Slashdot Mirror

you regurgitated zionist propoganda when you said: "is that a pathetic attempt at sophistry? Their leader, who de facto speaks for them, certainly has.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4378948.stm Unless he meant "wipe" in the literal sense and he's planning to do it with a big mop and a lot of bleach." incredible legs on that canard! "Experts confirm that Iran's president did not call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Reports that he did serve to strengthen western hawks." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155

That's because, after they find it, it's not MISSING.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/19/ida-fossil-missing-link

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071002-dinosaur-fossil.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7150627.stm

All from the first page of a google search for "discovered missing links."

I can easily understand plenty of Israelis supporting this effort. There's probably little that Israel wants more than a progressive government in Iran that will stop threatening to nuke them.

Not saying you're wrong, but note that:

1. Iran hasn't threatend to nuke Israel as far as I know; they are still maintaining that their nuclear program is peaceful.
2. According to the Guardian yesterday, the Israeli government were in favour of a Ahmedinejad victory as the candidates views are not really different and Ahmedinejad is easier to criticise due to his blunt attitude.

The results are so blatently fraudulent as to be laughable. According to the Guardian UK, the turnout rates in 26 provinces are scientifically impossible, with 30 towns having over 100% turnout. This isn't the kind of fraud that you get from a few corrupt poll workers here and there, this is the kind of fraud that you get when one of the people running for office is also counting the votes. What's the point in going through a legal protest of that kind of result? There's no chance of fairness or openness.

Basically, the newspapers took what the paper said, and extrapolated to an obscene extent. The author of the actual research disavows almost the entire news article outside of having a theory, and it involving oceans and magnetism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/20/bad-science-magnetism-ocean-core

Complete BS

A "car accident" (or heck, a standard homicide, those are common enough, just nick the guy's wallet so it looks apolitical) would have been much more professional.

Speaking of...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/17/iran-protests-day-five

There were unconfirmed reports that Mohammad Asgari, who was responsible for the security of the IT network in Iran's interior ministry, was killed yesterday in a suspicious car accident in Tehran. Asgari had reportedly leaked evidence that the elections were rigged to alter the votes from the provinces. Asgari was said to have leaked information that showed Mousavi had won almost 19m votes, and should therefore be president.

I read the Guardian (online, as I am not in the UK atm). But they did a monumentally stupid thing during the last Bush election. They got hold of electors' addresses in Clark County in the US, and got Guardian readers to write to them with advice. You can imagine the reaction. What the hell possessed them to think that people would take kindly to non-citizens giving them political advice?? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/oct/18/uselections2004.usa2

Just WOW. Look at all the shenanigans they dug out in just one day: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/jun/18/mps-expenses-houseofcommons

Great idea and good job Guardian.

Correct me when I'm wrong, but these plates don't just magically create electricity because a car drives over them, some change of motion is required (hence 'kinetic road plates').
=> according to this article : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/08/alternative-energy-speed-bumps the plates can be 'flat' or 'raised'

"When raised they act as speed bumps." Again, feel free to correct me when I'm wrong but personally, I tend to brake BEFORE arriving on a speed-bump, idle the car over it and then (gently!) accelerate again. From my experience I would say that I lose little to no speed on the bump as whatever speed I lose 'climbing' the bump, I gain again rolling of it. As *this* bump will sink into the ground when I'm on top, I won't be rolling down from it again, and so yes, I'd have lost a bit of speed because of it. This loss would then be (inefficiently) be converted to electricity by the system. What happens next is that I will need to accelerate from a lower 'starting' speed to drive on. NOT green at all ! So in order for this to work, we should in fact learn to decelerate less (= less energy wasted through braking), hit the bump at a 'decent' speed, and continue after it on our lowered speed, feeling all smug because we've just helped the environment. Frankly, I hope this is not the way "regenerative braking" is going...

