"Well, then we can't just overwhelm the enemy with numbers. "
If you are referring to Iraq, for example, sir you have no clue. You can't overwhelm them with numbers unless you are going start indiscriminately massacring innocent civilians, kind of like the U.S. tried in flattening Fallujah. All you do is make the people you have under occupation hate you more, and work harder to kill you. The more troops you put in, the more targets you give them, both in people and supply convoys.
"Did you type your post on a computer? Did you drive today?"
LOL. Most of the power I'm using is unfortunately coming from coal mined right next door to me. There isn't any global power projection necessary for us to have electricity.
As for gasoline yes I do drive, but I telecommute and I drive as little as absolutely possible. You see unfortunately the U.S. has been designed for nearly a hundred years to be completely dependent on gasoline. It was a bad design and a bad idea. Its led to complete dependence on a fuel which is finite, and is now crossing in to short supply, its led to pollution, and people spending 2 hours a day driving to and from work. Some of the worst life style choices imaginable. I have for a number of years lived in a city where I didn't own a car, walked to work and took subways and street cars power by nuclear energy to travel to get about.
So not only have we designed our civilization to be completely dependent on fossil fuels, but big oil and coal have done everything in the power to prevent any attempt to switch to something better. They jack up prices and profiteer like this year, people start switching to alternatives and then they drop prices, through collusion, to kick the legs out from under the alternatives, wash, rinse and repeat. Aren't monopolies wonderful.
STOP LAYING YOUR SORRY ASS LIFE STYLE GUILT TRIP ON ME. The world would for the most part be a better place without gasoline and cars. Save it all for the farm machinery we need to grow food and maybe some trains, ships and planes for transport, not for some dumbass to drive 2 hours a day to get from the suburbs to a job in the city.
I would be overjoyed if all my electricity came from nuclear, hydro, solar and wind.
If "defending my economic interest" means killing people, I'm willing to live with get by with less and live and let live.
"most evil or idiotic think that Khomeini, Hussein, and Chavez"
Khomeini came to power THANKS to the U.S. The Mossadegh government the U.S. toppled originally was in fact a pretty progressive government, the only thing they did wrong is they got fed up with the fact British oil companies, who got their foothold in the middle east thanks to colonial expansion from World War I, were taking the lion's share of their countries wealth so they nationalized Iran's own oil fields. The British whined to the U.S. to do something, they did, the CIA overthrew a sovereign government, oh and then they screwed the British too and gave the oil fields to U.S. companies. How did the U.S. put Khomeini in power? They put the Shah in power and he and his secret service were one of the most brutal regimes in the middle east, they were every bit Saddam class, disappearing, torturing and killing their opponents. The Iranian people hated the Shah so much they viewed Khomeini and Islamic fundamentalism as an improvement. Many Iranians hate the U.S. with a passion to this day thanks to the Shah.
As for Chavez he has been demonized by the U.S. as is the U.S. way when they want to topple someone, Kaddafi, Castro, Noriega, Saddam etc. Notice who since Khaddafi started kissing American and British boots, and opening his oil fields to them, they don't demonize him any more? Same guy, trust me. Chavez isn't perfect but the dynamics in Venezuela come down to two groups vying for power which is true of just about every country, especially in the Central and South America. A wealthy plutocracy where a few percent have all the wealth and power, and 90+% who are in grinding poverty and powerless. Chavez is popular with the 90+% who have nothing. He like Castro does some great things the U.S. always forgets to mention:
A. They insure universal access to quality health care for everyone, not just those who can afford it
B. They insure universal access to education, especially university education, again based on need and merit not ability to pay. Cuba turns out huge numbers of doctors for example that provide health care to poor areas around the globe who would have no health care if left to the whims of capitalism
C. They seek to distribute wealth more evenly versus having a few percent who are filthy rich and comfortable while everyone else is starving, illiterate and die young due to absence of basic health care.
Unfortunately Socialism is flawed just like Capitalism. People get drunk on power in both systems and abuse it. Socialism means big government and big government tends to be bad no matter what political philosophy it prescribes to. Socialism tends to trample individual liberties and freedom, but so does Capitalism. Capitalism just uses more carefully crafted and better concealed means to rob you of your freedoms.
Problem with people like you sir is you buy in to the propaganda the U.S. spews and think the only bad leaders in the world are the ones the U.S. hap Problem with people like you sir is you buy in to the propaganda the U.S. spews and think the only bad leaders in the world are the ones the U.S. decides to demonize. The Shah was every bit as bad and probably worse than your list of three, so was Marcos in the Phillippines, Papa Doc in Haiti, Diem in Vietnam Pinochet, and a cavalcade of other ruthless dictators the U.S. has propeed up over the years to the misfortune of the people who suffered under them
The problem with people like you sir are you are suckers for the U.S. propaganda, and their list of people they demonize on a given day, and you buy it hook like and sinker. The Shah of Iran was every bit as bad and probably worse than your list of three, so was Marcos in the Phillippines, Papa Doc in Haiti, Diem in Vietnam, Pinochet and a cavalcade of other ruthless dictators the U.S. has propped up over the years to the misfortune of the people who suffered under them.
Not sure I follow your point. Are you saying it wont be so bad this time because we aren't in a world war?
In 1918 they didn't have jet airplanes and people circling the globe in 24 hours in high volumes. They also didn't have container shipping moving vast quantities of goods.
All in all I'm certain vastly more people and cargo is moving much faster around the world today than 1918.
That said its still extremely premature for people to be going off the deep end about the impending doom of a pandemic like the grandparent did. It might happen, it might not. There is a significant chance this bird flu strain will NEVER mutate in to a form that is communicable between humans. There is also a chance that if it does mutate to be communicable it might be less lethal or not lethal at all. Mutations are a complete crap shoot and are completely unpredictable as to the eventual outcome, it could be lethal pandemic, it could be a flu season like those we have every year, it could be a big nothing.
The high mortality rate, if it persists could in fact work against its spread. Diseases with high mortality rates don't make for good pandemics. The insidious ones are the one that keep their hosts up and moving around while they are infectious.
Small pox in particular is very insidious because:
A. It is extremely communicable between people you just need to be within six feet of someone is infections
B. Smallpox onset is slow, like 2 weeks and you are infectious for that time so people unwittingly distribute it widely.
All in all the bird flu pandemic threat at present smacks of fear mongering on the part of both the media and politicians. Prepare for it, yes, obsessing over it like its the inevitable end of civilization is insane and delusional.
The media is obsessing over it because thanks to 24x7 news they need something to obsess over 24x7 and fear mongering is especially good at holding people's attention and boosting ratings. Its not responsible journalism.
Politicians fear monger because its a way to con people in to voting for them because it makes them look indispensable. "Vote for me or you will surely die". The Republican's did a great job of exploiting this tool in 2002 and 2004 elections by fear mongering over terrorism. Since terrorism is starting to wear thin with people I suspect bird flu is the new fear mongering issue du jour. Collecting all of this info on travelers smacks of large scale spying that would be useful for tracking "terrorists" or "political opponents" and to generally intimidate people in to being submissive. I wager the Bush administration is frustrated they've had trouble getting traveler info to track terrorists due to civil liberty complaints so they figure they could use bird flu and public health as an unarguable excuse.
It also make me more than a little nervous that the Bush administration has already said they will use a flu outbreak as an excuse for martial law. You could very easily fake an epidemic, declare martial law and use it as an excuse to seize dictatorial power, for example if it appears the Republican's are going to be trounced in the 2006 and 2008 elections and will lose their current stranglehold on power. The Republican's are currently intoxicated by power, and when people get that way they can do almost anything to keep it.
People in the health bureaucracy also fear monger because its a way to get a vast infusion of tax dollars that they can spend to build their empires. Maybe it will be for public benefit. Maybe it will be squandered and make no difference if a pandemic comes.
All in all yes it would be nice to have plans in place to deal with a pandemic. In the case of SARS it was in fact contained reasonably well, and it taught a few lessons on doing it better next time. It would be nice to develop a new means to develop and produce new vaccines rapidly. The one we use now dates to the 50's and is very slow and inefficient.
Whipping yourselves in to a frenzy over this is a bad idea. Letting your government engage in massive spying on you when there is no pandemic, also bad. So is letting yourselves be manipulated by the media and politicians to do stupid things, kind of like most people were on WMD's and Iraq.
Its not really that different. Its one in a long string of regime changes where the U.S. seeks to take down people it doesn't like, people who don't do what the U.S. says, people that thumb their noses at U.S. corporate interests, who challenge the U.S. on the world stage. The goal is to prop up friendly puppets who defend U.S. business interests and kowtow to U.S. demands.
Its been long established that the surest way for a sovereign leader of any state to be taken down by the U.S. is to have oil reserves and to not sign them over to the control of American/British/Dutch oil companies. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies have spent most of the last century insuring Allied oil companies control of the world's oil fields. The U.S. toppled the government of Iran, and installed a ruthless dictator, the Shah, precisely to put its oil fields in to the hands of American oil companies.
The U.S. has tried unsuccessfully to topple Chavez in Venezuela pricesly for the same reason, to get its oil reserves in to the hands of friendlies.
The only things really different about Iraq is the blatantness of the aggression, the blatantness of the lieing and the fact that it failed badly. Taking down Noriega in Panama was very much the same kind of war, its just it was much better executed and there wasn't the deep ethnic division that there is in Iraq, which is fueling the civil war there. Taking down the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, very similar, its just the war was much more covert and used largely indigenous guerrillas with CIA handlers. American's didn't die much in Nicaragua so American's mostly didn't care, even when the Reagan Administration tore down the Constitution by waging a war Congress forbad. The never ending series of coups in Haiti, pretty much the same thing. The U.S. gets tired of leaders there that don't play by U.S. rules so they arm bands of right wing thugs in the Dominican Republic and their CIA handlers send them to do their bidding.
