In July, the CIA pressured the govt of Cyprus to investigate Cyprus Indymedia in July. When the Cyprus govt finally admitted this publicly, it made front page news there.
What does the US govt plan to do to Indymedia in November, I wonder?
Here's some background on what the Italian govt had in mind when they requested the "assistance" of the US Feds. A federal prosecutor in Italy, Marina Plazzi, has stated that she is investigating Indymedia because of possible "support of terrorism". Apparently this is about supposedly positive postings after an attack on Italian soldiers in the Iraqi city of Nassiriya last November. "We asked the FBI for help alongside the Italian Department of Justice", federal prosecutor Plazzi said. The Italian Minister of Justice, Roberto Castelli, has so far refused to speak out on the proceedings of the FBI.
The parliamentary representatives of the Italian government parties are clearly less reticent. On Sunday, Mario Landolfi, spokesman of the neo-fascist party "Alleanza Nazionale" (AN), announced the seizure of the computers served "the enforcement of the law". Note that the AN are coalition partners in the current Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi, our Partner In The War On Terror(tm).
Last November, 17 AN delegates, including the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, demanded the shut-down of Indymedia in a joint statement. Back then, Paolo Valentino, state secretary in the Italian Department of Justice and also a member of AN, had announced possible cooperation with the USA.
This week's seizure of Indymedia servers appears to be what he was hoping for.
>> This begs the questions: Why did the Home >> Office agree? > > Who knows. But that has nothing to do with the > US.
How do you know? Do you think the UK govt never does favors for the US govt?
>> What does this action say about freedom of >> expression and freedom of the press?
> That you'd better now reveal the identities of > undercover law enforcement officers, with thinly > veiled threats?
Where does it say that their identities were revealed, and threats made? As far as I can tell, their photos were posted up, along with a message that they were Swiss cops. That's not illegal in the US or UK. I haven't seen any threats yet, not even in the reposts that I've seen, which have now inevitably followed on sites around the net.
If the govts involved were really interested in protecting the identity of the two cops, seizing the servers seems a pretty strange way to go about it: it's a guarantee of the widest possible publicity.
> And "probably" accompanied by the FBI? They > don't even know that for sure; they just know > that the subpoena ORIGINATED from the FBI; for > all we know, US FBI agents weren't even there.
From your original submission above: "Because Indymedia's hosting company, Rackspace.com, is a U.S. company, the FBI coordinated the request and accompanied UK Metropolitan Police on the seizure under the auspices of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT)"
So did they or did they not accompany? If we don't know if FBI agents were there, then we don't know if London Met officers were there either. Which article were you quoting? Or do you have firsthand knowledge of the operation?
All these years after the Cold war, the US continues to develop an offensive bioweapons capability, which is why they refuse to sign a Bioweapons Convention.
As if genuine political belief fell into two simple, easily identified categories of "Liberal" and "Conservative". Do Libertarians no longer exist in the US today? Anarchists? Socialists? Greens? Etc. etc.
I usually find that studies of human biology underpinning human behavior say far more about the prejudices of the scientists conducting the research, than about any underlying scientific observations they might be "discovering".
And the rigidly dualist categorization of ideology into center-right and far-right creeps into so much of daily life in the US, where you are continually required to choose ideological Coke or ideological Pepsi. Water is not on the menu.
That's a good idea too, but I think that this particular issue is more about deciding up-front whether you want to donate your organs. Presumed consent laws offer many advantages for this.
I said "ethics and praxis". I wasn't talking about fairness in donor organ distribution, I was talking about avoiding getting "retired early" for your valuable liver.
I didn't even begin to outline the complexity of the ethical issues. That'd take weeks...
One possible means of reducing the donor organ shortages in the US and UK could be the adoption of something like the "presumed consent" laws that operate in Europe. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, and Spain, consent for removal of organs for donation is presumed unless you express your objection in advance, whereas in the US the opposite is true.
