Iran has small boats that may present a threat in any future conflict, if for example packed with explosives and used in suicide fashion etc. I bet these lasers are way more effective in targeting ships that move towards them (Iranian ships) than those that run away from them (Somali pirates).
We Americans are staggeringly bad at deciding that something is just what a civilized society should do - public transportation, funding the arts or libraries, public transportation, etc.
And liberals are staggeringly bad at understanding that your opinion on what a "civilized society" should do may be radically different from my opinion. If don't think that forcing people uninterested in art, not to mention new and struggling artists to pay money to those supposedly superior artists chosen by a government committee as worthy of a grant, is in any way "civilized". I actually think its disgusting.
established and highly profitable oil companies take billions of incentives from your government every year
I would like to see some evidence of this often repeated claim. Yes there are some relatively small subsidies for drilling but while those make a difference for small companies, they are a drop in the ocean for the big ones. Btw, while oil companies tend to be very profitable, it's worth keeping in mind that, on average, an oil company makes 7c profit on a gallon of gas at the pump, while the government makes about 40c in taxes.
He lost me when he, like many celebrities these days, used his position to air his infantile political views instead of movie reviews. In particular, his over the top cheering of that despicable tub of lard Michael Moore, and even worse, cruelly mocking kids who were suspended from school for wearing an American flag on Cinco de Mayo. His reviews were all right, a bit on the lowbrow side. RIP, whatever.
Another theory: a shoe company has a brilliant marketing idea to get free publicity based on the fact that a lot of people don't understand the difference between what they have done (or claim to have done) and a serious scientific study.
But they are still going on!? Oh wait, did he stop them the same way Bush stopped the war in Iraq in 2003 with his Mission Accomplished speech?
under Bush, who started using Hellfire missiles on drones
If you think the technology of launching missiles from drones was Bush's invention, you are probably giving him too much credit. Btw, drone operations have been a decent success, scoring over 50 high level terrorist leaders so far and over 2500 militants overall with minimum risk to US troops. This is probably why Obama expanded their use dramatically, launching over 6 times as many strikes as Bush.
Oil companies make on average 7 cents profit on a gallon of oil. Government in the US takes on average 39 cents per gallon in taxes. Of course, much more in Europe.
Hardly, cause its so easy to look up the case anywhere including Wikipedia. She was offered $5K, then later as the case progressed, she was offered another chance to settle for $25K. Refused both. Oh and she didn't share 24 songs but 1,700. They focused on only 24 because it was easier and it was still enough to get significant damages.
Not saying that her punishment isn't excessive but your shoplifting analogy is wrong. Stealing a CD that costs $10 causes $10 worth of damages - easy. Her crime was distributing the songs and working out the true damages in lost sales is much harder.
My guys are great! Your guys are horrible! All we need to do is to keep my guys in and kick your guys out and everything will be perfect. Oh and people who disagree with me are crazy sociopaths, but those who agree who agree with me are just wonderful.
Your post is full of such unusual insights that nobody on either side has ever considered before. Are you by any chance a genius?
People are willing to pay for a product if its offered at a price that makes them paying for the media that they consume within their budget. The problem is, the industry hasn't done that for everyone yet.
$7 per month for Amazon Prime or Netflix is a pretty good deal. Add to it advertising supported sites like hulu, pandora, crackle etc etc, not to mention 700 free "channels" on things like Roku, then there is spotify etc etc. There is plenty of content available at a VERY low price. Just because you can't get every song and every show at a price you want doesn't make it all right to pirate them.
Be grateful for the Constitution that still protects us from the worst of moron stupidity, despite morons' best efforts to undermine it and expand the power of those who somehow manage to receive 51% of moron vote.
Easy solution: require Autonomy to make available detailed logs of their server activity so that any fiddling can be detected. Then use Autonomy software to analyze those logs for any suspicious activity.
