"You are forgetting the Democrats. Measured from the center, they are liberal/left wing."
I guess you missed the whole point of the post. The point being the center has moved so dramatically to the right in the last 25 years, and especially the last three years, that what is now passing for a centrist Democrat is what used to be a moderate Republican, the liberal democrats are painted as fringe loonies and have been completely locked out of the political process, and the center of the Republican party is moving to what used to be called the fringe right, not necessarily bad if it was to true conservatism but as I said its not, it much more closely resembles Fascism. Yes the Democrats are pro abortion and pro labor so if you want to define that is liberal go ahead.
"The US media is still mostly left wing (especially TV). This has not changed."
Thank you for playing the game and proving the point. The right wing keeps saying that in spite of the fact the media is dramatically further to the right than it was twenty years ago. Fox News alone has created a far right media that simply didn't exist twenty years ago. Talk radio is completely dominated by the far right. The so called liberal media has been compelled to move to the right to avoid being painted as the loony left. EVERY network jumped on the Iraq banwagon and was showing the exciting pictures of the tanks charging through Iraq. No network was asking the most rudimentary questions that should have been asked to challenge the deeply flawed and largely fabricated case for war in Iraq. They simply dare not because they would have been branded leftist and unpatriotic by the right wing and Fox. The end result questions that should have been asked weren't and we are in a ugly mess of a war that could easily cost a trillion dollars before its done and will most probably result in thousands of dead Americans and tens of thousands maimed for life.
"This is not true. Almost all corporations pay a rather high tax."
This is simply not true. They are in a rather high tax bracket but the tax code is swiss cheese for large corporations with skilled accountants. They fabricate losses, keep profits off shore, use complicated shelters, exploit tax loopholes that were put in the tax code to benefit large corporations. Its a simple fact that by the time it comes to send a check to Uncle Sam 2/3 of corporations especially the large multinationals DON'T pay their share of the tax burden.
The IRS doesn't even attempt to audit most large corporations, preferring to focus on middle america working people because they are an easy target. Auditing the complex books of large corporations is largely infeasible without massive new resources at the IRS. Just look at how long its taken to unravel Enron's books with a massive epxenditure of resources.
""and they are bought and paid for by big corporations"
Stop referring to far-left conspiracy theories as if they"
I'm sorry but all evidence suggests you are either naive or being intentionally dishonest. You have to look no further than last years so called Medicare reform bill. The drug and insurance companies flat out bought and paid for that legislation. Bill Tauzin who led it through Congress is taking a multimillion dollar job with the drug lobby as a reward for his efforts. The head of Medicare was, with the Bush Adminstration's approval, negotiating for a lucrative career with the very people he was rewarding with that legislation. He should have been fighting for the well being of Medicare, seniors and tax payers, but he was in fact concealing the true cost of the bill and how little it really offers seniors so he's future employers would get a bonanza at tax payers expense.
"will always be dominated by a couple of very centrist candidates"
This isn't really true in the U.S. lately. The Republican candidates adopt a facade of centrist until they are elected and then they are anything but. George H.W. Bush might pass for a centrist but in his early political life he was a hard right Goldwater Republican and assumed the facade of centrist when he realized it was useful to getting elected. Reagan and George W. Bush are about as far right as they can get away with in America and since 9/11 George W. Bush is going off the deep end to the right because he can get away with it and its a trend that appears to be accelerating. It should be noted these are right wing presidents, not true conservatives as the claim. They aren't conservatives because they are more fiscally irresponsible than liberals and appear to be huge fans of massive growth in government and encouraging that massive government to intrude in the economy and in the private lives of Americans. I know many of you wont like the term but they really are starting to more closely resemble moderate Fascists than anything conservative.
If the Republican's hold control of the white house and Congress in the next election and they can ram through a right wing appointment or two in to the Supreme court American government is going to be farther right than anyone would have ever imagined possible a few years ago.
The Democrats on the other hand adopt the facade of being the party of the left during primaries to win the nomination from their liberal base and then abandon them as they swing hard to the center right to try and get elected. Kerry for example was a complete flop during the primaries running as a centrist so he stole Dean's mantle as a leftist, won the primary and is now swinging towards the center right, his first policy initiative after winning the nomination being tax cuts for business (kind of odd since 2/3 of U.S. corporations don't pay any taxes and overall they carry a much smaller tax burden than the middle class does now (especially since Bush slashed taxes for the wealthy, on capital gains and dividends). Kerry is branded as a liberal but the record that is based on came during a period when the Democrats dominated Congress, Congress trended liberal, and Kerry is notorious for voting which ever way the wind blows. All in all Kerry has a snow ball's chance in hell of winning the election because he doesn't really appeal to anyone. The Deomcrats desperatelky need to throw him out at the conventions and put someone like John Edwards in, he is inexperienced which is good since he doesn't have Kerry's dismal record, he is likable which Kerry decidedly isn't, and most of all Edwards isn't a rich New England liberal.
There really is no liberal political party in the U.S. any more. The right has, over the last 25 years, successfully tarred the media as liberal and all liberals as dangerous. Through this campaign, and again with the aid of 9/11 they have pushed both the media and the Democratic party to center right which is a win/win for the hard right. The Democratic party no longer has any appeal to real liberals so they either vote for Nader or the Greens and waste their vote, hold their nose and vote Democrat because its less bad than Republican or don't vote at all. If the Democrats do win they are legislating at the center right. But, with this new world order the odds are stacked against Democrats winning anything anyway. They are now really just bad Republicans, they don't appeal to the right or the left, and they are bought and paid for by big corporations just like the Republican's they just aren't as good as the Republican's at selling out to corporate interests.
There is some truth in your contention but it is solvable in the short and long term. In the short term you might not be able to definitively establish a person's identity but as long as you start recording photographs, fingerprints and biometric information on a person you can begin to track that person especially if they are suspicious. Thats why the U.S. has begun to catalog people entering the U.S. who aren't traveling with passports which contain biometric information.
The long term definitive solution is you start identifying people from birth or a young age using biometrics, blood vessels in the eye and fingerprints for starters, and DNA sampling for more definitive proof as well as the ability to ID your parents. DNA identification requires more time and expense so is only viable where high certainty identification is required but it can most probably be accelerated with improved technology.
Passports are already being rapidly pushed to hold biometric identification though, as you say its hard to implement reliably today for people who aren't reliably identifiable to begin with.
The long term solution is already happening today, voluntarily, under the guise of identifying children in the event they are kidnapped. Its a pretty easy jump from that to mandatory biometric identification of children, again under the pretense that its for their safety. It will obviously take time but we will eventually reach the point that everyone from cooperating nations will be identifiable with very high confidence, and anyone who isn't so cataloged will have real difficulty traveling in nations with such a security obsession. It will be interesting to see if all nations develop such an obsession or if its confined to places like the U.S. and how much economic damage results.
There is a degree of inevitability in this in the U.S. now. It will be sold as for your protection and for your safety and no law abiding citizen could possibly object to it. The historical opposition to national ID's will be brushed aside without much more than a whimper. One reason its not happening yet is the U.S. economy is massively dependent on illegal immigrant labor and without it the U.S. economy would crater. I imagine this is a rationale for the Bush adminstration's plan to create a guest worker program so they can keep the cheap immigrant labor but start ID'ing and tracking them.
Some cinematic examples, in Woody Allen's "Sleeper" he was valuable to the resistance because he predated the ID system though I'm inclined to think having no ID would in fact make you a marked man.
In Minority Report Tom Cruise had to have an eye transplant to avoid identification when he was on the run. Its interesting to ponder if you could make a contact lens that would allow you to successfully forge blood vessel ID's on your eye without a full transplant.