Your point is a good one. But it might not work like that. Suppose you were in an accident, and someone with authority to sign your Do Not Resuscitate order didn't like you, but wanted one of your family to be able to cash in. You'd be DNR'd, and your organs would be auctioned off in accordance with your wishes.
The controls on the sale of organs are the end result of a very complex debate on the ethics and praxis of handling human tissues.
That's not evidence of Dubya's virtue, that's evidence of the virtue of the US system, which at least makes an attempt at guaranteeing free elections, and prohibits staying in for more than two terms. Saddam racked up the bodycount that he did because he's been in since 1978.
And the US system also ensures that the power is spread across a cabinet. So it's meaningless to compare a US President's criminal record with that of an Iraqi dictator, who has no "last-call" bell when 8 years are up. Rather, the comparison should be between the current cabinet and Saddam: Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Negroponte , etc.
"Last I checked there weren't any mass graves filled with turkish insurgents on GWB's resume."
If you're talking about the Kurds, I would give several people in the current White House full credit for their part in this. And full credit for helping Saddam brutally crush the Shia uprising too, ensuring that he stayed in power. Saddam couldn't have done it on his own.
[spoken] I never really wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to be...a...a SYSADMIN!
[system engineer choir and shift supervisor enter, music strikes up]
Oh, I'm a sysadmin and I'm OK, I grep all night and I chown all day.
[choir] He's a sysadmin and he's OK, He greps all night and he chowns all day.
I ping the nodes, I do PM, I awk and perl and sed. I've got a Star Wars lunchbox, And Tron sheets on my bed!
[choir] He pings the nodes, he does PM, He awks and perls and seds. He's got a Star Wars lunchbox, And Tron sheets on his bed!
I ping the nodes, I change the rates, I fork the processes. I wish that all my lusers would catch some rare disease!
[choir, growing slightly uncomfortable] He pings the nodes, he changes rates, He forks the processes. He wishes all his lusers would catch some rare disease!
[choir brightens as they repeat chorus]
I ping the nodes, I lock the/home partition and umount. I post.gifs of my boss's daughter from his own account!
[choir] He pings the nodes, he locks the/home partition and umounts??
[shift supervisor, in tears] Oh Bevis! And I thought you were so dedicated.
(quoted from Martin Martin "I wish to register a complaint about this system" Booda)
"If Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs, all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war. He'd still be alive, running the country, and killing whoever he pleased, whenever he pleased."
Rather like the current "President" of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. His favourite method of dealing with dissidents is to boil them alive.
But there are no plans to invade and bomb Uzbekistan since, like Saddam in the 1980s, Karimov's presently obeying orders from Washington, doing as he's told, and keeping the pipeline projects on track. This makes him Our Ally In The War On Terror(tm). I fully expect him to become Our Eternal Enemy(tm) in about 4 or 5 years time though.
Unlike most voters, however, I will blame President Kerry, Presidents Bush I and Bush II, President Clinton, President Reagan, President Carter, etc, for perpetuating a foreign policy which has done so much damage to the long-term interests of the United States and the rest of the world.
I had the misfortune to buy an HP Vectra from them for my brother , and the Windows install was in one huge monolithic blob on a CD: you had to install all the crap at once, even if you only wanted Windows or a certain driver. That would have been fine if they had shipped a stable build that actually worked. But the config for the Zip drive was both wrong and out-of-date, and downloading latest Zip drivers from Iomega didn't seem to help the persistent crashes and freezes.
So I rang up their "Tech support", to ask about their recommended fix. She walked me through the script, starting with "is the computer switched on Mr. (my surname)?", and suffixing every single question in the script with "Mr. (my surname)". This was clearly their attempt at personalizing "Customer Care", and make me feel like a Valued Individual(tm), but all it did was make me want to smack the "Customer Care" out of her with a blunt axe.
Eventually we came to the end of the script, and no closer to a solution. She now advised me to re-install from the massive blob CD, which would fdisk all my data to oblivion. I explained that I'd done that already, and it hadn't worked.
