| To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (5096) | 10/20/2006 11:29:47 AM | | From: ms.smartest.person | | | | Tally Narrower in Presidential Ballot in Ecuador
By SIMON ROMERO
QUITO, Ecuador, Oct. 17 — The presidential race tightened Tuesday when an official count of ballots showed a conservative banana magnate with a narrower margin over his leftist challenger, opening the race to charges of fraud and putting financial markets on edge.
Álvaro Noboa, one of Ecuador’s wealthiest business executives, had 26.1 percent of the vote while Rafael Correa, an economist with nationalist proposals similar to those of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, had 23.3 percent, with 73.2 percent of votes counted as of 7:45 p.m.
A preliminary count of 70 percent of votes from the first election round on Sunday had given Mr. Noboa a lead of almost five percentage points over Mr. Correa.
The narrowing of the count led to a brief sell-off of Ecuador’s bonds on Tuesday, with foreign banks concerned over the possibility of a debt default if Mr. Correa were elected president.
Mr. Correa, a foreign-educated former economy minister, has called for greater government control over the oil industry and for the removal of the United States military from an air base in Manta, on the Pacific coast.
The new figures still point to a runoff between the candidates on Nov. 26, as expected.
But tension is increasing as Mr. Correa and his supporters complain of fraud in an earlier electronic count and several technical snags and delays. Election observers from the Organization of American States called for calm after protests over the slowness in compiling returns.
Both Mr. Noboa and Mr. Correa have campaigned as populists, though Mr. Noboa favors closer ties to the United States while Mr. Correa is critical of American political and economic influence in Ecuador.
Mr. Noboa has stepped up attacks on Mr. Correa over his perceived ties to Mr. Chávez, trying to portray him as a Communist. Mr. Correa has criticized Ecuador’s established political parties, claiming Mr. Noboa represents a corrupt economic elite.
The contest could signal a return to political instability in Ecuador, which has had seven presidents in the last decade.
nytimes.com |
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| To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (5097) | 10/20/2006 11:30:31 AM | | From: ms.smartest.person | | | | Ecuador Elections in Doubt Due to Fraud
Quito, Oct 18 (Prensa Latina) Evidence of significant irregularities in Ecuador´s elections Sunday cast doubt on the official results declaring millionaire Alvaro Noboa of PRIAN (Renovador Institucional) leading with 26.24 percent.
# Ecuador Nominees Gearing for Runoff
With 79.72 percent of the votes counted, Rafael Correa of Alianza Pais, frontrunner in all the pre-election polls, was accounted 23.03 percent, Gilmar Gutierrez (Sociedad Patriotica) 17.72 and Leon Roldos (14.91).
Irregularities include the announced failure of the rapid count by E-VOTE company, the discovery of altered and as many as 10 percent missing ballots in Guayas Province , and photographic evidence of PRIAN members with marked ballots at voting stations.
Ricardo Patillo (Alianza Pais) denounced that Social Christian Alcer Villas, head of TSE planning, had plotted the fraud in secret meetings with executives of E-VOTE, the company hired to make the rapid vote count.
Patillo said their count gave Correa a half point lead over Noboa, and that this was done to snatch votes from Correa to go to the Nov 26 runoffs.
They even pushed for secret scanning but shifted to justify the fraud claiming a collapsed system, denounced congressional candidate Marta Roldos, sister of a presidential candidate, noting that the TSE has not announced the new members of Parliament and called for open-box, manual, transparent count.
ef ccs emw lgo PL-56
plenglish.com |
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| To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (5098) | 10/20/2006 11:34:15 AM | | From: ms.smartest.person | | | | Ecuador's Correa shifts right with Chavez comments
19 Oct 2006 23:02:14 GMT
Source: Reuters
QUITO, Ecuador, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Ecuadorean presidential candidate Rafael Correa tempered his leftist rhetoric on Thursday, distancing himself from firebrand Venezuelan President Huge Chavez and criticizing Colombia's Marxist rebels.
Correa, a self-described friend of Chavez criticized for his refusal to call Colombian guerrillas terrorists, came in second in Sunday's first round of voting against banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa, who favors closer ties to the United States.
Correa vows to win a run-off next month and crack down on what he calls Ecuador's corrupt elite.
"The first time that (Chavez) tries to interfere with Ecuadorean affairs, it will be the end our friendship," Correa told reporters during a campaign stop in southern Ecuador. "Neither Chavez nor (U.S. President George W.) Bush will tell us what to do."
Chavez, a constant critic of Washington whose "Bolivarian revolution" is funded in large part by oil sales to the United States, has gained few allies. His vocal support for leading leftists in recent Mexican and Peruvian elections backfired and they lost.
Correa, a 43-year-old U.S.-educated economist, accused the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, of violating human rights. His comments marked a hardening of his position against the neighboring country's guerrillas, who are fighting a four-decade-old war that often spills into Ecuador.
"We fully reject the human rights abuses, the attacks and the bombings by the FARC," Correa said. "If they enter the country they will be pursued, jailed and deported."