I really don't see the point of his cost benefit analysis of stealing an election. There is no correlation between the campaign budgets and the value of, or resources available to steal an election. If you are to look back at the last couple of years its pretty obvious that controlling the U.S. government is worth trillions of dollars to the party that wins. There is usually at least a thousand to one payoff from the largesse of the U.S. treasury for large campaign contributors when your candidate wins. Just a few examples, in the case of the Bush administration they've given:
- hundreds of billions in tax cuts to their wealthy benefactors - $55 billion a year in the so called Medicare reform plan much of which is going in to the pockets of insurance and drug companies, key Republican benefactors. The drug companies have been given a bonanza in that the U.S. government will be buying billions in drugs for seniors, but are precluded by law from negotiating fair prices, so drug companies can charge as much as they dare. This is the antithesis of a free market, purchasing without negotiation. - $18 billion dollars of no bid cost plus contracts have gone to Halliburton for Iraq - the list goes on - Koch oil was facing a $500 million in pollution fines under the Clinton adminstration, when their man Bush won over Gore the fines were reduced to $20 million.
The fact is the Republican's have an enormous financial incentive to do whatever it takes to retain the presidency and the house, and to achieve the holy grail, a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate. Gaining a fillibuster proof majority will be hard but it is the holy grail to the Republicans because they could then pass any legislation, no matter how extreme, as long as they can keep their party's legislators in line through deceit, intimidation and bribery (like they did to pass the Medicare reform bill).
Its also an unfortunate fact that the Republican's have two key resources at their disposal that are priceless:
First, they control the resources of the Federal government, especially in the shadowy world of Defense, Intelligence and law enforcement. For example the DOD's recent efforts to gain electronic control of the vote of soldiers and oversees American's would allow whomever control that system, which is by definition the President and the Secretary of Defense to control millions of votes for next to nothing.
The Republicans, as has been pointed numerous times, disproportionately control the companies that control electronic voting machines. This inside track gives the Republican's a huge advantage should they decide to try and rig the upcoming election.
You might think this far fetched but having watched Bob Woodward on 60 minute tonight I'm thinking anything is possible from the people who currently occupy the White House. Dick Cheney in particular appears to be pulling the strings of a President who is in over his head intellectually and FREQUENTLY setting policy based on prayer, divine guidance and the manipulations of people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Wolfowitz, because he is simply not up to the job that faces him intellectually.
One of many disturbing things Woodward listed was that Tommie Franks at one point spent $700 million dollars on Iraq war preparations before Congress was consulted on a war with Iraq or had approved any money. They apparently took this money from an Afghanistan authorization, without telling Congress, which is both unconstitutional and an impeachable offense. Only Congress can allocate money.
At this weeks press conference the President was repeatedly asked if he'd made a mistake. He either couldn't think of anything, or denied any mistakes had been made, which is pretty implausible. The many failures in failing to stop 9/11 and in the mess that is no Iraq have led to no one in the administration being held accountable. Its as if they make no mistakes. Infallibility is a leading indicator of a a couple kinds of leadership, a dictator
I think its interesting that Clear Channel is also at the forefront in the new FCC/Bush Administration effort to reinvigorate censorship. Sure the FCC smacked them with a few fines but they are banning shock jocks from their stations without much of a whimper. Whether you love or hate Howard Stern when the government returns to deciding what you can and can't watch and listen to that is deeply disturbing.
Some disturbing parallels can be drawn between 9/11 and the Janet Jackson costume malfunction. 9/11 was used by the Bush administration to pass the Patriot Act and to invade Iraq. Two things they keenly wanted to do before 9/11 but couldn't have made happen without 9/11.
Likewise Janet Jackson's poor judgment is going to be used as the excuse to put us back to broadcast standards from the 1950's which is something the bible thumpers in the Bush Administration keenly wanted to do anyway but needed the national outrage from the breast baring to enact. I really don't care a great deal if they do clamp down on the broadcast networks, don't watch them anyway, but the FCC seems to be eyeing cable/satellite for greater censorship and that is something that simply shouldn't happen. I really don't want to watch R rated movies on cable that have been censored in to PG and butchered in the process. Its extremely irritating to watch movies where all the profanity has been dubbed with stupid substitutes and critical parts of the movie ended up on the censor's cutting room floor.
I'm not saying the FCC and ClearChannel are in bed together but a lot of what is happening lately suggests ClearChannel is teaming with the FCC to clean up radio. ClearChannel is the logical choice as an FCC tool thanks to their excessive nationwide market clout.
Don't be suprised if ClearChannel turns in to the FCC's lap dog in its new censorship war and the FCC bestows some gifts on ClearChannel in return that will help them in the marketplace. This attack on satellite radio would appear to be an ideal candidate.
If this were to occur it would be a vivid example of why media concentration is fundementally bad in a nation that is supposed to be a democracy and have a free press. If the government starts trying to censor and influence the media in a nation with a great diversity of ownership they are much less like to succeed than they are in a nation where the media is controlled by a few large corporations who are extremely likely to pander to the demands of those in power.
Reference the STREAMS benchmarks post below AGAIN. The problem was not the memory bandwidth to the video and graphics hardware. The problem was the feeble 80 MB/sec to the CPU which made it horrible for ALL general purpose computing applications like Maya and Pro/E and helped put SGI out of these markets.
The key problem here is SGI was still trying to sell O2's two years later and four years later abd.... They were barely competitive with a PC when they were released, weren't competitive with the contemporary workstations and SGI kept trying to milk them for years when they were pure dogs for anything but video and video textures.
"Somewhat unreliable my ass, this fellow likely has never even laid naked eye on/or worked on one of their big iron systems."
If you read the original post you would notice I was talking about their multiboard graphics systems. With all those chips and mechanical interconnects they simply had no chance of matching the reliability of a single board Nvidia or ATI card with single chip GPU. My point was SGI was late in jumping to a single chip GPU, they were still building complex multiboard graphics systems which is where they got creamed by 3DFX and Nvidia on price, reliability and performance.
Yes it had exceptional total memory bendwidth and bandwidth to all the graphics and video gear and its a marketing bullet they used with great success to sucker people like you in to thinking it has great memory performance when it doesn't.
The problem is the memory pipe to the actual CPU is completely crippled. They improved it a little in later revs but it consistently trails a lowly PC in the definitive memory bandwidth benchmark, STREAMS:
http://www.dl.ac.uk/TCSC/disco/Benchmarks/stream s. html
Its 165th on this list out of 182 and a lot of the worse systems are SGI's. It gets 80.2 MB/sec which is pathetic by any modern standard. A not particularly new PC can get 400 MB/sec easy.
If you've used an O2 and wondered why it seems so freaking slow, that is reason number 1. The R5K isn't exactly a speed burner either. Its better suited to embedded applications than a desktop workstation.
Also about this time SGI's ground breaking new system was the O2. It was really good at some niche video functions, including video textures. Unfortunately it had truly dismal memory bandwidth to the CPU, I guess they just forgot that this is one of the most basic building blocks of a computer with good performance. It was trailing just about everything on SPEC benchmarks before it even released(and it was late).
They sold a bunch of them to people who wanted cheap SGI's, like ILM. I speculate to this day that the O2 was a key contributor to ILM making so many bad movies during the era they relied on those steaming piles. They were just crushingly slow and I imagine any sucked the creativity out of any artist that had to use one, especially after they saw Maya running on a $2,000 PC or a Mac.
SGI does some really interesting niche technology but they have never had a CPU strategy that worked in any sustained way and they completely lost it in graphics when they kept trying to build multiboard graphics monstrosities while GLINT came out with the first graphics chip, followed by 3DFX, Nvidia and ATI. Carver Mead outlined a long time ago how to design electronics and that was to put everything on a CMOS chip. SGI didn't learn that lesson for some reason so all their graphics systems were big, bulky, somewhat unreliable and most importantly way to expensive to manufacture versus a mass produced GPU.
"Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits."
Actually, I think you will just pile another GUI toolkit on to an already large pile, and create a new set of applications with a whole new look and feel. In particular you seem to be understating the major effort you are proposing either intentionally or unintentionally.
First off it takes a lot of work to develop a complete GUI toolkit from scratch. Once you do it then you have to migrate a large body of applications to it which is probably a larger effort than developing the toolkit in the first place. Are you planning to rewrite all the applications in GNOME and/or KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla etc. How long do you figure that will take. It would take a long time and it would be time spent not developing the capabilities of the applications. In many respects it would be hitting a master reset on the Linux desktop and starting over, which isn't likely to lead to world domination for at least a few years.
