agree with you on the economy, but the civil rights stuff is rather outweighed by ID cards, ASBOism, the CCTV state, ID cards (again, cos it really really is a bad implementation of a terrible idea based on a profound misapprehension about some of the fundamentals of security), virtually all the police, civil order, legal rights type legislation passed since October 2001... and above all, Iraq, I'm afraid, cancels out all the rest of it as far as I'm concerned. The man is lying, and IMO a criminal. FWIW I'm mostly a lib dem, so arguing that at least New Labour isn't the Tories, whilst true, isn't a terribly high standard to reach.
I would also point out that under the Tories I had a free education up to the age of 21, free dental treatment, and once signed on the dole for almost six months. Under New Labour I had all income support and benefits cut off because I refused to apply for jobs as a cleaner (for context, I'm now paying higher rate tax and working on really cool fun infosec stuff), have paid about a thousand pounds a year for the last three years for routine dental care (which also requires me to take a day off work in order to drive 130 miles to central London, because there are virtually no decent dentists where I live.) We've signed up to the DMCA-alike EUCD (copyright directive) and given many billions to shady spivs like EDS and Crapita for grandiose "modernization" projects which come in years late, hundreds of percent over budget, and turn out not to work properly in the first place. I'm just spooling this crap off the top of my head, I'm sure I could think of a lot more reasons to despise him and all he stands for. I mean the twat admits to believing in god in public, which puts him beyond laughable into the realm of "psychotic and dangerous" as far as I'm concerned. I personally find it very doubtful I could ever vote Tory - not until they've had several decades of transformative change at least. At least with Thatcher it was obvious that she was evil, Blair's "hey - look - y'know" fake sanctimonious patronising middle-class-guy act makes me puke.
and continuing the fascinating tangent - the situation yuou describe, of a siting government losing it's majority through attrition during the course of a parliament, has happened several times in living memory - in May 74, Labour formed a government with a tiny majority (2 or 3 IIRC); they called a second election in October without having lost a vote of no confidence, but got in with a larger majority. However this too was gradually whittled away until in 1978 they lost their majority. Labour then formed the 'Lib-Lab Pact' with David Steel's Liberal party, which staggered on into the winter of discontent of 78/79, and Thatcher's substantial majority won in May 79. A little over a decade later, in the mid 90s the rump Tory government presided over by John 'underpants' Major also came very close to losing a majority. Every time a Tory MP died or resigned or otherwise lost their seat, it went to Labour or Lib-Dems. I forget what they were down to by spring 97, ten or so perhaps? These narrow majorities always make for a more entertaining time for us political junkies because the backbenchers and third party MPs opinions suddenly matter - the government can lose substantial legislation if a relative handful of their MPs vote with the opposition. This has only just happened to Blair for the first time, last year. Course the Labour share of the vote has diminished steadily since 97 and the next parliament, not to mention the next General Election (presumably in 2009) should be a proper contest for a change. Blair is so bad that my father even admitted to voting Tory last year. *shudder*
Something else that's imminent: me, finally giving up on Slashdot. Anyone want a 10,000-range UID, not very carefully used, one previous owner? For years I ignored the trolls complaining about Slashdot going down the tubes, but some time in the last six months and invisible threshold was passed. Suddenly I find I can get by with a quick skim of the front page once a day. The comments are almost always shit, the same crap comes up time and again (no doubt the comments on this story will prove my point - some might argue this post is itself a symptom - I wouldn't dispute that. I'll get modd'd off-topic, quite rightly I guess, but I just don't care any more. Slashdot karma's a devalued currency these days.
*sigh* Farewell Slashdot: we had some good times, but it's time to move on.
Thirded. "Leave out the Free Software philosophy" and you may as well be running Windows, or... I was going to say OS/X, but that's a bit harsh and risks muddying the issue. Well, if the choice was Windows or OS X, I'd go for OS X (a) because it's more Free and (b) because it's more Unix-y. But after long slow painful years of effort, I've moved from being a developer on Microsoft, with Windows to the left, right and front of me (work, home,..) to 100% GNU/Linux at work (on the servers) at work (on the desktop) at home (both on a desk and a laptop.) Oh, and I gave my Mum an old office PC with a nice blue coat of paint and KDE on GNU and she's mailing away & surfing the net like she was born to it. (Fortunately, her mind hasn't been corrupted by years of exposure to Evil. [...defined as "the opposite of Free";) ]
(Disclaimer: I work infosec for a fairly well-known dotcom with approx 500 employees around the world, and many blue-chip customers.)
