In the US product placement on television is prohibited under the FCC sponsorship identification requirements of 47 U.S.C. 317 and 508, and 47 C.F.R. 73.1211. My wife used to be Director of Marketing of a well known consumer goods manufacturer. She says that back in her day TV placement for gratis product was already common, but the shows didn't even ask for money, probably more because it devalued advertising slots than because they were afraid of the FCC.
Hollywood, without advertisers or the FCC to answer to, was never so shy. She didn't pay them, because she was always able to place gratis product, but they always asked.
oh and don't forget his claim that "I remember my mother singing the union songs as she rocked me." LOL yea right! The guy was so book smart that it ruined him. Gore's tall tales was a form of speaking called "creative licence". But that only works when your audience knows that's what you are doing ie... same kind/class/educated group of people. To a general audience and in the age of sound bites it was just flat out stupid to do.
Where I come from they call that form of speaking a "joke." Gore was addressing a Teamsters confereence in Vegas when he said, "I still remember the lullabies I heard as a child." Then, with perfect comic timing but terrible pitch sang, "Look for the union label..." Apparently the teamsters were of the "same kind/class/educated" because it brought the house down.
This was a non-story. He told a union joke to a union crowd and got a big laugh. Who cares?
Interestingly, the internet Al Gore pushed for and the Internet that came about were essentially two different things. What he tried to get created would have been essentially restricted to schools and educational materials, and scientific institutions. An education friendly "information highway." The last thing Gore actually wanted, was a commercial internet, truely publically accessable and alterable, with few government controls.
Bullshit. Al Gore was the administration point man pushing the US National Information Infrastructure Act 1993 deregulating and partially privatizing the internet.
GORE: We need to look ahead, to protect it when it needs protecting, but not get in the way when it needs to walk alone. Like those wireless operators should have done in the North Atlantic, we should be alert to where the collisions could take place, and we shouldn't hesitate to chart a new course.
GORE: If we do that, then much more than the telecommunications industry will grow strong. This country will grow strong and humankind will as well.
GORE:Thank you very much. (Applause.)
Q: If you're talking about totally deregulating the information highway what steps do you think should be taken to ensure that the information superhighway is not captured by a few megacorporations for anticompetitive purposes?
GORE: One of the policymakers who has been meeting with us on a regular basis for the last several months is Ann Bingaman, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, and our administration believes very strongly, as I said in part of this presentation, that just as suffocating overregulation can stifle competition and innovation, so the abandonment of antitrust principles and the surrender to private conglomerations of monopoly power can have the same effect.
-Al Gore Promoting the NIIA (internet deregulation), 1993
That sounds like a problem with the attack vector, not with the material.
Well, yes and no. You are correct that the followers of Bhagwan Rajneesh hit upon a more effective delivery system when they simply sprayed salmonella salad bars. But salmonella did not prove sufficiently lethal. Although they infected hundreds and hospitalized 45, nobody died. Antharx, OTOH could not have been deliveed by the same mechanism. There is a balance of deadliness, controlability and deliverability which is difficult to strike. Military research has concentrated on aerosolizeable pathogens like Anthrax, for obvious reasons.
Basically, it is much easier to make effective and deliverable chemical weapons. Look at Iraq. On short notice, they deployed and used thousands of tons of nerve and mustard gas during the Iran-Iraq war. But they never managed to aerosolize Anthrax or deploy any useable biological weapons. And they had help from the US.
It wasn't that long ago that my father was paying 91% federal tax rate in 1963. Thankfully the Republicans have successfully fought the Democrats to reduce that crushing tax burden. For many years the Democrats encouraged the best and brightest in this country to not work and to not be productive since they took >90% of what we made.
Yeah Republicans like Jack Kennedy. It was Kennedy and a Democratic Congress who reduced the top marginal bracket from 91% to 65%.
There is no way your dad paid 91% Income tax. That applied to incomes over $400,000, which is $2,443,209 in 2005 constant dollars. In 1963 million dollar salaries didn't grow on trees they way they do now, even for captains of industry. Who was your father, David Rockefeller? In 1963 the median family income was $6,249 which equated to a 22% marginal rate. That is $38,169.03 in 2005 constant dollars which puts you in the 25% bracket if you are single or married filing seperately, and 15% if married filing jointly or head of household. Another $1600 dollars would knock you up to 25% as a head of household. What you are seeing is not a drastic reduction in the the median income tax, but a reduction in graduation from 24 brackets to six. Don't forget, there was no Medicare in 1963 and Social Security was taxed at a lower rate.
