Why is almost everyone saying that Google and PirateBay are doing the same thing? Is this some kind of mass delusion? Self deception? Or have we all learned disingenuous lawyers' tactics from crappy TV dramas? It was always a lame justification, a poor diversionary defensive posture, and never had any chance of being taken seriously outside of the lowest common denominator world of duh intarweb.
Here's the big news:
PirateBay ***runs a torrent tracker!!!*** Google doesn't!!!! OMG!!! OMFG!!!
Please somebody show me the Google torrent tracker. I use PirateBay's tracker daily, but if Google is running a tracker I want to use it. As every dedicated leecher knows More+Bigger = Better+Faster. Where is it?
As the author points out in the article, there is a difference between complaining and criticising. Well structured criticism is useful and is not necessarily done to seek redress. It isn't necessarily expressing a grievance either. A criticism is the beginning of an improvement.
GNU/Linux has many detractors and opponents (mostly being, or representing, commercial entities which see the danger to their business models) and for years there has been a strong culture of supposed 'Linux advocacy'. This has gone way beyond advocacy and in fact been relentless and aggressive promotion by adherents, that is religious evangelism in all but name. Evangelism doesn't accommodate criticism of the faith, positive or otherwise and is practised irrespective of context, reception, appropriateness or usefulness. Any deviation from full unthinking worship is apostacy. Hagiography mostly excludes review and peer review in the world of free software. There are even cults around distributions. There are some exceptions, but you only have to see what happens when someone makes an honest appraisal of a cult's idol to appreciate this. You can, occasionally and from very few authors, read positive and well informed reviews but because they are not shameless hagiographies the author gets berated, slandered, harangued and harassed and occasionally death threats are made! Look at reviews over the last year of Slackware and Puppy to see this actually happen. It's pretty remarkable. I even read this on the Slackware board at LQ this week: " I agree yet again. The only reason *buntu is better than Window$ is because it's FLOSS and marginally more secure (not due to the distro itself but due to the nature of FLOSS... generally less buggy and full of holes). Other than that, no real difference between the two." This is actually insane, yet comes from a well established priest of the cult, sorry I meant board member and, and naturally it went unremarked. There is no real difference between Windows and Ubuntu. Hmmm. And PV was born of a virgin and RMS has stigmata which look like Penguins (actually that last one may be true).
I think this kind of thinking applies far more to the communities around the code than the way the code is peer reviewed, but it does mean that honest, constructive and useful criticism in broad terms is very unlikley to be offered. Even a discussion is impossible. That has to have an impact on filtering the people who contribute and on they way they contribute and on what they contribute. It isn't healthy. Not many people will volunteer to be the witch in the witch hunt more than once.
Luckily I'm above that kind of thinking. I'm rational and broad minded enough that I will happily use either of Debian Stable or Debian Testing. I'm not fussed.
Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB...
Or spend $300 on a celeron-m end of line laptop and install Debian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faslane
"Her Majesty's Naval Base (HMNB) Clyde is one of three UK operating bases for the Royal Navy (the others being HMNB Devonport and HMNB Portsmouth). It is the service's headquarters in Scotland and is best known as the home of the United Kingdom's Trident-armed nuclear submarine force."
This place has been notorious/famous for decades.
Whoever wrote this "news" story is a fucking idiot and recycling on/. is fucking dumb too.
Some of the other "top secret" places featured in the story feature regularly in documentaries, fiction, news reports and so on. Some of them are so secret that they have their own public website complete with pictures and a contact us button:-)
http://www.sis.gov.uk/output/sis-home-welcome.html
Well done Timothy, well up to your usual standard (rubbish).
For UK readers 65TB of files is the equivalent to an area half the size of Wales, 10 Wembleys, 3 Home Office Detention Centres or 12 double decker buses!!!
Thank you for your comment. You may well be right. My point really was that the state which imposes the restrictions may also be subsidising the circumvention of those restrictions. Even (especially?) in China socio-economic class and tacit social/political compliance matters more than almost anything else when it comes to the freedom and ability to communicate.
