09.13.11
Posted in America, Bill Gates at 1:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Signs of growing awareness of Bill Gates’ agenda and why it is wrong to rob the public’s voice using fake grassroots (AstroTurf)
THE growing impact of foundations is troubling because these entities are used as vehicles of lobbying, run predominantly by rich white males. Pablo Eisenberg has this critical piece which he starts as follows: “In recent years the United States has developed into an increasingly pronounced class society. We see it in the growing inequality of income and wealth; we witness it in the expansion of corporate power and influence at a time when blue-collar job status is on the decline; and we view it in the daily depiction of our lives on our television screens.
“Nowhere are class divisions more visible than in the most elite of American institutions, the philanthropic foundations. The last vestige of royalty in America, their boards are composed almost entirely of wealthy and highly paid people who increasingly determine our country’s economy, public policies, values, and social practices. With few exceptions, they exclude the diverse faces that make up today’s America.
“The last vestige of royalty in America, their boards are composed almost entirely of wealthy and highly paid people who increasingly determine our country’s economy, public policies, values, and social practices. With few exceptions, they exclude the diverse faces that make up today’s America.”
–Pablo Eisenberg“Teachers, ministers, community leaders, social workers, small-business owners, blue-collar workers, union representatives, youth workers, and disabled people are rarely found on foundation boards. That is the case both with foundations started by one person or family and the community funds that raise and distribute money in one region.”
Today we’ll tackle the education bit because there is nothing more troubling than plutocrats taking over the minds of children through teachers that the public is forced to pay for. This one recent post claims that:
The Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations have bought up all the time and energy they can from academics, teachers, and policy people whose time and energies can be bought to pursue the one best curriculum and one best test for the nation’s schoolchildren. One nation, under Gates, with liberty and justice for corporations.
In various parts of the country, checks are being distributed to state governments to fund special classes this summer to get administrators and teachers trained in the latest corporate scam to come along: national standards, national curriculum, and a national test. Begun from a Business Roundtable effort called the American Diploma Project to shape the American high school curriculum state by state, the new effort at nationalizing K-12 schooling (paid for by ED, Gates, and Broad) makes the ADP seem like child’s play in comparison.
This teachers’ blog that we keep an eye on says:
Interesting how Teach for America has gone over like a stink bomb in West Seattle. I suppose Gates will now start throwing more money at West Seattle by way of the League of Education Voters (LEV), et al and we’ll start hearing ads about the wonders of TFA, Inc. on KUOW soon as we did with the Broad Foundation and now with the Gates Foundation.
In a later post it says that “Gates, CPPS and the League of Education voters have begun to seep into those minority communities where charter schools reign in other regions of the country. See the e-mail below from Kelly Munn of the Gates backed League of Education Voters.”
We wrote about Gates-funded almost a year ago and the New York Times recently gave the names of other such front groups that the Gates Foundation is using to drive 'reform'
Quoting further from the same blog:
For example, the Gates funded Seattle Foundation provided money to pay for the expense to have TFA, Inc. in our district for the first year even though the majority of teachers and parents did not want to have TFA, Inc. in Seattle.
TFA is also mentioned here:
It has never been clear why TFA should be brought to the Puget Sound area in the first place. There is no teacher shortage here. In fact, the Seattle School District recently announced it would lay off 30 teachers this year. Have low-income parents or those with special needs children (both targeted communities for Seattle’s TFAers) been demanding short-term, fast-tracked young temps in their kids’ classrooms? No. Or are major ed reform funders like the Gates Foundation, and others who would like to bring privatization to Seattle’s public schools, trying to create a spigot of young, impressionable, non-union teaching staff for future charter schools?
The evident problem with the Gates Foundation’s AstroTurfing has become so clear that even the Gates-funded NPR decided to address the subject and, despite trying to belittle Dr. Diane Ravitch by quoting Gates’ minions, NPR (a Gates Foundation grant recipient) does a decent job explains the problem to a wide audience. To quote a portion:
“I have no doubt that the movement Bill Gates has launched has created enormous hostility toward teachers,” says Diane Ravitch, who has been studying American education for 40 years.