Also, my dad who made about $20,000 a year in 1963 and has an MBA from a top finance school, tells me that the code was full of holes and nobody really paid anything the 91%. It was too easy to avoid.
He didn't. He threw them out after he learned they were spies more interested in his own location for additional assasination attempts than the location of any weapons. Then, after we did the "let them in or we'll invade" ultimatum, he let them back in again. We invaded anyway, there was lots and lots and lots of money to be made and strategic assets to secure.
No, he only threw out the suspected spies (the Americans). But the Iraqis did stall UNSCOM for many years. Their efforts pretty much fell apart after the defection of Kamal Hussein. By 1998 UNSCOM and the IAEA had effectively disarmed Iraq and were just mopping up.
Was it not because of breaches to the no-fly zones and other agressive behaviour?
No they used manufactured inspection confrontations as their justification for bombing.
How is patrolling your own airspace aggressive behavior anyway? The no-fly zones had no basis in international law. The UN did not authorize them and they violated Iraq's sovereignty. That said, they may have saved a lot of lives. Too bad we didn't enforce them in 1991 when Bush accidentally inspired the shiite uprising with his hamf-isted attempt at fomenting a Republican Guard or Army coup. We not only allowed the Iraqis to fly close air support, we barred shiite guerrillas from the Iraqi Army arsenals we had captured in the war. The Bush administration didn't like Saddam, but they were fine with Ba'ath rule and certainly preferred it to SCIRI rule.
But Ritter says that the CIA infiltrated UNSCOM on the ground and that the Iraqis were correct when they claimed that this intelligence was used in planning at least one Republican Guard coup attempt. Rolph Ekeus, Ritter's first boss also says that the US illegaly used UNSCOM intelligence for purposes other than arms control, a clear violation of Iraq's sovereignty.
"As time went on, some countries, especially the US, wanted to learn more about other parts of Iraq's capacity." The US even tried to find information about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. [Rolf Ekeus, Director of UNSCOM 1991-1997, Financial Times, 7/29/03]
Additionally, Ritter says that Ekeus's successor, Richard Butler, improperly exploited position to further Clinton Administration foreign policy goals. He claims Butler purposely designed and timed inspections to provoke the Iraqis whenever the Clinton Administration wanted a confrontation. I recommend reading Ritter's book, "Endgame." Interesting stuff.
Finally, you should mention that the 1997 crisis, with the expulsion of Americans and UNSCOM withdrawel to Bahrain, only lasted about a week. The UN brokered a deal and UNSCOM, including the Americans returned to work for another year.
I guess that is as good a place as any to start. Thanks. My mother spoke Polish. But she spoke it like a five year old, since she was five when she left.
"Have it compose a poem--a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism and in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"
"And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you're at it?" growled Trurl. "You can't give it such idiotic--"
But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:
Someday I plan to learn Polish so I can read the Cyberiad as written. I knew a guy who read it in Polish, German and English and said it was different but equally brilliant in all three.
'Tis a pity he didn't join the other Marx brothers in the entertainment industry. He would have been a great comedic asset to Groucho and company.;)
I have always thought that one of Marx's most interesting characteristics was his acerbic wit. While often mean spirited, he was always clever. To me the classic example is the title of his response to Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty.He called it the Poverty of Philosophy.
From the forward:
M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.
The reader will understand that in this thankless task we have often had to abandon our criticism of M. Proudhon in order to criticize German philosophy, and at the same time to give some observations on political economy.
Considering Proudhon was one of Marx's friends, this was rough business. But funny nonetheless.
I recently acquired a couple of older laptops to send to aquaintances in Zimbabwe. They both run pretty well, except for dead battaries of course. However, DHL wants $300 to send the heavier one to Victoria falls. I paid a total of $100 for the two computers. Parcel Post would only be $80 (for six week deilvery), but you can't send things through the Zimbabwean post office and expect them to reach their destination. Hopefully I can get the cost down by removing and mailing the batteries, paring down the pachaging and just shipping the valuable bits by reliable carrier. But for now, the barrier to me giving away laptops in south central Africa is shipping cost.
I'm just pointing out that requiring the US military to support the political party currently in power is possibly not worthy of a democratic country.
But I'm sure you would disagree.
Why do you think I would disagree with that? We are just shy of seeing Republican political commisars dictating tactics to field grade commanders on the battlefield. The good news is the Democratic resistence in the military appears active. Seven out of eight Iraq vets running for national office are Dems, IIRC.
Moreover, if you look at armies in Africa like those in Angola or Zimbabwe, the troops are expected to toe the party line, their required loyalty is to the Government, not to the people.