"It looks like the installation CD as shipped has a problem." "No that's not possible Mr. (my surname). They're thoroughly tested."
"Well sure it is. Maybe it worked before, but doesn't work on the latest hardware." "No that's not possible Mr. (my surname)"
"Why not? "What do you think could be wrong with it Mr. (my surname)?"
"How about the out-of-date drivers?" "How would that crash the machine Mr. (my surname)?"
"If there's a bug that didn't show up before, but shows up under a new revision of BIOS, or a new ethernet card, or new firmware in the Zip drive, and so on." "I don't see how that's possible Mr. (my surname)."
"Well it says on the Iomega site that there's a known memory leak issue with the version of drivers that you've shipped, for a start." "I'm sorry, what was that you said Mr. (my surname)? A memory LEAK?"
"Memory leak, yes. I can give you the address of the bug report on the Iomega site." (muffled laughter) "There's no thing as a 'memory LEAK', Mr. (my surname)." (more muffled laughter, now joined by her colleagues, phone covered up and uncovered as she talks)
At this point I was starting to get irritated. Paying for incompetence and ignorance is one thing, but getting laughed at for politely explaining to someone what I paid them to already know is quite another.
So I told her to put her supervisor on the phone, right now. She sighed, and said "OK, Mr. (my surname), I'll put him on right away!" (more muffled laughter).
The supervisor was no better informed than his idiot underlings, but at least he was willing to listen and learn when I explained to him how poor allocation and deallocation management can cause a failure to reclaim discarded memory, and he accepted that there really was something called a memory leak, and that the computing world outside of CompUSA had known about it for years, and that Iomega had reported the bug exactly as I'd described it.
But CompUSA never did fix my problem. So I backed up my brother's data, and rebuilt his PC from scratch with a borrowed Windows CD, figuring it was worth losing out on the "free" Norton AV etc. that came on HP's monolithic blob-CD, if that's what it took to get a PC that didn't freeze randomly a dozen times a day.
Now, whenever one of us runs into a "professional" who wouldn't know his own job if it jumped up and bit his dick off, we usually look at each other and say in unison "there's no such thing as a 'memory LEAK', Mr. (my surname)".
I guess you could say that taxes are set by the voters, since we're all too dumb to consider the price tag when we demand stuff like universal healthcare...
Actually, US voters are too dumb to consider the pricetag of NOT having universal healthcare. The "efficiencies" generated by competitive private coverage are eaten up many times over by the costs of form filling for multiple providers and insurers, among other things.
The United States spends a larger share of GDP on health than any other major industrialized country. In 2000 the United States devoted 13.3 percent of the GDP to health compared with 10.6-10.7 percent each in Germany and Switzerland and 9.1-9.5 percent in Canada and France, countries with the next highest shares.
In 2001 national health care expenditures in the United States totaled $1.4 trillion, increasing 8.7 percent from the previous year compared with a 7.4 percent increase in 2000. In the mid-1990s annual growth had slowed somewhat, following an average annual growth rate of 11 percent during the 1980s. According to the figures released by the White House this January, health spending now accounts for nearly 15 percent of the USA's economy, the largest share on record.
Yet around 40-43 million people in the US presently have no health insurance according to snapshot figures, and the longer term total of uninsured months per person is probably a lot higher.
The USA continues to be the only country in the G8 without some kind of universal healthcare, and the only winners are the private health corporations and the lawyers.
Export of military equipment from the UK to Chile FCO 7/2433
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office have reportedly held back all documents relating to the day of the coup, however. I assume they are waiting until Kissinger and other US parties who supported and assisted the coup die of old age, before these are released.
The overthrow of President Allende in Chile presented the Foreign Office with a refugee problem. "The usual fellow-travelling civil rights organisations will do their best to confuse the distinction [between] respected democratic socialists and undesirables further to the left," a department minute noted. "In view of the growth of terrorism in this country we really cannot knowingly risk admitting terrorists as refugees."
