You are going in circles. Start with my first post - just keep clicking on parent until you get there. It was a response to why Oil isn't about oil anymore. Those are the current set of corporate interests that are closest to the current governing regime. To name a couple of names that ought to familiar to anyone reading the news recently -- Haliburton and Bechtel. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. Even real oil companies are in there too, Chevron even named a super-tanker after the National Security Advisor - it is hard to get more blatant than that without publically exchanging cash.
First, I believe I offerred more than two choices.
You didn't. And really so far that's typical. I think its clear given your inattention to the thread of conversation, your spontaneous responses that indicate zero recollection of messages just a couple of steps back in the thread, that you don't have a serious argument to make here.
Every single point that you have made, I have knocked out of the ballpark. But you deliberately turn a blind and forgetful eye to those results and just make up reasonable sounding responses, except they aren't reasonable given the context of the thread of conversation. If anything they are just a broken record, coming back to where it started, over and over again.
For example:
In reading the article about the poll showing 3/4ths of the American population believing that Sadam was responsible for 9/11 - you micro-quote the statement that Bush never officially claimed that Sadam was part of it, meanwhile you completely ignore the context of the ENTIRE article which is about how cleverly the administration manipulated the media and the public into believing just that while still maintaining plausible deniability. Did you think that I didn't read the article? Seriously, how could you expect a quote so completely out of context to lend any credibility to your position? Well, the answer is that any sane person wouldn't expect it to, and that you are just trolling.
Well, I thank you for the opportunity to spell out my thoughts in a public arena by responding to some of the more common unresearched positions, but really, I've got better things to do then repeat myself and wear out my thesaurus in the process.
The point is that diplomacy is not a zero sum game where you simply make your principled stand and to hell with it. You have to balance your actions against your inactions and support people who you wouldn't want to invite into your home.
I'm saying that the US government's evaluation of what is and is not important is skewed by corporate interests. So we end up supporting fascists for all the WRONG reasons. If we are going to go against our own publically stated principles, principles that we use to justify our moral superiority to the rest of the world, then we sure as hell need to have a better long-term goal than just the enrichment of a bunch of already plenty-rich corporations. And LYING about our goals doesn't count.
You want the biggest example of US hypocricy then just look at our dealings with China. We still continue to deal with them economically and only put up restrained protests against their terrible human rights record. The point is that we need China a lot more than we need them to clean up their act. Are you out in the streets protesting this and not buying anything with a "Made in China" label?
Actually, I have said from day one that the granting of the MFN trading status was probably a mistake. The argument that through trade, China will open to democracy doesn't seem so clearcut to me. Their trade is based on slave labor and if anything, America is going in that direction - with the increased use of prison labor here it seems like we are becoming more like China than vice versa. Furthermore, my prime example in such debates as to why open trade does not bring open politics has been the middle-east. With all the trade for oil the middle-east does with free countries, precious little freedom has rubbed off.
Now this is an interesting statement. So, we could either have continued to surround Iraq, impose crippling sanctions on the country, and further breed discontent in the Arab world by our presence (which was used by Bin Laden as his "justification" for the 9/11 atack by the way). Or, we could actually make a principled stand.
That is an interesting statement. Primarily because it is a false dichotomy. Those were not the only two choices. We could have just stopped the sanctions a long time ago. It was clear that Saddam was using them for his own benefit, and they were certainly not having the desired effect of fomenting rebellion. But that kind of move had little benefit for American corporate interests, especially with all those contracts the Russians and French had already signed, so it really was never on the table.
The current American regime has too much to gain by waging a never-ending war
What does America have to gain from this war beyond potentially increased security? Be specific.
I never said AMERICA has anything to gain. In fact, we have a lot to lose, and are losing it daily. The current American regime has plenty to gain. For example, the office of homeland security, that's a great big new organization with lots of new powers. Then you've got Ashcroft and company running around claiming that anyone who disagrees with them is a terrorist - that kind of statement combined with his current penchant for locking up Americans accused of being terrorists, without even a trial is incredibly chilling of criticism. A government without criticism is a government with too much power. Hell, Ashcroft seems to think that right of Habeus Corpus has been repealed and that along with taxation without representation was one of the top two motivations for our rebellion against England. In fact, it was so important it was enshrined in the first article of the constitution. With Habeous Corpus out of the way, the federal government has made a huge power-grab right under the noses of most Americans.
This one's even better: now that Sadam, who more than 50% of the US population have been convinced was responsible for 9/11, is now all gone Please cite your survey for this in
You seem to be having a conversation with someone other than myself. The facts that you quote really have nothing to do with my point - neither pro nor con, they may be relevant to some other point, but not mine.
You do brush up against the topic of discussion when you say, "I find it amazing that you're railing against the influence of capitalism in the US while casually dismissing its influence in the other countries that were taking such a "principled" stand against the war."
So I will respond - I am railing against the corrupting influence of capitalism in the US because a) I am a US citizen and so it is my patriotic duty to critique my government when I believe its actions to be against the best interest of the US population at large b) I believe that corrupting influence of corporate capitalism to be a direct and primary contributing factor in the terrorism that we see directed at this country today.
If all those other countries want to be hypocrites, let them do so and suffer the consquences. But I for one am tired of America being a target not just because we are at the top, but because we are at the top and we don't care who our shit hits as it rolls down from the top. The US government has a long history of preaching democracy to the world but acting to support fascism. Whether it is supporting the fascism of middle-eastern dictatorships because of oil, or supporting the fascism of the south american dictatorships because of the war on some drugs, or supporting the fascism of the dictatorships of the 'stans that surround Afghanistan because the military wanted bases from which to attack the taliban (for bin Laden, but also for the pipeline).
