"We need a Fairness Doctrine for the internet. For example maybe you'll visit foxnews.com and a popup will ask if you want to read democrat.org too. We need to include that as part of net neutrality and other FCC regulations."
[citationneeded]. I can't find any record of a quote like this.
"We need to pass a law to remove MSNBC and FOXnews from cable television." The latter came from a Congressman Kennedy who is a nobody
"I’m not arguing that our traditional approach to journalism is inherently superior to the ideological model. After all, that model has served Great Britain and much of Europe pretty well for a long time. But it’s sure not what we’re used to, and confusing to many, even within the industry.
For us consumers, the important thing to remember is this: Fox and MSNBC are playing by different rules than the broadcast networks or NPR. If you like your news straight up, you’ll prefer the latter. If you like it with a twist, you know where to look."
“There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the F.C.C. to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; to our ability to do our work here in Congress; and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and, more importantly, in their future.”
A lamentation of ideologically driven news media - quite different from the claim that he is actively seeking laws to shutdown ideological news organizations.
And then of course there's Obama himself who gave a college speech advising them not to read the internet news sites and only listen to WH press releases
What he actually said:
The class of 2010 is "coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter," the president said, earning an honorary doctorate of laws degree during the ceremony.
"And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- (laughter) -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy
With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all -- to know what to believe, to figure out who's telling the truth and who's not. Let's face it, even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I've had some experience in that regard,"
Funny that you interpret it as an attack on freedom, when even FoxNews acknowledged that this bit of the speech was a reference to some false internet rumours: "Obama has endured some nasty rumors at the hands of the Internet. Blogs and comment pages continue to allege that the president has not been honest about his place of birth -- Hawaii -- or about his religion -- Christian."
So if there's confusion by Republicans, it's because of what they are he
You will not find a credible mental health professional who agrees with his assessment. That's a really fucking scary view into his psyche. His own admission is that video games are fun. He likes video games. Killing people is like playing a video game. Therefore, "Killing people is fun." At best, he's a sociopath.
Soldiers would never enjoy killing? : US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'"Other soldiers told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them".
If you were the pilot of an Apache, cruising through the skies, taking out enemy tanks with Hellfire missiles, why would you not enjoy the experience? If you believe that you are doing good deeds, killing bad guys, and protecting your country, and getting a massive adrenalin rush, all at the same time, would you honestly feel upset that you are killing bad guys and "terrorists"? Do you think that the average soldier cries when they kill a bad guy "terrorist"? Of course not. These people are professionals, they are trained to be desensitised towards killing. The men like Peter Mercer (who killed himself after asking his father "How can you love someone who has killed so many people?") are in the minority - most soldiers do not feel a lifetime of suicidal regret for their killing.
The only role of government is to ensure the freedom of people to establish those associations.
And how is this to be interpreted? Should the government have a military, and a police force? What about a fire service - it's hard to ensure stability and freedom when a fire in a city threatens the entire city infrastructure because some houses are uninsured. And what about some basic health service - to deal with pandemics and other problems which affect national security (e.g. wars, terrorism)? And what about prosecuting people who leak classified data? Intelligence agencies? Where does that fit into libertarianism?
Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets. Having lived and worked in many countries, I can see the tremendous vibrancy in, say, the Malaysian telecom sector compared to U.S. sector. In the U.S. everything is vertically integrated and sewn up, so you don’t have a free market. In Malaysia, you have a broad spectrum of players, and you can see the benefits for all as a result.
How do your leaks fit into that?
To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.
There's the famous lemon example in the used car market. It's hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers can't get a good price, even when they have a good car.
By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means there's a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who they’re dealing with.
You've developed a reputation as anti-establishment and anti-institution.
Not at all. Creating a well-run establishment is a difficult thing to do, and I've been in countries where institutions are in a state of collapse, so I understand the difficulty of running a company. Institutions don't come from nowhere.
It's not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I've learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I'm a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.
WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
Sweden has stronger protections for free-speech than his other options for residency. Look at The Pirate Bay - if it were in the U.S. or Russia or UK it would've been taken down long ago. As a resident of Sweden, he may also get the freedom to travel throughout the European Union, which would be useful as it gives him easy access to the 24-hour media of the West. Australian politicians have been signalling that they may want to prosecute him and confiscate his passport, so returning home isn't a wonderful prospect.
The rape allegations are true and Assange should be held to account.
