adapt it myself or pay somebody to do it, or I can hire the company that makes Stoq to make the modifications for me. If they find the modifications interesting enough to add to the product in general, I might not even get charged for the alterations.
One thing that's nice about Stoq is that as of the next version, which is due in January, I will have functionality that most of the proprietary solutions don't offer. It has to do with credit and debit card transactions. There are two ways to do that here. One is called, confusingly enough, POS (but to be fair, I should mention that Point of Sale is usually expressed in Portuguese - Ponto de Venda and is therefore usually abbreviated PdV or PDV). Under POS, the store owner has to rent separate machines for each major credit card brand (VISA and Mastercard are the two main brands, with a few others available). Under the other standard, TEF (from the abbreviation of "electronic funds transfer" in the Portuguese word order), the store has to have a single pinpad with a card reader, which is then used for transactions involving any kind of card.
TEF can be done a couple of different ways. For retailers with ten or more points of sale, it's worthwhile to have "Dedicated TEF," with a server that provides the communication between the points of sale and, via a dedicated X.25 connection, the credit card providers. For smaller retailers, a dedicated TEF solution is not worth what it costs. Smaller retailers wanting to use TEF have, until recently, been restricted to "dial-up TEF," and further, because of the fact that the only company approved to supply TEF dialers is a Microsoft partner, there were no non-Windows TEF dialers, so smaller retailers were restricted to Windows-based solutions in order to be able to use TEF.
It is ridiculous to have to use a dial-up solution in 2008, especially in places like Sao Paulo. TEF over IP exists, but there are still relatively few solutions in the market. Stoq will have TEF over IP available starting in January, just as free-as-in-beer AND free-as-in-speech as the rest of Stoq. The retailer will still need to pay the providers for the service, but the monthly cost to be able to provide transactions using all the card providers available in Brazil on a TEF over IP solution is less than the cost of renting a single card machine from a single card provider for a POS solution.
Anyway, given that there are good Free Software POS solutions available in Brazil, I would imagine such things are also available in the USA. "Non-existent" is a pretty strong claim.
The story quotes a climate modeler from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, CA. To anyone who speaks Portuguese, that name is pretty funny in the context of global warming. "Caldeira" means "boiler" in Portuguese.
Yes, Barack Obama, by mentioning arugula, has shown he is the elitist among the major party candidates.
John McCain, on the other hand, is just chock-full of mavericky goodness and simple values, and isn't elitist at all, despite the fact that he and his wife own a private jet and 8-12 homes on 8 properties (McCain says he doesn't know... it must be hard to keep track), spent $273,000 on household employees last year, and THIS JUST IN: own 13 cars. Oh, and despite McCain's claims that he has only bought American cars all his life, those cars include a Honda, a Lexus, and a Volkswagen, and also in the family is the Prius he boasted about his daughter buying just last year when he was pandering to voters with different concerns.
Oh, and Cindy McCain may have worn a $313,100 outfit on the first night of the Republican convention and said you just can't get around Arizona without a private plane, but trust the people who brought you the Iraq war: she's as down-to-Earth and "simple folk" as they come.
Those "uppity" Obamas, with their one house, on which they got a better-than-average mortgage deal (gasp!) based on Obama's senate income and book proceeds, have one car for the family. And both Obamas paid for their education with student loans, with Barack, who was raised by a single mother and his grandparents, ending up as president of the Harvard Law Review. John McCain, the son and grandson of Navy Admirals, was practically the definition of a legacy admission at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Yeah, that arugula comment really tells the whole story of who's an elitist.
That's more than a joke. It's one of the basic principles of project management, as collected by the Project Management Institute.
They put it a little differently, (here's another view of it for a fixed scope, which is the specific case to which the parent post refers), but the basics are what the parent said.
You're not the only one. I identified a niche in the ice cream market in Brazil that was ripe for the taking, and I worked for a while on a business plan to get investment to start an ice cream factory and make half-liter containers (just larger than pints) of ice cream to sell to retail chains.
After a while, I realized that I was going to have to deal with investors or partners who might not share my vision. I've seen too many businesses that could have been very successful while being loyal to their employees and not destructive to their environments and communities, but failed to act in this way, following instead the "conventional wisdom" of today's businesses. If the business wasn't immediately profitable, its investors would insist on cutting costs. The cuts would generally come from the employee salary budget and from differentiators. So the businesses cut good employees and cut out differentiators, leaving their products without a chance to win in the market, except in a price war, which nobody really wins.
I decided to start small, with a single ice cream shop. That allowed me to start the business with my own money and have total autonomy to make decisions they way the parent poster does. If it is successful, I will expand to other shops, probably moving the manufacturing part to a small factory in one of the smaller cities between Sao Paulo and Campinas. I hope to have loyal employees, and the way I hope to do that is by holding up the business's end of the bargain, giving them a pleasant and fulfilling work environment and good salaries. In return, I hope to have less employee churn, meaning less expenditures on recruiting and training, and higher quality from the work of experienced employees.
Obviously, I want to make a profit from my business, but I don't have to try to squeeze every possible advantage in the bean-counter sense of minimizing costs to try to stretch margins. Steady profits would be a very favorable result for me, unlike a publicly traded (or venture capital-backed) company, which is always in the unsustainable position of being obligated to have ever-increasing profits.