Fundamentally, we say one thing, but we do another and most of the time we do these things for the betterment of US business interests at the cost of empowerment of the people in those countries. True terrorism is about disempowerment - give these people democracy and all the other rights we claim to have in America and terrorism will practically disappear. Continue to repress these people for the benefit of American big business and you will just breed more people who feel that their only hope of ever changing the system is through violent means, that they have no voice other than the bomb in their backpack.
But, as a cynic, I doubt that will ever really happen, no matter how much the little guys like myself make a fuss. The current American regime has too much to gain by waging a never-ending war. The NeoCons at the helm seem to think that a reduction in American freedoms is a good thing, the almost unadulterated power grab that has happened and continues to go on today in the name of anti-terrorism is proof enough of that. How else can they such otherwise blatantly stupid actions like removing the requirement that data in the NCIC be correct? If that isn't an invitation to abuse of power without responsibility, I don't know what is.
In this way, everybody (who counts) wins - big business gets to do more business, the people in power get to stay in power and the public at large gets to be even better consumers with their fears at rest now that Sadam, who more than 50% of the US population have been convinced was responsible for 9/11, is now all gone. Well, at least until the next attack kills some Americans, maybe my wife, or my little boy or myself.
All I want is for the actions of the US government to match the rhetoric. Well, and for the rhetoric to keep on message about democracy and freedom for all. With my luck, now that Sadam the neo-Stalin is out of the way, the NeoCons will become even more bold and start preaching their true feelings, that subservience - both domestic and foreign - to corporate capitalism is the new ideal for the 21st century...
My use of terms such as pigopolist and Asses of America are not prejudegements, but the result of judgement. I have evaluated their actions and based on their behaviour I choose to call them by names more befitting their actions. Just as the PATRIOT Act is extremely anti-patriotic, the names these organizations would prefer to be called by are, judging by their actions, completely inappropriate.
As for the Stalin comment, perhaps you could provide some supporting evidence instead of playing Godwin brinksmanship.
What arrogance!
Bullshit. If anyone is arrogant here it is you for not bothering to read what I wrote, nor even the small part of it that you quoted. Judging by the rest of your comment you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I am arguing against the validty of copyright. I made no such claim. What I did claim, and you even quoted it, is that because of the way that corporate money has perverted the US government to no longer be the voice of THE PEOPLE that the current STATE OF COPYRIGHT LAW AS IT IS TODAY is not morally justifiable.
The social contract of copyright as first implemented by the Federal goverment is at least morally justifiable. What exists today is no longer a contract, it is as close to a royal imposition as you can get in America. If you are unfamiliar with the original terms of the social contract and how they have been twisted so that they no longer serve the public good, then frankly you are not qualified to comment on the state of affairs as they exist today.
But as the.sig said - "Perposterous" -- you would have to work pretty hard to top the illustration you just gave of that theory at work.
You must realize that you repudiate your own posting with the contents of your.sig, right?
When a...web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem...preposterous.
The truth is that the pigopolists that make up the various Asses of America (RIAA, MPAA, etc) own their little piece of the Federal Government. The Asses are the people who literally write the copyright laws and get their bought & paid for politicians to rubber-stamp them into existence.
The larger group of corps that essentially dictate the content of mainstream media and the available "choices" for major public office keep the average joe from having any substantial say in these matters of law.
But we have been told over and over for generations about how America is a country governed by the rule of law and the law is the embodiment of the will of the people. The truth of the matter is that the law is now the embodiment of the will of the corporations, and our government is the best that money can buy. Perposterous! Or so claim many who have been sold the big lie, generation over generation.
But for those who see more clearly, it is obvious that there is no morally justifiable reason for the state of copyright law as it is today. Because of that, and because the system is so skewed that any chance of substantial change in our lifetime is about nil, anyone who infringes copyright is fighting the pigopolists the only way they can be fought, by cutting off their funding. Undoubtedly many of these file sharers are doing so out of greed and not as a political action. But, so what? If the end result is the embodiment of the will of the people, then that is what America is about.
Personally, I don't have time or energy for any of this P2P crap. Instead, I do my part by buying only used DVDs and then lending them to as many people as I can for free as an effort to reduce the funding of the MPAA. But still, I say, more power to the online sharers, they push the limits of technology everday and they are fighting the good fight, even if they don't know it.
if you don't want the film to look grainy and dirty, you have to do at least some cleaning of the projector between each showing.
It has been my experience that most theaters don't care any more. So much so that I stopped going to movies in public and bought my own DVD & HDTV front-projection system. With a good scaler, and a good transfer to DVD, my home system is easily superior to 80-90% of the theaters in the area. A HDTV movie off of HBO-HD or Showtime-HD beats about 98% of the theaters in the area. A bit more investment up front, but not much more than a modern 50"-60" tv.
It ain't too hard to come up with a bazillion different email addresses that all route back to the same person. Just buy up a couple of hundred, or thousand, or even ten thousand non-descript, ISP sound-alike domains and then point their MX records all to the same server. So, you can't really prevent a professional astro-turf job by requiring discreet, verifiable email addresses.
But, I think a distinction between petitions and rubber-stamp form-mail is important. Sending the form-mail is potentially misleading (see the republican astroturf campaign of letters to the editors of major newspapers nationwide). Sure, if only a couple of people read all the mail, they figure it out pretty quickly anyway.
But a petition is direct, straightforward about agreement with a statement but has no chance of being mistaken for somebody pretending a written statement is their own words. It also has the benefit of much less overhead for the people who receive the petition. Instead of 10,000 emails they need to look through, they get one big email with a list of "signatures" which they can attempt to verify or not as is reasonable. Much less workload, no chance of confusion about the true motivations and opinions of the signatories and just as easy (or hard) to verify as a bazillion identical emails...
Did you follow the link to the photographs? Sure, they could be doctored, or cropped or otherwise misleading, but that applies to everything you see on CNN, FOX, etc as well.
Meanwhile, I didn't say anything about the French, Russian or German positions (nor those of what, 80% of the rest of the countries) as being principled. They are just as motivated by their own corporate interests as the USA. Well, maybe a little bit less.
