"The law (at least here in my state) requires employers to pay non-exempt employees overtime for any time past 40 hours"
Fortunately the Republicans have a solution to this little problem. They just changed the rules for non-exempt employees. For example instead of being a college graduate to be salaried, now if you served in the military and they trained you that improves your chances of being categorized as salaried so you have the opportunity to work overtime without pay.
This will miraculously lead to increased worker productivity statistics when its in place. You see the worker productivity statistics improve when people are working more hours for less money and all the economists rejoice because this is good for the economy.
I read with interest one goal was to help you find a friend in a crowded place using your phones.
It does kind of give you pause though when you juxtapose it with this article about a stolen Siemens SX1 cellphone prototype:
http://www.mobile9.com/news/2004/04/a_failed_att em pt_to_steal_siemens_sx1_prototype.php
When the prototype was stolen at a trade show Siemens engineers apparently sent some secret SMS messages to the phone which apparently overrode the GPS tracking switch enabling them to track the phone and catch the thief. They claim these messages were only pssible due to the "special nature" of the prototypes but thats pretty hard to swallow so you have to wonder how many GPS enabled cell phones have back doors to enable GPS tracking without the user's permission.
In an age where your every move can be tracked by the OnStar system in your car, or secretly enabling GPS tracking in your phone and pretty soon with RFID tags you may as well say hello to Big Brother and look happy when he's watching.
I recall a few days ago, in the thread on "India Saving Capitalism" someone lecturing me that the U.S. had better start encouraging a pro employer business environment or the U.S. just wont be competitive. This kind of a classic example of a pro employer workplace.
Its unfortunate unions in the U.S. went out of control and vastly overcorrected to the point unionized workers are largely worthless. Without unionization, which is in rapid decline in the U.S., we end up over correcting in the other direction, like this, where workers are abused and exploited and there isn't much they can do about it unless they want to get fired, find a lawyer willing to take the case for a percentage and survive a lengthy court battle.
Its a little off topic but when you see working people being screwed out of precious dollars its kind of instructive to see how the members of the Bush family, especially Neal Bush, get by:
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair04032004.html
Or a little background on our current Labor Secretary might be interesting. She is unfortunately decidedly unsympathetic to labor, as evidenced by the Labor department's guide to employers last year on how to avoid paying workers for overtime, which accompanyied the Bush administration's new rules that deny overtime pay to millions of American's like firefighters, police and nurses:
http://www.counterpunch.org/flanders04012004.htm l
When you hear on the business about worker "productivity" gains, you need to realize sometimes this might mean workers are more productive but more often than not it means they are working more hours for less money.
Nice anonymous coward rant. You apparently lack the guts and conviction to say it with your name attached.
I'm running on a 1 GHZ Pentium 3 laptop with 256 MB of RAM. Sure you can run them all but OpenOffice in particular is a complete and utter slug to start. You should try doing a head comparison with Windows starting IE, Outlook and Office. It dusts Linux on startup time versus Mozilla, Evolution and OpenOffice. There is an inevitability in it. Windows is sharing one set of DLL's. Linux is loading pretty much 3 completely different set of libraries.
OSX and Windows may not me completely consistent but Linux isn't even in the same ball park. If people are adopting Linux on the desktop its in spite of the terrible application consistency and more likely because of the price, and the fact security is better mostly just because no one is targeting Linux because its desktop share is so low.
Just keep telling yourself Linux is going to win the desktop without fixing the screwed up UI and usability problems. I love Linux, I pray for its success on the desktop, I've been running it on my laptops for years. Its just a simple fact of life that UI and application consistency is its Achilles heel, mostly because geeks like you would rather rant, justify the situation, fight religious wars, pretend its a plus instead of a problem and generally stick your head in the sand. Thats not going to solve the problem. It appears Linux is just going to fracture in to people only using KDE apps, and others using only Gnome apps, and geeks using a bunch of quirky splinters. As long as I stick to just KDE apps the consistency and interoperability is pretty good. Maybe I could just stick to GNOME apps though the consistency there is not as good. Its just unfortunate you have to ignore two thirds of Linux applications if you don't want to cope with a hopeless hodge podge.
As low as the Linux desktop share is, splintering it in to a bunch of pieces isn't going to improve its likelihood of success.
You can dream but as long as Linux geeks continue the UI religious wars you are going to end up with an ugly hodgepodge of applications that look inconsistent and behave inconsistently.
Now we have this wonderful prospect that Miguel de Icaza has declared all existing toolkits obsolete and is presumably going to develop a new one from scratch and start a religious war in the Gnome/GTK camp when he decides he wants to switch existing apps over with all the devastating consequences. The one plus here is KDE will just ignore him and maybe he will sufficiently screw up GNOME for a year or two so that GNOME will fall behind and fail and then we can unify on one desktop.
Just do what I do and try to run OpenOffice and Evolution on a KDE desktop. It puts a massive suck on memory because there are three sets of software doing all the same things but differently. You have to shift gears everytime you move between them because everything about the UI's in each is different. I have utter contempt for people who complain they don't like the "look" of KDE and GNOME. The "look" is insignificant compared to consistency.
I don't even consider using Mozilla because then I would hate the massive inconsistency so badly I would just give up on a Linux desktop. Konqueror has its quirks but its really important that its small, light, fast and fits with the rest of the desktop. I'll drop Evolution and return to kmail as soon as the HTML editor in kmail works. I need to start evaluating koffice to see if I can get off OpenOffice or I need to buy a whole bunch more RAM. The time it takes OpenOffice to load is reason enough to want to get rid of it. KDE is using some major tricks to get apps to load quickly and to circumvent the major overheads in dynamic linking. When you load OpenOffice you benefit from none of this so you wait an hour for it to load.
Let me spell it out for you. Mac OSX and Windows have a consistent look and feel, all the applications behave consistently. This is especially true of OSX. Thats why ordinary people like it so much. If you use one app you can switch to another and use it with equal ease. This consistency is a hundred times more important to users than all the "innovation" you see in Linux applications. If you want Linux to win on the desktop the application suite HAS to be consistent, and I mean really consistent, as in how menus are laid out, how accelerators are defined, how tools work, how things look etc.
If you want Linux to continue to fail on the desktop just stay the course. You might win some enterprise support because big companies want free. You don't have a prayer with most average users with the current state of things.
Something I haven't seen mentioned much is this is most likely a strategy to apply the Netscape sanction to Symantec, McAfee and all the other companies making a good living on security software.
As soon as Microsoft starts shipping anti virus and firewall software with Windows for free there is a pretty good chance people will stop paying for it. Security companies will then follow Netscape down the road in to oblivion. They might hold on for a while thanks to brand loyalty and if their offerings are superior to Microsoft's early versions, but its probably just a matter of time before Microsoft's free offering gets better technically and free is always better than "costs money" as IE proved over Netscape and Linux is trying to prove over Windows. Its also no secret Microsoft has been on a hiring binge for security talent so they probably have the talent to compete. They certainly have the R&D resources.
In fairness, Microsoft may be doing this partly because it realizes it has to solve its security problem because its pissing people off and its pissing governments off especially as fixated as governments are now about terrorism and cybersecurity.
But Microsoft also realizes there are billions of dollars pouring in to pockets that aren't theirs for security software. As in so many other markets if they bundle the same functionality with Windows for free, they put these other companies out of business. They can then jack up the price of Windows, or use some licensing scheme to redirect these billions in to there pockets because there are billions of dollars in IT budgets no longer going to security companies.
I don't recall everything about the intervening period but I do recall that NASA was being the pussy about doing a space walk where both astronauts would be outside and no one would be in the ISS. The Russians had done it on MIR, it was routine for them and they had no problem with it.
I know the jokes about the Russians and Mir are easy, but the Russians have, for decades done a lot more with a lot less while NASA's manned program, since Apollo at least, specializes in doing less with more.
It not a "single fucking case". Its one among many its just really well documented and was really over the top. Its pretty fucking amazing you can sit in your easy chair and say its no big deal someone guilty of nothing spent a year being tortured in Syria because our government has decided to suspend the most basic due process. You just don't seem to understand how democracy and the rule of law is supposed to work. Its become quite apparent that terrorist suspects. I repeat >, who don't respond to simple interrogation in the U.S. are being shipped to countries like Saudi Arabia where they can be properly tortured.
If our government didn't make mistakes and only did this stuff to terrorists maybe you could rationalize it. Fact is they are making mistakes and hurting innocent people.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been wrongfully held since 9/11.
An Egyptian student was staying at a hotel near ground zero on 9/11. A security guard at the hotel framed him, because he was Arab, and accused him of having a radio that could monitor airline frequencies that was found in the hotel. The FBI managed to coerce a confession out of him by threatening to turn his brother over to Egyptian authorties, just like the Syrian case. He admitted it was his radio to protect his family which led to him being a suspected part of the plot. After the confession hit the news the private pilot that actually owned the radio came forward. The FBI's threats were so good they made him confess to something he didn't do.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/12/13/wtc.pilot.radi o. suit/
Your missing a basic point. As soon as they started doing it there is nothing stopping them from continuing to do it and doing it more and worse. You really don't want to visit a country, where you can be arrested and held without charges and denied access to your embassy. It is the most basic travelers right. Unfortunately
Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, has been held without access to a lawyer, his family or any judicial review for a couple years now. He may be guilty of associating with terrorists. If he's guilty of something try him and prove it. Holding him forever without proving anything is simply not what a country based on law does.
