Slashdot Mirror

Eventually we will have no physical record of these writings and may someday learn from the digital copies that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and others had offered enthusiastic support for wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance.

From his blog:

The campaigns had no idea who made it--not the Obama campaign, not the Clinton campaign, nor any other campaign. I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs.

Yeah, but what I find scary here is that a month or so back, the pentagon had asked 24 to cut down on torture, ostensibly to discourage its practice by the military.

Of course, it's silly to imply that 24 has a place in the chain of command (as if Jack Bauer gives orders for real-life military torture). It's also scary that they could possibly think 24 has more sway than direct orders. Thus, I believe they want it off the show not to discourage torture, but because 24 puts current military practices in a bad light. Bush etc. have already ordered torture (although they refuse to call it such - and to think Clinton's "is" definition was once considered significant).

Now we have a concerned group of citizens doing this PR work for the army. If the people don't see it, they're safer/happier/etc.

George Bush Sr. collapsed and was revived by his buddy. '"The ugliest part of what happened was that my (male) friend ... gave me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation," Bush said with a smile.'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070312/ elder-bush-collapses

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I could keep going, but I don't really feel like patronizing you. You do read the news, don't you?

Google, please drop all Viacom sites from google.com. After all, they hate all the free publicity and promotion you give them.

Callyour senators and demand the arrest,
military commissions trial, conviction, and sentencing of Al-Qaeda's Chief Of Operations.

Thanks for your support of democracy and freedom.

Patriotically as always,
K. Trout, ACTIVIST

Untested fads by fashionable marxists intellectuals get rolled out into classrooms nationwide without any sort of testing, political correctness runs rampant, etc.

Uhm, if you look at the braintrust behind "No Child Left Behind", I'm sure you'll rethink that statement.

but at least Americans can be proud that we are still protecting our most fundamental human right.

What right, the right to wholeheartedly support Bush's war on whatever is moving, lest members of the government label us treasonous and call for our execution (or at least to be kicked off the air)?

To: Slashdot, News For Nerds, Stuff That DOESN'T Matter

From: Your Criminal-In-Command

I, being of somewhat sound body and unsound mind, do solemnly declare the URL www.slashdot.org to be in violation of the
The U.S.A. PatRIOT Act and advise the ownerz of this infidel web site to transfer all of your assets to my conspirator
President-VICE Richard B. Cheney by March 9, 2007, the year of our Savior and Prophet Baby Jesus Christ For All Wars Against Anyone
Who Dare Criticize My Crime Syndicate.

Please call President-VICE Cheney and arrange for this asset transfer immediately.

So Help Me God.

Yours very insanely,
President George W. Bush

outlaw before you outlaw other outlaws.

Here's what some think:

Comments ( http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html...

Here is another longer video about Iran...

**** VIEWER ADVISORY ****

There are scenes in this film that might make you realize that Iranians are human beings too, just like you - so viewer discretion is advised.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17 118.htm...

By: 333 on February 20, 2007 at 12:34pm
Flag: [abusive]
Northerncross says (to paraphrase), "Bring 'em on."

- Echos of another idiot.

Whether Iran or North Korea or Pakistan or any other Nation developes nuclear weapons is orders of magnitude less important than the fact that Russia, who only benefits by our entanglements, has over 10,000 nuclear warheads. Where are all those weapons?
Why build anything when you can buy it for cheap?

The neocons instigate argument on phony premises and lies, and then sit back and take advantage of the controversy generated while they plot more profiteering.

What's a couple million people when the world has over 6 billion? Right Northernapparatchik?

By: underdog on February 20, 2007 at 12:36pm
Flag: [abusive]
just came in on our news you have your 2nd aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

So you're all set, right ? If you will use nuclear arms it will isolate you in the rest of the world more than you can imagine. We are sick and tired of your geo strategic games bringing the world closer to WW3 in order to keep your war profiteers and Israel happy.

