It is just more proof American's no longer deserve the government framework they are given under the Constitution and the founding fathers worked so hard on, cherished so much and thought so hard about.
American's really need an extended period under a really repressive dictator so they stop taking it for granted. Fortunately or unfortunately it appears likely they may get something approaching just that under the extended reign of the New Republican Party. The 10 trillion dollar question, if they do end up in something tantamount to a dictatorship, will they even care. As long as they are making a living and have something on TV every night to watch, even if it is censored in to the ground, will American's be happier under a dictatorship and having their government think for them.
You just wish American's would relearn:
- the importance of voting - the importance of understanding the real issues and separating them from the scare tactics and BS both parties are shoveling out in their campaigns these days, - the ability to tell good, solid candidates from incompetents who are only good at vicious campaigning (not that I'm naming any names) - the independence to reject the candidates from the two parties if they suck and elect an independent or third party candidate who doesn't suck
Americans probably should learn a lesson from the Iraq elections. They turned out in pretty good numbers in spite of the danger and in spite of the fact they were pretty much a complete sham(oops, OK maybe they weren't such a great lesson).
Example from slashdot of people who doesn't deserve to live under America's constitution:
- Lord Kano who will vote for any incompetent for President as long as he says he is pro life and pro gun. The candidate can apparently completely screw him on every other issue and in fact no other issues even enter in to the decision.
- Numerous posters in a recent thread that said it was A-OK to torture people, because they are all airline hijacking terrorists, though in fact in many cases they aren't.
- Posters who've said its A-OK to give the President the power to arrest anyone he wants, anywhere in the world. hold them as long as he wants without due process, without access to a lawyer or their family, without charges, because he needs these powers to fight the never ending war on terrorism. OK as long as your cool with being arrested and disappeared from the face of the earth too, and are cool with spending the rest of your life being interrogated if not outright tortured.
"I would suggest that even the pork barrel gurus were probably blindsided by the incompetence of the management that was put in."
I think I covered why that is, though didn't spell it out. Not sure its universally true but all the government contracts I saw in my past life the top managers were working on the proposal and landing the contract. As soon as it was won, they put all the turkey managers on to the actual job, and all their best people move on to the next big proposal.
If you want to get big compensation from these companies you are more likely to get it if you work on the proposal team and land a big contract, because thats essentially when they book the revenue, because once the contract is signed the revenue over the duration of the contract is pretty much a given no matter what kind of losers you put on it. Its a lot easier to higher losers to put on it than top people. Working on government contracts is the pits and most good people are going to avoid if they can. Only losers are going to actually sit in the cube at the government agency billing the actual hours.
"Of course, much of this ridiculous per-unit cost is due the increasingly smaller total build orders the Pentagon has crafted. Less planes equals higher per-plane cost."
Think you are spreading misinformation too. You can't slip a schedule by a decade and not explode the cost. Lockheed has been spending money for the duration of that decade. A reason the number of planes ordered is dropping is because they've become so ridiculously expensive the U.S. can't afford the original number. And of course as the number of planes ordered drop, the price goes up, partially because they are spreading the huge R&D overruns over fewer planes but also because Lockheed wants to get as much money out of the dwindling contract as they can so everytime the number of planes is cut they are going to inflate the cost per plane. Its a vicious cycle and its screwing both the tax payer and the military.
As I read it the Air Force is going to decommission 800 existing, throughly capable, airplanes and replace them with less than 370 some F-22's which will further reduce Air Force capability. Sure there more capable but if you are ever in a big war or multiple theaters they are going to run out of planes.
"As I said, the F-22 is already operational."
I think there are operational planes and a training squadron. As I read it there wont be an operational squadron until December 2005 unless it slips again. Its hard to say for sure though since their schedule changes constantly. You can't have any confidence its really operational until its flying in combat. The B1B was finished decades ago and it was such a turkey its almost never used in combat(though they've sent it on a few combat missions just to save the total humiliation), the Air Force apparently prefers 50 year old B-52's.
"There was no failure."
Only if you are in denial. Lets see:
- Decade late - Massive explosion in both total cost and cost per plane - Total number of planes being delivered due to above is a fraction of the original target.
Don't think I call that success. F-15's still dominate the skies in every conflict and will for decades to come. The F-22 is residue from the cold war and its ridiculous overkill for the current realities where the main enemys are insurgents packing AK-47's, RPG's and IED's, or third world strongmen without any creditable air forces.
"The contract was for 23 helicopters, for $6.3 billion. About $260 million each. Hey, at least that's a lot less than the price by the rival contractor, Sikorsky."
I stand corrected the article I read this weekend must have been talking about just the first phase. All I can is that is an insane amount of money to squander just to ferry the President and his friends around. And of course a big chunk of the money is going in to trade deficit since the Italians are building the fuselage and the British the blades. At least Sikorsky would have put the money in to jobs in the U.S. and not send it to Italy. I gather it was partially a payoff to the British and Italians for supporting the misguided war in Iraq.
Don't recall ever using the term "Muslim unity". About the closest thing I said was Bin Laden is a towering hero in much of the Muslim world. That doesn't have anything to do with whether they are united. Nice rant otherwise but I'm not sure what it has to do with anything I said. When I referred to Al Qaida as scattered and a multi headed hydra now that is actually kind of the opposite of "unity". Its hundreds of little movements scattered around the globe, tapping in to local politics, tribes and situations. I think "united" might actually be easier for the U.S. to cope with, there would be a nice org chart to roll up.
Another place that absence of "unity" is going to be more, rather than less dangerous to American interests is the deep schism between Shia and Sunni. With the Shia rising to power in Iraq there is going to be all kinds of interest new pressures on American allies like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait, and a potential alliance between the Shia in Iran and Iraq against U.S. interests.
As for that last paragraph I think you've been reading a few to many Tom Clancy novels or playing video games of the same ilk. The U.S. and Pakistan have for whatever reason been completely impotent in the tribal areas of Pakistan and all the tribes there know it. I think the U.S. wouldn't and couldn't touch the place. If the U.S. were to have "AC-130s tear up your villages" it Pakistan it would be a political and diplomatic disaster and I imagine Musharaf would be dead or thrown out on his ear shortly thereafter.
Some things haven't really changed. If you are skilled insurgents, not wearing uniforms, not citing out in the open in tanks, and are adept at hiding in mountains, jungles, urban areas and generally underground, conventional military power is impotent, your grandiose visions of AC-130's aside. This was true in Vietnam and has been true multiple times over decades in Afghanistan and is true in Iraq.
Is this the same IBM who just sold their PC business to a Chinese company. The government is currently scrambling to evaluate the security implication of letting a Chinese company deliver personal computers to a bunch of government and military contracts IBM has already landed. Not sure it really gives them great street cred as a pillar of trustworthiness in government contracting.
Not sure you you can really cite any of big supercomputers as really illustrative of how a company will perform on a big and complex IT project. Company after company has delivered these bragging rights supercomputers, year after year and there aren't a lot of failures. Once you come up with a memory sharing scheme and an OS that will stay afloat across a lot of CPU's its not like there is really a lot of complex software to develop. Its mostly an exercise in logistics and trying to get the thing up and running before the CPU's in it are obsolete. You will notice that the government keeps buying these things over and over, because at the rate CPU's are advancing they tend to be obsolete before all the nodes are powered up. I wonder whats happened to the predecessors of these that were bought 5 and 10 years ago. A lot of hazardous scrap to recycle.
Heh. Post on slashdot and ask why IT projects fail and surprise, surprise all the geeks blame it on the managers, venting angst they still feel from some recent IT project that was a disaster and they blame on their manager.
Big government IT projects, and government contracts in general, fail because there is zero reason for them to succeed, they are designed to fail. Big companies who live to drain tax dollars out of the government, like Lockheed, CSC or ESD can fail on project after project and they will still have a thouroughly good chance of winning new ones. The government rarely withholds payment even if the project craters. So if the government never punishes failure why would contractors care if the succeed or fail. The worst that will happen is a little bad press, they wont get the next contract for the department they just cratered but there are always plenty more. After CSC botches it, ESD gets it, they botch and then they will try CSC again etc. Same thing for Boeing and Lockheed. Thanks to merger mania in the 90's there are only two aerospace giants left and its not much different for every other big government contracting sector. The government has to pick one or the other of the big players no matter if they've cratered on contract after contract.
You really need to understand how these companies are structured. They are well oiled machines for identifying opportunities, submitting impressive proposals, using undo influence and landing contracts. They put their best people on winning contracts. Once they win it its another story. Then they are just putting warm bodies in there to fill slots and bill hours as they march through milestones.
The irony is a contractor will probably make more money if the project goes bad. If the project goes bad their contract will be extended year after year. The civil servants will just throw more money at the project in the hope that if they just put in a little more they will turn the corner and pull it through.
If the project comes in on time and on budget the contractor will make less on it than if it goes bad and overruns, so why should come in on time and on budget.