I could have made more money more quickly if I had gone the VC route, but I am very happy I didn't. I'm improving the lives of the people who work for me, making exactly the products I want, with the highest-quality ingredients and the best possible sanitary conditions. I am also striving to keep my shop involved in the community that represents most of its customers, treating them as my neighbors rather than carriers of money to be hurried out of the shop as soon as they've paid. If I were running the company with investor money, I would have to compromise on all those points, and they simply aren't negotiable.
When you talk about "someone higher up the food chain," are you saying you would prefer autodidacts as coders, but a CS graduate as a software architect?
If so, I agree that's a good basic rule, but please don't forget the lessons from sitcoms and kids' books: don't judge a book by its cover, and don't jump to conclusions about people. I've met CS grads who are outstandingly productive coders, and I've met CS grads who are idiots who shouldn't be trusted with anything tech-related. I've met self-taught programmers who were great coders, others who were good even at the "higher up the food chain" tasks, and others who should have chosen some other field.
When retailers started applying mathematical models to store layout and pricing, based on consumer behavior ("beer and diapers" turned out to be a myth, but it's a good search string if you want to read up on the early work that led to today's automation of more aspects than you might imagine of retail business), some friends and I had a similar reaction. We wanted to coordinate and do things like buy socks and a specific flavor of gum together, so the correlations would show up in the retailers' analysis of their sales databases.
I've never worked at IBM, but I've known people who did, including my ex-wife, back when we were married.
I'm not sure about elsewhere, but here in Brazil, IBM attracts employees. One is by being multinational tech giant. People who value stability and like to say they're in a big company (there's a lot more of that than I ever would have imagined) are attracted by that image. Back in 2000, when my then-wife was at IBM, I knew one person (a woman, but not my then-wife) who got PMP certification and had done a lot of training at IBM, and was getting a lot of attention from headhunters. She was given the opportunity to interview for a job with twice (TWICE) the salary of the job she then had at IBM, but didn't even try to find out more about the company or go to the interview because, in her words, "I've already got a nice little career at IBM, so I'm going to stay." My first thought was that IBM, like most other publicly traded companies, would "downsize" by purging a four- or five-digit number of jobs, and would do it without blinking. That is, IBM would be nowhere near as loyal to this person and thousands like her as she was being to IBM. The thing is that I realized she believed her job was safe because the company is big, and if I had said what I was thinking, we would end up in an argument how well her job at IBM might weather tough times, and her image of IBM's stability was much too deeply rooted for me to change it.
The other thing about IBM that attracted people to work there is that IBM was known for giving its employees lots of training. Here in Brazil, a lot of tech people I met made frequent mentions of "Faculdades IBM" (roughly, "IBM University"). It was a place you went and earned a salary while learning new skills and new technologies free. Yes, the salary was less than you could earn at another job, but the training made it worthwhile, because after a few years at IBM, you could find a much higher-paying job with your new skills and experience. IBM was kinda screwing up by letting its employees get away, and that was largely because annual salary adjustments for loyal employees were small enough that even some of the stability-seekers were tempted to look elsewhere.
When I was back in the US for the last time before moving to Brazil, which means somewhere between April and June of 2000, I met a friend of friends who was working at IBM somewhere in California. I told him about the "IBM University" image the company had in the Brazilian high-tech market. He told me it was similar in the US. I mention that it was only one person, because this may not be generally true, but in the view of this one friend of my friends, it was. In fact, he told me he was earning a lot less than similarly-qualified friends, and some had even tried to get him to go and work with them, but he had a multi-year plan involving lots of training and experience at IBM before hitting the job market. He wanted to have a resume with training and experience that would get him the job he wanted without the job-hopping approach his friends were taking. Again, this was what one IBM employee told me in 2000, so I don't want to generalize.
All the problems mentioned in the parent post, plus some real jerks who were managers, plus some really ridiculous rules imposed on employees (gawd, the e-mails parodying those rules were hilarious, and I knew enough people at IBM Brasil to get several copies of each), contributed to IBM Brasil's less-than-ideal work environment. But IBM was able to keep recruiting even good employees because the employees, for one reason or another, believed it was worth dealing with that. The people whose thinking was stuck in Brazil's more unstable economic past valued the perceived stability of having a job at IBM and being able to proudly tell people they worked at an enormous company enough to deal with the negative aspects of working there. I'm the opposite of these "corporate size queens;" I never liked working at a company larger than a given size. Given
I've found that once you have a certain level of proficiency in a language, you don't even need to tell people. My experience is in South America, not Europe, but when I would give technical presentations about cryptographic security or network synchronization here, sometimes the customers would start out speaking English to me, but once I started the presentation in Portuguese or spoke briefly with one of my colleagues in Portuguese and the customer reps noticed that I could really speak, they switched over to Portuguese immediately.
Sorry to seem negative, but if my (limited, Holland/Belgium) experience is anything to go by, you will fail to learn the language in these countries. Certainly, despite attempts, I ended up with little more than a smattering of Dutch.
This doesn't surprise me.
I lived in a French-speaking canton of Switzerland for five months in 1987, and I have visited the following countries where English is not the native language: Italy; Monaco (OK, OK, but it was kinda cool); Austria; Czechoslovakia, which doesn't exist anymore, but it did when I went in '87; Germany; Denmark; the Netherlands; France; Spain; Portugal; Greece; Chile; and Brazil. Chile was just a ski trip, and Greece was the only country I visited with a group, but even there I did get out and wander on my own and talk to locals. In Greece I had to use English, and in Chile I used Portuguese first, then some combination of Portuguese, English, and gestures if Portuguese didn't work. I have lived in Brazil for a bit more than eight years. Also, I spent several years in universities in the US, getting a B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in physics. While I was in academia, I met a lot of foreign students.