The New York University professor has emerged as the most outspoken critic of the foundation’s approach.
“It’s like all accountability for educational failure is suddenly plopped on the heads of teachers, and this is wrong,” she says.
Moreover, Ravitch contends that when the foundation supports think tanks, academics and others who agree with its point of view, it drowns out other voices. Referring to Bill Gates, she says, one man shouldn’t have so much power.
[...]
Like most foundations, the Gates organization works with partners and grantees — thousands of them — who do the heavy lifting on the ground. And having strong relationships with them is critical.
But in an independent survey last year, many partners said the foundation didn’t understand their goals, was inconsistent in its communications and often unresponsive.
Raikes says those things have prevented the foundation from reaching its full potential.
Thursday night Melinda Gates talked about the need for honest feedback from partners; Raikes talks about it too. And both say they hope the new headquarters’ design, with its many informal meeting spaces and wide-open architecture, will lead to more collaboration and a richer exchange of ideas.
NPR is among the organizations that receive money from the Gates Foundation.
At least they added a disclosure, unlike most those who receive Gates money to push his agenda under the guise of ‘journalism’. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 1:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Critical writings about how Gates buys the publications and lobbies the right politicians in the area in order to claim wins against easily-cured diseases to be his own
AS WE gradually catch up with news that has been missed, we find out that Bill Gates is still monopolising new areas outside of IT. These relate to technology and patents, even if not directly to computing.
“How many of the vaccine related deaths will he attribute to Gates Foundation funding? If things don’t go well, how many ‘opportunity cost’ lives lost will he attribute to Gates Foundation funding?”
–Gates KeepersGates Keepers claims that, as noted here before, Bill Gates keeps taking credit for what he did not invent, just publicised under his own brand. The vaccine lobbying is led by large for-profit companies that he works with while also investing his money in them. It is easier for them to use Gates as a front figure as he might arouse less suspicion than when they try it themselves. It’s like celebrity endorsements.
“It appears that one of the chairs of the Gates Foundation,” alleges Gates Keepers, “is planning to use the metric of ‘lives saved’ as his bottom line. He needs to face the issue of attribution. If Gates Foundation funds are just the catalyst for increased immunisation, how many of the saved lives will he attribute to Gates Foundation funding? How many of the vaccine related deaths will he attribute to Gates Foundation funding? If things don’t go well, how many ‘opportunity cost’ lives lost will he attribute to Gates Foundation funding?”
Gates Keepers also points out that “One issue of the journal “Health Affairs” has been bought by the Gates Foundation.” Looking at the journal’s Web site we find:
Immunizing the world’s children against infectious diseases has dramatically cut childhood death and suffering in recent decades. In 2010, philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates called for a new “Decade of Vaccines” to vault the progress dramatically forward.
The June 2011 issue of Health Affairs, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, examines the strategies that will be needed to achieve the goal.
As we showed before, this practice is not so unusual and even the Lancet is a victim of it [1, 2, 3] . It is polluted by articles bought by Gates to promote his own interests, which stifles completion and promotes monopoly in direction.
We previously wrote about how Harper was lobbied by Gates in order to donate taxpayers’ money for patents Gates invests in and it is clear that Gates is starting to pressure more and more governments to give public money to his companies/monopolies, even based on pro-Gates sites that write:
Led by a $1-billion pledge from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, private donors and governments on Monday committed $4.3-billion to efforts to immunize millions more children against preventable diseases, according to CNN.
Are governments now “led” by Gates? That just sounds corrupt. As Gates Keepers puts it: “The first line in this article needs to be backed up. How did the pledge from the Gates Foundation ‘lead’ the commitment? Was it the first donation? Was it the biggest? Did governments only pledge because the Foundation did? Did the Foundation lead governments? Do foundations lead governments? The Chronicle of Philanthropy should explain how the Foundation ‘led’ these governments into making commitments.”
Well, since Bill Gates spends about $400,000,000 per year on PR alone, he gets to control how the stories are told. He does, after all, sponsor a lot of the reporting in this are. Does that not trouble anyone?
