I know this is off-topic, but most of the discussion so far has been pretty uninteresting, so I was wondering how other slashdotters feel about the "Blood Mary" episode of South Park being pulled off the air and basically being censored from TV or any other future reproductions because it offended a few religious conservatives.
More importantly, any 3rd party program that incorporates the use of WMF should be redesigned. You can't fix a vulnerability caused by a data structure that is insecure by design and still try to allow programs using WMF to function as normal. The logical thing to do would be to remove WMF implementation from Windows--thus disabling any application that uses WMF and are essentially vectors for potential exploits, then leave it up to the various 3rd party application authors to fix their own design flaws, which should be relatively easy--just stop relying on WMF.
No, the whole drug-disease analogy is flawed because it doesn't account for the fact that:
a.) Their product is what is causing the problem. Cancer researchers are rarely responsible for causing the disease they are trying to find a cure for.
b.) It's a problem that not only affects the system running their software, but also the rest of the internet/world through network congestion, downtime of critical systems, etc. This is a critical vulnerability, with a very real potential for compromising entire systems. Would you rather have a few obscure applications which use the flawed design of WMF no longer work anymore, or would you rather have your system compromised by a hacker or virus? If you wanna use a medical analogy it's like not releasing a cure for SARS because it might give you an upset stomache or dry mouth or potentially cause an allergic reactions in a small percentage of the population.
b.) A 3rd party has created a fix that has proven to be highly successful, has been deployed in a large scale already, and where follow-ups have revealed no indications of the fix breaking anything on the systems it has been installed on.
There aren't any medical/health industry analogies you could compare this to because it simply would not be tolerated if such a widely-used pharmacutical/medical product had such a defect.
Also, you're assuming that F-secure and other analysts who support the use of the 3rd party patch don't know anything about programming or security and haven't thoroughly tested the patch themselves. You also seem to be oblivious to the fact that despite MS' slow response time they have still managed to release several patches that do break their own code or fail to fix what they claim to fix.
why does it matter how it was made or who/what the wine was judged by if it tastes just as good? in the end aren't you just drinking it for the flavor? or is this some kind of image thing?
Perhaps these articles were written by different people? Just a thought.
On the flip side of the coin, most people who wanted ICANN to retain control of the internet instead of the UN used government censorship as an excuse--assuming that that's the only reason why the UN would want control of the DNS. But now when it's reported that ICANN is abetting government imposed censorship in certain countries, people in support of ICANN are calling it "international involvement" or "respect for sovereignty."
Perhaps it might not be such a bad idea to have an international organization control the DNS--that is the correct way to elicit international involvement. What we are doing right now is simply handing over control of the internet to governments/political factions that the U.S. government is currently in support of. In many cases, this means silencing governments and political factions that are opposed to U.S. policies. This is an abuse of U.S. control of ICANN.
When people speak of having "more international involvement" I don't think they are asking us to use our control over the DNS to exert more political influence over other parts of the world. They are asking us to give the international community more involvement in the management of the DNS. And IMHO, this hardly qualifies as any kind of concession. This only demonstrates why the UN doesn't want the DNS to be solely controlled by the U.S.
But by leveraging their marketshare against Sony's attempt to kill HD, doesn't this action make them anti-anti-competitive? In other words, aren't they simply providing the counter-weight against the Blu-Ray's strategy to kill HD, thus keeping the HD standard alive to compete with Blu-Ray?
If this had been Microsoft's offensive, then perhaps it could be seen as an abuse of their virtual monopoly. But I really can't see HD surviving very long without Microsoft's endorsement, so if you value competition, then this should be seen as a good thing.
That's a false dichotomy. The pharmacutical industry can be reformed and still produce viable drugs for the public.
And it's funny that you should mention AIDS. For the longest time, places like Africa, where 60% of the world's AIDS-infected population lives, the majority of the AIDS-infected population had no access to antiretroviral treatment because of economic barriers created by U.S. medical patents and the obscene prices placed on the drugs used. It required tremendous lobbying and political campaigning for local pharmacutical manufacturers to gain the rights to produce cheap generics which the local population could afford.