And in all this experience meeting people who speak English as a second language, I have to say that the Dutch are the ones whose English has impressed me the most. I've met individuals from other countries who speak English really well, including some who could pass for native speakers, but I have yet to meet a Dutch person whose English was anything less than excellent. I think foreign language education in the Netherlands must be really good.
I just noticed that the top-scoring Republican on the CNet tech voter guide page is "Senator George Allen." Wha? Jim Webb beat him 2 years ago and has been serving in the Senate since January of 2007. So that made me look more carefully. This is a 2006 voter guide. So the numbers may have changed a lot since the page was created.
John McCain could have a COMPLETELY different rating by now, because there's almost no substantive issue on which he hasn't reversed his position at least once in the last ten years. For example, McCain was against using the military for "nation-building" (never mind that that was never the mission in Bosnia anyway) when Clinton was president, and was against the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy when they were proposed and passed, but has obviously completely reversed his positions on both those issues and a number of others. For example, McCain was for outlawing abortion before he was against it (when he wanted to be a "maverick," bucking the Republican Party's position) before he was for it again (when he needed votes from the "Christian Right" in the current presidential campaign).
So what do we have in TFS? The use of a flawed means of analyzing Biden's tech voting record; the omission of the more relevant comparison of Obama and McCain, leaving the Biden numbers in a vacuum, looking scarily low for us tech nerds, even if we put aside the flawed nature of the rating; and the use of a page from 2006 to make this argument.
Seriously, I hope the schwag is really good, and not just cheesy "McCain 2008" mugs or T-shirts or something.
I have to give the modern (post-Reagan) Republican Party credit. They have the most amazing, unbroken party unity I've ever seen. This year, Bush's deep unpopularity has some Republican members of Congress (e.g., Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon) running away from Bush and pretending they've been endorsed by Obama. And the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Republican members of Congress to run away from the Republican brand in this year's election. But still, when they need a vote in Congress for legislation a Republican president wants, they command party unity that would be the envy of the Chinese Communist Party of the 1970s. And this despite the Republican voter coalition consisting of at least three distinct parts whose interests are often at odds with each other. There's the Christian Right, which would have the government legislate their version of "what God wants," the libertarian Goldwater types, and the "Rockefeller Republicans," who tend to be socially liberal, at least in relative terms in the 21st Century USA, but conservative on economic issues. You would think this coalition would have fractured, but the Rs have managed not only to hold it together for a quarter-century, but actually strengthened it, taking over all three branches of government for about half of this decade. Meanwhile, the Democrats never seem to muster that kind of unity. Clinton and Carter, the last two Democratic presidents, had a lot of problems with Democratic-majority Congresses. Will Rogers famously said that he did not belong to any organized political party - he was a Democrat. As Homer Simpson would say, "it's funny because it's true." OK, there are signs that Howard Dean and Obama are transforming the party, but I can't imagine it ever being the complete lock-step monolithic voting the Republican Party has been for the last 20 years or so.
Oh noes! The Democratic vice presidential candidate only got a 37.5 rating from the CNet technolgy voter guide.
Here are a couple of basic facts omitted by the submitter: Obama got a 50.00% rating and McCain got a 31.25% rating.
Given that that information was available via two clicks on the same page that yielded Biden's rating, and given that the positions of the presidential candidates is a lot more important than the positions of the VP candidates, one has to wonder why the submitter didn't find those details worth mentioning.
Additionally, Obama made it very clear before he announced his choice of Biden that he wanted a VP candidate who would engage him in discussions about issues, disagree with him, and challenge his assumptions. Here's an example, in Obama's own words:
Let me tell you first what I won't do. I won't hand over my energy policy to my vice president, without knowing necessarily what he's doing. I wont have my vice president engineering my foreign policy for me. The buck will stop with me, because I will be the president. My vice president, also by the way my vice president also will be a member of the executive branch, he won't be one of these 4th branches of government where he thinks he's above the law. But here's what I do want from my vice president, I want somebody who has integrity, who's in politics for the right reasons, I want somebody who is independent. Somebody who is able to say to me, 'you know what, Mr. President, I think you're wrong on this and here's why' and will give me (applause) who will help me think through major issues and consult with me, would be a key advisor. I want somebody who is capable of being president and who I would trust to be president. That's the first criteria for vice president. And the final thing is I want a [vice] president who shares with me a passion to make the lives of the American people better than they are right now. I want someone who is not in it just because they want to have their name up in lights or end up being president. I want somebody who is mad right now, that people are losing their jobs. And is mad right now that people have seen their incomes decline, and want to rebuild the middle class in this country. That's the kind of person that I want; somebody who in their gut knows where they came from and believes that we have to grow this country from the bottom up.
I apologize if this reduces the number of McCain troll points for somebody interested in getting some McCain campaign schwag.
I added the bold text for emphasis in the Obama quote above.
Another thing: a voting record is useful for evaluating a congresscritter, but not via a simple number. It requires more careful analysis. This is because a congressvarmints will sometimes vote for positions he opposes when the defeat of those positions is assured, but the positions are popular with the congressvarmint's constituents (or the opposite: vote against a position he supports when passage is assured without his vote). And while both members of the House of Representatives and Senators both do that, Senators have yet another trick because of the existence of the filibuster in the Senate. An example is Senator Joe Lieberman, who voted with the Republicans for cloture (i.e., to end the Democratic filibuster) on the nomination of Samuel Alito the Supreme Court. Since it was known that the Republicans had enough votes to rubber-stamp Bush's nomination of Alito, the vote that mattered was the cloture vote. After that, Lieberman cast his vote against confirming Alito, so he could tell the voters in Connecticut, an overwhelmingly Democratic state, that he had voted against Alito. If you were just to look at the confirmation vote, you might think Lieberman had been against confirming Alito, but on the vote that mattered, he voted with the Republicans.
