And Bush/Gonzales decided that getting any warrants at all was odious, and ignored the law. A lot of the surveillance has been against ant-Bush and peace groups. And agents provocateurs have been deployed to make such groups do stupid things -- and failed. And that's just a tiny number of offences we know about.
Still waiting for the impeachment proceedings.
Once again, everyone is staring at the golf ball where it lies rather than 18 holes down the course. This is an intermediate step, one of many to come, in which no laws control the dictator president, and they watch everyone they like for whatever purposes they like until the end of time. And people will still be arguing on slashdot that every new law is merely an incremental change on already accepted practices.
And oh yeah. McCain and the others recommended legalizing torture yesterday. Thought you'd all like to know.
Who is "they"? And how are they monitored, exactly? And what is a "viable threat"?
We have laws for this already. But they require courts and warrants. This bill removes those silly impedances. We'll just have nice, smooth secret surveillance of anyone they don't like, forever and ever and ever...
Anti-terror fish? Fish that keep me from freaking out in horror flicks? Are they narcotic? How do they keep fear at bay? Do they fire darts full of tranqullizer? Do they sing happy songs? Do I get a hug when I'm feeling scared?
How exactly do you keep water free of fear, then?
Isn't the "terror" in your own heads? Hard for even a very small fish to get into your actual head. Must be bio-engineered to get in through the sinus cavity.
I powered through school in order to become a programmer, back in the day. 12 months a year, 23 credits a semester, one, two jobs at the same time. I thought I was in a hurry.
In my old age, I know realize that the facts I learned weren't the education. I missed an education. I never had time to make friends or go to a party or watch TV.
The education is being with people as smart as you, as young as you. It's watching Battlestar Galactica together and learning about how other people think about moral questions... it's about making friends with your professors and the TA's. College is where you start making the friends that will connect you with the world as you leave school, giving you access to jobs and communities and a life.
If I had a summary, it would be: goof off in college. Spend an extra year there. Talk to everyone. Take a difficult course twice. Don't be afraid to change concentrations. Go to parties. Get drunk. Meet the opposite sex, even the same sex if that floats your boat. Maybe even at the same time. Live. Learn everything. Cheat authority at every turn, 'cause that disrespect and ability to bypass idiot rules will give you real success at life -- conformity makes you a loser, no matter what toys they give you. There is no other time or place in your whole life that will let you be yourself again, so grab it while you can.
Neh. No. It's not that the aims of big oil and big tobacco are the same; it's that the tobacco industry developed the methodology of creating bullshit "science" foundations and fake citizens' groups, combined with professional and surgical insertion of false memes into the popular culture through shills in the media.
I assume that big oil just wanted big tobacco's expertise in suppressing science and creating false "controversy" in the garbage news industry. I think we've witnessed our first corporate memetic mitosis.
The aim isn't to fund science, it's to create a false air of debate when the facts just don't warrant it. "Reasonable people can disagree on this matter" is the meme they want floating through the blow-dried heads of the media gods. But of course, reasonable people don't disagree. Unreasonable liars disagree. But no one is allowed to call a corporate shill a liar anymore, I guess. That wouldn't be "balanced".
Journalists are now inculated with the idea that their job is to present both "sides" of an "issue", where "reasonable" people can disagree. They don't take sides. The result of this is that PR masters can create BS "sides" and create fake debate that dethrone reason and install "balance". (I'd like to see this done with religious talking heads. Fat chance.)
A reasonable news industry would winnow out and dismiss the robots dancing to their masters tune. There would be no "debate". Hell, you can't find any opinion to the "left" of Ronald Reagan in the news shows anymore, so they apparently *can* filter out what they consider nuts; they unfortunately can't seem to apply their debate filters to fake science corporate fronts and economic looting institutes.
How about a world where we aren't spied on every moment of our lives to monitor the possiblity that we are listening to music without paying -- what used to be normal until the twentieth century.How about no commercial police state?
How about, oh, artists being paid for performances rather than recordings? Almost no artists make money from deals with record companies, as the companies have their own private accounting theories. Artists get real money from live performances, hence the record companies buying up concert venues to rip off that cash stream.
Buy creating the commercial police state to monitor transfers of non-existent "property", what we really would be doing is giving the record companies an eternal revenue stream, making them immortal rather than letting them die as the useless parasites they really are. And they will rape the artists. Not a prediction: they already are cutting down the percentages on digital downloads payable to the artists themselves. They are stealing the money, and the commercial police state will simply lock artists into being their victims until the end of time.
Almost everything Tolkien wrote, he wrote for his own pleasure, and his writings were always a work in progress. For example, the Silmarillion is a compendium of hundreds of writings, with many versions of the same stories spread over decades of J.R.R.'s life. The elves were originally called gnomes, for instance. Tolkien just didn't have enough time to finish his evolving mythology.
His son has been publishing those writings for years in the Lost Tales series of books. I think there's no one better qualified or knowledgable to do the work than he. If he managed to pull together a Hurin book, I'll be the first in line to buy it.
Reminds me of the "Long Range Foundation" in Heinlein's juvenile, "Time for the Stars". A foundation dedicated to pouring enormous amounts of money into basic research that no business wants to touch.
Google.org is going to be richer than the.com, eventually. American business culture has forgotten that "bread cast upon the water comes back sevenfold", the charter of the LRF. Non-military basic research. We don't do that anymore. Even the universities have become proprietary corporate entities.
