Hmmm, yes. And he was involved in writing Fawlty Towers. American moviemakers tend not to let actors write stuff, maybe that's the problem. Not to mention the TV execs who wanted to bring the series to the US and write Basil out of it.
Somehow almost everything John Cleese has appeared in since MP, with the major exception of "A Fish Called Wanda" has been terrible. Probably people who respect him have too much respect to ask him to do stuff, and he only gets roles from people who don't know who he is and don't get his stuff. OK, it just means that he needs collaborators. Monty Python was two couples and two individuals who feuded, competed, and synergized (John Cleese worked with Graham Chapman IRIC).
It was good to see Chris Barrie in Tomb Raider.
Does John Cleese as Q mean that James Bond is getting old and stale? Yes. Yes it does.
Must have seen the wrong year. It took them a couple of years to get the characters down, and then it was funny until the gestalt entity (Rob Naylor) fissioned. The first two books were funny, the competing ones by the fissioned halves sucked rocks.
I don't think subdued was the word to describe the good Red Dwarf episodes. I wonder if I still have them on tape, they don't show new ones (for good reason) any more, and I haven't seen a rerun on in a while.
I think quality needs something to rebel against. The BBC was pretty closed, and Britain does not have free speech, so people made creative shows, and risked lawsuits to air real news. In the US there is no lower limit for crappiness (is there an upper?), and there is constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, so people air bland formulaic (you can't do that! No one's done it before! Oh, someone did it, then go ahead, here's the money. --real quote flack about "new" reality show) TV shows, and gutlessly quote the administration and think tanks on the news with no fact-checking (it would take effort, they might get yelled at).
OK, I'll ignore the others because you mentioned "Black Adder", I miss that show. Maybe they'll do another special.
Americans (and Canadians) watch reality TV and "idol" shows, so subtlety may be lacking. On the other hand these audiences have been clubbed into the ground by TV execs who wanted to bring over "Fawlty Towers" and write Basil out, and who couldn't let Lister be messy in American "Red Dwarf" because he is a minority character.
I've heard that the LA sterrotype still holds, and if you want to make TV or movies you have to convince some old, rich, talentless white guy that you are just like he was at your age (young, rich, talentless), and that your idea is bland and unimaginative enough not to make his brain hurt (cue John Cleese).
I agree with him on this issue (to a degree, copyright used to be 17 years, not 52), but not on much else. He is quite reactionary.
I looked at some of his other articles on the site and he argues:
The supreme court should not have struck down anti-sodomy laws (says controlling reproduction is normal government function, constitution does not apply, presonal rights and freedoms aren't)
Israel is completely in the right, Palestine completely in the wrong
The press is blatantly liberal except for talk radio
Saddam supported Al-Qaeda, it's obvious, and we had to invade
Religion and family trump free thought and speech
He is the voice of reason and everyone else is obviously wrong and bad
Universities are fascistically liberal and excessively politically correct.
OK, he's right about that last one.
A few of the articles are interesting, most of them just show how far-right the people who don't consider themselves far-right have gone in the US.
OK, I'm exaggerating. There are some articles that show the common sense he seems to think permeates the whole site. Most of it reads to me like the the comments of the little old midwestern ladies who said "what harm can it do to tell people about Jesus" to justify the religious literature given out in Afghanistan. There are sane reasons to disagree, you don't hear them on American TV (but you do on the BBC and the CBC), and it's not because the American press is a liberal fiefdom.
Point well taken. I liked "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Starship Troopers," I guess I chose badly when I picked up other stuff (some bad juveniles, some less polished recent books, did not find them memorable, don't remember which...).
90% of everything is crap. Not Heinlein's stuff, maybe, but 90% of all science fiction is. 90% of art is crap. 90% of software is crap. 90% of music was crap, but the percentage has increased with RIAA power.
I don't feel that all old sci fi was crap, or that all Heinlein was crap. I do think that with the growth in popularity of the genre more people, and more literate people, are writing sci fi, and the quality is improving.
Nostalgia edits out the negative. Is there any earlier time in history that you would rather live? The '50s with racism, McCarthyism, and censorship (obvious censorship, that is)? Any earlier period without electricity and running water? A small number of rich people lived well (as is the case in any society) prior to the 20th century, but it was a very small number, and well is very relative. The quality of science fiction is similar. If you glorify good old stuff, forget bad old stuff, and ignore new stuff it may be in decline. If you look at all the old stuff and all the new stuff there may actually be positive progress.