Slashdot Mirror
PP said:
Wonderfully understated. But in this case, taking it further is interesting. So here I go...
Brazil's government has achieved a bunch of really aggressive goals in recent years. Let's start with the ones in energy independence...
* Ethanol is a viable fuel, being based on sugar cane and not corn. It's been that way for a while now.
* New cars in Brazil are now sold with engines that are equally happy burning gasoline or ethanol or a mix (or, with a conversion, natural gas - see below)
* Natural gas, originally imported via a pipeline from Bolivia, and now with big reserves found in Brazil, presents another alternative fuel with environmental, financial, and geopolitical advantages over petroleum. The pipeline was announced and then successfully executed. Exploiting Brazil's own natural gas was a new challenge. The programs were announced and then successfully executed.
* Over 95% of Brazil's electrical energy comes from hydroelectric plants. Hydroelectric projects were announced and then executed successfully.
* Total independence from foreign petroleum. Planned, announced, done.
Changing from energy, there are other things, like the...
* massive migration to FOSS going on since the early days of the Lula government (2003-present). I saw with my own two eyes huge numbers of Linux desktops at ITI (Information Technology Institute) and other government offices in 2005-2007. This one is still in the process of happening, and faces very well-funded opposition (from MS and friends), but despite that, it's been successful. Announced and made to happen.
* A more stable (and, not coincidentally, better-regulated) banking system than the one in the USA
* Health care policy that has basically done away with the black market for transplant organs, maintained the viability of what is widely considered the best AIDS policy in the world, and brought the benefits of generic drugs to the Brazilian people. All planned, announced, and executed successfully.
* A GROWING middle class. Tens of millions of people have joined the middle class of Brazil in the last several years. Growing the middle class is often a stated goal, but rarely achieved as spectacularly as it has been in Brazil in recent years
* I would also mention that the Brazilian government paid off close to $20B in loans early just in the year 2005, meeting the goal of reducing foreign debt, which the previous governments seemed to love, and saving something on the order of 10^9 dollars in interest payments. Goal announced, goal achieved.
Every place has its advantages and disadvantages, and wherever you go, the deal is the same: you've got to try to make the most of the advantages and minimize the effects of the disadvantages. Brazil's advantages and disadvantages are different from those of the US. But to say the Brazilian government isn't good at making things happen is just wrong. I hate to pull out a mean word, but here it is: saying the Brazilian government, especially in the last several years, isn't good at making things happen, is just plain ignorant.
In early 2003, the US invaded Iraq to save the world from Saddam Hussein's supposed stocks of weapons of mass destruction, and to fight a war against terrorism and bring peace, stability, and democracy to the Middle East. I remember the announcements. I also remember announcements of how the economic policy would continue US economic dominance into the 21st Century. I'm a US citizen, so I know the answer to this question as I ask it: how are those goals workin' out for ya? Is terrorism down in the last several years? Was the haul of WMDs worth the multi-trillion dollar cost of the stupidest war ever, plus the destabilization of the region? I guess by mentioning the destabiliz
Already the currency makes a difference and adding the fact that IBM is known to be very cheap in pay here makes a great savings plan..
IBM is known for paying relatively low salaries in other places. In Brazil, even IBM employees will tell you their salaries are lower than what they could get in the market. Some are there because they like the "security" of a big company. But most are there because IBM gives them a lot of training. A lot of people make references to "faculdades IBM" (something like "IBM University"). A lot of people go there, get training and work experience, and then go and find other jobs or start businesses with their beefed-up resumes.
I mentioned that to a friend of a friend who was working at IBM somewhere in California. He told me it was the same thing for him and a lot of his coworkers. They knew they could get better salaries in the market than they were getting at IBM at the time, but all the training and experience they got at IBM made it worthwhile as a stepping stone to other positions at other companies.
The point is that IBM paying relatively low salary is by no means unique to Poland. But depending on the cost (in, say, dollars) of things like development of software of the same quality that would be developed elsewhere, there could be some growth in places where salaries and the overall quality of available developers in the market can make it worthwhile to have development done there.
Also, in places where IBM's business is growing quickly, for whatever reason, there could be growth even when jobs are being cut overall.
I always love to see people with an axe to grind against the United States so eager to so utterly trivialize the Japanese. They are not a people to be trifled with, especially in war. All of this historical revisionist nonsense about how they were all ready to give in is so disrespectful to them individually and as a separate and independent culture and nation.
The Germans didn't give in so easily. They were fighting street to street all the way to Berlin even when all that was left were old men and boys. Why should we expect any less of the Japanese?
You're like some fundie that selectively chooses what part of scripture they will acknowledge.
Funny you should say that about the selective quotation of scripture. Your "analysis" ignores the United States Army Air Forces' own Strategic Bombing Survey on the atomic attacks, which produced a report that stated, among other things, the following (boldface emphasis mine):
Further, it is clear that leaders in the US had signs of this before the Strategic Bombing Survey was completed. Japanese codes had been cracked, and messages were being intercepted. The Allies knew that the Japanese ambassador in Moscow had been ordered to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had been talking about surrendering a year before that, and the Emperor himself had started suggesting in June of 1945 that alternatives to fighting to the end should be considered.
