Amazing that not many people in the world, even in the U.S., know that the U.S. instituted a you-can't-leave list with the passport reform law last January. If you are on the list, no matter what, you are not leaving the country, not by car, cruise ship, cargo ship, plane,foot, or train. Like the U.K, your country is your prison. And don't expect Canadians to help hide you, because entering while on that list is a crime, and they are now using our "criminal" lists to block entry; sneaking past the American wall would qualify you as a federal criminal, therefore your ass is being sent back to the Home of the Free.
The thing to watch in the U.S. is the generation of kids that have grown up in glorified prison yards called "schools". Consistently, when polled, they are all bang for giving up liberties for safety. They wouldn't recognized a society that didn't; they've dwelled in Orwellian surveillance in their schools since kindergarten. They're used to being told when to shut up, when to cough up ID, to give their retina and fingerprints, to be searched to the skin and blood at the whim of their rulers. Our universities now have "free speech zones" -- the kids don't even notice, as they've never been in a place that had free speech. They've been bred to fascism, and they are soon to be voting people into office for a few decades. And think of what their kids will put up with! They've no notion of the underpinnings of civil liberties are, as that commie propaganda has been mostly removed from school curriculums. There's no population of active people who love liberty being raised. It's a downhill luge.
"I mean, what else could they do, declare you a stateless person?"
Yes. The U.S., for instance, has prisons with hundreds, thousands of stateless people that will never be released. Not a well known fact that we've had gulags under the radar for quite a while.
Venezuela, or some other Latin American country once screwed over by the US and now is democratic. And V. is now rich because, like Norway, they kicked the oil companies out of the country.
That Free Markets religion again. Businesses cannot do anything they like; they are corporations, fictional entities created by license of the people of the country through their government. They are granted super-powers as non-existent individuals, exempting real operators from liablity for their own actions. In return, they hew the line we set for them. They have more responsibilty to the nation that created them other than pleasing shareholders, no matter what propoganda they pump to the contrary. They are not gods. And Microsoft is a monopoly, ruled so by the courts, and is under even more stringent strictures, because they have constantly abused their power in the past to invade and hold new markets.
So, no, making money is not all they have to worry about. Deceit and chicanery should have consequences other than making them more money. And if they need to cheat to win, it might be time to think about a new concept: revoking the corporate license, and reinstituting personal responsibility for their underhanded actions, with civil and criminal penalties.
Damn. Here I was, brave theoretician, thinking after I wrote my little blurb about the effect of unknown tachyons whizzing around, unable to slow down for us to detect them, and thought: dark matter, is that you?
I googled the two terms, and here we are: "Tachyonic Dark Matter", by P.C.W. Davies:
Grover Norquist, neocon "think tanker" and propogandist extraordinaire, once eludicated that he wanted to shrink government down to the point where one could drown it in a bathtub. Huzzah, cheer, all that from his audience.
Budget cuts are effectively impossible now, as discretionary spending, defined as non-obligatory, is now a tiny percentage of the Federal budget and essentially irrelevant in cost cutting.
How does one cut then? Apparently the neocons are using a new trick: spend like maniacs. Eventually discretionary funding, like NASA, becomes impossible because so much of the budget has gone towards military and privatization expenses. So much was spent that they had to borrow trillions to keep spending more.
Effect is that the government owes so much that the largest non-discretionary line item, outside of the military, is simply paying yearly interest on the debt. So the two biggest expenditures are now the military and paying out national treasure to service the debt of the money lent to us to cut taxes and spend like fools.
End game: government has three purposes: spending on military, spending on now-privatized government services, and debt service on monies borrowed to spend in the 2000's (and the Reagan 80's) on tax cuts. Government becomes a military contractor, a corporate contractor, and a welfare fountain for the very wealthy, while never actually paying off the debt incurred to give tax cuts to those same very wealthy.
And NASA doesn't get funds, the NSF gets defunded, a chain reaction of penury resulting from this spending NOW. The neocons get their new, streamlined government which looks a lot like a classic fascism, with direct-to-corporation payments, with no spending on things not deemed necessary to fund guns or debt. Bankruptcy. Both financial and cultural. Other nations without ideological madness spend less on military and tax cuts, keep government services cheap by using civil service, and keep debt low or nonexistent, as Canada or Norway does. Neocon ideology will cripple the future of the U.S., as we are consuming our present and future human capital to enrich the wealthy of today.