The problem is that people keep using that word - "Rape". It has an enormous number of negative connotations. Read the link you provided at kateharding.info - how many times does she use the "R" word? Rape, rape rape... From what we know of the Assange case, the women who he is accused of "raping" both continued to see him afterwards. One took him out for breakfast the next day, and paid for his train ticket back into Stockholm. Another arranged a party for him the next day, during which she twittered "Sitting outside; nearly freezing; with the world's coolest people; it's pretty amazing." These are not the actions of women who have been raped - at least, not in the sense of what the majority of people consider the word "rape" to mean. Calling whatever supposedly happened between Assange and these women "rape" diminishes the word, and is grossly offensive to both men and women who have genuinely been the victims of forced sexual intercourse.
The question is why fewer women would choose to play chess then; you haven't really answered the question, just shifted it slightly.
Personally I think women are just less interested in chess, which is probably genetic.
If you've ever been to a children's chess club, you'll notice that the ratio is something like 9 boys to 1 girl. The driving force in a child's chess career is the parents - they are the ones who organise everything, who finance everything, who transport the children between home and club and national events. Competing in national events requires thousands of miles of weekend travel every year - a considerable investment of time for any family. At this age (pre-puberty), there is no particular reason to think that there should be any substantial genetic differences. For some cultural or personal reason, parents of girls seem less willing to push them towards playing chess, and do not have a chess career ambition for their daughters. You may be right in that there is a genetic component, but we will never know for sure, until the parents of girls act the same way as they do for the boys, and act in a focused way to drive their children's careers forward. I am sure that if we had the same number of parents pushing their young daughters as they push their young sons, then there would be many more successful female chess players.
As they're not, you don't. There's no international consensus that helping someone use a website and giving someone priority status are crimes.
Hosting leaked documents that foreign governments don't want to be visible isn't even a crime. If it is, someone better arrest John Young for this outrage.
And that's the way you want it, unless you want international law to allow extradition ti China for hosting pages critical of the Chinese government?
You mean like the privacy of the people who are known as informants?
Do informants actually have a "right to privacy" for their activities? You're arguing that the Stasi informer list shouldn't have been published, because it violates an informants right to privacy?
Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has refused a request from a West MP for the Government to take action to stop children being able to access internet pornography.
Devizes Tory MP Claire Perry raised the issue at a special Commons debate, because as a mother-of-three she knew how difficult it was to keep youngsters from seeing inappropriate material.
But Mr Vaizey made it clear ministers will not take any steps to force internet service providers (ISPs) to tackle the problem.
He said: "We believe in an open, lightly regulated internet. The internet is by and large a force for good, it is central to our lives and to our economy and Government has to be wary about regulating or passing legislation."
The minister suggested it was for parents to take responsibility for what their children see online, rather than the ISPs that make money from pornography.
The Conservatives railed against the "Nanny State" and "Big Government" when they were out of power, and now they want to block every single web site with "adult content" by default, forcing ISPs to pay millions for upgraded filtering systems? The problem is, the filtering systems they want the ISPs to use are the same ones that they already use to enforce the IWF block list. But the IWF block list is only a few thousand URLs; to block all adult content they will have to block tens of thousands of URLs, including Wikipedia because of the "adult content", and many other large and popular sites, and that is going to cause the same problems with authentication and proxying that happened last time.
I hope ISPs actually bill people an appropriately expensive fee for this filtering service.
People should fear international law more than its absence.
The Nurenburg trials were conducted for violations of international law. The problem with restricting law to the boundaries of nation states is that if a nation state "goes rogue" and legalises genocide against certain ethnicities (e.g. Nazi Germany), then there is no legal framework for later prosecuting the people enforcing that law, as they acted lawfully under the jurisdiction of their nation state at the time.
Another instance where national law is of no use is in piracy. Since the jurisdiction of a nation state does not extend to international waters, in the absence of international law it would be entirely lawful to murder, enslave, rape etc. in international waters. Obviously it is desirable for most people that these activities be held accountable in some legal framework.
They claim to represent international laws, but enforce them for some countries, and ignore others.
The United Nations is not responsible for the enforcement of international laws. It has no military force. It has no authority to command the military forces of it's member nations.
Get rid of the UN.
The UN is just a place to facilitate communication and dialogue between the nation states of this world. It has no power in itself - any military intervention, any sanctions, etc. have to be willingly enforced by member states. What would getting rid of it actually achieve? The communication that the UN facilitates would either not happen, or happen in a distributed fashion, or the UN would simply be replaced by another global organisation carrying out the same functions.