Consider Lockheed's F-22 as described in the link above. In some respects it an impressive fighter but at $300 million a copy it ridiculously expensive. It was supposed to be operational a decade ago but the government just keeps pouring more and more money in to though the U.S. already completely dominates every other Air Force on the planet with the much cheaper planes it already has. Lockheed can continue to develop it for another 20 years and may never field an operational squadron. They were punished for their failure with another $200 billion contract for the Joint Strike Fighter. They were just given a contract to build 5 or 6 Presidential helicopers for $1.5 billion dollars. Thats $300 million each for a helicopter.
Why does the government do it. Simple, the government/contractor system has devolved in to massively corrupt system. There is a giant revolving door between government, the military and these big contractors. The ambitious and greedy are only taking government and civil service jobs so they can establish connections and influence, do favors for big companies, retire from government and cash in a massive way with executive positions at those same contractors. Any Air Force general whose ever steered contracts to Boeing or Lockheed has a gold plated job waiting when they retire, where they can continue to influence contracts pulling strings with people who use to be below them in the chain of command.
Darlene Druyan is another classic example. She was one of the Air Forces' top civil servants for procurement. She steered a ridiculously lucrative contract to Boeing for 767 tankers, and before the ink is dry she gets a lucrative senior executive position at Boeing. Only catch is it was so blatant that Congress said enough is enough and damended the
I should also add I wasn't exactly saying America is as bad as China on the oppression scale. I was saying their is an element of hypocrisy and denial for American's to start ranting about China arresting people in the middle of the night and making them disappear without a trial. Since 9/11 the U.S. has done this to thousands and thousands of people all around the world. You see the Chinese mostly just arrest people within their extended borders. The U.S. is arresting people without charges or trial all over the globe. One of the British citizens just released from Gitmo was arrested in Zambia of all places, he lost three years of his life living in a cage in Cuba and was never charged with anything by the U.S. or Britain. I'm inclined to say either you prove guilt and punish accordingly or you dont lock people in cages for years without due process.
So at least as far as arbitrary arrests go the U.S. can't lecture the Chinese any more.
As far as the invasion of Tibet well it was and is sad. But the U.S. did in fact engage in large scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of its own against the native American. They still live largely in apartheid states called Indian reservations which are usually quite desolate waste land, land the white man didn't want. In a cruel twist of irony the native American has discovered a hole in their relationship with the white man that enables the casino and is picking the white man clean. Ah, justice. More recently America's occupation of the Phillipines in the early 20th century was as noteworthy as China in Tibet for its brutality. The U.S. has also installed and supported some especially brutal puppet dictators in places like Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, Iran, etc.
All in all on the scale of brutality and oppression the U.S. is right up their contrary to popular opinion.
"The authorities are also very corrupt. America is in the middle of a scare, but China's been worse than this for a long while."
Well obviously we have a disconnect here. China must not be bad any more because the United States, bastion of "Freedom and Democracy" and Capitalism is currently engaged in a wholesale transfer of its jobs, intellectual property, wealth, and government debt to China. The great patriots, and defenders of Freedom, who currently run the United States couldn't possibly be turning America's fate over to an evil Socialist dictatorship. So which is it:
- China must be an OK place now or Clinton, Bush and Co. wouldn't have sold America down the river to it - China is still an evil Socialist dictatorship and Clinton, Bush and Co. are knowingly selling America down the river to them which implies they are evil too - American's are so blinded by the cheap labor and the money to be made that they are selling America's future down the river to make a quick buck now, and selling their children and grandchildren in to poverty. That couldn't possibly be it, considering how much time the Republicans spent during the campaign saying if the Democrats were elected all the children and grandchildren would die. If you look at the course the Republican's are taking both fiscally and in foreign affairs, I'm inclined to say they are probably the biggest danger to future generations America has seen. - American's captains naively think that if they turn China in to a wealthy bastion of Capitalism that the Chinese will one day just tell their repressive socialist government that they can retire. I'm sure thats what they say to themselves when they are in denial, I just rather doubt the people running China are going to loosen their grip no matter how rich they get. China is apparently going to be a first in world history, a socialist dictatorship that is both not under economic boycott from the Western world and filthy rich.
"The roundups here, however, largely have had access to due process. You are confusing them with the Guantanimo bay crowd."
You are thoroughly mistaken. It is well known there were county jails in New Jersey and New York in particular, turned in to indefinite detention facilities for hundreds if not thousands of Muslims detained after 9/11. It wasn't even possible to find out the names of those being held, let alone get them access to lawyers, family visits or anything resembling due process. There was a long running legal battle going over it between the government and groups like the ACLU.
Here is one of many links you can find in Google on them. Not sure how many are still being held, the media does a poor job of covering things like hundreds of people being locked up indefinitely without charge, especially if they are just Muslim.
Is it any surprise stuff like this can happen in the U.S. You just have to read the replies I've gotten in this thread. They follow two tacks:
A. Denial it is even happening indicating ignorance of what your governments been doing to civil liberties since 9/11 though its really obvious and there have been long running court cases over it proving it has and is happening.
B. They are getting what they deserve, with the implications all Muslim's are hijackers and terrorists, or if the Government arrests them they must be guilty and its not necessary for them to get a day in court.
"Imagine if the us decided that captured enemy soldiers could sue for due process"
The detainees in New Jersey and New York were NOT enemy soldiers caught on a battlefield carrying arms. No one really knew who they were or what they were being held for. If you go down this road you are giving the U.S. government, and in particular its President, authorization to arrest anyone, any time, anywhere in the world, and doing anything he chooses to to them. It is not the kind of power that should be giving to any one person unless you are a big fan of dictators. In fact the U.S., since 9/11 HAS been arresting people all over the world with nothing more than the government's worthless word as to their guilt.
For the last while I've been on the verge of leaving America because I am so ashamed of what its become, but the more I think about the more I think the people in the American government that are doing all this wrongness and the people like those that posted here that are cheering them on are the ones that should leave. Beside which America has extended its tentacles around the entire globe so it not like you can escape the insanity of its current government. Maybe its time to fight instead of flee.
All in all you people don't seem to have the first clue what our Constitution stands for, or how important the rule of law is. You are the ones that ought to be ashamed because you are helping destroy the worlds first great experiment in "Freedom and Democracy". At this point might I suggest you either learn or remember what rule of law, the Declaration of Independence, the American revolution, and the American Constitution really stand for or GET THE HELL OUT. You sound more like you should be in Saddam's Iraq than in the world's oldest democracy. First and foremost our fore fathers were fighting tyranny, for you all to be embracing tyranny the way you are sullies everything America used to stand for. In doing a side by side between our founding fathers and our pathetic politicians and people of today, I've concluded American's today are inferior in every regard.
"PS You can be a communist and run for office in the us, if you are a non-communist, what happens if you run for office in China, HRM??????"
Hmmm. I guess you are forgeting what America was like the last time the Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House. It was during the 1950's and a certain Republican Congressmen named McCarthy persecuted anyone who had the slightest hint of being a Communi
"Bin Laden personally: Kicked out of Afghanistan, lost his host government and is living life as a hunted man."
Excepting in the Muslim world he is towering hero and more so everyday for making the U.S. look like chumps. George Bush as you recall spouted off about getting him "dead or alive" years ago and has since pretty much gone mum on the subject because he fixated on Iraq and Saddam instead of Al Qaida. The U.S. hasn't even come close to catching him, and as nearly as anyone can tell the U.S. isn't even trying very hard because its impaled itself on Iraq for no obvious reason. For a hunted man he sure manages to put out propaganda tapes at his whim, and has rallied a big chunk of the Muslim world to his cause.
"Al Quaeda generally: Lost their host country."
They've lost their "host country" in Afghanistan before. Bin Laden did a long stint in Sudan. Another really obvious parallel is when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and engaged in a decade long occupation and lesson in futility. They got along just fine then in the mountains of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan just as the probably are now.
You may forget but Al Qaida was formed in the Pakistan tribal areas with the aid of the CIA and Ronald Reagan. They devastated a militarily superior Soviet army and that failed war as much as anything sped the fall of the Soviet Union. These are patient people and they now how to fight and win long insurgencies and wars, and dont kid themselves like the U.S. does when it wins a brief battles and that is all the U.S. has won so far in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Pakistan's incursions in to the tribal areas have been half assed or half hearted at best. The U.S. and the Afghan government doesn't control even a majority of Afghanistan. Its dominance of the country is confined to Kabul, a few urban areas and a few U.S. military bases.
Besides that I'd say there is a pretty good chance Al Qaida expected to lose Afghanistan after 9/11 and almost certainly planned for the contingency. Many analysts suggest Al Qaida is more dangerous now that it was then. Then it was concentrated and easier to track. Now its a multiheaded hydra thats been scattered around the globe and there is no one place to look for it any more. If there is one place its the same place its always been the mountains of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. As much as you think things have changed they probably haven't. Though according to the CIA's own studies Iraq is probably their new training ground for insurgency because there is a big fat American bullseye and all the ingredients for a successful insurgency, including a Sunni population that increasingly hates Americans.
"I have imprisoned no one. I have every right to criticize them".
Since you live in a representative democracy if your government does something wrong, especially as egregiously wrong as unlawful wars, arrests without due process and various grades of torture, and you and your fellow citizens do nothing to stop it, and continue to fund it through your taxes, you are just as much to blame as the people that commit the offenses in your name.