Have to blow my mod points for this thread, but you're wrong about accelerating mass to speed C. A particle, a mass, cannot reach speed C as it would require infinite energy, which is by definition impossible. You can pump more energy in, but what happens is this: the speed increase becomes lesser and lesser the closer to C it approaches. Sort of fractal. "Asymptotic curve", I think it's called. You pump more kinetic energy in, the increase slows. The energy added is quite real, and the effect is that the object gains mass in proportion referencing the classic e=mc2 equation, which does apply in calculating relativistic mass. Also, time dilation increases as speed progressively approaches C.
No matter what energy level you have, even if you have all the energy that was and ever will be, the particle will not reach C; it will keep acquiring more mass, keep inching towards C, and the timeframe for the particle, if you could measure it somehow, will move slower in relation to the rest of the universe. The universe will speed up for the object, years, centuries, millions of years will pass outside as it transits a few miles.
To achieve speed C, the object would have to aquire infinite kinetic energy, infinite mass, and time would stop in its framework.
To exceed C, one first has to achieve speed C, which is impossible given the requirements. But time would theoretically reverse in the particle's framework. Mass would become ????? Negative? Irrelevant to space time? God knows what the energy would be. The particle would be unknowable.
To toss a bone here, theory doesn't say that particles couldn't exist that *started out* at a speed greater than C. They've long been noodled over, and even have a name: tachyons. They're a hypothetical animal (not a theoretical one). The problem with those critters is that they can't slow down enough to achieve speed C, so they cannot *go slower* than C.
Summarize: mass can't achieve speed C. Theoretically, mass could exist that started existence at speed greater than C. But the limit of C applies to both sub- and theoretical hyper-light speed mass. C is the wall.
Thanks from me to Dr. Isaac Asimov, who patiently explained and re-explained the subject in so many essays I read growing up. We need more of him.
1)put cameras in our homes. (They'll just check them when there is a suspicion of a crime) - Wait. 2)ban all sex out side marriage - Effectively done is some of the redder states. 3)ban all non secular music. - 4)ban all non missionary position sex - non-*procreative* sex. See last week's story on a proposal to check prospective married couples for evidence of procreation abilities. 5)ban all violence on TV - except for coverage of our glorious war against Terror 6)ban all gay people - see 2 7)ban the GPL - not an issue yet with the fascists (yes, let's use the real term for once) Use installed camera to enforce all banned.
8)tag us and record where we go with gps ( they'll only check it if there is suspicion of a crime) - FYI : your cell phone is a GPS tracker. They can turn it on without you knowing, if they feel that you are a person of interest. 10)mandate car manufacturers to install tracking devices. (they'll only check it if . . . ) - wait. it will happen. Also, your phone is already a tracker. 11)build a berlin wall around USA (to keep out terrists and drugs, and illegals and..) keep us in? - WELL! Got an answer for that: it happened last January. We in the U.S. now are eligible to be put on a spanking new "Can't Leave List", enacted at the same time the new passports were. If you are on the list, you cannot leave by car, sea vessel, plane, or train. Not kidding. We are locked in. As for Canada, they are using our giant criminal violations database with vengeance - if you had a pot violation in 1971, you can't cross over ie leave the U.S. So forget walking if you've ever done anything naughty. And forget leaving at all if someone decides you don't merit the privilege. 12)ban all weapons but handguns which are useless when the people wake up from Shitney Shears and Anna Dickhole Sith and try to rise up and take back their country. - No gun you ever will possess will penetrate their Darth Vader armor. And you can't fight sonic weapons, microwave cannon, solid-state lasers, tasers, lightning cannon (yep, they have electron cannon under development), really BIG guns, railguns and super surveillance. I wonder who really fooled us Americans that we have the right to any semblance of privacy any way. - forty years of school budget cuts in civics, and the rightification of the national consciousness that precludes questioning police force. As far as the DOJ and law enforcement goes who needs to investigate anything anymore All we the righteous people of law-enforcement need is a great big control panel that we can monitor everyone and when we suspect them of a crime we just push a button and voila they are in prison. Who the hell needs due process anymore
Welcome people to the United States Socialist Republic. The USSR. - I like "USSA". The USSR was never this bad. they didn't have the tech.