"..;laid flat, so that drivers don't realise they are passing over it." This might be a great sales-pitch, but if you don't notice driving over it, then the plate must be essentially 'motionless' and can't really produce any energy either. IMHO, that's an expensive piece of hi-tech pavement they've just described (from the article : "The ramps - which cost between £20,000 and £55,000, depending on size")

Perhaps they only install these at the entrances to the car park, where you expect everybody to be slowing down - the excess kinetic energy might as well be siphoned off somewhere useful rather than being wasted as heat in the brakes.

However, I agree with your analysis that the numbers, as presented, make no sense (and the picture with illustrates the article is only a few mm thick, so 238,000 crossings is probably a rather conservative estimate). Another article on the topic says "The kinetic road plates are expected to produce 30 kWh of green energy every hour" (so that would just be 30kW, then) but I can guarantee you that a supermarket is not going to get a quarter of a million visitors in an hour (or to put that another way, more than 60 every second).

It's all just meaningless posturing, and it takes attention away from anything which might actually be useful. Any journalist reporting this as a green initiative ought to be ashamed of themselves.

It's not leeching. The cars are slowed down at the point at which the cars should be slowing down anyway - they're coming into the car park. The 'kinetic energy' device helps where the vehicle's brakes would normally be doing all the work. Bin the TFA, see this insightful article from yesterday's Guardian.

The 1st such war involved Estonia and Russia (and its sympathizers). The war was sparked by the moving of a bronze statue of a Russian soldier on April 27, 2007. Russians in both Russia and elsewhere were outraged. According to the article published by "The Guardian", "The [Internet] attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their internet addresses - many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions."

Computerworld published an article about the incident. The Estonian government convicted an ethnic Russian (living in Estonia) of the crime. However, other cyber thugs (working for the Kremlin) also contributed to the attack, but these criminals live outside Estonia and are beyond the reach of its justice system.

Note that Estonia was part of the democratization wave that swept Eastern Europe around 1990. The Kremlin had brutalized and occupied Estonia for about 45 years. If an Estonian had opposed the occupation, Russian "security" forces would have killed him. Thousands of Estonians died at the hands of the Russian occupiers.

Despite this decades-long tyranny, the Estonians revolted against their Russian occupiers and established a liberal Western democracy and a free market in 1991. That is how people act when they truly want freedom and free markets.

By contrast, in 1979, after the Iranians overthrew the despotic government supported by Washington, the Iranians immediately established a brutal Islamic theocracy. That is how people act when they reject both freedom and free markets.

Cultures are different. Estonian culture and Iranian culture are different. The Iranian people are 100% responsible for creating a brutal theocracy. They are 100% responsible for the terrorist acts funded and conducted by Tehran.

Indeed. It's worse than that - they've also taken to doing random drug searches at places of public transport, where everyone getting off a train that day is detained to be sniffed by a dog. I guess their logic is that because it's only a dog sniff, that doesn't in itself count as an official search (unless the dog barks, in which case you get pulled aside for a proper search). But the problem is that nonetheless people are forcibly detained, and I would be curious to see it tested in court.

I experienced this the other weekend in Cambridge - despite the ridiculous over the top scale of it (I honestly thought there'd been a murder or bombscare, what with police and police tents all over the place, but oh no, it was fishing for drugs), they only had one dog, meaning a 30 minute delay in a queue before I was let out. My experience was similar to this write up of one in 2008. No explanation was given, nor any indication of what law we were being detained under.

The Guardian reports that this sort of thing is becoming common at underground stations too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/31/internationalcrime

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/09/drugsandalcohol

Afterwards I took a photo, only to have an undercover police officer suddenly reveal himself to me, claiming I wasn't allowed to take pictures of him without permission. So to get slightly back on topic, apparently in Britain we have no right to privacy in a public place (whether it's blogging, or indeed CCTV, or indeed getting off of public transport), but for some reason that doesn't apply to the police...

Indeed. It's worse than that - they've also taken to doing random drug searches at places of public transport, where everyone getting off a train that day is detained to be sniffed by a dog. I guess their logic is that because it's only a dog sniff, that doesn't in itself count as an official search (unless the dog barks, in which case you get pulled aside for a proper search). But the problem is that nonetheless people are forcibly detained, and I would be curious to see it tested in court.