So calling inconvenient refugees "terrorists" is nothing new, e.g. abandoning thousands on the Chilean left to be murdered by the Pinochet regime, and slamming your doors to legitimate asylum seekers fleeing from "valued trading partners".
The Washington Times is owned by the Unification Church, also known as the "Moonies". They are quite right-wing, even by US standards.
The Moonies now also own the once-great United Press International, UPI. Just about all the good journalists left UPI in disgust when the takeover happened a few years back, and it turned into a sort of National Enquirer Newsfeed, practically overnight.
WSIS might sound like a boring bureaucratic exercise, but there's a strong chance that governments are going to walk away from it with new international agreements in their pockets to pass laws in their own countries restricting the free flow of information.
Quoting the "WSIS? We Seize!" press release:
'While the official agenda of this UN/ITU Summit talks about "free access to information", "the digital divide" and "equality of opportunities", in reality its doors are closed, its discussions exclusive and the agendas of those who attend it concealed. What's more, the right to demonstrate and protest has been suspended in Geneva at this time, as the usual parade of despots and tyrants fly in to Switzerland to define policy for their own citizens, and the rest of the world, based on the agendas of corporate multinationals, media conglomerates and infrastructure owners.
Geneva03 is a temporary network of groups and individuals set up to carry out agitational, educational and communications work during both the G8 and the WSIS. Geneva03 considers it critical to show, during such a display of media power and control, that independent groups and people have the ability to create their own media, to share media, self publish, build networks and communicate freely and autonomously. That's why we've titled our events during this time WSIS? WE SEIZE! We do not consider that negotiation and supplication before the altar of the UN will produce information autonomy for all. Instead, we are taking our autonomy now, using the means and technologies at our disposal: the Internet, peer to peer networks, Free and Open Source Software, community wireless infrastructures, pirate television and radio and streamed media. Beyond questions of communications technology, We Seize! seeks to open a wide-ranging discussion on the new social conditions that constitute today's world about which the WSIS has little or nothing to say: media concentration, expansive intellectual property regimes, casualised and immaterial labour and migration.
We insist that this urge to speak, to hear and be heard, is irrepressible. The Geneva03 group returns to Geneva following major attempts at repression during the G8 this year, in which the group were targetted by police whilst running an independent media centre. No charges were brought against the group, because - whatever the establishment would like us to believe - it is still lawful to freely express ourselves. We must, however, continue to exercise this ability, to expand and test it in diverse situations, if we are not to lose the freedom and potential that defines us as people.
Communication, language and information are essential to understanding both control and liberation in this new millenium. They are simultaneously the site of the most repressive and totalitarian suppression and disciplining we have seen since the 1950s and, we believe, the basis of a powerful, growing autonomous movement. Ultimately this movement must cut to the very heart of communication: for what we are able to articulate, we are able to create. We must speak of a new world without fear, and with all the creativity, energy and commitment we can find.' (end quote)
If you want to know more, here are some useful links:
I've searched my copy, but can't find that logo.
Are you sure you're using the same version as I am? Is yours endorsed by Art Linkletter? Well now. I didn't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
In July, the CIA pressured the govt of Cyprus to investigate Cyprus Indymedia in July. When the Cyprus govt finally admitted this publicly, it made front page news there.
In August, the US Secret Service harassed NY Indymedia's ISP Calyx during the Republican National Convention, making intimidating requests to the ISP, demanding home contact details of Indymedia server admins, etc.
Now it's the FBI's turn.
What does the US govt plan to do to Indymedia in November, I wonder?
Here's some background on what the Italian govt had in mind when they requested the "assistance" of the US Feds. A federal prosecutor in Italy, Marina Plazzi, has stated that she is investigating Indymedia because of possible "support of terrorism". Apparently this is about supposedly positive postings after an attack on Italian soldiers in the Iraqi city of Nassiriya last November. "We asked the FBI for help alongside the Italian Department of Justice", federal prosecutor Plazzi said. The Italian Minister of Justice, Roberto Castelli, has so far refused to speak out on the proceedings of the FBI.