Another illustration why you don't use computers for voting, for gambling, for running battleships or flying planes. Computers are infinitely malleable machines. There is no telling when or how a series of programs will fail or be manipulated. There is no way to make them bulletproof, as the totality of the system is beyond any human's capacity to understand. You don't even know what code is actually running at any given millisecond.
When lives are on the line, when democracies are on the line, you don't give control over to code. Keep control on a macro, human scale whenever possible.
You're not owed a damned thing. We own the discs. We'll reverse engineer them. This is the way the universe works. You don't get a say in what we do with things that we buy. Your connection to my home is not welcome.
And I believe player pianos were supposed to break musical profits. and TV was supposed to break movies' business model. and cassettes were supposed to destroy record companies. And Valenti compared VCRs to the Boston Strangler. And music and movie downloads are supposed to break the RIAA and MPAA members. Both outfits are making more money today than they did last year, and the year before.
You are wrong. And you've bought laws to invade our lives and put grandmothers in prison. The least we can do is break your balls, over and over and over.
Microwaves are better. You can spread the beam out to a large rectenna farm, thus preventing the "oops"factor when/if a laser powerful enough to power Bermuda wanders from the receptor. Read Gerard K. O'Neill's "The High Frontier" or numerous studies for fascinating workups.
This gadget will be used as a sniper gun from hell. Mount it on a plane, on a hybrid tank with a kilowatt generator, in a satellite.
Do we really trust the new SuperPresidents(tm) that Bush has created with a silent assassin from orbit? How long until a terrorist(tm) is smoked? The family around him? An environmentalist - already labeled terrorists. Hell. PETA members are now semi-official terrorists. REPORTERS are being labeled fellow travelers. The Army already smoked one building full of reporters with a tank. They'd love them some lasers. We've killed one foreign head of state by hanging, another still is in prison on charges that no one understands. You think the New American Century Cheney/Rice types will hesitate one second in smoking a head of state?
What really worries me is, say, an individual with advanced power storage tech (coming soon) or a hybrid car generating enough juice to have a lovely laser handgun. Perfect as a targeting system, perfect as a killer. No noise, good for miles, untraceable by conventional means in real time. Also good for "riot" (AKA protest) control for unruly peons. Goes with the microwave cannon, the electrical stunner, the sound cannon.
In all of this, how exactly are we becoming safer? What the hell do we need this thing for? and once we show it can be done, the Chinese and the Indian research teams will whack their own models out in a couple of years, selling it to the highest bidder. STREET GANGS will have lasers in fifteen years.
And you pass your taxes on to your kids, rather than paying for what you want your government to do.
Canada has a budget surplus. The US has cut taxes and borrowed nine trillion. You emptied the social security trust fund in 1984 to finance Reagan's cuts. The single line item that your taxes will pay for, soon, will be on the interest on that nine trillion. Congrats on your lower taxes. I'll be paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes in my lifetime for the privilege of you borrowing trillions so you personally didn't have to pay for your war and highways.
Banks have reasons to make sure their onlines systems balance. Political parties have reason to make sure they win at all costs. The purpose and auditing of online voting is different that other IT projects. It's more like gambling online, where somehow you assume the house will play fair. It won't.
Voting through computer systems is not a question of when it will be hijacked, but how soon. The difference between paper and electronic is this: you will never know that the computer systems are hijacked, now and forever, worlds without end, amen. Who will blow the whistle when the manipulation begins? Are you all aware we've already had a whistleblower programmer in Florida? He's been ignored, as all the future snitches will be. How do you keep a computer system honest if the media reporters start with the assumption that whistleblowers are conspiracy fanatics, and therefore to be ignored? If you don't believe that they hacked the elections in '02, '04, and '06, why will any of you listen in the future? Democracy is dead as long as these systems are operational.
Canada uses paper with a hostile counting system. Seems to work nationwide, and results are announced within three hours of closing the polls. There simply is no reason for electronic voting -- other than as a cover for cheating, either now or when no one cares to investigate cheating claims anymore. And how the hell do you prove cheating, ever, when all the logs match the votes cast? Paper backup of voter registration? Texas had major election fraud when the voting registration showed fewer voters than votes cast by a wide margin, in one local race. Big scandal, if you're rational -- but we've successfully ignored the fact that someone manipulated that election, that and a large sample of other miracles that've happened in the last five years.