I experienced this the other weekend in Cambridge - despite the ridiculous over the top scale of it (I honestly thought there'd been a murder or bombscare, what with police and police tents all over the place, but oh no, it was fishing for drugs), they only had one dog, meaning a 30 minute delay in a queue before I was let out. My experience was similar to this write up of one in 2008. No explanation was given, nor any indication of what law we were being detained under.

The Guardian reports that this sort of thing is becoming common at underground stations too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/31/internationalcrime

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/09/drugsandalcohol

Afterwards I took a photo, only to have an undercover police officer suddenly reveal himself to me, claiming I wasn't allowed to take pictures of him without permission. So to get slightly back on topic, apparently in Britain we have no right to privacy in a public place (whether it's blogging, or indeed CCTV, or indeed getting off of public transport), but for some reason that doesn't apply to the police...

I'm interested in the work of Robert Bussard's research team, which continued after his death. Last I heard was sometime late last year, when the US military announced a continued grant to that team for their "Polywell" system. The grant suggests that the military saw something it liked in the interesting, but questionable data from Bussard's last experiments. Is there any new info on this?

Re: fusion research in general, how much of a priority do you think it should be? Is the best way to think of it, "It'll be nice if it ever works, but don't plan on it ever being closer than "40 years away"? (Or 100, now?) There is that one experiment that's been reported on lately with breathless claims that it'll achieve better than break-even energy within "a few years," right? One story from May says that the new California facility will be the one to achieve net energy gain, but suggests that it might take till 2040.

As much of the foreign media has been shut out of Iran and communications have been cut and/or monitored in much of iran, twitter has become a major source of news coming out of iran. As much as many here on slashdot like to bash twitter, its clear that social networking tools such as twitter and facebook can be immensely useful in this sort of repressive situation. The traditional media have struggled to cover this, and there has been a lot of criticism of outlets such as CNN for not being on the ball.
The Huffington Post has a good blog covering much of the news coming out of twitter and blogs and some reporters still in iran.
The Guardian has perhaps the best reporting of the mainstream media, with a live blog that covers official reporters and some unofficial sources.

He won the 2009 Orwell special prize for blogs - under the pseudonym he used on the blog, Jack Night.

Wikipedia doesn't say much about the special prizes, only the Journalism and Book prizes.

but it works, doesn't it? :-)

Nope. Not in the UK. You just get given no rights, beaten and arrested under terrorism charges. Or worse.

but it works, doesn't it? :-)

Nope. Not in the UK. You just get given no rights, beaten and arrested under terrorism charges. Or worse.

but it works, doesn't it? :-)

Nope. Not in the UK. You just get given no rights, beaten and arrested under terrorism charges. Or worse.

Personally I am checking The Guardian and BBC News, CNN.com (which I agree is pretty horrible),MSNBC, The Independent, Wikinews, The Daily Beast (and Slashdot of course) and some random ones. I'd be interested to know which sources people are using to get news about the situation in Iran, or for that matter other international events of interest. Also I find it helpful to try to read around to get news and articles from different perspectives and not rely too heavily on one single source.

here is the stats from 5 YEARS AGO
Over two years ago, China over took America. India is number 3 and will pass America in about 2 years. In terms of PER CAPITA, we are also down the list. In 2004, was our highest per capitia, and we were at #10. Since that time, we have gone down slightly, while many other nations have moved up and have surpasses us.
  And comparing China and india to America in terms of PER CAPITA is a joke. It is TOTAL pollution that matters.

The other issue that you forgot is that CURRENTLY China emits more TOTAL POLLUTION (ignoring CO2), then America has COMMULATIVELY. We NEVER allowed it to get anywhere near as bad as China has. Likewise, even india and Russia are major polluters in the world.