Your one out is if you voted against the government that does wrong in your name at the first every opportunity. If you voted to keep Bush in the White House for a second term, in spite of the fact that they have been writing briefs endorsing torture and unlawful arrests, and fighting in the courts to acquire the power to make unlawful arrest and engage in torture, and have detained people for years without charge, often under the harshest of conditions, and launched wars based on fabrication, YOU ARE AS MUCH TO BLAME AS THEY ARE.
"Entering a nation with a fake or expired VISA is clearly wrong and unneccessary unless you're planning on committing more serious offenses"
OK you are either trolling or that is such an insane statement it barely warrants rebuttal. There are untold millions of people living in the U.S. without visa's and in violation of immigration laws. They are called illegal aliens and most of them are from Mexico and Central America. If EVERYONE of them is here to commit serious offenses this COUNTRY IS DOOMED. The main difference here is those millions and millions of ticking time bombs are Catholic and not Muslim so they are OK.
People cheat on visa's all the time. They come to the U.S. and they don't want to go back to their country so they stay after they expire. Its kind of hard for the U.S. to be all righteous about it since the U.S. makes almost zero effort to deport most illegals from this hemisphere. In fact, many places give them drivers licenses, education and heal care benefits. They are in fact welcomed in the U.S. with open arms because they are cheap exploitable labor. Half of America agricultural workers are illegal, and probably the same goes for hotel workers, gardeners, maids, kitchen workers etc.
Some of the infractions Muslims were arrested for were on student visa's where the person wasn't taking quite the prescribed number of hours of classes for one reason or another, trivial crap like that.
"That's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
Maybe you should try to make a coherent arguement to support your point, otherwise your post looks kind of stupid in its own right.
I assure you China is less likely to make a U.S. citizen disappear in the middle of the night than one of its own. That is true of any country arresting any other countries citizen. The reason is obvious, the person's embassy will get involved and it will quickly turn in to a diplomatic incident. If you arrest one of your own citizens, its unlikely anyone but his family and friends are going to care, unless the person has international notariety.
As far as bypassing censorship goes that is a case where there would be an obvious double standard between foreigners and Chinese. In bypassing a firewall the foreigner isn't going to learn anything he probably doesn't already know and isn't likely to be more corrupted than he already is. The foreigner is only going to get behind on current events thanks to censorship. Censorship as China practices it is intended to be life long to help insure all of its citizen's, who never live outside the country, are NEVER exposed to foreign concepts.
"than terrorist plots to fly hijacked planes into buildings"
Hate to break it to you, dumbass, but its unlikely any of the people the U.S. arrested on visa violations after 9/11 had anything to do with 9/11 or hijacking planes, or crashing them into buildings. They were mostly guilty of being Muslim and being in the U.S. after 9/11 and at worst violating their visas.
Even if they are guilty of something, we used to have this little thing we called due process and the rule of law which said if someone does something wrong you prove it in a court of law, instead of letting the government be judge, jury and hangman.
There is a total of one person the U.S. has arrested in the U.S., Zacharias Moussaoui, that may or may not have been involved in 9/11, and ironicly he is actually getting a trail, though the DOJ has botched that trial at every turn.
Your post is a golden example of whats gone wrong with America since 9/11. You are so enraged over it you fail to recognize a couple of basic things:
- If, because of 9/11 the U.S. shreds it Constitution, tramples everyone's civil liberties and turns in to an authoritarian state, to steal a Fox/Republican party jingo, "The Terrorists Have Won".
- Guerilla attacks like 9/11 and all those before it are designed precisely to cause a kneejerk reaction in the target country. The kneejerk reactions usually causes more damage than the original attack in the end.
- First they cause the target government to become more oppressive as it engages in a futile attempt to stop further attacks, in the process it makes its people unhappy with that government and less supportive of it.
- Second the kneejerk reaction causes massive economic damage as the target government squanders money trying, usually futilely, to prevent an attack, can you say Department of Homeland Security, TSA, war in Iraq etc. It also puts a drag on the whole economy just from all the new security overhead and the paranoia.
Some of America's kneejerk reactions to 9/11:
o Launching a fabricated war in Iraq o Torturing people at various secret and not so secret site around the world o Arbitrary arrests of people without due process o Strong arming and trampling the sovereignty of nations around the world
All of these have served to erase any good will the U.S. had around the world right after 9/11 and has turned America into a country that is despised and feared in many if not most corners of the world, among former friends and enemies alike.
All in all Bin Laden and Al Qaida must be overjoyed with the damage the Bush administration has done to itself and America's reputation. Their plan has at every step worked better than they probably could have imagined thanks to the fact that America's leadership is acutely short of basic wisdom, much like yourself.
America should have taken the moral high road at every turn since 9/11 instead of taking every degrading low road possible. If it had most of the world would be helping it in the war on Al Qaida instead of just shuddering everytime the U.S. makes another strategic blunder.
Do you mean when you go there with a fist full of American dollars its way cheaper, or do you mean if you are living there working for $0.30-$1.00 an hour its way cheaper.
In case you didn't know the Chinese peg their currency to the U.S. dollar to insure that its at an artificially low level so EVERYTHING in China is cheap compared to America by design. That's why Chinese goods are so cheap in America, and why the are wiping out whole sectors of the American economy because no one in the U.S. can compete on this tilted playing field. And its why American's are rushing to China, like this guy probably is, to try and cash in on the boom there while the American economy is tanking. China is the next dot.com bubble and a gold rush in one.
I was overjoyed to hear a few days ago some of our elected representatives in Congress are going to attempt to pass a bill to pass tariffs on Chinese goods though I wager it will die a quick death at the hands of the Bush administration and the New Republican party. These Congressmen don't really even want tariffs but they do want to put enough pressure on China to force them to let their currency float and force them to be subject to market forces and at least eliminate one of the tools they are using to destroy the U.S. economy. The U.S. simply can't sustain a half trillion a year trade deficit for very long. All of the wealth the U.S. treasures so much will be quickly drained out of the country.
You might retort that the U.S. economy is doing just fine. Well a reason it looks fine is cheap Chinese goods and expansion by American companies in China are making the U.S. look prosperous but it is false prosperity, and eventually a grim reaper will surface from the trade deficit, and the complete collapse of productive work in America.
They are very unlikely to do this to a foreign citizen unless what you are doing is or can be construed to be espionage or subversion. They are welcoming foreigners with open arms because they want your capital, skills, knowledge etc. so they are less likely to come down on you than one of their own citizens.
If what you were doing was offensive enough to them and you got caught you would almost certainly be deported which is true of just about any country where you are on a visa. If you are openly violating their law there is always a chance you would go to jail but thats true of any country. The U.S. embassy probably would try to spring you unless you were getting what you deserved.
At this point I think its a subject of debate on whether the China or the U.S. is actually worse in this regard. Hundreds if not thousands of foreigners have been locked up in the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11 without due process, without lawyers, without trials, without access to their families, and often under varying degrees of stress, sleep deprivation for example, if not rising to the level of torture. About the only thing many of them were guilty of are various visa infractions, which should at most have resulted in deportation, not indefinite detention without due process.
China probably does it on a larger scale but the U.S. and Americans no longer have the slightest morale high ground on which to challenge oppression and lawlessness in China. Certainly censorship isn't as bad in the U.S. but as far as unlawful arrests go the U.S. is at the same level as China. You can thank the Bush administration for lowering the U.S. to the same level has authoritarian states around the globe in this respect.
Yes but if global warming does starts happening places downwind from the ocean are going to get bigger rains, potentially a lot bigger as the ocean temperature rises. Places that don't benefit from the big rains might potentially get drier. The thing about global warming is that its not likely it will be just one kind of climate change across the whole planet. The only thing that is likely is weather extremes will increase in amplitude because there will be a lot more energy in the system. Obviously increased number and severity of hurricanes is the most obvious example but you may have droughts in other areas too.
There are some theorizing that the oceans have been sinking some of the green house gasses, especially carbon dioxide, but they might reach a point the suddenly stop doing that when they are saturated at which point global warming might suddenly accelerate much to our surprise and detriment, though again like just about everything on this subject its speculation.
In fairness to the EPA/NSF report that was only a small part of it on warming. It is a quite balanced report and hits the quantities and sources of greenhouse gases as well. It does acknowledge that CO2 respiration from plants is in fact a major, and poorly understood, factor in CO2 levels. But it is possible that nature was maintaining a balance and man may be tipping that balance.
"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%. These increases have enhanced the heat-trapping capability of the earths atmosphere. Sulfate aerosols, a common air pollutant, cool the atmosphere by reflecting light back into space; however, sulfates are short-lived in the atmosphere and vary regionally."
" In the United States, approximately 6.6 tons (almost 15,000 pounds carbon equivalent) of greenhouse gases are emitted per person every year. And emissions per person have increased about 3.4% between 1990 and 1997. Most of these emissions, about 82%, are from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and power our cars. The remaining emissions are from methane from wastes in our landfills, raising livestock, natural gas pipelines, and coal, as well as from industrial chemicals and other sources."