And to be absolutely clear, this vigilante and home breaker got access to kiddie porn collections. Or what he claims are logs of other people accessing kiddie porn. How do we know he wasn't beating off to those pictures? He's a sociopath, up front, for doing what he did. It doesn't take a cynic to suspect he's the biggest pedo on the block. Sociopaths manipulate people into liking them, even as they inflict pain. If he's crazy enough to obsess so much about what other people are doing in their homes, chances are it's because he's doing it himself. And crazy enough to plant the evidence and rewrite the logs he himself creates anyway. Don't have to even prove that he's looking at the porn -- he had to look at the porn, to know what it was. So we have a kiddie porn obssesive man downloading other people's kiddie porn to nail kiddie porn collectors. How many thousands of pictures did he look at during those three years before he dropped a quarter on the cops? Bloody perv.
This "vigilante" basically broke into 30,000 homes and set up cameras, waiting for someone to do something wrong.
And has anyone noticed that the biggest consumer of the kiddie porn was the vigilante? What a great cover for a pedophile -- monitoring someone else's porn collection.
Lesson: if you want a kiddie porn collection, become a freelance kiddie porn vigilante. You can get your jollies AND get feted in court for being a stand-up guy. AND you can plant evidence on your critics' PC's if you can hijack their boxes, then turn them in. What a setup!
"The United States Military Academy at West Point yesterday confirmed that Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan recently travelled to California to meet producers of the show, broadcast on the Fox channel. He told them that promoting illegal behaviour in the series - apparently hugely popular among the US military - was having a damaging effect on young troops."..
Funny, but the show's star disagrees with the idea that torture is productive:
"In addition, while Mr Surnow may not have any qualms about 24, it appears the show's main protagonist does. In a television interview last month, Sutherland said: "You torture someone and they'll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether it's true or not, if you put someone in enough pain... Within the context of our show, which is a fantastical show to begin with, the torture is a dramatic device to show you how desperate a situation is.""
Not to mention what the vigilante defines "pedophilia". The term has become useless in the legal sense. Pedos are into pre-pubescent children. That's different from, say, teenagers. If the latter definition is used, the Savior of Mankind has a good chance of locking up nearly every man, and a lot of women, that have accessed the internet in the last fourteen years. We'll need to turn the country into a open-air prison to hold all the bad people.
Maybe the righteous can build some walled towns to live in. Oh, wait...
Norway thrives because they nationalized their oil companies. The money that normally would be pouring in into local oil companies and the big 4 internationals is instead staying in the country and is being spent on infrastructure, education, roads, health care -- all of that. The industrialized world is being impoverished by the oil cartels and oil companies, the lesson seems to be. Norway is leading the world in quality of living because they kicked out the thieves that are currently ruining *us*.
Gates never gave away money. Remember that by setting up those foundations he avoided paying taxes on his wealth. He instead decided to give it away under his terms, and as you say, make some buckage on the way.
The US demanded that the Russians make "piracy" a crime as a condition of entering the WIPO. Pretending that the convictions, under laws we insisted they install at economic gunpoint, has nothing to do with us is a farce. And Gates is a flaming jackass for washing his hands with that argument. He wanted that law, he got that law. And he showed a complete lack of humanity when he wouldn't grant a little mercy when he was asked personally by Gorbachev to let woman have her life. Proportionality is the problem. He's the richest man in the world refusing to show mercy to a *schooteacher*, in *Russia*, for having copies of Windows on her classroom's PCs. An act of illegal copying that merely would have sown the seeds of another generation of people locked into Windows!
What is really delicious is that the school district in question has dumped Windows and is instead installing Linux on the school boxen. The banality of evil, indeed. Vicious meaness on Gates' part cost his company millions, maybe billions, maybe tens of billions, in the future if all of Russia takes the Linux route. They can't afford Windows, they don't want to take a chance on going to Siberia to die if they have "his IP" on them.
If I were Jobs, I'd be shipping free Macs over there right now.
Good job Gates, you flaming fake humanitarian jackass.
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Amazing that not many people in the world, even in the U.S., know that the U.S. instituted a you-can't-leave list with the passport reform law last January. If you are on the list, no matter what, you are not leaving the country, not by car, cruise ship, cargo ship, plane,foot, or train. Like the U.K, your country is your prison. And don't expect Canadians to help hide you, because entering while on that list is a crime, and they are now using our "criminal" lists to block entry; sneaking past the American wall would qualify you as a federal criminal, therefore your ass is being sent back to the Home of the Free.