By: CologneCitizen on February 20, 2007 at 12:38pm
Flag: [abusive]
the arabs and persians have the oil. they are our allies or should be and once were. israel has matzoballs. in a real politick relationship israel would assume the subordinate role it deserves in our foreign policy while we make sure the proper people in iraq and persia have an unlimited supply of their favorite vices. its not by accident the rest of the world makes sure its relations with the oil states are as smooth as silk while the french ambassador to britain calls israel "that shitty little country" saying what everyone is thinking. nuking israel would lead to a shortage of champagne in the world and an adundance of freely flowing(the obstensive object of our mid east strategy)and therefore, cheap oil.
By: yappymutt on February 20, 2007 at 10:27am

==============

A reasonable, rational American who seems to be capable of thinking for himself instead of just being led to the slaughter by Israel, AIPAC, JINSA and the neocons: the Zionists.

I can get on board with that.

I would like to place an order for more Americans like that to speak on ths forum.

By: CrazyAmericans on February 20, 2007 at 12:43pm
Flag: [abusive]
Any attack on Iran would inflame, not just Iran, but many Sunni nations as well who will then see commraderie with those in Iran and take steps in their own countries. You also have to remember that Iran got such a boost on the Arab street as Iran was the only nation to come to Lebanon's aid when Israel attacked it. I'm certain the leadership in surrounding countries are troubled by that.

Antiamericanism is spreading faster than at any other time in my lifetime, and it's not just the usual suspects in the Third World. Listening to affluent Europeans and other Westerners, the Americans cannot expect the rest of the world to lift a finger and come to their aid.

I fully expect a "Gulf of Tonkin" attack pretty soon. Bush has been getting other potential problems, clearing his agenda with deals with North Korea, for example.

By: PatrickWalker on February 20, 2007 at 12:45pm
Flag: [abusive]

Regards,
Kilgore Trout

The Battle Of Baghdad.

Call George W. Bush and demand his resignation before he seeks asylum in
Uzbekistan.

Thanks for your patriotism.

Unfailingly yours,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.

Well, that would not be the response of the USAF when Staff Sergeant Michelle Manhart appeared in loose clothing http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kluger/the-nak ed-drill-sergeant_b_39035.html (I like the line from the article, "Unfortunately for Manhart, the Air Force's top brass wasn't exactly titillated").

The problem with Real, QuickTime, Windows Media and all the other video players, is that all they are just stupid video players boxed into a rectangular prison, and not customizable or adaptable in any way. You can't add to their user interface, or fix their horrible design problems. No control over how closed captioning is presented. No transparent video overlays. No extra buttons or links to related videos. No webcam support or two-way video conferencing.

From a user interface design perspective, Flash has an enormous advantage over old-school video players, because developers are able to deeply customize and integrate the video player into their own user interfaces, like Google's and YouTube's video players, the OpenLaszlo YouTube player, or the SimFaux Network TV Fox News Simulation.

The other overwhelming advantage to Flash over all the other video players, is that it's installed on way more platforms than any other existing video player. So the fact that it has almost universal coverage, plus the fact that you can customize the user interface (like YouTube, Google Video, and everyone else does), combine to make Flash the hands-down best way to distribute video over the internet.

Here's an example of what I mean by customization: A set of reusable video playback and recording components that I've developed for OpenLaszlo, which are easy to customize and integrate into your own OpenLaszlo applications:

OpenLaszlo YouTube Player Demo and Source Code

I've been working on developing streaming video support for OpenLaszlo: LZX classes to support improved audio and video, including RTMP streaming via Flash Media Server (aka Flash Communication Server) and also the Red5 Open Source Flash Server, as well as streaming video via http. It supports playback of recorded FLVs, recording from camera and microphone, live two-way (or multi-party) audio/video conferencing, and FLV streaming over http.

It's easy to use the OpenLaszlo video components, because they're nicely integrated with the OpenLaszlo programming model. They expose logical attributes and events which make it easy to integrate video into OpenLaszlo applications.