But it doesn't matter, it was the USA making all the noise with the "justification of the week" for invading Iraq. Don't you think that the USA should be better than just a liar with the biggest stick? That we should live up to our promises to the best of our ability instead of the minimum of our ability? That all the rhetoric about democracy and freedom and capitalism should be backed up with real action instead of blatant greed and self-interest?
Pragmatically it sure would help if our foreign policy wasn't so much hypocrisy driven by corporate interests. The governments of a lot of the anti-war countries may have been motivated by finanical interests and some of their populations were just acting out their own form of jingoism, just like the USA is filled with people who uncritically accept what they see in the mass media. But we obviously have a huge PR problem with most of the world given how united the average joes outside the US were against the US invasion of Iraq. Allowing this kind of crony-capitalism (the socialism of the 21st century) only re-inforces what a lot of those people think and probably pushes the fench-sitters to the anti-USA camp.
Fundamentally what seems to be going on is that the NeoCons' agenda is ascendent in the white house and they are exerting the most influence on American policy, foriegn and domestic today. That policy can ultimately be summed up as -- America is going to eventually lose its dominate position in the world. Don't worry about the real long-term future because no matter what we do, America isn't going to stay ahead forever. But, for the duration, let's get while the getting is good. We don't need anyone telling us what to do, and "restricting our options," so we are going to ignore the UN, the ABM Treaty, Kyoto Accords, and anything or anyone else that might slow us down. To me, their actions are very much along the lines of exploiting the "Big fish little pond" situation rather than working for the "medium-fish in a big ocean" scenario which could be a whole lot better for the world, but particularly America, in the real long run.
Once long ago, a word from your lips and the world turned around But somehow you've changed, you're so far away
Because it didn't matter. They are (usually) smart enough to take 50% with little risk than go for 100% with huge risk. Every once in a while you get somebody too dumb to play it cool, somebody like the representative from Qualcomm who wants to put Qualcomm's interests ahead of the Iraqi peoples, but isn't buddies with the right people so he gets a little too loud and it all comes out...
Iraq's oil infrastructure was barely in a state to handle the meager allotments for the oil-for-food program, there is plenty of "work" to go around in building it up. Not all the contracts are Federal either, or at least not US Federal. You can expect that whatever government ends up in place in Iraq will be handing out lots of restoration and development contracts either directly, or through proxy via privatizing the oil fields, and you know who will be first in line for those.
Chalabi - remember that name. He's Rumsfield's favorite choice for head of Iraqi leadership / stooge for US corporate interests and like too many others that the administration endorses for service here in the US, is a criminal. Chalabi had a hand in a $500M banking scandal in Egypt, he was lucky to escape from the country in the trunk of a car.
FWI, read article about how the widely televised pull-down of the statue of Sadam was mostly staged and the people playing the role of the local Iraqis were really henchmen for Chalabi that had been flown in to put on a show.
The real deal is that anybody who still is somebody in Oil in Texas got out of the business of selling oil back in the late '70s when the gas shortage reversed. I should know, I got inlaws in them thar parts that worked as corporate bankruptcy lawyers helping all those people get out of the business.
The facts are that the people who are left in Oil in Texas are all about oil infrastructure. They build pipelines, they build wells, they build refineries, they even put out fires. But what they don't do is sell oil. These are the people that are buddy, buddy with Bush. These are the companies that get awarded $7.5B contracts from the US Federal goverment to go clean up Iraq's oil infrastructure without even having to worry about a competitive bidding process, in this particular case, Halliburton. But Halliburton is just the most public (and clumsy in their feeding-at-the-trough behavior) face of the oil infrastructure industrial complex. There are plenty more that you aren't going to hear about unless you run into them and their business in Iraq (and Afghanistan!) directly.
He does sound like a real stooge for the anti-privacy, pro-fascist crowd. The dangerous thing about him is that he doesn't seem dumb - he sounds like he has a decent grasp on the current state of technology and he is really good with the word-twisting, see his support for the PATRIOT act and his statement that helping instead of exploiting 3rd world countries won't do a thing to counter terrorism. That we are much better off giving up our liberties instead.
You guys rock (well, not really since it is an all talk station) - WGBH has gone in the shitter in terms of being a flagship PBS station, but as much as a radio station can, WBUR has stepped up. Think you might convince them to experiment with Vorbis?
I'm not quite sure what your point is except - "Sun has the best most mature, most stable 64-bit addressing architecture to help the transition from a 32-bit address space." Perhaps you can quantify what makes it the best, as far as I can tell, HP and IBM have the same level of robustness and functionality in terms of 64-bitness.
In terms of performance for big-fat databases, TPC-H shows Sun's latest 72-way 15k results as 7% faster than HP's 64-way results from 7 months prior. The 72-way results are also a little unrealistic given that configuring a 15K to use 72 cpus rather than just 64 cpus really cuts down on the available i/o interfaces, the 72-way config was designed for techincal workloads, not commercial - obviously it can be used that way, but that may not be a common . HP's next hardware rev is due RSN (the configuration that Sun used won't be available until the end of this month either) and will, assuming the comp.arch discussions are accurate, be dual-core which should result in significantly more than even a 15% increase.
As my original premise was that Solaris, and thus the catalog of Solaris-hosted applications are the only thing that distinguishes Sun from the other competitors in the marketplace, I think these numbers support that pretty well.
Instead of waiting, perhaps you would like to read what I wrote again. When I mentioned partitioning with hardware fault isolation as lacking on Sun but present on HP and IBM that was your clue as to how Sun lags. Look it up, read the docs, you'll see that everything is as I said.
TPC - Sun has 5-6 entries across the non-clustered top-10 type results across all tests and about 2 or 3 are #1, all the other slots 50-60 are dominated by IBM, HP and DELL with a smattering of Unisys.