I wish Iraq really was different but in fact its just how power politics is played. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R did it most of the last century and killed millions of people in assorted third world countries around the globe fighting proxy wars. In the process they created the cauldrons that brew terrorism. Somalia is the hell hole it is thanks to decades of proxy wars to control the horn of Africa. Afghanistan likewise became the base for Al Qaeda thanks to a proxy war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R there. The U.S. is just seeking to shape the world out if its own self interest, and the harvest it is reaping is very, very ugly.
Yes it is good to have enough weapons to deter someone bad from attacking, invading or destroying you. There are bad people in the world, and there are people who good or bad don't like what you do or stand for.
A problem today is certain American enemies know full well that they can't go toe to toe with the U.S. in conventional or strategic war. They don't and can't squander $500 billion on weapons, the military and intelligence a year, much of that money borrowed by the way. So they don't even try and don't need to.
What do the do? Well they use hijacked jetliners, suicide bombers, IED's, propaganda and other forms of asymmetric warfare. They have proved in Iraq that they can spend millions of dollars on asymmetric weapons and tie up the U.S. military in knots, which is spending billions a month, and which has hundreds of billions of weapons most of which are useless in urban guerrilla warfare. They can launch attacks that costs millions of dollars, if that, that cause, billions of dollars in economic damage to the U.S.
THAAD is in a lot of ways a good weapon if it works. Its main goal is to keep someone with ballistic missiles from killing people weather they are civilian or military.
There are other classes of weapons which unfortunately are dual use, and can be used both offensively and defensively. There have been times when American's have shunned foreign adventure and aggressive warfare. During those times our defense department was really for defense, to deter attack and counter ruthlessly when attacked.
Sadly political and military elites have at various times forgotten the basic difference between defense and preemptive or aggressive warfare. Preemptive and aggressive warfare is something only bad people, like the Nazi's did. Well not ture, The U.S. for example launched the Spanish American war largely under false pretense and to cover a large colonial expansion in the Carribean and the Phillippines. In the Phillippines there was an entire, lengthy, bloody war in the early 1900's never taught in American history classes where the U.S. ruthlessly killed civilians in a largely vain attempt to suppress an insurgency that didn't appreciate decades of American colonial occupation. It holds a lot of parallels to Iraq today, and probably could teach some lessons if we hadn't pushed it out of our collective conscious because it was so ugly.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm all for paying for enough weapons to defend the U.S. but the U.S. military is completely beyond that today. Its is a cold war relic turned in to an preemptive, offense tool for dominating the world and that flies in the face of what many people want the U.S. to be. What's worse it isn't even any good to deal with terrorist attacks or insurgencies like the ones in Vietnam and Iraq which are far more likely than a conventional war today.
You also need to look no further than the Duke Cunningham case yesterday to realize the Pentagon is mostly just a vast corrupted mechanism for funneling vast quantities of money from tax payer's pockets in to the pockets of largely corrupt defense contractors.
There is irony that China may well dominate the U.S. militarily and economically in the near future because the U.S. is squandering its wealth on excessive defense spending, and watching its economy wither in the face of globalization, budget and trade deficits. The Chinese might well win World War III without firing a shot. They will win it with a steady stream of containers ships to the U.S. and of U.S. dollars to China. The U.S. spends billions developing new weapons technology and the Chinese spend thousands to steal them. The Chinese will soon have all the manufacturing base to make weapons and the U.S. wont be able to make any without importing them from China.
A feature I'd like to know about is if Google IM is supported in Kopete. That was something missing in the months old 3.4 I run because of course it didn't exist when I built KDE 3.4 months ago. I guess I will find out as soon as I download and compile.
I more burning question is why would you want to expend the massive R&D effort to make a parallel version of Office or any of the basic desktop apps.
I imagine most of this new work this guy was hired for is targeted at servers, not the desktop. Excel yes I guess I could maybe see an advantage if its a really monster spreadsheet, though I imagine you would be better off just compiling it for starters. Word and Powerpoint just aren't CPU intensive enough that a parallel version would yield enough benefit to counteract the serious pain of threaded software development. It would be especially bad to try to redesign a massive legacy code base that wasn't designed for threading.
Desktop apps, browsing, email and office just aren't screaming out for major leaps in performance at this point other than Microsoft will find new ways in Vista to bloat them up so they require more CPU power to accomplish basically the same tasks people are doing now and have been doing for years. The computer is idle most of the time waiting on the human already unless you just waste it.
Now games, there is an arena in which you will never have enough power. In creating virtual worlds there is no limit to the computing power you can consume and it will always be the driver for performance on the desktop. To a lesser extent multimedia also, if you are running VoIP, movies, music, cameras, vector graphics all at once.
"and the second[natural gas] is not available to everyone, especially those in rural areas"
Whatever its origin this is a slightly suspect statement. I imagine its true in very poor or remote rural areas, but most people who live in the country have large self contained propane or butane tanks and do in fact have all the convenience of natural gas water heaters, heating and cooking.
You just need to buy or lease a tank and you need to have a distributor to refill it once in a while.
The obvious down side to natural gas in all forms is prices are getting pretty outrageous.
I'm not disagreeing that it may be necessary to dress for success. I would just point out that the quality of you expertise and advice doesn't improved because you throw on tie and suit jacket. It is facade. All it shows is you have extra money to burn on impractical, uncormtable clothing, and that you want to climb.
The fact you want to climb might be viewed positively by some executives above you, while others might view you as a threat. If the execs above you are judging you based on clothing instead of ability chances are your company is likely already screwed in a big way. Most of you peers are going to judge you harshly as being an ass kisser for dressing like a wannabe manager. The fact you are willing and able to dress well will certainly increase the likelihood you will be tapped to meet with customers and partners. But in reality its more important that you have expertise and communication skills. Unless you work in the fashion industry having insight in your area of expertise and the ability to communicate it is way more important to anyone with a clue than the fact you were able to pick out a suit and tie a tie.
Most IT workers aren't dealing with customers face to face most of the time. They are sitting in front of computers, and oddly enough, barring big advances in AI and machine vision computers don't care how you dress.
Quick tip #1. If you are sitting in front of a computer all comfort trumps fashion sense evertime.
Quick tip #2. Wearing a stiff buttoned collar with a tie is a pretty bad idea for comfort or probably even good health. I suspect managers do some of the dumb things they do due to the constriction of blood to their brain.
Quick tip #3. Formal dress is expensive and time consuming. Anything that requires dry cleaning is expensive, and ironing or pressing clothes likewise is time consuming or expensive. Most IT workers want to do more productive things with their time and money than going to the dry cleaners or shopping st Nordstrom's.
Quick tip #4. If you are a geek and meeting geeks from other companies chances are they will be in shirts and tee's too and they are going to conclude you are a noob or a phony if you wear a shirt and tie to the meeting. Only time you are gonna do it is if you are meeting executives from a customer because they wrongly place value, and make judgments, on how good or bad the tie you are wearing is. On the plus side ties are a top subject for casual chit chat among air headed executives.
People who deal in person with customers on a regular basis do have a motivation to dress well. Customers will judge you on it and get first impressions, rightly or wrongle.
People who don't deal with customers shouldn't be wearing expensive uncomfortable clothes on a daily basis.
A twist on this argument is people who do dress well are probably some of the least trustworthy:
You see these are all people who are spending big money to create a facade partially based on their wardrobe. They seek to impress you with their clothes to distract you from their substance.
"Greater Asia has over 3.5 Billion people! The US is just scratching 300 Million. So we are still doing better than them in Math/Science PhDs, percentage-wise."
This is the obvious flaw in Romney's argument. He could have made better ones. He probably could have made a better case with a historic comparison and shown how much the U.S. lead in PhD's has eroded over the last 50 years, though the erosion is really more that other nations are catching up more than the U.S. falling behind.
On the flip side another really interesting question would be how many of those 3500 PhD's aren't even Americans. A big percentage of them are not Americans, many are Chinese and Indian. A key problem is American K-12 education is so bad, and American young people have so many problems with discipline and motivation the U.S. just doesn't turn out many native top flight students any more. A persistent problem with affluence is it drains future generations of their drive to succeed since they aren't worried about starving if they are mediocre. The U.S. had a big surge in motivated talent from its greatest generation which grew up through the twin obstacles of the great depression and World War II. There just hasn't been similar flames of adversity to temper subsequent generations and it shows. The U.S. is also turning in to an increasingly corrupted nation, with a completely corrupted political system, that colors everything else.
It should also be noted the U.S. has had tons of foreign students, especially in the graduate studies for a long time. The genius of the U.S. system was that all the best and brightest from all over the world wanted to come to the U.S. for graduate studies, and for economic opportunity once they graduated they in places like Boston and Silicon Valley, much to the benefit of U.S. universities and companies. The U.S. was in effect skimming off the cream of the global crop of brains which was a damn smart strategy.
That all changed with the arrival of the Bush administration, 9/11 and the bursting of the Internet bubble. The U.S. is now throwing serious road blocks in front of these people to get visa's to come to the U.S. to study, in the name of fear mongering and "The War on Terrorism". Ironically we are obstructing the world's best mind from coming here legally while American borders are being inundated with an unchecked flood of poorly educated immigrants coming to the U.S. illegally with a wink and a nod from politicians and big business who want all the cheap, easily exploited labor.
Most of the world has also settled in to pretty much perpetual dislike of the regime now in power in the U.S. and that dislike is especially high among the most intelligent and best educated citizens of the world, inside and outside of the U.S. Most PhD's aren't going to have a favorable view of a nation dominated by religious fundamentalists who want to teach intelligent design instead of evolution, or who are developing a global torture system especially targeted at dark skinned foreigners, or who launch aggressive warfare based on deception. If you are enlightened, well educated person chances are you are going to look for a more enlightened political climate for the place you are going to make your home.
If you are Chinese or Indian chances are you realize that there is now more business opportunity in China and India that there is in an outsource plagued, in decline debtor nation like the U.S.
Another key factor at play here is the U.S. economic system simply doesn't reward or value high economic achievement. You are going to make vastly more money getting an MBA, a law degree, being a successful rapper, or playing pro sports. You have to have serious love for a field to invest all that hard work in challenging fields in math and science, with the degree of economic uncertainty you will face once you get the PhD. You will have better opportunities than most but you would be more certain to achieve economic success getting an MBA and climbing the executive ranks assuming you have a good golf game, social skills and a pronounced streak of ruthlessness.