Not shocking given their histories. In Zimbabwe, the army was formed mainly from the remnants of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), the military wing of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union ZANU, and to a lesser extent from Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union's (ZAPU) military. ZANU absorbed ZAPU in 1988, leaving a Zimbabwe a single party republic for most practical purposes. The army's leadership is by definition loyal to ZANU-PF. Replace ZANU and ZAPU with MPLA and UNITA and you have more or less the same situation in Angola, except the post revolutionary infighting between the MPLA and UNITA was even worse due to US, South African and Chinese backing of UNITA against the very established pro-Soviet MPLA governement.
An interesting case is Nicaragua, where national Army formed from the revolutionary force, Ejercito Popular Sandinista (EPS), remained for a period after a constitutional transfer of power to the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition of 14 rightist, conservative and Communist parties. Humberto Ortgega, brother of former president and current FSLN leader Daniel Ortega remained as head of the army after the transfer and became a close associate of UNO leader Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Despite the fact that the army rank and file and officer corp is overwhelmingly manned by FSLN supporters, it has for the most part not injected itself into the political process.
I would be interested in why you think the tapes "lend support to the idea that a crapload of weapons and related tech were squirreled away to Syria." They don't appear to say anything like that, although there are a lot of internet news reports which conflate the tape contents with completely unrelated claims of a Syrian connection.
The recently uncovered Saddam tapes (while far from a smoking gun), do lend support to the idea that a crapload of weapons and related tech were squirreled away to Syria and/or buried in the desert during the ramp-up to the war.
Only if you think the war took place in 1996. The tapes are from the mid 1990s, before Hussein Kamel defected. They contain no significant new information. After his defection UNSCOM carried on inspecting and destroying for three more years. Iraqi chemical weapons were of mediocre purity and had shelf lives measured in months, not years. Any stocks buried in 1995 would have been a mild irritant by 2003 (as we saw the one time we actually encountered the stuff). Iraqi scientists never succeeded in weaponizing anthrax or smallpox, although they put useless liquid anthrax in warheads so Saddam wouldn't execute them.
A spokeswoman for John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, said information contained in the transcriptions of the tapes was already known to intelligence officials.
"Intelligence community analysts from the CIA, and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that, while fascinating, from a historical perspective the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their post-war analysis of Iraq's weapons programs nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey group report," she said in a statement.
This sounds like a known bug in some versions of the Airport software. You can fix it by re-running the Network Setup Assistant. From the Terminal run, open/System/Library/CoreServices/Network\ Setup\ Assistant.app. Then recreate all your connections. For some reason simply removing and recreatng the connections in Internet Connect or System Preferrences does not fix it, but running the setup Asistant does. Probably deletes some preference file. I never really investigated the details.
I don't use all the features I've got (honestly, how many iMac users will actually use the built-in camera?)
I know I would. With iChat AV and iSight, all you need is an aim account and a 100+Mbps of bandwidth and you are video conferencing in stunning H.264 quality in seconds. Actually, it works just as well with any firewire camera, but then you need to convince all your friends and relatives to buy another device. I happen to have a camcorder, so I am set, however I can only one way chat becaue none of my buddies have firewire cameras. The good news is I can introduce my long distance nieces to our new dog. The bad news is I can't see their reactions.
I also want iSight because there is a good chance my wife and I will be buying a second house. I need to be in the city for work but we have livestock in need of space. Chances are we'll be apart a lot. With iChat AV we can essentially hang out together, watch TV, whatever, over the internet. The built in iSight makes that even more convenient, and knocks $139 off the price of the rig.
Frankly, it would be nice at work too. Another group here has spent significant money on a video conferencing system which merely matches iChat AV in performance and falls way short in ease of use. It is more featureful if you value Exchange integration. I put up a jabber server and dog n' ponied iChat AV for the other group and they were pretty much blown away. But again, since cameras are scarce around here we haven't exploited the four way video conferencing.
Harvard is in the ECAC for hockey not the Ivy League. Technically there is no Ivy League hockey, although they do award a specious championship to the top ECAC school which happens to be an Ivy. The Crimson men and women are top tier Division I-A hockey programs. Believe me, despite the absence of official "athletic" scholarships, top hockey players do not pay their own way at Ivy/ECAC schools. Even the women get extrememly generous financial aid packages. They have to in order to compete with schools like UNH which currently has 18 NCAA full rides for the women's team.
Hmmm.. I thought I had Thoreau on the list. Must have deleted him by accident. Could add John and John Q Adams as well.
