Slashdot Mirror

Please see The Arctic: Earth's Early Warning System "The Inuit are already suffering dramatic changes to their Arctic environment, warns a native leader... unpredictable weather, melting of permafrost and glaciers, decreasing sea ice, as well as the presence of new species such as barn owls, robins and mosquitoes never seen before by the Inuit people."

While this post fails to mention the hype is derived from the recent E3 conference, observations from E3 can actually be interesting for sensible and responsible gamers and consumers.

"As I watched the bored-looking "babes" strut across the stage at the Tecmo booth, I thought about what the industry has done when fans have occasionally tried to take creative ownership of the games they adore. Recently a bunch of college kids set up a site called NinjaHackers.com, where they shared home-brewed "skins" for the players of a Tecmo volleyball game. The skins were free, and they gave players more options for dressing (or undressing) the game characters. But of course, Tecmo threatened to sue. Even though the skins were hardly a substantive replacement for the game - indeed, you'd have to buy the game to use them - the company wouldn't stand for it." ( http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/22092/ )

However, the original post by CmdrTaco merely seeks to convey rhetoric of "Warning: don't do what you already won't do" and comes off as a transparent anti-hype advertisement.

Ok, all these experts say we'll run out of fossil fuels in about 50 years at our current consumption.

The obsession with low prices in this country creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation. We save money buying at walmart but in doing so, jobs move overseas and the jobs which stay here become less lucrative. Each individual saves some money by buying at walmart and that individuals own choice to buy at walmart (or buy cheap products in general) or not ultimately doesn't make much difference in whether their job gets offshored or not but collectively the behavior cuts jobs. As long as your neighbors buy the cheap stuff, your job still goes overseas. This is quite different from Henry Fords original goal to pay his workers enough money that they could afford to buy his cars. Every man for himself leaves us all vulnerable, unless we own a multinational corporation.

And as more people are unemployed or less gainfully employed we have less money to buy things so we have to buy cheap creating a vicious circle.

While the US economy appears to be growing, all this free market out of control and globalization the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The article In Praise of Prosperity points out that while GDP has gone up the real incomes of 90% of the population went down. It also points out that 7 out of 10 of the highest GDP per capita nations are social democracies. And that America's GDP went up only because we are working 25% more hours while other countries like France can sustain the same GDP growth while reducing the hours worked by 25%. So, if we both started at 40 hours a week, we are working 50 hours when the french are down to 30.

As the situation for Americans continues to deteriorate, we become ripe targets for palingenetic ultranationalist populism. And to distract people from the real problems they will redirect peoples discontent towards immigrants, sexual minorities, and other marginal groups. But there is nothing to worry about until you see campaigns to make it impossible for illegal aliens to get drivers licenses, vigilantes patrolling the border, or denying civil rights and jobs to homosexuals.
Oh... wait.

It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor"to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall:
The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' (from here)

Oh dear lord.

From the Wikipedia:

On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Disregarding the Senate Resolution, on November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification.

The Clinton Administration released an economic analysis in July 1998, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors, which concluded that with emissions trading among the Annex B/Annex I countries, and participation of key developing countries in the "Clean Development Mechanism" -- which grants the latter business-as-usual emissions rates through 2012 -- the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol could be reduced as much as 60% from many estimates. Other economic analyses, however, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Energy Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others, demonstrated a potentially large decline in GDP from implementing the Protocol.
The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the general idea, but because of the strain he believes the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasises the uncertainties he asserts are present in the climate change issue [10] (http://www.alternet.org/story/11054/). Furthermore, he is not happy with the details of the treaty. For example, he does not support the split between Annex I countries and others. Bush said of the treaty:

The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

China emits 2,893 million metric tons of CO2 per year (2.3 tons per capita). This compares to 5,410 million from the USA (20.1 tons per capita), and 3,171 million from the EU (8.5 tons per capita). China, currently exempted from the requirements of the protocol, has since ratified the Kyoto Protocol and is expected to become an Annex I country within the next decade (at which time it would no longer be exempted). The US Natural Resources Defense Council, stated in June 2001 that: "By switching from coal to cleaner energy sources, initiating energy efficiency programs, and restructuring its economy, China has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent since 1997".

>> Well, this looks like a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Any one else remember Dmitry Sklyarov?

Makes it kind of funny to see Adobe get locked out of someone else's IP.

As sad as it is, with everything that China has done, the world would significantly rather have China playing a global leadership role than America (their top pick, however, was France). That's how far things have degenerated...

