I'd say the resulting (planned) situation is worse than point 5. As Joe Stiglitz, former World Bank Chief Economist says [0], due to the conditionalities of the loan, privatisation of resources and infrastructure is mandated: "By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules."
When the loan can't be paid (due to lack of double digit growth), extra conditions are imposed such as provision of military bases and favoured access to natural resources. Of course, the interest on the loan is not cancelled, merely deferred.
It's quite suspicious that the four step plan (the conditionalities) that the IMF espouses for each country results in riots that further drive down the price of that country's assets: 1. Privatisation (Briberisation) 2. Capital Market Liberalisation 3. Market Based Pricing 4. Free Trade
1. "Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via kick-backs for his campaign....
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation." 2. "In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries." 3. "At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot."
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings,
Pardon me if I don't pop the champagne corks. Recalling some of their computer projects' greatest hits:
£30 million: Ministry of Defence (MoD) projects. £21 million to replace teleprinter systems: stopped working, GEC Plessey, and £8.7 million for managing pay and pensions: cost overrun by 217% in one year, Royal Navy. Source, 1998-99.
£1.6 billion: Benefit fraud prevention: scrapped due to "arguments, glitches and miscommunication": ICL: £180 million, Post Office: £1051 million, and Department of Social Security (as was): £427 million, May 1999
Inland Revenue lost five million tax records: closed the files, thus"writing off any tax/rebates." A failure in EDS and Andersen Consulting systems to communicate, July 2000.
£118 million: Probation Service infrastructure - "poor specification of expected outputs, weaknesses in service monitoring and inadequate control of purchases": 70% over budget.Bull Information Systems, April 2001.
£300 million: MoD pay, pension and HR services - failure to merge these systems for the fighting forces. A complete disaster."EDS, November 2001.
Finally, the punishment meted out to these suppliers for lack of computer expertise is minimal, cases in point being Siemens with a £60,000 fine over the Passport Agency and Andersen Consulting over the £170 million National Insurance Recording System II system fiasco, with a £3.9 million fine.
In a similar experiment, it was found that rats which could stimulate the pleasure centres of their brains, would continue to do so in preference to eating and drinking.
"cronic shortage of IT staff"
Eh? Chronic shortage of skilled IT staff.
Read the section entitled Why Don't Customers Wise Up? (Search for this section title within the page, as there was no internal anchor to link.)
It seems that since the 1960s, PHBs talked up the scarcity of IT staff to stimulate demand and cause a glut, so that they could drive down programmer salaries to reflect the 'true' importance of management to the managed i.e. managers earning multiples of their technical s[(a)(er)]vants.
From the article:
"The only problem with this arrangement is that most of today's working programmers don't know how to program."
Since there was such 'demand,' educational institutions found more applicants to CS courses. Due to the greed of the administrators who run these bodies, they lowered standards to let more people in.
In the UK, this has resulted in the merry farce which is the GCSE, A level and degree certification conveyor belt. Every Summer, we have Big Brother trumpeting the record number of students with higher grades, only to be confronted with academics complaining about the quality of undergraduates. The people at the coal face are then roundly denounced as elitists. I consider myself a plebeian, having experienced the vicissitudes of homelessness, which fact contributes even further to my anger at having been educationally shortchanged.
One need look no further than the consultancies to see the policies of absolute greed and pig ignorance in action. (Apologies to those of a porcine persuasion). In Britain, for this year alone, hundreds of millions of taxpayers' pounds have been squandered by Big Brother on their nepotic friends in industry who can't fscking even be held accountable. EDS, Siemens, Andersen, DeLoitte, Price Waterhouse. The list goes on and on.
MPolo wrote "That is, we would have to posit millions of years of non-working retinas that still managed to naturally select until they got to the point of a working retina. The fossil record doesn't bear this out."
Legion303 replied that "Its precursors were light-sensitive receptors that slowly (remember, it took billions of years) changed into what most mammals have today."
But the fossil record contradicts Legion303's statement. My earlier post mentioned complexity theory - complex structures/behaviours can arise spontaneously - they self organise. It did not take billions of years for the retina to develop. Darwin himself confessed to an American friend that "[the] eye to this day gives me a cold shudder."
I do not reject natural selection, just the view that it is the only source of order. An example was given by Kauffman - consider the multitude of shapes of bicycles that were first spawned - this is complexity. Over time the less efficient designs were winnowed out - evolution at work.
It seems that a fair few people on sadsloth/dashlots have some acquaintance with Stuart Kauffman's At Home In the Universe - complexity theory and autocatalytic sets:
"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."
Concrete evidence for spontaneous complexity:
Gunter von Kiedrowski, then at U. Freiburg in Germany, several years ago
published work on a collectively autocatalytic set of two DNA hexamers
that mutually ligated the two pairs of DNA trimers composing the two
hexamers. Meanwhile, Reza Ghadiri at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla,
California has made an autocatalytic peptide, Nature August 2 years ago and nearly collectively autocatalytic sets more recently.