Me personally I'd really like to know how Anthrax from a U.S. lab got mailed around the U.S. right after 9/11 with a weak attempt to make it look like it was done by Islamic terrorists. It is amazing that after engaging in character assassination of one suspect who was never charged this investigation appears to have disappeared in to a black hole.
It would seem to suggest our biggest danger from Anthrax is not Saddam or Bin Laden, but the U.S. government.
The only two solutions to the case seem to be:
- A lone right wing wacko working in a U.S. lab with access to deadly bio weapons, who may still be there, which is really scary, especially if you don't know what other agents this person has access to, small pox for example.
- There are people in power in Washington who perpetrated this despicable attack to pump up the frenzy for invading Iraq over WMD's. These maybe being the same people who manipulated Judith Miller in to terrorizing the nation with books and articles about WMD's in general and in Iraq in particular.
The choice of targets in particular screams out Republican nut case who, while engaged in this sick enterprise, couldn't resist targeting the liberal media and two Democrats in Congress they most hated, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle.
"The only way most firms will push to respect human rights is if we make serious domestic penalties for companies that break human rights laws overseas or use companies that break codes."
This is naive at best. Many multinationals are reaching the point that they could discard their American presence in a heartbeat if the need arose.
If you start "penalizing" them for doing things that are reprehensible but profitable chances are it would just hasten their abandonment of the U.S. Most multinationals are at best disinterested in U.S., Western Europe and Japan as markets or labor pools. These are old markets that have peaked and are in decline. Wages are to high to use as a labor pool, and consumer demand is plateaued. As wages are driven down in these markets by globalization it will cause consumer spending to go negative, and all companies want markets with growth, not decline.
Multinations are pretty much all betting their future growth on China, India, Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia in general, billions of people living in huts aspiring to acquire American life styles which means big consumer spending. I've seen several of them flat out say it on Charlie Rose. GE's if I recall and Exxon's CEO last week, a stereotype of a fat cat, pig like, oil company exec if ever there was one. He spelled it out, 75% of their business is outside the U.S. and if the government tries to regulate or spank them for profiteering the U.S. will regret it more than them.
Bottomline the more difficult the U.S. makes it on multinationals the faster they move their headquarters to the Caymans and their jobs to China.
Their executive and big shareholders are in fact the only ones who have any influence on their behavior. Its awesome if they use that influence to make them more ethical, but chances are the lion's share of big investors want the return on their investment maximized, not to campaign for ethical behavior. That is why most corporations have bad ethics because their sole purpose in life is to maximize profits and return to their shareholders. Most will only support good ethics if bad ethics are causing economic harm to their bottomline.
Investing in China is not causing any of them economic harm at present, in fact most are betting on China to be their engine for future growth and cheap labor.
Maybe you could hammer Cisco for becoming a "Chinese company" and helping build the Great Wall in the internet, but if you punish them, then you have to punish every other company engaged in massive expansion in China which is pretty much every multinational. If you boycott them all you would suddenly find either you have no place to buy routers or if you find some not being built in Asia now they are way more expensive.
"If everyone in America felt that way you would become irrelevant in the world wide community when it comes to human rights."
The U.S. has been irrelevant on the human rights front for pretty much its entire existence. It does spout a lot about it, pretends like it holds the high ground on the subject but it is so laced with hypocrisy you have to be pretty naive to buy it and I don't think most of the world does buy it anymore if it ever did, especially after the last 5 years when its become obvious the U.S. has globalized and institutionalized torture. Most repressive regimes confine abuse to within their borders and colonies. The U.S. has for the first time globalized it.
The U.S. perpetrated wholesale genocide against native Americans pretty much from Independence day, and they still live in apartheid class conditions.
The U.S. was one of the worlds largest perpetrators of slavery again from its inception and the apartheid state didn't even begin to get dismantled until the 1960's.
In the wake of the Spanish American war, a war designed for imperial expansion, and based largely on fabrications like Iraq today, the U.S. waged a multidecade occupation in the Phillippines where it murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of civilians trying to stop an insurgency, a lot like Iraq today.
The U.S. installed the Shah of Iran, and countless right wing dictators in Central and South America, all of whom were as every bit as despotic as Saddam ever was but as long as they did what the U.S. told them to, protected the U.S. corprate interests in their borders, the U.S. loved them, no matter they disappeared, killed and tortured their people.
You see the U.S. preaches freedom, democracy and human rights only when it is convenient and they only target human rights abuses in regimes with which they have an ax to grind, and whom they want to topple or punish. When the abuse occurs within the U.S. itself or within regimes friendly to the U.S. the U.S. tends to be largely silent on the problem, other than maybe muted protests from the bleeding heart liberals in the State department which have little real effect.
I imagine the U.S. does favor "Freedom and Democracy" and human rights if its convenient, but if pursuit of those lofty goals interferes with acquisition of the wealth and power the U.S. will sell those high sounding words down the river in a heart beat, always has, always will.
"they can just dispose of you when you are no longer productive and profitable for them."
Corporations can already dispose of workers with relative ease so I'm not sure what they gain in return for the massive responsibility of owning someone. Sure they give severance packages sometimes when they discard someone but that is mostly to make the masters feel better and to keep the serfs they keep from getting restless.
When you own someone the burning question is how do you dispose of them in a market awash with indentured servants?
Slave owning societies frown on just turning them loose because it breaks down the ownership system. If you have freed slaves all over its hard to track down the runaways, and make the productive ones stay in line.
As the grandparent said you would normally sell them off, but that worked better in places like the 19th century South when slaves were in relatively short supply and life expectency was short. In today's globalized labor market there is cheap labor in abundance so the markets for resale of marginal, aging servants would be terrible.
You could kill them in assorted obvious and not so obvious ways but the consequences of something so blatant would catch up to you in guilt in nothing else, and probably lead to revolt among the rest of the serfs. I'm pretty sure the dynamics of slaveholding are in fact quite complex and its not the panacea you suggest it is.
No, all in all I think the modern capitalist system has already optimized its labor system quite well especially of late. It was badly optimized by unions, benefits, rising wages and standard of living for a while, but the new pro-business regimes have straightened that out largely thanks to globalization. To discard people they give them two weeks pay and if they can't find new employment they end up homeless and die relatively quickly without anyone feeling guilty about, it was after all, their fault that they couldn't hold down a job, they must be lazy or psychotic. Thats much easier than just killing them directly to get rid of them.
Hard work can make wealth, but wealth does in fact also make wealth in the Capitalist system. Yes you can get some clueless heiress that will squander a fortune or tank a multigeneration family business.
But, if you have extensive wealth you can with relative ease continue to generate ever greater wealth by investing it in relatively safe investment vehicles in perpetuity, by tapping a financial manager if necessary. It is simply vastly easier for the affluent to make money than it is the poor, people who are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, to pay for home heating and gas to get to work.
It is a simple fact that without progressive taxation wealth rapidly accumulates in the hands of a tiny minority, while the vast majority get ever poorer. It was this way in the U.S. in the early twentieth century when progressives introduced progressive taxation and it is this way again today since the Republicans are dismantling progressive taxation, devastating wages for the lower and middle classes, cutting taxes for the rich while they bleed workers white with inescapable payroll taxes the surpluses from which they are squandering so their will be no money for workers benefits when they reach retirement though they paid 12.5% of their income most of their lives in to these bankrupt systems.
You might trot out Bill Gates as a rags to riches example, well his family was relatively affluent and he never really had to worry about basic survival. He also acquired the lion's share of his wealth by essentially illegal economic activity, the same goes for the Walton family. Gates and the Walton's started out engaging in hard work and hard nosed business but there is a point that they transitioned in to acquiring their wealth by monopolistic and underhanded business practices, not so much "hard work". Ethicless monopolies are remarkably lucrative when done well.
I think you will find many rags to riches stories where people engaged in economic activity that was either outright illegal or certainly unethical and that they screwed a large number of people to acquire their wealth, the didn't just "work hard".
I'm a little unclear why someone posting under aussie_a is so much less anonymous than someone posting as an AC. People who have URL's, like you do, or an email address associated with their alias maybe are a little more identifiable but those URL's and email addresses may be aliases too. I think all in all your standard is a little arbitrary. If people are saying something controversial, but insightful, doing it as AC is A-OK with me, I've read some great AC posts, though most are garbage from people posting as AC because they have nothing intelligent to say. If someone posts flamage under a login, they could discard it in a heartbeat, create a new one and be pretty much as anonymous as an AC.
If someone from China is posting here as an AC chances are China's government can watch the whole IP transaction and track down the person if they want to, same probably goes for an American thanks to extensive tapping of the Internet by various three letter agencies.
Fact is American's, like the Brits and everyone else, have "free speech" only as long as their government lets them have it and within the bounds they set. The UK did let people have free speech to advocate fundamentalist Islamic causes, but it is now speech likely to lead to deportation or jail. You don't really have free speech when there are all kinds of arbitrary bounds on it, i.e. you can speak freely until you say something we've decided we don't like and then you don't.
In reality free speech is a completely relative concept. The U.S. has free speech compared to China, so it does in relative terms, but in absolute terms there are countless bounds on it.
In eras rich in fear mongering your free speech rights can be abridged in a heart beat. You need to look no further than McCarthyism in the U.S. in the 50's to appreciate how fleeting free speech is, or today when the Executive of the United States has bestowed upon its self the power to arrest people on a whim, detain them without due process, without access to a lawyer, family or court and even to whisk you away to various secret prisons to be tortured indefinitely up to the end of your life which they have often brought about in these secret prisons. The U.S. projects an image of being free, but in many respects it is carefully manufactured facade, again free in relative terms just because there are places worse, and it is less free with each passing day. Countries which espouse freedom don't make people disappear or torture people and the U.S. most certainly does these things now thanks to government by paranoid wackos who were given carte blanche to be paranoid wackos by 9/11.