As early as 1996 we had effective treatments for AIDS which could help one stricken with the disease to live for another 20 years, but by 1999 the drugs used in the treatment was only accessible to less than 10% of AIDS-infected individuals in Africa even though the local governments had 100% of the resources and infrastructure needed to treat their entire AIDS-infected population.
Developing drugs with the wrong motivations has harmed millions of people in the past. The attitude that the poor are not people and don't deserve the same medical treatment for life-threatening diseases as the rich is a major problem within the medical industry, and one which needs to be addressed. Things have gotten better over the years as the issue was brought into the public eye, but the fight is still far from over. AIDS is just one aspect of this social problem.
No penis? Well, since there are no girls that read Slashdot, there's only one other possibility... you must be one of those eunuchs I've been hearing so much about.
I question the verity of that 1896 figure on the number of opium addicts in the United States. If you define an opium addict as anyone who consumes opium recreationally, then perhaps it could have been close to that figure, otherwise, it seems unlikely. Secondly, it should be noted that while opium as it was consumed by the Chinese in opium dens was outlawed, opium/morphine tinctures such as laudanum was still legal as it was a habit mostly taken up by the wealthy upper class.
Though I think coke and opiates should be regulated much like alcohol and tobacco, the prohibitionist policies we have against recreational use of these substances are simply irrational and were formed by the wrong motivations.
"Now, you may ask, who put their foot in their mouth in this story? Well, I'll tell you. Many people on the discussion board where you now read this very post put their feet in their mouths by spewing intemperate comments as a result of uncritically accepting the statements of a liar as the truth. I'd say that's a pretty good foot in the mouth story and a pretty good cautionary tale as well."
Having a discussion on a news story based on the information provided is not putting your foot in your mouth. As you said, the professor questioned the student, and also his parents--that is how he arrived at the truth. How many slashdotters do you think would have had as easy access to the student or his parents for questioning?
Sometimes it's easy to verify the statements made by a news article. In these situations, one can be expected to do so before accepting dubious claims. But unless when this news story was originally posted on Slashdot you were there to say "Hey guys, that kid lied. Here's how I know..." then you can't expect others to have caught the lie. Whether people were defending the Homeland Security act or were detractors, no one suspected that the student's claims were made up since it didn't seem so unlikely to most people who participated in the discussion.
Adding an opioid antagonist like nalaxone doesn't do anything when you snort it, only when you inject it. If you add enough of it that it has any effect when you take it orally or when you snort it, then you're blocking off just as much of its analgesic effects. Same with trying to remove the psychotropic effects of ecstasy--its the psychotropic effects that also make ecstasy theraputic (it's not really a pain killer).
Our drugs laws are just dumb. People are always going to take opiates and other drugs recreationally because it's fun. It's like trying to prohibit the recreational consumption of alcohol (a societally accepted recreational drug which we have a double standard for) just because there are alcoholics. The funny thing is, before opiate dependence was made a crime, it was seen by Americans as less of a nuisance to society than alcoholism--people could also support their opiate habit on pennies a day and still be functional members of society. In fact, you'd be suprised at how many well known people in history used opiates such as opium/heroin/morphine regularly.
What we need to do is just reform our drug policies and most of the societal problems related to drug abuse will simply go away--like people ODing on "ecstasy" because it was cut with more dangerous substances, or the prohibition style crime-wave which has sweeped the nation, etc.
That's irrelevant. Taiwan hasn't signed the Berne Convention either because they choose not to, or they are not allowed to. But the Taiwanese government still isn't nearly as bad as some of the the countries which are included on the list. Also, economically speaking, Taiwan isn't doing too poorly either. Plus, they have universal healthcare. So whether a country has signed the Berne Convention is a pretty poor indicator of the quality of government/living in that country.
Well, I'm sure they're going after the people selling the pirated discs, not the consumers, but those people aren't reaping huge profits either. They're often only working class people themselves. Taiwan and China are examples of unregulated and unrestrained capitalism that the WTO is pushing for all around the world. It's people doing whatever they can to make a buck. Except in the case of the WTO supported corporations, these people are making billions of dollars doing things that hurt working class people, and the lower class. Whereas, the people selling pirated goods in Russia, China, Taiwan, etc. are poor working class people "exploiting" these megacorporations.