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney01032004.html
Capt. James Yee, an Islamic Chaplain at Guantanami, was in a military brig in isolation for more than 2 months facing a death penalty charge for espionage. The military destroyed his life and his marriage. Last week they back handedly admitted he wasn't guilty of anything but they aren't going to apologize for destroying his life. During the course of the trial the military's lawyers inadvertently divulged classified documents to the defense team. The military in fact was guilty of what they were accusing Yee of doing. None of the docs he had in his possession were, rightly or wrongly, marked as classified.
Several British citizens held at Guantanamo were likewise just released. Only thing they were guilty of was being in Afghanistan when the war started so they got a couple years in relatively brutal solitary confinement and a series of beatings.
Well actually visitors rights in the U.S. were something worse than hampered right after 9/11. Read about a Syrian with Canadian citizenship connecting through New York, not even stopping in the U.S. He was picked up and shipped by the U.S. to Syria where he was tortured for a year until the Canadians finally extracted him.
http://www.counterpunch.org/arar11062003.html
I really can't see anyone visiting the United States until some sanity is returned to government here. As soon as they started blocking access to your embassy and to a lawyer when the picked you up, due process vanished and you don't want to be here anymore. When due process went out the window you can't count on the fact your 100% innocent to keep you safe.
If Bush is reelected I imagine I'm emigrating. Not only are the Republicans going to run the U.S. in to the ground, they are just plain nuts. Bush and Rice are simply in over their heads, and the people really running things, Cheney, Rice and Wolfowitz are truly ruthless SOB's. They weren't the best before 9/11 but when 9/11 happened:
A. They just snapped B. They had an excuse to get away with things they wanted to do anyway, like implement a police state and start wars in Iraq, Iran and Syria. Things this country would have never stood for otherwise.
Unfortunately the Democrats aren't really any better.
You kind of know your in trouble when your government is using the war on terrorism as it justification for reelection and for its being. They really have no incentive to win the war on terrorism or better yet resolve the issues underlying. Fixing these might not get rid of Islamic extremists but it would deprive them of backing by moderates, a lot of recruits and a lot of funding. For starters:
A. Fix the Israeli / Palastinian conflict by giving the Palastinians their own nation under UN supervision. As long as the Jews and Palestinians are killing each other terrorism is not going to go away.
B. Get US troops out of the Middle East. The presence of Christian and Jewish troops, especially liberated women in the heart of Arabic nations is going to just inevitably piss off Arabs.
Unfortunately it a basic axiom of Orwell's 1984 that government has to always have an enemy. If there isn't one it will create one. If a nation has no enemies then the usefulness of government and the military drops dramatically and people wont give them lots of money and will start depriving them of powers.
With the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and China turning capitalits the U.S. establishment was in a rock and hard place. No enemies. Military spending was dropping rapidly. Fortunately that problem has been solved. We now have an enemy that will exist forever and defense spending is back where they want it and heading through the roof.
It is rather difficult to figure out what it actually is though. It can apparently be set to whatever suits local authorities and conditions. Sounds kind of like a PR ploy. The question is, is the minimum wage really enforced and if so what is is, preferably in U.S. dollars.
Your pretending like this is a level playing field so American workers just have to retrain and they will all of a sudden be competitive. Its a good pitch, better training and education would help, and it would slow down offshoring but it simply wont stop it. If you are just living in the U.S. you can't compete against a worker in China who is working for next to nothing under a really repressive government. If a Chinese worker works as hard to acquire marketable skills as the American worker the Chinese work still wins.
Taking your philosophy working conditions in the U.S. are going to be pushed down to the level of China and probably to where they were in the U.S. at the start of the twentieth century. The U.S. will be competitive and it will be really "pro employer" but unless you are an employer living here will really suck. Its also not likely there will be a lot of small business employers because the big multinationals like WalMart have no problem burying them.
The gilded age at the end of the 19th century is a pretty good lesson on the ugly side of unchecked corporate greed. It to was a time where all the wealth was concentrating in the hands of a few very wealthy people and most working people were in dire straits. I imagine you would call it a pro employer era.
What the administration should do is what governments have done for centuries. Raise barriers to level the playing feel. What we have now is in fact the opposite. The U.S. has pretty much dropped all its barriers. China on the other hand is maintaining a bunch of barriers to insure it wins the trade war. It artificially sets it currency relatively low to the dollar so a U.S. worker is always at a disadvantage to a Chinese worker if everything else was equal which it isn't. Free trade means free in both directions.
"In the short term we may loose a few jobs to other nations but as long as the American businesses remain strong other jobs (maybe more white-collar) will be created here."
This is such outdated thinking. What exactly is "American business" in the era of globalization. Multinational corporation often as not aren't even based in the U.S. but rather on an island someplace. They will put their workers in the country thats most profitable for them. The only true American businesses left tend to be small business, and that are being decimated by globalization. Small retailers can't compete with WalMart. Small machine shops can't compete with the Chinese. Small businesses can't easily offshore their workforce though they are reaching the point they have to or die.
Everyone thinks Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. He isn't. The Walton family, owners of Walmart are. They just cleverly split their wealth among five family members each of which is worth about 20 billion, so their family is actually worth a 100 billion dollars. They are making their wealth entirely off the back of manufacturing workers in China and by driving down wages and benefits for Americans desperate for a job, any job, and they can't work in the store down the street because Walmart put it out of business.
"The bottom line here is that white-collar types have gotten fat and happy over the last several decades, and are now shocked to find that they are facing global competition much like agricultural and manufacturing workers have for decades."
First off India isn't "saving capitalism". Capitalism is using India to satiate its voracious appetite for cheap labor. In the complete absence of any checks on it there is zero chance of Capitalism failing. It will take care of itself, it always does. It will destroy a lot of people en route, like it always does. The people being destroyed are just changing. Capitalism is about picking winners and losers.
As for facing global competition, there isn't really any competition to it. You can live like a prince in China or India for ten dollars an hour. In the U.S. you are living in poverty at that wage.
What you're seeing here is all of the barriers to globalization have been removed. As is the way of capitalism, it rushes to the cheapest labor that can do the job. With globalization a labor pool of a couple billion new workers has come on line in China and India. There were also huge imbalances in the cost of labor between developed and developing countries. In China in particular there is no minimum wage, no pollution controls, no workplace safety regulation, health care costs aren't spiraling out of control like they are in the U.S. and there are no out of control taxes, especially payroll taxes, draining a workers income. There is a near inevitably that globalization is going to devastate workers in developed countries whether it be the U.S. or Western Europe. At the same time its going to continue to make multinational corporations and their share holders richer. If the government in the U.S. cared about working people it would have left enough barriers in place so they wouldn't be broadsided by the imbalances in global labor markets. Instead corporations are actually being given tax incentives to move jobs off shore. The fact is both Republicans and Democrats are so in the pockets of multinational corporations now abandoning U.S. workers is inevitable until working people get a clue, realize they are in the majority in the U.S. and start voting out any politician who is screwing them in favor of multinationals.
Indians should note that if Indian labor becomes wildly successful wages and cost of living will start to inflate. In the new world order, as soon as it does the jobs will just move to China or Vietnam and Indians will be carping about off shoring. The one thing in their favor is it will be a near impossibility to achieve full employment for the billions of workers in China and India. If you were to do it you would proably decimate increasingly scarce world resources like oil.
What you're seeing here is a godsend to multinational corporations and a death knell to workers. Workers in India and China should rejoice now for their rising prosperity but they should appreciate that they are just as expendable as workers in the U.S., its just a matter of time and inflation. With globalization we have reached a market that is entirely in the favor of employers and entirely against employees.
Its no accident the Bush administration is all for outsourcing because its entirely pro business and anti labor. You see the writing on the wall when you read a bio of Elaine Chow, Bush's labor secretary. Her father and her family make their fortune in container ships, shipping goods from China to the U.S.
http://www.counterpunch.org/flanders04012004.htm l
Our labor secretary is decidedly anti labor as evidenced by her departments effort to strip U.S. workers of overtime pay last year.
Slave labor is probably a bit harsh. Maybe indentured servitude is a little closer. The key problem is that when you have people who are completely dependent on a company to provide them a visa they can be coerced in to doing things a citizens wouldn't be. For example work 80 hours a week and get paid for 40, have no chance for promotions, stock options etc. Fact is either you keep your mouth shut and work really hard or you risk getting laid off and losing your visa. You company doesn't really have to reward you to keep you, they hold you by the balls with the visa.
When you get laid off its way worse than it is for a citizens where its just bad. When you get laid off you have to uproot your home and family and get out of the country quickly, unless you can get a new job and a new visa in a hearbeat.
They don't call these people visa slaves for no reason.