In most respects 9/11 WAS all about Al Qaeda attacking Freedom and Democracy in the West. The catch is they are destroying them, not by attacking the West, but by giving power mad governments of Western nations excuses to destroy Freedom and Democracy themselves.
"They would provide for all of your needs and you would work for them as long as you live (or until another corporation paid your corporation to take you from them... or just took over your corporation)."
There is an obvious problem with this approach which is why modern corporations probably wouldn't adopt it even if it was viable. The old IBM did for the most part have indentured life time servants. Unfortunately they are expensive when they get older, and productivity often declines. Skyrocketing health care costs alone speak to disposing of them when they reach middle age. No other corporation is going to buy them at that point, unless there is a corporation in the market for marginal slaves. When there is an abundance of 20-30 year old slaves in Asia who wants a 40 or 50 year old. I guess since they are in indentured servitude you could just deprive them of health care but then their productivity just declines even further. Pretty sure slave holders in the South couldn't just kick them off the plantation when they were no longer useful and no one else would buy them. Killing them outright probably happened but was kind of frowned on even in slave owning circles.
Modern corporations might prefer indentured servitude since they could discard benefits etc, but they would still need a quick, cheap mechanism for discarding the unproductive ones. In fact the system they have now really works a lot better. You are pretty much an indentured servant, as long as you work there and especially if the job market is tight but they can dispose of you when you outlive your usefulness with relative ease and with no concern if you land on the streets and starve.
Thanks to globalization they can buy new indentured servants in China or Burma for pennies an hour and throw them away too in favor of others elsewhere whenever they get bothersome.
All in all advocating that corporations give up the sweet deal they have for the responsibilities of slaving owning looks like kind of step backward.
"Here's a solution. Smuggle guns and ammo into countries with no respect for private property."
WTF? Repressive regimes and respect for private party are not really mutually exclusive. The West is so eager to deal with China today because they abandoned Socialism for Authoritarian capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism) in the last 20 years. They do have private property as a result and it hasn't stopped them from being a repressive regime. Repressive regimes trample private property rights when it suits them, but as a rule they don't because they want capitalists to invest there so they respect private property, especially of foreigners, to get investment. China really isn't very different from the U.S now. Since a recent Supreme Court ruling government entities in the U.S. can seize your property, reimburse you what suits them, and turn it over to a private developer to profit on.
Western countries are pouring capital into China, and transferring IP there because they think there is a buck to be made there, more so than in any of the aging economies in the U.S. Europe or Japan. When there is a buck to be made Westerners could care less if they are dealing with repressive regimes. Americans were enthusiastic investors in Nazi Germany in the 30's including the Bush family who were the American bankers for the Thyssen family who helped put Hitler in power. The U.S. went out its way to install the Shah of Iran who was one of the Middle East's most repressive rulers, right up there with Saddam. The U.S. installed countless right wing dictators in the Western Hemisphere who "respected private property" of U.S. corporations and the wealthy and ruthlessly killed, kidnapped and tortured everyone else.
"Get the U.N. involved and completely stop technology from getting there."
That is pretty out of touch with reality. Many of the electronics you buy today are MADE IN CHINA, the U.S. or U.N. couldn't boycott them if you tried. I guess you boycott buying stuff them which would have an impact but you would quickly realize the U.S. economy is totally dependent on China. Stop buying there and Walmart's shelves would empty and many smaller towns would realize they have no place to shop without Walmart and its Chinese goods.
The main thing China is importing are raw materials. In the case of oil, for example, they are securing their own oil fields and supplies so they will be largely immune to an oil boycott, which has been a weapon of choice by the U.S. in the past. Pearl Harbor was precipitated by a U.S, British and Dutch oil embargo against Japan. The Chinese are securing oil from Venezuela in particular because Chavez would never follow a U.S. lead boycott against China without the U.S. parking warships next to their oil terminals.
Chinese technological and manufacturing prowess is rapidly eclipsing the U.S. partially thanks to Western companies transferring their manufacturing base and technology R&D centers to China. Cisco gear can't be boycotted from China. Much of it is developed and manufactured there. Cisco's CEO Chambers routinely broadcasts the fact that Cisco is a "Chinese company" now.
Bottomline is the West has more to fear from China boycotting them than the other way around.
One has to wonder about the security implications of government employees in sensitive areas, like the the White House, State, DOD, etc using email, cell phones and wireless in general. You figure they aren't putting intensely classified information on them but if a foreign power, if you can call Canada a power:), China, Israel, Russia etc intercepts all those emails and listens to all those calls, which must be trivial to do with some basic electronics gear, they could piece together a lot of valuable intelligence.
Does Blackberry employ encryption on emails being transmitted to a given user so only the user can read them, or make it easy to PGP encrypt emails you send? If not I imagine national security would be better off if Blackberry's got pulled out of the hands of government employees in sensitive positions.
Setback for DRM yes, a lost battle, but a battle does not a war make.
This is a quote you should save for coming years.
"It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer."
Drag this quote out out when Trusted Computing, Vista and its successors come out and Microsoft and Intel really do seize control of your computer and everything on it and get away with it.
I think most of this backlash is just due to the fact Sony, a non U.S. corporation did it, and it was done as an add on. If in the future Microsoft does more or less the same thing, though better integrated and implemented, and ships it bundled in the OS it might well get forced on the world without a peep from the U.S. government.
In particular Microsoft just need to sell Trusted Computing and DRM as a defense against terrorism, as pro democracy, freedom and capitalism and the Federal government will be cheering it on.
To put it another way Sony's effort was just badly marketed and marketing is everything in this sorry world we live in.
I think it was called at various times VA Linux and VA Research with among others Larry Augustine in the executive's seat and Eric Raymond in the board room.
You may have heard, they had a boffo IPO and aqcuired big funding to do just this. Soon there after they had a board meeting and decided they couldn't actually make any money selling Linux boxen, abandoned the entire business plan they'd sold to Wall Street and on which investors invested so heavily. Last I heard they sell niche software development tools.
The link above is they chart of their stock performance, it peaked around $250 during the IPO frenzy. It is a log scale because it now trades around $1.50.
On the plus side they did hand out options to a bunch of open source developers and put some money in their pockets for their work, probably the only compensation many have received.
On the down side they are lucky they didn't get a share holder law suit putting out a business plan and IPO that it appears was designed to capitalize on the Linux hype of the era, to milk Wall Street investors for millions and then abandon it soon after after they'd cashed out. VA is a bitter pill to anyone attempting another serious startup to sell Linux boxes.
"I have quite the educated pallet, and I have my linguistic credentials hanging on the wall."
Well for someone with linguistic credentials your first post didn't show any evidence that you know how to express yourself. At this point you seem to have transitioned from bigot in to snob, snobs kind of like you generalize the French as being. Perhaps you dislike the French so much because you are engaged in a snobbery contest with them. For example.....
"I wouldn't call having tastes, likes, and dislikes cultural bigotry."
I think its the way you word your statements that pushes you in to some form of bigotry, cultural or personal:
"The food is HORRIBLE. The countryside isn't all that pretty. The women aren't as attractive as, say, Thai girls."
You see you said "The food is HORRIBLE" instead of "I think the food is HORRIBLE" or "I hate french food" which are expressions of taste. Instead you say it as an absolute, I say the food is horrible, I'm right and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong or has no taste. Or if you said "I find Thai women more attractive than French women" then you are not being a bigot, if you state as an absolute Thai women are more attractive than French women you again are not stating it as a matter of personal taste but some kind of absolute.
It shows a heavy hand of bigotry to judge cultures based on your perception of the beauty of their women, fact is most cultures have very beautiful and very ugly women. It is really superficial and bigoted to dismiss people based on their appearance. Looks are something you are born with, assuming you don't explore plastic surgery, you have much control over it, other than watching your weight and exercising. What's in a women's brain and personality are things they can control and are the things you should be judging people on.... if you are not a bigot though this indicated you are:
"I have very little use for them if I don't think they're physically attractive"
I sure hope your mom is physically attractive or is she ugly so you have no use for her.
Your first post was unavoidably bigoted toward the French because you are condemning an entire country full of people based on your stereotypes and generalizations. I dislike a lot of American's especially like the guy at the top of this thread, I really dislike the current government, but there are tons of good people in America, I'm not condemning every American because Bush is an ass, Budweiser is mass produced piss or McDonald's is some of the world's worst food. You see many American's don't like Bush, Budweiser or McDonald's either.
"A bigot is "one who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ".
I imagine it depends on your dictionary.....
From WordNet
bigot
n : a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own
You do seem to qualify under this definition because your posts suggest you are intolerant of someone who thinks French is pleasant sounding language, the French countryside is pretty, French cuisine tastes good and apparently are a complete ass to any women you don't find attractive.
Don't think I was saying anything particularly pro French in the post above justifying your rant. I was just pointing out the stupidity of Americans expecting the world to bow at their feet in an eternal debt of gratitude because the U.S. participated in World War II along with the Russians, British, Canadians, Aussies, Free French, Free Polish etc.
Yes the French have changed regimes a few times in the last 200 years. The Roosevelt administration which led the U.S. in to and through World War II is night and day different from today's Bush administration. Expecting Europe to bow to the U.S. and the Bush administration today because of actions taken by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations 60 years ago is insanely arrogant.
As for the rest of your rant, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Most people with an ear for language appreciate French is a quite beautiful language. I think people with an educated pallet appreciate French cuisine, but there are interesting cuisines from all over the world all with their own merits. As for the beauty of women I find their are beautiful women in all corners of the world, and ugly ones too. I also strive to judge women based on something more than the superficiality of their looks.
All in all you are just showing a different variant of cultural bigotry like the original poster who seems enamored with mass produced food, beer and lowest common denominator TV.
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"Well, then we can't just overwhelm the enemy with numbers. "
If you are referring to Iraq, for example, sir you have no clue. You can't overwhelm them with numbers unless you are going start indiscriminately massacring innocent civilians, kind of like the U.S. tried in flattening Fallujah. All you do is make the people you have under occupation hate you more, and work harder to kill you. The more troops you put in, the more targets you give them, both in people and supply convoys.