The UN can't get pisspot dictators to stop comitting genocide
That is not the job of the UN. The UN has no military forces, and it has no authority to order the military forces of its member nations into battle.
The job of the UN is to facilitate dialogue and cooperation between nation states, not to wage war. If nation states want to end genocide, then they can use the UN as a talking shop, and gain agreement in enforcement protocols etc. leading to Declarations, but the UN as an organisation can not itself declare war or command nation states. In the recent genocides to which you are alluding, Kofi Annan was clear that he wanted Western nations to commit military resources to protect people and prevent genocide, but Western nations tend to not be as supportive of military intervention when the nation in question is not strategically important to their own interests.
Really? You mean Slashdot, Google, Yahoo!, and porn are all government funded?
Bad examples. Google was the commercialisation of a research project at Stanford University. The others tend to be consumers of R&D rather than producers; but all ultimately rely on a lot of stuff that was government funded - TCP/IP, RSA/DES encryption, information theory, database theory, etc.
RMS was right about Bitkeeper. He was right about binary modules in the Linux kernel and prominent developers argued the same thing years later. He might have been right about Java - we'll have to wait and see, but things certainly aren't as rosy as they appeared to be once upon a time. He currently seems to be against ACTA, and he will probably proven right in a few years when the first ACTA legislated court cases start popping up.
This is the same guy who has insinuated that George W. Bush is pals with Osama Bin Laden and specifically sent too few troops into Afghanistan to make sure Bin Laden escaped and wanted to keep his Taliban friends safe.
Do you have a citation for these claims? From what I remember of the movie, the points you refer to are:
The claim that the Bush family have business contacts and personal friendships with some of the Bin Laden family - the friendships being so close that they affectionately nicknamed one Bin Laden "Bandar Bush". However, there is no claim, at all, that George W. Bush is pals with Osama Bin Laden. Moore does make a point that the Bin Ladens were given special "fly" approval and allowed to leave the country when everyone else in the U.S. was prohibited from flying. Given the personal and financial contacts that the Bin Laden family have had with Osama, Moore suggests that interviewing these people may have been more appropriate.
The claim that Bush sent too few troops into Tora Bora, despite having intelligence that Osama bin Laden was there. This refers to the incident: "How bin Laden outsmarted Bush in caves of Tora Bora". Despite publically stating that they were certain Osama was in Tora Bora, only a special operations task force of fewer than 30 US soldiers was sent after him, and no attempt was made to close mountain passes with Pakistan. Several thousand U.S. troops from the US Army's Tenth Mountain Division were just across the border in Uzbekistan and ready to be sent in to action, but the order was never given.
The Bush/Bin Laden family and business connection stuff is documented fact. The President's special "fly" approval enabling the Bin Laden's to leave the U.S. immediately after the 9/11 attacks is documented fact. The decision to send fewer than 30 soldiers to pursue Osama, when they knew (or claimed to know) where he was, is documented fact. What is so outrageous about Moore's statements here?
I got disgusted with him after watching a part of Bowling for Columbine where he went to the Shopko (or some other store) where the assailants bought bullets. He then proceeded to badger one of the cashiers at length, insinuating that they bore responsibility for those murders because they sold bullets. That was when I was done with Michael Moore forever.
YouTube link of the interview you're talking about, note that the woman featured is K-Mart's Director of Media Relations, not a cashier, big difference.
You call that "badgering"? Moore appears to be calmly asking questions, not being aggressive and harassing. Shouldn't a professional Director of Media Relations be able to handle a man calmly asking questions? What about this clip is so outrageous?
If population density were really the only issue, then you'd be able to get Japanese-style broadband to the home in every U.S. city that has a population density equal to or greater than that of Japan (337 residents per square kilometer, 873 per square mile). NYC has a population density of 27532 residents per square mile, so average broadband there should be much better than the Japanese national average, no?
South Korea = 1,261 people per square mile. So by the reckoning that population density is the significant factor, most U.S. metropolitan areas should have better broadband than South Korea.
Sending an IP datagram with your own IP in the header makes you traceable? Inconceiveable!
Indeed. Though there is a slight advantage of a SYN flood attack: deniability. All of those packets could have been spoofed to make it look like they came from your IP, when in fact you had nothing to do with it.
I mean why would you join something such as the LOIC without IP spoofing?
Because many people can't IP spoof? You need to get your broadband router to forward a packet without NATing it, then your ISP has to forward that packet even though the source IP is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
"We need a Fairness Doctrine for the internet. For example maybe you'll visit foxnews.com and a popup will ask if you want to read democrat.org too. We need to include that as part of net neutrality and other FCC regulations."