Just because your shop is buying 15K's doesn't mean much because A) It's anecdotal and B) My premise was that Solaris is currently a differentiator, but that's it - everything else they do is done equally well or better by their competitors.
Yeah, and that 4/110 was significantly more expensive than PCs - compared to the equivalently priced systems from other vendors that lead was nowhere near as significant. There were plenty of machines that cost more and were much faster than the 4/110 too. They did have a decent price/perf lead with the SparcStation 1, for a while, and it was cool to have one on my desk.
As for the fighter-jet versus jetliner analogy, the same can be said of all the other vendors - SGI, IBM and HP all have systems that cost more than a PC and can support bigger workloads, just like Sun. It is those systems which Sun competes with on that level, not PCs.
On the low end of the range, please don't try to say that Sun's is a better architecture than a PC, ever looked in a low-end sun workstation? It is a PC - VGA card, IDE disk, 32-bit PCI, USB. Just with slower cpu.
Intel is not the only competitor, especially not x86 intel. Like I said the first time around, HP, IBM and SGI all scale at least as well as Sun, in some cases better and their building blocks are more powerful to start with. Plus, if you are still dismissing itanic as an under-performer, that would be a mistake. The 2nd generation has floating-point performance that leads the pack and it is reasonable to expect the 3rd generation to continue leading with the FP and bring the integer performance up to parity as well. Sure the chips may require more cooling infrastructure, but that's not a huge factor in system cost, especially in the smaller 4-8 configurations.
As for Sun's market share growing. You might want to check you sources. If you listen to any vendor you will hear how their market share is growing. The problem is that they all pick subsets of the overall market that make them look best. For example, it is common to ignore linux when talking about the Unix market since Linux doesn't have the licensed Unix trademark, or it is harder to measure due to the free nature, or measuring it makes all the other vendors look bad, etc. More important is revenue and Sun has been losing revenue, significantly more revenue than the competition.
I don't think you have been paying much attention to the high-end of the market. IBM, HP and SGI all provide better performance for the dollar. You can stuff a few more sparc cpus into a single system image machine than you can with the others (well, not SGI they still scale way past Sun). But in terms of most workloads - commercial and technical, the total maximum perofrmance with the leading edge hardware of all the vendors with each vendor's maximum cpu configuration, Sun trails the pack. In terms of flexibile system configuration, sun is also behind HP and IBM - both offer flexible hardware partitioning with fault isolation, Sun has yet to provide a system as robust, although I hear they are working on it. In the server consolidation market, fault isolation is key, without it Sun isn't even a player.
Also, Sun's scalable ABI is no big deal, IBM, HP and SGI all implement the equivalent on their systems and have done so for the last few year. But, unless you are running embarrasingly parallel code, the kind of thing that scales very well on a cluster-of-workstations like Beowulf, you sure aren't going to see linear scaling on a single system-image type of machine - sparc or otherwise.
Exactly. The only thing that differentiates Sun hardware is that Solaris runs on it, and thus the multitude of Solaris hosted applications runs on it. Take away Solaris and Sun doesn't lead in anything. Sparc performance has always been and still is a laggard compared to the rest of the industry. Pricing at the low-end is wiped by PCs, and features at the high-end, where the profit margins are still fat, are wiped by IBM and HP in the commercial sector and SGI in the technical markets.
Unless Sun figures out a way to turbo-charge the Sparc architecture, they won't have any competitive advantage in the near future.
The thing is that CR's audience is not the experts in a particular field. Expert computer users have a different set of needs than the average consumer. So too with just about everything else they review - cars are reviewed for the typical soccer mom or the typical 9-to-5 commuter, not the hardcore driving enthusiast. Home theater equipment is not reviewed for the a/v geek with a $20K system, the audience is the average joe who rents a DVD from blockbuster every few weeks and has a regular sized tv. Etc, etc.
Beyond reviewing things for the average consumer they spell out their ratings critieria. Hardly any other publication is so candid. You may not agree with their criteria, but at least you know exactly what it is. With other reviews you are often left guessing as to exactly why one particular brand/model was preferred over another one. And, if you get two different reviewers in other magazines, their biases are likely to be both hidden and very different. So you can't even compare between them. CR is as close to an unbiased, level playing field you are going to get in this world.
"Oh my God, someone is going to STEAL my idea!", they think to themselves as if they have the one or two true insights in the universe.
Thing is, that in the industry they probably really are the few with any insight and I'd say that fear was justified. Hollywood is the place where the man with one eye does not rule the blind, instead he has to keep it closed because everyone else wants to pluck it out for themselves.
Yes, inquiring minds want to know. If you aren't going to use it for targetted marketing, exactly what value is it to you? If you need demographics, you don't need that level of detail. Age, zip code, gender - that pretty covers it.
Meanwhile, consider this. In the age of just incredible anti-american laws like the patriot act, merely keeping this kind of data around is an invitation for a subpoena. But if you make it a policy to not keep this kind of data and in fact to destroy any identifying data (e.g. records of IP addresses) as soon as feasible, then if you get subpoenaed, it won't matter because you won't have the data anyway. And, if for some reason you are a civil rights hating person, think of the business case, no data, no work to satisfy a subpoena. But if you do keep records then you are obliged to produce them when asked, and sometimes that can be a herculean task.
I have never heard of a single person, apart from people using unauthorized players, who has ever bought a DVD that was unable to play a disc, assuming their player follows all the standards, due to the encryption present for any reason whatsoever
I guess you don't know anyone with a tv that has only rf-input. I know lots of people with older tv's like that. They also have VCRs with composite input. They tend to hook their DVD player up to their VCRs to convert composite to RF. It doesn't work because of Macrovision. They don't know why - they aren't a/v geeks, else they would have newer equipment, it just either looks like total crap or they don't even get a picture.