"Did you type your post on a computer? Did you drive today?"
LOL. Most of the power I'm using is unfortunately coming from coal mined right next door to me. There isn't any global power projection necessary for us to have electricity.
As for gasoline yes I do drive, but I telecommute and I drive as little as absolutely possible. You see unfortunately the U.S. has been designed for nearly a hundred years to be completely dependent on gasoline. It was a bad design and a bad idea. Its led to complete dependence on a fuel which is finite, and is now crossing in to short supply, its led to pollution, and people spending 2 hours a day driving to and from work. Some of the worst life style choices imaginable. I have for a number of years lived in a city where I didn't own a car, walked to work and took subways and street cars power by nuclear energy to travel to get about.
So not only have we designed our civilization to be completely dependent on fossil fuels, but big oil and coal have done everything in the power to prevent any attempt to switch to something better. They jack up prices and profiteer like this year, people start switching to alternatives and then they drop prices, through collusion, to kick the legs out from under the alternatives, wash, rinse and repeat. Aren't monopolies wonderful.
STOP LAYING YOUR SORRY ASS LIFE STYLE GUILT TRIP ON ME. The world would for the most part be a better place without gasoline and cars. Save it all for the farm machinery we need to grow food and maybe some trains, ships and planes for transport, not for some dumbass to drive 2 hours a day to get from the suburbs to a job in the city.
I would be overjoyed if all my electricity came from nuclear, hydro, solar and wind.
If "defending my economic interest" means killing people, I'm willing to live with get by with less and live and let live.
"most evil or idiotic think that Khomeini, Hussein, and Chavez"
Khomeini came to power THANKS to the U.S. The Mossadegh government the U.S. toppled originally was in fact a pretty progressive government, the only thing they did wrong is they got fed up with the fact British oil companies, who got their foothold in the middle east thanks to colonial expansion from World War I, were taking the lion's share of their countries wealth so they nationalized Iran's own oil fields. The British whined to the U.S. to do something, they did, the CIA overthrew a sovereign government, oh and then they screwed the British too and gave the oil fields to U.S. companies. How did the U.S. put Khomeini in power? They put the Shah in power and he and his secret service were one of the most brutal regimes in the middle east, they were every bit Saddam class, disappearing, torturing and killing their opponents. The Iranian people hated the Shah so much they viewed Khomeini and Islamic fundamentalism as an improvement. Many Iranians hate the U.S. with a passion to this day thanks to the Shah.
As for Chavez he has been demonized by the U.S. as is the U.S. way when they want to topple someone, Kaddafi, Castro, Noriega, Saddam etc. Notice who since Khaddafi started kissing American and British boots, and opening his oil fields to them, they don't demonize him any more? Same guy, trust me. Chavez isn't perfect but the dynamics in Venezuela come down to two groups vying for power which is true of just about every country, especially in the Central and South America. A wealthy plutocracy where a few percent have all the wealth and power, and 90+% who are in grinding poverty and powerless. Chavez is popular with the 90+% who have nothing. He like Castro does some great things the U.S. always forgets to mention:
A. They insure universal access to quality health care for everyone, not just those who can afford it
B. They insure universal access to education, especially university education, again based on need and merit not ability to pay. Cuba turns out huge numbers of doctors for example that provide health care to poor areas around the globe who would have no health care if left to the whims of capitalism
C. They seek to distribute wealth more evenly versus having a few percent who are filthy rich and comfortable while everyone else is starving, illiterate and die young due to absence of basic health care.
Unfortunately Socialism is flawed just like Capitalism. People get drunk on power in both systems and abuse it. Socialism means big government and big government tends to be bad no matter what political philosophy it prescribes to. Socialism tends to trample individual liberties and freedom, but so does Capitalism. Capitalism just uses more carefully crafted and better concealed means to rob you of your freedoms.
Problem with people like you sir is you buy in to the propaganda the U.S. spews and think the only bad leaders in the world are the ones the U.S. hap
Problem with people like you sir is you buy in to the propaganda the U.S. spews and think the only bad leaders in the world are the ones the U.S. decides to demonize. The Shah was every bit as bad and probably worse than your list of three, so was Marcos in the Phillippines, Papa Doc in Haiti, Diem in Vietnam Pinochet, and a cavalcade of other ruthless dictators the U.S. has propeed up over the years to the misfortune of the people who suffered under them
The problem with people like you sir are you are suckers for the U.S. propaganda, and their list of people they demonize on a given day, and you buy it hook like and sinker. The Shah of Iran was every bit as bad and probably worse than your list of three, so was Marcos in the Phillippines, Papa Doc in Haiti, Diem in Vietnam, Pinochet and a cavalcade of other ruthless dictators the U.S. has propped up over the years to the misfortune of the people who suffered under them.
Not sure I follow your point. Are you saying it wont be so bad this time because we aren't in a world war?
In 1918 they didn't have jet airplanes and people circling the globe in 24 hours in high volumes. They also didn't have container shipping moving vast quantities of goods.
All in all I'm certain vastly more people and cargo is moving much faster around the world today than 1918.
That said its still extremely premature for people to be going off the deep end about the impending doom of a pandemic like the grandparent did. It might happen, it might not. There is a significant chance this bird flu strain will NEVER mutate in to a form that is communicable between humans. There is also a chance that if it does mutate to be communicable it might be less lethal or not lethal at all. Mutations are a complete crap shoot and are completely unpredictable as to the eventual outcome, it could be lethal pandemic, it could be a flu season like those we have every year, it could be a big nothing.
The high mortality rate, if it persists could in fact work against its spread. Diseases with high mortality rates don't make for good pandemics. The insidious ones are the one that keep their hosts up and moving around while they are infectious.
Small pox in particular is very insidious because:
A. It is extremely communicable between people you just need to be within six feet of someone is infections
B. Smallpox onset is slow, like 2 weeks and you are infectious for that time so people unwittingly distribute it widely.
All in all the bird flu pandemic threat at present smacks of fear mongering on the part of both the media and politicians. Prepare for it, yes, obsessing over it like its the inevitable end of civilization is insane and delusional.
The media is obsessing over it because thanks to 24x7 news they need something to obsess over 24x7 and fear mongering is especially good at holding people's attention and boosting ratings. Its not responsible journalism.
Politicians fear monger because its a way to con people in to voting for them because it makes them look indispensable. "Vote for me or you will surely die". The Republican's did a great job of exploiting this tool in 2002 and 2004 elections by fear mongering over terrorism. Since terrorism is starting to wear thin with people I suspect bird flu is the new fear mongering issue du jour. Collecting all of this info on travelers smacks of large scale spying that would be useful for tracking "terrorists" or "political opponents" and to generally intimidate people in to being submissive. I wager the Bush administration is frustrated they've had trouble getting traveler info to track terrorists due to civil liberty complaints so they figure they could use bird flu and public health as an unarguable excuse.
It also make me more than a little nervous that the Bush administration has already said they will use a flu outbreak as an excuse for martial law. You could very easily fake an epidemic, declare martial law and use it as an excuse to seize dictatorial power, for example if it appears the Republican's are going to be trounced in the 2006 and 2008 elections and will lose their current stranglehold on power. The Republican's are currently intoxicated by power, and when people get that way they can do almost anything to keep it.
People in the health bureaucracy also fear monger because its a way to get a vast infusion of tax dollars that they can spend to build their empires. Maybe it will be for public benefit. Maybe it will be squandered and make no difference if a pandemic comes.
All in all yes it would be nice to have plans in place to deal with a pandemic. In the case of SARS it was in fact contained reasonably well, and it taught a few lessons on doing it better next time. It would be nice to develop a new means to develop and produce new vaccines rapidly. The one we use now dates to the 50's and is very slow and inefficient.
Whipping yourselves in to a frenzy over this is a bad idea. Letting your government engage in massive spying on you when there is no pandemic, also bad. So is letting yourselves be manipulated by the media and politicians to do stupid things, kind of like most people were on WMD's and Iraq.
"The Iraq war is different..."
Its not really that different. Its one in a long string of regime changes where the U.S. seeks to take down people it doesn't like, people who don't do what the U.S. says, people that thumb their noses at U.S. corporate interests, who challenge the U.S. on the world stage. The goal is to prop up friendly puppets who defend U.S. business interests and kowtow to U.S. demands.
Its been long established that the surest way for a sovereign leader of any state to be taken down by the U.S. is to have oil reserves and to not sign them over to the control of American/British/Dutch oil companies. The U.S. military and intelligence agencies have spent most of the last century insuring Allied oil companies control of the world's oil fields. The U.S. toppled the government of Iran, and installed a ruthless dictator, the Shah, precisely to put its oil fields in to the hands of American oil companies.
The U.S. has tried unsuccessfully to topple Chavez in Venezuela pricesly for the same reason, to get its oil reserves in to the hands of friendlies.
The only things really different about Iraq is the blatantness of the aggression, the blatantness of the lieing and the fact that it failed badly. Taking down Noriega in Panama was very much the same kind of war, its just it was much better executed and there wasn't the deep ethnic division that there is in Iraq, which is fueling the civil war there. Taking down the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, very similar, its just the war was much more covert and used largely indigenous guerrillas with CIA handlers. American's didn't die much in Nicaragua so American's mostly didn't care, even when the Reagan Administration tore down the Constitution by waging a war Congress forbad. The never ending series of coups in Haiti, pretty much the same thing. The U.S. gets tired of leaders there that don't play by U.S. rules so they arm bands of right wing thugs in the Dominican Republic and their CIA handlers send them to do their bidding.
I wish Iraq really was different but in fact its just how power politics is played. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R did it most of the last century and killed millions of people in assorted third world countries around the globe fighting proxy wars. In the process they created the cauldrons that brew terrorism. Somalia is the hell hole it is thanks to decades of proxy wars to control the horn of Africa. Afghanistan likewise became the base for Al Qaeda thanks to a proxy war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R there. The U.S. is just seeking to shape the world out if its own self interest, and the harvest it is reaping is very, very ugly.