The thing to watch in the U.S. is the generation of kids that have grown up in glorified prison yards called "schools". Consistently, when polled, they are all bang for giving up liberties for safety. They wouldn't recognized a society that didn't; they've dwelled in Orwellian surveillance in their schools since kindergarten. They're used to being told when to shut up, when to cough up ID, to give their retina and fingerprints, to be searched to the skin and blood at the whim of their rulers. Our universities now have "free speech zones" -- the kids don't even notice, as they've never been in a place that had free speech. They've been bred to fascism, and they are soon to be voting people into office for a few decades. And think of what their kids will put up with! They've no notion of the underpinnings of civil liberties are, as that commie propaganda has been mostly removed from school curriculums. There's no population of active people who love liberty being raised. It's a downhill luge.
"I mean, what else could they do, declare you a stateless person?"
Yes. The U.S., for instance, has prisons with hundreds, thousands of stateless people that will never be released. Not a well known fact that we've had gulags under the radar for quite a while.
Venezuela, or some other Latin American country once screwed over by the US and now is democratic. And V. is now rich because, like Norway, they kicked the oil companies out of the country.
That Free Markets religion again. Businesses cannot do anything they like; they are corporations, fictional entities created by license of the people of the country through their government. They are granted super-powers as non-existent individuals, exempting real operators from liablity for their own actions. In return, they hew the line we set for them. They have more responsibilty to the nation that created them other than pleasing shareholders, no matter what propoganda they pump to the contrary. They are not gods. And Microsoft is a monopoly, ruled so by the courts, and is under even more stringent strictures, because they have constantly abused their power in the past to invade and hold new markets.
So, no, making money is not all they have to worry about. Deceit and chicanery should have consequences other than making them more money. And if they need to cheat to win, it might be time to think about a new concept: revoking the corporate license, and reinstituting personal responsibility for their underhanded actions, with civil and criminal penalties.
Damn. Here I was, brave theoretician, thinking after I wrote my little blurb about the effect of unknown tachyons whizzing around, unable to slow down for us to detect them, and thought: dark matter, is that you?
: cosmos.asu.edu/publications/papers/TachyonicDarkMa tter%252082.pdf+tachyons+dark+matter&hl=en&ct=clnk &cd=1&gl=us
I googled the two terms, and here we are: "Tachyonic Dark Matter", by P.C.W. Davies:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:WzdQk_JHdScJ
Grover Norquist, neocon "think tanker" and propogandist extraordinaire, once eludicated that he wanted to shrink government down to the point where one could drown it in a bathtub. Huzzah, cheer, all that from his audience.
Budget cuts are effectively impossible now, as discretionary spending, defined as non-obligatory, is now a tiny percentage of the Federal budget and essentially irrelevant in cost cutting.
How does one cut then? Apparently the neocons are using a new trick: spend like maniacs. Eventually discretionary funding, like NASA, becomes impossible because so much of the budget has gone towards military and privatization expenses. So much was spent that they had to borrow trillions to keep spending more.
Effect is that the government owes so much that the largest non-discretionary line item, outside of the military, is simply paying yearly interest on the debt. So the two biggest expenditures are now the military and paying out national treasure to service the debt of the money lent to us to cut taxes and spend like fools.
End game: government has three purposes: spending on military, spending on now-privatized government services, and debt service on monies borrowed to spend in the 2000's (and the Reagan 80's) on tax cuts. Government becomes a military contractor, a corporate contractor, and a welfare fountain for the very wealthy, while never actually paying off the debt incurred to give tax cuts to those same very wealthy.
And NASA doesn't get funds, the NSF gets defunded, a chain reaction of penury resulting from this spending NOW. The neocons get their new, streamlined government which looks a lot like a classic fascism, with direct-to-corporation payments, with no spending on things not deemed necessary to fund guns or debt. Bankruptcy.
Both financial and cultural. Other nations without ideological madness spend less on military and tax cuts, keep government services cheap by using civil service, and keep debt low or nonexistent, as Canada or Norway does. Neocon ideology will cripple the future of the U.S., as we are consuming our present and future human capital to enrich the wealthy of today.