And yea, considiring the cost of living in these countries, the prices that the RIAA & MPAA wanna charge for their goods is simply unrealistic. Most people in these countries would sooner stop buying american DVDs and CDs than to start paying these exorbitant costs. In any case, it's still millionare CEO's going after impoverished people for relatively insignificant sums to the American recording industry.
Who exactly runs the WTO, and how is it operated? From what I've seen, the WTO seems to promote globalization in the interest of transnational corporations and international conglomerates. In a lot of 3rd world countries which the WTO has jurisdiction over, they simply tear down protectionist policies to open up new markets for these transnationals to exploit. So why would any country want to be the WTO? or is it mainly the large Russian corporations which want Russia to gain admission into the organization?
All of the events you listed seem like much larger national crises than Russians pirating music.
Seriously, this is like shoeing away hobos picking scraps out of a dumpster. Sure, they didn't pay for it, but it's certainly a stretch to call it stealing. Most working-class Russians probably couldn't afford to pay $19.99 for a CD every 3 weeks, so the potential revenue that the RIAA is really losing (not the theoretical value of the music pirated) isn't likely to be significant compared to all of the evenue they are already making off of legitimate CD sales, shows, merch sales, etc. in Russia. Heck, the money they are pouring into fighting piracy is probably magnitudes higher than their revenue losses to piracy
Taiwan isn't on the list of signatures to the Berne Convention either. While Taiwan's government is far from perfect, I think we're doing a lot better than countries like China, Turkey, South Africa, etc.
It's boring--to some people. But other individuals, though I'm not one of them, enjoy seeing the deliberate engineering behind the production process. A lot of manufacturing processes which may be easy to perform by hand may be very complicated to reproduce mechanically. It often takes a lot of ingenuity to design a machine, or machines, that efficiently mass produce(s) a certain product. In other words, what's boring or interesting to watch is subject.
Oh yea, and the Bush administration also has very close ties to most of those Texas power companies. Bush met with the president of atleast one of the companies that was convicted of energy gouging, and swindling California out of billions of dollars in the 2001 energy crisis. And Cheney even defended those companies afterwards in a TV interview on Dateline.
And looking at the political contributions made by these companies, maybe you shouldn't be thanking Bush for putting these criminals away, but thanking these criminals for helping get Bush elected.
Kmart's SEC investigation was about actions taken in 2001.
Merck's false revenues were declared from 1999-2001.
Mirant was convicted of energy gouging from 2000-2001.
Peregrine Systems reported false revenue from 2000 to 2002.
Qwest fraudulently concealed the fact that, based on a series of accounting errors, it improperly recognized $112 million of revenue between 2000 and 2002 from its Wireless division.
Reliant Energy committed energy gouging in 2000 and 2001.
WorldCom fraud was masterminded starting in 2000 but took place up till July 2002 when the company filed for bankrupcy.
Stop talking out of your ass. This page also details the amount of money each of these fraud committing corporations contributed to the Democratic or Republican parties during the 2002 election cycle. It's pretty obvious which party is in favor with the white collar criminals.
There's one more thing I feel I should bring to your attention: 2000,2001, and 2002 are not the late 90's. And all but 2 of the scandals listed on that Forbes page happened in 2002. So either you can't read, or you can't count.
I'm guessing that you meant to say that the national deficit isn't the same as the national debt. You're right, I made a mistake in my post implying that they are the same. But that is irrelevent. The 2004 deficit was $412 billion, whereas at the end of Clinton's term there was a budget surplus of over $200 billion. In Clinton's 8 years of presidency, the national debt went up a little over $1 trillion--drastically reducing the rate at which we had been incurring debt up to that point--whereas, Bush has increased our debt over $2 trillion in just 5 years. If you take inflation into account, the results are just as dramatic: in Clinton's 8 years of presidency he did not increase the national debt at all, in fact, he lowered it. In contrast, Bush increased our national debt by $1 trillion compared to before he took office.
Clinton proved to be quite fiscally responsible--something which is not so simple as just cutting the funding on random government programs. Bush proved to be quite the opposite--End of argument.
How is veganism harmful to one's health? I'd be more worried about eating fast food too often than a vegan diet. While I'm not a vegan or a vegetarian myself, I'm pretty sure that in this day an age pretty much all the nutrients that one needs can be found outside of animal products, and that most vegans probably pay more attention to their diet than the average person and would are in better health as well because of it.