To test it out the code and demonstrate its functionality, I've developed a simple YouTube Player in OpenLaszlo [click here to open it in a window]. It uses the YouTube ReST Web API, and some simple html screen scraping to get the URL parameters to stream the FLV file directly.

Here is the source for the test application wrapper that puts the YouTube video player in a resizable window, and the more interesting source for the youtubeplayer component, that uses the new OpenLaszlo video classes I'm developing (whose source is in this directory).

The new video classes and the YouTube player demo are now checked into the OpenLaszlo svn repository.

Call your fascistly selected leaders and demand the arrest, trial, conviction, and
sentencing of the Al-Qaeda Commander-In-Chief

Thanks for your patriotism,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.

While AL-QAEDA occupies the White House.

Seagate said; Sanyo said, IBM said, and so on and so forth.

Patriotically as always,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.

Sigh. When are Christians going to learn to think critically;

- Why Day 2 of creation is not called Good, and
- Why there are numerous contradictions in the 2 accounts of creation [*]

before teaching others about their ignorance about the Bible? The Bible is ALLEGORY.
- Gal 4:24 "Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; ... "

To take it literally, shows a lack of reasoning -- no wonder the Atheists have a field day.

- Jonah 4:11 "And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more then sixscore thousand (120,000 !) persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?"

- Mat 8:22 "But Jesus said unto him, "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead." (How do the dead do anything, let along bury others?!)

* Here are the 2 accounts:

1) The First Account (sometimes called the Priestly, or Elohim Account), from Gen 1:1 to 2:3
2) The Second Account (sometimes called the Jehovist, or Yahweh Elohim Account), from Gen 2:4 - 3:24

Some of the absurdities in it...

- In Genesis 1, humans are created after the other animals; in Genesis 2, they're created before them ?!

- Genesis 1:27 says that the first man and woman were created at the same time; yet Genesis 2:18-22 says man was created first, then the animals, then woman, from Adam's rib ?!

- There were day and night, but the sun wasn't made until the forth day ?!

What did the Church Father Origen write?
"What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon and stars, and the first day without a heaven. What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in paradise in Eden, like a husbandman, and planted therein the tree of life, perceptible to the eyes and senses, which gave life to the eater thereof; and another tree which gave to the eater thereof a knowledge of good and evil? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which the hidden sense lies concealed"
- (Origen - Huet., Prigeniana, 167 Franck, p. 142).

--
Is this guy putting the fun back in fundamentalism!

Call Your Senator now and demand the arrest,
trial, conviction, and sentencing of AL-QAEDA's CHIEF OF
OPERATIONS.

Thanks again for your support,
Kilgore Trout, ACTIVIST

my alma mater

Sincerely,
Osama bin Laden

From the article:

The funny - or sad - thing is that the paper doesn't come close to following its own advice.

What everyone seems to be missing here is that the problem isn't just restricted to tech stories; their track record is just as bad when it comes to real world news. Remember Judith Miller and the "proof" about Iraq's WMD--the one they wound up apologizing for, years after we'd gotten mired in Vietnam II? Of course, it's a step up from citing totally made up sources (e.g. Jason Blaire's "composite" sources), but not by much.

They used to be the paper of record, but now they're just another waste of dead tree pulp.

--MarkusQ

Dial 1-800-ALQ-AEDA and ask to speak to the Number One Mr. Big Guy about global warning.

Your efforts are appreciated.

Patriotically,
Kilgore Trout, ex-patriot

Get the FUCK out of Iraq.

Patriotically as always,
Kilgore Trout.

P.S.: Call Your Senator and demand the arrest, trial, and conviction of the
world's most dangerous war criminal.

Call 1-800-ALQ-AEDA and place your order with the
world's most dangerous ex-cokehead.

Thanks in advance.

Yours patriotically,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.