Chances are you wont even get a majority of the developers on some of these major projects to buy in to your new toolkit, though some probably will so you will probably end up with a bunch of new splinters.
I'm just not sure what it is about GUI toolkits and window managers that exert this constant allure on geeks, compelling them to constantly develop new ones, the vast majority of which never develop critical mass.
But hey, maybe through superior uber geekness you will develop a new superior uber geek toolkit and you will be able to migrate a complete set of applications to it, and all others will be abandoned in the face of its superiority. Its just seems like something of a long shot. One thing positive I can say about this plan is it might be the only way to end the death match between GNOME and KDE.
Exactly how much time were you estimating to achieve this grand unified GUI?
I'm trying really hard to remember a case where a company stopped "fighting MS and start(ed) working with them" and came out a winner in the end. Dell and Intel might be considered successful partnerships with Microsoft but they are partnerships in name only since Microsoft tends to dictate all the terms and conditions.
SGI tried to stop fighting and work with Microsoft on Fahrenheit among other things. They pretty much cratered the company in the process. Not sure anyone remembers Fahrenheit, but it was an attempt to develop a next gen 3D API beyond Direct3D, OpenGL and Performer. It became very obvious from day one that it was mostly designed to divert SGI's attention from backing OpenGL against Direct3D. SGI was dreaming of defining the 3D standard for all those millions of Windows desktops. Microsoft wasn't concealing the fact that everything going on there was irrelevant unless it could be shoehorned in to Direct3D:
Microsoft simply DOESN'T work with its competitors. It very rarely works with its partners. Its partnerships tend to be a smaller companies who think by partnering with Microsoft they are going to be "made men" in the mafia sense of the term, but at some point if the project is successful or not Microsoft will, one way or another "whack" the partner. The one strategy most likely to lead to a desirable outcome is for the small company to sell its assets to Microsoft, probably for less than they are worth, but still make a tidy profit and run.
Microsoft seduces, it bullies, it uses slight of hand misdirection, it uses, it simply doesn't partner. One thing Scooter used to have right at SUN, you either fight Microsoft or you die, the only other viable strategy is to look small, don't get to profitable, and hope Microsoft doesn't notice you before you cash out.
The key problem here is the government pretty much always has to put this kind of thing our for competitive bids to the private sector. Its increasingly rare for civil servants do software or systems development whether it be NASA, the IRS or the DOD.
Dick Cheney was the trailblazer for contracting out everything at the DOD when he was Secretary of Defense. He conveniently went to work at Halliburton right after that, whose Kellog Brown and Root subsidiary has been the army's contractor of choice since at least Vietnam so his new policy was conveniently a bonanza for Cheney in his after life. Its led to oddities like Blackwater, an organization of ex SEALS and special forces who are essentially mercenaries, filling all the huge gaps in the regular army, thanks to downsizing and contracting, but they draw six figure salaries standing next to grunts not making anything close to six figures. Interestingly American troops in Iraq are fed by Saudi and Kuwaiti subcontractors to Halliburton. When your fighting a war against Muslims having indigenous Muslims feed your army is an immensely dangerous and interesting avenue for a terrorist infiltrator.
But to get back to the original point, since the government generally must contract out IT projects this has led to the creation of massive corporations who do nothing but bid for government IT contracts. Two of the biggest being CSC and EDS. IBM and other do to but they don't feed as quite as exclusively at the government trough.
The problem with companies like CSC and EDS is they are well honed killing machines when it comes to writing proposals for government contracts and doing whatever it takes to win them. At the point they make the kill, they really stop having any incentive to actually do the job well. The government does an exceedingly poor job of penalizing bad performance by contractors. As a result CSC comes in to something like this, they hire a required quota of warm bodies and they start going though a standard process of requirements, specifications, reviews, coding, delivering and billing. In the midst of all there is really no one who has a really strong incentive to develop a really simple, stellar solution quickly or cheaply. The solution almost inevitably becomes an exercise in unmanageable complexity, it overruns which is usually OK with the CSC, since they usually keep getting paid as everyone ever more desperately seeks an ever more elusive goal of completion. So what if the project is eventually cancelled and defeat is admitted. CSC is unlikely to be penalized in any meaningful way. It wont stop them from getting the next government contract up for bids. There is a chance they will be persona non grata at the the IRS for a while so maybe EDS will do the next attempt and they will most probably do no better and there are only so many big prime contractors to choose from.
A key point here is 8 billion dollars may sound like a lot and it really is to all the working people whose hard earn money is going in to taxes that are being squandered, but in multi trillion dollar Federal budgets its insignificant. Everyone is wasting this kind of money everywhere so who among the politicians, bureaucrats and contractor hogs feeding at the trough really cares. Its just a simple fact that the U.S. government has spiraled out of control, voting Democrat or Republican isn't going to fix it. At this point it appears impossible to fix it, because ordinary people have no way to unite, stand up in unison one day and say enough is enough. Of course lots of ordinary people are working at CSC and Halliburton and they REALLY have no reason to complain about the fraud, waste and abuse in the government contracting system.
Simple solution. Train them but train them badly, very badly. Train them with stuff that sounds plausible but is diametricly opposed to right. What are they going to do, fire you?
I'm pretty sure this must be a late April Fools Joke. I've never seen any evidence anyone working customer support in India has ever been trained by anybody.
Well actually natural gas generated electricity has reached the point that is so expensive its becoming impractical thanks to high gas prices. The break even point for gas generation versus coal is $3 per million BTU's of gas. Gas is currently around $6-7.
America is in fact poised for a massive building surge in coal fired power plants according to the AP today. Something like 90 coal fired plants are in the queue to generate 50,000 megawatts of power. They usually have a hard time getting through the permitting process since they are the dirtiest form of power generation (not counting fission's radioactive waste), but the Bush administration is exceptionally friendly to the coal industry, they are one of his largest campaign contributors, so I'm pretty sure the EPA and the rest of the federal government will grease the skids for these new plants.
Over the next ten years the U.S. will probably need 140,000 megawatts of new power and the current plan is for half of it to be from coal.
Of course this is going to be a boon to the people in the Bush adminstration who view greenhouse gases, acid rain and big increases in air pollution as a sign of a healthy economy.
I think China figured out a while ago, its a little easier and less messy to bury the U.S. using economic means, rather than via wars. Wars are pretty messy.
China does need a creditable deterrent to keep the U.S. from adventuring militarily in Asia. Especially at the point when the U.S. figures out that is bankrupt and is going to need to use its military to maintain its global domination.
Nope. It was reported by BBC and all the major U.S. news outlets last summer. I have to give your foreign minister high marks for truthfullness, if nothing else.
Here is the BBC on it, thanks to 30 seconds in google:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3043330.stm
"The Polish Foreign Minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, said his country had never disguised the fact that it sought direct access to the oilfields."
"He was speaking as a group of Polish firms signed a deal with a subsidiary of US Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton."
"The US firm, Kellogg, Brown and Root, has already won million-dollar contracts to carry out reconstruction work in Iraq."
"We have never hidden our desire for Polish oil companies to finally have access to sources of commodities," Mr Cimoszewicz told the Polish PAP news agency. "
It noteworthy that Poland, with one of the of the larger contingents, flat admitted they are there because they wanted a cut of Iraq's oil wealth and all the other lucrative contracts being let to rebuild Iraq, largely funded by U.S. tax dollars.
I really wish my tax dollars were being spent to rebuild the U.S., to create jobs in the U.S. and were not being pouring them in to a country that is likely to explode in civil war anyway,
Of course people are going to take these jobs. There was a truck driver on the news a couple nights ago getting ready to go there to work for KBR(Halliburton's military contractor subsidiary). He's nearing retirement and he needs the FU money. Where exactly are you going to get a truck driving job in the U.S. thats going to pay you a hundred thousand a year, tax free.
He knows its a gamble, that he might die in an ambush or have his legs blown off by an IED but if you can't get a decent job in the U.S. why not. May as well cash in on the spoils of war, everyone else is.