Exactly. There are some great older authors (simak, Wyndham, Wells etc.) and lots of nostalgically overrated crap. Movies like "Pulp Fiction" get by just making fun of similar junk, the parodies work, the serious attempts end up like the original "Little Shop of Horrors."
A number of more recent authors, such as Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, are as good as any of their predecessors, and in part because they take writing more seriously than science fiction ("Asimov has interesting ideas, but his writing! I wouldn't let him write junk mail!" --Douglas Adams). Quite a number of sci-fi authors, including some who still sell well (and not just the ones who write "Star Wars" adaptaions) just cannot write good English. Heinlein, Asimov, Anthony (OK, he writes kid stuff now, but he used to write "seriously", he just did it awkwardly). Not to say these authors did not produce good stories, they just did it without grace and poetry (and don't look for any in my posts, I'm a critic, not an artist).
Come to think of it there are even sci-fi authors (or were recently) who wrote well enough they could make junk mail readable. People like Douglas Adams, Donaldson (who works hard at making the subject material unpleasant), Gibson (who also has great ideas)... Compare what recent authors put out to the crap Heinlein wrote for most of his career (OK, I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that), and see what you prefer.
90% of sci-fi has always been crap, just like 90% of most things (especially entertainment things) is crap. I think the top 10% today is as good as the top 10% 30 years ago. Nostalgia is just another way of revising history.
Why not just block the ports that blaster uses to propagate temporarily? It might not make everyone happy, but as a short term measure it's easy... Plus only some M$ users care about those particular ports, it should not affect many people.
Money nevery trickles down. Most societies have, historically, had a very small number of rich people, and loads of poor people. Lowering taxes on rich people will not normally make poor people better off because even if there are more jobs the people in charge will pay as little as they can. Only when there are sufficient jobs that people can chose does it become necessary to raise salaries to attract good people (at a global level this is some decades away in any field).
Money flows up. If poor or middle class people have money they spend it and the CEOs of the world get rich on their consumption. Henry Ford had it right, pay employees a little more and they will consume leading to more production, more jobs, and more prosperity.
The big economic threat to the US at the moment, surprisingly, is deflation. People don't have the money to buy items, even though the items are cheaper because they were produced by the most desperate employees anywhere in the world. There is no reason that global living standards will rise with outsourcing unless the amount of work outsourced exceeds the amount of workers globally. Prosperity won't happen unless the living standards rise enough that workers, even in China, are earning enough to buy the items they make (and they won't on 30 cents an hour, especially when many of them die at 35 because of the working conditions).
What can we do about it? We can try to reclaim US politics from the obviously corrupt "conservatives" who don't want to conserve anything except greed, embezzlement, oppression, and influence-peddling, and from those who are completely bought, but it won't be easy (or possible?). How many congressmen make less than $1 million/year? None. How many care about people who make less than $1 million per year? None, especially with the campaign financing rules and incumbency advantages. How many congressmen will pass any law for a fee? A large majority.
The other difference is that clothes made in China don't differ much from clothes made in the US, while outsourced code tends to be crap. There are good people working in the third world, but they have options, and they don't want to work for subsistence either. India is tapped out. HP found this out when they outsourced their support work and got people with no experience, who hate working nights (time shift), who are now pissing of their clients.
The problem is that tech HR in the US is so bad that big companies cannot hire good people, so the potential quality difference goes unrealized.
As per a friend from a large company: do what everyone else does, get someone to submit your CV, which should be a work of fiction, get them to tell you what you need to know for the interview, fake the interview as best you can, then take training courses. Of course most of the people end up being useless, and the company then outsources, first inside the country, and, when that doesn't work well, to India/China/Romania.
The real reason for outsourcing is HR, not savings. HR people don't know anything about tech, so they take the dishonest applications over the honest ones, and managers are forced to hire from their selection. The people they hire are useless, so they increase the requirements without increasing the salaray, and get even more dishonest applicants. Then they give up and outsource just so they can be rid of the useless people they hired. Nortel went through this (and you would not believe how bad the people they brought in through outsourcing were), they knew their IT people were crap, and they tried to replace them first (during the boom, so they only got rid of good people).
To eliminate outsourcing promote good HR practices. This does not mean scanning CVs and counting buzzwords.