Maybe because billions of your tax dollars were funneled to Afghanistan by the CIA during the Reagan area, supplying mujahedin with shoulder-launched anti-helicopter missiles, specifically to bleed the Russian economy out of its ass?

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/16352/

As with software, there's ambiguity in the meaning of the English word "free". Most of the discussion here is focussing on "free as in beer". Price is important to many, natually enough, not least because of the intrusion required online to make sure you've paid.

But I suspect a lot of /.ers are more concerned with "free as in speech". This is often, but not always, connected to the pricing. "Free" newspapers are owned by businesses whose reason for publishing is to make money: if you're not paying upfront for the paper, then all their revenue is coming from ads, and they thererefore have even more need to keep their editorial policy in line with their advertisers. It's already been pointed out above that supposedly "independent" news media like the BBC aren't all that independent: running a news site really well costs money, and the BBC is still reliant on an increasingly pushy and spin-loving UK government to pay its bills.

Having a no-charge business model also puts pressure on costs, and makes getting cheap or "free" (i.e. no-cost) content all the more attractive. The independence of the reporting can suffer as a result. The NYT has coincidentally just run a story about how the White House is pushing pro-government "news" stories to the networks, paid for by the taxpayer, which don't always clue the viewer who produced them. This isn't necessarily a conspiracy, it's just "good business". The same conflict of interest exists in a corporate-owned newspaper, online or hardcopy.

I think many people attribute a sense of mission to their news provider. Some people think FOX tells it "fair and balanced", and watch it for that reason. Good for them. I personally would rather watch Bullwinkle re-runs than FOX News, but that's beside the point. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot of people believe that their favorite news provider is mostly "telling the truth" about what's going on in the world, and are unable or unwilling to see conflicts of interest, especially when they're unaware of how their favorite news provider's business model works. I simply don't believe that a GE-owned news business is always going to tell the truth about what GE gets up to.

The one large-scale attempt that I'm aware of to build a global news network which is free both of corporate and government control is Indymedia. Their quality varies anywhere from excellent first-hand reporting, to the truly awful. Freedom is like that: you have the freedom to write something which some people really want to hear, and other people really hate. The US and some European govts have been cracking down on Indymedia lately, which doesn't bode well for freedom of speech. This is true even if you don't like Indymedia's anarchist/left-wing editorial policy: people have the right to report the news as they see it. You equally have a right to redress if lies are told about you.

So the Indymedia model is far from perfect. How then can an international news network operate which is free of both corporate and government interference? If 100% free-as-in-freedom news isn't possible without a regular revenue stream, then how do you at least maximize the freedom AND the quality of the content?

PS: BugMeNot helps you skirt around that "free" registration with the NYT.

For good coverage on the truth to social security, check out this article, which I of course found 15 seconds after finishing my long post.

Bill Moyers article: http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/

Check out this analysis. The whole book is pretty good; I never looked at Dilbert in the same way after reading this.

Keep in mind, this doesn't prove the mainstream media to be liberal. Some recent news reports have shown otherwise.

Keep in mind, this doesn't prove the mainstream media to be liberal. Some recent news reports have shown otherwise.

Keep in mind, this doesn't prove the mainstream media to be liberal. Some recent news reports have shown otherwise.

Tucker already has a new job! "After all, Richard Carlson used to head the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which partially funds PBS, and also contributes to the production of -- you guessed it -- "Tucker Carlson Unfiltered! Before that, Richard headed the United States Information Agency, which presumably explains the propaganda gene so prevalent in much of young Tuck's prior shouting . . .er, "reporting.""

How about warmongering and 25% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions (from 5% of the world's population) for a start dipstick? And you smell bad, too.

• Torture in the US
  
• Execution of foriegners in the US
  
• The spread of fundamentalism in the US
  
• Historical support for Terrorist Organisations in the US
  
• Suppression of Homosexuals in the US
  

I'm not saying that we can't criticise countries because of their human rights records, but we have to remember that the US is not whiter than white. By any stretch of the imagination.

I didn't say "mass media". I said "news". Go ahead and compare Fox News with something like Alternet, and then tell me that there's no substantial differences anywhere within the news.

Read this article to find out why there is such a big difference in the figures (it's a little old, but informative).

Pretty much. The news is so heavily skewed to the left OR the right (depending on your outlet) that you have to go to several different sources to get even a glimmer of the truth. Even NPR, that one-time bastion of somewhat impartial reporting, has started sliding toward sensationalism.

I, personally, have pretty much given up on the news. I dunno; maybe by averaging between Alternet and Fox News, you might be able to get at what the news really is.