Whether burning fossil fuels is going to trigger significant global warming certainly can be debated but I think we can safely say burning them is a bad idea and we should probably stopif we can. Oil is going to start becoming relatively scarce soon anyway and when it does prices are going to soar unless consumption declines rapidly. Unfortunately with China and India booming economicly and embracing the excess of American lifestyle both in cars and power consumption its likely they will rapidly aggravate the scarcity of oil and its price.
Unfortunately places like China, the U.S and Germany probably have enough coal to burn for centuries and if there is going to be a man made origin to global warming, burning coal will be it. The Bush administration is keen to trumpet advances in "clean coal" power plants but they gloss over that they in fact aren't reducing carbon dioxide emissions at all, just nitrates and sulfates.
It should also be noted that we use organic compounds for a lot of things besides energy production. You wonder if maybe we should be conserving fossil fuels to use for organic chemisty instead of squandering them producing energy.
All in all, if you were to ask me, the BEST thing America could be doing right now is an all out Apollo level effort to make fusion power feasible and viable. It would have been a way better option than squandering $280 billion and counting on Iraq, tax cuts for the wealthy or NASA's misguided CEV program which is little more than an attempt to rerun and recapture the glory of Apollo with no real payoff that I can see(though we may want to mine the Moon for fuel if we had fusion rectors first).
Here is a Washington Post piece on the Bush administration's efforts to suppress this kind of report, at the EPA no less, though I wager unless its coming from Fox news you will probably consider it left wing propaganda since I imagine you are a card carrying member of the American Gestapo(a.k.a the New Repulican Party). You probably shouldn't refer to yourself as incompetent, its not a sign of the strength you need in your line of work:)
Here is a good resource on global warming from EPA and National Science Foundation though there estimates are little lower, 6 celsius is there upper end over the next century. The most impressive thing about this web site is that its created by people in the U.S. government, the Bush White House hasn't shut it down and they haven't fired the people who created it, so shhhhh don't tell them about it because they must know its there because they really hate anyone who says stuff like this.
One of the more interesting sections. Those of you who've been through the big rains on the West Coast and the big snows on the East Coast should note that intense rainstorms and presumably snow storms are a potential indicator of global warming as the oceans evaporate off more water as they warm.
"Global mean surface temperatures have increased 0.5-1.0F since the late 19th century. The 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. Globally, sea level has risen 4-8 inches over the past century. Worldwide precipitation over land has increased by about one percent. The frequency of extreme rainfall events has increased throughout much of the United States."
"Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are likely to accelerate the rate of climate change. Scientists expect that the average global surface temperature could rise 1-4.5F (0.6-2.5C) in the next fifty years, and 2.2-10F (1.4-5.8C) in the next century, with significant regional variation. Evaporation will increase as the climate warms, which will increase average global precipitation. Soil moisture is likely to decline in many regions, and intense rainstorms are likely to become more frequent. Sea level is likely to rise two feet along most of the U.S. coast."
New space suits would be cool I guess, but I'm kind of left wondering what exactly these will be used for other than the occasional turn around the ISS before the Bush administration mothballs it and the space shuttle.
I see Boeing and Northrop have teamed for the CEV leading to the inevitable result of every NASA contract competition, a team led by Boeing competeing against one led by Lockheed, assuming they don't either collude or spy on one another as is theire history.
So, I assume maybe these suits will be used for the CEV and maybe landing on the moon 20 years from now if its not cancelled first, when it becomes obvious the U.S. is so deeply in debt it can't afford it.
I sure wish there would be a real maverick CEV team lead by Burt Rutan and T/Space but it appears inevitable it will be the same old, same old pork going to Boeing and Lockheed and T/Space will have to partner with and be swallowed by one of them.
If you read the description in the link of what the Crew Exploration Vehicle is, it sure sounds to me like they are going to spend 10-15 years to basicly redevelop Apollo. Considering it took less than a decade the first time you'd think they would do it in slightly less time, not way more time this time around, especially with better computers, more experience etc.
Lockheed is a fascinating study in the giant corporations that run the U.S. government... err... excuse me work for the U.S. government. By one counting the average tax payer in the U.S. pays $228 dollars just to Lockheed in a year. The F-22 fighter has turned in to the most expensive and delayed fighter aircraft in history, at maybe $300 million a copy.
All in all the CEV just sounds like yet another avenue for redistributing our tax dollars to Lockheed and Boeing and it will probably never fly anything useful. Maybe the will make it to the moon briefly just so people wont be completely pissed over the billins spent on it and then just like Apollo everyone will be wondering what the point is, and why we are spending so much money on it. Unless we develop fusion power first, which would be a better use for the money, and are mining fuel for it from the Moon I'm really at a loss as to what going to he moon again would be good for except as a stunt.
Mars is a far more worthwhile place to go, and put a permenent colony, but its pretty much an unattainable goal due to the simple fact that NASA/Boeing/Lockheed budgets are so extravagantly wasteful that we will never be able to afford it.
It should be noted that mplayer as installed on Gentoo supports WMV files fine on Linux, at least all the ones I've ever tried. I'm sure there are Linux users that don't install on religious grounds, not sure how "legal" it is, and its hard to say how many Linux installations are actually setup for it to work but there isn't any particular reason at this point Linux users need to exclude themselves from watching WMV movies.
I love Alpha Centauri too, and was hoping a new civ would build on it which is why I bought Call to Power. Call to Power has truly awful and I was sorry I wasted money on it. The tech research paths are awful and it just wasn't much fun to play compared to Alpha Centauri.
I dearly wish they would do an Alpha Centauri II, keep the best of it in tact, build on it, fix the AI's and reopen some servers for online play.
Only problem in Alpha Centauriy is the AI's in it are pretty lame especially once you master the game, after that it almost always ends up being disappointing to play. For example the probes will never learn how to approach a city or unit without being seen first and destroyed, so they attack over and over and basicly suicide. The AI often develop this massive forces of 20 jets and then never use them to attack if the odds are against 1 jet but sacrificing 3-4 would turn the course of a battle. In general the AI's seem aggressive early on but once you get big civilizations and you start attacking they often just sit there and never fight back effectively.
Strategy games like this need openess in the AI, so I sure hope thats what they are opening up. Open source AI development for games should yield some really interesting open source projects especially if you could develop generic concepts and reuse them in more than one game. Would probably develop skills in young programmers that would be useful in real AI projects later in life.
Alpha Centauri might still be fun if you could play it online so you are matched against players and not the lame AI's. Of course evenly match AC games on a big map take a day or more to play and its hard to find 2-5 online gamers that will hold together that long especially once they start losing.
Dude, whoever moderated this troll you have no sense of humor or any appreciation for the realities of the employee/manager relationship. I'm sure you would prefer to think managers are an employee best friends, and quote all the BS textbooks on being a "good manager" but what I wrote is the reality.
Maybe you are a manager trying to keep the truth from getting out by modding it down.
Maybe you are an employee in denial about the reality of what your manager's job is.
"as you would like to be treated if the positions were reversed."
Well that would be the naive geeks answer especially coming from a worker that would like their to sucker new managers in to treat them that way.
First here is a little ditty you should memorize:
Work is like a tree full of monkeys. If you are on top you look down and see nothing but smiling faces. If you are on the bottom you look up and see nothing but assholes about to shit on you. If you are on the top and things go bad you have a golden parachute so the landing is positively pleasant. If you are on the bottom when the monkey above you knocks you out of the free you break your fucking ass.
In the real world....here are some more realistic tips.
Your objective as a manager is to exploit the people that work for you to the maximum extent possible. You want to get the most, and best quality work you can, for the least amount of money. The more you exploit out of them the more there is for you and your manager friends in ridiculous salaries, bonuses, lavish trips, perks, secretaries with special skills, expense accounts and options.
Needless to say exploitation is a fine art. You need to exploit them just up to that invisible line where they will stop doing good work or quit. Though if they are expendable to you its OK if you push them until they quit so those people you can totally exploit. Fortunately most geeks are dumb and you can push them reaaalllllly far before they get pissed off and do something about it.
If the job market is tight you can ratchet up the exploitation.
If you value the employee you need to throw them just enough bones to make them think they are getting something. For example:
- When you work them 80 hour week death marches give them a small fraction of the uncompensated overtime off after you ship and before you start the next death march. Don't give them all of it back because then you have a gigantic hole in your next schedule and you look weak and like a chump to the managers above you.
- Give them a 1000 stock options, though this doesn't work as well as it used to when stock options were free candy. Make sure the options are priced at a point where there will have to be a major surge in the stock price for them to be worth anything. Also don't tell them that they are probably going to get laid off before they vest. Don't tell them all the managers get 100 times more options priced at pennies on the dollar and they will be worth buckets of money even if the managers tank the company and the stock price.
- Make out like what a great favor you are doing for even giving them the measly health plan and the IRA.
- If your company is tanking a quarter don't give any of your employees any raises or bonuses, in fact claw back any benefits you can. Have an all hands and give them a speech about the need for sacrifice. Don't tell them that the managers are in fact giving back nothing and are in fact still making out like bandits on bonuses, options and perks. If some employee, fed up with your sweatshop, challenges you on the subject, lie and then lay that employee off. That will encourage everyone else to shut up.
Slashdot Mirror
"Now this is NOT an insignificant study."