Space defense has all the appearance of a Maginot line. Its very expensive to build and very easy to defeat, especially in an age of asymmetric warfare. When the most devastating attack in U.S. history was done with civilian airlines explain to me the value of fixating on missile defense. Its a relic of cold war thinking when the one true threat the U.S. had was a missile attack from the U.S.S.R.
Missile defense is also very lucrative to the big aerospace companies who want to get the multibillion dollar contracts. You can be sure they are lobbying hard and spreading around campaign contributions to make it happen. A sympathetic Republican administration and big defense companies lobbying for them is an assurance these programs will continue for the forseeable future and will expand.
The only attack this system might prevent is a rogue state, with a few primitive missiles, like North Korea launching a missile at the U.S. If they know the missile defense is there they can just put their nukes on tramp steamers and sail them in to the harbors of major U.S. cities. They only way to deal with states like North Korea is to disarm them, one way or another. If there is any state that deserves to be taken down for WMD's and repressive dictatorship its North Korea, not Iraq. Only prolbem is if we try they will probably devastate Seoul and may retaliate with nukes against South Korea and the U.S., if they have them. The Bush administration will never be able to explain the rational for leaving North Korea in tact, taking down Iraq, and letting Pakistan get away with proliferating nuclear weapons technology to anyone with a few million dollars. We took down Iraq for a vague suspicion of developing nuclear weapons. North Korean has them and Pakistan has been really proliferating them, wholesale, and we haven't done much since we caught on.
If you turn to Russia, they had largely stopped developing strategic weapons. Thanks to the Bush administrations saber rattling they are now going to resume the arms race. They've already announced plans to develop warheads with manuevering capability to defeat ABM's, massive decoy strategies are also inevitable, and they are resuming work on their own missile defense. Another way to beat missile defense is to deploy massive numbers of new missiles. One reason the U.S. and U.S.S.R signed a treaty banning ABM's is because they had the foresight to look ahead and see the consequence of deploying them. Both countries would have dramaticly escalated missile production in order to be sure they could overwhelm the new defense. As bad as the arms race was Mutual Assured Destruction kept it in check. When you start deploying defenses and start planning to try to win a nuclear war it leads to two things:
A. A greater risk of a war happening if one side thinks they can win without significant damage thanks to defenses. B. The arms race spirals out of control, as countries build massive numbers of new missiles to overwhelm the others defenses, and then massive new defense to counter the huge numbers of new missiles.
All in all the world would have been a better place without restarting the arms race. Thank you again, little George.
Re:Administration hasn't done anything bad
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Clinton: War in Iraq, zero American casualties and cost less than a billion dollars. Its a real stretch to call one retaliatory strike a war in this day and age.
Bush: Nearly six hundred dead American soldiers and counting, thousands of soldiers wounded, many with permanent burn scars and lost limbs, thousands of dead Iraqi civilians(the provisional authority wont let anyone even count them). Cost at least a $150 billion dollars and counting. The end result is a country that is teetering on the brink of a civil war. If we pull out it will explode. If we stay it will probably cost us $100 billion and hundreds of casualties a year, indefinitely. And, of course, we don't really know why we did it. Everyone in the Bush administration has admitted the WMD charges were at best wrong, and at worst intentional deception. Bush recently made jokes about the missing WMD's during a speech in Washington. The families of the dead and wounded soldiers weren't laughing. There have been no proven ties to Al Queada or 9/11. Fact is Saddam was only Muslim out of convenience and Islamic extremists for the most part hated him.
Saddam was a bad man but there are a lot of bad men ruling countries around the world. If we are going to take it on ourselves to get rid of all of them we will be very busy, very broke and our military will be broken. As General Shinseki said before the war it takes a big army to occupy a country. Bush fired him for saying it, he's been proven to be correct.
If we are going to take down governments the minimum we should except from our government is for them to think about the day after the tanks rolled in to Baghdad. This administration clearly didn't. Bush #1 could have rolled into Baghdad in the first gulf war, there was justification then. They said they didn't because our allies wouldn't support it. I wager its more likely they considered the consequences of deposing Saddam and realized Saddam if nothing else held Iraq together. Without him the Kurds will seek independence which will start a war with Turkey. The Shia's will seek the power that is their right being the majority, and they will institute an Iran friendly Islamic republic. The Sunni's being pushed out of power will be shit on by the Shia's, turnabout being fairplay, and will generally get pissed off and start blowing things up which is what they are doing.
The only country that is probably really happy about all this is Israel. They managed to get the U.S. to, by proxy, take down one of their bitterest enemies without firing a shot.
I neglected to point out that if governments really want to use computers and databases to catch fraud, maybe they should first consider using computers and databases to finally deal with the massive fraud, waste and abuse in their own budgets. I'm willing to bet you a half a trillion dollars they would find a whole lot more money there than they will find trying to milk every last cent from working Americans who are for the most part fed up with our governments taxes and tax code.
"Thats this point the government cannot effectively eliminate the debt with either a) sacrificing essential services or B) increasing revenue."
Thats ridiculous. The reason we are running massive budget deficits and our taxes are so high is thanks to massive corruption and waste in our government.
Halliburton has something like 18 billion dollars in no bid contracts in Iraq. They are cost plus contracts so its impossible for them to not make money on them. On top of that they've been cooking their books to rake in even higher profits, for example wildly inflating the number of meals they are serving to the Army. Bechtel is presumably doing about as well. Its pretty simple really, they are so connected with the Bush administration there was no chance these contracts would be competitively bid, and they are raking in huge profits at tax payer expense. Most of the contractors working in Iraq are making six figure, tax exempt, salaries. Iraq is one giant pork barrel for friends of the Bush administration. This is, no doubt, one reason they wanted to invade Iraq.
The annual ombudsmen bill is an annual ritual where Congressmen, from both parties, dole out pork to the friends and contributors. Its $820 billion total, $328 billions is discretionary spending (which means not essential) and about $11 billion is unabashed pork. John McKane does an annual speech exposing all the blatant payola and humiliating his fellow Congressman for doing it. The congressional delegation from Alaska is especially adept at it. Alaska gets more federal hand outs than any state in the Union, per capita.
http://timesargus.com/Story/77768.html
Last years so called Medicare reform bill was a gigantic subsidy to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries which will cost us at least $55 billion a year very little of which is benefiting seniors. It was passed using deceptively low cost estimates, bribery, deception and pushed through by corrupt insiders. Billy Tauzin who pushed it through congress, and the Medicare administrator who hid the true cost, instantaneously took multimillion dollar jobs with the drug industry they'd just blessed with tax payer subsidized wealth. Its a basicly a transfer of our tax dollars in to their pockets because they are friends and contributors of the Republicans. I'm pretty sure these two industries are probably the least in need of a bailout from the Federal government of any in this country.
The Bush/Cheney Energy bill is likewise going to be a huge transfer of wealth in to the pockets of big energy companies if it passes.
The Pentagon is equally bad. There is a revolving door from the civilians and officers in the DOD to big defense contractors. They are throwing billions in contracts to these companies while they are in the government and then taking lucrative jobs with the contractors as the payoff when they leave the government. The latest most vivid case was a $20 billion dollar deal for 767 tankers that was thrown to Boeing by Darlene Druyun, a key civilian procurement official for the Air Force. As soon as the deal was signed she took a lucrative job at Boeing. The only reason this stinking mess unraveled was because John McCain once again refused to stand for it and exposed it.
Basically you need to understand how the U.S. system works. Big corporations and wealthy individuals donate relatively small amounts to a candidates war chest. If that candidate wins they get a 1,000 or 10,000 fold return on their investment at tax payer expense. The company wins, the politician wins (its not their money they are giving back to their donors), and the tax payer gets screwed.
There is also a revolving door where people are jumping between big corporations and government service. They don't make anything while they are on the Federal payroll but they get RICH as soon as they return to private industry and they get paid off for their gener
Slashdot Mirror
"You are forgetting the Democrats. Measured from the center, they are liberal/left wing."