There presence is also a pretty serious drag on all the workers in their company. Because they are willing, or compelled, to work twice as hard for half as much they are a great tool to drag down salaries and working conditions for everyone which is one reason U.S. corporations are constantly clamoring for higher visa quotas.
Hmmm. I must have been moderated as Flamebait by a Bush backer. What exactly is flame bait when I offer URL's backing the basic facts in the post which is VERY relevant to a discussion of the Texas educational system:
- Texas, in general, and Houston in particular were touted as model school systems and a great success story. So much so they were integral in the Bush presidential campaing in 2000 and used as a model for the federal program we are pinning our hopes on to save the U.S. education system
- Its then discovered that the Houston school system's stellar performance was not because it was teaching kids but because they were forging dropout statistics by calling dropouts, transfers.
- Rod Paige then calls the NEA, a major national teachers association, a "terrorist" organization and gets away unscathed as is typical for abusive behavior in the bush administration like outing a CIA agent.
Ah well. The truth hurts some people I guess. You probably also don't want to hear about all the wicked underhandedness the Bush administration used to pass their Medicare drug bill or about those WMD's in Iraq or absence thereof.
"I met an entire group of high level EE/CS types who were relocating to Alaska to work on a missle defense program and one other had a job with the State of Alaska."
Ah yes, what a great job, I imagine its a top secret clearance giving the government the right to know every intimate detail of your life for the rest of your life, to dictate where you travel and who you associate with.
You also have a chance to work on a program on which the U.S. will waste billions and billions of dollars and it probably wont work when the time comes, or it will get cancelled when someone comes to their senses and it will all be wasted just like it was the first time around under Reagan.
From the 9/11 hearings and Richard Clark's testimony it appears the Bush administration was totally fixated on this absurd program to the exclusion of the real threat, terrorism. End result, we start building Star Wars again, cut FBI funds for counterterrorism and we get attacked with civilian airlines by a few committed Islamic fundamentalists who spent like a half million dollars to kill 3,000 people and inflict hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage on the U.S. and could probably do it again.
But you have to think like the Bush administration. To them Reagan was like a god and Reagan wanted missile defense so 20 years later we have to restart this bloody waste of money. Condi Rice is a specialist in the Soviet Union, so as evidence of her failure to adapt to the modern world she was also probably real keen on this.
On the plus side, for the Bush administration, it does pumps billions of dollars in to their big aerospace company friends which is why they offer such great jobs:
Lucrative aerospace jobs = massive budget deficit
About the one chance this thing has to do anything of value is it might shoot down a North Korean missile. We still haven't figured out why we took down Iraq who had no missiles worth mentioning and no nukes while North Korea is happily humming along with both. One guess is North Korea is not a big threat to Isreal while Saddam was so we did their bidding in a proxy war for them.
In most ways missile defense has a disturbing resemblance to the Maginot line. Its hugely expensive to build and any potential enemy is going to have absolutely no problem circumventing it. If North Korea wants to nuke the U.S. they just slip a nuke in on a tramp steamer. If Russia or China wants to beat this in a full fledge missile attack they swamp it with decoys and build manuevering warheads, which is their plan as of a month or two ago, or they launch cruise missile from subs. In the case of Russia this appears very likely to reignite a strategic arms race. This does make all the Bush administration cold warrior relics pleased as punch. We can just never stop the arms race even if we are the only one running lately and it appears likely to bankrupt the U.S. eventually just like it did the U.S.S.R.
Houston was widely touted to have a Great school system, along with the rest of Texas. It was a key plank in George W.'s presidential campaign, and part of the impetus for his national "No Child Left Behind" education program. Its also a reason the head of the Houston school system, Rod Paige, is now the Secretary of Education. Of course a year or two later it came out the Houston's stellar graduation rate was due to massive fabrication of the statistics.
http://www.nea.org/neatoday/0310/upfront.html
"Houston school officials recently picked (B) in a frenzied effort to explain the ingenious bit of bookkeeping unveiled by a state audit. Turns out that thousands of students who should have been recorded as drop-outs had been swapped to other categories, such as "transferred" or "moved." Across this school district once led by U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige--the man President George W. Bush boasted had made the Texas school system a model in accountability--revelation of the trickery was beyond embarrassing. A New York Times editorial called the official drop-out numbers "the educational equivalent of Enron's accounting results."
Not long ago Secretary Paige referred to the NEA as a "terrorist" organization:
I forgot to mention on the subject of kmail 3.2 authentication not working if you go to the Network Config to the Secuirty tab do "Check What the Server Supports" it grays everything out suggesting no authentication is supported.
"KMail/Kontact included in KDE 3.2 have an inline spell checker that is also used in Konqueror for editing webforms like this one."
Doesn't seem to work for me. There is an option box for automatic spell checking that is turned on. When I misspell a word it doesn't put the squiggly line under it that Outlook and Evolution do. Is something broken in my kmail build or is kmail's idea of automatic spell checking different than what I'm expecting.
"KMail in CVS has (optional) support for HTML editing."
Cool. If the editor is good and I fixed these other problems I'd drop evolution in a heartbeat. Don't much want to use Miguel's stuff.
"There isn't enough info here to mKMail in CVS has (optional) support for HTML editing.ake a judgment. You might like to verify that authentication is actually being used, as your mail client may be silently erroring out rather than actually using authentication."
Its not silent. You get a popup from kmail:
Your SMTP server doesn't support authentication.
The server responded "5.7.1 AUTH command is not enabled".
"you will know that my feeling is that all of the existing toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will become obsolete and we need to start looking at the next generation toolkit system."
This would be a truly wonderful thing if a new toolkit was developed, and it had the best of all the existing ones and then some, and it had licensing that everyone could bless and rejoice everyone migrated to it and we finally drove a nail in the coffin of the debilitating Gtk/Qt religious ware.
The reality though is it would probably be just one more new GUI toolkit(how many are there now 20-30-35 and counting) and it would just spawn another religious faction and further insure the failure of Linux on the desktop, something the strife between GNOME/Gtk and KDE/Qt is already on the verge of doing.
So miguel your team could go out and develop this and we could have a religious war within GNOME between those sticking to Gtk and those jumping ahead to your toolkit, and a multiyear effort to:
A. Finish your new toolkit B. Migrate the GNOME application base to.
The KDE/Qt will just completely ignore it and probably gain a huge development lead while you dick with a major toolkit migration.
Everyone might dis the Win32 API but they have done something pretty smart. They only have 1 toolkit and it doesn't change much though they add new things on top of and around it. They've developed a huge lead in application support and development, all their applications work together for the most part, and they behave consistently which is something extremely cherished by most ordinary users.
Geeks need to really get a clue on this subject. GUI toolkit religious wars are SO cherished in the geek community and are so self defeating if you want to attract applications and users, which is the thing that really counts if you want Linux to be something other than a geek's wet dream.
I haven't used Kontact but I did use kmail for a long time until I switched to Evolution so I have a few opinions on these two. I have to try Kontact soon to see if they've fixed the deficiencies in kmail. I would be overjoyed if someone could correct me if I'm wrong on some of these points.
Evolution has few features that make it a hands down winner over kmail.
-The inline spell checker is a huge advantage, I hate running spell checkers after the fact in kmail. Please put an inline spell checker in kmail or if there is one tell me how to turn it on.
- The ability to edit HTML in Evolution is GREAT. A lot of geeks might diss HTML email but its pretty much mandatory if you are engaged in business communication with people using Outlook and Rich Text. Straight text looks real poor in this kind of exchange especially if you are sending anything lengthy.
- kmail stopped working with my ISP when I moved to 3.2.1. This is on top of Red Hat 8. My ISP has a simple login authentication and I find it truly awe inspiring with all the new weight in this area in kmail in 3.2.1 that the simplest authentication fails. Probably should file a bug but I'd already stopped using it due to the two above reasons.
The down side to Evolution
- The next and previous message buttons on the tool bar are COMPLETELY BRAIN DEAD. They don't go to the next or previous UNREAD message, they go to the next message. This makes it a horrendous pain to find unread messages if you use threaded folders. I assume they must have cloned this from Outlook though I've never used Outlook to speak of. I pray there is a configuration option to fix this. If not then ther Evolution developers had their head up there ass on this point. It is ALMOST enough to make me drop Evolution. In kmail you open a folder it goes to the first unread message, you click next message and you zip through the unread stuff in the folder. Evolution you get dumped to the top of the folder and you have to go on a search and destroy mission to find the unread mail. I assum Outlook types must always use chronological folders with new messages at the top which is the only way Evolutions behaviour doesn't completely suck..
- The mechanism for searching emails for strings strikes me as really heavy and difficult to use compared to kmail. Its kind of powerful but it is just to much work to do a simple search for a string in the emails in a folder. Again I hope there is a simple way to do this I'm missing.
- Installing evolution from a download on Red Hate 8 is kind of incredible in terms of the number of RPM's you have to download and install and all the special version of standard things they have.
- Evolution doesn't integrate well with a KDE desktop on the most basic things like cut and paste.
- Running Evolution on KDE is a real SUCK on memory since you end up running all of the KDE environment and pretty much all of GNOME/GTK.