Interesting fact: the Russians had agreed to declare war on Japan 90 days after the end of the European war. The actual date of the end of the European war meant that the Russians were due to declare war on Japan on the 8th of August of 1945.
OSI President Michael Tiemann says:
This article suggests that Obama's style of governing will employ lessons learned from FOSS, and this will improve the prospects for FOSS because people will come to understand the open source model as part of the Obama Administration's way of doing business. Additionally, the government actually using a lot more FOSS would add to the credibility of FOSS solutions among the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft)" crowd, and any cost savings actually achieved by the government can only make risk-averse decision-makers more likely to give FOSS solutions a shot. All these factors would be very good for FOSS adoption, greatly helping FOSS developers and vendors of FOSS-based solutions. In return, in addition to the model being applied to opening the government and seeking suggestions and solutions in the community, the cost savings could be significant enough to help with the serious budget problems coming in the next few years.
The US Federal government already had huge budget problems, with enormous structural deficits that will only get worse as health care costs, and therefore Medicare spending, continue to grow. Additionally, the handouts to financiers who caused the economic crisis have added $700 billion to the deficit, and an economic stimulus plan will add hundreds of billions more. Even with a 16-month withdrawal from Iraq, the costs of continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the deployment of more resources in Afghanistan, can add hundreds of billions more.
Health care reform will probably involve, in addition to bigger changes, the standardization of electronic formats and computer systems to generate administrative cost savings, another opportunity for FOSS solutions using open formats to be used, further bolstering the image of open formats and open (source) software. Further, the cost of proprietary software in the Federal government is large enough that cost savings from using FOSS, even after training and migration costs are considered (support costs should be similar or cheaper, given that there can be actual competition among providers of support for FOSS), could be significant, helping the Obama Administration with the challenge of starting to cut the deficit in 2011 and 2012, after the bank handouts and economic stimulus, temporary and huge increases, come out of the budget.
Good tip for folks in the US, but I'm an expat and Hulu won't let me see videos, but will be happy to let me know by e-mail if and when they make a deal to allow US TV shows to be shown in my region.
I agree with the parent post's basic point, but disagree on terminology. It was better marketing that made the iPod dominate the portable digital music player market in a way that still seems difficult to believe.
The thing is that most people use the term "marketing" as a synonym for "advertising," which it isn't. The most important work done by good marketers is in identifying and understanding the target market segment and developing products that will sell. Many people seem to associate "marketing" with convincing people to buy something, which can often be evil if it's something harmful or crappy. But proper marketing work in the development of products is not only not evil, it's good! That kind of work allows for the development of products that people actually want to buy and that give them satisfactory experiences. Apple has been great at that kind of marketing in the second Jobs era, and that's why it has had so many "hits" and some of them have been so huge. The iPod is not the digital music player with the most features and doesn't support music file formats like Vorbis, and Apple doesn't make iTunes for Linux. But for out-of-the-box ease of use, nothing comes close to an iPod, especially for non-geeks. Apple saw that there was a large potential for a simple player with a decent storage capacity, simple controls, and easy music management and synchronization. It's easy to come up with features you wish the iPod-iTunes combo had, but iPods continue to dominate the market even after others have had opportunities to copy what's good about the iPod and iTunes and add whatever features they thought would make their offerings "iPod killers."
With the iPod and iTunes, Apple hit the "sweet spot" where the player was just good enough technically and had just enough features, and the set was easy enough to use that everyone except the most rabid anti-Apple zealots found something to like. I have a friend who still carries an irrational hatred for Apple, left over from the days of 6502 machines in the 1980s (C=64 owner who for some reason felt he had to hate Apple machines), and even he has an iPod. He, like me, is a nerd, and he did try some other digital music players, but the iPod-iTunes experience is sufficiently better that even he had to swallow bile and buy an iPod. And the thing is that while I don't know how much of this is because of Jobs, Apple has hit that "sweet spot" repeatedly with different products since Jobs returned.
I wasn't saying anyone should say that to somebody who figures there has to be a "catch" if something is free. I just question whether one should tell the skeptical party something incorrect about FOSS, and I made the point to the person who posted that his or her assertion about the "catch" of FOSS was incorrect. I'm pretty sure the poster knew that and completely sure the poster can understand that while the basic idea is good, he or she might look for an accessible argument that is factually correct.
I think other posters, when they have mentioned things like charity or helping neighbors or kids, have gotten closer to an easily accessible argument about how something free can be worthwhile without misrepresenting what FOSS is and how it works. When talking to a business-minded person, one can talk about the business model being different from the one used by proprietary software companies and even get into terms like "commoditization" that such people enjoy hearing.
Not necessarily. You can make whatever changes you want to GPL software without having to "give away" the modified version (i.e., distribute source code) as long as you don't distribute the binary based on the modified code. The GPL only requires the modified source code to be distributed if the modified executable is distributed. An "in-house" application can use GPL code without having to distribute the alterations.
And you can modify BSD-licensed code and include it even in distributed binaries without having to distribute the modified code. All you have to do is be sure the distributed binary reproduces the copyright notice and disclaimer from the original code.