I'm not sure how sophisticated is the management and regulation of public computers in China but assuming it's not perfect then it should be possible for anyone who can afford a small pen drive to install and run DSL with Qemu and from there add tor and privoxy. Yes this requires a little research and determination and I'm assuming there is reasonable documentation in Chinese languages which may not be the case.
My undestanding of the Chinese firewall is that it is not the all encompassing seeing eye as described by the hysterical media, but more of a rather subtle and intelligently implemented method of training the population to self-censor. Articles which are available this week might not be available next week. This week's acceptable site is next month's taboo and so on. The upshot being that the general population self moderates, leaving the censors and police to concentrate on those who persistently use vpn, ssh, tor etc. My guess is that there is always a way through but maybe not a regular safe way through. In controlling a population their internet access is just an aspect of relevant behaviour, not the be all and end all so it would be foolish to divert too many resources to it when more might be achieved through traditional methods of control and surveillance such as a state monopoly on the telephone, a helpful concierge in every building, certain requirements of every employer. Just look at the DDR as was.
Another aspect to bear in mind is that we always seem to assume that these one party or autocratic states are competent in their endeavours to control their population. This definitely isn't the case. China may be an exception due to a stable government (60 years so far!) and technological expertise but many other oppressive places are utterly reliant on technology and methods they actually don't understand and are unable to effectively implement or maybe afford, or can't implement because every foreign company would leave the next day.
"This presents an interesting chicken and egg problem with circumvention software. How do you get the software in the first place if it's source of the software package is censored?"
apt-get install tor privoxy
I've been in countries where use of any method to circumvent state censorship is criminal, all known proxies are blocked, all proxifying/anonymising software websites are blocked, tor.eff.org is blocked and so on. But there are Debian mirrors hosted by the state funded university. No more censorship:-)
The OP isn't doing licensing, he's researching for the purpose of drafting a policy document on procurement/standards with a view to reducing licensing *costs*. If he works for a branch of government they will inevitably have their own legal dept. who vet all such documents as a matter of course. Being fellow employees, even colleagues, they may even do it without billing him;-) I'm sure Mr Perens' extensive experience in this area goes beyond blowing out air on/. and does actually include occasional contact with the legal profession. I would call him first, second and third and the office legal dept 4th......unless BP advised me otherwise:-)
I'm extremely impressed that Bruce Perens responds with his phone number and an offer of advice, which I assume we all appreciate is based on a wealth of practical experience and success, and even more impressed that just a few posts later someone suggests that what you really need is a lawyer. What a strange world. Perhaps the anon coward who suggested a lawyer is, in fact, a lawyer?
If you ignore Bruce Perens and opt instead to call a lawyer you should get fired;-)
btw I'm writing this from my nuclear planet. I made it last week. I have a very fast computer. The planet is OK but a bit hot (I didn't have time to put the air-con in yet).
Basically, on the whole, people who use prostitutes are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never get the clap or have their wallet stolen.
Basically, on the whole, people who use badly maintained electrical goods are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never get a shock or have their house burn down.
Basically, on the whole, people who use heroin are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never OD, get a bad batch, get sick or die.
Basically, on the whole, people who use illegally modified cars are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never break down or crash.
(Compulsory car analogy, offered as part of the/. car analogy quota target program).
I think I spotted a flaw in your reasoning.
It's obvious to everyone that if you can't detect malware by using cracked "security" tools on a cracked OS then there simply isn't any malware there to find. Obvious and simple too! Duh.
Anyway carry on with your warez. Trust all your data to the goodwill and competence of the warez scene. Believe that if you can't understand or perceive something then it can't exist. And good luck.
You're still confusing the street vendors with the people who make the warez (the cracked software *not* the physical CD). For example:
"where there is a motive for the supplier to add "evil bits" even if it only earns him a few cents a....."
It isn't the guy making a few cents selling physical media who adds anything (except a few scratches ha ha).
Reputations: assume someone spends the whole $2 and buys XP Pro and installs it. Next step? Install a bunch of other stuff too, some from similar warez CDs, some from p2p, some from warez ftp. Now tell me how anyone who *even notices there is a rootkit(!!!)* can determine its origin? Street vendor reputation unaffected, in fact not really even relevant.