Re:THE PROGRAM IS BEING HALTED!
on
X-43A Hits Mach 7
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"So why is NASA stopping development?"
I'd rather doubt they are. If it can be made to work and there is a need, either the NASA program will be funded or it will disappear in to an Air Force black program and will just appear to have been killed.
It does appear it can be made to work and it would presumably add a new top end to Aurora or whatever the Air Force's current black program is.
Its use for civilian transportation is dubious. Its pretty dangerous and would take a LONG time to be made safe, cheap and comfortable. I'm also doubtful it will prove to be a great launch vehicle though you never know.
Its military applications are obvious. The DOD has a pretty desperate need to drop bombs on targets of interest that arise quickly and move around like Bin Laden. When they get intelligence he is at a place they need to drop ordinance there as quickly as possible before he moves and with some targeting flexibility. A manned or remotely controlled Mach 11 bomber would seem ideal. An RPV version of this could come to fruition a lot faster than a manned version, Cruise missiles, the stealth bomber etc are to slow to get to the target in time. Using ballistic missiles tends to set of alarm bells in Russia, China and everyplace else where governments have satellites watching for launch signatures. Targeting for ballistic missiles also can't be redirected at or stopped at the last minute.
It would also be priceless for strategic and tactical reconnisance. Spy satellites are to predictable and inflexible since they are locked in to orbits with limited manueverability. Most countries know the schedule and hide stuff when they are overhead. A Scramjet would be flying fast and high enough it would be hard to shoot down, or even detect until after its done the job.
NASA Dryden deserves a huge pat on the back for finally bending metal and flying something. They've been wasting money on computer generated fantasies for this concept for more than a decade and haven't done much to realize it. It would be fantastic if it lead to a better launch vehicle and civilian transport, I just doubt that it will.
"This is the kind of thing that Frank Zappa warned us was going to happen."
Here is an "Ask Slashdot" Question for a Saturday night. Who would you guess might lead America in to a new summer of love, whether they be musicians, poets, rebels or prophets. Who is the modern day Pete Seeger, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Tom Hayden, George Carlin, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, CSN&Y or Bob Dylan.
Do you think this summer or next could be a new summer of love. America is entering an increasingly dark period much like it did in the 50's and 60's but maybe much worse, much darker this time around. Our government seems to be waging a war on drugs, a war on p2p, a war on imaginary WMD's, a war on privacy, a war on religion if its the wrong kind, a war on love, a war on freedom and democracy, war on everything. You have to figure they won't be able to build prison's fast enough to lock everyone up. Perhaps this is an indicator to that new career path we can all retrain for, one that can't be easily oursourced and seems to be a growth industry...prison gaurd. America now has the largest prison population per capita in the world, a title once held by the gulag's of the Soviet Union but now America reigns supreme.
A couple names that come to mind for the next Woodstock, a real Woodstock and not the decandent self indulgent festivals we've been doing lately:
- Michael Moore, OK sometimes he's a goof but he often hit the nail on the head no one else will hit.
Part of the problem is most of the musicians of today don't seem to really stand for anything and real talent seems to be increasingly rare. Musicians seem to mostly turn out formulas or beat, they sing about love but mostly as pop thats just rearranging the same empty words over and over again. There is plenty of hate and sex. Rap and hip hop don't really capture the same spirit, the peace loving rebellion of the sixties, the thoughtful message.
Of course maybe we can't capture that same magic again. For one thing the government has seen it happen once, and they've been to school on it so this time around they may smash it with an iron fist. Now they have computers to catalog us all and agencies with truly wicked tools to suppress dissent, and a willingness to keep building prisons. We are also such a lazy, spoiled culture, mesmerized by TV, alcohol, video games and the beloved buck. Could we really stand up against all the wrongness our government seems to be perpetrating everyday and at an accelerating pace. Could we all stand up sometime soon and tell those in charge enough is enough and turn the tide.
Stop killing people and doing things that make people want to kill us. Stop using bold faced lies to sucker us in to wars, stop promoting ruthless dictators, stop taxing working people in to poverty and giving all the money to the richest 1%, stop rewarding corporations for sending all our jobs to China. Stop trying to destroy all the people that are speaking the truth like Paul O'Neill, Richard Clark and Joe Wilson. Stop selling out our country and its government to the highest bidder. Stop the war on drugs and the war on p2p and locking up people who've never hurt anyone. Stop selling our elections and democracy to the highest bidder, the one who can mesmerize us with the most TV ads or engage in the dirtiest trick to steal an election and power. Stop taking tax money from working people and doling it out to corporations like you did in that sham Medicare prescription drug bill, the one you lied and cheated and bribed to pass. Stop congress from writing DMCA's and Patriot Acts that rob us of our rights, because they are working for corporations and not the people. Stop subjecting us to elections between Republican's and Democrat's where both choices are awful and undifferentiated so its pointle
"Perhaps, although doing so would be a clear violation of the first amendment's freedom of assembly"
Perhaps you should read about the governments response to an antiwar conference at Drake Univertsity after which a few people committed an act of peaceful civil disobedience. The DOJ swept in and wanted to know everyone who attended and everything that was said, they placed a gag order on the Univertisty prohibiting the University from telling anyone about the massive investigation because they wanted to keep it secret, a grand jury was impaneled etc.
The DOJ backed off when their investigation became public, it was so massive they couldn't keep it secret, and it was starting to get embarassing how massively they'd overreacted and how much they were treading on basic civil liberties. But they no doubt have cataloged everyone who'd attended the conference and have them all on file as potential troublemakers. There is also no telling how far they would have gone if they'd kept the investigation secret.
The fact is Al Queda wins as much by the massive bureaucratic overreaction to try and prevent terrorism, as by the original act.
First off the Bush Administration keeps saying terrorists hate us for our "Freedom and Democracy" but it is double speak because the fact is the Bush administration is using Terrorism to dismantle freedom and democracy. Big corpratist government want a bunch of docile workers reporting to their cubes everyday, and NEVER doing anything that would resemble protest, dissent, disagreement with wrong doing(something the Bush administration is apparently rich in) or antisocial behavior. To achieve this they just need a database with detailed histories of everyone, and for every employer to check this database as a condition of employment and soon enough you either:
A. Never protest, dissent, or engage in antisocial behaviour B. Never work again unless you can scrape together self employment.
Someone will, no doubt argue, how "Free" America is. It does kind of look free on the surface but in most respects its really not unless you are willing to be homeless and starving and then you might get arrested for vagrancy.
It should be noted that the U.S now has the highest per capita prison population in the world (though China and North Korea might be higher they just dont report accurately). This honor used to belong to the Soviet Union's gulags but the U.S. now leads Russia who is a close second. How did this happen, primarily by the "War on Drugs" which first and foremost punishes people for recreational drug use and drug addiction which is decidely antisocial behavior. Its also due to 3 strikes laws that pass down life sentances for things like shoplifting.
The economic damage thats also being done to the U.S. by this overreaction will eclipse the direct damage done by 9/11. Hundreds of billions on databases and computers to track everyone in the U.S. or who passes through, a constant push to equip every local fire and police department, no matter how small, with a complete bio and chem warfare capability, a nationwide sensor grid to spot the first hint of a biochem cloud, laser missile defense systems in every airplane, continuing pressure to inspect every bit of cargo entering the U.S. through every port, airport or truck.
Stop the insanity. All this stuff does produce economic activity, often to the benefit of companies who are benefactors of the administration, but its also contributing to massive budget deficits and its pure economic waste because every countermeasure costs billions and the terrorist will just switch to a mode of attack that circumvents the countermeasures, leading to more countermeasures and more economic damage. This is a key objective of the doctrine of guerilla warfare, bleed the target white economicly trying to stop you. You can't win against terrorism by never ending escalation of repres
The way this reads is there was a race after sputnik to launch the first U.S. satellite. The JPL/Army Orbiter lost out to the Navy's Vangaurd. Vangaurd exploded on the pad and JPL revived Orbiter but they focused on the satellite more than the rocket. They turned their focus to payloads from them on, and NASA came in to being in 1958 and assumed hegemony over rocket R&D elsewhere. As for not changing the name I assume it was:
A. Sentimental, since the early JPL had a rich history B. To cheap to print new stationary and change signs C. Geeks busy doing geek stuff and didn't get around to it
The original founders are a colorful group. Theodore Von Karman was the leader and guding force.
Jack Parsons, leading chemist, who was part of an "esoteric order" rumored to be fond of drugs and orgies.
Tsien Hsue-shen is considered to be the father of the Chinese missile and space program. He was held hostage in the U.S. for a number of years during the red scare when he wanted to return home to China. He was released by Eisenhower as part of prisoner exchanges in Korea.
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I'm guessing it saved them having to impose on Verizon or whomever to track the phone for them.
I imagine they sent the phone one of these secret messages and it probably started sending its GPS coordinates to an SMS mailbox.
I guess it is a little pointless to worry about GPS tracking in cell phones when just having one of the things turned on is good enough.