The parliamentary representatives of the Italian government parties are clearly less reticent. On Sunday, Mario Landolfi, spokesman of the neo-fascist party "Alleanza Nazionale" (AN), announced the seizure of the computers served "the enforcement of the law".
Note that the AN are coalition partners in the current Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi, our Partner In The War On Terror(tm).
Last November, 17 AN delegates, including the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, demanded the shut-down of Indymedia in a joint statement. Back then, Paolo Valentino, state secretary in the Italian Department of Justice and also a member of AN, had announced possible cooperation with the USA.
This week's seizure of Indymedia servers appears to be what he was hoping for.
>> This begs the questions: Why did the Home
>> Office agree?
>
> Who knows. But that has nothing to do with the
> US.
How do you know? Do you think the UK govt never does favors for the US govt?
>> What does this action say about freedom of
>> expression and freedom of the press?
> That you'd better now reveal the identities of
> undercover law enforcement officers, with thinly
> veiled threats?
Where does it say that their identities were revealed, and threats made? As far as I can tell, their photos were posted up, along with a message that they were Swiss cops. That's not illegal in the US or UK.
I haven't seen any threats yet, not even in the reposts that I've seen, which have now inevitably followed on sites around the net.
If the govts involved were really interested in protecting the identity of the two cops, seizing the servers seems a pretty strange way to go about it: it's a guarantee of the widest possible publicity.
> And "probably" accompanied by the FBI? They
> don't even know that for sure; they just know
> that the subpoena ORIGINATED from the FBI; for
> all we know, US FBI agents weren't even there.
From your original submission above:
"Because Indymedia's hosting company, Rackspace.com, is a U.S. company, the FBI coordinated the request and accompanied UK Metropolitan Police on the seizure under the auspices of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT)"
So did they or did they not accompany? If we don't know if FBI agents were there, then we don't know if London Met officers were there either. Which article were you quoting? Or do you have firsthand knowledge of the operation?
All these years after the Cold war, the US continues to develop an offensive bioweapons capability, which is why they refuse to sign a Bioweapons Convention.
3 wh eelis.html
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2003/jf03/jf0
Space weapons, bioweapons, landmines, take your pick: the USA is the real "rogue state".
Elwood: Ah... what kind of music do you usually have here? Claire: Oh we got both kinds. We got Country, AND Western.
As if genuine political belief fell into two simple, easily identified categories of "Liberal" and "Conservative".
Do Libertarians no longer exist in the US today?
Anarchists?
Socialists?
Greens?
Etc. etc.
I usually find that studies of human biology underpinning human behavior say far more about the prejudices of the scientists conducting the research, than about any underlying scientific observations they might be "discovering".
And the rigidly dualist categorization of ideology into center-right and far-right creeps into so much of daily life in the US, where you are continually required to choose ideological Coke or ideological Pepsi. Water is not on the menu.
Right. So there's no point in introducing something just as dangerous as insurance-inspired murder, if there are alternatives available.
That's a good idea too, but I think that this particular issue is more about deciding up-front whether you want to donate your organs. Presumed consent laws offer many advantages for this.
I said "ethics and praxis". I wasn't talking about fairness in donor organ distribution, I was talking about avoiding getting "retired early" for your valuable liver.
I didn't even begin to outline the complexity of the ethical issues. That'd take weeks...
Exactly. Cash for organs would lead to early deaths for profit, just like with life insurance.
One possible means of reducing the donor organ shortages in the US and UK could be the adoption of something like the "presumed consent" laws that operate in Europe. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, and Spain, consent for removal of organs for donation is presumed unless you express your objection in advance, whereas in the US the opposite is true.
Your point is a good one. But it might not work like that. Suppose you were in an accident, and someone with authority to sign your Do Not Resuscitate order didn't like you, but wanted one of your family to be able to cash in. You'd be DNR'd, and your organs would be auctioned off in accordance with your wishes.