Have to blow my mod points for this thread, but you're wrong about accelerating mass to speed C. A particle, a mass, cannot reach speed C as it would require infinite energy, which is by definition impossible. You can pump more energy in, but what happens is this: the speed increase becomes lesser and lesser the closer to C it approaches. Sort of fractal. "Asymptotic curve", I think it's called. You pump more kinetic energy in, the increase slows. The energy added is quite real, and the effect is that the object gains mass in proportion referencing the classic e=mc2 equation, which does apply in calculating relativistic mass. Also, time dilation increases as speed progressively approaches C.
No matter what energy level you have, even if you have all the energy that was and ever will be, the particle will not reach C; it will keep acquiring more mass, keep inching towards C, and the timeframe for the particle, if you could measure it somehow, will move slower in relation to the rest of the universe. The universe will speed up for the object, years, centuries, millions of years will pass outside as it transits a few miles.
To achieve speed C, the object would have to aquire infinite kinetic energy, infinite mass, and time would stop in its framework.
To exceed C, one first has to achieve speed C, which is impossible given the requirements. But time would theoretically reverse in the particle's framework. Mass would become ????? Negative? Irrelevant to space time? God knows what the energy would be. The particle would be unknowable.
To toss a bone here, theory doesn't say that particles couldn't exist that *started out* at a speed greater than C. They've long been noodled over, and even have a name: tachyons. They're a hypothetical animal (not a theoretical one). The problem with those critters is that they can't slow down enough to achieve speed C, so they cannot *go slower* than C.
Summarize: mass can't achieve speed C. Theoretically, mass could exist that started existence at speed greater than C. But the limit of C applies to both sub- and theoretical hyper-light speed mass. C is the wall.
Thanks from me to Dr. Isaac Asimov, who patiently explained and re-explained the subject in so many essays I read growing up. We need more of him.
1)put cameras in our homes. (They'll just check them when there is a suspicion of a crime)
- Wait.
2)ban all sex out side marriage
- Effectively done is some of the redder states.
3)ban all non secular music.
-
4)ban all non missionary position sex
- non-*procreative* sex. See last week's story on a proposal to check prospective married couples for evidence of procreation abilities.
5)ban all violence on TV
- except for coverage of our glorious war against Terror
6)ban all gay people
- see 2
7)ban the GPL
- not an issue yet with the fascists (yes, let's use the real term for once)
Use installed camera to enforce all banned.
8)tag us and record where we go with gps ( they'll only check it if there is suspicion of a crime)
- FYI : your cell phone is a GPS tracker. They can turn it on without you knowing, if they feel that you are a person of interest.
10)mandate car manufacturers to install tracking devices. (they'll only check it if . . . )
- wait. it will happen. Also, your phone is already a tracker.
11)build a berlin wall around USA (to keep out terrists and drugs, and illegals and..) keep us in?
- WELL! Got an answer for that: it happened last January. We in the U.S. now are eligible to be put on a spanking new "Can't Leave List", enacted at the same time the new passports were. If you are on the list, you cannot leave by car, sea vessel, plane, or train. Not kidding. We are locked in. As for Canada, they are using our giant criminal violations database with vengeance - if you had a pot violation in 1971, you can't cross over ie leave the U.S. So forget walking if you've ever done anything naughty. And forget leaving at all if someone decides you don't merit the privilege.
12)ban all weapons but handguns which are useless when the people wake up from Shitney Shears and Anna Dickhole Sith and try to rise up and take back their country.
- No gun you ever will possess will penetrate their Darth Vader armor. And you can't fight sonic weapons, microwave cannon, solid-state lasers, tasers, lightning cannon (yep, they have electron cannon under development), really BIG guns, railguns and super surveillance.
I wonder who really fooled us Americans that we have the right to any semblance of privacy any way.
- forty years of school budget cuts in civics, and the rightification of the national consciousness that precludes questioning police force.
As far as the DOJ and law enforcement goes who needs to investigate anything anymore All we the righteous people of law-enforcement need is a great big control panel that we can monitor everyone and when we suspect them of a crime we just push a button and voila they are in prison. Who the hell needs due process anymore
Welcome people to the United States Socialist Republic. The USSR.
- I like "USSA". The USSR was never this bad. they didn't have the tech.