"The law (at least here in my state) requires employers to pay non-exempt employees overtime for any time past 40 hours"
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Fortunately the Republicans have a solution to this little problem. They just changed the rules for non-exempt employees. For example instead of being a college graduate to be salaried, now if you served in the military and they trained you that improves your chances of being categorized as salaried so you have the opportunity to work overtime without pay.
http://www.aflcio.org/yourjobeconomy/overtimepa
This will miraculously lead to increased worker productivity statistics when its in place. You see the worker productivity statistics improve when people are working more hours for less money and all the economists rejoice because this is good for the economy.
I read with interest one goal was to help you find a friend in a crowded place using your phones.
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It does kind of give you pause though when you juxtapose it with this article about a stolen Siemens SX1 cellphone prototype:
http://www.mobile9.com/news/2004/04/a_failed_at
When the prototype was stolen at a trade show Siemens engineers apparently sent some secret SMS messages to the phone which apparently overrode the GPS tracking switch enabling them to track the phone and catch the thief. They claim these messages were only pssible due to the "special nature" of the prototypes but thats pretty hard to swallow so you have to wonder how many GPS enabled cell phones have back doors to enable GPS tracking without the user's permission.
In an age where your every move can be tracked by the OnStar system in your car, or secretly enabling GPS tracking in your phone and pretty soon with RFID tags you may as well say hello to Big Brother and look happy when he's watching.
I recall a few days ago, in the thread on "India Saving Capitalism" someone lecturing me that the U.S. had better start encouraging a pro employer business environment or the U.S. just wont be competitive. This kind of a classic example of a pro employer workplace.
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Its unfortunate unions in the U.S. went out of control and vastly overcorrected to the point unionized workers are largely worthless. Without unionization, which is in rapid decline in the U.S., we end up over correcting in the other direction, like this, where workers are abused and exploited and there isn't much they can do about it unless they want to get fired, find a lawyer willing to take the case for a percentage and survive a lengthy court battle.
Its a little off topic but when you see working people being screwed out of precious dollars its kind of instructive to see how the members of the Bush family, especially Neal Bush, get by:
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair04032004.htm
Or a little background on our current Labor Secretary might be interesting. She is unfortunately decidedly unsympathetic to labor, as evidenced by the Labor department's guide to employers last year on how to avoid paying workers for overtime, which accompanyied the Bush administration's new rules that deny overtime pay to millions of American's like firefighters, police and nurses:
http://www.counterpunch.org/flanders04012004.ht
When you hear on the business about worker "productivity" gains, you need to realize sometimes this might mean workers are more productive but more often than not it means they are working more hours for less money.
Nice anonymous coward rant. You apparently lack the guts and conviction to say it with your name attached.
I'm running on a 1 GHZ Pentium 3 laptop with 256 MB of RAM. Sure you can run them all but OpenOffice in particular is a complete and utter slug to start. You should try doing a head comparison with Windows starting IE, Outlook and Office. It dusts Linux on startup time versus Mozilla, Evolution and OpenOffice. There is an inevitability in it. Windows is sharing one set of DLL's. Linux is loading pretty much 3 completely different set of libraries.
OSX and Windows may not me completely consistent but Linux isn't even in the same ball park. If people are adopting Linux on the desktop its in spite of the terrible application consistency and more likely because of the price, and the fact security is better mostly just because no one is targeting Linux because its desktop share is so low.
Just keep telling yourself Linux is going to win the desktop without fixing the screwed up UI and usability problems. I love Linux, I pray for its success on the desktop, I've been running it on my laptops for years. Its just a simple fact of life that UI and application consistency is its Achilles heel, mostly because geeks like you would rather rant, justify the situation, fight religious wars, pretend its a plus instead of a problem and generally stick your head in the sand. Thats not going to solve the problem. It appears Linux is just going to fracture in to people only using KDE apps, and others using only Gnome apps, and geeks using a bunch of quirky splinters. As long as I stick to just KDE apps the consistency and interoperability is pretty good. Maybe I could just stick to GNOME apps though the consistency there is not as good. Its just unfortunate you have to ignore two thirds of Linux applications if you don't want to cope with a hopeless hodge podge.
As low as the Linux desktop share is, splintering it in to a bunch of pieces isn't going to improve its likelihood of success.
You can dream but as long as Linux geeks continue the UI religious wars you are going to end up with an ugly hodgepodge of applications that look inconsistent and behave inconsistently.
Now we have this wonderful prospect that Miguel de Icaza has declared all existing toolkits obsolete and is presumably going to develop a new one from scratch and start a religious war in the Gnome/GTK camp when he decides he wants to switch existing apps over with all the devastating consequences. The one plus here is KDE will just ignore him and maybe he will sufficiently screw up GNOME for a year or two so that GNOME will fall behind and fail and then we can unify on one desktop.
Just do what I do and try to run OpenOffice and Evolution on a KDE desktop. It puts a massive suck on memory because there are three sets of software doing all the same things but differently. You have to shift gears everytime you move between them because everything about the UI's in each is different. I have utter contempt for people who complain they don't like the "look" of KDE and GNOME. The "look" is insignificant compared to consistency.
I don't even consider using Mozilla because then I would hate the massive inconsistency so badly I would just give up on a Linux desktop. Konqueror has its quirks but its really important that its small, light, fast and fits with the rest of the desktop. I'll drop Evolution and return to kmail as soon as the HTML editor in kmail works. I need to start evaluating koffice to see if I can get off OpenOffice or I need to buy a whole bunch more RAM. The time it takes OpenOffice to load is reason enough to want to get rid of it. KDE is using some major tricks to get apps to load quickly and to circumvent the major overheads in dynamic linking. When you load OpenOffice you benefit from none of this so you wait an hour for it to load.
Let me spell it out for you. Mac OSX and Windows have a consistent look and feel, all the applications behave consistently. This is especially true of OSX. Thats why ordinary people like it so much. If you use one app you can switch to another and use it with equal ease. This consistency is a hundred times more important to users than all the "innovation" you see in Linux applications. If you want Linux to win on the desktop the application suite HAS to be consistent, and I mean really consistent, as in how menus are laid out, how accelerators are defined, how tools work, how things look etc.
If you want Linux to continue to fail on the desktop just stay the course. You might win some enterprise support because big companies want free. You don't have a prayer with most average users with the current state of things.
Something I haven't seen mentioned much is this is most likely a strategy to apply the Netscape sanction to Symantec, McAfee and all the other companies making a good living on security software.
As soon as Microsoft starts shipping anti virus and firewall software with Windows for free there is a pretty good chance people will stop paying for it. Security companies will then follow Netscape down the road in to oblivion. They might hold on for a while thanks to brand loyalty and if their offerings are superior to Microsoft's early versions, but its probably just a matter of time before Microsoft's free offering gets better technically and free is always better than "costs money" as IE proved over Netscape and Linux is trying to prove over Windows. Its also no secret Microsoft has been on a hiring binge for security talent so they probably have the talent to compete. They certainly have the R&D resources.
In fairness, Microsoft may be doing this partly because it realizes it has to solve its security problem because its pissing people off and its pissing governments off especially as fixated as governments are now about terrorism and cybersecurity.
But Microsoft also realizes there are billions of dollars pouring in to pockets that aren't theirs for security software. As in so many other markets if they bundle the same functionality with Windows for free, they put these other companies out of business. They can then jack up the price of Windows, or use some licensing scheme to redirect these billions in to there pockets because there are billions of dollars in IT budgets no longer going to security companies.
I don't recall everything about the intervening period but I do recall that NASA was being the pussy about doing a space walk where both astronauts would be outside and no one would be in the ISS. The Russians had done it on MIR, it was routine for them and they had no problem with it.
I know the jokes about the Russians and Mir are easy, but the Russians have, for decades done a lot more with a lot less while NASA's manned program, since Apollo at least, specializes in doing less with more.
It not a "single fucking case". Its one among many its just really well documented and was really over the top. Its pretty fucking amazing you can sit in your easy chair and say its no big deal someone guilty of nothing spent a year being tortured in Syria because our government has decided to suspend the most basic due process. You just don't seem to understand how democracy and the rule of law is supposed to work. Its become quite apparent that terrorist suspects. I repeat >, who don't respond to simple interrogation in the U.S. are being shipped to countries like Saudi Arabia where they can be properly tortured.
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If our government didn't make mistakes and only did this stuff to terrorists maybe you could rationalize it. Fact is they are making mistakes and hurting innocent people.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been wrongfully held since 9/11.
An Egyptian student was staying at a hotel near ground zero on 9/11. A security guard at the hotel framed him, because he was Arab, and accused him of having a radio that could monitor airline frequencies that was found in the hotel. The FBI managed to coerce a confession out of him by threatening to turn his brother over to Egyptian authorties, just like the Syrian case. He admitted it was his radio to protect his family which led to him being a suspected part of the plot. After the confession hit the news the private pilot that actually owned the radio came forward. The FBI's threats were so good they made him confess to something he didn't do.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/12/13/wtc.pilot.rad
Your missing a basic point. As soon as they started doing it there is nothing stopping them from continuing to do it and doing it more and worse. You really don't want to visit a country, where you can be arrested and held without charges and denied access to your embassy. It is the most basic travelers right. Unfortunately
Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, has been held without access to a lawyer, his family or any judicial review for a couple years now. He may be guilty of associating with terrorists. If he's guilty of something try him and prove it. Holding him forever without proving anything is simply not what a country based on law does.