I guess you missed the whole point of the post. The point being the center has moved so dramatically to the right in the last 25 years, and especially the last three years, that what is now passing for a centrist Democrat is what used to be a moderate Republican, the liberal democrats are painted as fringe loonies and have been completely locked out of the political process, and the center of the Republican party is moving to what used to be called the fringe right, not necessarily bad if it was to true conservatism but as I said its not, it much more closely resembles Fascism. Yes the Democrats are pro abortion and pro labor so if you want to define that is liberal go ahead.
"The US media is still mostly left wing (especially TV). This has not changed."
Thank you for playing the game and proving the point. The right wing keeps saying that in spite of the fact the media is dramatically further to the right than it was twenty years ago. Fox News alone has created a far right media that simply didn't exist twenty years ago. Talk radio is completely dominated by the far right. The so called liberal media has been compelled to move to the right to avoid being painted as the loony left. EVERY network jumped on the Iraq banwagon and was showing the exciting pictures of the tanks charging through Iraq. No network was asking the most rudimentary questions that should have been asked to challenge the deeply flawed and largely fabricated case for war in Iraq. They simply dare not because they would have been branded leftist and unpatriotic by the right wing and Fox. The end result questions that should have been asked weren't and we are in a ugly mess of a war that could easily cost a trillion dollars before its done and will most probably result in thousands of dead Americans and tens of thousands maimed for life.
"This is not true. Almost all corporations pay a rather high tax."
This is simply not true. They are in a rather high tax bracket but the tax code is swiss cheese for large corporations with skilled accountants. They fabricate losses, keep profits off shore, use complicated shelters, exploit tax loopholes that were put in the tax code to benefit large corporations. Its a simple fact that by the time it comes to send a check to Uncle Sam 2/3 of corporations especially the large multinationals DON'T pay their share of the tax burden.
The IRS doesn't even attempt to audit most large corporations, preferring to focus on middle america working people because they are an easy target. Auditing the complex books of large corporations is largely infeasible without massive new resources at the IRS. Just look at how long its taken to unravel Enron's books with a massive epxenditure of resources.
""and they are bought and paid for by big corporations"
Stop referring to far-left conspiracy theories as if they"
I'm sorry but all evidence suggests you are either naive or being intentionally dishonest. You have to look no further than last years so called Medicare reform bill. The drug and insurance companies flat out bought and paid for that legislation. Bill Tauzin who led it through Congress is taking a multimillion dollar job with the drug lobby as a reward for his efforts. The head of Medicare was, with the Bush Adminstration's approval, negotiating for a lucrative career with the very people he was rewarding with that legislation. He should have been fighting for the well being of Medicare, seniors and tax payers, but he was in fact concealing the true cost of the bill and how little it really offers seniors so he's future employers would get a bonanza at tax payers expense.
"will always be dominated by a couple of very centrist candidates"
This isn't really true in the U.S. lately. The Republican candidates adopt a facade of centrist until they are elected and then they are anything but. George H.W. Bush might pass for a centrist but in his early political life he was a hard right Goldwater Republican and assumed the facade of centrist when he realized it was useful to getting elected. Reagan and George W. Bush are about as far right as they can get away with in America and since 9/11 George W. Bush is going off the deep end to the right because he can get away with it and its a trend that appears to be accelerating. It should be noted these are right wing presidents, not true conservatives as the claim. They aren't conservatives because they are more fiscally irresponsible than liberals and appear to be huge fans of massive growth in government and encouraging that massive government to intrude in the economy and in the private lives of Americans. I know many of you wont like the term but they really are starting to more closely resemble moderate Fascists than anything conservative.
If the Republican's hold control of the white house and Congress in the next election and they can ram through a right wing appointment or two in to the Supreme court American government is going to be farther right than anyone would have ever imagined possible a few years ago.
The Democrats on the other hand adopt the facade of being the party of the left during primaries to win the nomination from their liberal base and then abandon them as they swing hard to the center right to try and get elected. Kerry for example was a complete flop during the primaries running as a centrist so he stole Dean's mantle as a leftist, won the primary and is now swinging towards the center right, his first policy initiative after winning the nomination being tax cuts for business (kind of odd since 2/3 of U.S. corporations don't pay any taxes and overall they carry a much smaller tax burden than the middle class does now (especially since Bush slashed taxes for the wealthy, on capital gains and dividends). Kerry is branded as a liberal but the record that is based on came during a period when the Democrats dominated Congress, Congress trended liberal, and Kerry is notorious for voting which ever way the wind blows. All in all Kerry has a snow ball's chance in hell of winning the election because he doesn't really appeal to anyone. The Deomcrats desperatelky need to throw him out at the conventions and put someone like John Edwards in, he is inexperienced which is good since he doesn't have Kerry's dismal record, he is likable which Kerry decidedly isn't, and most of all Edwards isn't a rich New England liberal.
There really is no liberal political party in the U.S. any more. The right has, over the last 25 years, successfully tarred the media as liberal and all liberals as dangerous. Through this campaign, and again with the aid of 9/11 they have pushed both the media and the Democratic party to center right which is a win/win for the hard right. The Democratic party no longer has any appeal to real liberals so they either vote for Nader or the Greens and waste their vote, hold their nose and vote Democrat because its less bad than Republican or don't vote at all. If the Democrats do win they are legislating at the center right. But, with this new world order the odds are stacked against Democrats winning anything anyway. They are now really just bad Republicans, they don't appeal to the right or the left, and they are bought and paid for by big corporations just like the Republican's they just aren't as good as the Republican's at selling out to corporate interests.
There is some truth in your contention but it is solvable in the short and long term. In the short term you might not be able to definitively establish a person's identity but as long as you start recording photographs, fingerprints and biometric information on a person you can begin to track that person especially if they are suspicious. Thats why the U.S. has begun to catalog people entering the U.S. who aren't traveling with passports which contain biometric information.
The long term definitive solution is you start identifying people from birth or a young age using biometrics, blood vessels in the eye and fingerprints for starters, and DNA sampling for more definitive proof as well as the ability to ID your parents. DNA identification requires more time and expense so is only viable where high certainty identification is required but it can most probably be accelerated with improved technology.
Passports are already being rapidly pushed to hold biometric identification though, as you say its hard to implement reliably today for people who aren't reliably identifiable to begin with.
The long term solution is already happening today, voluntarily, under the guise of identifying children in the event they are kidnapped. Its a pretty easy jump from that to mandatory biometric identification of children, again under the pretense that its for their safety. It will obviously take time but we will eventually reach the point that everyone from cooperating nations will be identifiable with very high confidence, and anyone who isn't so cataloged will have real difficulty traveling in nations with such a security obsession. It will be interesting to see if all nations develop such an obsession or if its confined to places like the U.S. and how much economic damage results.
There is a degree of inevitability in this in the U.S. now. It will be sold as for your protection and for your safety and no law abiding citizen could possibly object to it. The historical opposition to national ID's will be brushed aside without much more than a whimper. One reason its not happening yet is the U.S. economy is massively dependent on illegal immigrant labor and without it the U.S. economy would crater. I imagine this is a rationale for the Bush adminstration's plan to create a guest worker program so they can keep the cheap immigrant labor but start ID'ing and tracking them.
Some cinematic examples, in Woody Allen's "Sleeper" he was valuable to the resistance because he predated the ID system though I'm inclined to think having no ID would in fact make you a marked man.
In Minority Report Tom Cruise had to have an eye transplant to avoid identification when he was on the run. Its interesting to ponder if you could make a contact lens that would allow you to successfully forge blood vessel ID's on your eye without a full transplant.
I really don't see the point of his cost benefit analysis of stealing an election. There is no correlation between the campaign budgets and the value of, or resources available to steal an election. If you are to look back at the last couple of years its pretty obvious that controlling the U.S. government is worth trillions of dollars to the party that wins. There is usually at least a thousand to one payoff from the largesse of the U.S. treasury for large campaign contributors when your candidate wins. Just a few examples, in the case of the Bush administration they've given:
- hundreds of billions in tax cuts to their wealthy benefactors
- $55 billion a year in the so called Medicare reform plan much of which is going in to the pockets of insurance and drug companies, key Republican benefactors. The drug companies have been given a bonanza in that the U.S. government will be buying billions in drugs for seniors, but are precluded by law from negotiating fair prices, so drug companies can charge as much as they dare. This is the antithesis of a free market, purchasing without negotiation.