[citationneeded]. I can't find any record of a quote like this.
"We need to pass a law to remove MSNBC and FOXnews from cable television." The latter came from a Congressman Kennedy who is a nobody
I can find a Kennedy who has opinions on MSNBC and FOXnews, but he isn't a Congresman, and he does not appear to be calling for censorship. George Kennedy - former managing editor at the Missourian and professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism. He says:
"I’m not arguing that our traditional approach to journalism is inherently superior to the ideological model. After all, that model has served Great Britain and much of Europe pretty well for a long time. But it’s sure not what we’re used to, and confusing to many, even within the industry.
For us consumers, the important thing to remember is this: Fox and MSNBC are playing by different rules than the broadcast networks or NPR. If you like your news straight up, you’ll prefer the latter. If you like it with a twist, you know where to look."
There was a Senator Rockefeller who said:
“There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the F.C.C. to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; to our ability to do our work here in Congress; and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and, more importantly, in their future.”
A lamentation of ideologically driven news media - quite different from the claim that he is actively seeking laws to shutdown ideological news organizations.
And then of course there's Obama himself who gave a college speech advising them not to read the internet news sites and only listen to WH press releases
What he actually said:
The class of 2010 is "coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter," the president said, earning an honorary doctorate of laws degree during the ceremony.
"And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- (laughter) -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy
With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all -- to know what to believe, to figure out who's telling the truth and who's not. Let's face it, even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I've had some experience in that regard,"
Funny that you interpret it as an attack on freedom, when even FoxNews acknowledged that this bit of the speech was a reference to some false internet rumours: "Obama has endured some nasty rumors at the hands of the Internet. Blogs and comment pages continue to allege that the president has not been honest about his place of birth -- Hawaii -- or about his religion -- Christian."
So if there's confusion by Republicans, it's because of what they are he
You will not find a credible mental health professional who agrees with his assessment. That's a really fucking scary view into his psyche. His own admission is that video games are fun. He likes video games. Killing people is like playing a video game. Therefore, "Killing people is fun." At best, he's a sociopath.
Soldiers would never enjoy killing? : US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies' "Other soldiers told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them".
If you were the pilot of an Apache, cruising through the skies, taking out enemy tanks with Hellfire missiles, why would you not enjoy the experience? If you believe that you are doing good deeds, killing bad guys, and protecting your country, and getting a massive adrenalin rush, all at the same time, would you honestly feel upset that you are killing bad guys and "terrorists"? Do you think that the average soldier cries when they kill a bad guy "terrorist"? Of course not. These people are professionals, they are trained to be desensitised towards killing. The men like Peter Mercer (who killed himself after asking his father "How can you love someone who has killed so many people?") are in the minority - most soldiers do not feel a lifetime of suicidal regret for their killing.
The only role of government is to ensure the freedom of people to establish those associations.
And how is this to be interpreted? Should the government have a military, and a police force? What about a fire service - it's hard to ensure stability and freedom when a fire in a city threatens the entire city infrastructure because some houses are uninsured. And what about some basic health service - to deal with pandemics and other problems which affect national security (e.g. wars, terrorism)? And what about prosecuting people who leak classified data? Intelligence agencies? Where does that fit into libertarianism?
But when it comes to whatever Assange believes, you should just read the words of the man himself:
Would you call yourself a free market proponent?
Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets. Having lived and worked in many countries, I can see the tremendous vibrancy in, say, the Malaysian telecom sector compared to U.S. sector. In the U.S. everything is vertically integrated and sewn up, so you don’t have a free market. In Malaysia, you have a broad spectrum of players, and you can see the benefits for all as a result.
How do your leaks fit into that?
To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.
There's the famous lemon example in the used car market. It's hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers can't get a good price, even when they have a good car.
By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means there's a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who they’re dealing with.
You've developed a reputation as anti-establishment and anti-institution.
Not at all. Creating a well-run establishment is a difficult thing to do, and I've been in countries where institutions are in a state of collapse, so I understand the difficulty of running a company. Institutions don't come from nowhere.
It's not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I've learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I'm a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.
WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
Sweden has stronger protections for free-speech than his other options for residency. Look at The Pirate Bay - if it were in the U.S. or Russia or UK it would've been taken down long ago. As a resident of Sweden, he may also get the freedom to travel throughout the European Union, which would be useful as it gives him easy access to the 24-hour media of the West. Australian politicians have been signalling that they may want to prosecute him and confiscate his passport, so returning home isn't a wonderful prospect.