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney01032004.htm
Capt. James Yee, an Islamic Chaplain at Guantanami, was in a military brig in isolation for more than 2 months facing a death penalty charge for espionage. The military destroyed his life and his marriage. Last week they back handedly admitted he wasn't guilty of anything but they aren't going to apologize for destroying his life. During the course of the trial the military's lawyers inadvertently divulged classified documents to the defense team. The military in fact was guilty of what they were accusing Yee of doing. None of the docs he had in his possession were, rightly or wrongly, marked as classified.
http://www.refuseandresist.org/detentions/art.p
Several British citizens held at Guantanamo were likewise just released. Only thing they were guilty of was being in Afghanistan when the war started so they got a couple years in relatively brutal solitary confinement and a series of beatings.
Well actually visitors rights in the U.S. were something worse than hampered right after 9/11. Read about a Syrian with Canadian citizenship connecting through New York, not even stopping in the U.S. He was picked up and shipped by the U.S. to Syria where he was tortured for a year until the Canadians finally extracted him.
http://www.counterpunch.org/arar11062003.html
I really can't see anyone visiting the United States until some sanity is returned to government here. As soon as they started blocking access to your embassy and to a lawyer when the picked you up, due process vanished and you don't want to be here anymore. When due process went out the window you can't count on the fact your 100% innocent to keep you safe.
If Bush is reelected I imagine I'm emigrating. Not only are the Republicans going to run the U.S. in to the ground, they are just plain nuts. Bush and Rice are simply in over their heads, and the people really running things, Cheney, Rice and Wolfowitz are truly ruthless SOB's. They weren't the best before 9/11 but when 9/11 happened:
A. They just snapped
B. They had an excuse to get away with things they wanted to do anyway, like implement a police state and start wars in Iraq, Iran and Syria. Things this country would have never stood for otherwise.
Unfortunately the Democrats aren't really any better.
You kind of know your in trouble when your government is using the war on terrorism as it justification for reelection and for its being. They really have no incentive to win the war on terrorism or better yet resolve the issues underlying. Fixing these might not get rid of Islamic extremists but it would deprive them of backing by moderates, a lot of recruits and a lot of funding. For starters:
A. Fix the Israeli / Palastinian conflict by giving the Palastinians their own nation under UN supervision. As long as the Jews and Palestinians are killing each other terrorism is not going to go away.
B. Get US troops out of the Middle East. The presence of Christian and Jewish troops, especially liberated women in the heart of Arabic nations is going to just inevitably piss off Arabs.
Unfortunately it a basic axiom of Orwell's 1984 that government has to always have an enemy. If there isn't one it will create one. If a nation has no enemies then the usefulness of government and the military drops dramatically and people wont give them lots of money and will start depriving them of powers.
With the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and China turning capitalits the U.S. establishment was in a rock and hard place. No enemies. Military spending was dropping rapidly. Fortunately that problem has been solved. We now have an enemy that will exist forever and defense spending is back where they want it and heading through the roof.
Well they do just seem to have pass regulations to try and enforce a minimum wage, though maybe they've had one since 1993.
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http://www.nyconsulate.prchina.org/eng/xw/t6337
It is rather difficult to figure out what it actually is though. It can apparently be set to whatever suits local authorities and conditions. Sounds kind of like a PR ploy. The question is, is the minimum wage really enforced and if so what is is, preferably in U.S. dollars.
Your pretending like this is a level playing field so American workers just have to retrain and they will all of a sudden be competitive. Its a good pitch, better training and education would help, and it would slow down offshoring but it simply wont stop it. If you are just living in the U.S. you can't compete against a worker in China who is working for next to nothing under a really repressive government. If a Chinese worker works as hard to acquire marketable skills as the American worker the Chinese work still wins.
Taking your philosophy working conditions in the U.S. are going to be pushed down to the level of China and probably to where they were in the U.S. at the start of the twentieth century. The U.S. will be competitive and it will be really "pro employer" but unless you are an employer living here will really suck. Its also not likely there will be a lot of small business employers because the big multinationals like WalMart have no problem burying them.
The gilded age at the end of the 19th century is a pretty good lesson on the ugly side of unchecked corporate greed. It to was a time where all the wealth was concentrating in the hands of a few very wealthy people and most working people were in dire straits. I imagine you would call it a pro employer era.
What the administration should do is what governments have done for centuries. Raise barriers to level the playing feel. What we have now is in fact the opposite. The U.S. has pretty much dropped all its barriers. China on the other hand is maintaining a bunch of barriers to insure it wins the trade war. It artificially sets it currency relatively low to the dollar so a U.S. worker is always at a disadvantage to a Chinese worker if everything else was equal which it isn't. Free trade means free in both directions.
"In the short term we may loose a few jobs to other nations but as long as the American businesses remain strong other jobs (maybe more white-collar) will be created here."
This is such outdated thinking. What exactly is "American business" in the era of globalization. Multinational corporation often as not aren't even based in the U.S. but rather on an island
someplace. They will put their workers in the country thats most profitable for them. The only true American businesses left tend to be small business, and that are being decimated by globalization. Small retailers can't compete with WalMart. Small machine shops can't compete with the Chinese. Small businesses can't easily offshore their workforce though they are reaching the point they have to or die.
Everyone thinks Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. He isn't. The Walton family, owners of Walmart are. They just cleverly split their wealth among five family members each of which is worth about 20 billion, so their family is actually worth a 100 billion dollars. They are making their wealth entirely off the back of manufacturing workers in China and by driving down wages and benefits for Americans desperate for a job, any job, and they can't work in the store down the street because Walmart put it out of business.
"The bottom line here is that white-collar types have gotten fat and happy over the last several decades, and are now shocked to find that they are facing global competition much like agricultural and manufacturing workers have for decades."
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First off India isn't "saving capitalism". Capitalism is using India to satiate its voracious appetite for cheap labor. In the complete absence of any checks on it there is zero chance of Capitalism failing. It will take care of itself, it always does. It will destroy a lot of people en route, like it always does. The people being destroyed are just changing. Capitalism is about picking winners and losers.
As for facing global competition, there isn't really any competition to it. You can live like a prince in China or India for ten dollars an hour. In the U.S. you are living in poverty at that wage.
What you're seeing here is all of the barriers to globalization have been removed. As is the way of capitalism, it rushes to the cheapest labor that can do the job. With globalization a labor pool of a couple billion new workers has come on line in China and India. There were also huge imbalances in the cost of labor between developed and developing countries. In China in particular there is no minimum wage, no pollution controls, no workplace safety regulation, health care costs aren't spiraling out of control like they are in the U.S. and there are no out of control taxes, especially payroll taxes, draining a workers income. There is a near inevitably that globalization is going to devastate workers in developed countries whether it be the U.S. or Western Europe. At the same time its going to continue to make multinational corporations and their share holders richer. If the government in the U.S. cared about working people it would have left enough barriers in place so they wouldn't be broadsided by the imbalances in global labor markets. Instead corporations are actually being given tax incentives to move jobs off shore. The fact is both Republicans and Democrats are so in the pockets of multinational corporations now abandoning U.S. workers is inevitable until working people get a clue, realize they are in the majority in the U.S. and start voting out any politician who is screwing them in favor of multinationals.
Indians should note that if Indian labor becomes wildly successful wages and cost of living will start to inflate. In the new world order, as soon as it does the jobs will just move to China or Vietnam and Indians will be carping about off shoring. The one thing in their favor is it will be a near impossibility to achieve full employment for the billions of workers in China and India. If you were to do it you would proably decimate increasingly scarce world resources like oil.
What you're seeing here is a godsend to multinational corporations and a death knell to workers. Workers in India and China should rejoice now for their rising prosperity but they should appreciate that they are just as expendable as workers in the U.S., its just a matter of time and inflation. With globalization we have reached a market that is entirely in the favor of employers and entirely against employees.
Its no accident the Bush administration is all for outsourcing because its entirely pro business and anti labor. You see the writing on the wall when you read a bio of Elaine Chow, Bush's labor secretary. Her father and her family make their fortune in container ships, shipping goods from China to the U.S.
http://www.counterpunch.org/flanders04012004.ht
Our labor secretary is decidedly anti labor as evidenced by her departments effort to strip U.S. workers of overtime pay last year.
Slave labor is probably a bit harsh. Maybe indentured servitude is a little closer. The key problem is that when you have people who are completely dependent on a company to provide them a visa they can be coerced in to doing things a citizens wouldn't be. For example work 80 hours a week and get paid for 40, have no chance for promotions, stock options etc. Fact is either you keep your mouth shut and work really hard or you risk getting laid off and losing your visa. You company doesn't really have to reward you to keep you, they hold you by the balls with the visa.
When you get laid off its way worse than it is for a citizens where its just bad. When you get laid off you have to uproot your home and family and get out of the country quickly, unless you can get a new job and a new visa in a hearbeat.