To balance this on the west's back is just plain wrong. The west MUST deal with this by encouraging all nations to think long term. To do this, we must impliment a tax on ALL CONSUMED GOODS BASED on CO2 emission and pollution that went into it. IOW, if something is consumed in Ill, and it was made in texas, than the amount of CO2 from its power plant, the trucks to transport it, and even the ingrediants that went into it should figure into it. OR, we can just say that Texas had ex amount of CO2 from there, and then apply a tax on it. Something from france which uses heavy nukes would have less tax due to power. OTH, China has LARGEST TOTAL AMOUNT OF CO2 and by far, the largest amount of pollution and should be hit the highest tax. This will encourage ALL major polluting countries to re-think how they are handling things. Hopefully EU will re-think kyoto which is proving to be WORTHLESS.

"Ahmadinejad and his pals" weren't the only ones running the election and counting the votes. To quote the Guardian (which like everyone else was hoping that Mousavi would win): "In this election moreover, there were two separate governmental election monitors in addition to observers from each camp to prevent mass voter fraud."

I don't think it is nearly so cut-and-dried as the media currently portray it. Like most everyone else outside of Iran I was hoping that Mousavi would win the election but there's a very real and strong possibility that Ahmadinejad won the election fair and square on a pro-religious platform. His heavy-handed response to protesters seems a little excessive (by our western standards) but seems inline with other crackdowns in Iran over the years. So I'm not convinced this is necessarily proof that the election was rigged. If however, they do uncover evidence of election rigging and he is tossed out, I'd be delighted. But to date, the facts don't necessarily support this.

See this Guardian article for some more info: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iranian-election/.

Actually its not clear at all that the election was rigged - despite the claims of the reformist loser. See this Guardian article for more details: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iranian-election/

Look

at this... under sea map of fiber connections How do you propose the US cut off those connections?

As ever, the media companies are deploying insupportable statistics. Most of the numbers for 'lost revenue' are coming form multiplying 'estimates' for the number of files shared by the recommended retail price of the shared item, which makes the huge leap of believing that every single download that the RIAA thinks happened represents a lost sale that otherwise would have taken place. This assumption is not only naive but studies have shown that people who download music for free also buy more music. In the UK the government is basing policies on similarly erroneous information bought and paid for by the media companies. In that particular case the 'academic study' got it's numbers for lost revenue from an industry press release...

There's a difference between what they're "allowed to access" and what's admissible in court once they've seen it. The techs aren't the government--things they've seen don't automatically get excluded because they shouldn't have seen them.

Guess what? No more Fourth Amendment. No, really.

If a private citizen breaks into my house and sees something illegal, they can usually alert the cops and have knowledge of that thing be admitted in court, even though they themselves can still be prosecuted for trespassing and breaking and entering.

If a private citizen breaks into my house and sees something illegal, they can place you under citizen's arrest which for you is legally equivalent to being arrested by a police officer, even though they themselves can still be prosecuted for trespassing and breaking and entering. There, fixed that for you.

The difference in an arrest between a cop and an citizen is that a) the citizen is usually assumed to be a jackass in court, because the system hates competition and b) a cop can arrest you on the suspicion of a misdemeanor whereas a citizen has to see you commit it but may still arrest you on the suspicion of a felony. (This is how it works in California; I would guess that it would be similar most places, but I certainly wouldn't take it as legal advice in any state. I learned when I was becoming a security guard, something I'm glad I don't do any more. And the most dangerous things I ever had to patrol were the Santa Cruz bus station, and mental health offices.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/development.topstories3

You were saying? China has international aid groups all over the second and third world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/19/gps-close-to-breakdown

The system is too valuable to let fail, but with the current state of government spending I'm not sure this has gotten much attention.

unfortunately, an encouraging success like this is tempered by the fact that the holocaust denying, convicted rapists and genuine terrorists of the british nazi party now have an MEP as well. a sad and terrifying day for britain and europe.

Apologies, you're right, I had gone off track.

However, regarding things that aren't supposed to happen in the Free World, I refer you to:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/26/mi5-new-torture-allegations

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/mi5-torture-allegations-pakistan

Apologies, you're right, I had gone off track.

