Of course, in causal terms everything that has been is responsible for what is today and what will be tomorrow. You could just as easily say that Emperor Hirohito and Adolf Hitler were responsible as they were crucial elements in the drive for the advancement of various aspects computer science that we use every day, particularly in cryptography. For that matter, one could argue that certain logistical problems faced by the Nazis had a hand in that same advancement. You could also make a fairly cogent argument that Joseph Stalin and Nikita Kruschev were responsible for the creation of Nasa as without them the space race would not have been relevant. Or you could blame the whole lot on a dinosaur fart. Causality sucks, man.
I must correct the previous assumption that he makes more than $100k, a little bird informed me that he makes less, but suffice it to say, it's closer to 100 than it is to 70. I'm not judging whether or not that is overpaid, but it does strike me as a TAD (ok, extraordinarily) hypocritical when one is so closely skirting the top 10% marker to start yelping about other people being overcompensated especially when some of the targets make LESS.
WTF? Using the writer's own figures, 2 weddings *4.33 weeks*6months=52 weddings, each requiring at least five hours of on-site work and an equal or greater amount off-site. That comes to a very normal professional service rate of about $115/hour INCLUDING all the expendables. Piss off, buddy, that's par for the course.
I wonder what someone with the following pedigree pulls in, since he failed to print his own salary. Last I worked in news (as an unpaid peon intern, they LOVE that in broadcast media) damn near everyone in the newsroom broke $100k and the big guns made millions:
"CBS Assistant Managing Editor, was a news editor for Bloomberg News, Executive Editor for the Daily Record in Baltimore and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times."
Now, I know he paid his dues at the LA Times, but I'm going to bet he now easily breaks $100k, putting him right smack in the top 7% of earners nationwide. For writing bullshit fluff like this, I think that's pretty damned over-paid. Hell, I've seen better writing on/., maybe he could adjust his salary to the same level of compensation.
IMHO Belkin makes crappy sub-standard products already. That they feel the need to make them intrusive as well as shoddy is just another reason not to buy a bottom-of-the-line product.
Clearly, the problems with BKAS security protocols likely will not be solved any time soon.
The perception that a WAP that is connected to absolutely nothing but the direct internet connection creates any greater risk takes an awe-inspiring level of logical prowess. If the WIRED connection has no security, and why would it if you have nothing connected to it, why bother with the WAP? That's like putting a padlock on a screen door.
Ah, Ayn Rand. A woman with the same authority as her nom du plume: a mechanical typewriter.
"everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort." (Virtue of Selfishness, p. 23)
I suppose that rules out wealth by acquisition, outright theft and for that matter the work of employees then, non? Doesn't make Billy boy any more respectable than the Bolsheviks, even by the standards of dearest delusional Alice.
Besides, let's not forget that this moral authority comes from someone who was above all else quite pissed off primarily because the family 's chemical laboratory that made it possible for her to attend University at St. Petersburg was communized--not exactly the fruit of her own labor, methinks. If her philosophy was consistent and "vithsout contradiction," she would have disavowed herself of interest in that wealth in the first place, thus having no reason to be so perpetually pissed off at its loss, since she didn't work for it, it wasn't hers to lose, n'est-ce pas?
That is exactly what I did to relative success...until I created another VPN connection to my office, which happily returned a public address on a network seemingly devoid of any firewall protection whatsoever. "Hello, you've got DoS!"
Can't name names, but their acronym rearraged sounds like "I SUCK."
Consider that most people have net worths of $46 thousand or less, he's doing the equivalent of John Q. Citizen writing two checks for five hundred bucks. Even those who are lucky enough to be equity millionaires, that's like sending one kid to college. If he cashed out everything and shoved it into a 2.25% interest bearing checking account he'd STILL make over a billion dollars the first year.