The controls on the sale of organs are the end result of a very complex debate on the ethics and praxis of handling human tissues.
That's not evidence of Dubya's virtue, that's evidence of the virtue of the US system, which at least makes an attempt at guaranteeing free elections, and prohibits staying in for more than two terms. Saddam racked up the bodycount that he did because he's been in since 1978.
And the US system also ensures that the power is spread across a cabinet. So it's meaningless to compare a US President's criminal record with that of an Iraqi dictator, who has no "last-call" bell when 8 years are up. Rather, the comparison should be between the current cabinet and Saddam: Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Negroponte , etc.
"Last I checked there weren't any mass graves filled with turkish insurgents on GWB's resume."
If you're talking about the Kurds, I would give several people in the current White House full credit for their part in this. And full credit for helping Saddam brutally crush the Shia uprising too, ensuring that he stayed in power.
Saddam couldn't have done it on his own.
[spoken]
/home partition and umount. .gifs of my boss's daughter from his own account!
/home partition and umounts??
I never really wanted to be a scientist.
I wanted to be...a...a SYSADMIN!
[system engineer choir and shift supervisor enter, music strikes up]
Oh, I'm a sysadmin and I'm OK,
I grep all night and I chown all day.
[choir]
He's a sysadmin and he's OK,
He greps all night and he chowns all day.
I ping the nodes, I do PM,
I awk and perl and sed.
I've got a Star Wars lunchbox,
And Tron sheets on my bed!
[choir]
He pings the nodes, he does PM,
He awks and perls and seds.
He's got a Star Wars lunchbox,
And Tron sheets on his bed!
I ping the nodes, I change the rates,
I fork the processes.
I wish that all my lusers
would catch some rare disease!
[choir, growing slightly uncomfortable]
He pings the nodes, he changes rates,
He forks the processes.
He wishes all his lusers
would catch some rare disease!
[choir brightens as they repeat chorus]
I ping the nodes, I lock the
I post
[choir]
He pings the nodes, he locks the
[shift supervisor, in tears]
Oh Bevis! And I thought you were so dedicated.
(quoted from Martin Martin "I wish to register a complaint about this system" Booda)
...if you don't know the meaning of "obfuscating". :)
"If Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs, all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war. He'd still be alive, running the country, and killing whoever he pleased, whenever he pleased."
Rather like the current "President" of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. His favourite method of dealing with dissidents is to boil them alive.
But there are no plans to invade and bomb Uzbekistan since, like Saddam in the 1980s, Karimov's presently obeying orders from Washington, doing as he's told, and keeping the pipeline projects on track. This makes him Our Ally In The War On Terror(tm).
I fully expect him to become Our Eternal Enemy(tm) in about 4 or 5 years time though.
Unlike most voters, however, I will blame President Kerry, Presidents Bush I and Bush II, President Clinton, President Reagan, President Carter, etc, for perpetuating a foreign policy which has done so much damage to the long-term interests of the United States and the rest of the world.
Wrong, heh heh!
Fox is not my surname. You're not the first one to make that mistake though.
You don't read a lot about that, nowadays.
I had the misfortune to buy an HP Vectra from them for my brother , and the Windows install was in one huge monolithic blob on a CD: you had to install all the crap at once, even if you only wanted Windows or a certain driver. That would have been fine if they had shipped a stable build that actually worked. But the config for the Zip drive was both wrong and out-of-date, and downloading latest Zip drivers from Iomega didn't seem to help the persistent crashes and freezes.
So I rang up their "Tech support", to ask about their recommended fix. She walked me through the script, starting with "is the computer switched on Mr. (my surname)?", and suffixing every single question in the script with "Mr. (my surname)". This was clearly their attempt at personalizing "Customer Care", and make me feel like a Valued Individual(tm), but all it did was make me want to smack the "Customer Care" out of her with a blunt axe.