The rape allegations are true and Assange should be held to account.
The problem is that people keep using that word - "Rape". It has an enormous number of negative connotations. Read the link you provided at kateharding.info - how many times does she use the "R" word? Rape, rape rape... From what we know of the Assange case, the women who he is accused of "raping" both continued to see him afterwards. One took him out for breakfast the next day, and paid for his train ticket back into Stockholm. Another arranged a party for him the next day, during which she twittered "Sitting outside; nearly freezing; with the world's coolest people; it's pretty amazing." These are not the actions of women who have been raped - at least, not in the sense of what the majority of people consider the word "rape" to mean. Calling whatever supposedly happened between Assange and these women "rape" diminishes the word, and is grossly offensive to both men and women who have genuinely been the victims of forced sexual intercourse.
The question is why fewer women would choose to play chess then; you haven't really answered the question, just shifted it slightly.
Personally I think women are just less interested in chess, which is probably genetic.
If you've ever been to a children's chess club, you'll notice that the ratio is something like 9 boys to 1 girl. The driving force in a child's chess career is the parents - they are the ones who organise everything, who finance everything, who transport the children between home and club and national events. Competing in national events requires thousands of miles of weekend travel every year - a considerable investment of time for any family. At this age (pre-puberty), there is no particular reason to think that there should be any substantial genetic differences. For some cultural or personal reason, parents of girls seem less willing to push them towards playing chess, and do not have a chess career ambition for their daughters. You may be right in that there is a genetic component, but we will never know for sure, until the parents of girls act the same way as they do for the boys, and act in a focused way to drive their children's careers forward. I am sure that if we had the same number of parents pushing their young daughters as they push their young sons, then there would be many more successful female chess players.
As they're not, you don't. There's no international consensus that helping someone use a website and giving someone priority status are crimes.
Hosting leaked documents that foreign governments don't want to be visible isn't even a crime. If it is, someone better arrest John Young for this outrage.
And that's the way you want it, unless you want international law to allow extradition ti China for hosting pages critical of the Chinese government?
You mean like the privacy of the people who are known as informants?
Do informants actually have a "right to privacy" for their activities? You're arguing that the Stasi informer list shouldn't have been published, because it violates an informants right to privacy?
Apparently they don't actually want to block all porn:
Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has refused a request from a West MP for the Government to take action to stop children being able to access internet pornography.
Devizes Tory MP Claire Perry raised the issue at a special Commons debate, because as a mother-of-three she knew how difficult it was to keep youngsters from seeing inappropriate material.
But Mr Vaizey made it clear ministers will not take any steps to force internet service providers (ISPs) to tackle the problem.
He said: "We believe in an open, lightly regulated internet. The internet is by and large a force for good, it is central to our lives and to our economy and Government has to be wary about regulating or passing legislation."
The minister suggested it was for parents to take responsibility for what their children see online, rather than the ISPs that make money from pornography.
Discussed last month on Slashdot.
The Conservatives railed against the "Nanny State" and "Big Government" when they were out of power, and now they want to block every single web site with "adult content" by default, forcing ISPs to pay millions for upgraded filtering systems? The problem is, the filtering systems they want the ISPs to use are the same ones that they already use to enforce the IWF block list. But the IWF block list is only a few thousand URLs; to block all adult content they will have to block tens of thousands of URLs, including Wikipedia because of the "adult content", and many other large and popular sites, and that is going to cause the same problems with authentication and proxying that happened last time.
I hope ISPs actually bill people an appropriately expensive fee for this filtering service.
People should fear international law more than its absence.
The Nurenburg trials were conducted for violations of international law. The problem with restricting law to the boundaries of nation states is that if a nation state "goes rogue" and legalises genocide against certain ethnicities (e.g. Nazi Germany), then there is no legal framework for later prosecuting the people enforcing that law, as they acted lawfully under the jurisdiction of their nation state at the time.
Another instance where national law is of no use is in piracy. Since the jurisdiction of a nation state does not extend to international waters, in the absence of international law it would be entirely lawful to murder, enslave, rape etc. in international waters. Obviously it is desirable for most people that these activities be held accountable in some legal framework.
They claim to represent international laws, but enforce them for some countries, and ignore others.
The United Nations is not responsible for the enforcement of international laws. It has no military force. It has no authority to command the military forces of it's member nations.
Get rid of the UN.