I like the idea of "a reputation system the non-braindead use to check out quality and safety" because the idea contains the paradox of supposedly intelligent people trusting all their IT security to street vendors and unknown warez producers. Sweet!
p.s. a rootkit is by definition very hard to detect;-)
p.p.s. claiming that something doesn't happen because you haven't noticed it, and demonstrating neither the ability nor the will to notice it, is not a powerful argument. Even if you say bollocks. Seems to me that Brits writing "Bollocks" at the start of a (usually flawed) assertion equates to Americans writing "Period" at the end of one. Neither is as impressively convincing as the author always believes:-)
You're confusing the people who sell the stuff on the street/malls/markets with the people who crack the software and to some extent with the people who manufacture it.
You're also making a mistake in assuming a modified binary in a software installer is something that an anti-virus/anti-malware program can necessarily detect.
I've seen "clean" installs from commonly used and sold XP CD (in SE Asia) which contain keyloggers and so on from minute one. They were undetectable from the running machine but could be found by scanning from read only media such as live CD.
The best way to get a rootkit onto many, many people's PCs is to have them install it along with the OS, or have the local PC retail industry helpfully do the work for you when they clone the pirated OS onto the newly purchased (without OS) PC using their cracked copy of Norton Ghost....and the distribution network of human vendors is efficient, motivated (profit), looks after its customers and broadly trusted. Perfect and beautiful! You pay now, wait 5 minutes.
Hmmm...a brain washed Thai speaks? No I didn't make it up. It definitely wasn't suicide, nobody of any persuasion has ever considered that to be a possibility because of the nature of the fatal wound. Some innocent palace servants were eventually executed many years later. The two prime suspects with motive, opportunity etc are clearly the current King and his mother.
I'd suggest to anyone interested that they do their own research because it's a really remarkable event. If you're in Thailand don't do it, do what everyone else does which is pretend it never happened and refuse to acknowledge the event (another they pefer to overlook/deny occured is the Japanese occupation...a trifling matter, an agreement between friends *cough*). If you're in Thailand and do attempt to research this event you will be jailed if caught by the MICT censorship machine. If you discuss this event you have a very good chance of being jailed. If you write about this event your writings will be banned and you will be jailed. If you're considering discussing it with a Thai then reconsider. They are not allowed to know their own history and even when it stares them in the face they are so perfectly imbued with blind nationalism, ideas of racial superiority and so perfectly conditioned in their adoration of their masters that they are in fact unable to address many subjects with any kind of rationale.
They forgot to mention the part about him and/or his mother the queen shooting his older brother dead and thus guaranteeing the succession of a hard nosed and ambitious leader instead of a sickly youth. Thais just love that story, start telling it as soon as you're through immigration, or maybe even right there at the desk while the happy cop checks your passport.
The Thai king is very old and very fragile. Succession is imminent. In Thailand you probably won't hear a bad word about the king but you seldom hear a good word about the crown prince. The current king has taken the royal family from penniless pawns of the military elite (ethnic Thais) and business elite (Chinese/Thai)to being phenomenally wealthy and arch manipulators of everybody and everything; politics, politicians, the army, the courts, markets, property deals and so on. He is also one of the few uniting factors in a nation horribly divided by religion, ethnicity, class and money, rural vs urban. When he dies there's a very good chance that Thailand will descend into a bloody mess. The recent more robust (than usual) prosecution of lese majeste cases probably has many causes but surely one is the stark realisation by the current self appointed government that when the monarchy ceases to be universally respected it must at least be prohibitively risky to criticise it. If the majority of Thais, who are very poor and have seen the only politician who ever gave them anything deposed and then the next government they elected dissolved in a de facto coup, one day cease to be blinded by their adoration of King Bhumibol, if they finally see how the royal family and the urban rich are ceaselessly getting richer while the poor stay poor and are also disenfranchised....maybe they won't be too happy...and there are plenty of them. Thaksin might even be able to exploit the situation by being the only person capable of quelling a serious threat akin to the communist insurgency of the 70s. The current rulers of Thailand would go to almost any lengths to keep Thaksin out and he and his supporters will be very interested in opportunities to foment a volatile and frightening climate. It would be extremely ironic if the next king found himself asking such a bitter enemy to save his skin.