- $18 billion dollars of no bid cost plus contracts have gone to Halliburton for Iraq
- the list goes on
- Koch oil was facing a $500 million in pollution fines under the Clinton adminstration, when their man Bush won over Gore the fines were reduced to $20 million.
The fact is the Republican's have an enormous financial incentive to do whatever it takes to retain the presidency and the house, and to achieve the holy grail, a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate. Gaining a fillibuster proof majority will be hard but it is the holy grail to the Republicans because they could then pass any legislation, no matter how extreme, as long as they can keep their party's legislators in line through deceit, intimidation and bribery (like they did to pass the Medicare reform bill).
Its also an unfortunate fact that the Republican's have two key resources at their disposal that are priceless:
First, they control the resources of the Federal government, especially in the shadowy world of Defense, Intelligence and law enforcement. For example the DOD's recent efforts to gain electronic control of the vote of soldiers and oversees American's would allow whomever control that system, which is by definition the President and the Secretary of Defense to control millions of votes for next to nothing.
The Republicans, as has been pointed numerous times, disproportionately control the companies that control electronic voting machines. This inside track gives the Republican's a huge advantage should they decide to try and rig the upcoming election.
You might think this far fetched but having watched Bob Woodward on 60 minute tonight I'm thinking anything is possible from the people who currently occupy the White House. Dick Cheney in particular appears to be pulling the strings of a President who is in over his head intellectually and FREQUENTLY setting policy based on prayer, divine guidance and the manipulations of people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Wolfowitz, because he is simply not up to the job that faces him intellectually.
One of many disturbing things Woodward listed was that Tommie Franks at one point spent $700 million dollars on Iraq war preparations before Congress was consulted on a war with Iraq or had approved any money. They apparently took this money from an Afghanistan authorization, without telling Congress, which is both unconstitutional and an impeachable offense. Only Congress can allocate money.
At this weeks press conference the President was repeatedly asked if he'd made a mistake. He either couldn't think of anything, or denied any mistakes had been made, which is pretty implausible. The many failures in failing to stop 9/11 and in the mess that is no Iraq have led to no one in the administration being held accountable. Its as if they make no mistakes. Infallibility is a leading indicator of a a couple kinds of leadership, a dictator
I think its interesting that Clear Channel is also at the forefront in the new FCC/Bush Administration effort to reinvigorate censorship. Sure the FCC smacked them with a few fines but they are banning shock jocks from their stations without much of a whimper. Whether you love or hate Howard Stern when the government returns to deciding what you can and can't watch and listen to that is deeply disturbing.
Some disturbing parallels can be drawn between 9/11 and the Janet Jackson costume malfunction. 9/11 was used by the Bush administration to pass the Patriot Act and to invade Iraq. Two things they keenly wanted to do before 9/11 but couldn't have made happen without 9/11.
Likewise Janet Jackson's poor judgment is going to be used as the excuse to put us back to broadcast standards from the 1950's which is something the bible thumpers in the Bush Administration keenly wanted to do anyway but needed the national outrage from the breast baring to enact. I really don't care a great deal if they do clamp down on the broadcast networks, don't watch them anyway, but the FCC seems to be eyeing cable/satellite for greater censorship and that is something that simply shouldn't happen. I really don't want to watch R rated movies on cable that have been censored in to PG and butchered in the process. Its extremely irritating to watch movies where all the profanity has been dubbed with stupid substitutes and critical parts of the movie ended up on the censor's cutting room floor.
I'm not saying the FCC and ClearChannel are in bed together but a lot of what is happening lately suggests ClearChannel is teaming with the FCC to clean up radio. ClearChannel is the logical choice as an FCC tool thanks to their excessive nationwide market clout.
Don't be suprised if ClearChannel turns in to the FCC's lap dog in its new censorship war and the FCC bestows some gifts on ClearChannel in return that will help them in the marketplace. This attack on satellite radio would appear to be an ideal candidate.
If this were to occur it would be a vivid example of why media concentration is fundementally bad in a nation that is supposed to be a democracy and have a free press. If the government starts trying to censor and influence the media in a nation with a great diversity of ownership they are much less like to succeed than they are in a nation where the media is controlled by a few large corporations who are extremely likely to pander to the demands of those in power.
Reference the STREAMS benchmarks post below AGAIN. The problem was not the memory bandwidth to the video and graphics hardware. The problem was the feeble 80 MB/sec to the CPU which made it horrible for ALL general purpose computing applications like Maya and Pro/E and helped put SGI out of these markets.
The key problem here is SGI was still trying to sell O2's two years later and four years later abd .... They were barely competitive with a PC when they were released, weren't competitive with the contemporary workstations and SGI kept trying to milk them for years when they were pure dogs for anything but video and video textures.
"Somewhat unreliable my ass, this fellow likely has never even laid naked eye on/or worked on one of their big iron systems."
If you read the original post you would notice I was talking about their multiboard graphics systems. With all those chips and mechanical interconnects they simply had no chance of matching the reliability of a single board Nvidia or ATI card with single chip GPU. My point was SGI was late in jumping to a single chip GPU, they were still building complex multiboard graphics systems which is where they got creamed by 3DFX and Nvidia on price, reliability and performance.
What crack are you smoking!
m s. html
Yes it had exceptional total memory bendwidth and bandwidth to all the graphics and video gear and its a marketing bullet they used with great success to sucker people like you in to thinking it has great memory performance when it doesn't.
The problem is the memory pipe to the actual CPU is completely crippled. They improved it a little in later revs but it consistently trails a lowly PC in the definitive memory bandwidth benchmark, STREAMS:
http://www.dl.ac.uk/TCSC/disco/Benchmarks/strea
Its 165th on this list out of 182 and a lot of the worse systems are SGI's. It gets 80.2 MB/sec which is pathetic by any modern standard. A not particularly new PC can get 400 MB/sec easy.
If you've used an O2 and wondered why it seems so freaking slow, that is reason number 1. The R5K isn't exactly a speed burner either. Its better suited to embedded applications than a desktop workstation.
Also about this time SGI's ground breaking new system was the O2. It was really good at some niche video functions, including video textures. Unfortunately it had truly dismal memory bandwidth to the CPU, I guess they just forgot that this is one of the most basic building blocks of a computer with good performance. It was trailing just about everything on SPEC benchmarks before it even released(and it was late).
They sold a bunch of them to people who wanted cheap SGI's, like ILM. I speculate to this day that the O2 was a key contributor to ILM making so many bad movies during the era they relied on those steaming piles. They were just crushingly slow and I imagine any sucked the creativity out of any artist that had to use one, especially after they saw Maya running on a $2,000 PC or a Mac.
SGI does some really interesting niche technology but they have never had a CPU strategy that worked in any sustained way and they completely lost it in graphics when they kept trying to build multiboard graphics monstrosities while GLINT came out with the first graphics chip, followed by 3DFX, Nvidia and ATI. Carver Mead outlined a long time ago how to design electronics and that was to put everything on a CMOS chip. SGI didn't learn that lesson for some reason so all their graphics systems were big, bulky, somewhat unreliable and most importantly way to expensive to manufacture versus a mass produced GPU.
"Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits."
Actually, I think you will just pile another GUI toolkit on to an already large pile, and create a new set of applications with a whole new look and feel. In particular you seem to be understating the major effort you are proposing either intentionally or unintentionally.
First off it takes a lot of work to develop a complete GUI toolkit from scratch. Once you do it then you have to migrate a large body of applications to it which is probably a larger effort than developing the toolkit in the first place. Are you planning to rewrite all the applications in GNOME and/or KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla etc. How long do you figure that will take. It would take a long time and it would be time spent not developing the capabilities of the applications. In many respects it would be hitting a master reset on the Linux desktop and starting over, which isn't likely to lead to world domination for at least a few years.