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You are going in circles. Start with my first post - just keep clicking on parent until you get there. It was a response to why Oil isn't about oil anymore. Those are the current set of corporate interests that are closest to the current governing regime. To name a couple of names that ought to familiar to anyone reading the news recently -- Haliburton and Bechtel. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. Even real oil companies are in there too, Chevron even named a super-tanker after the National Security Advisor - it is hard to get more blatant than that without publically exchanging cash.
First, I believe I offerred more than two choices.
You didn't. And really so far that's typical. I think its clear given your inattention to the thread of conversation, your spontaneous responses that indicate zero recollection of messages just a couple of steps back in the thread, that you don't have a serious argument to make here.
Every single point that you have made, I have knocked out of the ballpark. But you deliberately turn a blind and forgetful eye to those results and just make up reasonable sounding responses, except they aren't reasonable given the context of the thread of conversation. If anything they are just a broken record, coming back to where it started, over and over again.
For example:
In reading the article about the poll showing 3/4ths of the American population believing that Sadam was responsible for 9/11 - you micro-quote the statement that Bush never officially claimed that Sadam was part of it, meanwhile you completely ignore the context of the ENTIRE article which is about how cleverly the administration manipulated the media and the public into believing just that while still maintaining plausible deniability. Did you think that I didn't read the article? Seriously, how could you expect a quote so completely out of context to lend any credibility to your position? Well, the answer is that any sane person wouldn't expect it to, and that you are just trolling.
Well, I thank you for the opportunity to spell out my thoughts in a public arena by responding to some of the more common unresearched positions, but really, I've got better things to do then repeat myself and wear out my thesaurus in the process.
The point is that diplomacy is not a zero sum game where you simply make your principled stand and to hell with it. You have to balance your actions against your inactions and support people who you wouldn't want to invite into your home.
I'm saying that the US government's evaluation of what is and is not important is skewed by corporate interests. So we end up supporting fascists for all the WRONG reasons. If we are going to go against our own publically stated principles, principles that we use to justify our moral superiority to the rest of the world, then we sure as hell need to have a better long-term goal than just the enrichment of a bunch of already plenty-rich corporations. And LYING about our goals doesn't count.
You want the biggest example of US hypocricy then just look at our dealings with China. We still continue to deal with them economically and only put up restrained protests against their terrible human rights record. The point is that we need China a lot more than we need them to clean up their act. Are you out in the streets protesting this and not buying anything with a "Made in China" label?
Actually, I have said from day one that the granting of the MFN trading status was probably a mistake. The argument that through trade, China will open to democracy doesn't seem so clearcut to me. Their trade is based on slave labor and if anything, America is going in that direction - with the increased use of prison labor here it seems like we are becoming more like China than vice versa. Furthermore, my prime example in such debates as to why open trade does not bring open politics has been the middle-east. With all the trade for oil the middle-east does with free countries, precious little freedom has rubbed off.
Now this is an interesting statement. So, we could either have continued to surround Iraq, impose crippling sanctions on the country, and further breed discontent in the Arab world by our presence (which was used by Bin Laden as his "justification" for the 9/11 atack by the way). Or, we could actually make a principled stand.
That is an interesting statement. Primarily because it is a false dichotomy. Those were not the only two choices. We could have just stopped the sanctions a long time ago. It was clear that Saddam was using them for his own benefit, and they were certainly not having the desired effect of fomenting rebellion. But that kind of move had little benefit for American corporate interests, especially with all those contracts the Russians and French had already signed, so it really was never on the table.
The current American regime has too much to gain by waging a never-ending war
What does America have to gain from this war beyond potentially increased security? Be specific.
I never said AMERICA has anything to gain. In fact, we have a lot to lose, and are losing it daily. The current American regime has plenty to gain. For example, the office of homeland security, that's a great big new organization with lots of new powers. Then you've got Ashcroft and company running around claiming that anyone who disagrees with them is a terrorist - that kind of statement combined with his current penchant for locking up Americans accused of being terrorists, without even a trial is incredibly chilling of criticism. A government without criticism is a government with too much power. Hell, Ashcroft seems to think that right of Habeus Corpus has been repealed and that along with taxation without representation was one of the top two motivations for our rebellion against England. In fact, it was so important it was enshrined in the first article of the constitution. With Habeous Corpus out of the way, the federal government has made a huge power-grab right under the noses of most Americans.
This one's even better:
now that Sadam, who more than 50% of the US population have been convinced was responsible for 9/11, is now all gone
Please cite your survey for this in
You seem to be having a conversation with someone other than myself. The facts that you quote really have nothing to do with my point - neither pro nor con, they may be relevant to some other point, but not mine.
You do brush up against the topic of discussion when you say, "I find it amazing that you're railing against the influence of capitalism in the US while casually dismissing its influence in the other countries that were taking such a "principled" stand against the war."
So I will respond - I am railing against the corrupting influence of capitalism in the US because a) I am a US citizen and so it is my patriotic duty to critique my government when I believe its actions to be against the best interest of the US population at large b) I believe that corrupting influence of corporate capitalism to be a direct and primary contributing factor in the terrorism that we see directed at this country today.
If all those other countries want to be hypocrites, let them do so and suffer the consquences. But I for one am tired of America being a target not just because we are at the top, but because we are at the top and we don't care who our shit hits as it rolls down from the top. The US government has a long history of preaching democracy to the world but acting to support fascism. Whether it is supporting the fascism of middle-eastern dictatorships because of oil, or supporting the fascism of the south american dictatorships because of the war on some drugs, or supporting the fascism of the dictatorships of the 'stans that surround Afghanistan because the military wanted bases from which to attack the taliban (for bin Laden, but also for the pipeline).
Fundamentally, we say one thing, but we do another and most of the time we do these things for the betterment of US business interests at the cost of empowerment of the people in those countries. True terrorism is about disempowerment - give these people democracy and all the other rights we claim to have in America and terrorism will practically disappear. Continue to repress these people for the benefit of American big business and you will just breed more people who feel that their only hope of ever changing the system is through violent means, that they have no voice other than the bomb in their backpack.