They don't call these people visa slaves for no reason.
There presence is also a pretty serious drag on all the workers in their company. Because they are willing, or compelled, to work twice as hard for half as much they are a great tool to drag down salaries and working conditions for everyone which is one reason U.S. corporations are constantly clamoring for higher visa quotas.
Hmmm. I must have been moderated as Flamebait by a Bush backer. What exactly is flame bait when I offer URL's backing the basic facts in the post which is VERY relevant to a discussion of the Texas educational system:
- Texas, in general, and Houston in particular were touted as model school systems and a great success story. So much so they were integral in the Bush presidential campaing in 2000 and used as a model for the federal program we are pinning our hopes on to save the U.S. education system
- Its then discovered that the Houston school system's stellar performance was not because it was teaching kids but because they were forging dropout statistics by calling dropouts, transfers.
- Rod Paige then calls the NEA, a major national teachers association, a "terrorist" organization and gets away unscathed as is typical for abusive behavior in the bush administration like outing a CIA agent.
Ah well. The truth hurts some people I guess. You probably also don't want to hear about all the wicked underhandedness the Bush administration used to pass their Medicare drug bill or about those WMD's in Iraq or absence thereof.
"I met an entire group of high level EE/CS types who were relocating to Alaska to work on a missle defense program and one other had a job with the State of Alaska."
Ah yes, what a great job, I imagine its a top secret clearance giving the government the right to know every intimate detail of your life for the rest of your life, to dictate where you travel and who you associate with.
You also have a chance to work on a program on which the U.S. will waste billions and billions of dollars and it probably wont work when the time comes, or it will get cancelled when someone comes to their senses and it will all be wasted just like it was the first time around under Reagan.
From the 9/11 hearings and Richard Clark's testimony it appears the Bush administration was totally fixated on this absurd program to the exclusion of the real threat, terrorism. End result, we start building Star Wars again, cut FBI funds for counterterrorism and we get attacked with civilian airlines by a few committed Islamic fundamentalists who spent like a half million dollars to kill 3,000 people and inflict hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage on the U.S. and could probably do it again.
But you have to think like the Bush administration. To them Reagan was like a god and Reagan wanted missile defense so 20 years later we have to restart this bloody waste of money. Condi Rice is a specialist in the Soviet Union, so as evidence of her failure to adapt to the modern world she was also probably real keen on this.
On the plus side, for the Bush administration, it does pumps billions of dollars in to their big aerospace company friends which is why they offer such great jobs:
Lucrative aerospace jobs = massive budget deficit
About the one chance this thing has to do anything of value is it might shoot down a North Korean missile. We still haven't figured out why we took down Iraq who had no missiles worth mentioning and no nukes while North Korea is happily humming along with both. One guess is North Korea is not a big threat to Isreal while Saddam was so we did their bidding in a proxy war for them.
In most ways missile defense has a disturbing resemblance to the Maginot line. Its hugely expensive to build and any potential enemy is going to have absolutely no problem circumventing it. If North Korea wants to nuke the U.S. they just slip a nuke in on a tramp steamer. If Russia or China wants to beat this in a full fledge missile attack they swamp it with decoys and build manuevering warheads, which is their plan as of a month or two ago, or they launch cruise missile from subs. In the case of Russia this appears very likely to reignite a strategic arms race. This does make all the Bush administration cold warrior relics pleased as punch. We can just never stop the arms race even if we are the only one running lately and it appears likely to bankrupt the U.S. eventually just like it did the U.S.S.R.
"how about your highschool system?"
e rr orist.nea/
Houston was widely touted to have a Great school system, along with the rest of Texas. It was a key plank in George W.'s presidential campaign, and part of the impetus for his national "No Child Left Behind" education program. Its also a reason the head of the Houston school system, Rod Paige, is now the Secretary of Education. Of course a year or two later it came out the Houston's stellar graduation rate was due to massive fabrication of the statistics.
http://www.nea.org/neatoday/0310/upfront.html
"Houston school officials recently picked (B) in a frenzied effort to explain the ingenious bit of bookkeeping unveiled by a state audit. Turns out that thousands of students who should have been recorded as drop-outs had been swapped to other categories, such as "transferred" or "moved." Across this school district once led by U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige--the man President George W. Bush boasted had made the Texas school system a model in accountability--revelation of the trickery was beyond embarrassing. A New York Times editorial called the official drop-out numbers "the educational equivalent of Enron's accounting results."
Not long ago Secretary Paige referred to the NEA as a "terrorist" organization:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/23/paige.t
Kind of standard procedure for the Bush administration. Lie, deceive and when caught accuse your critics of being terrorists, unpatriotic, lairs, etc.
I forgot to mention on the subject of kmail 3.2 authentication not working if you go to the Network Config to the Secuirty tab do "Check What the Server Supports" it grays everything out suggesting no authentication is supported.
"KMail/Kontact included in KDE 3.2 have an inline spell checker that is also used in Konqueror for editing webforms like this one."
Doesn't seem to work for me. There is an option box for automatic spell checking that is turned on. When I misspell a word it doesn't put the squiggly line under it that Outlook and Evolution do. Is something broken in my kmail build or is kmail's idea of automatic spell checking different than what I'm expecting.
"KMail in CVS has (optional) support for HTML editing."
Cool. If the editor is good and I fixed these other problems I'd drop evolution in a heartbeat.
Don't much want to use Miguel's stuff.
"There isn't enough info here to mKMail in CVS has (optional) support for HTML editing.ake a judgment. You might like to verify that authentication is actually being used, as your mail client may be silently erroring out rather than actually using authentication."
Its not silent. You get a popup from kmail:
Your SMTP server doesn't support authentication.
The server responded "5.7.1 AUTH command is not enabled".
Didn't have this problem on KDE 3.1.
"you will know that my feeling is that all of the existing toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will become obsolete and we need to start looking
at the next generation toolkit system."
This would be a truly wonderful thing if a new toolkit was developed, and it had the best of all the existing ones and then some, and it had licensing that everyone could bless and rejoice everyone migrated to it and we finally drove a nail in the coffin of the debilitating Gtk/Qt religious ware.
The reality though is it would probably be just one more new GUI toolkit(how many are there now 20-30-35 and counting) and it would just spawn another religious faction and further insure the failure of Linux on the desktop, something the strife between GNOME/Gtk and KDE/Qt is already on the verge of doing.
So miguel your team could go out and develop this and we could have a religious war within GNOME between those sticking to Gtk and those jumping ahead to your toolkit, and a multiyear effort to:
A. Finish your new toolkit
B. Migrate the GNOME application base to.
The KDE/Qt will just completely ignore it and probably gain a huge development lead while you dick with a major toolkit migration.
Everyone might dis the Win32 API but they have done something pretty smart. They only have 1 toolkit and it doesn't change much though they add new things on top of and around it. They've developed a huge lead in application support and development, all their applications work together for the most part, and they behave consistently which is something extremely cherished by most ordinary users.
Geeks need to really get a clue on this subject. GUI toolkit religious wars are SO cherished in the geek community and are so self defeating if you want to attract applications and users, which is the thing that really counts if you want Linux to be something other than a geek's wet dream.
"1. Evolution is by far the better product"
I haven't used Kontact but I did use kmail for a long time until I switched to Evolution so I have a few opinions on these two. I have to try Kontact soon to see if they've fixed the deficiencies in kmail. I would be overjoyed if someone could correct me if I'm wrong on some of these points.
Evolution has few features that make it a hands down winner over kmail.
-The inline spell checker is a huge advantage, I hate running spell checkers after the fact in kmail. Please put an inline spell checker in kmail or if there is one tell me how to turn it on.
- The ability to edit HTML in Evolution is GREAT. A lot of geeks might diss HTML email but its pretty much mandatory if you are engaged in business communication with people using Outlook and Rich Text. Straight text looks real poor in this kind of exchange especially if you are sending anything lengthy.
- kmail stopped working with my ISP when I moved to 3.2.1. This is on top of Red Hat 8. My ISP has a simple login authentication and I find it truly awe inspiring with all the new weight in this area in kmail in 3.2.1 that the simplest authentication fails. Probably should file a bug but I'd already stopped using it due to the two above reasons.
The down side to Evolution
- The next and previous message buttons on the tool bar are COMPLETELY BRAIN DEAD. They don't go to the next or previous UNREAD message, they go to the next message. This makes it a horrendous pain to find unread messages if you use threaded folders. I assume they must have cloned this from Outlook though I've never used Outlook to speak of. I pray there is a configuration option to fix this. If not then ther Evolution developers had their head up there ass on this point. It is ALMOST enough to make me drop Evolution. In kmail you open a folder it goes to the first unread message, you click next message and you zip through the unread stuff in the folder. Evolution you get dumped to the top of the folder and you have to go on a search and destroy mission to find the unread mail. I assum Outlook types must always use chronological folders with new messages at the top which is the only way Evolutions behaviour doesn't completely suck..
- The mechanism for searching emails for strings strikes me as really heavy and difficult to use compared to kmail. Its kind of powerful but it is just to much work to do a simple search for a string in the emails in a folder. Again I hope there is a simple way to do this I'm missing.