First of all, they aren't rich New England assholes. They are rich East Asian assholes. You certainly can get a better undergraduate education many places (notably down the street at MIT). Harvard's graduate schools are mostly extremely good though.
However, here are three options you haven't considered:
1) Be a really, really good hockey player like Jamie Hagerman, Caitlen chow and Angela Ruggiero, not to mention Ted Donato. Then you can go gratis.
3) Have your university destroyed by a hurricane (also gratis).
3) Get a job at they university or at an affilated institution. Harvard pays thousands of people to accept these Apple deals. And since minimum age in Cambridge is $10/hr. you wouldn't have to give up your custodial career.;-)
Seriously though, Harvard was good enough for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Leonard Bernstein, Jack Lemmon, Philip Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is probably good enough for you. If you can't get into Yale, McGill or MIT, Harvard isn't a bad choice.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US product placement on television is prohibited under the FCC sponsorship identification requirements of 47 U.S.C. 317 and 508, and 47 C.F.R. 73.1211. My wife used to be Director of Marketing of a well known consumer goods manufacturer. She says that back in her day TV placement for gratis product was already common, but the shows didn't even ask for money, probably more because it devalued advertising slots than because they were afraid of the FCC.
Hollywood, without advertisers or the FCC to answer to, was never so shy. She didn't pay them, because she was always able to place gratis product, but they always asked.
This was a non-story. He told a union joke to a union crowd and got a big laugh. Who cares?
GORE: We need to look ahead, to protect it when it needs protecting, but not get in the way when it needs to walk alone. Like those wireless operators should have done in the North Atlantic, we should be alert to where the collisions could take place, and we shouldn't hesitate to chart a new course.
GORE: If we do that, then much more than the telecommunications industry will grow strong. This country will grow strong and humankind will as well.
GORE:Thank you very much. (Applause.)
Q: If you're talking about totally deregulating the information highway what steps do you think should be taken to ensure that the information superhighway is not captured by a few megacorporations for anticompetitive purposes?
GORE: One of the policymakers who has been meeting with us on a regular basis for the last several months is Ann Bingaman, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, and our administration believes very strongly, as I said in part of this presentation, that just as suffocating overregulation can stifle competition and innovation, so the abandonment of antitrust principles and the surrender to private conglomerations of monopoly power can have the same effect.
-Al Gore Promoting the NIIA (internet deregulation), 1993
Basically, it is much easier to make effective and deliverable chemical weapons. Look at Iraq. On short notice, they deployed and used thousands of tons of nerve and mustard gas during the Iran-Iraq war. But they never managed to aerosolize Anthrax or deploy any useable biological weapons. And they had help from the US.
There is no way your dad paid 91% Income tax. That applied to incomes over $400,000, which is $2,443,209 in 2005 constant dollars. In 1963 million dollar salaries didn't grow on trees they way they do now, even for captains of industry. Who was your father, David Rockefeller? In 1963 the median family income was $6,249 which equated to a 22% marginal rate. That is $38,169.03 in 2005 constant dollars which puts you in the 25% bracket if you are single or married filing seperately, and 15% if married filing jointly or head of household. Another $1600 dollars would knock you up to 25% as a head of household. What you are seeing is not a drastic reduction in the the median income tax, but a reduction in graduation from 24 brackets to six. Don't forget, there was no Medicare in 1963 and Social Security was taxed at a lower rate.
Also, my dad who made about $20,000 a year in 1963 and has an MBA from a top finance school, tells me that the code was full of holes and nobody really paid anything the 91%. It was too easy to avoid.
How is patrolling your own airspace aggressive behavior anyway? The no-fly zones had no basis in international law. The UN did not authorize them and they violated Iraq's sovereignty. That said, they may have saved a lot of lives. Too bad we didn't enforce them in 1991 when Bush accidentally inspired the shiite uprising with his hamf-isted attempt at fomenting a Republican Guard or Army coup. We not only allowed the Iraqis to fly close air support, we barred shiite guerrillas from the Iraqi Army arsenals we had captured in the war. The Bush administration didn't like Saddam, but they were fine with Ba'ath rule and certainly preferred it to SCIRI rule.
Finally, you should mention that the 1997 crisis, with the expulsion of Americans and UNSCOM withdrawel to Bahrain, only lasted about a week. The UN brokered a deal and UNSCOM, including the Americans returned to work for another year.
(joined in progress)
Male 9: The English come to Iraq after ten years with $150 billion. Where's our share?