There is more to beliefs than what makes rational sense. In the same way that an average tennis player will perform better (plenty of studies) if he truly "believes" he can beat Federer, a society performs better if it believes in certain things rather than others. Beliefs are about what works best, not what is true (may coincide, may not). We have evolved to survive, not to discover truth. This is why I consider aggressive atheists to be rather naive and annoying even if they are not strictly speaking wrong. They are like a guy walking up to the above mentioned tennis player and yelling "Dude you are being irrational! Of course you can't beat Federer! Be rational and skeptical!", to which he rationally responds "Fuck off, jerk!"
If you're going to ask that question, you might as well ask does the government have the right to use violence against people who have harmed neither themselves nor the others. If you think the answer is obviously no, then I hope you are in favor of abolishing the income tax.
Fuck you for accusing someone of racism just because they disagree with you about the proper scope of government. Where the fuck do you see any mention of skin color in the gp post? Go back and comment on msnbc site where you belong you fucking asshole. Those morons see racism everywhere.
You describe crony capitalism which is made possible by exessively big and powerful government and then you blame free-market capitalism. I think you are making a classic mistake of confusing support for capitalism with support for capitalists.
Communism is not an economic theory. In practice it is really a form of government, or if you are crazy enough to believe in it's fairy tales, a form of social order that magically exists without government. In any case, I just find it interesting how leftists change their philosophy depending on what they think works at a given time, and, comically, get it wrong even with the benefit of hindsight.
As for the second part, you are either joking or you are new here. Ad hominem is pretty much bread and butter on slashdot although very few posters manage to transition from criticizing other people's ad hominem posts to launching their very own ad hominem attack quite as quickly as you did. Congratulations.
In real world, libertarian socialism is an oxymoron. A natural result of liberty is inequality. If you agree with that obvious truth then you have to accept that any system that enforces equality is not libertarian. How do you have equality without transferring wealth by force from one person to another? Now, if you have this idea that all people are the same in terms of ability and that without, as you probably imagine, collusion of evil corporate oligarchs, greedy banksters, corrupt politicians and "1 percenters" in general, everybody would naturally do about the same amount and quality of work, save and invest the same and end up more or less equal in terms of wealth then I would suggest that this is a psychological problem, not a philosophical one.
That's the trouble with socialism. It's the complex answer to a complex problem.
No it is not. Socialism means public ownership of the means of production and distribution, i.e. state ownership of the industry and central planning of the economy. That's simply what the word means (look it up in a dictionary) and what that ideology was always understood to represent. Just because "socialists" are embarrassed by the utter failure of their system wherever it was tried, doesn't mean you can simply pretend that a word with a clearly defined meaning now means something completely different. It may be that a complex mix of free market and government regulation is the best way (though I personally disagree) but that is commonly called "mixed economy", not "socialism". Btw. Keynes would be insulted if you called him a socialist to his face, and being and disgusting power-hungry evil bully as he was, it probably wouldn't be a good idea.
The real joke is that many of the site users apparently cheered the "move". Apparently forced labor concentration camps, widespread torture, arbitrary arrest and murder of citizens by the government, collective punishment for entire families and villages, complete absence of freedom of speech, no independent media, death penalty listening to foreign radio are bad, but not as bad as IP laws that prevent you from downloading stuff you want for free.
Most of it is ridiculous, whether its based on "rigorous rational thinking and an axiomatic approach" or not (actually not). Besides, which ethics school do you apply? Consequentialists (ends justify the means a.k.a. screw the principles), utilitarians (happiness of the majority is key, a.k.a screw the minority), Pragmatists (whatever society decides... so much for rigorous rational thinking) etc etc
Of course there are people that are for and against such technology.
They should find something else to occupy themselves with because the technology will happen regardless. As long as we have a world of competing nation states (generally a good thing) if one doesn't develop a technology to its full military potential, another one will. Even nuclear weapons are slowly but surely proliferating despite major technological difficulties and the most intensive legal/diplomatic etc efforts ever made to prevent any device from being made.