The problem is not only exporting money, it is the Henry Ford lesson in reverse. It doesn't matter where your employees are, if you pay them just enough to survive (and reduce their lifespans with nasty chemicals) they won't be able to buy anything, and the economy takes a hit. If you pay employees a little extra they start buying stuff, whether they are in China, India, or North America, and companies prosper.
Money never trickles down, it flows up. Corporations are really dumb to be pushing for tax breaks at the cost of welfare, UI, and social programs that indirectly put money in their pockets. They are dumb to outsource, too. Cheaper goods are very nice, but company executives are not a sufficient market to sell them on.
When you get down to it most VPs could be outsourced way easier than techies, especially considering how employees can be abused in China et al. Point stick bosses instead of PHBs.
No one in the US thinks long term. Anyone who thinks a presidential term ahead is considered to be doing serious planning. Thus chaos.
I took over an SMTP server that was an open relay. Spam had been relayed, so the server was blacklisted. I secured the server, contacted the various blacklists, and the server was removed from the blacklists. I had no problem with any of the blacklists, and had no problem getting the server removed. Of course I was polite, and I went through the appropriate channels...
The volume of spam is sufficient without removing the blacklists.
Believe me. Seagate drives, same model, same everything. Just no bracket. They give you an unusable filler bracket... I was tempted to use duct tape (and I know people who have just left disks free in the case, heck, I've done that in some Ultras where there is no real space for a third HD). I've put PC disks into loads of Sun boxen, no issues.
It's the same reason I don't buy macs anymore. When mac made really different hardware with different buses and RAM and cards there might have been a justification for the pricing. Now that the hardware is PC but more expensive (at least they haven't switched to USB yet (I have a firewire card on my PC)) there is not justification for the pricing. It's too bad. A great BSD-based O/S with a great gui and lots of software. I just can't bring myself to pay for the hardware, especially when they could (there was a download for specific PC hardware) port it so easily to commodity hardware.
Sun does some great stuff, and they have great support, but they can't decided what to do in terms of business. x86, linux, CDE, solaris, SCO-meddling, java...
Sun tries so hard to damage M$ that they hurt themselves, their friends, and their clients.
That said I'm a Solaris admin, and I like Sun hardware and software in spite of the Applesque pricing (yes that HD is $400, yes it is physically identical to the $80 PC drive, no you can't get the mounting bracket separately).
They are greedier than other companies, and won't sell low-cost to the third world. So people die, it doesn't change the bottom line.
Big pharma is currently refusing to provide needed drugs in the third world because the demand is not enough (mostly for diseases that don't exist in the first world), but they still try to prevent the generic companies from supplying, because they (rightly) fear reverse engineering in places where they make money.
There are a number of drugs available only for animals (people don't get many parasitic infections in the first world) in the US that are not available for people in Africa for financial reasons.
Differential prices are fine, but there are limits. Government funded corporations (like big pharma) should be obliged to let others supply if they can't be bothered. I guess Microsoft can price however they like (even if it hurts them. If they succeed in killing windows O/S piracy their market will flee and kill their standards advantage. They are outsourcing too, I guess they want problems), but they are among the few who don't get lots of redirected US tax dollars (they have their own tax).
Kafka wanted his works burned after his death. Many, many people are very glad his executors refused to follow his instructions and published the stuff.
I would expect telemarketers outside the US to use the DNCL as their phone number lists.
I'm not sure exempting charities is a good idea, either, they are often worse. I had a friend who gave to one charity, and she had to change her number. She was deluged with calls by charities who thought they had a sucker.
Charities tend to hire telemarketers to make the calls (at least the dumb ones who don't mind losing 30-80% of money donated) anyway.
Weather is not really relevant to the politics.
Britain has sacrificed a lot of personal freedoms, but then they don't seem to do the McCarthyist stuff. Banning handguns really does cut crime, too, especially once police have enough faith in the ban to deal with it.
Canada tends to go more in line with the US, most follies are bought by large corporations. The fact that the pols have to get up on their hind legs and talk about what they do prevents some of the worst abuses. OK, Mulroney got away with following Reagan into idiocy for a few years, but his name is mud now.
The US has advantages (wealth, population, resources, power) that other countries do not, and yet education is a mess and getting worse in spite of the doublethink (no child left behind, cut the budget for everyone), medical care is bankrupting middle class members who get sick, including those who have coverage, and companies are manipulating stock and stealing money instead of producing. Most US failures are purely political.