Going back to the Harper-Gates deal, “HIV project with Bill Gates flops,” says a report from Canada, raising some valid questions:
The prime minister won headlines across Canada when he announced the project on Feb. 20, 2007, a smiling Bill Gates at his side.
“Through today’s initiative, Canada, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, will provide the resources needed to help realize an HIV-AIDS vaccine, which could one day spare millions of people from this horrific disease,” Harper said.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $28 million to the five-year project to pay for its keystone: a pilot manufacturing facility for trial batches of HIV vaccine.
As one investigative journalist points out:
The media/advocacy campaign (much of it paid for or supported by the Gates Foundation) is aimed at pushing out the value of vaccination in advance of a big meeting in London next week aimed at expanding a global project on immunization in poor countries.
See my earlier post on this initiative, GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, The biggest success story in global health you’ve never heard of. It’s also the Gates Foundation’s biggest project.
[...]
SIDE NOTE: It is also potentially problematic for one organization, the Gates Foundation, to be exerting so much singular influence over a fundamental component of public health. It may be well-intentioned, but the Seattle philanthropy is funding so many different aspects of immunization worldwide — GAVI, vaccine research, scholarly analysis (Health Affairs, for example, got a grant from Gates) as well as media — there is the risk of distorting the story line or drowning out alternative views. I, for one, welcome the Gates Foundation’s advocacy of (and amazingly generous funding for) immunization. But there is a risk with influence so profound.
In summary, by controlling the press Gates is able to control where public money goes to (which patents and companies) and furthermore he takes credit for something which he neither invented nor funded in full. It is a good example of reputation laundering that piggybacks the work of others. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
09.12.11
Posted in Novell at 6:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Yes we’re talking about knifing the baby.” –Microsoft
Summary: A look at some recent news about the company we have been boycotting for almost half a decade
THE COMPANY which bought Novell, Attachmate, is rather obscure and the way it bought Novell was mysterious given the sizes of the companies and the source of financing.
We recently started tracking Attachmate and there is very little about it in the news. This new page includes Mark Benoit from Attachmate Corporation, but there have been no items of news about Attachmate in over a week, except when it was mentioned in relation to a biased Novell survey:
It seems like you can’t go a week without reading a story in the news about some type of data security breach. Brennan O’ Hara, solution manager for Seattle-based Attachmate division, NetIQ (News – Alert) recently released a survey of over 200 IT “decision makers,” who commented that “although all this money and technology is being thrown at the problem, if you have a terabyte’s worth of data to dig through and you are under-staffed as an organization, under-resourced as an IT organization, it’s going to be very difficult for you to properly spend the time to navigate through all that data.” However, enterprise password management software can help in these types of situations.
This was just a self-serving/promotional survey which we wrote about at the time. Those who base articles on it must apply better critical analysis.
In other news, “Novell Ireland Software loss of $11.4m” says a headline from the Irish Times. So it is not working too well for Novell, is it?
NOVELL IRELAND Software Ltd, head of Novell operations in Europe and the Middle East, recorded a pretax loss of $11.4 million (€8 million) in the year to the end of October 2010, according to accounts filed recently.
The Dublin company employed an average of 146 people during the year, compared with 150 the previous year.
Novell is a dying entity living in its past glory and legacy products. WordPerfect, for example, is mentioned in this article from Utah:
WESTERLUND: As far as entrepreneurism goes, a lot of the major industries that are here were started that way. When you look at Novell and WordPerfect (WP), you look at Nu Skin and a lot of these companies, a lot of the major corporations that we have in this area are seeds from one of those two arenas. And that’s fostered an idea that you can go out and do those things.
The other thing that helps support that is infrastructure. When a company grows up and they’re really big, like Novell or WordPerfect, you have all these support industries that come along with it, whether it’s as simple as printing or hotels. These support industries are now in a mature enough state that they can support other companies.
There is another news article from Utah which mentions WP:
This is the birthplace of multi-level marketing companies galore with international giants NuSkin and Tahitian Noni nested in Provo. If any of your secretaries or accountants ever used word-processing software in the ’90s, chances are it was WordPerfect, created in Provo, as was the company that bought it out, Novell, an early world leader in networking.