With 94.5 percent of Sunday's first round vote counted, Noboa had 26.6 percent compared with Correa's 22.9 percent.
AlertNet news is provided by
© 1998-2006 Reuters Limited.
alertnet.org |
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| To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (5099) | 10/20/2006 11:36:59 AM | | From: ms.smartest.person | | | | Ecuador hopeful banana import ban will be lifted
Thursday, 19/10/2006
Ecuador and other banana exporting countries are hopeful the ban on Australia importing bananas from the Philippines will be overturned before the end of the year.
The Australian Banana Growers Council says Biosecurity Australia has changed its position on the issue several times, but it must take account of the dangers of Moko disease in its current import risk analysis.
Ecuador's Ambassador Antonio Rodas Posso says if Filipino imports get approved, it will make the application process easier for other countries.
"We have heard that you right now, the Australians, are making research on another kind of banana from another country," he said.
"I've already talked to some people who deal in this area with the banana trade and they mentioned, well we are waiting until the end of this year and then we could look if it is possible for Ecuadorian possibilities."
abc.net.au |
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| To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (5100) | 10/20/2006 11:37:45 AM | | From: ms.smartest.person | | | | Ecuador Demands Election Answers
Quito, Oct 19 (Prensa Latina) Demands for accountability in the electoral process are resounding all over Ecuador Thursday, with PRIAN candidate (Renovador Institucional party) Alvaro Noboa officially leading with 26.20 percent of the votes.
Although the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) speeded up its work and started the ballot count to fill the information blank left by the E-VOTE company´s computer failure, calls to count vote by vote do not stop.
“One by one, ballot box by ballot box,” was the demand by Alexis Ponce, Human Rights Permanent Assembly (APDH) spokesman, complaining he still doesn´t know how many null and void votes there were for the legislators elected on Sunday.
He said problems and irregularities continue coming to light in Orellana, Esmeraldas, and other territories.
The electoral organization agreed to scrutinize 15 percent of the ballot boxes in Guayas Province, where serious irregularities in favor of the Social Christian and PRIAN parties were reported. Also, 831 ballot boxes were opened in Manabi due to numerical inconsistencies so a dozen people counted the ballots one by one.
Jose Dominguez, TSE president in Manabi, said 19 presidential ballots are still missing.
Congressional Supervision Committee chair Ricardo Ulcuango asked for the TSE to resign, accusing them of responsibility of delayed reporting of results, something that had not happened in the country for 28 years, he said.
As of now, TSE official data place candidate Rafael Correa in second place, with 23.03 percent of the votes, with 92.11 percent counted.
hr ccs iom lgo
PL-44
plenglish.com |
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| From: ms.smartest.person | 11/4/2006 8:01:20 AM | | | | | | "How Much Does It Cost To Run Your PC?"
Eric Shufro - 9/23/06
Do you know how much it costs to run your PC each month? Until recently, I didn't. In the past, I had speculated that running my PC 24/7 may cost about 10 dollars per month. However, with increasing fuel / electricity prices, my new estimation may surprise you.
cont'dhttp://www.overclockers.com/articles1364/ |
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| From: ms.smartest.person | 11/4/2006 6:19:53 PM | | | | | | :•) November 2, 2006 I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The $200 Billion Lunch | PBS
We're switching to IPv6, dontcha know, and it might be worth it.
Remember Y2K? If you worked in Information Technology in the waning days of the last millennium, you probably remember Y2K as a combination of Christmas and the hardest workday of your life. We'd programmed ourselves into a potential disaster with the way computers handled dates, and fixing the problem took several years and a reported $100 billion. Well if you liked Y2K, you'll LOVE IPv6.
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is, of course, the next-generation Internet address scheme that has been around for a decade but generally not implemented. Instead, we came up with Network Address Translation (NAT), a kludge that allowed us to stretch the available pool of Internet addresses that would otherwise have run out years ago. NAT works well enough that we could rely on it for years to come, but then those feisty Chinese went ahead and decided to switch their whole country to IPv6, so now we have to do it, too.
To a certain extent, it is Sputnik all over again. Some people see this as a place where there will be a commercial disadvantage unless the U.S. keeps up. It is comparable to NTSC vs. PAL television standards (hint: PAL is better but we don't have it).
To be fair, IPv6 is a far better solution to the problem of diminishing Internet address space than NAT could ever have been. IPv6 just expands the total size of the address pool by making the addresses substantially longer, with the benefit that the pool will be big enough for every device to have its own unique static IP address.
As things stand right now, something over 30 percent of Internet packet traffic is illicit, either spam email or attacks of various sorts. As such, a passive unprotected Windows system on the net can be infected with some kind of pathological code in a median time of minutes. Converting to IPv6 addressing would be a chance to at least get a finger into that leak.
There is also a very large market for being able to encrypt net traffic. IPv6 puts that where it belongs, down in the lower layers of the protocol stack. Right now we really have to put encryption in the top of the stack at the application layer.
The downside of all this upgrading is cost. Implementing IPv6 will incur an infrastructure cost of around $200 billion, and that's just for the U.S. Figure another $200+ billion for the rest of the world. In short, this means an IP feeding trough of unprecedented size.