Thailand is a very fucked up country and I would hate to be there when the king dies. There will be a few weeks of mourning and then anarchy.
It was a joke you stupid cunt. Hence the other references to Kim Wilde's song "Cambodia", Bonnie Tyler's "Lost in France" and David Bowie's "Young Americans".
fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off you humourless, soulless, pedantic cretin.
p.s. I really have been to Cambodia many times, I've seen the piles of skulls and the numerous people horribly injured by landmines, it still happens, usually to poor rural kids playing who can't really understand what a landmine is until they step on one, or people so poor that they'll risk their lives to forage or hunt. I never met anyone as fucking dumb as you.
"Presumably, since you are actually here to post about it, you didn't go to Cambodia while Pol Pot was in power. I assure you, disappointment would be the least of your worries in Cambodia in the 70's."
I went to Cambodia several times in the last decade. Quite obviously there was not a whole lot of tourism in the kingdom in the last quarter of the 20th century. I think everyone knows this even without you announcing it on/.
I'm not sure why two people mentioning some songs and making a silly comment brings two such pedantic, pompous and condescending replies. I don't know what your problem is, or why you think you ought to give me a lecture (about a country I visited many times...did you?) or what kind of asshole mods up your pedantic and stupid remarks. To summarize: piss off.
>As Jello Biafra put it in Holiday in Cambodia
>So you been to school
>For a year or two.....
I went to Camodia and it wasn't anything like Jello Biafra's song. Nor was it like Kim Wilde's song. Overall it was a very disappointing experience, paling besides the time I was Lost in France or when I met some Young Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
100% agree.
Why is almost everyone saying that Google and PirateBay are doing the same thing? Is this some kind of mass delusion? Self deception? Or have we all learned disingenuous lawyers' tactics from crappy TV dramas? It was always a lame justification, a poor diversionary defensive posture, and never had any chance of being taken seriously outside of the lowest common denominator world of duh intarweb.
Here's the big news:
PirateBay ***runs a torrent tracker!!!*** Google doesn't!!!! OMG!!! OMFG!!!
Please somebody show me the Google torrent tracker. I use PirateBay's tracker daily, but if Google is running a tracker I want to use it. As every dedicated leecher knows More+Bigger = Better+Faster. Where is it?
Start with this guy.
Bless you, and try to kill more non-believers.
slashdot got busy on day 7 when I was resting up thinking about smiting and flooding.
I am the supreme being and here it is: sex, shoes, babies, butt size, curtains, weight gain (see sex), wrinkles, dust.
As the author points out in the article, there is a difference between complaining and criticising. Well structured criticism is useful and is not necessarily done to seek redress. It isn't necessarily expressing a grievance either. A criticism is the beginning of an improvement.
GNU/Linux has many detractors and opponents (mostly being, or representing, commercial entities which see the danger to their business models) and for years there has been a strong culture of supposed 'Linux advocacy'. This has gone way beyond advocacy and in fact been relentless and aggressive promotion by adherents, that is religious evangelism in all but name. Evangelism doesn't accommodate criticism of the faith, positive or otherwise and is practised irrespective of context, reception, appropriateness or usefulness. Any deviation from full unthinking worship is apostacy. Hagiography mostly excludes review and peer review in the world of free software. There are even cults around distributions. There are some exceptions, but you only have to see what happens when someone makes an honest appraisal of a cult's idol to appreciate this. You can, occasionally and from very few authors, read positive and well informed reviews but because they are not shameless hagiographies the author gets berated, slandered, harangued and harassed and occasionally death threats are made! Look at reviews over the last year of Slackware and Puppy to see this actually happen. It's pretty remarkable. I even read this on the Slackware board at LQ this week: " I agree yet again. The only reason *buntu is better than Window$ is because it's FLOSS and marginally more secure (not due to the distro itself but due to the nature of FLOSS ... generally less buggy and full of holes). Other than that, no real difference between the two." This is actually insane, yet comes from a well established priest of the cult, sorry I meant board member and, and naturally it went unremarked. There is no real difference between Windows and Ubuntu. Hmmm. And PV was born of a virgin and RMS has stigmata which look like Penguins (actually that last one may be true).