Besides, he didn't give dime one to a single soul for long after he became a multi-billionaire. Last I recall, "tithing" was considered par for philanthropy and this guy is quite a few points below par on that course. Would you really gush thankful if your local millionaire spent twenty years consuming and hording and then sent one kid to college to save his immortal soul? You probably wouldn't even stop to notice. I'd gander most people would do like a waiter receiving an insulting tip and insist he take his stingy excuse for gratuity and shove it where it came from. Bill Gates' "philanthopy" does not exceed that which is merely beneficial from a tax write-off point of view. He's not being generous at all. He simply knows how to do his taxes, which incidentally means for every billion he sends off to his pet projects, the public coffers lose several hundred million dollars. As the wealthiest person on the planet, I think it is fair to expect real generosity and not just good bookkeeping.
He's a robber-baron and should be treated with the respect one worthy of the title deserves.
Oh please, sir, might I have some more?
Re:Translated for the America-Impaired
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 1
Oh, like David Frum, who's on NPR every bile-spewing day of his life and must be a left wing commie pinko despite writing for the National Review and being so far right the only way he could be considered left on that scale is if it was drawn on a circle. Not that I'm biased, but if THAT guy can get on NPR, they've got my vote for "Fair and Balanced" hands down. Not that National Review and Fox News aren't objective. They're certainly not as biased as, say, Die Brennessel, which seems to be good enough for their demographic just the same...
Oh right, I can really see this working wonders in DC. You'd have to fire it at 15 signals just to turn from Massachussetts to Connecticut Ave at Dupont Circle. Besides, no one here pays attention to red lights anyway, so who cares if you have a green light in the middle of a gridlocked intersection?
Right. Microsoft GUI design tests have absolutely nothing to do with marketing. I suppose when you go to an autoshow and look at shiny mock-ups of cars that will never see the asphalt you think there is no connection to marketing. I suppose you also think that when information is "leaked" out of the White House it has nothing to do with public relations.
People think that product sneak peaks and information leaks are about marketing and public relations because that is the exact purpose of them.
DUH.
They are marketing to the same people who buy $60,000 SUVs based on the $10 dashboard clock. This is asinine from a technical point of view, but sadly good marketing. I'm surprised the taskbar doesn't have "Bulgari" embossed over simulated Connolly leather with burlwood accents and bling-bling galore.
It is truly a strange place that becomes stranger still in proximity. For instance, I live five minutes by foot from the US Capitol, yet as a US citizen, I have no voting representative. The distict government even prints 'Taxation without representation' on the license plates.
In fairness, the usual false majority is around 23 percent. A current example of this is the 7 million out of 27 million in California that voted and the 3.5 million who constituted a majority which othewise wouldnt even remotely be considered a quorum.
Yay, democracy.
More than possess an as yet to exist alternate, certainly. Last I checked it was less than 20%, given the number of annual issuances over the last ten year period, which without adjusting for 5-year validity for 18yos would yield the total number of current documents.
Obviously the idea is not a panacea, but given the problems, it certainly beats creating an entirely new system. If 20% of Americans already participate in the passport document system, that roughly equates to the number who make up a "majority" in any national election, given voter turnout.
The drivers license has no other purpose than authorizing the operation of a vehicle in a particular state. It is not by design a true identification as evidenced by the recent events in California where otherwise undocumented illegal aliens are being issued drivers licenses. Do you want to trust that for those boarding a jumbo jet?
Unless of course 'capacity,' 'distance,' 'speed' and 'fuel consumption' are considered as part of the efficiency calculation that generarlly works into 'cost.' I would dare say that in many circumstances a balloon is slightly more efficient than a dolly, for instance.
The database exists already, or haven't you ever left the country? You also apparently failed to notice that the hijackers in question boarded national flights, where any of the 250+ state issued IDs (or forgeries thereof) would have granted access. Look, there are more versions of our drivers' licenses than there are countries in the world--certainly of those we allow unfettered arrival visas to. I didn't say it would solve the entire problem of security, obviously, but making it remotely possible to verify authenticity of an ID by limiting the number of variations, particularly limiting to the one that has a very small number of variants (10) and is already being modified to include biometrics so you can positively link the document with the animal, one might say is a "Good Thing."