However, regarding things that aren't supposed to happen in the Free World, I refer you to:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/26/mi5-new-torture-allegations

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/mi5-torture-allegations-pakistan

They should spend their time and energy solving REAL problems.

Yeah. Like banning paintball. Oh, wait.

Certainly all those thoughts are legitimately expressed in the United States, even though many of these shows occur at times when young children would be expected to listen. We assume that these are just words, and hearing that gay people should be punished, or that Lutheran doctors might deserve to be murdered are just words and will not effect them. This is the same logic we use to support the distribution of other content that reasonable people might find objectionable. Of course merely being objectionable does not make it subject to regulation. We may not agree that shooting police in a video games is acceptable, or verbally promoting the murder of large groups of people based on superficial characteristics, or limited opposition speech, but that does not mean we can regulate it

Of course Germany has a history of hate speech escalating to mass murder, so they have different tolerance to such entertainment

The problem here is that it isn't an extra task. It's a new concept on the same task. Fraud, Child porn, and everything else is already one of the 5 tasks. Adding the word internet may change the expertise needed to affect those tasks but it doesn't change the task. Take all of them and apply the existing wire or mail fraud charges and poof, you have the exact same effect of an "internet crime".

Maybe the problem isn't being expressed properly. Maybe the state should be saying that with the internet, the amount of crime covered by the existing tasks has increased to a point that more funding for enforcement is needed. I could buy that justification even though I wouldn't support a tax. But as it stands, it is being presented as the parent said, as a new qualification for an existing job which in every other industry, the employee would be required to cover the expense of most of it for the same pay or be replaced by someone who is qualified. On occasions, profitable companies will provide training to those less likely to be able to afford it, some companies roll the cost into the entire change over knowing that new machinery or menu changes or whatever will require some levels of retraining. But the police isn't a profit center, and the state isn't supposed to be one either.

With the usage of computers, the requirements for internet crimes already cross over into other crimes like Murder, regular fraud and so on. So creating a separate task that already falls within an existing task would be like claiming that collecting evidence of someone searching how to kill someone and viewing pages on how his wife was actually killed a week before her death would be an entirely different task the murder investigations itself. Just because the internet or a computer was used, does not make it another task, it's just a new aspect of an existing task.

It isn't illegal in the US (unless it falls under obscenity laws, in which case it would be illegal to publish).

It is illegal to possess in the UK, as of January this year, if it falls under one of their rather vague definitions that they made up in the law (see http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/ , http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/24/extreme_pron_law_live/ ).

When the UK Government first started thinking "Something Must Be Done" (because some murderer happened to have previously looked at a website featuring porn that the murder victim's mother didn't like), their first response was to try to get the sites shut down. That didn't work, because the sites were legally hosted in places like the US (well, actually, some were also hosted legally in the UK). So instead they decided to criminalise UK citizens themselves for just looking at naughty pictures (it even applies to entirely private personal pics).

Don't get me wrong, I don't find that stuff appealing, but I don't find gay sex appealing either. That doesn't mean it's wrong -- it's just not my thing.

Exactly. If only more people could get this. With this law, it was depressing to see how many people - from lobbyists to politicians - giving the "But it's disgusting" response as their justification.

If you've got issues with the timeline, please read my other post in this thread. The wars were not for entirely discrete reasons. Believe it or not, the past and context DID play a role in decision making.

Yes, in the past ignoring genocide and supporting genocidal dictators was acceptable. In the context of the Cold War and the rise of an Islamic Republic with ties to Russia, it was very realpolitik to let it go on. And by realpolitik, I mean pragmatically not giving a flying dicktwitter about the gassing of the Kurds as long as it didn't hurt them politically, which is why they kept it quiet.

But in the context of the War on Terror and a nation still reeling and frightened after being attacked, it was a perfect time to put some neo-con philosophy into practice. Iraq was their perfect stepping stone into the Middle East: weak, secular and thus ripe for democracy(they thought), and with some convenient excuses that they could play up to a terrified public. It is exactly because they were not a threat that they were chosen as the target. Notice in the Axis of Evil, the two actual threats are still untouched!