Eventually we came to the end of the script, and no closer to a solution. She now advised me to re-install from the massive blob CD, which would fdisk all my data to oblivion. I explained that I'd done that already, and it hadn't worked.
"It looks like the installation CD as shipped has a problem."
"No that's not possible Mr. (my surname). They're thoroughly tested."
"Well sure it is. Maybe it worked before, but doesn't work on the latest hardware."
"No that's not possible Mr. (my surname)"
"Why not?
"What do you think could be wrong with it Mr. (my surname)?"
"How about the out-of-date drivers?"
"How would that crash the machine Mr. (my surname)?"
"If there's a bug that didn't show up before, but shows up under a new revision of BIOS, or a new ethernet card, or new firmware in the Zip drive, and so on."
"I don't see how that's possible Mr. (my surname)."
"Well it says on the Iomega site that there's a known memory leak issue with the version of drivers that you've shipped, for a start."
"I'm sorry, what was that you said Mr. (my surname)? A memory LEAK?"
"Memory leak, yes. I can give you the address of the bug report on the Iomega site."
(muffled laughter) "There's no thing as a 'memory LEAK', Mr. (my surname)." (more muffled laughter, now joined by her colleagues, phone covered up and uncovered as she talks)
At this point I was starting to get irritated. Paying for incompetence and ignorance is one thing, but getting laughed at for politely explaining to someone what I paid them to already know is quite another.
So I told her to put her supervisor on the phone, right now. She sighed, and said "OK, Mr. (my surname), I'll put him on right away!" (more muffled laughter).
The supervisor was no better informed than his idiot underlings, but at least he was willing to listen and learn when I explained to him how poor allocation and deallocation management can cause a failure to reclaim discarded memory, and he accepted that there really was something called a memory leak, and that the computing world outside of CompUSA had known about it for years, and that Iomega had reported the bug exactly as I'd described it.
But CompUSA never did fix my problem. So I backed up my brother's data, and rebuilt his PC from scratch with a borrowed Windows CD, figuring it was worth losing out on the "free" Norton AV etc. that came on HP's monolithic blob-CD, if that's what it took to get a PC that didn't freeze randomly a dozen times a day.
Now, whenever one of us runs into a "professional" who wouldn't know his own job if it jumped up and bit his dick off, we usually look at each other and say in unison "there's no such thing as a 'memory LEAK', Mr. (my surname)".
I guess you could say that taxes are set by the voters, since we're all too dumb to consider the price tag when we demand stuff like universal healthcare...
Actually, US voters are too dumb to consider the pricetag of NOT having universal healthcare. The "efficiencies" generated by competitive private coverage are eaten up many times over by the costs of form filling for multiple providers and insurers, among other things.
The United States spends a larger share of GDP on health than any other major industrialized country. In 2000 the United States devoted 13.3 percent of the GDP to health compared with 10.6-10.7 percent each in Germany and Switzerland and 9.1-9.5 percent in Canada and France, countries with the next highest shares.
In 2001 national health care expenditures in the United States totaled $1.4 trillion, increasing 8.7 percent from the previous year compared with a 7.4 percent increase in 2000. In the mid-1990s annual growth had slowed somewhat, following an average annual growth rate of 11 percent during the 1980s. According to the figures released by the White House this January, health spending now accounts for nearly 15 percent of the USA's economy, the largest share on record.
Yet around 40-43 million people in the US presently have no health insurance according to snapshot figures, and the longer term total of uninsured months per person is probably a lot higher.
The USA continues to be the only country in the G8 without some kind of universal healthcare, and the only winners are the private health corporations and the lawyers.
EUR 280,000 = USD 356,140 = UKP 193,144 = JPY 37,835,034.
In case you were wondering.
You're right. But there is a new Debian installer on the way: it's just gone to beta 2.
Actually, the Palm Zire 71 comes with an Audible audiobook player.
audible.com's content is not my cup of tea though.