If you're a company that respects its employees, rewards them appropriately and values them, do you think internal threats are going to be such a large issue compared to the faceless megaopolies that most American companies have mutated into?
Sure they are. "disgruntlement" is not the only factor to consider. There's also "how much money would it take to persuade a cleaner to let an attacker into the office", "how much money would it cost to buy access to a relatively junior employee's account", "how dumb are typical users when it comes to routine mass-mailer viruses?" and of course... "How much are your product plans, pricing, R&D, marketing plans, market research data,.. etc, etc, worth to your Chinese competitors?" The latter is my current nightmare, not so much for us here (we use a very reliable internet-level mail filtering service.)
The "faceless megapolies" you describe are a threat to many things, our culture, our way of life, our democratic traditions and so on - no question. But they're not a threat to information security. That's why I don't see there's a conflict between my job title and the EFF bumper sticker on my car and the FSF membership card (business-card live CD, actually) in my wallet.
Actually if you re-read my comments, I didn't actually advocate any particular policy response to climate change.
I agree that political will to actually do anything about CO2 emissions is weak in the US and that the momentum of change is probably up to the levels where Bad Stuff is gonna happen regardless. (Dare I raise the ghost of NOLA at this point? Probably not wise, as I don't mean to be taken to be asserting that the hurricanes were 'caused by anthropogenic global warming', which I don't.)
My point is not that congresscritters will or won't do various things. My point is that it's not going to not happen because the Beltway droids are mostly in this or that camp. If US emissions were to fall at some wild rate like 10% in the next 10 years this might have some marginal effect, but that's not what I'd call serious action anyway. I just strongly suspect that at some point in the next few years an American president is going to do an unexpected address to the nation along the lines of Bill Gates' famous "I was completely wrong" memos in 1997(?) and 2003 (the former being the "hey this internet thing is pretty big news, huh?", the latter being "Crap, we're losing customers because our security's so shit." )
I just checked back the original comment I replied to. I agree with you that the droids don't want to lose their jobs, and therefore they won't start taking those unpopular decisions until some grotesque level of *visible*, and "intuitively obvious" AGW effects are seen in Texas and Iowa and Kansas. Waiting to see what level of catastrophe it will take to get through to those people makes for a rather horrible spectator sport. FWIW, I personally predict it won't be the price of gas or auto taxes that does it - it'll be the first 'event' that stops TV for a day or two. (Whether it be power failures or electricity costs or some huge production number "911 for climate" type event with thousands of people dead...)
What scares me is the thought that all it would take to flip much of the US into a Mad Max / Escape from New York style collapse of civil society, really, is a few horrible catastrophes within a short space of time. Imagine a big CA earthquake with significant loss of life but (importantly) massive infrastructure damage. Bang goes the world economy. China calls in the national debt, snuffing the remaining US economy. Stir in tons of weapons, apparently widespread belief in a millenarian, supernaturalist interventionist god, very weak social structures, the widespread mass poverty that's already out there, survivalists, fundamentalists, embittered ex-military,... it could get really shitty:(
I don't think this scenario is very likely to happen. Say, a 5% chance over the next five decades. But would you get on a plane that had a 5% chance of crashing?
Structured cabling. My house is several hundred years old in places, there are three-foot thick stone walls which wifi will never penetrate (cellphones scarely get signal.)
I made the mistake of digging for primary material last year, after an argument with my boss about the effectiveness of Tamiflu. (My employer's classed as 'critical infrastructure', so we have 500 full courses of Tamiflu stockpiled with our names on; the boss asserted that this meant we had nothing to worry about.) However, if you look for coverage in respected journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine or 'Nature', you will see that one of the major problems being planned for is the sudden disposal of millions of corpses. Sounds funny, huh? Go read the articles and tell me you still find it funny.
You're absolutely right.
People love those sorts of lifestyle changes that represent a reduction in lifestyle.
You're so right. And as we all know, there are no socio-economic or physical limitations imposed by reality that will force people to do something they'd rather not do. That's why everyone on earth has the lifestyle they want.
Well, it sort-of is a dupe, although the previous story saying this was referring to an article that apparently specifically said that teh launch wasn't hyped. So what's happening, did CNet not RTFA either?