There was no good reason for this war, and invoking the name of twenty-year-old genocide that they never gave a shit about in the first place and still don't is simply bullshit. Using their invasion of Iran as a justification makes even less sense (which is why even the idiots in charge didn't use it). That's not even a hypothetical reason to invade! It justifies nothing. None of this comes close to being even a pretend justification for invading Iraq in 2003. Why did we have to punish Saddam for 20 year old crimes right then? How did that 20 year old crime make him an urgent threat? We all know it didn't.

So you're left saying that it's to "clean up" the mess from Gulf War 1... Because we didn't "finish the job" we have to go back, because... Well, that's interesting, because there's plenty of Cold War messes that we never have any intention of cleaning up, usually because trying will only make things worse. Which GHWB knew would be the case in Iraq. It's not that we didn't finish, it's that we were finished with what made sense. The invasion had nothing to do with cleaning up Cold War messes, the neo-cons don't care about that. They cared about trying out their theory that if you bombed a country into oblivion, Democracy would spring forth fully formed.

To the extent that it was still, hypothetically if not practically, the right thing to do, it was still the wrong time and the wrong people. Invading Iraq while Afghanistan was ongoing was retarded beyond belief, not having a post-invasion plan was equally stupid, hell the whole thing was idiotic. When/if we finish with Afghanistan and prove that we're capable of that "nation building" thing Rummy said he doesn't do, then was the time to start worrying about Iraq. Instead, we let Afghanistan backslide while our attention was turned. Idiocy!

That's a pretty interesting allegation. Where's the proof? I've never seen any.

Pfft. How about just about everyone who has left the administration saying so, from the Richard Clark to George Tenet to Colin Powel, the one who presented the evidence to the global community and regrets it? The administration wanted to invade, and finding a justification was more important than figuring out if it was the right or necessary thing to do, so they asked for cherry-picked evidence and ignored everything that didn't match what they already believed. Since the actual result matches this scenario in every way, what's so hard to believe?

Oh you mean you need documented proof? Well you might have to wait for a while until the documents can be received via FOIA request, like the proof that we knew Saddam was gassing Kurds and Ir

subsystem posted this down in the comments, but everyone should read it. Guardian has actually done some fact checking with it unlike TechCrunch: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/28/not-safe-for-work-last-fm

Here's an article with some actual fact checking: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/28/not-safe-for-work-last-fm (sfw). I didn't like the fact that comments on TechCrunch that offered any opposing viewpoints were promptly deleted.

Nah, it should be Pride and Predator. After all, it's PNP, not PNPNZ.

From 2001 to 2005 he ran a $170 million hedge fund that returned an average of 15 percent a year.

Nice job Newsweek (someone take a screenshot before the article gets pulled/corrected). His hedge fund didn't even exist in 2001. And it's not a $170 million fund, it's roughly a 170 million British Pounds fund. I would add more, but his hedge fund was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange in January 2005 right after this fiasco (and it's funny, except for one cryptic note about taking counsel in their official news section, one wouldn't know that the fund got liquidated and delisted four years ago for its shenanigans).

I didn't read his drivel about Iraq, nor was I replying to him. The reason I made the comment is because I agreed with the OP that he is a nutter and I base that classification on past observations and discussion I have had with him. If you feel a compultion to stand up for him then good for you, just be aware that your wasting your time trying to make a dent in my opinion of him and his sock puppets.

As for YOUR adopted claim that "everyone at the time was convinced that Saddam still had his WMD's", I think you are forgetting Robin Cook (the Britsh foriegn minister at the time) who resigned in disgust over the issue. Maybe you don't consider the Britsh foriegn minister to be a "major player" but as I indicated before this is not about Iraq or the nutter's revisionist history of what people knew at the time. There were plenty of other "players" who knew the WMD thing was bullshit both here in Australia and in the UK, I understand why they were not given any air time in the US but that's another sad story.