But, as a cynic, I doubt that will ever really happen, no matter how much the little guys like myself make a fuss. The current American regime has too much to gain by waging a never-ending war. The NeoCons at the helm seem to think that a reduction in American freedoms is a good thing, the almost unadulterated power grab that has happened and continues to go on today in the name of anti-terrorism is proof enough of that. How else can they such otherwise blatantly stupid actions like removing the requirement that data in the NCIC be correct? If that isn't an invitation to abuse of power without responsibility, I don't know what is.
In this way, everybody (who counts) wins - big business gets to do more business, the people in power get to stay in power and the public at large gets to be even better consumers with their fears at rest now that Sadam, who more than 50% of the US population have been convinced was responsible for 9/11, is now all gone. Well, at least until the next attack kills some Americans, maybe my wife, or my little boy or myself.
All I want is for the actions of the US government to match the rhetoric. Well, and for the rhetoric to keep on message about democracy and freedom for all. With my luck, now that Sadam the neo-Stalin is out of the way, the NeoCons will become even more bold and start preaching their true feelings, that subservience - both domestic and foreign - to corporate capitalism is the new ideal for the 21st century...
Nope, no built-in bias there, nosiree
.sig said - "Perposterous" -- you would have to work pretty hard to top the illustration you just gave of that theory at work.
My use of terms such as pigopolist and Asses of America are not prejudegements, but the result of judgement. I have evaluated their actions and based on their behaviour I choose to call them by names more befitting their actions. Just as the PATRIOT Act is extremely anti-patriotic, the names these organizations would prefer to be called by are, judging by their actions, completely inappropriate.
As for the Stalin comment, perhaps you could provide some supporting evidence instead of playing Godwin brinksmanship.
What arrogance!
Bullshit. If anyone is arrogant here it is you for not bothering to read what I wrote, nor even the small part of it that you quoted. Judging by the rest of your comment you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I am arguing against the validty of copyright. I made no such claim. What I did claim, and you even quoted it, is that because of the way that corporate money has perverted the US government to no longer be the voice of THE PEOPLE that the current STATE OF COPYRIGHT LAW AS IT IS TODAY is not morally justifiable.
The social contract of copyright as first implemented by the Federal goverment is at least morally justifiable. What exists today is no longer a contract, it is as close to a royal imposition as you can get in America. If you are unfamiliar with the original terms of the social contract and how they have been twisted so that they no longer serve the public good, then frankly you are not qualified to comment on the state of affairs as they exist today.
But as the
You must realize that you repudiate your own posting with the contents of your .sig, right?
When a...web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem...preposterous.
The truth is that the pigopolists that make up the various Asses of America (RIAA, MPAA, etc) own their little piece of the Federal Government. The Asses are the people who literally write the copyright laws and get their bought & paid for politicians to rubber-stamp them into existence.
The larger group of corps that essentially dictate the content of mainstream media and the available "choices" for major public office keep the average joe from having any substantial say in these matters of law.
But we have been told over and over for generations about how America is a country governed by the rule of law and the law is the embodiment of the will of the people. The truth of the matter is that the law is now the embodiment of the will of the corporations, and our government is the best that money can buy. Perposterous! Or so claim many who have been sold the big lie, generation over generation.
But for those who see more clearly, it is obvious that there is no morally justifiable reason for the state of copyright law as it is today. Because of that, and because the system is so skewed that any chance of substantial change in our lifetime is about nil, anyone who infringes copyright is fighting the pigopolists the only way they can be fought, by cutting off their funding. Undoubtedly many of these file sharers are doing so out of greed and not as a political action. But, so what? If the end result is the embodiment of the will of the people, then that is what America is about.
Personally, I don't have time or energy for any of this P2P crap. Instead, I do my part by buying only used DVDs and then lending them to as many people as I can for free as an effort to reduce the funding of the MPAA. But still, I say, more power to the online sharers, they push the limits of technology everday and they are fighting the good fight, even if they don't know it.
if you don't want the film to look grainy and dirty, you have to do at least some cleaning of the projector between each showing.
It has been my experience that most theaters don't care any more. So much so that I stopped going to movies in public and bought my own DVD & HDTV front-projection system. With a good scaler, and a good transfer to DVD, my home system is easily superior to 80-90% of the theaters in the area. A HDTV movie off of HBO-HD or Showtime-HD beats about 98% of the theaters in the area. A bit more investment up front, but not much more than a modern 50"-60" tv.
This technique does not involve some cockeyed "protection scheme" that renders the product absolutely useless in certain circumstances.
I guess you don't consider a migraine the size of a mac truck or a seizure to render the product absolutely useless.
Epileptic
Seizure
Lawsuit
It ain't too hard to come up with a bazillion different email addresses that all route back to the same person. Just buy up a couple of hundred, or thousand, or even ten thousand non-descript, ISP sound-alike domains and then point their MX records all to the same server. So, you can't really prevent a professional astro-turf job by requiring discreet, verifiable email addresses.
But, I think a distinction between petitions and rubber-stamp form-mail is important. Sending the form-mail is potentially misleading (see the republican astroturf campaign of letters to the editors of major newspapers nationwide). Sure, if only a couple of people read all the mail, they figure it out pretty quickly anyway.
But a petition is direct, straightforward about agreement with a statement but has no chance of being mistaken for somebody pretending a written statement is their own words. It also has the benefit of much less overhead for the people who receive the petition. Instead of 10,000 emails they need to look through, they get one big email with a list of "signatures" which they can attempt to verify or not as is reasonable. Much less workload, no chance of confusion about the true motivations and opinions of the signatories and just as easy (or hard) to verify as a bazillion identical emails...
Did you follow the link to the photographs? Sure, they could be doctored, or cropped or otherwise misleading, but that applies to everything you see on CNN, FOX, etc as well.