The UN is just a place to facilitate communication and dialogue between the nation states of this world. It has no power in itself - any military intervention, any sanctions, etc. have to be willingly enforced by member states. What would getting rid of it actually achieve? The communication that the UN facilitates would either not happen, or happen in a distributed fashion, or the UN would simply be replaced by another global organisation carrying out the same functions.
You are assuming that the make up of those councils is strategically important to U.S. interests...
The UN can't get pisspot dictators to stop comitting genocide
That is not the job of the UN. The UN has no military forces, and it has no authority to order the military forces of its member nations into battle.
The job of the UN is to facilitate dialogue and cooperation between nation states, not to wage war. If nation states want to end genocide, then they can use the UN as a talking shop, and gain agreement in enforcement protocols etc. leading to Declarations, but the UN as an organisation can not itself declare war or command nation states. In the recent genocides to which you are alluding, Kofi Annan was clear that he wanted Western nations to commit military resources to protect people and prevent genocide, but Western nations tend to not be as supportive of military intervention when the nation in question is not strategically important to their own interests.
Really? You mean Slashdot, Google, Yahoo!, and porn are all government funded?
Bad examples. Google was the commercialisation of a research project at Stanford University. The others tend to be consumers of R&D rather than producers; but all ultimately rely on a lot of stuff that was government funded - TCP/IP, RSA/DES encryption, information theory, database theory, etc.
Links:
Text
Wikipedia article
You missed:
Attack Vector: IED v1.5 - bury the wire.
US Countermeasure: None (?) - no way to detect buried wire or differentiate from regular urban cables
he has become the Chicken Little of geekdom.
RMS was right about Bitkeeper. He was right about binary modules in the Linux kernel and prominent developers argued the same thing years later. He might have been right about Java - we'll have to wait and see, but things certainly aren't as rosy as they appeared to be once upon a time. He currently seems to be against ACTA, and he will probably proven right in a few years when the first ACTA legislated court cases start popping up.
How many times was Chicken Little right?
This is the same guy who has insinuated that George W. Bush is pals with Osama Bin Laden and specifically sent too few troops into Afghanistan to make sure Bin Laden escaped and wanted to keep his Taliban friends safe.
Do you have a citation for these claims? From what I remember of the movie, the points you refer to are:
The Bush/Bin Laden family and business connection stuff is documented fact. The President's special "fly" approval enabling the Bin Laden's to leave the U.S. immediately after the 9/11 attacks is documented fact. The decision to send fewer than 30 soldiers to pursue Osama, when they knew (or claimed to know) where he was, is documented fact. What is so outrageous about Moore's statements here?
I got disgusted with him after watching a part of Bowling for Columbine where he went to the Shopko (or some other store) where the assailants bought bullets. He then proceeded to badger one of the cashiers at length, insinuating that they bore responsibility for those murders because they sold bullets. That was when I was done with Michael Moore forever.
YouTube link of the interview you're talking about, note that the woman featured is K-Mart's Director of Media Relations, not a cashier, big difference.
You call that "badgering"? Moore appears to be calmly asking questions, not being aggressive and harassing. Shouldn't a professional Director of Media Relations be able to handle a man calmly asking questions? What about this clip is so outrageous?
... and the population density of that area is 5276 people per square mile, a number exceeded by many cities of the United States .
If population density were really the only issue, then you'd be able to get Japanese-style broadband to the home in every U.S. city that has a population density equal to or greater than that of Japan (337 residents per square kilometer, 873 per square mile). NYC has a population density of 27532 residents per square mile, so average broadband there should be much better than the Japanese national average, no?
U.S. cities by population density
Nations by population density
South Korea = 1,261 people per square mile. So by the reckoning that population density is the significant factor, most U.S. metropolitan areas should have better broadband than South Korea.
Sending an IP datagram with your own IP in the header makes you traceable? Inconceiveable!
Indeed. Though there is a slight advantage of a SYN flood attack: deniability. All of those packets could have been spoofed to make it look like they came from your IP, when in fact you had nothing to do with it.
I mean why would you join something such as the LOIC without IP spoofing?
Because many people can't IP spoof? You need to get your broadband router to forward a packet without NATing it, then your ISP has to forward that packet even though the source IP is wrong.
The patent trolls are like North Korea or Iran; they have no real assets to protect and nothing of significant value that can be destroyed
Not really. "The economy of Iran is the eighteenth largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity". Iran has lots of oil and gas. And the people in charge do have something to lose: power, control, influence, personal wealth. Same thing for the guys at the top of the North Korean system.