Chances are you wont even get a majority of the developers on some of these major projects to buy in to your new toolkit, though some probably will so you will probably end up with a bunch of new splinters.
I'm just not sure what it is about GUI toolkits and window managers that exert this constant allure on geeks, compelling them to constantly develop new ones, the vast majority of which never develop critical mass.
But hey, maybe through superior uber geekness you will develop a new superior uber geek toolkit and you will be able to migrate a complete set of applications to it, and all others will be abandoned in the face of its superiority. Its just seems like something of a long shot. One thing positive I can say about this plan is it might be the only way to end the death match between GNOME and KDE.
Exactly how much time were you estimating to achieve this grand unified GUI?
I'm trying really hard to remember a case where a company stopped "fighting MS and start(ed) working with them" and came out a winner in the end. Dell and Intel might be considered successful partnerships with Microsoft but they are partnerships in name only since Microsoft tends to dictate all the terms and conditions.
t ly _dumps_windows_opengl/
SGI tried to stop fighting and work with Microsoft on Fahrenheit among other things. They pretty much cratered the company in the process. Not sure anyone remembers Fahrenheit, but it was an attempt to develop a next gen 3D API beyond Direct3D, OpenGL and Performer. It became very obvious from day one that it was mostly designed to divert SGI's attention from backing OpenGL against Direct3D. SGI was dreaming of defining the 3D standard for all those millions of Windows desktops. Microsoft wasn't concealing the fact that everything going on there was irrelevant unless it could be shoehorned in to Direct3D:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/29/ms_quie
Microsoft simply DOESN'T work with its competitors. It very rarely works with its partners. Its partnerships tend to be a smaller companies who think by partnering with Microsoft they are going to be "made men" in the mafia sense of the term, but at some point if the project is successful or not Microsoft will, one way or another "whack" the partner. The one strategy most likely to lead to a desirable outcome is for the small company to sell its assets to Microsoft, probably for less than they are worth, but still make a tidy profit and run.
Microsoft seduces, it bullies, it uses slight of hand misdirection, it uses, it simply doesn't partner. One thing Scooter used to have right at SUN, you either fight Microsoft or you die, the only other viable strategy is to look small, don't get to profitable, and hope Microsoft doesn't notice you before you cash out.
The key problem here is the government pretty much always has to put this kind of thing our for competitive bids to the private sector. Its increasingly rare for civil servants do software or systems development whether it be NASA, the IRS or the DOD.
Dick Cheney was the trailblazer for contracting out everything at the DOD when he was Secretary of Defense. He conveniently went to work at Halliburton right after that, whose Kellog Brown and Root subsidiary has been the army's contractor of choice since at least Vietnam so his new policy was conveniently a bonanza for Cheney in his after life. Its led to oddities like Blackwater, an organization of ex SEALS and special forces who are essentially mercenaries, filling all the huge gaps in the regular army, thanks to downsizing and contracting, but they draw six figure salaries standing next to grunts not making anything close to six figures. Interestingly American troops in Iraq are fed by Saudi and Kuwaiti subcontractors to Halliburton. When your fighting a war against Muslims having indigenous Muslims feed your army is an immensely dangerous and interesting avenue for a terrorist infiltrator.
But to get back to the original point, since the government generally must contract out IT projects this has led to the creation of massive corporations who do nothing but bid for government IT contracts. Two of the biggest being CSC and EDS. IBM and other do to but they don't feed as quite as exclusively at the government trough.
The problem with companies like CSC and EDS is they are well honed killing machines when it comes to writing proposals for government contracts and doing whatever it takes to win them. At the point they make the kill, they really stop having any incentive to actually do the job well. The government does an exceedingly poor job of penalizing bad performance by contractors. As a result CSC comes in to something like this, they hire a required quota of warm bodies and they start going though a standard process of requirements, specifications, reviews, coding, delivering and billing. In the midst of all there is really no one who has a really strong incentive to develop a really simple, stellar solution quickly or cheaply. The solution almost inevitably becomes an exercise in unmanageable complexity, it overruns which is usually OK with the CSC, since they usually keep getting paid as everyone ever more desperately seeks an ever more elusive goal of completion. So what if the project is eventually cancelled and defeat is admitted. CSC is unlikely to be penalized in any meaningful way. It wont stop them from getting the next government contract up for bids. There is a chance they will be persona non grata at the the IRS for a while so maybe EDS will do the next attempt and they will most probably do no better and there are only so many big prime contractors to choose from.
A key point here is 8 billion dollars may sound like a lot and it really is to all the working people whose hard earn money is going in to taxes that are being squandered, but in multi trillion dollar Federal budgets its insignificant. Everyone is wasting this kind of money everywhere so who among the politicians, bureaucrats and contractor hogs feeding at the trough really cares. Its just a simple fact that the U.S. government has spiraled out of control, voting Democrat or Republican isn't going to fix it. At this point it appears impossible to fix it, because ordinary people have no way to unite, stand up in unison one day and say enough is enough. Of course lots of ordinary people are working at CSC and Halliburton and they REALLY have no reason to complain about the fraud, waste and abuse in the government contracting system.
Simple solution. Train them but train them badly, very badly. Train them with stuff that sounds plausible but is diametricly opposed to right. What are they going to do, fire you?
I'm pretty sure this must be a late April Fools Joke. I've never seen any evidence anyone working customer support in India has ever been trained by anybody.
Well actually natural gas generated electricity has reached the point that is so expensive its becoming impractical thanks to high gas prices. The break even point for gas generation versus coal is $3 per million BTU's of gas. Gas is currently around $6-7.
America is in fact poised for a massive building surge in coal fired power plants according to the AP today. Something like 90 coal fired plants are in the queue to generate 50,000 megawatts of power. They usually have a hard time getting through the permitting process since they are the dirtiest form of power generation (not counting fission's radioactive waste), but the Bush administration is exceptionally friendly to the coal industry, they are one of his largest campaign contributors, so I'm pretty sure the EPA and the rest of the federal government will grease the skids for these new plants.
Over the next ten years the U.S. will probably need 140,000 megawatts of new power and the current plan is for half of it to be from coal.
Of course this is going to be a boon to the people in the Bush adminstration who view greenhouse gases, acid rain and big increases in air pollution as a sign of a healthy economy.
"Why would China worry?"
I think China figured out a while ago, its a little easier and less messy to bury the U.S. using economic means, rather than via wars. Wars are pretty messy.
China does need a creditable deterrent to keep the U.S. from adventuring militarily in Asia. Especially at the point when the U.S. figures out that is bankrupt and is going to need to use its military to maintain its global domination.
Nope. It was reported by BBC and all the major U.S. news outlets last summer. I have to give your foreign minister high marks for truthfullness, if nothing else.
Here is the BBC on it, thanks to 30 seconds in google:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3043330.stm
"The Polish Foreign Minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, said his country had never disguised the fact that it sought direct access to the oilfields."
"He was speaking as a group of Polish firms signed a deal with a subsidiary of US Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton."
"The US firm, Kellogg, Brown and Root, has already won million-dollar contracts to carry out reconstruction work in Iraq."
"We have never hidden our desire for Polish oil companies to finally have access to sources of commodities," Mr Cimoszewicz told the Polish PAP news agency. "
It noteworthy that Poland, with one of the of the larger contingents, flat admitted they are there because they wanted a cut of Iraq's oil wealth and all the other lucrative contracts being let to rebuild Iraq, largely funded by U.S. tax dollars.
I really wish my tax dollars were being spent to rebuild the U.S., to create jobs in the U.S. and were not being pouring them in to a country that is likely to explode in civil war anyway,
"Oh yeah, and there is rampant corruption in Iraq that makes the U.S. pork barrel stuff look squeaky clean."
I hate to point this out but that rampant corruption in Iraq is being stoked with something like $100 billion dollars in pork from the U.S.
Of course people are going to take these jobs. There was a truck driver on the news a couple nights ago getting ready to go there to work for KBR(Halliburton's military contractor subsidiary). He's nearing retirement and he needs the FU money. Where exactly are you going to get a truck driving job in the U.S. thats going to pay you a hundred thousand a year, tax free.