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/03/ 1911227
Many people who call themselves religious fundamentalists are in actuality suffering from obsessive thinking. They think they are superior, but they are mentally ill. There are Christians and Muslims and Jews who fit this explanation.
Just pointing out that it's not wise to talk about striking in such a critical field in a time of war.
You imply that you are "in a time of war" at present. Hmmm. Leaving that aside, do you think that "it's not wise to talk about striking" is a good thing, or a bad thing?
Were you oppsed (sic) to Clinton's actions in Kosovo/
At the time? Yes. But he at least had UN backing. As it turned out, we were really fighting al Queda there, unlike in Iraq which was known to be antagonistic towards al Queda from the beginning.
I agree with everything you've said up to here, about Iraq, but I'm afraid this just isn't true. I know a fair bit about the breakup of Yugoslavia, and I've never heard this said. We (I'm not American but my country is a NATO member - and it was a NATO op, not a US op - were fighting the Milosevic regieme. We were probably four years late, and the atrocities committed by all sides during those years shamed Europe. There may well have been Islamic fighters from outside the area going there to fight alongside the Muslims (particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina), but there were also plenty of other foreign mercs and others running around at the same time.
The Milosevic Serb nationalist types had no more to do with Al Qaeda than with Ronald McDonald.
Anyway... I'm about a week late posting to this story, anyway; always the way isn't it...
Most of the players are states, or state-owned extraction / refining companies, or state-sized private sector firms.
Lower supply with rising demand makes the price increase.
Shell (as an example) just announced the largest profits ever reported in the UK - over £12 billion, and that's sterling, not dollars. The other oil corps have also done very well.
See, when people say "it's all about the oil", it's naive to take that phrase to mean "We must preserve oil for our national needs".
Hi Aaron, I'm sure we've had this discussion on a previous climate change story, and I'm sure I'd have asked this - but I can't recall the answer! - Did you read the Real Climate pieces on the role of water vapour in climate, and in climate change? Hmmm, do I seem to remember that you don't regard RC as a credible source?
This trend is seriously shitty behaviour by the classic imperialist corporate monoliths,self-perpetuating autocracy that... sorry, wrong meeting. They're certainly trying it on, whether they'll be able to get away with it is another matter; hopefully the US govt will realise that net access is a classic universal public utility that has to be made available to everyone in society (OK, everyone within reason) in the same way as mains water and sewerage, electricity, phone and postal service. (Obviously no-one's going to run sewers up to a log cabin half way up a Rocky, but presumably the US mail will deliver there - the postal service is a better model for net access actually, the infrastructure needs are lighter (as is increasingly becoming the case with NSPs, with long range wireless and other unwired technologies rapidly heading for the price/performance/sales/R&D sweet spot...)
The really sad thing is that it's clearly basic political corruption that's allowed the telcos to buy themselves back into monopoly power, like the mercury bot in T2.
Fortunately for those of us in the rest of the world - apart from India (and Pakistan?) which I believe are still saddled with state monopoly telcos) we mostly have a thing called 'competition'; if BT started treating customers like that they'd rapidly find they wouldn't have any left. I hate to admit it but Thatcher's tyrannical regieme *did* actually do the Right Thing on a few occasions, and the BT privatisation was one of them. (Shame they didn't pursue them as vigorously as they should have to allow competitors to get infrastructure access, and LLU is only just getting going now, almost 20 years later... but we do now have a good market for basic IP connectivity, with lots of smaller sub-markets. This comes to you down a 2 Mbps line which costs £15/month, no b/w cap as far as I know, and they seem to be doing a good job keeping worm traffic & suchlike from my friend's totally unsecured W2K laptop, which remains miraculously uncompromised as far as I can see. (I have a packet sniffer on a stealthed linux box, BTW, I'm not relying on windows' netstat to tell me that:)
Bad choice of example. The shredder story is actually now well-known as one of the first positively identified fake stories planted by US psyops. Google for the (highly respectable) research, or show us a primary source.