It is just more proof American's no longer deserve the government framework they are given under the Constitution and the founding fathers worked so hard on, cherished so much and thought so hard about.
American's really need an extended period under a really repressive dictator so they stop taking it for granted. Fortunately or unfortunately it appears likely they may get something approaching just that under the extended reign of the New Republican Party. The 10 trillion dollar question, if they do end up in something tantamount to a dictatorship, will they even care. As long as they are making a living and have something on TV every night to watch, even if it is censored in to the ground, will American's be happier under a dictatorship and having their government think for them.
You just wish American's would relearn:
- the importance of voting
- the importance of understanding the real issues and separating them from the scare tactics and BS both parties are shoveling out in their campaigns these days,
- the ability to tell good, solid candidates from incompetents who are only good at vicious campaigning (not that I'm naming any names)
- the independence to reject the candidates from the two parties if they suck and elect an independent or third party candidate who doesn't suck
Americans probably should learn a lesson from the Iraq elections. They turned out in pretty good numbers in spite of the danger and in spite of the fact they were pretty much a complete sham(oops, OK maybe they weren't such a great lesson).
Example from slashdot of people who doesn't deserve to live under America's constitution:
- Lord Kano who will vote for any incompetent for President as long as he says he is pro life and pro gun. The candidate can apparently completely screw him on every other issue and in fact no other issues even enter in to the decision.
- Numerous posters in a recent thread that said it was A-OK to torture people, because they are all airline hijacking terrorists, though in fact in many cases they aren't.
- Posters who've said its A-OK to give the President the power to arrest anyone he wants, anywhere in the world. hold them as long as he wants without due process, without access to a lawyer or their family, without charges, because he needs these powers to fight the never ending war on terrorism. OK as long as your cool with being arrested and disappeared from the face of the earth too, and are cool with spending the rest of your life being interrogated if not outright tortured.
"I would suggest that even the pork barrel gurus were probably blindsided by the incompetence of the management that was put in."
I think I covered why that is, though didn't spell it out. Not sure its universally true but all the government contracts I saw in my past life the top managers were working on the proposal and landing the contract. As soon as it was won, they put all the turkey managers on to the actual job, and all their best people move on to the next big proposal.
If you want to get big compensation from these companies you are more likely to get it if you work on the proposal team and land a big contract, because thats essentially when they book the revenue, because once the contract is signed the revenue over the duration of the contract is pretty much a given no matter what kind of losers you put on it. Its a lot easier to higher losers to put on it than top people. Working on government contracts is the pits and most good people are going to avoid if they can. Only losers are going to actually sit in the cube at the government agency billing the actual hours.
"Of course, much of this ridiculous per-unit cost is due the increasingly smaller total build orders the Pentagon has crafted. Less planes equals higher per-plane cost."
Think you are spreading misinformation too. You can't slip a schedule by a decade and not explode the cost. Lockheed has been spending money for the duration of that decade. A reason the number of planes ordered is dropping is because they've become so ridiculously expensive the U.S. can't afford the original number. And of course as the number of planes ordered drop, the price goes up, partially because they are spreading the huge R&D overruns over fewer planes but also because Lockheed wants to get as much money out of the dwindling contract as they can so everytime the number of planes is cut they are going to inflate the cost per plane. Its a vicious cycle and its screwing both the tax payer and the military.
As I read it the Air Force is going to decommission 800 existing, throughly capable, airplanes and replace them with less than 370 some F-22's which will further reduce Air Force capability. Sure there more capable but if you are ever in a big war or multiple theaters they are going to run out of planes.
"As I said, the F-22 is already operational."
I think there are operational planes and a training squadron. As I read it there wont be an operational squadron until December 2005 unless it slips again. Its hard to say for sure though since their schedule changes constantly. You can't have any confidence its really operational until its flying in combat. The B1B was finished decades ago and it was such a turkey its almost never used in combat(though they've sent it on a few combat missions just to save the total humiliation), the Air Force apparently prefers 50 year old B-52's.
"There was no failure."
Only if you are in denial. Lets see:
- Decade late
- Massive explosion in both total cost and cost per plane
- Total number of planes being delivered due to above is a fraction of the original target.
Don't think I call that success. F-15's still dominate the skies in every conflict and will for decades to come. The F-22 is residue from the cold war and its ridiculous overkill for the current realities where the main enemys are insurgents packing AK-47's, RPG's and IED's, or third world strongmen without any creditable air forces.
"The contract was for 23 helicopters, for $6.3 billion. About $260 million each. Hey, at least that's a lot less than the price by the rival contractor, Sikorsky."
I stand corrected the article I read this weekend must have been talking about just the first phase. All I can is that is an insane amount of money to squander just to ferry the President and his friends around. And of course a big chunk of the money is going in to trade deficit since the Italians are building the fuselage and the British the blades. At least Sikorsky would have put the money in to jobs in the U.S. and not send it to Italy. I gather it was partially a payoff to the British and Italians for supporting the misguided war in Iraq.
Don't recall ever using the term "Muslim unity". About the closest thing I said was Bin Laden is a towering hero in much of the Muslim world. That doesn't have anything to do with whether they are united. Nice rant otherwise but I'm not sure what it has to do with anything I said. When I referred to Al Qaida as scattered and a multi headed hydra now that is actually kind of the opposite of "unity". Its hundreds of little movements scattered around the globe, tapping in to local politics, tribes and situations. I think "united" might actually be easier for the U.S. to cope with, there would be a nice org chart to roll up.
Another place that absence of "unity" is going to be more, rather than less dangerous to American interests is the deep schism between Shia and Sunni. With the Shia rising to power in Iraq there is going to be all kinds of interest new pressures on American allies like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait, and a potential alliance between the Shia in Iran and Iraq against U.S. interests.
As for that last paragraph I think you've been reading a few to many Tom Clancy novels or playing video games of the same ilk. The U.S. and Pakistan have for whatever reason been completely impotent in the tribal areas of Pakistan and all the tribes there know it. I think the U.S. wouldn't and couldn't touch the place. If the U.S. were to have "AC-130s tear up your villages" it Pakistan it would be a political and diplomatic disaster and I imagine Musharaf would be dead or thrown out on his ear shortly thereafter.
Some things haven't really changed. If you are skilled insurgents, not wearing uniforms, not citing out in the open in tanks, and are adept at hiding in mountains, jungles, urban areas and generally underground, conventional military power is impotent, your grandiose visions of AC-130's aside. This was true in Vietnam and has been true multiple times over decades in Afghanistan and is true in Iraq.
Is this the same IBM who just sold their PC business to a Chinese company. The government is currently scrambling to evaluate the security implication of letting a Chinese company deliver personal computers to a bunch of government and military contracts IBM has already landed. Not sure it really gives them great street cred as a pillar of trustworthiness in government contracting.
Not sure you you can really cite any of big supercomputers as really illustrative of how a company will perform on a big and complex IT project. Company after company has delivered these bragging rights supercomputers, year after year and there aren't a lot of failures. Once you come up with a memory sharing scheme and an OS that will stay afloat across a lot of CPU's its not like there is really a lot of complex software to develop. Its mostly an exercise in logistics and trying to get the thing up and running before the CPU's in it are obsolete. You will notice that the government keeps buying these things over and over, because at the rate CPU's are advancing they tend to be obsolete before all the nodes are powered up. I wonder whats happened to the predecessors of these that were bought 5 and 10 years ago. A lot of hazardous scrap to recycle.
Heh. Post on slashdot and ask why IT projects fail and surprise, surprise all the geeks blame it on the managers, venting angst they still feel from some recent IT project that was a disaster and they blame on their manager.
Big government IT projects, and government contracts in general, fail because there is zero reason for them to succeed, they are designed to fail. Big companies who live to drain tax dollars out of the government, like Lockheed, CSC or ESD can fail on project after project and they will still have a thouroughly good chance of winning new ones. The government rarely withholds payment even if the project craters. So if the government never punishes failure why would contractors care if the succeed or fail. The worst that will happen is a little bad press, they wont get the next contract for the department they just cratered but there are always plenty more. After CSC botches it, ESD gets it, they botch and then they will try CSC again etc. Same thing for Boeing and Lockheed. Thanks to merger mania in the 90's there are only two aerospace giants left and its not much different for every other big government contracting sector. The government has to pick one or the other of the big players no matter if they've cratered on contract after contract.
You really need to understand how these companies are structured. They are well oiled machines for identifying opportunities, submitting impressive proposals, using undo influence and landing contracts. They put their best people on winning contracts. Once they win it its another story. Then they are just putting warm bodies in there to fill slots and bill hours as they march through milestones.
The irony is a contractor will probably make more money if the project goes bad. If the project goes bad their contract will be extended year after year. The civil servants will just throw more money at the project in the hope that if they just put in a little more they will turn the corner and pull it through.
If the project comes in on time and on budget the contractor will make less on it than if it goes bad and overruns, so why should come in on time and on budget.