He knows its a gamble, that he might die in an ambush or have his legs blown off by an IED but if you can't get a decent job in the U.S. why not. May as well cash in on the spoils of war, everyone else is.
Space defense has all the appearance of a Maginot line. Its very expensive to build and very easy to defeat, especially in an age of asymmetric warfare. When the most devastating attack in U.S. history was done with civilian airlines explain to me the value of fixating on missile defense. Its a relic of cold war thinking when the one true threat the U.S. had was a missile attack from the U.S.S.R.
Missile defense is also very lucrative to the big aerospace companies who want to get the multibillion dollar contracts. You can be sure they are lobbying hard and spreading around campaign contributions to make it happen. A sympathetic Republican administration and big defense companies lobbying for them is an assurance these programs will continue for the forseeable future and will expand.
The only attack this system might prevent is a rogue state, with a few primitive missiles, like North Korea launching a missile at the U.S. If they know the missile defense is there they can just put their nukes on tramp steamers and sail them in to the harbors of major U.S. cities. They only way to deal with states like North Korea is to disarm them, one way or another. If there is any state that deserves to be taken down for WMD's and repressive dictatorship its North Korea, not Iraq. Only prolbem is if we try they will probably devastate Seoul and may retaliate with nukes against South Korea and the U.S., if they have them. The Bush administration will never be able to explain the rational for leaving North Korea in tact, taking down Iraq, and letting Pakistan get away with proliferating nuclear weapons technology to anyone with a few million dollars. We took down Iraq for a vague suspicion of developing nuclear weapons. North Korean has them and Pakistan has been really proliferating them, wholesale, and we haven't done much since we caught on.
If you turn to Russia, they had largely stopped developing strategic weapons. Thanks to the Bush administrations saber rattling they are now going to resume the arms race. They've already announced plans to develop warheads with manuevering capability to defeat ABM's, massive decoy strategies are also inevitable, and they are resuming work on their own missile defense. Another way to beat missile defense is to deploy massive numbers of new missiles. One reason the U.S. and U.S.S.R signed a treaty banning ABM's is because they had the foresight to look ahead and see the consequence of deploying them. Both countries would have dramaticly escalated missile production in order to be sure they could overwhelm the new defense. As bad as the arms race was Mutual Assured Destruction kept it in check. When you start deploying defenses and start planning to try to win a nuclear war it leads to two things:
A. A greater risk of a war happening if one side thinks they can win without significant damage thanks to defenses.
B. The arms race spirals out of control, as countries build massive numbers of new missiles to overwhelm the others defenses, and then massive new defense to counter the huge numbers of new missiles.
All in all the world would have been a better place without restarting the arms race. Thank you again, little George.
Clinton: War in Iraq, zero American casualties and cost less than a billion dollars. Its a real stretch to call one retaliatory strike a war in this day and age.
Bush: Nearly six hundred dead American soldiers and counting, thousands of soldiers wounded, many with permanent burn scars and lost limbs, thousands of dead Iraqi civilians(the provisional authority wont let anyone even count them). Cost at least a $150 billion dollars and counting. The end result is a country that is teetering on the brink of a civil war. If we pull out it will explode. If we stay it will probably cost us $100 billion and hundreds of casualties a year, indefinitely. And, of course, we don't really know why we did it. Everyone in the Bush administration has admitted the WMD charges were at best wrong, and at worst intentional deception. Bush recently made jokes about the missing WMD's during a speech in Washington. The families of the dead and wounded soldiers weren't laughing. There have been no proven ties to Al Queada or 9/11. Fact is Saddam was only Muslim out of convenience and Islamic extremists for the most part hated him.
Saddam was a bad man but there are a lot of bad men ruling countries around the world. If we are going to take it on ourselves to get rid of all of them we will be very busy, very broke and our military will be broken. As General Shinseki said before the war it takes a big army to occupy a country. Bush fired him for saying it, he's been proven to be correct.
If we are going to take down governments the minimum we should except from our government is for them to think about the day after the tanks rolled in to Baghdad. This administration clearly didn't. Bush #1 could have rolled into Baghdad in the first gulf war, there was justification then. They said they didn't because our allies wouldn't support it. I wager its more likely they considered the consequences of deposing Saddam and realized Saddam if nothing else held Iraq together. Without him the Kurds will seek independence which will start a war with Turkey. The Shia's will seek the power that is their right being the majority, and they will institute an Iran friendly Islamic republic. The Sunni's being pushed out of power will be shit on by the Shia's, turnabout being fairplay, and will generally get pissed off and start blowing things up which is what they are doing.
The only country that is probably really happy about all this is Israel. They managed to get the U.S. to, by proxy, take down one of their bitterest enemies without firing a shot.
I neglected to point out that if governments really want to use computers and databases to catch fraud, maybe they should first consider using computers and databases to finally deal with the massive fraud, waste and abuse in their own budgets. I'm willing to bet you a half a trillion dollars they would find a whole lot more money there than they will find trying to milk every last cent from working Americans who are for the most part fed up with our governments taxes and tax code.
"Thats this point the government cannot effectively eliminate the debt with either a) sacrificing essential services or B) increasing revenue."
.b ashes.bush.ap/
Thats ridiculous. The reason we are running massive budget deficits and our taxes are so high is thanks to massive corruption and waste in our government.
Halliburton has something like 18 billion dollars in no bid contracts in Iraq. They are cost plus contracts so its impossible for them to not make money on them. On top of that they've been cooking their books to rake in even higher profits, for example wildly inflating the number of meals they are serving to the Army. Bechtel is presumably doing about as well. Its pretty simple really, they are so connected with the Bush administration there was no chance these contracts would be competitively bid, and they are raking in huge profits at tax payer expense.
Most of the contractors working in Iraq are making six figure, tax exempt, salaries. Iraq is one giant pork barrel for friends of the Bush administration. This is, no doubt, one reason they wanted to invade Iraq.
The annual ombudsmen bill is an annual ritual where Congressmen, from both parties, dole out pork to the friends and contributors. Its $820 billion total, $328 billions is discretionary spending (which means not essential) and about $11 billion is unabashed pork. John McKane does an annual speech exposing all the blatant payola and humiliating his fellow Congressman for doing it. The congressional delegation from Alaska is especially adept at it. Alaska gets more federal hand outs than any state in the Union, per capita.
http://timesargus.com/Story/77768.html
Last years so called Medicare reform bill was a gigantic subsidy to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries which will cost us at least $55 billion a year very little of which is benefiting seniors. It was passed using deceptively low cost estimates, bribery, deception and pushed through by corrupt insiders. Billy Tauzin who pushed it through congress, and the Medicare administrator who hid the true cost, instantaneously took multimillion dollar jobs with the drug industry they'd just blessed with tax payer subsidized wealth. Its a basicly a transfer of our tax dollars in to their pockets because they are friends and contributors of the Republicans. I'm pretty sure these two industries are probably the least in need of a bailout from the Federal government of any in this country.
The Bush/Cheney Energy bill is likewise going to be a huge transfer of wealth in to the pockets of big energy companies if it passes.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/30/mccain
The Pentagon is equally bad. There is a revolving door from the civilians and officers in the DOD to big defense contractors. They are throwing billions in contracts to these companies while they are in the government and then taking lucrative jobs with the contractors as the payoff when they leave the government. The latest most vivid case was a $20 billion dollar deal for 767 tankers that was thrown to Boeing by Darlene Druyun, a key civilian procurement official for the Air Force. As soon as the deal was signed she took a lucrative job at Boeing. The only reason this stinking mess unraveled was because John McCain once again refused to stand for it and exposed it.
Basically you need to understand how the U.S. system works. Big corporations and wealthy individuals donate relatively small amounts to a candidates war chest. If that candidate wins they get a 1,000 or 10,000 fold return on their investment at tax payer expense. The company wins, the politician wins (its not their money they are giving back to their donors), and the tax payer gets screwed.
There is also a revolving door where people are jumping between big corporations and government service. They don't make anything while they are on the Federal payroll but they get RICH as soon as they return to private industry and they get paid off for their gener