Meanwhile, I didn't say anything about the French, Russian or German positions (nor those of what, 80% of the rest of the countries) as being principled. They are just as motivated by their own corporate interests as the USA. Well, maybe a little bit less.
But it doesn't matter, it was the USA making all the noise with the "justification of the week" for invading Iraq. Don't you think that the USA should be better than just a liar with the biggest stick? That we should live up to our promises to the best of our ability instead of the minimum of our ability? That all the rhetoric about democracy and freedom and capitalism should be backed up with real action instead of blatant greed and self-interest?
Pragmatically it sure would help if our foreign policy wasn't so much hypocrisy driven by corporate interests. The governments of a lot of the anti-war countries may have been motivated by finanical interests and some of their populations were just acting out their own form of jingoism, just like the USA is filled with people who uncritically accept what they see in the mass media. But we obviously have a huge PR problem with most of the world given how united the average joes outside the US were against the US invasion of Iraq. Allowing this kind of crony-capitalism (the socialism of the 21st century) only re-inforces what a lot of those people think and probably pushes the fench-sitters to the anti-USA camp.
Fundamentally what seems to be going on is that the NeoCons' agenda is ascendent in the white house and they are exerting the most influence on American policy, foriegn and domestic today. That policy can ultimately be summed up as -- America is going to eventually lose its dominate position in the world. Don't worry about the real long-term future because no matter what we do, America isn't going to stay ahead forever. But, for the duration, let's get while the getting is good. We don't need anyone telling us what to do, and "restricting our options," so we are going to ignore the UN, the ABM Treaty, Kyoto Accords, and anything or anyone else that might slow us down. To me, their actions are very much along the lines of exploiting the "Big fish little pond" situation rather than working for the "medium-fish in a big ocean" scenario which could be a whole lot better for the world, but particularly America, in the real long run.
Once long ago, a word from your lips and the world turned around
But somehow you've changed, you're so far away
Because it didn't matter. They are (usually) smart enough to take 50% with little risk than go for 100% with huge risk. Every once in a while you get somebody too dumb to play it cool, somebody like the representative from Qualcomm who wants to put Qualcomm's interests ahead of the Iraqi peoples, but isn't buddies with the right people so he gets a little too loud and it all comes out...
Iraq's oil infrastructure was barely in a state to handle the meager allotments for the oil-for-food program, there is plenty of "work" to go around in building it up. Not all the contracts are Federal either, or at least not US Federal. You can expect that whatever government ends up in place in Iraq will be handing out lots of restoration and development contracts either directly, or through proxy via privatizing the oil fields, and you know who will be first in line for those.
Chalabi - remember that name. He's Rumsfield's favorite choice for head of Iraqi leadership / stooge for US corporate interests and like too many others that the administration endorses for service here in the US, is a criminal. Chalabi had a hand in a $500M banking scandal in Egypt, he was lucky to escape from the country in the trunk of a car.
FWI, read article about how the widely televised pull-down of the statue of Sadam was mostly staged and the people playing the role of the local Iraqis were really henchmen for Chalabi that had been flown in to put on a show.
The real deal is that anybody who still is somebody in Oil in Texas got out of the business of selling oil back in the late '70s when the gas shortage reversed. I should know, I got inlaws in them thar parts that worked as corporate bankruptcy lawyers helping all those people get out of the business.
The facts are that the people who are left in Oil in Texas are all about oil infrastructure. They build pipelines, they build wells, they build refineries, they even put out fires. But what they don't do is sell oil. These are the people that are buddy, buddy with Bush. These are the companies that get awarded $7.5B contracts from the US Federal goverment to go clean up Iraq's oil infrastructure without even having to worry about a competitive bidding process, in this particular case, Halliburton. But Halliburton is just the most public (and clumsy in their feeding-at-the-trough behavior) face of the oil infrastructure industrial complex. There are plenty more that you aren't going to hear about unless you run into them and their business in Iraq (and Afghanistan!) directly.
You are entirely correct sir.
He does sound like a real stooge for the anti-privacy, pro-fascist crowd. The dangerous thing about him is that he doesn't seem dumb - he sounds like he has a decent grasp on the current state of technology and he is really good with the word-twisting, see his support for the PATRIOT act and his statement that helping instead of exploiting 3rd world countries won't do a thing to counter terrorism. That we are much better off giving up our liberties instead.
You guys rock (well, not really since it is an all talk station) - WGBH has gone in the shitter in terms of being a flagship PBS station, but as much as a radio station can, WBUR has stepped up. Think you might convince them to experiment with Vorbis?
I'm not quite sure what your point is except - "Sun has the best most mature, most stable 64-bit addressing architecture to help the transition from a 32-bit address space." Perhaps you can quantify what makes it the best, as far as I can tell, HP and IBM have the same level of robustness and functionality in terms of 64-bitness.
In terms of performance for big-fat databases, TPC-H shows Sun's latest 72-way 15k results as 7% faster than HP's 64-way results from 7 months prior. The 72-way results are also a little unrealistic given that configuring a 15K to use 72 cpus rather than just 64 cpus really cuts down on the available i/o interfaces, the 72-way config was designed for techincal workloads, not commercial - obviously it can be used that way, but that may not be a common . HP's next hardware rev is due RSN (the configuration that Sun used won't be available until the end of this month either) and will, assuming the comp.arch discussions are accurate, be dual-core which should result in significantly more than even a 15% increase.
As my original premise was that Solaris, and thus the catalog of Solaris-hosted applications are the only thing that distinguishes Sun from the other competitors in the marketplace, I think these numbers support that pretty well.
Instead of waiting, perhaps you would like to read what I wrote again. When I mentioned partitioning with hardware fault isolation as lacking on Sun but present on HP and IBM that was your clue as to how Sun lags. Look it up, read the docs, you'll see that everything is as I said.
TPC - Sun has 5-6 entries across the non-clustered top-10 type results across all tests and about 2 or 3 are #1, all the other slots 50-60 are dominated by IBM, HP and DELL with a smattering of Unisys.