These are the related documents released this week that I've found so far, though I'm still digging:
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office have reportedly held back all documents relating to the day of the coup, however. I assume they are waiting until Kissinger and other US parties who supported and assisted the coup die of old age, before these are released.
The overthrow of President Allende in Chile presented the Foreign Office with a refugee problem. "The usual fellow-travelling civil rights organisations will do their best to confuse the distinction [between] respected democratic socialists and undesirables further to the left," a department minute noted. "In view of the growth of terrorism in this country we really cannot knowingly risk admitting terrorists as refugees."
So calling inconvenient refugees "terrorists" is nothing new, e.g. abandoning thousands on the Chilean left to be murdered by the Pinochet regime, and slamming your doors to legitimate asylum seekers fleeing from "valued trading partners".
The Washington Times is owned by the Unification Church, also known as the "Moonies". They are quite right-wing, even by US standards.
The Moonies now also own the once-great United Press International, UPI. Just about all the good journalists left UPI in disgust when the takeover happened a few years back, and it turned into a sort of National Enquirer Newsfeed, practically overnight.
WSIS might sound like a boring bureaucratic exercise, but there's a strong chance that governments are going to walk away from it with new international agreements in their pockets to pass laws in their own countries restricting the free flow of information.
Quoting the "WSIS? We Seize!" press release:
'While the official agenda of this UN/ITU Summit talks about "free access to information", "the digital divide" and "equality of opportunities", in reality its doors are closed, its discussions exclusive and the agendas of those who attend it concealed. What's more, the right to demonstrate and protest has been suspended in Geneva at this time, as the usual parade of despots and tyrants fly in to Switzerland to define policy for their own citizens, and the rest of the world, based on the agendas of corporate multinationals, media conglomerates and infrastructure owners.
Geneva03 is a temporary network of groups and individuals set up to carry out agitational, educational and communications work during both the G8 and the WSIS. Geneva03 considers it critical to show, during such a display of media power and control, that independent groups and people have the ability to create their own media, to share media, self publish, build networks and communicate freely and autonomously. That's why we've titled our events during this time WSIS? WE SEIZE! We do not consider that negotiation and supplication before the altar of the UN will produce information autonomy for all. Instead, we are taking our autonomy now, using the means and technologies at our disposal: the Internet, peer to peer networks, Free and Open Source Software, community wireless infrastructures, pirate television and radio and streamed media. Beyond questions of communications technology, We Seize! seeks to open a wide-ranging discussion on the new social conditions that constitute today's world about which the WSIS has little or nothing to say: media concentration, expansive intellectual property regimes, casualised and immaterial labour and migration.
We insist that this urge to speak, to hear and be heard, is irrepressible. The Geneva03 group returns to Geneva following major attempts at repression during the G8 this year, in which the group were targetted by police whilst running an independent media centre. No charges were brought against the group, because - whatever the establishment would like us to believe - it is still lawful to freely express ourselves. We must, however, continue to exercise this ability, to expand and test it in diverse situations, if we are not to lose the freedom and potential that defines us as people.
Communication, language and information are essential to understanding both control and liberation in this new millenium. They are simultaneously the site of the most repressive and totalitarian suppression and disciplining we have seen since the 1950s and, we believe, the basis of a powerful, growing autonomous movement. Ultimately this movement must cut to the very heart of communication: for what we are able to articulate, we are able to create. We must speak of a new world without fear, and with all the creativity, energy and commitment we can find.'
(end quote)
If you want to know more, here are some useful links:
Good background article on Indymedia Global
WSIS? We Seize!
The World Forum on Communication Rights
Polimedia Lab
Civil Society news centre for the WSIS
Indymedia UK WSIS 2003 section
If they could pronounce "Shibboleth" properly, they were in. If they couldn't, they were sent on their way.
Um... actually they were dragged away and killed, as usually happens in Bible stories: Judges 12:4-6
I've searched my copy, but can't find that logo.
Are you sure you're using the same version as I am?
Is yours endorsed by Art Linkletter?
Well now. I didn't think so.