It remains to be seen if the WP case against Microsoft will be carried forward by Attachmate. Lexology still has some new pages about the SCO case [1, 2], which is hopefully over for good.
People are constantly leaving Novell and finding new jobs elsewhere as Novell has been on the decline for over a decade. Here is one new case of departure from Novell:
The school changed its email provider last semester, from the Novell Groupwise system to the Google Mail system. Ordoyne said the move was primarily made to cut back on server costs.
A project maintained by a Novell developer, Pinta, has formally died as we explained some days ago and ITWeb is still promoting a Novell Vibe, which is a dead product that Novell buried quite a while back.
In the past week’s news we have found former Novelles such as this man, another former one joining Quintana as president as covered here, and another former Noveller as covered there. Novell once employed a lot of people, including Google’s departing CEO. But now Novell is nothing, it’s an embarrassment at best. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, OpenSUSE at 6:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OpenSUSE still under the microscope following SUSE’s Microsoft patent deal
WE ARE still keeping abreast of the OpenSUSE project as it helps shape what becomes “Microsoft Linux” (SUSE) — the distribution which is funded by Microsoft to bring revenue to Microsoft when some companies deploy GNU/Linux.
The word on many SUSE people’s lips is still OSC, the OpenSUSE Conference. There is keysigning and cheese being planned by those who drive the project. There is almost nothing else going on (slow news week), except the OBS downtime, some new OBS packages, and perhaps the HOWTOs, yast2 vulnerabilities, and other Novell security problems. It has become rather apparent that for OpenSUSE to become mainstream again it will need to earn some respect from users it lost after Novell (and then SUSE) had signed Microsoft patent deals. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Rebuttal to the argument of uniformity though reduction of competition and cooperation
THERE is a danger inherent in monopoly for many different reasons that necessitated special laws and regulations. Monopolies limit choice, impede competition, reduce quality of service because they can afford to, and typically slow down progress because they lack incentive to improve. In duopoly, there is agreement between two parties to do this together and slice the market, dividing it among themselves. For 3 or more parties, cartels can exist to assure price-fixing and other abusive practices that hurt the market and enrich members of the cartel. All of these forms of industry organisation come about naturally with expansion or a government franchise. It is often being said that it’s acceptable and even beneficial to have monopolies or shared monopolies in particular areas of industry such as energy, water, telephone etc. due to shared infrastructure. Microsoft has been trying to make up excuses along those lines, dishonestly arguing that a Windows plus Office monopoly is a Good Thing in the sense that it standardises desktop computing. This is a false argument because standard APIs and consistent structures across applications can be coordinated such that everything works in cohesion and harmony. Sharing binary data is not the same as sharing water that goes through the same water conduit.
Suffice to say, Linux has been under attack recently — an attack which has cartels behind it. This is not an attack on Linux per se. Linux is among the leading projects that demonstrate healthy collaboration and low cost to customers; Android is an example of that. Now that Android is taking over a lucrative market, its foes come to grips with the fact that it won’t just go away on its own. They therefore try to portray Android as a violation of the law, as if it is illegal to compete. By joining financial resources for extortion through litigation, Linux foes hope to repel and expel their most potent competitor. Had it been MeeGo in this position, they would have tried that too. Apple even threatened Palm a couple of years ago, just as it had introduced WebOS. What gives?
“To call something which is free a “monopoly” is almost like alleging that breathing is free and thus oxygen is monopolistic.”A new pattern of FUD emerges, claiming that Android is a monopoly even though it is free (just as Google search is free and nobody is forced to use it). To call something which is free a “monopoly” is almost like alleging that breathing is free and thus oxygen is monopolistic. If the code is a public asset, then the harm is very much limited.
So how “open” or free (gratis and freedom) is Android really? It is not as bad as Microsoft and Apple would love people to think. Those companies clearly want to crush Android using software patents and incitations of all sorts. Some time in the past we found the allegation that Open Source is “a cartel”. Quite a way to spin collaboration, eh? Trying to criminalise it even.