Or are you arguing that we should just do away with identification entirely and just let anyone board a plane with no concern about their identity? As for the denial of passports for people the government doesn't like, well, that's a slippery slope you can slide down on whatever body part thrills you most.
The feeling of security was dealt with in a Transportation Security Administration hearing here in Washington not too long ago where the obivous lack of a national identity card was skewered, since it is highly unlikely that the Driver's License, which is used as ID for all national flights, in all its 250+ forms could possibly be known on sight by anyone, much less the comatose security drones we have in place. The bottom line was that having the ID checked made people "feel" secure, but that it was a useless exercise made even worse by the preferential treatment of airport employees and commercial cargo that circumvent all security while senators risk being strip searched. The whole thing is so asinine and convoluted around alternately excessive invasions of privacy and nearly absolute anonymity. The aversion to a "national ID card" makes absolutely no sense. It is called a "passport" and it is linked to so much information it makes my head spin every time I watch the endless pages of data fly past on the computer screens in customs. Why not just require a damned passport to board a plane? The newest issues coming out within the year even have embedded biometrics. Problem solved.
It is perhaps useful that an MBA also be a CPA or vice versa, but there is no requirement that one possess the other or that a $25k/year staff accountant or individual auditor have either. The only authority the CPA designation gives is the ability to sign off external audits. I'm not devaluing the designation, but it does have a specific purpose that is not broadly applicable to everyone in business administration or even accounting in general.
If the perception of someone evaluating your skills is so woefully distorted that they cannot divine out the difference between "popping in a SuSE distro" and actual accomplishments based on your past performance and academic history then I doubt if having your name on every RFC for the past decade, a dozen patents and a Nobel Prize would convince them either. I'm sure the word of another faceless corporation that contracts out its training and certification operation to a third-party who then subcontracts "professional trainers" with no working experience beyond the classroom would be highly valuable to some simultaneously arrogant and ignorant human resources drone who is too lazy to perform an evaluation beyond checking off "MC[P|OP|OS[MI]|DST|SA[s|m|'03]|SE[s|m|'03]|SD|AD| DBA|T]." I doubt if most hiring managers could tell you the difference between an MCSA and MCSE or MCSD and MCAD anyway and god help them if they had to rummage through a stack of them from fifteen different sources. I mean, come on, does it take an MCP to operate Microsoft Word (the only thing required for the credential)? "Gosh, Bob, I like to let you write that letter, but you're not an MC[O|P|S]. You're just not qualified. Here, use this IBM Selectric, which arguably requires greater skills, instead." Please.
Nearly everyone I've encountered in IT, including a number whose names DO appear on RFCs going back twenty years, think these things aren't worth the paper they're printend on. Hiring managers, on the other hand, can't seem to see the forest unless every tree has a big sign on it in 850pt helvetica bold that says "Certified Tree" when a casual glance would provide more information that even the average squirrel could deduce on sight.
But wait, there's more! You can get the same raving lunatics passing rabid conspiracy theories who are also biased greedy corporate lackies at Fox News! Yay Capitalism!
...partly because if someone who has been in IT for more than ten minutes went out and got a commercial certification on everything they are skilled in, they would spend more than they would getting two Bachelor's degrees, a Master's and a Ph.D. from a private university.
What gives? Oh, I'm sorry you've been doing that for more than decade (or several) and/or have a string of degrees that cost tens of thousands of dollars and represent thousands of hours of specialized education that required passing hundreds of tests given by dozens of people with "Ph.D." behind their names. Worthless! We're going to take the flunky who has been doing it since last week and passed a single $2500 exam given by a janitor who was trained to pass the same test.
Sigh.
Maybe corporations should start requiring the same amount of granular commercial certification for MBA's. Oh, sorry you spent $150,000 to get that Harvard MBA. Could you take this $15,000 test to prove you can perform double-entry accounting?