I think that puts the rest of your claims into context.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, am I ranting? Didn't mean to rant at you ;)
Compact and bijou, Mostyn, compact and bijou.
and continuing the fascinating tangent - the situation yuou describe, of a siting government losing it's majority through attrition during the course of a parliament, has happened several times in living memory - in May 74, Labour formed a government with a tiny majority (2 or 3 IIRC); they called a second election in October without having lost a vote of no confidence, but got in with a larger majority. However this too was gradually whittled away until in 1978 they lost their majority. Labour then formed the 'Lib-Lab Pact' with David Steel's Liberal party, which staggered on into the winter of discontent of 78/79, and Thatcher's substantial majority won in May 79. A little over a decade later, in the mid 90s the rump Tory government presided over by John 'underpants' Major also came very close to losing a majority. Every time a Tory MP died or resigned or otherwise lost their seat, it went to Labour or Lib-Dems. I forget what they were down to by spring 97, ten or so perhaps? These narrow majorities always make for a more entertaining time for us political junkies because the backbenchers and third party MPs opinions suddenly matter - the government can lose substantial legislation if a relative handful of their MPs vote with the opposition. This has only just happened to Blair for the first time, last year. Course the Labour share of the vote has diminished steadily since 97 and the next parliament, not to mention the next General Election (presumably in 2009) should be a proper contest for a change. Blair is so bad that my father even admitted to voting Tory last year. *shudder*
Something else that's imminent: me, finally giving up on Slashdot. Anyone want a 10,000-range UID, not very carefully used, one previous owner? For years I ignored the trolls complaining about Slashdot going down the tubes, but some time in the last six months and invisible threshold was passed. Suddenly I find I can get by with a quick skim of the front page once a day. The comments are almost always shit, the same crap comes up time and again (no doubt the comments on this story will prove my point - some might argue this post is itself a symptom - I wouldn't dispute that. I'll get modd'd off-topic, quite rightly I guess, but I just don't care any more. Slashdot karma's a devalued currency these days. *sigh* Farewell Slashdot: we had some good times, but it's time to move on.
Thirded. "Leave out the Free Software philosophy" and you may as well be running Windows, or... I was going to say OS/X, but that's a bit harsh and risks muddying the issue. Well, if the choice was Windows or OS X, I'd go for OS X (a) because it's more Free and (b) because it's more Unix-y. But after long slow painful years of effort, I've moved from being a developer on Microsoft, with Windows to the left, right and front of me (work, home,..) to 100% GNU/Linux at work (on the servers) at work (on the desktop) at home (both on a desk and a laptop.) Oh, and I gave my Mum an old office PC with a nice blue coat of paint and KDE on GNU and she's mailing away & surfing the net like she was born to it. (Fortunately, her mind hasn't been corrupted by years of exposure to Evil. [ ...defined as "the opposite of Free" ;) ]
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my behind. The acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the earth may be 9.8 m/s^2. Who's to say?
Sure they are. "disgruntlement" is not the only factor to consider. There's also "how much money would it take to persuade a cleaner to let an attacker into the office", "how much money would it cost to buy access to a relatively junior employee's account", "how dumb are typical users when it comes to routine mass-mailer viruses?" and of course... "How much are your product plans, pricing, R&D, marketing plans, market research data,.. etc, etc, worth to your Chinese competitors?" The latter is my current nightmare, not so much for us here (we use a very reliable internet-level mail filtering service.)
The "faceless megapolies" you describe are a threat to many things, our culture, our way of life, our democratic traditions and so on - no question. But they're not a threat to information security. That's why I don't see there's a conflict between my job title and the EFF bumper sticker on my car and the FSF membership card (business-card live CD, actually) in my wallet.
I agree that political will to actually do anything about CO2 emissions is weak in the US and that the momentum of change is probably up to the levels where Bad Stuff is gonna happen regardless. (Dare I raise the ghost of NOLA at this point? Probably not wise, as I don't mean to be taken to be asserting that the hurricanes were 'caused by anthropogenic global warming', which I don't.)