Well, the bottom line is, what we see here are monopolies or former monopolies showing their hypocrisy, describing what liberates us from monopolies as a monopoly. We oughn’t fall for this spin doctoring. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in America, GNU/Linux, Google, Law, Patents at 6:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Bumps on the road towards freedom
Summary: An overview of coverage about patents and where we are heading without the required reform
SOFTWARE freedom is being jeopardised by the rising influence of patent cartels. One must not take for granted or for certain the triumph of Android, which enjoys an economic advantage. Hardware makers tend to favour Android because it is a free platform which also offers many features. Android can compete with Blackberry, Symbian, and iPhone/iOS not just because of cost but also the growing impact and inertia. Its vast repository of applications, for example, would not have been possible without the cost advantage; it is a chicken-and-egg scenario.
“This illustrates the sort of loophole that exists in the system, allowing big corporations to just harass their competitors without being sued back or even deterred by other patent arsenals.”Realising that they react too late to the growing importance of Android, the oligarchy of Nokia, Apple and Microsoft now holds onto software patents. They are trying to diminish Android’s cost advantage and also make it more expensive than already-pricey proprietary platforms (often tied to particular hardware/phones). Apple has been suing with goal of embargo, Microsoft has been suing mostly with goals of taxation and extortion/intimidation, and Nokia has just had a Microsoft mole installed. This mole has just passed thousands of patents to a patent troll, MOSAID, to attack Android while he spreads yet more FUD about Android. Nokia would like it to look like it is the troll — not Nokia — which is behind the patent attacks. This illustrates the sort of loophole that exists in the system, allowing big corporations to just harass their competitors without being sued back or even deterred by other patent arsenals.
The patent reform which the press speaks about these days is somewhat of a sham because it does not resolve the problems mentioned by those who have been calling for a patent reform. It is not entirely clear why the real problems are getting swept under the rug, unless of course one departs from the supposition that those in charge do not serve public interests. Here is a new AFP article which says about the exiting reform that is misses the point for the following reason (among others):
Endpoint Technologies Associates’ Kay said consideration should be given to doing away with software patents altogether.
“People patent any old thing and they repatent things that are already patented,” he said. “Really we should be going 180 degrees in the other direction and saying ‘How about no patents for software?’”
James Temple, a Chronicle columnist, also expressed scepticism along similar lines. “The real solution is raising the bar on what gets patented in the first place,” he wrote. “Technology industry patents are riddled with “fuzzy boundaries” – broadly-worded business methods and software solutions continually arrived at independently. If anyone can think it up, it ain’t that novel in the first place.”
“Protectionism and monopoly are not good for the public, but it is exceptionally beneficial to some people with a lot of money and power.”James Love, who has been busy in recent days looking at Cablegate cables just as we did, claims that “In #TPPA negotiation, White House wants negotiating text secret from public, but available to governments and big firms” (underlining the problem with the existing process).
According to other sources, patent firm “Jurasoft gives 20.000 EUR to German Pirate Party, while filing for software patents in DE: http://t.co/2Q5CYDY http://t.co/KVUcQCy” (as noted by Benjamin Henrion). Will this influence The party’s policies? It is not unusual for us to see groups that proclaim to represent public interest while in fact doing the opposite.
We remain hopeful that in this anti-competitive mess which puts Linux in danger there will be enough involvement from the public — not large corporations — which will result in elimination of software patents. Protectionism and monopoly are not good for the public, but it is exceptionally beneficial to some people with a lot of money and power. Their lucrative patent market is the embodiment of their entitlement. By crushing it, the public can take more power back from those who influence politics in private. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux at 5:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why the enthusiastic predictions of something’s “fall” are often nothing more than an attempt at self-fulfilling prophecies
“I like X, but…”
Sounds familiar? This is a typical trolling tactic, pretending to like something before actually bashing it. Claiming the rise of something is order to declare it dead is a similar tactic. Poisonous people from The Guardian try this against Wikileaks and Microsoft trolls have been using this tactic for ages, especially through sensationalist blogs, e.g. in ZDNet. More recently we have been seeing claims of desktops “dying” or something along those lines. Well, they are not really dying, especially if one counts laptops as though they fall under the same category. But what we are generally seeing is a saturation and expansion of technology, which along with the growth of the Internet (higher bandwidth and low cost) is moving further away from the desk and the Ethernet port.