Male 2: Tell him we'll spend it on biological... [Laughs]
[Laughter from everyone]
Male 2: We don't know about the new ways, you have to teach us all over again... [Laughs]
I guess that is as good a place as any to start. Thanks. My mother spoke Polish. But she spoke it like a five year old, since she was five when she left.
From the forward:
Considering Proudhon was one of Marx's friends, this was rough business. But funny nonetheless.
I recently acquired a couple of older laptops to send to aquaintances in Zimbabwe. They both run pretty well, except for dead battaries of course. However, DHL wants $300 to send the heavier one to Victoria falls. I paid a total of $100 for the two computers. Parcel Post would only be $80 (for six week deilvery), but you can't send things through the Zimbabwean post office and expect them to reach their destination. Hopefully I can get the cost down by removing and mailing the batteries, paring down the pachaging and just shipping the valuable bits by reliable carrier. But for now, the barrier to me giving away laptops in south central Africa is shipping cost.
Wine already runs on OS X.
I guess I didn't know I was contradicting you.
Apple, IBM and Motorola formed the AIM alliance (AIMed breaking the INtel deathgrip on the PC architecture) in 1991, two years before Scully left.
An interesting case is Nicaragua, where national Army formed from the revolutionary force, Ejercito Popular Sandinista (EPS), remained for a period after a constitutional transfer of power to the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition of 14 rightist, conservative and Communist parties. Humberto Ortgega, brother of former president and current FSLN leader Daniel Ortega remained as head of the army after the transfer and became a close associate of UNO leader Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Despite the fact that the army rank and file and officer corp is overwhelmingly manned by FSLN supporters, it has for the most part not injected itself into the political process.
I would be interested in why you think the tapes "lend support to the idea that a crapload of weapons and related tech were squirreled away to Syria." They don't appear to say anything like that, although there are a lot of internet news reports which conflate the tape contents with completely unrelated claims of a Syrian connection.
Or at least restrict by host at the firewall. On OS X, remember to turn on ipfw's statefulness.
This sounds like a known bug in some versions of the Airport software. You can fix it by re-running the Network Setup Assistant. From the Terminal run, open /System/Library/CoreServices/Network\ Setup\ Assistant.app. Then recreate all your connections. For some reason simply removing and recreatng the connections in Internet Connect or System Preferrences does not fix it, but running the setup Asistant does. Probably deletes some preference file. I never really investigated the details.
I also want iSight because there is a good chance my wife and I will be buying a second house. I need to be in the city for work but we have livestock in need of space. Chances are we'll be apart a lot. With iChat AV we can essentially hang out together, watch TV, whatever, over the internet. The built in iSight makes that even more convenient, and knocks $139 off the price of the rig.
Frankly, it would be nice at work too. Another group here has spent significant money on a video conferencing system which merely matches iChat AV in performance and falls way short in ease of use. It is more featureful if you value Exchange integration. I put up a jabber server and dog n' ponied iChat AV for the other group and they were pretty much blown away. But again, since cameras are scarce around here we haven't exploited the four way video conferencing.
Harvard is in the ECAC for hockey not the Ivy League. Technically there is no Ivy League hockey, although they do award a specious championship to the top ECAC school which happens to be an Ivy. The Crimson men and women are top tier Division I-A hockey programs. Believe me, despite the absence of official "athletic" scholarships, top hockey players do not pay their own way at Ivy/ECAC schools. Even the women get extrememly generous financial aid packages. They have to in order to compete with schools like UNH which currently has 18 NCAA full rides for the women's team.
Hmmm.. I thought I had Thoreau on the list. Must have deleted him by accident. Could add John and John Q Adams as well.
Ouch, those grapes must be sour anyway, right?
;-)
First of all, they aren't rich New England assholes. They are rich East Asian assholes. You certainly can get a better undergraduate education many places (notably down the street at MIT). Harvard's graduate schools are mostly extremely good though.
However, here are three options you haven't considered:
1) Be a really, really good hockey player like Jamie Hagerman, Caitlen chow and Angela Ruggiero, not to mention Ted Donato. Then you can go gratis.
3) Have your university destroyed by a hurricane (also gratis).
3) Get a job at they university or at an affilated institution. Harvard pays thousands of people to accept these Apple deals. And since minimum age in Cambridge is $10/hr. you wouldn't have to give up your custodial career.
Seriously though, Harvard was good enough for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Leonard Bernstein, Jack Lemmon, Philip Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is probably good enough for you. If you can't get into Yale, McGill or MIT, Harvard isn't a bad choice.
I'm afraid the application process is rather lengthy, but here you go