My mistake, he was a VP. But I just noticed he hasn't posted in months: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-rost/

Here you go, thwackers!

The press has forgotten that Bob Gates, during his time at CIA, acquired a reputation for trying to tailor intelligence to satisfy political masters in the Reagan White House. In addition, Bob Gates, a man of enormous intellect and a photographic memory, conveniently forgot salient facts and meetings surrounding the Iran Contra scandal...

Three witnesses testified that Mr. Gates slanted intelligence analysis as a senior agency official in the 1980's . . .

The most dramatic testimony came from Melvin A. Goodman, a former division chief in Soviet affairs. He accused Mr. Gates of imposing his political judgments on intelligence analyses without any evidence to back his views, of suppressing his analysts' conclusions, of corrupting the agency's stringent analytical process and of misusing personnel. . .

I remember talking to the South African analyst back in 1988, who told me about the time Bob Gates tried to change the lede on an intelligence piece, which argued that Nelson Mandela was NOT a communist. Gates wanted the lede to say that Mandela was a communist. The analyst kicked back hard and ultimately prevailed, but this behavior was consistent with his reputation as a political animal willing to curry favor with the political masters downtown and sacrifice sound analysis.

Detain the world's most dangerous person.

Call 1-800-ALQ-AEDA and demand the arrest, trial, conviction; and sentencing of
The White House.

Thanks for you help,
Kilgore Trout

A little off topic, but your point about canidates trying to score points near the election triggered something I have been waiting for people to start discussing, but haven't seen.

I have been hearing lots of reports about how Bush has stated over and over that he has confidence the Republicans will maintain control of the house. He even critcised a comment made by his father, about how hard the next few years will be if the Democrates take control of the house, and Bush's response was "He shouldn't be speculating like this, because -- he should have called me ahead of time and I'd tell him they're not going to (win),"http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.a spx?type=politicsNews&storyid=2006-10-22T193206Z_0 1_N22305445_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-FATHER.xml. Even thou this sounds like an admission that he plans to steal the election, and I wouldn't put it past him to try, most election fraud is to swing just enough votes to win a close election, so far it doesn't look like this election is close. I think instead he is going to use Bin Laden's trial to scare people into voting Republican. I just can't see it being a coincedence that the verdict is being read 2 days before elections http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,221101,00.html

I suspect they will call for an execution, probably Nov 6th or 7th. They are using a man's life to gain points in an election. This man was a US ally for many decades. Even assuming he is guilty and should be taken out of power, should his life be used as a pawn to sway the American vote.

On a similar subject, I also heard on the news that the Republicans are releasing a campaign "warning" people of more terroist attacks if they are not re-elected http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/10/19/gop-to-ru n-ad-warning-aga_n_32103.html. Terroism is defined by the US Department of Defense as "the unlawful use of -- or threatened use of -- force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives." How does this not fall under that definition?

I was hoping that the time was drawing near for people to wake up and change the current situation in goverment, but I don't have enough faith in people anymore to think for themselves instead of believing whatever they are told by our goverment on TV.

At all.

He didn't say that poor / black / college people don't vote correctly, he said that they tend to vote Democrat (backed up by stats) and mysteriously, their ballots tend to be thrown away as "spoiled" far more than other demographics. In other words, it is not HIM that says they can't vote correctly, it is whomever is taking out the "spoiled" ballots, many of which aren't.

For your amusement, what some Republicans *really* think of blacks.

Yes, this ad really runs on radio.

I can say "Fuck Bush" all I want.

Sure. But you can't tell the administration that their policy is reprehensible, or joke that the army has run out of low lying fruit, or discuss possible ways for terrorists to attack us. Without accusations of treason or actual arrest, anyways.

Hope you're feeling safer with a government that would rather arrest teenagers than do anything to actually protect the government against terrorists.

Vote AGAINST the world's most dangerous "leader".

Thanks for your support.

Remember, friends don't let friends call Republicans.