“But what we are generally seeing is a saturation and expansion of technology, which along with the growth of the Internet (higher bandwidth and low cost) is moving further away from the desk and the Ethernet port.”Thankfully, Linux-based platforms were fast to capitalise on the growth of this emerging market, elevating Linux from underdog to market leader. Basically we won but a lot of people just haven’t noticed it, to borrow a phrase recently heard from Samba developer Jeremy Allison.
Right now we see Linux on the rise. It has been on the rise for two decades and prior to its existence GNU was rising and one can only hope that Android will become more GNU-friendly. Those who try to predict a future fall of Android are probably correct as nothing lasts forever. But in the short term, Android is going to grow despite the FUD. It has already endured years of such FUD. The next few posts will discuss this in light of the latest news (written on the train, so expect typos). Based on confidential mail received today, we expect to see major action very soon. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
09.11.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Applications
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
Today we can bring you some great news, a brand new release of Xonotic! It has been quite a while since the 0.1 preview version, but we have made immense progress over the last few months. In this blog post we’ll be showing off the latest improvements and tell you about the changes we made from the feedback we had after the initial release.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
Plasma Active aims at creating a desirable user experience for a spectrum of devices, based on a fully Free software stack, developed in the open. The first release is planned for October. In the following article, you can read about the latest status and recent improvements made.
-
Perhaps I am the last one writing about the wonderful Desktop Summit in Berlin some days ago. Nevertheless I want to summarize my personal highlights.
The Desktop Summit was awesome. I had the pleasure to meet people (old and new friends from all over the world), discuss complicated stuff face-to-face and of cause: have a lot of fun together.
In a combined cross desktop marketing BoF we discussed some ideas how we (GNOME and KDE) could join forces to get bigger media coverage (e.g. TV, radio or big newspapers). One intresting first step is by paying attention on our messages. It occured that the message was: “… is THE Linux Desktop Environment” or “A is better than B”.
-
How awesome are the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Season of KDE (SoK) programs? According to Daniel Moctezuma, “All the work done by students in GSoC/SoK will have an impact in Free Software and the world.” Daniel is one of the 2011 GSoC students. Lydia Pintscher is the main administrator of these programs for KDE. She made the following report.
[...]
It makes me proud that KDE as a community is able and willing to teach newcomers to Free Software on such a large scale, while delivering high-quality results in terms of code produced and students mentored.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
After the benchmarks a few days back of Intel Sandy Bridge Acceleration On Non-SNB Hardware, Chris Wilson of Intel who has been responsible for much of the “Sandy Bridge New Acceleration” work requested more tests, but this time to see the effect that the compositing window manager has on this new acceleration architecture. As a result, here is some quick tests of Intel’s Sandy Bridge graphics under the Unity, Unity 2D, and GNOME Shell desktops.
-
-
Praising an operating system over and over is a sure sign of fanboyism, which is punishable by flogging in some countries, or at the very least, leads to ostracization in the higher social circles. But it is truly difficult to find fault with the Puppy Linux, release after release. And while I tested Lucid Puppy not that long ago, I had an urge for more great stuff, so I redid my testing with the latest release, version 5.2.8.
-
New Releases
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
After my summer vacation, I finally did the official update on my defy, which brought the thing to Android 2.2.2.
-
Making its public debut with the release of the HTC Dream/G1, Google’s Android mobile operating system has provided the search giant with a massively successful mobile ecosystem that, whilst doesn’t directly generate revenues through licensing, it provides smartphone manufacturers with a free, powerful and customisable software platform – generating millions of dollars in sales – and also helps possibly the world’s biggest advertising company dominate another advertising vertical.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
Moskowitz did acknowledge the possibility that the Amazon tablet could be a major player, though cited concerns about the Android OS as a weak spot.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
The new documentation covers the complete LibreOffice 3.4 API, has reference documentation for the Java UNO Runtime and C++ UNO runtime systems, and an overview of the UNO development tools.