I think this kind of thinking applies far more to the communities around the code than the way the code is peer reviewed, but it does mean that honest, constructive and useful criticism in broad terms is very unlikley to be offered. Even a discussion is impossible. That has to have an impact on filtering the people who contribute and on they way they contribute and on what they contribute. It isn't healthy. Not many people will volunteer to be the witch in the witch hunt more than once.
Luckily I'm above that kind of thinking. I'm rational and broad minded enough that I will happily use either of Debian Stable or Debian Testing. I'm not fussed.
Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB...
Or spend $300 on a celeron-m end of line laptop and install Debian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faslane "Her Majesty's Naval Base (HMNB) Clyde is one of three UK operating bases for the Royal Navy (the others being HMNB Devonport and HMNB Portsmouth). It is the service's headquarters in Scotland and is best known as the home of the United Kingdom's Trident-armed nuclear submarine force." This place has been notorious/famous for decades. Whoever wrote this "news" story is a fucking idiot and recycling on /. is fucking dumb too.
Some of the other "top secret" places featured in the story feature regularly in documentaries, fiction, news reports and so on. Some of them are so secret that they have their own public website complete with pictures and a contact us button :-)
http://www.sis.gov.uk/output/sis-home-welcome.html
Well done Timothy, well up to your usual standard (rubbish).
For UK readers 65TB of files is the equivalent to an area half the size of Wales, 10 Wembleys, 3 Home Office Detention Centres or 12 double decker buses!!!
Thank you for your comment. You may well be right. My point really was that the state which imposes the restrictions may also be subsidising the circumvention of those restrictions. Even (especially?) in China socio-economic class and tacit social/political compliance matters more than almost anything else when it comes to the freedom and ability to communicate. I'm not sure how sophisticated is the management and regulation of public computers in China but assuming it's not perfect then it should be possible for anyone who can afford a small pen drive to install and run DSL with Qemu and from there add tor and privoxy. Yes this requires a little research and determination and I'm assuming there is reasonable documentation in Chinese languages which may not be the case. My undestanding of the Chinese firewall is that it is not the all encompassing seeing eye as described by the hysterical media, but more of a rather subtle and intelligently implemented method of training the population to self-censor. Articles which are available this week might not be available next week. This week's acceptable site is next month's taboo and so on. The upshot being that the general population self moderates, leaving the censors and police to concentrate on those who persistently use vpn, ssh, tor etc. My guess is that there is always a way through but maybe not a regular safe way through. In controlling a population their internet access is just an aspect of relevant behaviour, not the be all and end all so it would be foolish to divert too many resources to it when more might be achieved through traditional methods of control and surveillance such as a state monopoly on the telephone, a helpful concierge in every building, certain requirements of every employer. Just look at the DDR as was. Another aspect to bear in mind is that we always seem to assume that these one party or autocratic states are competent in their endeavours to control their population. This definitely isn't the case. China may be an exception due to a stable government (60 years so far!) and technological expertise but many other oppressive places are utterly reliant on technology and methods they actually don't understand and are unable to effectively implement or maybe afford, or can't implement because every foreign company would leave the next day.
"This presents an interesting chicken and egg problem with circumvention software. How do you get the software in the first place if it's source of the software package is censored?"
apt-get install tor privoxy
I've been in countries where use of any method to circumvent state censorship is criminal, all known proxies are blocked, all proxifying/anonymising software websites are blocked, tor.eff.org is blocked and so on. But there are Debian mirrors hosted by the state funded university. No more censorship :-)
plz seed
The OP isn't doing licensing, he's researching for the purpose of drafting a policy document on procurement/standards with a view to reducing licensing *costs*. If he works for a branch of government they will inevitably have their own legal dept. who vet all such documents as a matter of course. Being fellow employees, even colleagues, they may even do it without billing him ;-) I'm sure Mr Perens' extensive experience in this area goes beyond blowing out air on /. and does actually include occasional contact with the legal profession. I would call him first, second and third and the office legal dept 4th......unless BP advised me otherwise :-)
I'm extremely impressed that Bruce Perens responds with his phone number and an offer of advice, which I assume we all appreciate is based on a wealth of practical experience and success, and even more impressed that just a few posts later someone suggests that what you really need is a lawyer. What a strange world. Perhaps the anon coward who suggested a lawyer is, in fact, a lawyer?