Patriotically,
Kilgore Trout

Bush suspends Habeas corpus. Coming to your area: gulag!

Is it just new demos that you want? Well that's easy! Here's an OpenLaszlo YouTube Player, which is a demonstration of the new video api. And of course there's SimFaux and its open source code and content.

-Don

is a failed experiment in capitalism AND democracy.

Call 1-800-ALQ-AEDA and demand an end to the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Thanks for your support,
Kilgore Trout

"alternative energy investments have been major failure and will continue to be major faliures as long as oil is cheap. Oil is getting cheaper as I write this" DarkOx

Not exactly true as the above comment points out. And if alternative energy is doomed to failure why did big oil get a tariff on ethanol being imported into the US and at the same time pushes to reduce domestic production. According to a number of impartial and reliable resources oil production has already peaked.

Oil is getting temperorly cheaper for the oil companies mainly because the US stole Iraqs entire oil supply and is currently selling it back to them. The value of the dollar is tied to the price of oil. Consequently the global markets are tied to oil. Anything to impact the price of oil would have disasterous consequences possibly leading to a total crash. Perhaps this is the real motive in big oils objection to alternative energy. These conditions can not be good for long term economic stability.

"a good energy investment for emotional reasons is just missing a good oppertunity .. emotions and morals have NO PLACE in the stock market"

According to this the disinformation comes chiefly from the other side.

Uhm, everyone got concerned when [I]n a Nov. 7 interview with BusinessWeek Online, AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre Jr. declared: "What [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that." Whitacre and AT&T argue that they need flexibility to exact a toll from Web services that hog bandwidth."

This is a good read on the subject and my source for the quote. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-ed-markey/net-ne utrality-and-the-co_b_19056.html

rebuts the facts as he lays them out?

From Some Might Call It Treason by Mark Crispin Miller:

Take "Democracy at Risk," the DNC report on the election in Ohio, which came out in the summer of 2005. The document appears to be a very damning study of Republican malfeasance in Ohio. It offers many harrowing statistics, and some strong firsthand accounts, of Democratic disenfranchisement throughout the state -- only to deny that fraud had anything to do with it. The problem, rather, was "incompetence," which was somehow epidemic in Ohio on Election Day, and which, stranger still, invariably helped Bush/Cheney and hurt Kerry/Edwards. The report is not exactly readable, with long abstruse equations covering page after page -- a haze of math that does not quite conceal the bald self-contradictions that distort the document like heavy cracks across a windshield. For instance, the report confirms, in various ways, that there were far too few machines only in Democratic precincts, while the number of machines in GOP strongholds was more than adequate. Then, out of nowhere, toward the end, we're told that members of both parties were affected equally by the statewide shortage of machines, so that the glitch did not, of course, affect the outcome of the race.

The whole report is twisted thus, the authors tortuously bending over backward to assure us that DeLay et al. were right: "No voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004." If we look deeper into the report (and also read the pertinent exposés by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at freepress.org), we find that it is less an earnest study of the fraud committed in Ohio than a political statement, meant primarily to distance the committee, and the party, from John Conyers and those other Democrats who had been so tactless as to harp on the abundant evidence of systematic fraud by the Republicans. This fact is highly relevant to Manjoo's attack on Robert Kennedy, as Manjoo's case is heavily dependent on the DNC report. Manjoo invokes it several times, accusing Kennedy of quoting only certain parts of it and pointedly ignoring all those later parts that clear the GOP of fraud. Your reporter calls this a "deliberate omission of key bits of data." And yet that charge is groundless, as the DNC report is only partly accurate, and Kennedy, quite rightly, quoted only its sound figures and ignored its weird exculpatory spin.

I'd like to point out that Ohio's own Democratic party has a web page set up that pretty much debunks these theories. Don't you think that if 270,000 votes were suppressed, they would be the ones to scream about it?

So there.

Oh, also note that RFK Jr. is the same winner that blamed Bush and Barbour for Katrina, in one of the biggest bullshit articles of 2005.