-
Personally I think the whole driver model for Windows is a huge mess, especially when problems come up like this,
-
Security
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
After investigating whether or not she could file sexual assault charges, and being told that this was probably a non-starter, she instead wrote about the experience, and named the TSA agent who she dealt with: Thedala Magee. Alkon felt that if people can’t stop these kinds of searches, they should at least be able to name the TSA agents who are doing them.
-
The discovery on September 8, 2011, of 18 bodies buried in western Libya corroborates reports of the death by suffocation of detainees held by Gaddafi forces in June in the town of al-Khoms, Human Rights Watch said today. Another victim died a few days later, so was not buried with the other 18.
-
As he shopped for a children’s watch inside the sprawling Mall of America, two security guards approached and began questioning him. Although he was not accused of wrongdoing, the guards filed a confidential report about Kleinerman that was forwarded to local police.
The reason: Guards thought he might pose a threat because they believed he had been looking at them in a suspicious way.
-
Cablegate
-
THE federal government has secretly wound back a critical environmental protection for the Great Barrier Reef against shipping accidents in order to avoid a diplomatic stoush with the US and Singapore.
-
The leaked documents also reveal the penetration of Indonesian surveillance on Papuans: everyone from teachers to taxi drivers is on the Kopassus payroll. I have first-hand experience of it. In 2002 I worked with advocate John Rumbiak (now in exile in the US) at Elsham, a Papuan human rights organisation. As an Australian exchange student at an Indonesian university, I had entry where journalists were denied – but it did not spare me from surveillance or intimidation.
-
Mexico’s offensive against the drug cartels that plague the nation has been fraught with controversy. Over the past four and a half years, tens of thousands have been killed, including many civilians, and the violence continues unabated.
The drug war is made up of hundreds of incidents and decisions, both public and behind-the-scenes, that the media dutifully reports, unless, as in the case of some Mexican media, there is self-censorship out of fear.
-
The government’s long-running war on drugs is having little impact, according to documents just released. The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) of the Justice Department reports demand for drugs is rising and the demand is being supplied by major transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) or cartels, which adapt to government “counterdrug efforts” modifying interrelationships, altering drug production levels and adjusting trafficking routes and methods.
-
Finance
-
Goldman Sachs has historically been one of the more bullish investment houses on Wall Street, but the firm has recently taken a dark macro view. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 1 that Goldman issued a 54-page report sent to their institutional clients on August 16th arguing that as much as $1 trillion in capital may be needed to shore up European banks; that small businesses in the U.S., a past driver of job production, are still languishing; and that China’s growth may not be sustainable.
-
No Franchise lasts forever. In the 1990′s, the Chicago Bulls were considered the best basketball team ever. Today, the same sentiments do not exist. When the junk bond market was red hot in the 1980′s, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was the premier investment bank on Wall Street. Before DLJ, the big dog was Drexel Burnham Lambert.
[...]
If history truly repeats itself, Goldman Sachs may one day be considered as a second-rate bank, or may even become defunct.
-
It was the summer of 2008, and the entire country was outraged over $4 gas. It seemed like everyone had bought into the idea that the solution to high gas prices was more drilling for oil: Sarah Palin and other prominent Republicans had taken up the “Drill, baby, drill” refrain. Democrats in Congress, so afraid of consumer backlash, let the 27-year-old moratorium on new drilling in the outer continental shelf quietly expire. But what most people didn’t realize at the time was the role that big financial players like Goldman Sachs—not simple supply and demand—played in pushing gas prices sky-high.
-
Civil Rights
-
The ACLU, photographers’ groups, and others have been complaining about such incidents for years — and we have been consistently winning in court. Recently, an appeals court ruled, on behalf of an ACLU client, that Americans have a First Amendment right to videotape the police making an arrest in a public park.
-
Cambodia is home to some 300 factories where clothing for export is manufactured. They supply major global brands such as Gap, H&M, Wal-Mart and Puma.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