Britain has more control over its citizens and press, but the people strike when they get ripped off. The press prints stuff the government does not like. In the US people allow themselves to be ripped off by corrupt corporations and unions (who sell concessions for individual gain). The American press might as well be muzzled considering the corporate propaganda it spews.
Funny, the NRA and the bible belt will organize, rally, and pay for special rights of their own and restrictions on others. Why won't other Americans stand up for their rights and their lifestyle? Why is there no outcry over Enron's theft or HP's outsourcing (well, OK, their customers are making an outcry)? Why is there no outcry that private hospitals and HMOs are making huge profits at taxpayer expense while literally bankrupting initially well-off patients?
Patents, copyrights, and IP laws have gotten very anti-American lately. An article in the New Yorker described the situation as "registry capture" where the people in the patent office have contact only with people who want to register patents, and not with anyone who is harmed when they allow ludicrously vague patents without considering prior use.
Extending commercial IP for people like Disney and the RIAA to extend for generations is VERY unamerican, and likely to cause orbital distortions about the resting places of the founding fathers.
Republicans are not pro-personal interest, which affects everyone. They are pro-specific interest, which affects a small minority. If people could actually take a sufficient interest to look beyond the sound bites, look at issues and platforms, and vote accordingly, democracy would actually work.
Example: Dairy farmers in Quebec were very patriotic, and pro-separation for many years until they looked at the quota system, realized their livelihoods were at stake, and became staunch federalists.
Most people in any democracy listen to the rhetoric, vote for the guy they would choose to go bowling with (biggest reason for Bush votes according to exit polls), and ignore the issues until they get hit over the head with them.
Politicians are bought and sold in every democracy, but the price is higher outside the US. Doing actual, obvious, harm to the country is a little less common in other first world nations as well.
Same thing for the conservatives. Most political labels are being misapplied to people who either have radical ideological beliefs or who are so corrupt that their beliefs are irrelevant. It would be really nice to see real opposition to the ruling party (Bush the Lesser would NEVER have been elected in any political system that required debate, imagine him getting laughed at daily in Canada or Britain), as it would give someone an incentive to have some ethics.
Influence peddling is not business acumen. Rolling over is not opposition. Conservatism does not give power to corporations. Liberalism does not mean what the twits in university politics say it does.
You mean there are issues on which they don't piss you off? Personally I can't think of any.
Of course the democrats piss me off on most issues.
As do most of the other parties.
The American political system has been shredded by influence peddling and cronyism. The lack of coherent opposition just makes it more pathetic.
Most dumb issues like the RIAA are an issue globally, but they only really screw things (and people) up in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, yes. And he was involved in writing Fawlty Towers. American moviemakers tend not to let actors write stuff, maybe that's the problem. Not to mention the TV execs who wanted to bring the series to the US and write Basil out of it.
Somehow almost everything John Cleese has appeared in since MP, with the major exception of "A Fish Called Wanda" has been terrible. Probably people who respect him have too much respect to ask him to do stuff, and he only gets roles from people who don't know who he is and don't get his stuff. OK, it just means that he needs collaborators. Monty Python was two couples and two individuals who feuded, competed, and synergized (John Cleese worked with Graham Chapman IRIC).
It was good to see Chris Barrie in Tomb Raider.
Does John Cleese as Q mean that James Bond is getting old and stale? Yes. Yes it does.
Must have seen the wrong year. It took them a couple of years to get the characters down, and then it was funny until the gestalt entity (Rob Naylor) fissioned. The first two books were funny, the competing ones by the fissioned halves sucked rocks.
I don't think subdued was the word to describe the good Red Dwarf episodes. I wonder if I still have them on tape, they don't show new ones (for good reason) any more, and I haven't seen a rerun on in a while.
Poetic license.
I think quality needs something to rebel against. The BBC was pretty closed, and Britain does not have free speech, so people made creative shows, and risked lawsuits to air real news. In the US there is no lower limit for crappiness (is there an upper?), and there is constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, so people air bland formulaic (you can't do that! No one's done it before! Oh, someone did it, then go ahead, here's the money. --real quote flack about "new" reality show) TV shows, and gutlessly quote the administration and think tanks on the news with no fact-checking (it would take effort, they might get yelled at).
Love the monk electric sigs. RIP DA.
OK, I'll ignore the others because you mentioned "Black Adder", I miss that show. Maybe they'll do another special.