If you ignore Bruce Perens and opt instead to call a lawyer you should get fired ;-)
btw I'm writing this from my nuclear planet. I made it last week. I have a very fast computer. The planet is OK but a bit hot (I didn't have time to put the air-con in yet).
Basically, on the whole, people who use prostitutes are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never get the clap or have their wallet stolen. Basically, on the whole, people who use badly maintained electrical goods are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never get a shock or have their house burn down. Basically, on the whole, people who use heroin are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never OD, get a bad batch, get sick or die. Basically, on the whole, people who use illegally modified cars are a lot more aware of the "dark side" and take more precautions than upright citizens. And they never break down or crash. (Compulsory car analogy, offered as part of the /. car analogy quota target program).
I think I spotted a flaw in your reasoning.
It's obvious to everyone that if you can't detect malware by using cracked "security" tools on a cracked OS then there simply isn't any malware there to find. Obvious and simple too! Duh.
Anyway carry on with your warez. Trust all your data to the goodwill and competence of the warez scene. Believe that if you can't understand or perceive something then it can't exist. And good luck.
You're still confusing the street vendors with the people who make the warez (the cracked software *not* the physical CD). For example: "where there is a motive for the supplier to add "evil bits" even if it only earns him a few cents a ....."
It isn't the guy making a few cents selling physical media who adds anything (except a few scratches ha ha).
Reputations: assume someone spends the whole $2 and buys XP Pro and installs it. Next step? Install a bunch of other stuff too, some from similar warez CDs, some from p2p, some from warez ftp. Now tell me how anyone who *even notices there is a rootkit(!!!)* can determine its origin? Street vendor reputation unaffected, in fact not really even relevant.
I like the idea of "a reputation system the non-braindead use to check out quality and safety" because the idea contains the paradox of supposedly intelligent people trusting all their IT security to street vendors and unknown warez producers. Sweet!
p.s. a rootkit is by definition very hard to detect ;-)
p.p.s. claiming that something doesn't happen because you haven't noticed it, and demonstrating neither the ability nor the will to notice it, is not a powerful argument. Even if you say bollocks. Seems to me that Brits writing "Bollocks" at the start of a (usually flawed) assertion equates to Americans writing "Period" at the end of one. Neither is as impressively convincing as the author always believes :-)
You're confusing the people who sell the stuff on the street/malls/markets with the people who crack the software and to some extent with the people who manufacture it. You're also making a mistake in assuming a modified binary in a software installer is something that an anti-virus/anti-malware program can necessarily detect. I've seen "clean" installs from commonly used and sold XP CD (in SE Asia) which contain keyloggers and so on from minute one. They were undetectable from the running machine but could be found by scanning from read only media such as live CD. The best way to get a rootkit onto many, many people's PCs is to have them install it along with the OS, or have the local PC retail industry helpfully do the work for you when they clone the pirated OS onto the newly purchased (without OS) PC using their cracked copy of Norton Ghost....and the distribution network of human vendors is efficient, motivated (profit), looks after its customers and broadly trusted. Perfect and beautiful! You pay now, wait 5 minutes.
oooh look two foreigners having a pissing contest about which is the best "little thai".