Another illustration why you don't use computers for voting, for gambling, for running battleships or flying planes. Computers are infinitely malleable machines. There is no telling when or how a series of programs will fail or be manipulated. There is no way to make them bulletproof, as the totality of the system is beyond any human's capacity to understand. You don't even know what code is actually running at any given millisecond.
When lives are on the line, when democracies are on the line, you don't give control over to code. Keep control on a macro, human scale whenever possible.
You're not owed a damned thing. We own the discs. We'll reverse engineer them. This is the way the universe works. You don't get a say in what we do with things that we buy. Your connection to my home is not welcome.
And I believe player pianos were supposed to break musical profits. and TV was supposed to break movies' business model. and cassettes were supposed to destroy record companies. And Valenti compared VCRs to the Boston Strangler. And music and movie downloads are supposed to break the RIAA and MPAA members. Both outfits are making more money today than they did last year, and the year before.
You are wrong. And you've bought laws to invade our lives and put grandmothers in prison. The least we can do is break your balls, over and over and over.
and please, do, go out of business.
This isn't a targeting laser. If you get this beam to your eye, you no longer have a head to have eyes in. Think a puff of plasma.
Microwaves are better. You can spread the beam out to a large rectenna farm, thus preventing the "oops"factor when/if a laser powerful enough to power Bermuda wanders from the receptor. Read Gerard K. O'Neill's "The High Frontier" or numerous studies for fascinating workups.
This gadget will be used as a sniper gun from hell. Mount it on a plane, on a hybrid tank with a kilowatt generator, in a satellite.
Do we really trust the new SuperPresidents(tm) that Bush has created with a silent assassin from orbit? How long until a terrorist(tm) is smoked? The family around him? An environmentalist - already labeled terrorists. Hell. PETA members are now semi-official terrorists. REPORTERS are being labeled fellow travelers. The Army already smoked one building full of reporters with a tank. They'd love them some lasers. We've killed one foreign head of state by hanging, another still is in prison on charges that no one understands. You think the New American Century Cheney/Rice types will hesitate one second in smoking a head of state?
What really worries me is, say, an individual with advanced power storage tech (coming soon) or a hybrid car generating enough juice to have a lovely laser handgun. Perfect as a targeting system, perfect as a killer. No noise, good for miles, untraceable by conventional means in real time. Also good for "riot" (AKA protest) control for unruly peons. Goes with the microwave cannon, the electrical stunner, the sound cannon.
In all of this, how exactly are we becoming safer? What the hell do we need this thing for? and once we show it can be done, the Chinese and the Indian research teams will whack their own models out in a couple of years, selling it to the highest bidder. STREET GANGS will have lasers in fifteen years.
And you pass your taxes on to your kids, rather than paying for what you want your government to do.
Canada has a budget surplus. The US has cut taxes and borrowed nine trillion. You emptied the social security trust fund in 1984 to finance Reagan's cuts. The single line item that your taxes will pay for, soon, will be on the interest on that nine trillion. Congrats on your lower taxes. I'll be paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes in my lifetime for the privilege of you borrowing trillions so you personally didn't have to pay for your war and highways.
Banks have reasons to make sure their onlines systems balance. Political parties have reason to make sure they win at all costs. The purpose and auditing of online voting is different that other IT projects. It's more like gambling online, where somehow you assume the house will play fair. It won't.
Voting through computer systems is not a question of when it will be hijacked, but how soon. The difference between paper and electronic is this: you will never know that the computer systems are hijacked, now and forever, worlds without end, amen. Who will blow the whistle when the manipulation begins? Are you all aware we've already had a whistleblower programmer in Florida? He's been ignored, as all the future snitches will be. How do you keep a computer system honest if the media reporters start with the assumption that whistleblowers are conspiracy fanatics, and therefore to be ignored? If you don't believe that they hacked the elections in '02, '04, and '06, why will any of you listen in the future? Democracy is dead as long as these systems are operational.
Canada uses paper with a hostile counting system. Seems to work nationwide, and results are announced within three hours of closing the polls. There simply is no reason for electronic voting -- other than as a cover for cheating, either now or when no one cares to investigate cheating claims anymore. And how the hell do you prove cheating, ever, when all the logs match the votes cast? Paper backup of voter registration? Texas had major election fraud when the voting registration showed fewer voters than votes cast by a wide margin, in one local race. Big scandal, if you're rational -- but we've successfully ignored the fact that someone manipulated that election, that and a large sample of other miracles that've happened in the last five years.