That's weird. Here in Brazil, most POS solutions (that's "Point of Sale," not "Piece of $#!+") are Windows-based, but I found a few Linux-based solutions, of which some were Free Software and some were proprietary. The best one, called Stoq, does everything I want, and it's real Free Software, so if I want to have it modified or customized, I can get the source code and adapt it myself or pay somebody to do it, or I can hire the company that makes Stoq to make the modifications for me. If they find the modifications interesting enough to add to the product in general, I might not even get charged for the alterations.
One thing that's nice about Stoq is that as of the next version, which is due in January, I will have functionality that most of the proprietary solutions don't offer. It has to do with credit and debit card transactions. There are two ways to do that here. One is called, confusingly enough, POS (but to be fair, I should mention that Point of Sale is usually expressed in Portuguese - Ponto de Venda and is therefore usually abbreviated PdV or PDV). Under POS, the store owner has to rent separate machines for each major credit card brand (VISA and Mastercard are the two main brands, with a few others available). Under the other standard, TEF (from the abbreviation of "electronic funds transfer" in the Portuguese word order), the store has to have a single pinpad with a card reader, which is then used for transactions involving any kind of card.
TEF can be done a couple of different ways. For retailers with ten or more points of sale, it's worthwhile to have "Dedicated TEF," with a server that provides the communication between the points of sale and, via a dedicated X.25 connection, the credit card providers. For smaller retailers, a dedicated TEF solution is not worth what it costs. Smaller retailers wanting to use TEF have, until recently, been restricted to "dial-up TEF," and further, because of the fact that the only company approved to supply TEF dialers is a Microsoft partner, there were no non-Windows TEF dialers, so smaller retailers were restricted to Windows-based solutions in order to be able to use TEF.
It is ridiculous to have to use a dial-up solution in 2008, especially in places like Sao Paulo. TEF over IP exists, but there are still relatively few solutions in the market. Stoq will have TEF over IP available starting in January, just as free-as-in-beer AND free-as-in-speech as the rest of Stoq. The retailer will still need to pay the providers for the service, but the monthly cost to be able to provide transactions using all the card providers available in Brazil on a TEF over IP solution is less than the cost of renting a single card machine from a single card provider for a POS solution.
Anyway, given that there are good Free Software POS solutions available in Brazil, I would imagine such things are also available in the USA. "Non-existent" is a pretty strong claim.
Those who don't remember can play a Free version.
There are versions available on the project's download page for Windows, OSX, BSD, and Linux.
The story quotes a climate modeler from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, CA. To anyone who speaks Portuguese, that name is pretty funny in the context of global warming. "Caldeira" means "boiler" in Portuguese.
Yes, Barack Obama, by mentioning arugula, has shown he is the elitist among the major party candidates.
John McCain, on the other hand, is just chock-full of mavericky goodness and simple values, and isn't elitist at all, despite the fact that he and his wife own a private jet and 8-12 homes on 8 properties (McCain says he doesn't know... it must be hard to keep track), spent $273,000 on household employees last year, and THIS JUST IN: own 13 cars. Oh, and despite McCain's claims that he has only bought American cars all his life, those cars include a Honda, a Lexus, and a Volkswagen, and also in the family is the Prius he boasted about his daughter buying just last year when he was pandering to voters with different concerns.
Oh, and Cindy McCain may have worn a $313,100 outfit on the first night of the Republican convention and said you just can't get around Arizona without a private plane, but trust the people who brought you the Iraq war: she's as down-to-Earth and "simple folk" as they come.
Those "uppity" Obamas, with their one house, on which they got a better-than-average mortgage deal (gasp!) based on Obama's senate income and book proceeds, have one car for the family. And both Obamas paid for their education with student loans, with Barack, who was raised by a single mother and his grandparents, ending up as president of the Harvard Law Review. John McCain, the son and grandson of Navy Admirals, was practically the definition of a legacy admission at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Yeah, that arugula comment really tells the whole story of who's an elitist.
That's more than a joke. It's one of the basic principles of project management, as collected by the Project Management Institute.
They put it a little differently, (here's another view of it for a fixed scope, which is the specific case to which the parent post refers), but the basics are what the parent said.
You're not the only one. I identified a niche in the ice cream market in Brazil that was ripe for the taking, and I worked for a while on a business plan to get investment to start an ice cream factory and make half-liter containers (just larger than pints) of ice cream to sell to retail chains.
After a while, I realized that I was going to have to deal with investors or partners who might not share my vision. I've seen too many businesses that could have been very successful while being loyal to their employees and not destructive to their environments and communities, but failed to act in this way, following instead the "conventional wisdom" of today's businesses. If the business wasn't immediately profitable, its investors would insist on cutting costs. The cuts would generally come from the employee salary budget and from differentiators. So the businesses cut good employees and cut out differentiators, leaving their products without a chance to win in the market, except in a price war, which nobody really wins.
I decided to start small, with a single ice cream shop. That allowed me to start the business with my own money and have total autonomy to make decisions they way the parent poster does. If it is successful, I will expand to other shops, probably moving the manufacturing part to a small factory in one of the smaller cities between Sao Paulo and Campinas. I hope to have loyal employees, and the way I hope to do that is by holding up the business's end of the bargain, giving them a pleasant and fulfilling work environment and good salaries. In return, I hope to have less employee churn, meaning less expenditures on recruiting and training, and higher quality from the work of experienced employees.
Obviously, I want to make a profit from my business, but I don't have to try to squeeze every possible advantage in the bean-counter sense of minimizing costs to try to stretch margins. Steady profits would be a very favorable result for me, unlike a publicly traded (or venture capital-backed) company, which is always in the unsustainable position of being obligated to have ever-increasing profits.