Just because your shop is buying 15K's doesn't mean much because A) It's anecdotal and B) My premise was that Solaris is currently a differentiator, but that's it - everything else they do is done equally well or better by their competitors.
Yeah, and that 4/110 was significantly more expensive than PCs - compared to the equivalently priced systems from other vendors that lead was nowhere near as significant. There were plenty of machines that cost more and were much faster than the 4/110 too. They did have a decent price/perf lead with the SparcStation 1, for a while, and it was cool to have one on my desk.
As for the fighter-jet versus jetliner analogy, the same can be said of all the other vendors - SGI, IBM and HP all have systems that cost more than a PC and can support bigger workloads, just like Sun. It is those systems which Sun competes with on that level, not PCs.
On the low end of the range, please don't try to say that Sun's is a better architecture than a PC, ever looked in a low-end sun workstation? It is a PC - VGA card, IDE disk, 32-bit PCI, USB. Just with slower cpu.
Intel is not the only competitor, especially not x86 intel. Like I said the first time around, HP, IBM and SGI all scale at least as well as Sun, in some cases better and their building blocks are more powerful to start with. Plus, if you are still dismissing itanic as an under-performer, that would be a mistake. The 2nd generation has floating-point performance that leads the pack and it is reasonable to expect the 3rd generation to continue leading with the FP and bring the integer performance up to parity as well. Sure the chips may require more cooling infrastructure, but that's not a huge factor in system cost, especially in the smaller 4-8 configurations.
As for Sun's market share growing. You might want to check you sources. If you listen to any vendor you will hear how their market share is growing. The problem is that they all pick subsets of the overall market that make them look best. For example, it is common to ignore linux when talking about the Unix market since Linux doesn't have the licensed Unix trademark, or it is harder to measure due to the free nature, or measuring it makes all the other vendors look bad, etc. More important is revenue and Sun has been losing revenue, significantly more revenue than the competition.
I don't think you have been paying much attention to the high-end of the market. IBM, HP and SGI all provide better performance for the dollar. You can stuff a few more sparc cpus into a single system image machine than you can with the others (well, not SGI they still scale way past Sun). But in terms of most workloads - commercial and technical, the total maximum perofrmance with the leading edge hardware of all the vendors with each vendor's maximum cpu configuration, Sun trails the pack. In terms of flexibile system configuration, sun is also behind HP and IBM - both offer flexible hardware partitioning with fault isolation, Sun has yet to provide a system as robust, although I hear they are working on it. In the server consolidation market, fault isolation is key, without it Sun isn't even a player.
Also, Sun's scalable ABI is no big deal, IBM, HP and SGI all implement the equivalent on their systems and have done so for the last few year. But, unless you are running embarrasingly parallel code, the kind of thing that scales very well on a cluster-of-workstations like Beowulf, you sure aren't going to see linear scaling on a single system-image type of machine - sparc or otherwise.
Exactly. The only thing that differentiates Sun hardware is that Solaris runs on it, and thus the multitude of Solaris hosted applications runs on it. Take away Solaris and Sun doesn't lead in anything. Sparc performance has always been and still is a laggard compared to the rest of the industry. Pricing at the low-end is wiped by PCs, and features at the high-end, where the profit margins are still fat, are wiped by IBM and HP in the commercial sector and SGI in the technical markets.
Unless Sun figures out a way to turbo-charge the Sparc architecture, they won't have any competitive advantage in the near future.
The thing is that CR's audience is not the experts in a particular field. Expert computer users have a different set of needs than the average consumer. So too with just about everything else they review - cars are reviewed for the typical soccer mom or the typical 9-to-5 commuter, not the hardcore driving enthusiast. Home theater equipment is not reviewed for the a/v geek with a $20K system, the audience is the average joe who rents a DVD from blockbuster every few weeks and has a regular sized tv. Etc, etc.
Beyond reviewing things for the average consumer they spell out their ratings critieria. Hardly any other publication is so candid. You may not agree with their criteria, but at least you know exactly what it is. With other reviews you are often left guessing as to exactly why one particular brand/model was preferred over another one. And, if you get two different reviewers in other magazines, their biases are likely to be both hidden and very different. So you can't even compare between them. CR is as close to an unbiased, level playing field you are going to get in this world.
"Oh my God, someone is going to STEAL my idea!", they think to themselves as if they have the one or two true insights in the universe.
Thing is, that in the industry they probably really are the few with any insight and I'd say that fear was justified. Hollywood is the place where the man with one eye does not rule the blind, instead he has to keep it closed because everyone else wants to pluck it out for themselves.
Yes, inquiring minds want to know. If you aren't going to use it for targetted marketing, exactly what value is it to you? If you need demographics, you don't need that level of detail. Age, zip code, gender - that pretty covers it.
Meanwhile, consider this. In the age of just incredible anti-american laws like the patriot act, merely keeping this kind of data around is an invitation for a subpoena. But if you make it a policy to not keep this kind of data and in fact to destroy any identifying data (e.g. records of IP addresses) as soon as feasible, then if you get subpoenaed, it won't matter because you won't have the data anyway. And, if for some reason you are a civil rights hating person, think of the business case, no data, no work to satisfy a subpoena. But if you do keep records then you are obliged to produce them when asked, and sometimes that can be a herculean task.
I have never heard of a single person, apart from people using unauthorized players, who has ever bought a DVD that was unable to play a disc, assuming their player follows all the standards, due to the encryption present for any reason whatsoever
I guess you don't know anyone with a tv that has only rf-input. I know lots of people with older tv's like that. They also have VCRs with composite input. They tend to hook their DVD player up to their VCRs to convert composite to RF. It doesn't work because of Macrovision. They don't know why - they aren't a/v geeks, else they would have newer equipment, it just either looks like total crap or they don't even get a picture.