And to be absolutely clear, this vigilante and home breaker got access to kiddie porn collections. Or what he claims are logs of other people accessing kiddie porn. How do we know he wasn't beating off to those pictures? He's a sociopath, up front, for doing what he did. It doesn't take a cynic to suspect he's the biggest pedo on the block. Sociopaths manipulate people into liking them, even as they inflict pain. If he's crazy enough to obsess so much about what other people are doing in their homes, chances are it's because he's doing it himself. And crazy enough to plant the evidence and rewrite the logs he himself creates anyway. Don't have to even prove that he's looking at the porn -- he had to look at the porn, to know what it was. So we have a kiddie porn obssesive man downloading other people's kiddie porn to nail kiddie porn collectors. How many thousands of pictures did he look at during those three years before he dropped a quarter on the cops? Bloody perv.
This "vigilante" basically broke into 30,000 homes and set up cameras, waiting for someone to do something wrong.
And has anyone noticed that the biggest consumer of the kiddie porn was the vigilante? What a great cover for a pedophile -- monitoring someone else's porn collection.
Lesson: if you want a kiddie porn collection, become a freelance kiddie porn vigilante. You can get your jollies AND get feted in court for being a stand-up guy. AND you can plant evidence on your critics' PC's if you can hijack their boxes, then turn them in. What a setup!
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/artic le2264632.ece
..
"The United States Military Academy at West Point yesterday confirmed that Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan recently travelled to California to meet producers of the show, broadcast on the Fox channel. He told them that promoting illegal behaviour in the series - apparently hugely popular among the US military - was having a damaging effect on young troops."
Funny, but the show's star disagrees with the idea that torture is productive:
"In addition, while Mr Surnow may not have any qualms about 24, it appears the show's main protagonist does. In a television interview last month, Sutherland said: "You torture someone and they'll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether it's true or not, if you put someone in enough pain... Within the context of our show, which is a fantastical show to begin with, the torture is a dramatic device to show you how desperate a situation is.""
Ah, the Bush/Cheney/Gonzales concept that the constitution doesn't apply if enough people can be made afraid.
Would Goetz had been found guilty if he had been a black man being menaced by a white gang? Think about it.
Not to mention what the vigilante defines "pedophilia". The term has become useless in the legal sense. Pedos are into pre-pubescent children. That's different from, say, teenagers. If the latter definition is used, the Savior of Mankind has a good chance of locking up nearly every man, and a lot of women, that have accessed the internet in the last fourteen years. We'll need to turn the country into a open-air prison to hold all the bad people.
Maybe the righteous can build some walled towns to live in. Oh, wait...
Norway thrives because they nationalized their oil companies. The money that normally would be pouring in into local oil companies and the big 4 internationals is instead staying in the country and is being spent on infrastructure, education, roads, health care -- all of that. The industrialized world is being impoverished by the oil cartels and oil companies, the lesson seems to be. Norway is leading the world in quality of living because they kicked out the thieves that are currently ruining *us*.
Gates never gave away money. Remember that by setting up those foundations he avoided paying taxes on his wealth. He instead decided to give it away under his terms, and as you say, make some buckage on the way.
The US demanded that the Russians make "piracy" a crime as a condition of entering the WIPO. Pretending that the convictions, under laws we insisted they install at economic gunpoint, has nothing to do with us is a farce. And Gates is a flaming jackass for washing his hands with that argument. He wanted that law, he got that law. And he showed a complete lack of humanity when he wouldn't grant a little mercy when he was asked personally by Gorbachev to let woman have her life. Proportionality is the problem. He's the richest man in the world refusing to show mercy to a *schooteacher*, in *Russia*, for having copies of Windows on her classroom's PCs. An act of illegal copying that merely would have sown the seeds of another generation of people locked into Windows!
What is really delicious is that the school district in question has dumped Windows and is instead installing Linux on the school boxen. The banality of evil, indeed. Vicious meaness on Gates' part cost his company millions, maybe billions, maybe tens of billions, in the future if all of Russia takes the Linux route. They can't afford Windows, they don't want to take a chance on going to Siberia to die if they have "his IP" on them.
If I were Jobs, I'd be shipping free Macs over there right now.
Good job Gates, you flaming fake humanitarian jackass.