Hmmm...a brain washed Thai speaks? No I didn't make it up. It definitely wasn't suicide, nobody of any persuasion has ever considered that to be a possibility because of the nature of the fatal wound. Some innocent palace servants were eventually executed many years later. The two prime suspects with motive, opportunity etc are clearly the current King and his mother. I'd suggest to anyone interested that they do their own research because it's a really remarkable event. If you're in Thailand don't do it, do what everyone else does which is pretend it never happened and refuse to acknowledge the event (another they pefer to overlook/deny occured is the Japanese occupation...a trifling matter, an agreement between friends *cough*). If you're in Thailand and do attempt to research this event you will be jailed if caught by the MICT censorship machine. If you discuss this event you have a very good chance of being jailed. If you write about this event your writings will be banned and you will be jailed. If you're considering discussing it with a Thai then reconsider. They are not allowed to know their own history and even when it stares them in the face they are so perfectly imbued with blind nationalism, ideas of racial superiority and so perfectly conditioned in their adoration of their masters that they are in fact unable to address many subjects with any kind of rationale.
They forgot to mention the part about him and/or his mother the queen shooting his older brother dead and thus guaranteeing the succession of a hard nosed and ambitious leader instead of a sickly youth. Thais just love that story, start telling it as soon as you're through immigration, or maybe even right there at the desk while the happy cop checks your passport.
The Thai king is very old and very fragile. Succession is imminent. In Thailand you probably won't hear a bad word about the king but you seldom hear a good word about the crown prince. The current king has taken the royal family from penniless pawns of the military elite (ethnic Thais) and business elite (Chinese/Thai)to being phenomenally wealthy and arch manipulators of everybody and everything; politics, politicians, the army, the courts, markets, property deals and so on. He is also one of the few uniting factors in a nation horribly divided by religion, ethnicity, class and money, rural vs urban. When he dies there's a very good chance that Thailand will descend into a bloody mess. The recent more robust (than usual) prosecution of lese majeste cases probably has many causes but surely one is the stark realisation by the current self appointed government that when the monarchy ceases to be universally respected it must at least be prohibitively risky to criticise it. If the majority of Thais, who are very poor and have seen the only politician who ever gave them anything deposed and then the next government they elected dissolved in a de facto coup, one day cease to be blinded by their adoration of King Bhumibol, if they finally see how the royal family and the urban rich are ceaselessly getting richer while the poor stay poor and are also disenfranchised....maybe they won't be too happy...and there are plenty of them. Thaksin might even be able to exploit the situation by being the only person capable of quelling a serious threat akin to the communist insurgency of the 70s. The current rulers of Thailand would go to almost any lengths to keep Thaksin out and he and his supporters will be very interested in opportunities to foment a volatile and frightening climate. It would be extremely ironic if the next king found himself asking such a bitter enemy to save his skin. Thailand is a very fucked up country and I would hate to be there when the king dies. There will be a few weeks of mourning and then anarchy.
It was a joke you stupid cunt. Hence the other references to Kim Wilde's song "Cambodia", Bonnie Tyler's "Lost in France" and David Bowie's "Young Americans". fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off you humourless, soulless, pedantic cretin. p.s. I really have been to Cambodia many times, I've seen the piles of skulls and the numerous people horribly injured by landmines, it still happens, usually to poor rural kids playing who can't really understand what a landmine is until they step on one, or people so poor that they'll risk their lives to forage or hunt. I never met anyone as fucking dumb as you.
"Presumably, since you are actually here to post about it, you didn't go to Cambodia while Pol Pot was in power. I assure you, disappointment would be the least of your worries in Cambodia in the 70's." I went to Cambodia several times in the last decade. Quite obviously there was not a whole lot of tourism in the kingdom in the last quarter of the 20th century. I think everyone knows this even without you announcing it on /.
I'm not sure why two people mentioning some songs and making a silly comment brings two such pedantic, pompous and condescending replies. I don't know what your problem is, or why you think you ought to give me a lecture (about a country I visited many times...did you?) or what kind of asshole mods up your pedantic and stupid remarks. To summarize: piss off.
>As Jello Biafra put it in Holiday in Cambodia >So you been to school >For a year or two .....
I went to Camodia and it wasn't anything like Jello Biafra's song. Nor was it like Kim Wilde's song. Overall it was a very disappointing experience, paling besides the time I was Lost in France or when I met some Young Americans.
He said boxen. Please mod down and then exterminate.