I could have made more money more quickly if I had gone the VC route, but I am very happy I didn't. I'm improving the lives of the people who work for me, making exactly the products I want, with the highest-quality ingredients and the best possible sanitary conditions. I am also striving to keep my shop involved in the community that represents most of its customers, treating them as my neighbors rather than carriers of money to be hurried out of the shop as soon as they've paid. If I were running the company with investor money, I would have to compromise on all those points, and they simply aren't negotiable.
Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not an evaluator of confessions! But yes, I'll argue his precious Vulcan logic with him...
When you talk about "someone higher up the food chain," are you saying you would prefer autodidacts as coders, but a CS graduate as a software architect?
If so, I agree that's a good basic rule, but please don't forget the lessons from sitcoms and kids' books: don't judge a book by its cover, and don't jump to conclusions about people. I've met CS grads who are outstandingly productive coders, and I've met CS grads who are idiots who shouldn't be trusted with anything tech-related. I've met self-taught programmers who were great coders, others who were good even at the "higher up the food chain" tasks, and others who should have chosen some other field.
Hmmm... But it's not two-top, one-bottom. RTFA!
Still, what I thought is this: they found a two-strange bottom? Yawn. I've already seen pictures of one o' those.
When retailers started applying mathematical models to store layout and pricing, based on consumer behavior ("beer and diapers" turned out to be a myth, but it's a good search string if you want to read up on the early work that led to today's automation of more aspects than you might imagine of retail business), some friends and I had a similar reaction. We wanted to coordinate and do things like buy socks and a specific flavor of gum together, so the correlations would show up in the retailers' analysis of their sales databases.
I've never worked at IBM, but I've known people who did, including my ex-wife, back when we were married.
I'm not sure about elsewhere, but here in Brazil, IBM attracts employees. One is by being multinational tech giant. People who value stability and like to say they're in a big company (there's a lot more of that than I ever would have imagined) are attracted by that image. Back in 2000, when my then-wife was at IBM, I knew one person (a woman, but not my then-wife) who got PMP certification and had done a lot of training at IBM, and was getting a lot of attention from headhunters. She was given the opportunity to interview for a job with twice (TWICE) the salary of the job she then had at IBM, but didn't even try to find out more about the company or go to the interview because, in her words, "I've already got a nice little career at IBM, so I'm going to stay." My first thought was that IBM, like most other publicly traded companies, would "downsize" by purging a four- or five-digit number of jobs, and would do it without blinking. That is, IBM would be nowhere near as loyal to this person and thousands like her as she was being to IBM. The thing is that I realized she believed her job was safe because the company is big, and if I had said what I was thinking, we would end up in an argument how well her job at IBM might weather tough times, and her image of IBM's stability was much too deeply rooted for me to change it.
The other thing about IBM that attracted people to work there is that IBM was known for giving its employees lots of training. Here in Brazil, a lot of tech people I met made frequent mentions of "Faculdades IBM" (roughly, "IBM University"). It was a place you went and earned a salary while learning new skills and new technologies free. Yes, the salary was less than you could earn at another job, but the training made it worthwhile, because after a few years at IBM, you could find a much higher-paying job with your new skills and experience. IBM was kinda screwing up by letting its employees get away, and that was largely because annual salary adjustments for loyal employees were small enough that even some of the stability-seekers were tempted to look elsewhere.
When I was back in the US for the last time before moving to Brazil, which means somewhere between April and June of 2000, I met a friend of friends who was working at IBM somewhere in California. I told him about the "IBM University" image the company had in the Brazilian high-tech market. He told me it was similar in the US. I mention that it was only one person, because this may not be generally true, but in the view of this one friend of my friends, it was. In fact, he told me he was earning a lot less than similarly-qualified friends, and some had even tried to get him to go and work with them, but he had a multi-year plan involving lots of training and experience at IBM before hitting the job market. He wanted to have a resume with training and experience that would get him the job he wanted without the job-hopping approach his friends were taking. Again, this was what one IBM employee told me in 2000, so I don't want to generalize.
All the problems mentioned in the parent post, plus some real jerks who were managers, plus some really ridiculous rules imposed on employees (gawd, the e-mails parodying those rules were hilarious, and I knew enough people at IBM Brasil to get several copies of each), contributed to IBM Brasil's less-than-ideal work environment. But IBM was able to keep recruiting even good employees because the employees, for one reason or another, believed it was worth dealing with that. The people whose thinking was stuck in Brazil's more unstable economic past valued the perceived stability of having a job at IBM and being able to proudly tell people they worked at an enormous company enough to deal with the negative aspects of working there. I'm the opposite of these "corporate size queens;" I never liked working at a company larger than a given size. Given
I've found that once you have a certain level of proficiency in a language, you don't even need to tell people. My experience is in South America, not Europe, but when I would give technical presentations about cryptographic security or network synchronization here, sometimes the customers would start out speaking English to me, but once I started the presentation in Portuguese or spoke briefly with one of my colleagues in Portuguese and the customer reps noticed that I could really speak, they switched over to Portuguese immediately.
This doesn't surprise me.