Consider Lockheed's F-22 as described in the link above. In some respects it an impressive fighter but at $300 million a copy it ridiculously expensive. It was supposed to be operational a decade ago but the government just keeps pouring more and more money in to though the U.S. already completely dominates every other Air Force on the planet with the much cheaper planes it already has. Lockheed can continue to develop it for another 20 years and may never field an operational squadron. They were punished for their failure with another $200 billion contract for the Joint Strike Fighter. They were just given a contract to build 5 or 6 Presidential helicopers for $1.5 billion dollars. Thats $300 million each for a helicopter.
Why does the government do it. Simple, the government/contractor system has devolved in to massively corrupt system. There is a giant revolving door between government, the military and these big contractors. The ambitious and greedy are only taking government and civil service jobs so they can establish connections and influence, do favors for big companies, retire from government and cash in a massive way with executive positions at those same contractors. Any Air Force general whose ever steered contracts to Boeing or Lockheed has a gold plated job waiting when they retire, where they can continue to influence contracts pulling strings with people who use to be below them in the chain of command.
Darlene Druyan is another classic example. She was one of the Air Forces' top civil servants for procurement. She steered a ridiculously lucrative contract to Boeing for 767 tankers, and before the ink is dry she gets a lucrative senior executive position at Boeing. Only catch is it was so blatant that Congress said enough is enough and damended the
I should also add I wasn't exactly saying America is as bad as China on the oppression scale. I was saying their is an element of hypocrisy and denial for American's to start ranting about China arresting people in the middle of the night and making them disappear without a trial. Since 9/11 the U.S. has done this to thousands and thousands of people all around the world. You see the Chinese mostly just arrest people within their extended borders. The U.S. is arresting people without charges or trial all over the globe. One of the British citizens just released from Gitmo was arrested in Zambia of all places, he lost three years of his life living in a cage in Cuba and was never charged with anything by the U.S. or Britain. I'm inclined to say either you prove guilt and punish accordingly or you dont lock people in cages for years without due process.
So at least as far as arbitrary arrests go the U.S. can't lecture the Chinese any more.
As far as the invasion of Tibet well it was and is sad. But the U.S. did in fact engage in large scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of its own against the native American. They still live largely in apartheid states called Indian reservations which are usually quite desolate waste land, land the white man didn't want. In a cruel twist of irony the native American has discovered a hole in their relationship with the white man that enables the casino and is picking the white man clean. Ah, justice. More recently America's occupation of the Phillipines in the early 20th century was as noteworthy as China in Tibet for its brutality. The U.S. has also installed and supported some especially brutal puppet dictators in places like Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, Iran, etc.
All in all on the scale of brutality and oppression the U.S. is right up their contrary to popular opinion.
"The authorities are also very corrupt. America is in the middle of a scare, but China's been worse than this for a long while."
Well obviously we have a disconnect here. China must not be bad any more because the United States, bastion of "Freedom and Democracy" and Capitalism is currently engaged in a wholesale transfer of its jobs, intellectual property, wealth, and government debt to China. The great patriots, and defenders of Freedom, who currently run the United States couldn't possibly be turning America's fate over to an evil Socialist dictatorship. So which is it:
- China must be an OK place now or Clinton, Bush and Co. wouldn't have sold America down the river to it
- China is still an evil Socialist dictatorship and Clinton, Bush and Co. are knowingly selling America down the river to them which implies they are evil too
- American's are so blinded by the cheap labor and the money to be made that they are selling America's future down the river to make a quick buck now, and selling their children and grandchildren in to poverty. That couldn't possibly be it, considering how much time the Republicans spent during the campaign saying if the Democrats were elected all the children and grandchildren would die. If you look at the course the Republican's are taking both fiscally and in foreign affairs, I'm inclined to say they are probably the biggest danger to future generations America has seen.
- American's captains naively think that if they turn China in to a wealthy bastion of Capitalism that the Chinese will one day just tell their repressive socialist government that they can retire. I'm sure thats what they say to themselves when they are in denial, I just rather doubt the people running China are going to loosen their grip no matter how rich they get. China is apparently going to be a first in world history, a socialist dictatorship that is both not under economic boycott from the Western world and filthy rich.
"The roundups here, however, largely have had access to due process. You are confusing them with the Guantanimo bay crowd."
You are thoroughly mistaken. It is well known there were county jails in New Jersey and New York in particular, turned in to indefinite detention facilities for hundreds if not thousands of Muslims detained after 9/11. It wasn't even possible to find out the names of those being held, let alone get them access to lawyers, family visits or anything resembling due process. There was a long running legal battle going over it between the government and groups like the ACLU.
Here is one of many links you can find in Google on them. Not sure how many are still being held, the media does a poor job of covering things like hundreds of people being locked up indefinitely without charge, especially if they are just Muslim.
Is it any surprise stuff like this can happen in the U.S. You just have to read the replies I've gotten in this thread. They follow two tacks:
A. Denial it is even happening indicating ignorance of what your governments been doing to civil liberties since 9/11 though its really obvious and there have been long running court cases over it proving it has and is happening.
B. They are getting what they deserve, with the implications all Muslim's are hijackers and terrorists, or if the Government arrests them they must be guilty and its not necessary for them to get a day in court.
"Imagine if the us decided that captured enemy soldiers could sue for due process"
The detainees in New Jersey and New York were NOT enemy soldiers caught on a battlefield carrying arms. No one really knew who they were or what they were being held for. If you go down this road you are giving the U.S. government, and in particular its President, authorization to arrest anyone, any time, anywhere in the world, and doing anything he chooses to to them. It is not the kind of power that should be giving to any one person unless you are a big fan of dictators. In fact the U.S., since 9/11 HAS been arresting people all over the world with nothing more than the government's worthless word as to their guilt.
For the last while I've been on the verge of leaving America because I am so ashamed of what its become, but the more I think about the more I think the people in the American government that are doing all this wrongness and the people like those that posted here that are cheering them on are the ones that should leave. Beside which America has extended its tentacles around the entire globe so it not like you can escape the insanity of its current government. Maybe its time to fight instead of flee.
All in all you people don't seem to have the first clue what our Constitution stands for, or how important the rule of law is. You are the ones that ought to be ashamed because you are helping destroy the worlds first great experiment in "Freedom and Democracy". At this point might I suggest you either learn or remember what rule of law, the Declaration of Independence, the American revolution, and the American Constitution really stand for or GET THE HELL OUT. You sound more like you should be in Saddam's Iraq than in the world's oldest democracy. First and foremost our fore fathers were fighting tyranny, for you all to be embracing tyranny the way you are sullies everything America used to stand for. In doing a side by side between our founding fathers and our pathetic politicians and people of today, I've concluded American's today are inferior in every regard.
"PS You can be a communist and run for office in the us, if you are a non-communist, what happens if you run for office in China, HRM??????"
Hmmm. I guess you are forgeting what America was like the last time the Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House. It was during the 1950's and a certain Republican Congressmen named McCarthy persecuted anyone who had the slightest hint of being a Communi
"Bin Laden personally: Kicked out of Afghanistan, lost his host government and is living life as a hunted man."
Excepting in the Muslim world he is towering hero and more so everyday for making the U.S. look like chumps. George Bush as you recall spouted off about getting him "dead or alive" years ago and has since pretty much gone mum on the subject because he fixated on Iraq and Saddam instead of Al Qaida. The U.S. hasn't even come close to catching him, and as nearly as anyone can tell the U.S. isn't even trying very hard because its impaled itself on Iraq for no obvious reason. For a hunted man he sure manages to put out propaganda tapes at his whim, and has rallied a big chunk of the Muslim world to his cause.
"Al Quaeda generally: Lost their host country."
They've lost their "host country" in Afghanistan before. Bin Laden did a long stint in Sudan. Another really obvious parallel is when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and engaged in a decade long occupation and lesson in futility. They got along just fine then in the mountains of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan just as the probably are now.
You may forget but Al Qaida was formed in the Pakistan tribal areas with the aid of the CIA and Ronald Reagan. They devastated a militarily superior Soviet army and that failed war as much as anything sped the fall of the Soviet Union. These are patient people and they now how to fight and win long insurgencies and wars, and dont kid themselves like the U.S. does when it wins a brief battles and that is all the U.S. has won so far in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Pakistan's incursions in to the tribal areas have been half assed or half hearted at best. The U.S. and the Afghan government doesn't control even a majority of Afghanistan. Its dominance of the country is confined to Kabul, a few urban areas and a few U.S. military bases.
Besides that I'd say there is a pretty good chance Al Qaida expected to lose Afghanistan after 9/11 and almost certainly planned for the contingency. Many analysts suggest Al Qaida is more dangerous now that it was then. Then it was concentrated and easier to track. Now its a multiheaded hydra thats been scattered around the globe and there is no one place to look for it any more. If there is one place its the same place its always been the mountains of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. As much as you think things have changed they probably haven't. Though according to the CIA's own studies Iraq is probably their new training ground for insurgency because there is a big fat American bullseye and all the ingredients for a successful insurgency, including a Sunni population that increasingly hates Americans.
"I have imprisoned no one. I have every right to criticize them".
Since you live in a representative democracy if your government does something wrong, especially as egregiously wrong as unlawful wars, arrests without due process and various grades of torture, and you and your fellow citizens do nothing to stop it, and continue to fund it through your taxes, you are just as much to blame as the people that commit the offenses in your name.