This is an interesting problem.
Yes it is good to have enough weapons to deter someone bad from attacking, invading or destroying you. There are bad people in the world, and there are people who good or bad don't like what you do or stand for.
A problem today is certain American enemies know full well that they can't go toe to toe with the U.S. in conventional or strategic war. They don't and can't squander $500 billion on weapons, the military and intelligence a year, much of that money borrowed by the way. So they don't even try and don't need to.
What do the do? Well they use hijacked jetliners, suicide bombers, IED's, propaganda and other forms of asymmetric warfare. They have proved in Iraq that they can spend millions of dollars on asymmetric weapons and tie up the U.S. military in knots, which is spending billions a month, and which has hundreds of billions of weapons most of which are useless in urban guerrilla warfare. They can launch attacks that costs millions of dollars, if that, that cause, billions of dollars in economic damage to the U.S.
THAAD is in a lot of ways a good weapon if it works. Its main goal is to keep someone with ballistic missiles from killing people weather they are civilian or military.
There are other classes of weapons which unfortunately are dual use, and can be used both offensively and defensively. There have been times when American's have shunned foreign adventure and aggressive warfare. During those times our defense department was really for defense, to deter attack and counter ruthlessly when attacked.
Sadly political and military elites have at various times forgotten the basic difference between defense and preemptive or aggressive warfare. Preemptive and aggressive warfare is something only bad people, like the Nazi's did. Well not ture, The U.S. for example launched the Spanish American war largely under false pretense and to cover a large colonial expansion in the Carribean and the Phillippines. In the Phillippines there was an entire, lengthy, bloody war in the early 1900's never taught in American history classes where the U.S. ruthlessly killed civilians in a largely vain attempt to suppress an insurgency that didn't appreciate decades of American colonial occupation. It holds a lot of parallels to Iraq today, and probably could teach some lessons if we hadn't pushed it out of our collective conscious because it was so ugly.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm all for paying for enough weapons to defend the U.S. but the U.S. military is completely beyond that today. Its is a cold war relic turned in to an preemptive, offense tool for dominating the world and that flies in the face of what many people want the U.S. to be. What's worse it isn't even any good to deal with terrorist attacks or insurgencies like the ones in Vietnam and Iraq which are far more likely than a conventional war today.
You also need to look no further than the Duke Cunningham case yesterday to realize the Pentagon is mostly just a vast corrupted mechanism for funneling vast quantities of money from tax payer's pockets in to the pockets of largely corrupt defense contractors.
There is irony that China may well dominate the U.S. militarily and economically in the near future because the U.S. is squandering its wealth on excessive defense spending, and watching its economy wither in the face of globalization, budget and trade deficits. The Chinese might well win World War III without firing a shot. They will win it with a steady stream of containers ships to the U.S. and of U.S. dollars to China. The U.S. spends billions developing new weapons technology and the Chinese spend thousands to steal them. The Chinese will soon have all the manufacturing base to make weapons and the U.S. wont be able to make any without importing them from China.
A feature I'd like to know about is if Google IM is supported in Kopete. That was something missing in the months old 3.4 I run because of course it didn't exist when I built KDE 3.4 months ago. I guess I will find out as soon as I download and compile.
I more burning question is why would you want to expend the massive R&D effort to make a parallel version of Office or any of the basic desktop apps.
I imagine most of this new work this guy was hired for is targeted at servers, not the desktop. Excel yes I guess I could maybe see an advantage if its a really monster spreadsheet, though I imagine you would be better off just compiling it for starters. Word and Powerpoint just aren't CPU intensive enough that a parallel version would yield enough benefit to counteract the serious pain of threaded software development. It would be especially bad to try to redesign a massive legacy code base that wasn't designed for threading.
Desktop apps, browsing, email and office just aren't screaming out for major leaps in performance at this point other than Microsoft will find new ways in Vista to bloat them up so they require more CPU power to accomplish basically the same tasks people are doing now and have been doing for years. The computer is idle most of the time waiting on the human already unless you just waste it.
Now games, there is an arena in which you will never have enough power. In creating virtual worlds there is no limit to the computing power you can consume and it will always be the driver for performance on the desktop. To a lesser extent multimedia also, if you are running VoIP, movies, music, cameras, vector graphics all at once.
"and the second[natural gas] is not available to everyone, especially those in rural areas"
Whatever its origin this is a slightly suspect statement. I imagine its true in very poor or remote rural areas, but most people who live in the country have large self contained propane or butane tanks and do in fact have all the convenience of natural gas water heaters, heating and cooking.
You just need to buy or lease a tank and you need to have a distributor to refill it once in a while.
The obvious down side to natural gas in all forms is prices are getting pretty outrageous.
I'm not disagreeing that it may be necessary to dress for success. I would just point out that the quality of you expertise and advice doesn't improved because you throw on tie and suit jacket. It is facade. All it shows is you have extra money to burn on impractical, uncormtable clothing, and that you want to climb.
The fact you want to climb might be viewed positively by some executives above you, while others might view you as a threat. If the execs above you are judging you based on clothing instead of ability chances are your company is likely already screwed in a big way. Most of you peers are going to judge you harshly as being an ass kisser for dressing like a wannabe manager. The fact you are willing and able to dress well will certainly increase the likelihood you will be tapped to meet with customers and partners. But in reality its more important that you have expertise and communication skills. Unless you work in the fashion industry having insight in your area of expertise and the ability to communicate it is way more important to anyone with a clue than the fact you were able to pick out a suit and tie a tie.
... assanine article to put on the front page.
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Most IT workers aren't dealing with customers face to face most of the time. They are sitting in front of computers, and oddly enough, barring big advances in AI and machine vision computers don't care how you dress.
Quick tip #1. If you are sitting in front of a computer all comfort trumps fashion sense evertime.
Quick tip #2. Wearing a stiff buttoned collar with a tie is a pretty bad idea for comfort or probably even good health. I suspect managers do some of the dumb things they do due to the constriction of blood to their brain.
Quick tip #3. Formal dress is expensive and time consuming. Anything that requires dry cleaning is expensive, and ironing or pressing clothes likewise is time consuming or expensive. Most IT workers want to do more productive things with their time and money than going to the dry cleaners or shopping st Nordstrom's.
Quick tip #4. If you are a geek and meeting geeks from other companies chances are they will be in shirts and tee's too and they are going to conclude you are a noob or a phony if you wear a shirt and tie to the meeting. Only time you are gonna do it is if you are meeting executives from a customer because they wrongly place value, and make judgments, on how good or bad the tie you are wearing is. On the plus side ties are a top subject for casual chit chat among air headed executives.
People who deal in person with customers on a regular basis do have a motivation to dress well. Customers will judge you on it and get first impressions, rightly or wrongle.
People who don't deal with customers shouldn't be wearing expensive uncomfortable clothes on a daily basis.
A twist on this argument is people who do dress well are probably some of the least trustworthy:
Politicians
Lawyers
Salesmen
Executives
Stock brokers
You see these are all people who are spending big money to create a facade partially based on their wardrobe. They seek to impress you with their clothes to distract you from their substance.
"Greater Asia has over 3.5 Billion people! The US is just scratching 300 Million. So we are still doing better than them in Math/Science PhDs, percentage-wise."
This is the obvious flaw in Romney's argument. He could have made better ones. He probably could have made a better case with a historic comparison and shown how much the U.S. lead in PhD's has eroded over the last 50 years, though the erosion is really more that other nations are catching up more than the U.S. falling behind.
On the flip side another really interesting question would be how many of those 3500 PhD's aren't even Americans. A big percentage of them are not Americans, many are Chinese and Indian. A key problem is American K-12 education is so bad, and American young people have so many problems with discipline and motivation the U.S. just doesn't turn out many native top flight students any more. A persistent problem with affluence is it drains future generations of their drive to succeed since they aren't worried about starving if they are mediocre. The U.S. had a big surge in motivated talent from its greatest generation which grew up through the twin obstacles of the great depression and World War II. There just hasn't been similar flames of adversity to temper subsequent generations and it shows. The U.S. is also turning in to an increasingly corrupted nation, with a completely corrupted political system, that colors everything else.
It should also be noted the U.S. has had tons of foreign students, especially in the graduate studies for a long time. The genius of the U.S. system was that all the best and brightest from all over the world wanted to come to the U.S. for graduate studies, and for economic opportunity once they graduated they in places like Boston and Silicon Valley, much to the benefit of U.S. universities and companies. The U.S. was in effect skimming off the cream of the global crop of brains which was a damn smart strategy.
That all changed with the arrival of the Bush administration, 9/11 and the bursting of the Internet bubble. The U.S. is now throwing serious road blocks in front of these people to get visa's to come to the U.S. to study, in the name of fear mongering and "The War on Terrorism". Ironically we are obstructing the world's best mind from coming here legally while American borders are being inundated with an unchecked flood of poorly educated immigrants coming to the U.S. illegally with a wink and a nod from politicians and big business who want all the cheap, easily exploited labor.
Most of the world has also settled in to pretty much perpetual dislike of the regime now in power in the U.S. and that dislike is especially high among the most intelligent and best educated citizens of the world, inside and outside of the U.S. Most PhD's aren't going to have a favorable view of a nation dominated by religious fundamentalists who want to teach intelligent design instead of evolution, or who are developing a global torture system especially targeted at dark skinned foreigners, or who launch aggressive warfare based on deception. If you are enlightened, well educated person chances are you are going to look for a more enlightened political climate for the place you are going to make your home.
If you are Chinese or Indian chances are you realize that there is now more business opportunity in China and India that there is in an outsource plagued, in decline debtor nation like the U.S.
Another key factor at play here is the U.S. economic system simply doesn't reward or value high economic achievement. You are going to make vastly more money getting an MBA, a law degree, being a successful rapper, or playing pro sports. You have to have serious love for a field to invest all that hard work in challenging fields in math and science, with the degree of economic uncertainty you will face once you get the PhD. You will have better opportunities than most but you would be more certain to achieve economic success getting an MBA and climbing the executive ranks assuming you have a good golf game, social skills and a pronounced streak of ruthlessness.