Slashdot Mirror
Iran has small boats that may present a threat in any future conflict, if for example packed with explosives and used in suicide fashion etc. I bet these lasers are way more effective in targeting ships that move towards them (Iranian ships) than those that run away from them (Somali pirates).
We Americans are staggeringly bad at deciding that something is just what a civilized society should do - public transportation, funding the arts or libraries, public transportation, etc.
And liberals are staggeringly bad at understanding that your opinion on what a "civilized society" should do may be radically different from my opinion. If don't think that forcing people uninterested in art, not to mention new and struggling artists to pay money to those supposedly superior artists chosen by a government committee as worthy of a grant, is in any way "civilized". I actually think its disgusting.
established and highly profitable oil companies take billions of incentives from your government every year
I would like to see some evidence of this often repeated claim. Yes there are some relatively small subsidies for drilling but while those make a difference for small companies, they are a drop in the ocean for the big ones. Btw, while oil companies tend to be very profitable, it's worth keeping in mind that, on average, an oil company makes 7c profit on a gallon of gas at the pump, while the government makes about 40c in taxes.
He lost me when he, like many celebrities these days, used his position to air his infantile political views instead of movie reviews. In particular, his over the top cheering of that despicable tub of lard Michael Moore, and even worse, cruelly mocking kids who were suspended from school for wearing an American flag on Cinco de Mayo. His reviews were all right, a bit on the lowbrow side. RIP, whatever.
Another theory: a shoe company has a brilliant marketing idea to get free publicity based on the fact that a lot of people don't understand the difference between what they have done (or claim to have done) and a serious scientific study.
Obama *stopped* two wars
But they are still going on!? Oh wait, did he stop them the same way Bush stopped the war in Iraq in 2003 with his Mission Accomplished speech?
under Bush, who started using Hellfire missiles on drones
If you think the technology of launching missiles from drones was Bush's invention, you are probably giving him too much credit. Btw, drone operations have been a decent success, scoring over 50 high level terrorist leaders so far and over 2500 militants overall with minimum risk to US troops. This is probably why Obama expanded their use dramatically, launching over 6 times as many strikes as Bush.
Oil companies make on average 7 cents profit on a gallon of oil. Government in the US takes on average 39 cents per gallon in taxes. Of course, much more in Europe.
Hardly, cause its so easy to look up the case anywhere including Wikipedia. She was offered $5K, then later as the case progressed, she was offered another chance to settle for $25K. Refused both. Oh and she didn't share 24 songs but 1,700. They focused on only 24 because it was easier and it was still enough to get significant damages.
Not saying that her punishment isn't excessive but your shoplifting analogy is wrong. Stealing a CD that costs $10 causes $10 worth of damages - easy. Her crime was distributing the songs and working out the true damages in lost sales is much harder.
My guys are great! Your guys are horrible! All we need to do is to keep my guys in and kick your guys out and everything will be perfect. Oh and people who disagree with me are crazy sociopaths, but those who agree who agree with me are just wonderful.
Your post is full of such unusual insights that nobody on either side has ever considered before. Are you by any chance a genius?
People are willing to pay for a product if its offered at a price that makes them paying for the media that they consume within their budget. The problem is, the industry hasn't done that for everyone yet.
$7 per month for Amazon Prime or Netflix is a pretty good deal. Add to it advertising supported sites like hulu, pandora, crackle etc etc, not to mention 700 free "channels" on things like Roku, then there is spotify etc etc. There is plenty of content available at a VERY low price. Just because you can't get every song and every show at a price you want doesn't make it all right to pirate them.
Be grateful for the Constitution that still protects us from the worst of moron stupidity, despite morons' best efforts to undermine it and expand the power of those who somehow manage to receive 51% of moron vote.
Easy solution: require Autonomy to make available detailed logs of their server activity so that any fiddling can be detected. Then use Autonomy software to analyze those logs for any suspicious activity.