Your one out is if you voted against the government that does wrong in your name at the first every opportunity. If you voted to keep Bush in the White House for a second term, in spite of the fact that they have been writing briefs endorsing torture and unlawful arrests, and fighting in the courts to acquire the power to make unlawful arrest and engage in torture, and have detained people for years without charge, often under the harshest of conditions, and launched wars based on fabrication, YOU ARE AS MUCH TO BLAME AS THEY ARE.
"Entering a nation with a fake or expired VISA is clearly wrong and unneccessary unless you're planning on committing more serious offenses"
OK you are either trolling or that is such an insane statement it barely warrants rebuttal. There are untold millions of people living in the U.S. without visa's and in violation of immigration laws. They are called illegal aliens and most of them are from Mexico and Central America. If EVERYONE of them is here to commit serious offenses this COUNTRY IS DOOMED. The main difference here is those millions and millions of ticking time bombs are Catholic and not Muslim so they are OK.
People cheat on visa's all the time. They come to the U.S. and they don't want to go back to their country so they stay after they expire. Its kind of hard for the U.S. to be all righteous about it since the U.S. makes almost zero effort to deport most illegals from this hemisphere. In fact, many places give them drivers licenses, education and heal care benefits. They are in fact welcomed in the U.S. with open arms because they are cheap exploitable labor. Half of America agricultural workers are illegal, and probably the same goes for hotel workers, gardeners, maids, kitchen workers etc.
Some of the infractions Muslims were arrested for were on student visa's where the person wasn't taking quite the prescribed number of hours of classes for one reason or another, trivial crap like that.
"That's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
Maybe you should try to make a coherent arguement to support your point, otherwise your post looks kind of stupid in its own right.
I assure you China is less likely to make a U.S. citizen disappear in the middle of the night than one of its own. That is true of any country arresting any other countries citizen. The reason is obvious, the person's embassy will get involved and it will quickly turn in to a diplomatic incident. If you arrest one of your own citizens, its unlikely anyone but his family and friends are going to care, unless the person has international notariety.
As far as bypassing censorship goes that is a case where there would be an obvious double standard between foreigners and Chinese. In bypassing a firewall the foreigner isn't going to learn anything he probably doesn't already know and isn't likely to be more corrupted than he already is. The foreigner is only going to get behind on current events thanks to censorship. Censorship as China practices it is intended to be life long to help insure all of its citizen's, who never live outside the country, are NEVER exposed to foreign concepts.
"than terrorist plots to fly hijacked planes into buildings"
Hate to break it to you, dumbass, but its unlikely any of the people the U.S. arrested on visa violations after 9/11 had anything to do with 9/11 or hijacking planes, or crashing them into buildings. They were mostly guilty of being Muslim and being in the U.S. after 9/11 and at worst violating their visas.
Even if they are guilty of something, we used to have this little thing we called due process and the rule of law which said if someone does something wrong you prove it in a court of law, instead of letting the government be judge, jury and hangman.
There is a total of one person the U.S. has arrested in the U.S., Zacharias Moussaoui, that may or may not have been involved in 9/11, and ironicly he is actually getting a trail, though the DOJ has botched that trial at every turn.
Your post is a golden example of whats gone wrong with America since 9/11. You are so enraged over it you fail to recognize a couple of basic things:
- If, because of 9/11 the U.S. shreds it Constitution, tramples everyone's civil liberties and turns in to an authoritarian state, to steal a Fox/Republican party jingo, "The Terrorists Have Won".
- Guerilla attacks like 9/11 and all those before it are designed precisely to cause a kneejerk reaction in the target country. The kneejerk reactions usually causes more damage than the original attack in the end.
- First they cause the target government to become more oppressive as it engages in a futile attempt to stop further attacks, in the process it makes its people unhappy with that government and less supportive of it.
- Second the kneejerk reaction causes massive economic damage as the target government squanders money trying, usually futilely, to prevent an attack, can you say Department of Homeland Security, TSA, war in Iraq etc. It also puts a drag on the whole economy just from all the new security overhead and the paranoia.
Some of America's kneejerk reactions to 9/11:
o Launching a fabricated war in Iraq
o Torturing people at various secret and not so secret site around the world
o Arbitrary arrests of people without due process
o Strong arming and trampling the sovereignty of nations around the world
All of these have served to erase any good will the U.S. had around the world right after 9/11 and has turned America into a country that is despised and feared in many if not most corners of the world, among former friends and enemies alike.
All in all Bin Laden and Al Qaida must be overjoyed with the damage the Bush administration has done to itself and America's reputation. Their plan has at every step worked better than they probably could have imagined thanks to the fact that America's leadership is acutely short of basic wisdom, much like yourself.
America should have taken the moral high road at every turn since 9/11 instead of taking every degrading low road possible. If it had most of the world would be helping it in the war on Al Qaida instead of just shuddering everytime the U.S. makes another strategic blunder.
Duh...
Do you mean when you go there with a fist full of American dollars its way cheaper, or do you mean if you are living there working for $0.30-$1.00 an hour its way cheaper.
In case you didn't know the Chinese peg their currency to the U.S. dollar to insure that its at an artificially low level so EVERYTHING in China is cheap compared to America by design. That's why Chinese goods are so cheap in America, and why the are wiping out whole sectors of the American economy because no one in the U.S. can compete on this tilted playing field. And its why American's are rushing to China, like this guy probably is, to try and cash in on the boom there while the American economy is tanking. China is the next dot.com bubble and a gold rush in one.
I was overjoyed to hear a few days ago some of our elected representatives in Congress are going to attempt to pass a bill to pass tariffs on Chinese goods though I wager it will die a quick death at the hands of the Bush administration and the New Republican party. These Congressmen don't really even want tariffs but they do want to put enough pressure on China to force them to let their currency float and force them to be subject to market forces and at least eliminate one of the tools they are using to destroy the U.S. economy. The U.S. simply can't sustain a half trillion a year trade deficit for very long. All of the wealth the U.S. treasures so much will be quickly drained out of the country.
You might retort that the U.S. economy is doing just fine. Well a reason it looks fine is cheap Chinese goods and expansion by American companies in China are making the U.S. look prosperous but it is false prosperity, and eventually a grim reaper will surface from the trade deficit, and the complete collapse of productive work in America.
They are very unlikely to do this to a foreign citizen unless what you are doing is or can be construed to be espionage or subversion. They are welcoming foreigners with open arms because they want your capital, skills, knowledge etc. so they are less likely to come down on you than one of their own citizens.
If what you were doing was offensive enough to them and you got caught you would almost certainly be deported which is true of just about any country where you are on a visa. If you are openly violating their law there is always a chance you would go to jail but thats true of any country. The U.S. embassy probably would try to spring you unless you were getting what you deserved.
At this point I think its a subject of debate on whether the China or the U.S. is actually worse in this regard. Hundreds if not thousands of foreigners have been locked up in the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11 without due process, without lawyers, without trials, without access to their families, and often under varying degrees of stress, sleep deprivation for example, if not rising to the level of torture. About the only thing many of them were guilty of are various visa infractions, which should at most have resulted in deportation, not indefinite detention without due process.
China probably does it on a larger scale but the U.S. and Americans no longer have the slightest morale high ground on which to challenge oppression and lawlessness in China. Certainly censorship isn't as bad in the U.S. but as far as unlawful arrests go the U.S. is at the same level as China. You can thank the Bush administration for lowering the U.S. to the same level has authoritarian states around the globe in this respect.
Yes but if global warming does starts happening places downwind from the ocean are going to get bigger rains, potentially a lot bigger as the ocean temperature rises. Places that don't benefit from the big rains might potentially get drier. The thing about global warming is that its not likely it will be just one kind of climate change across the whole planet. The only thing that is likely is weather extremes will increase in amplitude because there will be a lot more energy in the system. Obviously increased number and severity of hurricanes is the most obvious example but you may have droughts in other areas too.
There are some theorizing that the oceans have been sinking some of the green house gasses, especially carbon dioxide, but they might reach a point the suddenly stop doing that when they are saturated at which point global warming might suddenly accelerate much to our surprise and detriment, though again like just about everything on this subject its speculation.
In fairness to the EPA/NSF report that was only a small part of it on warming. It is a quite balanced report and hits the quantities and sources of greenhouse gases as well. It does acknowledge that CO2 respiration from plants is in fact a major, and poorly understood, factor in CO2 levels. But it is possible that nature was maintaining a balance and man may be tipping that balance.
"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%. These increases have enhanced the heat-trapping capability of the earths atmosphere. Sulfate aerosols, a common air pollutant, cool the atmosphere by reflecting light back into space; however, sulfates are short-lived in the atmosphere and vary regionally."
" In the United States, approximately 6.6 tons (almost 15,000 pounds carbon equivalent) of greenhouse gases are emitted per person every year. And emissions per person have increased about 3.4% between 1990 and 1997. Most of these emissions, about 82%, are from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and power our cars. The remaining emissions are from methane from wastes in our landfills, raising livestock, natural gas pipelines, and coal, as well as from industrial chemicals and other sources."