And what about Thomas White who, prior to his appointment to Bush's cabinet as Secretary of Army, was a senior chairman at Enron and also happened to sell 200,000 shares of Enron stock for $12 million just before the company's collapse? Or Robert Zoellick--Bush's Deputy Secretary of state--who was previously a paid consultant on the Enron advisory board? Or Karl Rove--Bush's chief political advisor, who had significant stock in Enron, and helped get republican strategist Ralph Reed a consulting contract with Enron during Bush's first presidential campaign? Or John Ashcroft--who wasn't allowed to participate in the criminal investigation of the Enron scandle because of a "possible conflict of interest," and had also received more than $57,000 from Enron? Or Lawrence Lindsey, the current chief economic advisor of the whitehouse, who happens to be a former director on Enron's board? Oh, and let's not forget about the $1.75 million that Enron and Kenneth Lay gave to the G.O.P. during the 2000 campaign.
So is Bush going after corporate accounting fraud by giving those responsible cabinet positions and letting them make national policies? There's definitely corruption within the democratic party as well, but if you think Republicans are any better, you must have been living under a rock for the last 50 years. And what mess did Bush clean up after Clinton? You mean like that $200 billion surplus at the end of the Clinton administration that Bush turned into a $8 trillion deficit while cutting back on education, employment services, health, housing, law enforcement, and other programs that might actually improve our society?
Yea, thanks for all the dead arabs and U.S. soldiers Dubya, and thanks for trampling on the Constitution. The war on terrorism is going great. We're sure to win this thing any day now...
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is off-topic, but most of the discussion so far has been pretty uninteresting, so I was wondering how other slashdotters feel about the "Blood Mary" episode of South Park being pulled off the air and basically being censored from TV or any other future reproductions because it offended a few religious conservatives.
Here's another news article on it featured in the North Korea Times.
you're an idiot.
More importantly, any 3rd party program that incorporates the use of WMF should be redesigned. You can't fix a vulnerability caused by a data structure that is insecure by design and still try to allow programs using WMF to function as normal. The logical thing to do would be to remove WMF implementation from Windows--thus disabling any application that uses WMF and are essentially vectors for potential exploits, then leave it up to the various 3rd party application authors to fix their own design flaws, which should be relatively easy--just stop relying on WMF.
No, the whole drug-disease analogy is flawed because it doesn't account for the fact that:
a.) Their product is what is causing the problem. Cancer researchers are rarely responsible for causing the disease they are trying to find a cure for. b.) It's a problem that not only affects the system running their software, but also the rest of the internet/world through network congestion, downtime of critical systems, etc. This is a critical vulnerability, with a very real potential for compromising entire systems. Would you rather have a few obscure applications which use the flawed design of WMF no longer work anymore, or would you rather have your system compromised by a hacker or virus? If you wanna use a medical analogy it's like not releasing a cure for SARS because it might give you an upset stomache or dry mouth or potentially cause an allergic reactions in a small percentage of the population.b.) A 3rd party has created a fix that has proven to be highly successful, has been deployed in a large scale already, and where follow-ups have revealed no indications of the fix breaking anything on the systems it has been installed on.
There aren't any medical/health industry analogies you could compare this to because it simply would not be tolerated if such a widely-used pharmacutical/medical product had such a defect.
Also, you're assuming that F-secure and other analysts who support the use of the 3rd party patch don't know anything about programming or security and haven't thoroughly tested the patch themselves. You also seem to be oblivious to the fact that despite MS' slow response time they have still managed to release several patches that do break their own code or fail to fix what they claim to fix.
why does it matter how it was made or who/what the wine was judged by if it tastes just as good? in the end aren't you just drinking it for the flavor? or is this some kind of image thing?
Perhaps these articles were written by different people? Just a thought.
On the flip side of the coin, most people who wanted ICANN to retain control of the internet instead of the UN used government censorship as an excuse--assuming that that's the only reason why the UN would want control of the DNS. But now when it's reported that ICANN is abetting government imposed censorship in certain countries, people in support of ICANN are calling it "international involvement" or "respect for sovereignty."