BTW: I tentatively supported the invasion because of Saddam's track record, but even I knew the WMD thing was propoganda at the time, I'm not ashamed to say I made a mistake and grossly overestimated GWB's competence, I realised I had made that mistake on the third day when the US dismantled Iraq's institutions (cops, etc) then stood back and allowed looters to trash the place. But I have forgiven myself for that mistake since I'm not the commander in chief of the world's last remaining superpower, I'm just an old fart living at the arse end of the Earth.

Citation provided

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/oct/18/retail1

There's a nice article in The Guardian today pointing that about 1000 years of history is all that differentiates a mainstream religion from a cult.

Imagine what would happen if the Catholic Cult, I mean Church, had their IP addresses block-banned from editing Wikipedia.

And in a thousand years they can have their Wikipedia contribution rights back.

Maybe in a thousand years some of their ideas will sound plausible, but as for now it sounds alot like something written by a science fiction author.

Oh, nevermind.

There's a nice article in The Guardian today pointing that about 1000 years of history is all that differentiates a mainstream religion from a cult.

Imagine what would happen if the Catholic Cult, I mean Church, had their IP addresses block-banned from editing Wikipedia.

I'm sure they'll throw you out with the same hospitality that these thugs showed a Guardian journalist. But hey, they say they're not as bad as Iran!

When was the last time a real terrorist was found in a border check In 2007, although the terrorist in question had been on ceasefire for a decade, and was by that stage a reasonably respectable member of the political establishment, and had been invited to the US to meet the President.

"On what basis does he claim that newspapers have been harmed"

Its the same thinking as Rupert Murdoch, i.e. "News Corp will charge for newspaper websites, says Rupert Murdoch"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-charging-websites [guardian.co.uk]

It is conceivable you're right and their strategy is clueless, but the articles you quote don't support your argument *at all*.
How are these two cases "the same thinking"?
Do you have any sources where Murdoch actually says something like "the Internet is harmful and provides no benefit"?

Murdoch claims he's fixing "a malfunctioning business model", and per the article it seems he's convinced they can make money from the internet (citing the WSJ) - just not from "free".

That seems an accurate and necessary assessment: "our business model doesn't make money - so (besides crying about the good old days) we need to change our business model".

Even if you don't like their choice, these attempts are needed for that "evolution" you're talking about. It's their content and their websites, so they can put a login/password if they want to. Readers will determine whether their non-free model works beyond the WSJ, and they'll have to adapt accordingly - or disappear in the end.

"On what basis does he claim that newspapers have been harmed"

Its the same thinking as Rupert Murdoch, i.e. "News Corp will charge for newspaper websites, says Rupert Murdoch"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-charging-websites

Rupert Murdoch and this Sony CEO are the same type of person. People like them don't get to become high up in corporations without being power seeking control freaks. Their ruthless arrogant self serving behavior provides them with a competitive advantage which allows them to fight their way high up the corporate hierarchical power tree structures to gain power over others. This is why their kind of personality type feature so prominently in very competitive environments like business and politics.

So its no wonder the people at the top of these corporations think in terms of how to apply pressure to control others. They do that in their jobs to stay at the top so its no surprise they apply that same kind of thinking to the Internet.

For so many decades these control freak kind of people ruled over the old school media to control what people could see and when they could see it and for how much. These control freaks can't cope with a new open world where people can choose what they want to see and when they want to see it and even see it for free. Its an alien world to the control freaks. They want to be in power, to control others, they don't want open sharing of information.

The new and media companies are not going to die. Its simply evolving into media outlets that provide content that attract like minded people around open information that appeals to this group of people. The companies that work like this will gain advertising and other incomes like in some cases merchandising and cross promotional incomes etc.. while the old control freak media companies will die out as they fail to control what people can see and do.

The sooner the better.

It goes further than that. Could a person test positive after having one of these drinks ?
Recently belgian cyclist and former world chanmpion Tom Bonen tested positive for cocaine even though he claims to have no memory of taking it during the drinking binge when the drug use is alleged to have happened (no witnesses, just a positive test.)
This drink is available here, if there are trace amounts of cocaine in it and it could influence a test then a lot of drug tests done since the drinks release are potentially useless.