Free trade is the natural state of existence? Really, for whom, when and where? OH, I forgot, it's an ideal and by definition exists only in your imagination.
The reason you have "special interest" concerns is that free trade can only be remotely possible with realtively level playing fields. If one country has no IP protection, no child-labor prevention laws, no environmental standards, whatever, you cannot expect to compete. The devil is in the details and in order to reduce tariffs, you have to equalize the legal frameworks that make them necessary to prevent a rapid race to the bottom. It is not surprising at all that what has been passed in this U.S. already is being proposed as the yardstick, considering the U.S. is the largest economy in the bloc.
From 1994 when NAFTA entered into force and 2000, imports to the U.S. from Latin America nearly doubled, increasing by US$140B and exports to Latin America more than doubled, increasing by US$175B. Canada too received a US$100B(+59%) increase in imports from the US and an increase of almost US$120B(+75%) in exports to the US in the same time. The previous six period's data show increases of 45% both ways between the US and Canada and only half as much between the US and Latin America, when post-NAFTA we saw ~100% increases. If Latin American trade, both in terms of exports and imports, increased at five times the rate as the same period pre-NAFTA, one can quite strongly suggest that NAFTA just might have had a positive effect. Really, what data are you using?
The interactive trade statistics are available here:
Sure, I can say "I am right now at this moment worse off than I was in 1993." However, that condition and all the anecdotal evidence I can muster say nothing about NAFTA. I might as well blame it all on the price of peas in Pakistan.
This must be why every overpriced enterprise application server suite has an "integration server" tied to it so you can create an n-tier application through obfuscation. If that is "getting rid of client/server," then I suppose by the same logic if you strapped a jet engine onto your honda civic, it would become a stealth fighter and cease to be a honda civic.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, in causal terms everything that has been is responsible for what is today and what will be tomorrow. You could just as easily say that Emperor Hirohito and Adolf Hitler were responsible as they were crucial elements in the drive for the advancement of various aspects computer science that we use every day, particularly in cryptography. For that matter, one could argue that certain logistical problems faced by the Nazis had a hand in that same advancement. You could also make a fairly cogent argument that Joseph Stalin and Nikita Kruschev were responsible for the creation of Nasa as without them the space race would not have been relevant. Or you could blame the whole lot on a dinosaur fart. Causality sucks, man.
I must correct the previous assumption that he makes more than $100k, a little bird informed me that he makes less, but suffice it to say, it's closer to 100 than it is to 70. I'm not judging whether or not that is overpaid, but it does strike me as a TAD (ok, extraordinarily) hypocritical when one is so closely skirting the top 10% marker to start yelping about other people being overcompensated especially when some of the targets make LESS.
10) WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS
/., maybe he could adjust his salary to the same level of compensation.
WTF? Using the writer's own figures, 2 weddings *4.33 weeks*6months=52 weddings, each requiring at least five hours of on-site work and an equal or greater amount off-site. That comes to a very normal professional service rate of about $115/hour INCLUDING all the expendables. Piss off, buddy, that's par for the course.
I wonder what someone with the following pedigree pulls in, since he failed to print his own salary. Last I worked in news (as an unpaid peon intern, they LOVE that in broadcast media) damn near everyone in the newsroom broke $100k and the big guns made millions:
"CBS Assistant Managing Editor, was a news editor for Bloomberg News, Executive Editor for the Daily Record in Baltimore and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times."
Now, I know he paid his dues at the LA Times, but I'm going to bet he now easily breaks $100k, putting him right smack in the top 7% of earners nationwide. For writing bullshit fluff like this, I think that's pretty damned over-paid. Hell, I've seen better writing on
I think I'll ask him. Why don't you?
Really, Ask Him
IMHO Belkin makes crappy sub-standard products already. That they feel the need to make them intrusive as well as shoddy is just another reason not to buy a bottom-of-the-line product.