Personally, I say we get rid of the voting machines altogether. They are simply an easy way for people to commit fraud. In an excerpt from this article:

When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of the world does - people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean, and easily audited. And even though it takes a week or more to count the vote (and costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off.

This method sounds pretty simple and effective to me. I'm all about advancing technology, but maybe in some cases it doesn't work so well....

You obviously didn't hear the Bush administration's recent report that high school students are uninterested in sex.

Christian fundamentalists are actively destroying the world in the name of their very own Apocalypse.

Also keep in mind that "wounded" during the Civil War likely meant missing arms or legs upon your return from the front.

Hemp isn't Pot. I don't smoke it, and I don't waste my time with addle-headed fools that do. Although, I'm sure the Snack food manufacturers of the world have a part in it's constant availability... :-)

Are you actually alleging that ALL THREE e-voting vendors - ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia - have found some way to add votes only to the Republican candidates, undetected?

So, if they were undetected, how could we have a story on /. about them?

And 2/3rds of the stories linked were about a nonpartisan type of failure, which wouldn't necessarily give advantage to either candidate.

With this many fallicies in the first sentence of your post, why should I read the rest?

Besides, suggesting that the election machine companies are acting together is not farfetched. Their ownership is rather tight with each other.

Have you? I bet you haven't, because they don't exist.

It's a pity that we won't see him handling the Al Qaeda case. Seeing him sweeping through the financial accounts of the Carlyle Group would surely have been fun.

If you think Bush hasn't been thinking about this, you better think again.

• Improper storage of cocoa and marshmallows
• Posession with intent to distribute of a conterfeit Rubik's Cube
• Violation of a work visa (after the employer was ordered to fire him)
• Eating curry?
• Photographing Cheney's Hotel
• Finding sensors on public lan near area 51
• Bribing city officials to let customers touch topless dancers

If this was on SNL 4+ years ago it would have been some funny shit.

I think you miss his point. If you object to the process or some aspect of the process - say to the fact that corporations fund candidates and their campaigns and are candidates are beholden to them - then no matter who you vote for your vote supports a system that you don't believe in.

If you object on grounds such as these, voting for a third party candidate does not solve the problem. In this election, anarchists have to decide which is the greater problem - George Bush or the system that made him president. Some such as Utah Phillips have decided Bush is the greater threat whereas folks like the original poster disagree.

I know it can be hard to understand objecting to voting but Utah Phillip's comment about other ways of voting - what he calls the body vote - is a useful way of looking at the issue. When I choose not to vote, I am in fact voting. It is no different than when I skip over voting a particular office because I don't like either candidate.

Not at all - CNN is what we call Pentagon TV here in the rest of the world!

Al Jazeera (only an other kind of propaganda TV)
has probably more here:
Really Full Speech

For really objective information I would highly recommend you in the US:

www.occupationwatch.org
www.alternet.org



BTW: Al Jazeera had also more images of fallen childreen in Iraq as CNN showed you in the US clean video games or faked trailers.

-->This is the point Bin Laden made on you in his tape!

Speaking of reality..."A new survey that Bush supporters choose to keep faith in their leader than face reality."

It's amazing, but is it surprising? Faith is the foundation of loyalty. As it happens, Bush Jr is supported most vociferously by fundamentalists and others of varying degrees of religious fidelity. Religion is the most commonly visible example of faith (others are sports, the stock market, and other forms of gambling), and loyalty to something unseen or even proven false is its hallmark.

It goes to show that blind faith doesn't lead to wise choices.

= 9J =

Speaking of reality..."A new survey that Bush supporters choose to keep faith in their leader than face reality."

It's amazing, but is it surprising? Faith is the foundation of loyalty. As it happens, Bush Jr is supported most vociferously by fundamentalists and others of varying degrees of religious fidelity. Religion is the most commonly visible example of faith (others are sports, the stock market, and other forms of gambling), and loyalty to something unseen or even proven false is its hallmark.

It goes to show that blind faith doesn't lead to wise choices.

= 9J =

I would like to hear more about this. Is there an English version of that article anywhere?

Discuss among yourselves...

Okay.

Since the journalists decide what to cover and what gets said, it biases most news to the liberal side.

Uh, no. The reporter on the camera might be liberal, but who tells him what stories to cover and how to cover them? Managers. Who tells the managers what to do? Owners. What political affiliation are most owners? Overwhelmingly conservative. This is why conservatives tidbit that 90% (or whatever) of all journalists are liberal is irrelevant, because the owners of Clear Channel, CNN, NBC, Fox and so on are all conservative. And reporters that go against owners and management get fired.