Ok, so I read the rebuttal, and the RFK/Manjoo back and forth here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/06/rf k_responds/index.html

and this Salon article that talks about their position in the affair:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/06/sa lon_answers/index.html

and this article that slams Manjoo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-crispin-miller/ some-might-call-it-treaso_b_23187.html

and I still don't really think that the claim that the Ohio election was out right stolen has a great deal of substance. There is certainly a smell about the 2004 exit poll results from Ohio, but I think Manjoo does a pretty good job of putting the ball back in Kennedy's court; Kennedy needs to do some work to actually establish some fraud, screaming that it might have happened isn't enough anymore. The Salon articles also seem quite a lot less partisan, but maybe that's just me.

The 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure applies to all US Citizens (and legal residents, visitors, etc). The State is required to obtain a warrant. Not "law enforcement," not "the military," not "branch X that didn't exist when the Constitution was written," but THE STATE AS A WHOLE. There are exceptions for clear and present dangers and such, but the Constitution does not specify "law enforcement" as the only department subject to the burden of obtaining a warrant. The NSA is, the last time I checked, part of the US Government, so unless you have some enlightening piece of information that the rest of us don't, they're still subject to the US Constitution, which means they need a warrant.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Bush admitted as much when "he insisted that any government wiretap required a court order."

You mean like this???

Here's an instructional video on hacking a voting machine: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/how-to- hack-a-diebold-vot_b_26301.html

This is what the associated press reported: "On Saturday, Israeli commandos seized two Palestinians suspected of being Hamas militants in the army's first arrest raid in the Gaza Strip since Israel's withdrawal nearly a year ago. An Israeli army spokesman said the two men, arrested at a house near Rafah in southern Gaza, were in the 'final states of planning a large-scale terror attack' in coming days. The army did not provide details on the nature of the alleged plot. Hamas denied that the men, who were identified by neighbors as brothers, are members." Quite a different account than the one provided by Chomsky et al. (Lie number two). Chomsky has said in interviews that "we don't even know their names," referring to the arrested militants. But a quick check of newspapers reveals that their names are Osama and Mostafa Muamar, whose father is Ali Muamar, a notorious Hamas leader. According to press reports "local Hamas activists said the pair was ... known to be members of Hamas." (Lie Number three).

Nor was the arrest of these Hamas terrorists the origin of the crisis, as Chomsky asserts. Even Kofi Annan acknowledged that "Hezbollah's provocative attack on July 12 was the trigger of this particular crisis"; that Hezbollah is "deliberate[ly] targeting...Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons"; and that Israel has the "right to defend itself under Article 51 of the U.N. chater."

The people in Israeli jails are there because they were involved in terrorist activities and many committed heinous crimes. In an effort to win greater sympathy for their gambit, Hamas has asked for the release of women and children, giving the impression that housewives and toddlers are being unfairly imprisoned. Out of the 109 women and 313 juveniles currently in prison, 64 women and 91 juveniles "have blood on their hands." Palestinian prisoners under the age of 18 threw Molotov cocktails, transported weapons and associated with terrorist organizations. The women planned suicide attacks, prepared bombs and assisted suicide bombers; they also attacked Israeli soldiers and joined terrorist organizations. Ahlan Tanimi, for example, brought the bomb that murdered 16 in the Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem. Kahira Sa'adi drove a terrorist to King George Avenue, where he blew up three people. Hanady Jaradats killed 21 in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa (Jerusalem Post, July 6, 2006).

He is probably intentionally keeping himself at arms' length from everyone he considers the "opposition", lest he see the light like Hilary Rosen sort of did.

Call 1-800-ALQ-AEDA and demand the arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing of the
world's most dangerous "leader".

Cheers,
K. Trout, M.D.

To report an offender:

Call your Commander-In-Crime

Have a day,
Kilgore Trout, C.I.O.