Americans (and Canadians) watch reality TV and "idol" shows, so subtlety may be lacking. On the other hand these audiences have been clubbed into the ground by TV execs who wanted to bring over "Fawlty Towers" and write Basil out, and who couldn't let Lister be messy in American "Red Dwarf" because he is a minority character.
I've heard that the LA sterrotype still holds, and if you want to make TV or movies you have to convince some old, rich, talentless white guy that you are just like he was at your age (young, rich, talentless), and that your idea is bland and unimaginative enough not to make his brain hurt (cue John Cleese).
I looked at some of his other articles on the site and he argues:
OK, he's right about that last one.
A few of the articles are interesting, most of them just show how far-right the people who don't consider themselves far-right have gone in the US.
OK, I'm exaggerating. There are some articles that show the common sense he seems to think permeates the whole site. Most of it reads to me like the the comments of the little old midwestern ladies who said "what harm can it do to tell people about Jesus" to justify the religious literature given out in Afghanistan. There are sane reasons to disagree, you don't hear them on American TV (but you do on the BBC and the CBC), and it's not because the American press is a liberal fiefdom.
Point well taken. I liked "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Starship Troopers," I guess I chose badly when I picked up other stuff (some bad juveniles, some less polished recent books, did not find them memorable, don't remember which...).
90% of everything is crap. Not Heinlein's stuff, maybe, but 90% of all science fiction is. 90% of art is crap. 90% of software is crap. 90% of music was crap, but the percentage has increased with RIAA power.
I don't feel that all old sci fi was crap, or that all Heinlein was crap. I do think that with the growth in popularity of the genre more people, and more literate people, are writing sci fi, and the quality is improving.
Nostalgia edits out the negative. Is there any earlier time in history that you would rather live? The '50s with racism, McCarthyism, and censorship (obvious censorship, that is)? Any earlier period without electricity and running water? A small number of rich people lived well (as is the case in any society) prior to the 20th century, but it was a very small number, and well is very relative. The quality of science fiction is similar. If you glorify good old stuff, forget bad old stuff, and ignore new stuff it may be in decline. If you look at all the old stuff and all the new stuff there may actually be positive progress.
Exactly. There are some great older authors (simak, Wyndham, Wells etc.) and lots of nostalgically overrated crap. Movies like "Pulp Fiction" get by just making fun of similar junk, the parodies work, the serious attempts end up like the original "Little Shop of Horrors."
A number of more recent authors, such as Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, are as good as any of their predecessors, and in part because they take writing more seriously than science fiction ("Asimov has interesting ideas, but his writing! I wouldn't let him write junk mail!" --Douglas Adams). Quite a number of sci-fi authors, including some who still sell well (and not just the ones who write "Star Wars" adaptaions) just cannot write good English. Heinlein, Asimov, Anthony (OK, he writes kid stuff now, but he used to write "seriously", he just did it awkwardly). Not to say these authors did not produce good stories, they just did it without grace and poetry (and don't look for any in my posts, I'm a critic, not an artist).
Come to think of it there are even sci-fi authors (or were recently) who wrote well enough they could make junk mail readable. People like Douglas Adams, Donaldson (who works hard at making the subject material unpleasant), Gibson (who also has great ideas)... Compare what recent authors put out to the crap Heinlein wrote for most of his career (OK, I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that), and see what you prefer.
90% of sci-fi has always been crap, just like 90% of most things (especially entertainment things) is crap. I think the top 10% today is as good as the top 10% 30 years ago. Nostalgia is just another way of revising history.
Why not just block the ports that blaster uses to propagate temporarily? It might not make everyone happy, but as a short term measure it's easy... Plus only some M$ users care about those particular ports, it should not affect many people.
Money flows up. If poor or middle class people have money they spend it and the CEOs of the world get rich on their consumption. Henry Ford had it right, pay employees a little more and they will consume leading to more production, more jobs, and more prosperity.
The big economic threat to the US at the moment, surprisingly, is deflation. People don't have the money to buy items, even though the items are cheaper because they were produced by the most desperate employees anywhere in the world. There is no reason that global living standards will rise with outsourcing unless the amount of work outsourced exceeds the amount of workers globally. Prosperity won't happen unless the living standards rise enough that workers, even in China, are earning enough to buy the items they make (and they won't on 30 cents an hour, especially when many of them die at 35 because of the working conditions).