Perhaps it might not be such a bad idea to have an international organization control the DNS--that is the correct way to elicit international involvement. What we are doing right now is simply handing over control of the internet to governments/political factions that the U.S. government is currently in support of. In many cases, this means silencing governments and political factions that are opposed to U.S. policies. This is an abuse of U.S. control of ICANN.
When people speak of having "more international involvement" I don't think they are asking us to use our control over the DNS to exert more political influence over other parts of the world. They are asking us to give the international community more involvement in the management of the DNS. And IMHO, this hardly qualifies as any kind of concession. This only demonstrates why the UN doesn't want the DNS to be solely controlled by the U.S.
But by leveraging their marketshare against Sony's attempt to kill HD, doesn't this action make them anti-anti-competitive? In other words, aren't they simply providing the counter-weight against the Blu-Ray's strategy to kill HD, thus keeping the HD standard alive to compete with Blu-Ray?
If this had been Microsoft's offensive, then perhaps it could be seen as an abuse of their virtual monopoly. But I really can't see HD surviving very long without Microsoft's endorsement, so if you value competition, then this should be seen as a good thing.
That's a false dichotomy. The pharmacutical industry can be reformed and still produce viable drugs for the public.
And it's funny that you should mention AIDS. For the longest time, places like Africa, where 60% of the world's AIDS-infected population lives, the majority of the AIDS-infected population had no access to antiretroviral treatment because of economic barriers created by U.S. medical patents and the obscene prices placed on the drugs used. It required tremendous lobbying and political campaigning for local pharmacutical manufacturers to gain the rights to produce cheap generics which the local population could afford.
As early as 1996 we had effective treatments for AIDS which could help one stricken with the disease to live for another 20 years, but by 1999 the drugs used in the treatment was only accessible to less than 10% of AIDS-infected individuals in Africa even though the local governments had 100% of the resources and infrastructure needed to treat their entire AIDS-infected population.
Developing drugs with the wrong motivations has harmed millions of people in the past. The attitude that the poor are not people and don't deserve the same medical treatment for life-threatening diseases as the rich is a major problem within the medical industry, and one which needs to be addressed. Things have gotten better over the years as the issue was brought into the public eye, but the fight is still far from over. AIDS is just one aspect of this social problem.
No penis? Well, since there are no girls that read Slashdot, there's only one other possibility... you must be one of those eunuchs I've been hearing so much about.
I question the verity of that 1896 figure on the number of opium addicts in the United States. If you define an opium addict as anyone who consumes opium recreationally, then perhaps it could have been close to that figure, otherwise, it seems unlikely. Secondly, it should be noted that while opium as it was consumed by the Chinese in opium dens was outlawed, opium/morphine tinctures such as laudanum was still legal as it was a habit mostly taken up by the wealthy upper class.
Though I think coke and opiates should be regulated much like alcohol and tobacco, the prohibitionist policies we have against recreational use of these substances are simply irrational and were formed by the wrong motivations.
"Now, you may ask, who put their foot in their mouth in this story? Well, I'll tell you. Many people on the discussion board where you now read this very post put their feet in their mouths by spewing intemperate comments as a result of uncritically accepting the statements of a liar as the truth. I'd say that's a pretty good foot in the mouth story and a pretty good cautionary tale as well."
Having a discussion on a news story based on the information provided is not putting your foot in your mouth. As you said, the professor questioned the student, and also his parents--that is how he arrived at the truth. How many slashdotters do you think would have had as easy access to the student or his parents for questioning?
Sometimes it's easy to verify the statements made by a news article. In these situations, one can be expected to do so before accepting dubious claims. But unless when this news story was originally posted on Slashdot you were there to say "Hey guys, that kid lied. Here's how I know..." then you can't expect others to have caught the lie. Whether people were defending the Homeland Security act or were detractors, no one suspected that the student's claims were made up since it didn't seem so unlikely to most people who participated in the discussion.
Adding an opioid antagonist like nalaxone doesn't do anything when you snort it, only when you inject it. If you add enough of it that it has any effect when you take it orally or when you snort it, then you're blocking off just as much of its analgesic effects. Same with trying to remove the psychotropic effects of ecstasy--its the psychotropic effects that also make ecstasy theraputic (it's not really a pain killer).