The good parts about IPv6 include no more NAT, greater resistance to hacking (though that's only until the new IPv6 crime codes are introduced, believe me), and much easier tracking of data on the net. Figuring out your new IP address is easy, too, just add a string of zeroes at the front of your current IP.
The bad parts of IPv6 include having to replace most routers, as well as any performance hit that may come a jump in packet size -– today’s packets average 63 bytes, while IPv6 packets will weigh in at 87 bytes. But the real hit will come from inadvertently broken parts of the network, like anything based on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology. ATM uses fixed 53-byte packets with eight bytes of address. Switching from eight-byte to 32-byte addressing will decrease the packet data payload from 40 bytes to 16 bytes, which is not good. IF ATM survives it will require either a NAT-like kludge, new ATM equipment that runs 2.5 times as fast, or a simple acceptance that the new Internet is slower than the old one it replaced.
My Mama wouldn't like that.
But the U.S. military sure would. Future Combat Systems (FCS), the $125 billion (or $300 billion, depending whether oil changes are included) U.S. Army of the near future will absolutely rely on IPv6. FCS wants to make addressable over the Internet anything with an electrical system -- every flashlight, walkie-talkie, and Humvee. The FCS mantra is that everything that has electricity is a sensor, a node, an effector, or all of the above. That's a LOT of IP addresses. The same force is moving the civilian market, too, with RFID tags on everything.
All this government money is about to be spent on IPv6 upgrades because otherwise it won't happen. Nobody is going to do it voluntarily, so there is a federal mandate, and such mandates often come with federal money. This one sure does. People won't voluntarily upgrade because their systems are working just fine now, and will continue to work after the IPs run out -- they just won't be compatible with the later IPs. Until that SERIOUSLY affects their day, they won't spend the money to change.
Here's where I get on my soapbox.
Most readers of this column have known about IPv6 for years, but I doubt that many readers know a mandated upgrade is coming. It isn't my job to announce this stuff, yet it seems like that's what I often do. And I'll do so with a prediction that it won't be a smooth upgrade because we're too distracted with other issues and we'll turn this transition into an excuse to spend far more money than we really need to.
Instead, we should look for inspiration to the source of our most recent motivation to move to IPv6 -- China. In the current addressing scheme, China received a very small number of IP addresses, and this was causing them a lot of difficulty. If they stayed with the existing system it would have resulted in a nasty network kludge. So they made a national decision to implement IPv6 and put in a good network design. With IPv6 China has the address space they need and it is working well for them. Of course, the rest of the world is still on the old system and to communicate with China an address translation is needed. This is becoming a pain. Countries who want to do lots of business with China or who want to do lots of business through the Internet (India) are now seriously looking at their own IPv6 plans.
Look at it as leadership through good example. China has done something very impressive and now others are taking notice. We (the U.S.) think we control the Internet, but China is proving otherwise.
And what is happening in the USA? Well we have Net Neutrality. We have a telco rebuilding a national monopoly. We have Cisco and Microsoft working together on Network Admission Control (NAC). I can see a time in the near future when they'll try to charge me for every PC in my house. While China is building a national resource, our government is letting companies turn the public Internet into an expensive private toll road.
But we'll move to IPv6, that's for sure, if only to make sure Halliburton has plenty of business.
pbs.org |
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| From: ms.smartest.person | 11/14/2006 9:03:50 PM | | | | | | After numerous rounds of "We don't know if Osama is still alive," Osama himself decided to send George Bush a letter in his own handwriting to let him know he was still in the game.
Bush opened the letter and it contained a single line of coded message:
370HSSV-0773H
Bush was baffled, so he e-mailed it to Condi Rice. Condi and her aides had no clue either, so they sent it to the FBI. No one could solve it at the FBI so it went to the CIA, then to the NSA.
With no clue as to its meaning they eventually asked Britain's Secret Service (MI-6) for help. Within a minute MI-6 cabled the White House with this reply :
"Tell the President he's holding the message upside down!" |
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| From: ms.smartest.person | 11/18/2006 9:39:56 PM | | | | | | Apply funding where it can do the most good
November 18, 2006
Regarding Marcela Sanchez’s Nov. 10 column, U.S. aid to Colombia could very well spread both coca production and civil war throughout South America. Communist guerrilla movements do not originate in a vacuum. U.S. tax dollars would be better spent addressing the socioeconomic causes of civil strife in Colombia rather than applying overwhelming military force to attack the symptoms.
We’re not doing the Colombian people any favors by funding civil war. Nor are Americans being protected from drugs.
Destroy the Colombian coca crop and production will boom in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.
Destroy every last plant in South America and domestic methamphetamine production will increase to meet the demand for cocaine-like drugs.
The self-professed champions of the free market in Congress are seemingly incapable of applying basic economic principles to drug policy. Instead of waging a futile supply-side drug war abroad, we should be funding cost-effective drug treatment here at home.
Robert Sharpe, Policy Analyst, Common Sense for Drug Policy, Arlington, Virg.
statesmanjournal.com
Copyright 2006 Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon |
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