Clearly, the problems with BKAS security protocols likely will not be solved any time soon.
The perception that a WAP that is connected to absolutely nothing but the direct internet connection creates any greater risk takes an awe-inspiring level of logical prowess. If the WIRED connection has no security, and why would it if you have nothing connected to it, why bother with the WAP? That's like putting a padlock on a screen door.
Ah, Ayn Rand. A woman with the same authority as her nom du plume: a mechanical typewriter. "everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort." (Virtue of Selfishness, p. 23) I suppose that rules out wealth by acquisition, outright theft and for that matter the work of employees then, non? Doesn't make Billy boy any more respectable than the Bolsheviks, even by the standards of dearest delusional Alice. Besides, let's not forget that this moral authority comes from someone who was above all else quite pissed off primarily because the family 's chemical laboratory that made it possible for her to attend University at St. Petersburg was communized--not exactly the fruit of her own labor, methinks. If her philosophy was consistent and "vithsout contradiction," she would have disavowed herself of interest in that wealth in the first place, thus having no reason to be so perpetually pissed off at its loss, since she didn't work for it, it wasn't hers to lose, n'est-ce pas?
That is exactly what I did to relative success...until I created another VPN connection to my office, which happily returned a public address on a network seemingly devoid of any firewall protection whatsoever. "Hello, you've got DoS!" Can't name names, but their acronym rearraged sounds like "I SUCK."
Yes, but he's worth $46 billion.
Consider that most people have net worths of $46 thousand or less, he's doing the equivalent of John Q. Citizen writing two checks for five hundred bucks. Even those who are lucky enough to be equity millionaires, that's like sending one kid to college. If he cashed out everything and shoved it into a 2.25% interest bearing checking account he'd STILL make over a billion dollars the first year.
Besides, he didn't give dime one to a single soul for long after he became a multi-billionaire. Last I recall, "tithing" was considered par for philanthropy and this guy is quite a few points below par on that course. Would you really gush thankful if your local millionaire spent twenty years consuming and hording and then sent one kid to college to save his immortal soul? You probably wouldn't even stop to notice. I'd gander most people would do like a waiter receiving an insulting tip and insist he take his stingy excuse for gratuity and shove it where it came from. Bill Gates' "philanthopy" does not exceed that which is merely beneficial from a tax write-off point of view. He's not being generous at all. He simply knows how to do his taxes, which incidentally means for every billion he sends off to his pet projects, the public coffers lose several hundred million dollars. As the wealthiest person on the planet, I think it is fair to expect real generosity and not just good bookkeeping.
He's a robber-baron and should be treated with the respect one worthy of the title deserves.
Oh please, sir, might I have some more?
Oh, like David Frum, who's on NPR every bile-spewing day of his life and must be a left wing commie pinko despite writing for the National Review and being so far right the only way he could be considered left on that scale is if it was drawn on a circle. Not that I'm biased, but if THAT guy can get on NPR, they've got my vote for "Fair and Balanced" hands down. Not that National Review and Fox News aren't objective. They're certainly not as biased as, say, Die Brennessel, which seems to be good enough for their demographic just the same...
Oh right, I can really see this working wonders in DC. You'd have to fire it at 15 signals just to turn from Massachussetts to Connecticut Ave at Dupont Circle. Besides, no one here pays attention to red lights anyway, so who cares if you have a green light in the middle of a gridlocked intersection?
Right. Microsoft GUI design tests have absolutely nothing to do with marketing. I suppose when you go to an autoshow and look at shiny mock-ups of cars that will never see the asphalt you think there is no connection to marketing. I suppose you also think that when information is "leaked" out of the White House it has nothing to do with public relations. People think that product sneak peaks and information leaks are about marketing and public relations because that is the exact purpose of them. DUH.
They are marketing to the same people who buy $60,000 SUVs based on the $10 dashboard clock. This is asinine from a technical point of view, but sadly good marketing. I'm surprised the taskbar doesn't have "Bulgari" embossed over simulated Connolly leather with burlwood accents and bling-bling galore.