Whether burning fossil fuels is going to trigger significant global warming certainly can be debated but I think we can safely say burning them is a bad idea and we should probably stopif we can. Oil is going to start becoming relatively scarce soon anyway and when it does prices are going to soar unless consumption declines rapidly. Unfortunately with China and India booming economicly and embracing the excess of American lifestyle both in cars and power consumption its likely they will rapidly aggravate the scarcity of oil and its price.
Unfortunately places like China, the U.S and Germany probably have enough coal to burn for centuries and if there is going to be a man made origin to global warming, burning coal will be it. The Bush administration is keen to trumpet advances in "clean coal" power plants but they gloss over that they in fact aren't reducing carbon dioxide emissions at all, just nitrates and sulfates.
It should also be noted that we use organic compounds for a lot of things besides energy production. You wonder if maybe we should be conserving fossil fuels to use for organic chemisty instead of squandering them producing energy.
All in all, if you were to ask me, the BEST thing America could be doing right now is an all out Apollo level effort to make fusion power feasible and viable. It would have been a way better option than squandering $280 billion and counting on Iraq, tax cuts for the wealthy or NASA's misguided CEV program which is little more than an attempt to rerun and recapture the glory of Apollo with no real payoff that I can see(though we may want to mine the Moon for fuel if we had fusion rectors first).
Here is a Washington Post piece on the Bush administration's efforts to suppress this kind of report, at the EPA no less, though I wager unless its coming from Fox news you will probably consider it left wing propaganda since I imagine you are a card carrying member of the American Gestapo(a.k.a the New Repulican Party). You probably shouldn't refer to yourself as incompetent, its not a sign of the strength you need in your line of work :)
Here is a good resource on global warming from EPA and National Science Foundation though there estimates are little lower, 6 celsius is there upper end over the next century. The most impressive thing about this web site is that its created by people in the U.S. government, the Bush White House hasn't shut it down and they haven't fired the people who created it, so shhhhh don't tell them about it because they must know its there because they really hate anyone who says stuff like this.
One of the more interesting sections. Those of you who've been through the big rains on the West Coast and the big snows on the East Coast should note that intense rainstorms and presumably snow storms are a potential indicator of global warming as the oceans evaporate off more water as they warm.
"Global mean surface temperatures have increased 0.5-1.0F since the late 19th century. The 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. Globally, sea level has risen 4-8 inches over the past century. Worldwide precipitation over land has increased by about one percent. The frequency of extreme rainfall events has increased throughout much of the United States."
"Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are likely to accelerate the rate of climate change. Scientists expect that the average global surface temperature could rise 1-4.5F (0.6-2.5C) in the next fifty years, and 2.2-10F (1.4-5.8C) in the next century, with significant regional variation. Evaporation will increase as the climate warms, which will increase average global precipitation. Soil moisture is likely to decline in many regions, and intense rainstorms are likely to become more frequent. Sea level is likely to rise two feet along most of the U.S. coast."
New space suits would be cool I guess, but I'm kind of left wondering what exactly these will be used for other than the occasional turn around the ISS before the Bush administration mothballs it and the space shuttle.
... err ... excuse me work for the U.S. government. By one counting the average tax payer in the U.S. pays $228 dollars just to Lockheed in a year. The F-22 fighter has turned in to the most expensive and delayed fighter aircraft in history, at maybe $300 million a copy.
I see Boeing and Northrop have teamed for the CEV leading to the inevitable result of every NASA contract competition, a team led by Boeing competeing against one led by Lockheed, assuming they don't either collude or spy on one another as is theire history.
So, I assume maybe these suits will be used for the CEV and maybe landing on the moon 20 years from now if its not cancelled first, when it becomes obvious the U.S. is so deeply in debt it can't afford it.
I sure wish there would be a real maverick CEV team lead by Burt Rutan and T/Space but it appears inevitable it will be the same old, same old pork going to Boeing and Lockheed and T/Space will have to partner with and be swallowed by one of them.
If you read the description in the link of what the Crew Exploration Vehicle is, it sure sounds to me like they are going to spend 10-15 years to basicly redevelop Apollo. Considering it took less than a decade the first time you'd think they would do it in slightly less time, not way more time this time around, especially with better computers, more experience etc.
Lockheed is a fascinating study in the giant corporations that run the U.S. government
All in all the CEV just sounds like yet another avenue for redistributing our tax dollars to Lockheed and Boeing and it will probably never fly anything useful. Maybe the will make it to the moon briefly just so people wont be completely pissed over the billins spent on it and then just like Apollo everyone will be wondering what the point is, and why we are spending so much money on it. Unless we develop fusion power first, which would be a better use for the money, and are mining fuel for it from the Moon I'm really at a loss as to what going to he moon again would be good for except as a stunt.
Mars is a far more worthwhile place to go, and put a permenent colony, but its pretty much an unattainable goal due to the simple fact that NASA/Boeing/Lockheed budgets are so extravagantly wasteful that we will never be able to afford it.
It should be noted that mplayer as installed on Gentoo supports WMV files fine on Linux, at least all the ones I've ever tried. I'm sure there are Linux users that don't install on religious grounds, not sure how "legal" it is, and its hard to say how many Linux installations are actually setup for it to work but there isn't any particular reason at this point Linux users need to exclude themselves from watching WMV movies.
Civilization "Call to Power" was awful.
I love Alpha Centauri too, and was hoping a new civ would build on it which is why I bought Call to Power. Call to Power has truly awful and I was sorry I wasted money on it. The tech research paths are awful and it just wasn't much fun to play compared to Alpha Centauri.
I dearly wish they would do an Alpha Centauri II, keep the best of it in tact, build on it, fix the AI's and reopen some servers for online play.
Only problem in Alpha Centauriy is the AI's in it are pretty lame especially once you master the game, after that it almost always ends up being disappointing to play. For example the probes will never learn how to approach a city or unit without being seen first and destroyed, so they attack over and over and basicly suicide. The AI often develop this massive forces of 20 jets and then never use them to attack if the odds are against 1 jet but sacrificing 3-4 would turn the course of a battle. In general the AI's seem aggressive early on but once you get big civilizations and you start attacking they often just sit there and never fight back effectively.
Strategy games like this need openess in the AI, so I sure hope thats what they are opening up. Open source AI development for games should yield some really interesting open source projects especially if you could develop generic concepts and reuse them in more than one game. Would probably develop skills in young programmers that would be useful in real AI projects later in life.
Alpha Centauri might still be fun if you could play it online so you are matched against players and not the lame AI's. Of course evenly match AC games on a big map take a day or more to play and its hard to find 2-5 online gamers that will hold together that long especially once they start losing.
Dude, whoever moderated this troll you have no sense of humor or any appreciation for the realities of the employee/manager relationship. I'm sure you would prefer to think managers are an employee best friends, and quote all the BS textbooks on being a "good manager" but what I wrote is the reality.
Maybe you are a manager trying to keep the truth from getting out by modding it down.
Maybe you are an employee in denial about the reality of what your manager's job is.
"as you would like to be treated if the positions were reversed."
Well that would be the naive geeks answer especially coming from a worker that would like their to sucker new managers in to treat them that way.
First here is a little ditty you should memorize:
Work is like a tree full of monkeys.
If you are on top you look down and see nothing but smiling faces.
If you are on the bottom you look up and see nothing but assholes about to shit on you.
If you are on the top and things go bad you have a golden parachute so the landing is positively pleasant.
If you are on the bottom when the monkey above you knocks you out of the free you break your fucking ass.
In the real world....here are some more realistic tips.
Your objective as a manager is to exploit the people that work for you to the maximum extent possible. You want to get the most, and best quality work you can, for the least amount of money. The more you exploit out of them the more there is for you and your manager friends in ridiculous salaries, bonuses, lavish trips, perks, secretaries with special skills, expense accounts and options.
Needless to say exploitation is a fine art. You need to exploit them just up to that invisible line where they will stop doing good work or quit. Though if they are expendable to you its OK if you push them until they quit so those people you can totally exploit. Fortunately most geeks are dumb and you can push them reaaalllllly far before they get pissed off and do something about it.
If the job market is tight you can ratchet up the exploitation.
If you value the employee you need to throw them just enough bones to make them think they are getting something. For example:
- When you work them 80 hour week death marches give them a small fraction of the uncompensated overtime off after you ship and before you start the next death march. Don't give them all of it back because then you have a gigantic hole in your next schedule and you look weak and like a chump to the managers above you.
- Give them a 1000 stock options, though this doesn't work as well as it used to when stock options were free candy. Make sure the options are priced at a point where there will have to be a major surge in the stock price for them to be worth anything. Also don't tell them that they are probably going to get laid off before they vest. Don't tell them all the managers get 100 times more options priced at pennies on the dollar and they will be worth buckets of money even if the managers tank the company and the stock price.
- Make out like what a great favor you are doing for even giving them the measly health plan and the IRA.
- If your company is tanking a quarter don't give any of your employees any raises or bonuses, in fact claw back any benefits you can. Have an all hands and give them a speech about the need for sacrifice. Don't tell them that the managers are in fact giving back nothing and are in fact still making out like bandits on bonuses, options and perks. If some employee, fed up with your sweatshop, challenges you on the subject, lie and then lay that employee off. That will encourage everyone else to shut up.
Might have a few more later.