There is more to beliefs than what makes rational sense. In the same way that an average tennis player will perform better (plenty of studies) if he truly "believes" he can beat Federer, a society performs better if it believes in certain things rather than others. Beliefs are about what works best, not what is true (may coincide, may not). We have evolved to survive, not to discover truth. This is why I consider aggressive atheists to be rather naive and annoying even if they are not strictly speaking wrong. They are like a guy walking up to the above mentioned tennis player and yelling "Dude you are being irrational! Of course you can't beat Federer! Be rational and skeptical!", to which he rationally responds "Fuck off, jerk!"
If you're going to ask that question, you might as well ask does the government have the right to use violence against people who have harmed neither themselves nor the others. If you think the answer is obviously no, then I hope you are in favor of abolishing the income tax.
Fuck you for accusing someone of racism just because they disagree with you about the proper scope of government. Where the fuck do you see any mention of skin color in the gp post? Go back and comment on msnbc site where you belong you fucking asshole. Those morons see racism everywhere.
You describe crony capitalism which is made possible by exessively big and powerful government and then you blame free-market capitalism. I think you are making a classic mistake of confusing support for capitalism with support for capitalists.
What was lost was a nation of people that could contribute their creativity to the rest of the internet.
So when were they planing to start contributing?
Communism is not an economic theory. In practice it is really a form of government, or if you are crazy enough to believe in it's fairy tales, a form of social order that magically exists without government. In any case, I just find it interesting how leftists change their philosophy depending on what they think works at a given time, and, comically, get it wrong even with the benefit of hindsight.
As for the second part, you are either joking or you are new here. Ad hominem is pretty much bread and butter on slashdot although very few posters manage to transition from criticizing other people's ad hominem posts to launching their very own ad hominem attack quite as quickly as you did. Congratulations.
In real world, libertarian socialism is an oxymoron. A natural result of liberty is inequality. If you agree with that obvious truth then you have to accept that any system that enforces equality is not libertarian. How do you have equality without transferring wealth by force from one person to another? Now, if you have this idea that all people are the same in terms of ability and that without, as you probably imagine, collusion of evil corporate oligarchs, greedy banksters, corrupt politicians and "1 percenters" in general, everybody would naturally do about the same amount and quality of work, save and invest the same and end up more or less equal in terms of wealth then I would suggest that this is a psychological problem, not a philosophical one.
That's the trouble with socialism. It's the complex answer to a complex problem.
No it is not. Socialism means public ownership of the means of production and distribution, i.e. state ownership of the industry and central planning of the economy. That's simply what the word means (look it up in a dictionary) and what that ideology was always understood to represent. Just because "socialists" are embarrassed by the utter failure of their system wherever it was tried, doesn't mean you can simply pretend that a word with a clearly defined meaning now means something completely different. It may be that a complex mix of free market and government regulation is the best way (though I personally disagree) but that is commonly called "mixed economy", not "socialism". Btw. Keynes would be insulted if you called him a socialist to his face, and being and disgusting power-hungry evil bully as he was, it probably wouldn't be a good idea.
The real joke is that many of the site users apparently cheered the "move". Apparently forced labor concentration camps, widespread torture, arbitrary arrest and murder of citizens by the government, collective punishment for entire families and villages, complete absence of freedom of speech, no independent media, death penalty listening to foreign radio are bad, but not as bad as IP laws that prevent you from downloading stuff you want for free.
Unlimited democracy = unlimited power for the 51% to oppress the other 49%
Most of it is ridiculous, whether its based on "rigorous rational thinking and an axiomatic approach" or not (actually not). Besides, which ethics school do you apply? Consequentialists (ends justify the means a.k.a. screw the principles), utilitarians (happiness of the majority is key, a.k.a screw the minority), Pragmatists (whatever society decides ... so much for rigorous rational thinking) etc etc
Of course there are people that are for and against such technology.
They should find something else to occupy themselves with because the technology will happen regardless. As long as we have a world of competing nation states (generally a good thing) if one doesn't develop a technology to its full military potential, another one will. Even nuclear weapons are slowly but surely proliferating despite major technological difficulties and the most intensive legal/diplomatic etc efforts ever made to prevent any device from being made.