It is truly a strange place that becomes stranger still in proximity. For instance, I live five minutes by foot from the US Capitol, yet as a US citizen, I have no voting representative. The distict government even prints 'Taxation without representation' on the license plates. In fairness, the usual false majority is around 23 percent. A current example of this is the 7 million out of 27 million in California that voted and the 3.5 million who constituted a majority which othewise wouldnt even remotely be considered a quorum. Yay, democracy.
More than possess an as yet to exist alternate, certainly. Last I checked it was less than 20%, given the number of annual issuances over the last ten year period, which without adjusting for 5-year validity for 18yos would yield the total number of current documents. Obviously the idea is not a panacea, but given the problems, it certainly beats creating an entirely new system. If 20% of Americans already participate in the passport document system, that roughly equates to the number who make up a "majority" in any national election, given voter turnout. The drivers license has no other purpose than authorizing the operation of a vehicle in a particular state. It is not by design a true identification as evidenced by the recent events in California where otherwise undocumented illegal aliens are being issued drivers licenses. Do you want to trust that for those boarding a jumbo jet?
Terrific. You just made it easier to board a plane than to purchase cigarettes or beer. How insightful.
Unless of course 'capacity,' 'distance,' 'speed' and 'fuel consumption' are considered as part of the efficiency calculation that generarlly works into 'cost.' I would dare say that in many circumstances a balloon is slightly more efficient than a dolly, for instance.
The database exists already, or haven't you ever left the country? You also apparently failed to notice that the hijackers in question boarded national flights, where any of the 250+ state issued IDs (or forgeries thereof) would have granted access. Look, there are more versions of our drivers' licenses than there are countries in the world--certainly of those we allow unfettered arrival visas to. I didn't say it would solve the entire problem of security, obviously, but making it remotely possible to verify authenticity of an ID by limiting the number of variations, particularly limiting to the one that has a very small number of variants (10) and is already being modified to include biometrics so you can positively link the document with the animal, one might say is a "Good Thing."
Or are you arguing that we should just do away with identification entirely and just let anyone board a plane with no concern about their identity? As for the denial of passports for people the government doesn't like, well, that's a slippery slope you can slide down on whatever body part thrills you most.
The feeling of security was dealt with in a Transportation Security Administration hearing here in Washington not too long ago where the obivous lack of a national identity card was skewered, since it is highly unlikely that the Driver's License, which is used as ID for all national flights, in all its 250+ forms could possibly be known on sight by anyone, much less the comatose security drones we have in place. The bottom line was that having the ID checked made people "feel" secure, but that it was a useless exercise made even worse by the preferential treatment of airport employees and commercial cargo that circumvent all security while senators risk being strip searched. The whole thing is so asinine and convoluted around alternately excessive invasions of privacy and nearly absolute anonymity. The aversion to a "national ID card" makes absolutely no sense. It is called a "passport" and it is linked to so much information it makes my head spin every time I watch the endless pages of data fly past on the computer screens in customs. Why not just require a damned passport to board a plane? The newest issues coming out within the year even have embedded biometrics. Problem solved.
It is perhaps useful that an MBA also be a CPA or vice versa, but there is no requirement that one possess the other or that a $25k/year staff accountant or individual auditor have either. The only authority the CPA designation gives is the ability to sign off external audits. I'm not devaluing the designation, but it does have a specific purpose that is not broadly applicable to everyone in business administration or even accounting in general.
| DBA|T]." I doubt if most hiring managers could tell you the difference between an MCSA and MCSE or MCSD and MCAD anyway and god help them if they had to rummage through a stack of them from fifteen different sources. I mean, come on, does it take an MCP to operate Microsoft Word (the only thing required for the credential)? "Gosh, Bob, I like to let you write that letter, but you're not an MC[O|P|S]. You're just not qualified. Here, use this IBM Selectric, which arguably requires greater skills, instead." Please.