And that's even using the GOP formula for counting how "liberal" the media is: ignore everything that is conservative. So in calling the media liberal, they ignore talk radio. When they call the New York Times liberal, they only count Maureen Dowd and Bob Hebert on the editorial page and ignore the conservative David Brooks and the hawk William Safire.

...they're not all bad...

http://alternet.org/

In case you haven't heard, Wal-Mart is evil

It's funny that those same blogs don't fact-check the Bush administration as much as they do the Kerry campaign. Here is an administration that has told more lies to the public (in the few press conferences that they've had; they're also very secretive) than any that I can remember (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II).

"Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, and we know where they are."
"Saddam is in cahoots with al Qaeda, and could give WMD to them."
"We went to war for the freedom of the Iraqi people."
"These tax cuts are going to stimulate the economy and create many new jobs by stimulating investment."
"We've inherited a recession from Clinton."
"You don't need to know who Cheney spoke to in his secret energy policy meetings."
"We're going to whole-heartedly support fighting AIDS in third-world countries."

It's so funny that I could cry.

Thanks for that, Karl Rove. Please back that assertion up with facts. Because it sure seems to anyone who's actually paying attention that there's a huge disparity between Bush and Kerry. Let me list just a few of the differences that I've observed.

Kerry actually mentioned science in his DNC acceptence speech. Kerry actually mentioned his web site in his DNC acceptence speech. Kerry actually saved the lives of several people in Vietnam and afterwards. Kerry is a documented war hero. Everyone who was actually there at the time says so. (Lots of people who weren't there and just happen to be funded by wealthy Republicans from Texas claim otherwise.)

Meanwhile Bush's favorite philosopher is Jesus, which is fair enough. Lots of Christians love Jesus. But Bush can't name anything Jesus ever said, let alone abide by His word. Still, Jesus is a good name-drop sop to the sacreligious right for him, so he'll continue to use that line.

Bush has never saved anyone's life. Bush started a preemptive war that has so far resulted in over 1000 American deaths and at least ten times that number of Iraqi deaths -- including innocent women and children.

Come on, man, pick up the beat. Kerry is much superior to Bush. Don't listen to the right-wing talking heads. Think for yourself.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the Attorney General Ashcroft's October 12, 2001 memo instructing federal agencies to stall on FOIA requests.

So, rather than asking federal officials to pay special attention when the public's right to know might collide with the government's need to safeguard our security, Ashcroft instead asked them to consider whether "institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure of the information." Even more disturbing, he wrote:

"When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records."

The Greenwich case appears to be an extension of the precident set by General Ashcroft. If FOIA is curtailed, how will journalists and watchdog groups get their information they use to keep government honest?

For an interesting take on Dubya's "dumb" factor, this article on George W Bush's political background is pretty interesting:

Bush did the "smart" thing, and it didn't work for him politically. It's a sad statement on the American people, but they actually (on average, at least) seem to like leaders who aren't that bright.

Also, there's no question that Bush's strong conservative stance on moral issues (do you really *have* to broach the issue of Gay Marriage during the "State of the Union" address? I think *not*) has helped him get elected. I have the utmost of respect for those who hold Christian beliefs, even conservative beliefs, so long as they don't try to push those beliefs into the political spectrum, which is what the Christian Right has been doing through the Bush administration. It even affects their environmental policy.

-FL

I'm sure he'll still have his little 2% taking away from the Democrats come Election Day.

more proof of malfeasance(previous diebold owners running away with elections when behind in polls, etc...)
Politicians
Halfway down, see ctrl-f rigging
convicted fellons working for them!
i don't have an account :(
Backdoor vote rigging?

That is a starter list, I'll post more later, just mod the parent up(this one!)

"There must have been a reason," Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. "They couldn't just barge in here and chase everyone out." ~ "No reason," wailed the old woman. "No reason."

"Go to the back, go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled.

I hesitated, lost in my own panic.

"Did you not hear me, go to the back and sit down," they demanded.

I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging in age from late-teens to senior citizen. One of the policemen pointed his gun point-blank in the face of the waiter and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen. ...

When I asked to speak to a lawyer, the INS official informed me that I do have the right to a lawyer but I would have to be brought down to the station and await security clearance before being granted one. When I asked how long that would take, he replied with a coy smile: "Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month."

- Patriot Raid, Jason Halperin, April 2003.

quit watching Fox http://www.alternet.org/story/16892

The parent post was taken verbatim from the following website: http://www.alternet.org/election04nv/19519/