Our drugs laws are just dumb. People are always going to take opiates and other drugs recreationally because it's fun. It's like trying to prohibit the recreational consumption of alcohol (a societally accepted recreational drug which we have a double standard for) just because there are alcoholics. The funny thing is, before opiate dependence was made a crime, it was seen by Americans as less of a nuisance to society than alcoholism--people could also support their opiate habit on pennies a day and still be functional members of society. In fact, you'd be suprised at how many well known people in history used opiates such as opium/heroin/morphine regularly.
What we need to do is just reform our drug policies and most of the societal problems related to drug abuse will simply go away--like people ODing on "ecstasy" because it was cut with more dangerous substances, or the prohibition style crime-wave which has sweeped the nation, etc.
That's irrelevant. Taiwan hasn't signed the Berne Convention either because they choose not to, or they are not allowed to. But the Taiwanese government still isn't nearly as bad as some of the the countries which are included on the list. Also, economically speaking, Taiwan isn't doing too poorly either. Plus, they have universal healthcare. So whether a country has signed the Berne Convention is a pretty poor indicator of the quality of government/living in that country.
Well, I'm sure they're going after the people selling the pirated discs, not the consumers, but those people aren't reaping huge profits either. They're often only working class people themselves. Taiwan and China are examples of unregulated and unrestrained capitalism that the WTO is pushing for all around the world. It's people doing whatever they can to make a buck. Except in the case of the WTO supported corporations, these people are making billions of dollars doing things that hurt working class people, and the lower class. Whereas, the people selling pirated goods in Russia, China, Taiwan, etc. are poor working class people "exploiting" these megacorporations.
And yea, considiring the cost of living in these countries, the prices that the RIAA & MPAA wanna charge for their goods is simply unrealistic. Most people in these countries would sooner stop buying american DVDs and CDs than to start paying these exorbitant costs. In any case, it's still millionare CEO's going after impoverished people for relatively insignificant sums to the American recording industry.
Who exactly runs the WTO, and how is it operated? From what I've seen, the WTO seems to promote globalization in the interest of transnational corporations and international conglomerates. In a lot of 3rd world countries which the WTO has jurisdiction over, they simply tear down protectionist policies to open up new markets for these transnationals to exploit. So why would any country want to be the WTO? or is it mainly the large Russian corporations which want Russia to gain admission into the organization?
All of the events you listed seem like much larger national crises than Russians pirating music.
Seriously, this is like shoeing away hobos picking scraps out of a dumpster. Sure, they didn't pay for it, but it's certainly a stretch to call it stealing. Most working-class Russians probably couldn't afford to pay $19.99 for a CD every 3 weeks, so the potential revenue that the RIAA is really losing (not the theoretical value of the music pirated) isn't likely to be significant compared to all of the evenue they are already making off of legitimate CD sales, shows, merch sales, etc. in Russia. Heck, the money they are pouring into fighting piracy is probably magnitudes higher than their revenue losses to piracy
Taiwan isn't on the list of signatures to the Berne Convention either. While Taiwan's government is far from perfect, I think we're doing a lot better than countries like China, Turkey, South Africa, etc.
Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't that short by about 9 months?
Baby != fetus != embryo
It's boring--to some people. But other individuals, though I'm not one of them, enjoy seeing the deliberate engineering behind the production process. A lot of manufacturing processes which may be easy to perform by hand may be very complicated to reproduce mechanically. It often takes a lot of ingenuity to design a machine, or machines, that efficiently mass produce(s) a certain product. In other words, what's boring or interesting to watch is subject.
Oh yea, and the Bush administration also has very close ties to most of those Texas power companies. Bush met with the president of atleast one of the companies that was convicted of energy gouging, and swindling California out of billions of dollars in the 2001 energy crisis. And Cheney even defended those companies afterwards in a TV interview on Dateline.
And looking at the political contributions made by these companies, maybe you shouldn't be thanking Bush for putting these criminals away, but thanking these criminals for helping get Bush elected.
So you assume that any trial that begins in 2002 is about a crime that happened atleast 2 and a half years ago? Let's look at the facts, shall we?
SEC charges against Adlphia were in regards to accounting fraud commited between 1999 and 2001.
SEC charges against AOL were in regards to accounting practices after their merger with Time-Warner: from 2000 to 2002.