If the perception of someone evaluating your skills is so woefully distorted that they cannot divine out the difference between "popping in a SuSE distro" and actual accomplishments based on your past performance and academic history then I doubt if having your name on every RFC for the past decade, a dozen patents and a Nobel Prize would convince them either. I'm sure the word of another faceless corporation that contracts out its training and certification operation to a third-party who then subcontracts "professional trainers" with no working experience beyond the classroom would be highly valuable to some simultaneously arrogant and ignorant human resources drone who is too lazy to perform an evaluation beyond checking off "MC[P|OP|OS[MI]|DST|SA[s|m|'03]|SE[s|m|'03]|SD|AD
Nearly everyone I've encountered in IT, including a number whose names DO appear on RFCs going back twenty years, think these things aren't worth the paper they're printend on. Hiring managers, on the other hand, can't seem to see the forest unless every tree has a big sign on it in 850pt helvetica bold that says "Certified Tree" when a casual glance would provide more information that even the average squirrel could deduce on sight.
But wait, there's more! You can get the same raving lunatics passing rabid conspiracy theories who are also biased greedy corporate lackies at Fox News! Yay Capitalism!
What, will Porsche start suing to have "gas-guzzler" removed from any reference to the worse-than-a-hummer 8mpg Cayenne?
...partly because if someone who has been in IT for more than ten minutes went out and got a commercial certification on everything they are skilled in, they would spend more than they would getting two Bachelor's degrees, a Master's and a Ph.D. from a private university.
What gives? Oh, I'm sorry you've been doing that for more than decade (or several) and/or have a string of degrees that cost tens of thousands of dollars and represent thousands of hours of specialized education that required passing hundreds of tests given by dozens of people with "Ph.D." behind their names. Worthless! We're going to take the flunky who has been doing it since last week and passed a single $2500 exam given by a janitor who was trained to pass the same test.
Sigh.
Maybe corporations should start requiring the same amount of granular commercial certification for MBA's. Oh, sorry you spent $150,000 to get that Harvard MBA. Could you take this $15,000 test to prove you can perform double-entry accounting?
Free trade is the natural state of existence? Really, for whom, when and where? OH, I forgot, it's an ideal and by definition exists only in your imagination.
The reason you have "special interest" concerns is that free trade can only be remotely possible with realtively level playing fields. If one country has no IP protection, no child-labor prevention laws, no environmental standards, whatever, you cannot expect to compete. The devil is in the details and in order to reduce tariffs, you have to equalize the legal frameworks that make them necessary to prevent a rapid race to the bottom. It is not surprising at all that what has been passed in this U.S. already is being proposed as the yardstick, considering the U.S. is the largest economy in the bloc.
e .cfm
From 1994 when NAFTA entered into force and 2000, imports to the U.S. from Latin America nearly doubled, increasing by US$140B and exports to Latin America more than doubled, increasing by US$175B. Canada too received a US$100B(+59%) increase in imports from the US and an increase of almost US$120B(+75%) in exports to the US in the same time. The previous six period's data show increases of 45% both ways between the US and Canada and only half as much between the US and Latin America, when post-NAFTA we saw ~100% increases. If Latin American trade, both in terms of exports and imports, increased at five times the rate as the same period pre-NAFTA, one can quite strongly suggest that NAFTA just might have had a positive effect. Really, what data are you using?
The interactive trade statistics are available here:
http://www.bea.gov/bea/international/bp_web/simpl
Sure, I can say "I am right now at this moment worse off than I was in 1993." However, that condition and all the anecdotal evidence I can muster say nothing about NAFTA. I might as well blame it all on the price of peas in Pakistan.
This must be why every overpriced enterprise application server suite has an "integration server" tied to it so you can create an n-tier application through obfuscation. If that is "getting rid of client/server," then I suppose by the same logic if you strapped a jet engine onto your honda civic, it would become a stealth fighter and cease to be a honda civic.