What can we do about it? We can try to reclaim US politics from the obviously corrupt "conservatives" who don't want to conserve anything except greed, embezzlement, oppression, and influence-peddling, and from those who are completely bought, but it won't be easy (or possible?). How many congressmen make less than $1 million/year? None. How many care about people who make less than $1 million per year? None, especially with the campaign financing rules and incumbency advantages. How many congressmen will pass any law for a fee? A large majority.
The other difference is that clothes made in China don't differ much from clothes made in the US, while outsourced code tends to be crap. There are good people working in the third world, but they have options, and they don't want to work for subsistence either. India is tapped out. HP found this out when they outsourced their support work and got people with no experience, who hate working nights (time shift), who are now pissing of their clients. The problem is that tech HR in the US is so bad that big companies cannot hire good people, so the potential quality difference goes unrealized.
As per a friend from a large company: do what everyone else does, get someone to submit your CV, which should be a work of fiction, get them to tell you what you need to know for the interview, fake the interview as best you can, then take training courses. Of course most of the people end up being useless, and the company then outsources, first inside the country, and, when that doesn't work well, to India/China/Romania.
The real reason for outsourcing is HR, not savings. HR people don't know anything about tech, so they take the dishonest applications over the honest ones, and managers are forced to hire from their selection. The people they hire are useless, so they increase the requirements without increasing the salaray, and get even more dishonest applicants. Then they give up and outsource just so they can be rid of the useless people they hired. Nortel went through this (and you would not believe how bad the people they brought in through outsourcing were), they knew their IT people were crap, and they tried to replace them first (during the boom, so they only got rid of good people).
To eliminate outsourcing promote good HR practices. This does not mean scanning CVs and counting buzzwords.
The problem is not only exporting money, it is the Henry Ford lesson in reverse. It doesn't matter where your employees are, if you pay them just enough to survive (and reduce their lifespans with nasty chemicals) they won't be able to buy anything, and the economy takes a hit. If you pay employees a little extra they start buying stuff, whether they are in China, India, or North America, and companies prosper.
Money never trickles down, it flows up. Corporations are really dumb to be pushing for tax breaks at the cost of welfare, UI, and social programs that indirectly put money in their pockets. They are dumb to outsource, too. Cheaper goods are very nice, but company executives are not a sufficient market to sell them on.
When you get down to it most VPs could be outsourced way easier than techies, especially considering how employees can be abused in China et al. Point stick bosses instead of PHBs.
No one in the US thinks long term. Anyone who thinks a presidential term ahead is considered to be doing serious planning. Thus chaos.
I took over an SMTP server that was an open relay. Spam had been relayed, so the server was blacklisted. I secured the server, contacted the various blacklists, and the server was removed from the blacklists. I had no problem with any of the blacklists, and had no problem getting the server removed. Of course I was polite, and I went through the appropriate channels...
The volume of spam is sufficient without removing the blacklists.
Believe me. Seagate drives, same model, same everything. Just no bracket. They give you an unusable filler bracket... I was tempted to use duct tape (and I know people who have just left disks free in the case, heck, I've done that in some Ultras where there is no real space for a third HD). I've put PC disks into loads of Sun boxen, no issues.
It's the same reason I don't buy macs anymore. When mac made really different hardware with different buses and RAM and cards there might have been a justification for the pricing. Now that the hardware is PC but more expensive (at least they haven't switched to USB yet (I have a firewire card on my PC)) there is not justification for the pricing. It's too bad. A great BSD-based O/S with a great gui and lots of software. I just can't bring myself to pay for the hardware, especially when they could (there was a download for specific PC hardware) port it so easily to commodity hardware.
Sun does some great stuff, and they have great support, but they can't decided what to do in terms of business. x86, linux, CDE, solaris, SCO-meddling, java...
Sun tries so hard to damage M$ that they hurt themselves, their friends, and their clients.
That said I'm a Solaris admin, and I like Sun hardware and software in spite of the Applesque pricing (yes that HD is $400, yes it is physically identical to the $80 PC drive, no you can't get the mounting bracket separately).
They are greedier than other companies, and won't sell low-cost to the third world. So people die, it doesn't change the bottom line.
Big pharma is currently refusing to provide needed drugs in the third world because the demand is not enough (mostly for diseases that don't exist in the first world), but they still try to prevent the generic companies from supplying, because they (rightly) fear reverse engineering in places where they make money.