Unexpected evidence comes from Lou Allamandola. "The most amazing thing is that we start with something really simple. And then suddenly
we're making this enormous range of complex molecules. When I see
this kind of complexity forming under these exceedingly extreme conditions, I begin to really
believe that life is a cosmic imperative."
and from Biliang Zhang and Tom Cech, who isolated RNAs that could efficiently link specific amino acids together. These
pseudo-ribosomes were selected from a random pool of 10^15 synthetic RNAs.
So, there is enough evidence to invalidate the claim that complexity theory is
'fact-free science'.
Recently Yao et al described a four-component peptide system that is capable
of auto- and cross-catalysis and which supports the suggestion that self-replicating peptides may
have played a role in the origin of life.
The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind;
The water has no mind to retain their image.
Wrong, Horses Did Evolve in North Amerika
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
Somehow, nature forgave us for introducing things like horses to
North America..., even though these things were -clearly- never intended to happen through any 'natural' means. But, "most horse species, including all the ancestors of Equus, arose in North
America." "Most of the one-toed horses in North America also died out, as the Ice
Ages started. (The causes of these extinctions are unknown.)"
Get your facts right American AC in Paris.
A programme was shown recently on UK TV entitled The Hunger Business, on the way Ethiopian famine was used as a weapon of war by the Ethiopian government.
Bob Geldof then went in with eyes wide shut, and secured aid for famine relief. A noble man, but ill informed and painfully naive.
Of course, the Ethiopian government was grateful. How do you think they fed their soldiers? Money from Live Aid was used to support the Ethiopian government in the civil war against rebels. Since rebels were indistinguishable from the general farming population, the government decided to drive out and persecute its own people. Hence, the famine.
Some of the most vivid footage I saw was of an Ethiopian fighter jet bombing a farming village. Damn.
The media has to shoulder a large part of the blame. There was at least one reporter who was trying to give a picture of the real situation but she was ignored and accused of trying to crash the party.
Sorry, I couldn't find a more informative link to Channel 4's informative program.
The raindrops patter on the bamboo leaf, but these are not tears of grief;
This is only the anguish of him who is listening to them.
I believe similar research was also done in Apartheid-era South Africa.
I believe that the genes targeted were those which caused lactose
intolerance in Africans, but not in the majority of Caucasians.
Patent for a "Method for the consolidation summarization and transmission of a plurality of mailable materials" bought by your favourite non-tech company M$. (Marks & Spencer? NO! Microsoft)
What it means is simply that billing organisations can participate in a clearing house system whereby participating subscribers get just the one summary bill every month, and can pay the lot with one cheque if they like. The clever bit, such as it is, seems to be merging the database info, or maybe printing on two sides of a sheet of paper according to this Register article
Breakfast like a king,
Lunch like a queen,
Dine like a pauper.
Is there a rigorous and current comparison of Webservers out there?
I've been playing with AOLServer recently and would like to know how much of a performance advantage it currently has over Apache. (Used to be 10 times faster than Apache)
For those who don't know, AOLServer, formerly NaviServer, was built in 1994 by Jim Davidson and Doug McKee. It was then bought by AOL and GPLed a little later. More info here.
she had only the light sensor thingies that see black and white, not the ones that distinguish colour
The two types of photoreceptor cells in the human eye are called rods and cones due to their shape. Rods are sensitive enough to respond to a single photon, but together they create only one coarse, gray image, which is just adequate for seeing in poor light. Fine detail and color come from the cones, but they need a lot more light.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the resulting (planned) situation is worse than point 5. As Joe Stiglitz, former World Bank Chief Economist says [0], due to the conditionalities of the loan, privatisation of resources and infrastructure is mandated:
"By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules."
When the loan can't be paid (due to lack of double digit growth), extra conditions are imposed such as provision of military bases and favoured access to natural resources. Of course, the interest on the loan is not cancelled, merely deferred.
It's quite suspicious that the four step plan (the conditionalities) that the IMF espouses for each country results in riots that further drive down the price of that country's assets:
1. Privatisation (Briberisation)
2. Capital Market Liberalisation
3. Market Based Pricing
4. Free Trade
1. "Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets. ...
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via kick-backs for his campaign.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation."
2. "In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries."
3. "At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot."
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings,
Various software problems, still ongoing:
Flight disruption,
poorly designed display software,
capacity reduced by half. IBM, 2002.
Mod this up.
that the only way out from under your boot heel is by use of violence.
Gandhi was successful in a non-violent fashion.
See intracranial self-stimulation.
In a similar experiment, it was found that rats which could stimulate the pleasure centres of their brains, would continue to do so in preference to eating and drinking.
Hence, they died.
Eh? Chronic shortage of skilled IT staff.
Read the section entitled Why Don't Customers Wise Up? (Search for this section title within the page, as there was no internal anchor to link.)