- Installing evolution from a download on Red Hate 8 is kind of incredible in terms of the number of RPM's you have to download and install and all the special version of standard things they have.
- Evolution doesn't integrate well with a KDE desktop on the most basic things like cut and paste.
- Running Evolution on KDE is a real SUCK on memory since you end up running all of the KDE environment and pretty much all of GNOME/GTK.
"So why is NASA stopping development?"
I'd rather doubt they are. If it can be made to work and there is a need, either the NASA program will be funded or it will disappear in to an Air Force black program and will just appear to have been killed.
It does appear it can be made to work and it would presumably add a new top end to Aurora or whatever the Air Force's current black program is.
Its use for civilian transportation is dubious. Its pretty dangerous and would take a LONG time to be made safe, cheap and comfortable. I'm also doubtful it will prove to be a great launch vehicle though you never know.
Its military applications are obvious. The DOD has a pretty desperate need to drop bombs on targets of interest that arise quickly and move around like Bin Laden. When they get intelligence he is at a place they need to drop ordinance there as quickly as possible before he moves and with some targeting flexibility. A manned or remotely controlled Mach 11 bomber would seem ideal. An RPV version of this could come to fruition a lot faster than a manned version, Cruise missiles, the stealth bomber etc are to slow to get to the target in time. Using ballistic missiles tends to set of alarm bells in Russia, China and everyplace else where governments have satellites watching for launch signatures. Targeting for ballistic missiles also can't be redirected at or stopped at the last minute.
It would also be priceless for strategic and tactical reconnisance. Spy satellites are to predictable and inflexible since they are locked in to orbits with limited manueverability. Most countries know the schedule and hide stuff when they are overhead. A Scramjet would be flying fast and high enough it would be hard to shoot down, or even detect until after its done the job.
NASA Dryden deserves a huge pat on the back for finally bending metal and flying something. They've been wasting money on computer generated fantasies for this concept for more than a decade and haven't done much to realize it. It would be fantastic if it lead to a better launch vehicle and civilian transport, I just doubt that it will.
Here is an "Ask Slashdot" Question for a Saturday night. Who would you guess might lead America in to a new summer of love, whether they be musicians, poets, rebels or prophets. Who is the modern day Pete Seeger, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Tom Hayden, George Carlin, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, CSN&Y or Bob Dylan.
Do you think this summer or next could be a new summer of love. America is entering an increasingly dark period much like it did in the 50's and 60's but maybe much worse, much darker this time around. Our government seems to be waging a war on drugs, a war on p2p, a war on imaginary WMD's, a war on privacy, a war on religion if its the wrong kind, a war on love, a war on freedom and democracy, war on everything. You have to figure they won't be able to build prison's fast enough to lock everyone up. Perhaps this is an indicator to that new career path we can all retrain for, one that can't be easily oursourced and seems to be a growth industry...prison gaurd. America now has the largest prison population per capita in the world, a title once held by the gulag's of the Soviet Union but now America reigns supreme.
A couple names that come to mind for the next Woodstock, a real Woodstock and not the decandent self indulgent festivals we've been doing lately:
- Michael Moore, OK sometimes he's a goof but he often hit the nail on the head no one else will hit.
- Rage Against the Machine
- Bruce Cockburn
- Peace Songs
Part of the problem is most of the musicians of today don't seem to really stand for anything and real talent seems to be increasingly rare. Musicians seem to mostly turn out formulas or beat, they sing about love but mostly as pop thats just rearranging the same empty words over and over again. There is plenty of hate and sex. Rap and hip hop don't really capture the same spirit, the peace loving rebellion of the sixties, the thoughtful message.
Of course maybe we can't capture that same magic again. For one thing the government has seen it happen once, and they've been to school on it so this time around they may smash it with an iron fist. Now they have computers to catalog us all and agencies with truly wicked tools to suppress dissent, and a willingness to keep building prisons. We are also such a lazy, spoiled culture, mesmerized by TV, alcohol, video games and the beloved buck. Could we really stand up against all the wrongness our government seems to be perpetrating everyday and at an accelerating pace. Could we all stand up sometime soon and tell those in charge enough is enough and turn the tide.
Stop killing people and doing things that make people want to kill us. Stop using bold faced lies to sucker us in to wars, stop promoting ruthless dictators, stop taxing working people in to poverty and giving all the money to the richest 1%, stop rewarding corporations for sending all our jobs to China. Stop trying to destroy all the people that are speaking the truth like Paul O'Neill, Richard Clark and Joe Wilson. Stop selling out our country and its government to the highest bidder. Stop the war on drugs and the war on p2p and locking up people who've never hurt anyone. Stop selling our elections and democracy to the highest bidder, the one who can mesmerize us with the most TV ads or engage in the dirtiest trick to steal an election and power. Stop taking tax money from working people and doling it out to corporations like you did in that sham Medicare prescription drug bill, the one you lied and cheated and bribed to pass. Stop congress from writing DMCA's and Patriot Acts that rob us of our rights, because they are working for corporations and not the people. Stop subjecting us to elections between Republican's and Democrat's where both choices are awful and undifferentiated so its pointle
"Perhaps, although doing so would be a clear violation of the first amendment's freedom of assembly"
Perhaps you should read about the governments response to an antiwar conference at Drake Univertsity after which a few people committed an act of peaceful civil disobedience. The DOJ swept in and wanted to know everyone who attended and everything that was said, they placed a gag order on the Univertisty prohibiting the University from telling anyone about the massive investigation because they wanted to keep it secret, a grand jury was impaneled etc.
http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo02102004.html
http://www.mapm.org/drake.htm
The DOJ backed off when their investigation became public, it was so massive they couldn't keep it secret, and it was starting to get embarassing how massively they'd overreacted and how much they were treading on basic civil liberties. But they no doubt have cataloged everyone who'd attended the conference and have them all on file as potential troublemakers. There is also no telling how far they would have gone if they'd kept the investigation secret.
The fact is Al Queda wins as much by the massive bureaucratic overreaction to try and prevent terrorism, as by the original act.
First off the Bush Administration keeps saying terrorists hate us for our "Freedom and Democracy" but it is double speak because the fact is the Bush administration is using Terrorism to dismantle freedom and democracy. Big corpratist government want a bunch of docile workers reporting to their cubes everyday, and NEVER doing anything that would resemble protest, dissent, disagreement with wrong doing(something the Bush administration is apparently rich in) or antisocial behavior. To achieve this they just need a database with detailed histories of everyone, and for every employer to check this database as a condition of employment and soon enough you either:
A. Never protest, dissent, or engage in antisocial behaviour
B. Never work again unless you can scrape together self employment.
Someone will, no doubt argue, how "Free" America is. It does kind of look free on the surface but in most respects its really not unless you are willing to be homeless and starving and then you might get arrested for vagrancy.
It should be noted that the U.S now has the highest per capita prison population in the world (though China and North Korea might be higher they just dont report accurately). This honor used to belong to the Soviet Union's gulags but the U.S. now leads Russia who is a close second. How did this happen, primarily by the "War on Drugs" which first and foremost punishes people for recreational drug use and drug addiction which is decidely antisocial behavior. Its also due to 3 strikes laws that pass down life sentances for things like shoplifting.
The economic damage thats also being done to the U.S. by this overreaction will eclipse the direct damage done by 9/11. Hundreds of billions on databases and computers to track everyone in the U.S. or who passes through, a constant push to equip every local fire and police department, no matter how small, with a complete bio and chem warfare capability, a nationwide sensor grid to spot the first hint of a biochem cloud, laser missile defense systems in every airplane, continuing pressure to inspect every bit of cargo entering the U.S. through every port, airport or truck.
Stop the insanity. All this stuff does produce economic activity, often to the benefit of companies who are benefactors of the administration, but its also contributing to massive budget deficits and its pure economic waste because every countermeasure costs billions and the terrorist will just switch to a mode of attack that circumvents the countermeasures, leading to more countermeasures and more economic damage. This is a key objective of the doctrine of guerilla warfare, bleed the target white economicly trying to stop you. You can't win against terrorism by never ending escalation of repres
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/about_JPL/jpl101.pdf
The way this reads is there was a race after sputnik to launch the first U.S. satellite. The JPL/Army Orbiter lost out to the Navy's Vangaurd. Vangaurd exploded on the pad and JPL revived Orbiter but they focused on the satellite more than the rocket. They turned their focus to payloads from them on, and NASA came in to being in 1958 and assumed hegemony over rocket R&D elsewhere. As for not changing the name I assume it was:
A. Sentimental, since the early JPL had a rich history
B. To cheap to print new stationary and change signs
C. Geeks busy doing geek stuff and didn't get around to it
The original founders are a colorful group. Theodore Von Karman was the leader and guding force.
Jack Parsons, leading chemist, who was part of an "esoteric order" rumored to be fond of drugs and orgies.
Tsien Hsue-shen is considered to be the father of the Chinese missile and space program. He was held hostage in the U.S. for a number of years during the red scare when he wanted to return home to China. He was released by Eisenhower as part of prisoner exchanges in Korea.