Me personally I'd really like to know how Anthrax from a U.S. lab got mailed around the U.S. right after 9/11 with a weak attempt to make it look like it was done by Islamic terrorists. It is amazing that after engaging in character assassination of one suspect who was never charged this investigation appears to have disappeared in to a black hole.
It would seem to suggest our biggest danger from Anthrax is not Saddam or Bin Laden, but the U.S. government.
The only two solutions to the case seem to be:
- A lone right wing wacko working in a U.S. lab with access to deadly bio weapons, who may still be there, which is really scary, especially if you don't know what other agents this person has access to, small pox for example.
- There are people in power in Washington who perpetrated this despicable attack to pump up the frenzy for invading Iraq over WMD's. These maybe being the same people who manipulated Judith Miller in to terrorizing the nation with books and articles about WMD's in general and in Iraq in particular.
The choice of targets in particular screams out Republican nut case who, while engaged in this sick enterprise, couldn't resist targeting the liberal media and two Democrats in Congress they most hated, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle.
"The only way most firms will push to respect human rights is if we make serious domestic penalties for companies that break human rights laws overseas or use companies that break codes."
This is naive at best. Many multinationals are reaching the point that they could discard their American presence in a heartbeat if the need arose.
If you start "penalizing" them for doing things that are reprehensible but profitable chances are it would just hasten their abandonment of the U.S. Most multinationals are at best disinterested in U.S., Western Europe and Japan as markets or labor pools. These are old markets that have peaked and are in decline. Wages are to high to use as a labor pool, and consumer demand is plateaued. As wages are driven down in these markets by globalization it will cause consumer spending to go negative, and all companies want markets with growth, not decline.
Multinations are pretty much all betting their future growth on China, India, Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia in general, billions of people living in huts aspiring to acquire American life styles which means big consumer spending. I've seen several of them flat out say it on Charlie Rose. GE's if I recall and Exxon's CEO last week, a stereotype of a fat cat, pig like, oil company exec if ever there was one. He spelled it out, 75% of their business is outside the U.S. and if the government tries to regulate or spank them for profiteering the U.S. will regret it more than them.
Bottomline the more difficult the U.S. makes it on multinationals the faster they move their headquarters to the Caymans and their jobs to China.
Their executive and big shareholders are in fact the only ones who have any influence on their behavior. Its awesome if they use that influence to make them more ethical, but chances are the lion's share of big investors want the return on their investment maximized, not to campaign for ethical behavior. That is why most corporations have bad ethics because their sole purpose in life is to maximize profits and return to their shareholders. Most will only support good ethics if bad ethics are causing economic harm to their bottomline.
Investing in China is not causing any of them economic harm at present, in fact most are betting on China to be their engine for future growth and cheap labor.
Maybe you could hammer Cisco for becoming a "Chinese company" and helping build the Great Wall in the internet, but if you punish them, then you have to punish every other company engaged in massive expansion in China which is pretty much every multinational. If you boycott them all you would suddenly find either you have no place to buy routers or if you find some not being built in Asia now they are way more expensive.
"If everyone in America felt that way you would become irrelevant in the world wide community when it comes to human rights."
The U.S. has been irrelevant on the human rights front for pretty much its entire existence. It does spout a lot about it, pretends like it holds the high ground on the subject but it is so laced with hypocrisy you have to be pretty naive to buy it and I don't think most of the world does buy it anymore if it ever did, especially after the last 5 years when its become obvious the U.S. has globalized and institutionalized torture. Most repressive regimes confine abuse to within their borders and colonies. The U.S. has for the first time globalized it.
The U.S. perpetrated wholesale genocide against native Americans pretty much from Independence day, and they still live in apartheid class conditions.
The U.S. was one of the worlds largest perpetrators of slavery again from its inception and the apartheid state didn't even begin to get dismantled until the 1960's.
In the wake of the Spanish American war, a war designed for imperial expansion, and based largely on fabrications like Iraq today, the U.S. waged a multidecade occupation in the Phillippines where it murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of civilians trying to stop an insurgency, a lot like Iraq today.
The U.S. installed the Shah of Iran, and countless right wing dictators in Central and South America, all of whom were as every bit as despotic as Saddam ever was but as long as they did what the U.S. told them to, protected the U.S. corprate interests in their borders, the U.S. loved them, no matter they disappeared, killed and tortured their people.
You see the U.S. preaches freedom, democracy and human rights only when it is convenient and they only target human rights abuses in regimes with which they have an ax to grind, and whom they want to topple or punish. When the abuse occurs within the U.S. itself or within regimes friendly to the U.S. the U.S. tends to be largely silent on the problem, other than maybe muted protests from the bleeding heart liberals in the State department which have little real effect.
I imagine the U.S. does favor "Freedom and Democracy" and human rights if its convenient, but if pursuit of those lofty goals interferes with acquisition of the wealth and power the U.S. will sell those high sounding words down the river in a heart beat, always has, always will.
"they can just dispose of you when you are no longer productive and profitable for them."
Corporations can already dispose of workers with relative ease so I'm not sure what they gain in return for the massive responsibility of owning someone. Sure they give severance packages sometimes when they discard someone but that is mostly to make the masters feel better and to keep the serfs they keep from getting restless.
When you own someone the burning question is how do you dispose of them in a market awash with indentured servants?
Slave owning societies frown on just turning them loose because it breaks down the ownership system. If you have freed slaves all over its hard to track down the runaways, and make the productive ones stay in line.
As the grandparent said you would normally sell them off, but that worked better in places like the 19th century South when slaves were in relatively short supply and life expectency was short. In today's globalized labor market there is cheap labor in abundance so the markets for resale of marginal, aging servants would be terrible.
You could kill them in assorted obvious and not so obvious ways but the consequences of something so blatant would catch up to you in guilt in nothing else, and probably lead to revolt among the rest of the serfs. I'm pretty sure the dynamics of slaveholding are in fact quite complex and its not the panacea you suggest it is.
No, all in all I think the modern capitalist system has already optimized its labor system quite well especially of late. It was badly optimized by unions, benefits, rising wages and standard of living for a while, but the new pro-business regimes have straightened that out largely thanks to globalization. To discard people they give them two weeks pay and if they can't find new employment they end up homeless and die relatively quickly without anyone feeling guilty about, it was after all, their fault that they couldn't hold down a job, they must be lazy or psychotic. Thats much easier than just killing them directly to get rid of them.
"Hording doesn't make wealth, hard work does."
Hard work can make wealth, but wealth does in fact also make wealth in the Capitalist system. Yes you can get some clueless heiress that will squander a fortune or tank a multigeneration family business.
But, if you have extensive wealth you can with relative ease continue to generate ever greater wealth by investing it in relatively safe investment vehicles in perpetuity, by tapping a financial manager if necessary. It is simply vastly easier for the affluent to make money than it is the poor, people who are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, to pay for home heating and gas to get to work.
It is a simple fact that without progressive taxation wealth rapidly accumulates in the hands of a tiny minority, while the vast majority get ever poorer. It was this way in the U.S. in the early twentieth century when progressives introduced progressive taxation and it is this way again today since the Republicans are dismantling progressive taxation, devastating wages for the lower and middle classes, cutting taxes for the rich while they bleed workers white with inescapable payroll taxes the surpluses from which they are squandering so their will be no money for workers benefits when they reach retirement though they paid 12.5% of their income most of their lives in to these bankrupt systems.
You might trot out Bill Gates as a rags to riches example, well his family was relatively affluent and he never really had to worry about basic survival. He also acquired the lion's share of his wealth by essentially illegal economic activity, the same goes for the Walton family. Gates and the Walton's started out engaging in hard work and hard nosed business but there is a point that they transitioned in to acquiring their wealth by monopolistic and underhanded business practices, not so much "hard work". Ethicless monopolies are remarkably lucrative when done well.
I think you will find many rags to riches stories where people engaged in economic activity that was either outright illegal or certainly unethical and that they screwed a large number of people to acquire their wealth, the didn't just "work hard".
I'm a little unclear why someone posting under aussie_a is so much less anonymous than someone posting as an AC. People who have URL's, like you do, or an email address associated with their alias maybe are a little more identifiable but those URL's and email addresses may be aliases too. I think all in all your standard is a little arbitrary. If people are saying something controversial, but insightful, doing it as AC is A-OK with me, I've read some great AC posts, though most are garbage from people posting as AC because they have nothing intelligent to say. If someone posts flamage under a login, they could discard it in a heartbeat, create a new one and be pretty much as anonymous as an AC.
If someone from China is posting here as an AC chances are China's government can watch the whole IP transaction and track down the person if they want to, same probably goes for an American thanks to extensive tapping of the Internet by various three letter agencies.
Fact is American's, like the Brits and everyone else, have "free speech" only as long as their government lets them have it and within the bounds they set. The UK did let people have free speech to advocate fundamentalist Islamic causes, but it is now speech likely to lead to deportation or jail. You don't really have free speech when there are all kinds of arbitrary bounds on it, i.e. you can speak freely until you say something we've decided we don't like and then you don't.
In reality free speech is a completely relative concept. The U.S. has free speech compared to China, so it does in relative terms, but in absolute terms there are countless bounds on it.
In eras rich in fear mongering your free speech rights can be abridged in a heart beat. You need to look no further than McCarthyism in the U.S. in the 50's to appreciate how fleeting free speech is, or today when the Executive of the United States has bestowed upon its self the power to arrest people on a whim, detain them without due process, without access to a lawyer, family or court and even to whisk you away to various secret prisons to be tortured indefinitely up to the end of your life which they have often brought about in these secret prisons. The U.S. projects an image of being free, but in many respects it is carefully manufactured facade, again free in relative terms just because there are places worse, and it is less free with each passing day. Countries which espouse freedom don't make people disappear or torture people and the U.S. most certainly does these things now thanks to government by paranoid wackos who were given carte blanche to be paranoid wackos by 9/11.