It seems that since the 1960s, PHBs talked up the scarcity of IT staff to stimulate demand and cause a glut, so that they could drive down programmer salaries to reflect the 'true' importance of management to the managed i.e. managers earning multiples of their technical s[(a)(er)]vants.
From the article:
"The only problem with this arrangement is that most of today's working programmers don't know how to program."
Since there was such 'demand,' educational institutions found more applicants to CS courses. Due to the greed of the administrators who run these bodies, they lowered standards to let more people in.
In the UK, this has resulted in the merry farce which is the GCSE, A level and degree certification conveyor belt. Every Summer, we have Big Brother trumpeting the record number of students with higher grades, only to be confronted with academics complaining about the quality of undergraduates. The people at the coal face are then roundly denounced as elitists. I consider myself a plebeian, having experienced the vicissitudes of homelessness, which fact contributes even further to my anger at having been educationally shortchanged.
One need look no further than the consultancies to see the policies of absolute greed and pig ignorance in action. (Apologies to those of a porcine persuasion). In Britain, for this year alone, hundreds of millions of taxpayers' pounds have been squandered by Big Brother on their nepotic friends in industry who can't fscking even be held accountable. EDS, Siemens, Andersen, DeLoitte, Price Waterhouse. The list goes on and on.
For those of you who want to minimise occupational typing injuries, have a look at the Typing Injury FAQ.
Forgot the everything2.com link explaining that you can replace www with partners, channel for NYT.
Is here Sorry
http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/03/05/technology/0 5IVAN.html?pagewanted=all
Legion303 replied that "Its precursors were light-sensitive receptors that slowly (remember, it took billions of years) changed into what most mammals have today."
But the fossil record contradicts Legion303's statement. My earlier post mentioned complexity theory - complex structures/behaviours can arise spontaneously - they self organise. It did not take billions of years for the retina to develop. Darwin himself confessed to an American friend that "[the] eye to this day gives me a cold shudder."
I do not reject natural selection, just the view that it is the only source of order. An example was given by Kauffman - consider the multitude of shapes of bicycles that were first spawned - this is complexity. Over time the less efficient designs were winnowed out - evolution at work.
Incidentally, while researching, I came across Complexity applied to GNU/Linux development.
It seems that a fair few people on sadsloth/dashlots have some acquaintance with Stuart Kauffman's At Home In the Universe - complexity theory and autocatalytic sets:
"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."
Concrete evidence for spontaneous complexity:
More links:
NASA Nanotechnology Team
Nanotechnology with Carbon Nanotubes
Also do a search on /. for nanotube.
The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind;
The water has no mind to retain their image.
But, "most horse species, including all the ancestors of Equus, arose in North America." "Most of the one-toed horses in North America also died out, as the Ice Ages started. (The causes of these extinctions are unknown.)"
Get your facts right American AC in Paris.
More on the evolution of the horse.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, grass grows by itself.
Sally Struthers Asks You to Save the Dot-Coms
Bob Geldof then went in with eyes wide shut, and secured aid for famine relief. A noble man, but ill informed and painfully naive.
Of course, the Ethiopian government was grateful. How do you think they fed their soldiers? Money from Live Aid was used to support the Ethiopian government in the civil war against rebels. Since rebels were indistinguishable from the general farming population, the government decided to drive out and persecute its own people. Hence, the famine.
Some of the most vivid footage I saw was of an Ethiopian fighter jet bombing a farming village. Damn.
The media has to shoulder a large part of the blame. There was at least one reporter who was trying to give a picture of the real situation but she was ignored and accused of trying to crash the party.
Sorry, I couldn't find a more informative link to Channel 4's informative program.
The raindrops patter on the bamboo leaf, but these are not tears of grief;
This is only the anguish of him who is listening to them.
I believe that the genes targeted were those which caused lactose intolerance in Africans, but not in the majority of Caucasians.
More information on this nefarious research is available in the article Ethnic Weapons For Ethnic Cleansing
Regret for the past
Is a waste of spirit
What it means is simply that billing organisations can participate in a clearing house system whereby participating subscribers get just the one summary bill every month, and can pay the lot with one cheque if they like. The clever bit, such as it is, seems to be merging the database info, or maybe printing on two sides of a sheet of paper according to this Register article
Breakfast like a king,
Lunch like a queen,
Dine like a pauper.
I've been playing with AOLServer recently and would like to know how much of a performance advantage it currently has over Apache. (Used to be 10 times faster than Apache)
For those who don't know, AOLServer, formerly NaviServer, was built in 1994 by Jim Davidson and Doug McKee. It was then bought by AOL and GPLed a little later. More info here.
Regret for the past, Is a waste of spirit.
Regret for the past is a waste of spirit
Regret for the past is a waste of spirit
Regret for the past is a waste of spirit
The two types of photoreceptor cells in the human eye are called rods and cones due to their shape. Rods are sensitive enough to respond to a single photon, but together they create only one coarse, gray image, which is just adequate for seeing in poor light. Fine detail and color come from the cones, but they need a lot more light.
Regret for the past is a waste of spirit