Bristol-Myers Squibb - states in the article--very clearly--that they inflated their 2001 revenue by $1.5 billion.
CMS Energy's round-trip trades occured between the 3rd quarters of 2000 and 2001.
Duke Energy's round-trip trades occured in 2001 and 2002.
Dynegy committed round-trip trades in 2001 and included them in their 2002 first quarter revenue.
El Paso Energy's round-trip trades occured in 2001.
Halliburton - lol, do I even need to explain this one? I don't think the Bush administration will be clamping down on this one any time soon.
Homestore.com - inflated revenue in 2001.
Kmart's SEC investigation was about actions taken in 2001.
Merck's false revenues were declared from 1999-2001.
Mirant was convicted of energy gouging from 2000-2001.
Peregrine Systems reported false revenue from 2000 to 2002.
Qwest fraudulently concealed the fact that, based on a series of accounting errors, it improperly recognized $112 million of revenue between 2000 and 2002 from its Wireless division.
Reliant Energy committed energy gouging in 2000 and 2001.
WorldCom fraud was masterminded starting in 2000 but took place up till July 2002 when the company filed for bankrupcy.
Stop talking out of your ass. This page also details the amount of money each of these fraud committing corporations contributed to the Democratic or Republican parties during the 2002 election cycle. It's pretty obvious which party is in favor with the white collar criminals.
There's one more thing I feel I should bring to your attention: 2000,2001, and 2002 are not the late 90's. And all but 2 of the scandals listed on that Forbes page happened in 2002. So either you can't read, or you can't count.
I'm guessing that you meant to say that the national deficit isn't the same as the national debt. You're right, I made a mistake in my post implying that they are the same. But that is irrelevent. The 2004 deficit was $412 billion, whereas at the end of Clinton's term there was a budget surplus of over $200 billion. In Clinton's 8 years of presidency, the national debt went up a little over $1 trillion--drastically reducing the rate at which we had been incurring debt up to that point--whereas, Bush has increased our debt over $2 trillion in just 5 years. If you take inflation into account, the results are just as dramatic: in Clinton's 8 years of presidency he did not increase the national debt at all, in fact, he lowered it. In contrast, Bush increased our national debt by $1 trillion compared to before he took office.
Clinton proved to be quite fiscally responsible--something which is not so simple as just cutting the funding on random government programs. Bush proved to be quite the opposite--End of argument.
How is veganism harmful to one's health? I'd be more worried about eating fast food too often than a vegan diet. While I'm not a vegan or a vegetarian myself, I'm pretty sure that in this day an age pretty much all the nutrients that one needs can be found outside of animal products, and that most vegans probably pay more attention to their diet than the average person and would are in better health as well because of it.
And what about Thomas White who, prior to his appointment to Bush's cabinet as Secretary of Army, was a senior chairman at Enron and also happened to sell 200,000 shares of Enron stock for $12 million just before the company's collapse? Or Robert Zoellick--Bush's Deputy Secretary of state--who was previously a paid consultant on the Enron advisory board? Or Karl Rove--Bush's chief political advisor, who had significant stock in Enron, and helped get republican strategist Ralph Reed a consulting contract with Enron during Bush's first presidential campaign? Or John Ashcroft--who wasn't allowed to participate in the criminal investigation of the Enron scandle because of a "possible conflict of interest," and had also received more than $57,000 from Enron? Or Lawrence Lindsey, the current chief economic advisor of the whitehouse, who happens to be a former director on Enron's board? Oh, and let's not forget about the $1.75 million that Enron and Kenneth Lay gave to the G.O.P. during the 2000 campaign.
So is Bush going after corporate accounting fraud by giving those responsible cabinet positions and letting them make national policies? There's definitely corruption within the democratic party as well, but if you think Republicans are any better, you must have been living under a rock for the last 50 years. And what mess did Bush clean up after Clinton? You mean like that $200 billion surplus at the end of the Clinton administration that Bush turned into a $8 trillion deficit while cutting back on education, employment services, health, housing, law enforcement, and other programs that might actually improve our society?
Yea, thanks for all the dead arabs and U.S. soldiers Dubya, and thanks for trampling on the Constitution. The war on terrorism is going great. We're sure to win this thing any day now...