My point is not that congresscritters will or won't do various things. My point is that it's not going to not happen because the Beltway droids are mostly in this or that camp. If US emissions were to fall at some wild rate like 10% in the next 10 years this might have some marginal effect, but that's not what I'd call serious action anyway. I just strongly suspect that at some point in the next few years an American president is going to do an unexpected address to the nation along the lines of Bill Gates' famous "I was completely wrong" memos in 1997(?) and 2003 (the former being the "hey this internet thing is pretty big news, huh?", the latter being "Crap, we're losing customers because our security's so shit." )
I just checked back the original comment I replied to. I agree with you that the droids don't want to lose their jobs, and therefore they won't start taking those unpopular decisions until some grotesque level of *visible*, and "intuitively obvious" AGW effects are seen in Texas and Iowa and Kansas. Waiting to see what level of catastrophe it will take to get through to those people makes for a rather horrible spectator sport. FWIW, I personally predict it won't be the price of gas or auto taxes that does it - it'll be the first 'event' that stops TV for a day or two. (Whether it be power failures or electricity costs or some huge production number "911 for climate" type event with thousands of people dead...) What scares me is the thought that all it would take to flip much of the US into a Mad Max / Escape from New York style collapse of civil society, really, is a few horrible catastrophes within a short space of time. Imagine a big CA earthquake with significant loss of life but (importantly) massive infrastructure damage. Bang goes the world economy. China calls in the national debt, snuffing the remaining US economy. Stir in tons of weapons, apparently widespread belief in a millenarian, supernaturalist interventionist god, very weak social structures, the widespread mass poverty that's already out there, survivalists, fundamentalists, embittered ex-military,... it could get really shitty :(
I don't think this scenario is very likely to happen. Say, a 5% chance over the next five decades. But would you get on a plane that had a 5% chance of crashing?
Structured cabling. My house is several hundred years old in places, there are three-foot thick stone walls which wifi will never penetrate (cellphones scarely get signal.)
I made the mistake of digging for primary material last year, after an argument with my boss about the effectiveness of Tamiflu. (My employer's classed as 'critical infrastructure', so we have 500 full courses of Tamiflu stockpiled with our names on; the boss asserted that this meant we had nothing to worry about.) However, if you look for coverage in respected journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine or 'Nature', you will see that one of the major problems being planned for is the sudden disposal of millions of corpses. Sounds funny, huh? Go read the articles and tell me you still find it funny.
Where do you get the bizarre idea that objective reality cares who gets elected?
You're so right. And as we all know, there are no socio-economic or physical limitations imposed by reality that will force people to do something they'd rather not do. That's why everyone on earth has the lifestyle they want.
Well, it sort-of is a dupe, although the previous story saying this was referring to an article that apparently specifically said that teh launch wasn't hyped. So what's happening, did CNet not RTFA either? http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/03/ 1911227
*, .. . . oO Xx_x__ /*\). ... * **XXx xx
(tumbleweed)
You imply that you are "in a time of war" at present. Hmmm. Leaving that aside, do you think that "it's not wise to talk about striking" is a good thing, or a bad thing?
Mod up parent!
It's generally considered polite to attribute quotations from Wikipedia, especially when you quote an entire article.
The Milosevic Serb nationalist types had no more to do with Al Qaeda than with Ronald McDonald.
Anyway... I'm about a week late posting to this story, anyway; always the way isn't it...
Most of the players are states, or state-owned extraction / refining companies, or state-sized private sector firms.
Lower supply with rising demand makes the price increase.
Shell (as an example) just announced the largest profits ever reported in the UK - over £12 billion, and that's sterling, not dollars. The other oil corps have also done very well.
See, when people say "it's all about the oil", it's naive to take that phrase to mean "We must preserve oil for our national needs".
Hi Aaron, I'm sure we've had this discussion on a previous climate change story, and I'm sure I'd have asked this - but I can't recall the answer! - Did you read the Real Climate pieces on the role of water vapour in climate, and in climate change? Hmmm, do I seem to remember that you don't regard RC as a credible source?
Woof! Woof!
The really sad thing is that it's clearly basic political corruption that's allowed the telcos to buy themselves back into monopoly power, like the mercury bot in T2.
Fortunately for those of us in the rest of the world - apart from India (and Pakistan?) which I believe are still saddled with state monopoly telcos) we mostly have a thing called 'competition'; if BT started treating customers like that they'd rapidly find they wouldn't have any left. I hate to admit it but Thatcher's tyrannical regieme *did* actually do the Right Thing on a few occasions, and the BT privatisation was one of them. (Shame they didn't pursue them as vigorously as they should have to allow competitors to get infrastructure access, and LLU is only just getting going now, almost 20 years later... but we do now have a good market for basic IP connectivity, with lots of smaller sub-markets. This comes to you down a 2 Mbps line which costs £15/month, no b/w cap as far as I know, and they seem to be doing a good job keeping worm traffic & suchlike from my friend's totally unsecured W2K laptop, which remains miraculously uncompromised as far as I can see. (I have a packet sniffer on a stealthed linux box, BTW, I'm not relying on windows' netstat to tell me that :)
I think that puts the rest of your claims into context.