In most respects 9/11 WAS all about Al Qaeda attacking Freedom and Democracy in the West. The catch is they are destroying them, not by attacking the West, but by giving power mad governments of Western nations excuses to destroy Freedom and Democracy themselves.
"They would provide for all of your needs and you would work for them as long as you live (or until another corporation paid your corporation to take you from them... or just took over your corporation)."
There is an obvious problem with this approach which is why modern corporations probably wouldn't adopt it even if it was viable. The old IBM did for the most part have indentured life time servants. Unfortunately they are expensive when they get older, and productivity often declines. Skyrocketing health care costs alone speak to disposing of them when they reach middle age. No other corporation is going to buy them at that point, unless there is a corporation in the market for marginal slaves. When there is an abundance of 20-30 year old slaves in Asia who wants a 40 or 50 year old. I guess since they are in indentured servitude you could just deprive them of health care but then their productivity just declines even further. Pretty sure slave holders in the South couldn't just kick them off the plantation when they were no longer useful and no one else would buy them. Killing them outright probably happened but was kind of frowned on even in slave owning circles.
Modern corporations might prefer indentured servitude since they could discard benefits etc, but they would still need a quick, cheap mechanism for discarding the unproductive ones. In fact the system they have now really works a lot better. You are pretty much an indentured servant, as long as you work there and especially if the job market is tight but they can dispose of you when you outlive your usefulness with relative ease and with no concern if you land on the streets and starve.
Thanks to globalization they can buy new indentured servants in China or Burma for pennies an hour and throw them away too in favor of others elsewhere whenever they get bothersome.
All in all advocating that corporations give up the sweet deal they have for the responsibilities of slaving owning looks like kind of step backward.
"Here's a solution. Smuggle guns and ammo into countries with no respect for private property."
WTF? Repressive regimes and respect for private party are not really mutually exclusive. The West is so eager to deal with China today because they abandoned Socialism for Authoritarian capitalism(a.k.a. Fascism) in the last 20 years. They do have private property as a result and it hasn't stopped them from being a repressive regime. Repressive regimes trample private property rights when it suits them, but as a rule they don't because they want capitalists to invest there so they respect private property, especially of foreigners, to get investment. China really isn't very different from the U.S now. Since a recent Supreme Court ruling government entities in the U.S. can seize your property, reimburse you what suits them, and turn it over to a private developer to profit on.
Western countries are pouring capital into China, and transferring IP there because they think there is a buck to be made there, more so than in any of the aging economies in the U.S. Europe or Japan. When there is a buck to be made Westerners could care less if they are dealing with repressive regimes. Americans were enthusiastic investors in Nazi Germany in the 30's including the Bush family who were the American bankers for the Thyssen family who helped put Hitler in power. The U.S. went out its way to install the Shah of Iran who was one of the Middle East's most repressive rulers, right up there with Saddam. The U.S. installed countless right wing dictators in the Western Hemisphere who "respected private property" of U.S. corporations and the wealthy and ruthlessly killed, kidnapped and tortured everyone else.
"Get the U.N. involved and completely stop technology from getting there."
That is pretty out of touch with reality. Many of the electronics you buy today are MADE IN CHINA, the U.S. or U.N. couldn't boycott them if you tried. I guess you boycott buying stuff them which would have an impact but you would quickly realize the U.S. economy is totally dependent on China. Stop buying there and Walmart's shelves would empty and many smaller towns would realize they have no place to shop without Walmart and its Chinese goods.
The main thing China is importing are raw materials. In the case of oil, for example, they are securing their own oil fields and supplies so they will be largely immune to an oil boycott, which has been a weapon of choice by the U.S. in the past. Pearl Harbor was precipitated by a U.S, British and Dutch oil embargo against Japan. The Chinese are securing oil from Venezuela in particular because Chavez would never follow a U.S. lead boycott against China without the U.S. parking warships next to their oil terminals.
Chinese technological and manufacturing prowess is rapidly eclipsing the U.S. partially thanks to Western companies transferring their manufacturing base and technology R&D centers to China. Cisco gear can't be boycotted from China. Much of it is developed and manufactured there. Cisco's CEO Chambers routinely broadcasts the fact that Cisco is a "Chinese company" now.
Bottomline is the West has more to fear from China boycotting them than the other way around.
One has to wonder about the security implications of government employees in sensitive areas, like the the White House, State, DOD, etc using email, cell phones and wireless in general. You figure they aren't putting intensely classified information on them but if a foreign power, if you can call Canada a power :), China, Israel, Russia etc intercepts all those emails and listens to all those calls, which must be trivial to do with some basic electronics gear, they could piece together a lot of valuable intelligence.
Does Blackberry employ encryption on emails being transmitted to a given user so only the user can read them, or make it easy to PGP encrypt emails you send? If not I imagine national security would be better off if Blackberry's got pulled out of the hands of government employees in sensitive positions.
Not sure I follow your conspiracy theory. I don't think VA, OSDN or Slashdot is likely to try to milk that cow again.
I'm pretty sure Taco, Augustine and Raymond all got their FU money and I doubt they would try to run the same scam again.
Setback for DRM yes, a lost battle, but a battle does not a war make.
This is a quote you should save for coming years.
"It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer."
Drag this quote out out when Trusted Computing, Vista and its successors come out and Microsoft and Intel really do seize control of your computer and everything on it and get away with it.
I think most of this backlash is just due to the fact Sony, a non U.S. corporation did it, and it was done as an add on. If in the future Microsoft does more or less the same thing, though better integrated and implemented, and ships it bundled in the OS it might well get forced on the world without a peep from the U.S. government.
In particular Microsoft just need to sell Trusted Computing and DRM as a defense against terrorism, as pro democracy, freedom and capitalism and the Federal government will be cheering it on.
To put it another way Sony's effort was just badly marketed and marketing is everything in this sorry world we live in.
I think it was called at various times VA Linux and VA Research with among others Larry Augustine in the executive's seat and Eric Raymond in the board room.
You may have heard, they had a boffo IPO and aqcuired big funding to do just this. Soon there after they had a board meeting and decided they couldn't actually make any money selling Linux boxen, abandoned the entire business plan they'd sold to Wall Street and on which investors invested so heavily. Last I heard they sell niche software development tools.
The link above is they chart of their stock performance, it peaked around $250 during the IPO frenzy. It is a log scale because it now trades around $1.50.
On the plus side they did hand out options to a bunch of open source developers and put some money in their pockets for their work, probably the only compensation many have received.
On the down side they are lucky they didn't get a share holder law suit putting out a business plan and IPO that it appears was designed to capitalize on the Linux hype of the era, to milk Wall Street investors for millions and then abandon it soon after after they'd cashed out. VA is a bitter pill to anyone attempting another serious startup to sell Linux boxes.
"I have quite the educated pallet, and I have my linguistic credentials hanging on the wall."
.... if you are not a bigot though this indicated you are:
.....
Well for someone with linguistic credentials your first post didn't show any evidence that you know how to express yourself. At this point you seem to have transitioned from bigot in to snob, snobs kind of like you generalize the French as being. Perhaps you dislike the French so much because you are engaged in a snobbery contest with them. For example.....
"I wouldn't call having tastes, likes, and dislikes cultural bigotry."
I think its the way you word your statements that pushes you in to some form of bigotry, cultural or personal:
"The food is HORRIBLE. The countryside isn't all that pretty. The women aren't as attractive as, say, Thai girls."
You see you said "The food is HORRIBLE" instead of "I think the food is HORRIBLE" or "I hate french food" which are expressions of taste. Instead you say it as an absolute, I say the food is horrible, I'm right and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong or has no taste. Or if you said "I find Thai women more attractive than French women" then you are not being a bigot, if you state as an absolute Thai women are more attractive than French women you again are not stating it as a matter of personal taste but some kind of absolute.
It shows a heavy hand of bigotry to judge cultures based on your perception of the beauty of their women, fact is most cultures have very beautiful and very ugly women. It is really superficial and bigoted to dismiss people based on their appearance. Looks are something you are born with, assuming you don't explore plastic surgery, you have much control over it, other than watching your weight and exercising. What's in a women's brain and personality are things they can control and are the things you should be judging people on
"I have very little use for them if I don't think they're physically attractive"
I sure hope your mom is physically attractive or is she ugly so you have no use for her.
Your first post was unavoidably bigoted toward the French because you are condemning an entire country full of people based on your stereotypes and generalizations. I dislike a lot of American's especially like the guy at the top of this thread, I really dislike the current government, but there are tons of good people in America, I'm not condemning every American because Bush is an ass, Budweiser is mass produced piss or McDonald's is some of the world's worst food. You see many American's don't like Bush, Budweiser or McDonald's either.
"A bigot is "one who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ".
I imagine it depends on your dictionary
From WordNet
bigot
n : a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own
You do seem to qualify under this definition because your posts suggest you are intolerant of someone who thinks French is pleasant sounding language, the French countryside is pretty, French cuisine tastes good and apparently are a complete ass to any women you don't find attractive.
Don't think I was saying anything particularly pro French in the post above justifying your rant. I was just pointing out the stupidity of Americans expecting the world to bow at their feet in an eternal debt of gratitude because the U.S. participated in World War II along with the Russians, British, Canadians, Aussies, Free French, Free Polish etc.
Yes the French have changed regimes a few times in the last 200 years. The Roosevelt administration which led the U.S. in to and through World War II is night and day different from today's Bush administration. Expecting Europe to bow to the U.S. and the Bush administration today because of actions taken by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations 60 years ago is insanely arrogant.
As for the rest of your rant, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Most people with an ear for language appreciate French is a quite beautiful language. I think people with an educated pallet appreciate French cuisine, but there are interesting cuisines from all over the world all with their own merits. As for the beauty of women I find their are beautiful women in all corners of the world, and ugly ones too. I also strive to judge women based on something more than the superficiality of their looks.
All in all you are just showing a different variant of cultural bigotry like the original poster who seems enamored with mass produced food, beer and lowest common denominator TV.