There are a number of drugs available only for animals (people don't get many parasitic infections in the first world) in the US that are not available for people in Africa for financial reasons.
Differential prices are fine, but there are limits. Government funded corporations (like big pharma) should be obliged to let others supply if they can't be bothered. I guess Microsoft can price however they like (even if it hurts them. If they succeed in killing windows O/S piracy their market will flee and kill their standards advantage. They are outsourcing too, I guess they want problems), but they are among the few who don't get lots of redirected US tax dollars (they have their own tax).
-SCO patented my sig, but I'm still using it.
Kafka wanted his works burned after his death. Many, many people are very glad his executors refused to follow his instructions and published the stuff.
I would expect telemarketers outside the US to use the DNCL as their phone number lists.
I'm not sure exempting charities is a good idea, either, they are often worse. I had a friend who gave to one charity, and she had to change her number. She was deluged with calls by charities who thought they had a sucker.
Charities tend to hire telemarketers to make the calls (at least the dumb ones who don't mind losing 30-80% of money donated) anyway.
Weather is not really relevant to the politics.
Britain has sacrificed a lot of personal freedoms, but then they don't seem to do the McCarthyist stuff. Banning handguns really does cut crime, too, especially once police have enough faith in the ban to deal with it.
Canada tends to go more in line with the US, most follies are bought by large corporations. The fact that the pols have to get up on their hind legs and talk about what they do prevents some of the worst abuses. OK, Mulroney got away with following Reagan into idiocy for a few years, but his name is mud now.
The US has advantages (wealth, population, resources, power) that other countries do not, and yet education is a mess and getting worse in spite of the doublethink (no child left behind, cut the budget for everyone), medical care is bankrupting middle class members who get sick, including those who have coverage, and companies are manipulating stock and stealing money instead of producing. Most US failures are purely political.
Britain has more control over its citizens and press, but the people strike when they get ripped off. The press prints stuff the government does not like. In the US people allow themselves to be ripped off by corrupt corporations and unions (who sell concessions for individual gain). The American press might as well be muzzled considering the corporate propaganda it spews.
Funny, the NRA and the bible belt will organize, rally, and pay for special rights of their own and restrictions on others. Why won't other Americans stand up for their rights and their lifestyle? Why is there no outcry over Enron's theft or HP's outsourcing (well, OK, their customers are making an outcry)? Why is there no outcry that private hospitals and HMOs are making huge profits at taxpayer expense while literally bankrupting initially well-off patients?
Patents, copyrights, and IP laws have gotten very anti-American lately. An article in the New Yorker described the situation as "registry capture" where the people in the patent office have contact only with people who want to register patents, and not with anyone who is harmed when they allow ludicrously vague patents without considering prior use.
Extending commercial IP for people like Disney and the RIAA to extend for generations is VERY unamerican, and likely to cause orbital distortions about the resting places of the founding fathers.
Republicans are not pro-personal interest, which affects everyone. They are pro-specific interest, which affects a small minority. If people could actually take a sufficient interest to look beyond the sound bites, look at issues and platforms, and vote accordingly, democracy would actually work.
Example: Dairy farmers in Quebec were very patriotic, and pro-separation for many years until they looked at the quota system, realized their livelihoods were at stake, and became staunch federalists.
Most people in any democracy listen to the rhetoric, vote for the guy they would choose to go bowling with (biggest reason for Bush votes according to exit polls), and ignore the issues until they get hit over the head with them.
Politicians are bought and sold in every democracy, but the price is higher outside the US. Doing actual, obvious, harm to the country is a little less common in other first world nations as well.
Same thing for the conservatives. Most political labels are being misapplied to people who either have radical ideological beliefs or who are so corrupt that their beliefs are irrelevant. It would be really nice to see real opposition to the ruling party (Bush the Lesser would NEVER have been elected in any political system that required debate, imagine him getting laughed at daily in Canada or Britain), as it would give someone an incentive to have some ethics.
Influence peddling is not business acumen. Rolling over is not opposition. Conservatism does not give power to corporations. Liberalism does not mean what the twits in university politics say it does.
You mean there are issues on which they don't piss you off? Personally I can't think of any.
Of course the democrats piss me off on most issues.
As do most of the other parties.
The American political system has been shredded by influence peddling and cronyism. The lack of coherent opposition just makes it more pathetic.
Most dumb issues like the RIAA are an issue globally, but they only really screw things (and people) up in the US.
And Naya is just an abbreviation.