I lived in a French-speaking canton of Switzerland for five months in 1987, and I have visited the following countries where English is not the native language: Italy; Monaco (OK, OK, but it was kinda cool); Austria; Czechoslovakia, which doesn't exist anymore, but it did when I went in '87; Germany; Denmark; the Netherlands; France; Spain; Portugal; Greece; Chile; and Brazil. Chile was just a ski trip, and Greece was the only country I visited with a group, but even there I did get out and wander on my own and talk to locals. In Greece I had to use English, and in Chile I used Portuguese first, then some combination of Portuguese, English, and gestures if Portuguese didn't work. I have lived in Brazil for a bit more than eight years. Also, I spent several years in universities in the US, getting a B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in physics. While I was in academia, I met a lot of foreign students.
And in all this experience meeting people who speak English as a second language, I have to say that the Dutch are the ones whose English has impressed me the most. I've met individuals from other countries who speak English really well, including some who could pass for native speakers, but I have yet to meet a Dutch person whose English was anything less than excellent. I think foreign language education in the Netherlands must be really good.
Ahhh.. Tchoooo! BZZZZZZT!
Ow! Dammit! Friggin electro-flu!
I just noticed that the top-scoring Republican on the CNet tech voter guide page is "Senator George Allen." Wha? Jim Webb beat him 2 years ago and has been serving in the Senate since January of 2007. So that made me look more carefully. This is a 2006 voter guide. So the numbers may have changed a lot since the page was created.
John McCain could have a COMPLETELY different rating by now, because there's almost no substantive issue on which he hasn't reversed his position at least once in the last ten years. For example, McCain was against using the military for "nation-building" (never mind that that was never the mission in Bosnia anyway) when Clinton was president, and was against the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy when they were proposed and passed, but has obviously completely reversed his positions on both those issues and a number of others. For example, McCain was for outlawing abortion before he was against it (when he wanted to be a "maverick," bucking the Republican Party's position) before he was for it again (when he needed votes from the "Christian Right" in the current presidential campaign).
So what do we have in TFS? The use of a flawed means of analyzing Biden's tech voting record; the omission of the more relevant comparison of Obama and McCain, leaving the Biden numbers in a vacuum, looking scarily low for us tech nerds, even if we put aside the flawed nature of the rating; and the use of a page from 2006 to make this argument.
Seriously, I hope the schwag is really good, and not just cheesy "McCain 2008" mugs or T-shirts or something.
I have to give the modern (post-Reagan) Republican Party credit. They have the most amazing, unbroken party unity I've ever seen. This year, Bush's deep unpopularity has some Republican members of Congress (e.g., Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon) running away from Bush and pretending they've been endorsed by Obama. And the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Republican members of Congress to run away from the Republican brand in this year's election. But still, when they need a vote in Congress for legislation a Republican president wants, they command party unity that would be the envy of the Chinese Communist Party of the 1970s. And this despite the Republican voter coalition consisting of at least three distinct parts whose interests are often at odds with each other. There's the Christian Right, which would have the government legislate their version of "what God wants," the libertarian Goldwater types, and the "Rockefeller Republicans," who tend to be socially liberal, at least in relative terms in the 21st Century USA, but conservative on economic issues. You would think this coalition would have fractured, but the Rs have managed not only to hold it together for a quarter-century, but actually strengthened it, taking over all three branches of government for about half of this decade. Meanwhile, the Democrats never seem to muster that kind of unity. Clinton and Carter, the last two Democratic presidents, had a lot of problems with Democratic-majority Congresses. Will Rogers famously said that he did not belong to any organized political party - he was a Democrat. As Homer Simpson would say, "it's funny because it's true." OK, there are signs that Howard Dean and Obama are transforming the party, but I can't imagine it ever being the complete lock-step monolithic voting the Republican Party has been for the last 20 years or so.
Here are a couple of basic facts omitted by the submitter: Obama got a 50.00% rating and McCain got a 31.25% rating.
Given that that information was available via two clicks on the same page that yielded Biden's rating, and given that the positions of the presidential candidates is a lot more important than the positions of the VP candidates, one has to wonder why the submitter didn't find those details worth mentioning.
Additionally, Obama made it very clear before he announced his choice of Biden that he wanted a VP candidate who would engage him in discussions about issues, disagree with him, and challenge his assumptions. Here's an example, in Obama's own words:
I apologize if this reduces the number of McCain troll points for somebody interested in getting some McCain campaign schwag.
I added the bold text for emphasis in the Obama quote above.
Another thing: a voting record is useful for evaluating a congresscritter, but not via a simple number. It requires more careful analysis. This is because a congressvarmints will sometimes vote for positions he opposes when the defeat of those positions is assured, but the positions are popular with the congressvarmint's constituents (or the opposite: vote against a position he supports when passage is assured without his vote). And while both members of the House of Representatives and Senators both do that, Senators have yet another trick because of the existence of the filibuster in the Senate. An example is Senator Joe Lieberman, who voted with the Republicans for cloture (i.e., to end the Democratic filibuster) on the nomination of Samuel Alito the Supreme Court. Since it was known that the Republicans had enough votes to rubber-stamp Bush's nomination of Alito, the vote that mattered was the cloture vote. After that, Lieberman cast his vote against confirming Alito, so he could tell the voters in Connecticut, an overwhelmingly Democratic state, that he had voted against Alito. If you were just to look at the confirmation vote, you might think Lieberman had been against confirming Alito, but on the vote that mattered, he voted with the Republicans.
(and the person who was falling isn't killed by the sudden deceleration of being caught by the superhero)
Yeah, that drives me and my friend Gwen Stacy nuts too!
That said, maybe you didn't get the memo. It turns out superhero movies and TV shows are not documentaries.
Click here for a little background if who don't know why I mentioned my friend Gwen Stacy.