How much has the Cold War and the "War on Terror" cost us by pouring money into better ways of killing instead of say, the trivial task of building a decent battery/capacitor? We're not rich at all now, compared to what we could have gained had we been sane and financed research and infrastructure instead of ways of microwaving protestors and blowing up the world.
Get rid of those damned voting machines, now. If the Republicans didn't know for th most part that the voting machines were being manipulated, they know now, after so many studies have shown how to do it. Even if you think no one stole an election using those damned things before, they will be stolen now. They've step-by-step instructions. How can they possibly stop themselves? You think a little vote change is going to present moral problems to the party that gave us an Iraqi invasion, an executive who claims he has authority to cancel the constitution, 14,000 people kidnapped into secret prisons, that gave us Swift-boating and Ken Starr?
Why just the Republicans? I've noodled it for years now (soapbox time) and I've narrowed it down to this: business morality. All seem to be profoundly religious, seem to anyway, and profess godly morality and all that. BUT. It's a party of businessmen, whereas Democrats tend to be a populist party. Businessmen, have you ever noticed, no matter their private morality, shut off the Ten Commandments as soon as they're on the clock? Lying, cheating, and stealing, even killing, is okay if you do it in the name of winning. This businessman's exemption to common ideas of morality is overwhelmingly present in the Republican party's situational ethics. Lying isn't just a necessity, it's practically a sport with them. There's so much BS pouring forth per second on Fox News that the heads are strangling, trying not to break out laughing in wonder at how much crap they can say without losing any professional credibilty.
Unfortunately, business's preocupation with fibbing and ignoring reality to make short-term gains inevitably butts up with reality. Cognitive dissonance, big time. Even a country that watches "Lost" instead of the news -- and who can blame it, considering how "balanced" and useless the news is now -- is noticing that the buggers are lying to them.
"It's just that only around now has technology reached the point where HDTV is practical. (Wasn't the original HDTV rollout years something like 1997, 2000, 2003, and so on until technology became cheap and available?)"
I'm probably the only one here who is 1) old enough to remember, and 2) actually paying attention to the HDTV fiasco from 1985 onwards.
Analog HDTV was rolled out in Japan in the 1980's. A bit stung, the American television manufactures and the networks hammered together a proposal to broadcast 1080p in the following way: standard def over the usual VHF channels, while the HD component would be broadcast over unused channels. Thus, Channel 2 CBS would go out as normal, while an HDTV set would take that signal and add information broadcast over channel, say, 3. All analog. All broadcast. The rollout would have been around 1990 or so.
A funny thing happened. Digital video. The broadcasters saw what digital compression could do for them. Why just one channel, using all that bandwidth, when we can now use the same two channels and broadcast 4 programs simo? We promise that sometimes we'll broadcast in HD; just most of the time, we'd like to make more money with four low-def channels. And they demanded, and got, 1080 (i), to halve the signal and enable more channels on the side thereby.
And their wish was granted. These were the years of no-regulation, after all. The issue of public ownership of the airwaves was going bye-bye, and the government would like to auction off those frequencies anyway, which leads us to
Cable. Since so much programming was going over cable, the Gov decided that public regulation of public airwaves was silly and undermining competition. So long Fairness Doctrine, so long limits on corporate ownership and monopoly control. And so additionally, why force public airwaves to go digital when cable could deliver it so much better than they?
And network TV didn't really want to pay to upgrade, either, so that slowed it down a lot. Delay after delay...
THEN the kicker. The "content owners" saw that in the digital age they had a chance to lock down signals and force people to pay each time they accessed their "property". They wanted taping to go away as well -- they hated VCR's and almost killed the tech in 1984. They could win this one, and so was born the Broadcast Flag, a digital lock on transmissions that controlled the use of the program. Cue a big delay as HDMI, HTCP and all the other locks were developed and approved by the "content" industry.
Now... it's the 21st century. almost 20 years late, and we've crappy 1080i signals going over the air, infomercials clogging all those channels we can access for free, and we can't record the standard 1080i signal.
Remember, the public airwaves are supposed to belong to we the people, and the broadcasters and producers are supposed to dance to our tune. Somehow they are now the masters, and we those begging for mercy.
"That said, I'm convinced there were shennanigans from both sides in 2000 and 2004 -- but taking exit polls as fact is fundamentally flawed."
Statistically, no. They were never flawed. The polls match the vote results, as statisticians know what they are doing, and history backs me up. Not to mention that the elections in Chechnya were anulled and redone because the exit polls didn't match the counts -- and the polls were right, and the votes WERE manipulated in the first election as the second election (far better monitored) changed the results enormously.
The idea that exit polls are flawed came from the Republicans in 2000 on those talking head shows, trying to explain away the obvious fact that someone rigged the election results in the contested areas, as those were the only places where statistics magically stopped functioning. The networks threw up their hands at their own exit-poll operations, which were fantastically accurate until they hit Florida in 2000, and decided rather than conclude that statistic work and vote counts were fishy, that Republicans were right and statistics somehow didn't work anymore ipso facto. Bullshit, of course. But the Republicans were in power in both the government and their own network boardrooms, and butting heads with them has been shown not to be a good career move.
So now we don't have exit polls. Hooray! Now there is absolutely NO evidence if someone electronically rigs an election, no backup system as we used to have. Exit poll stats don't match outcome, stats therefore are "flawed", therefore get rid exit polls, end of problem. This is magical thinking, and works well in the US which is a magic-based nation, anyway.
Exit polls were never "flawed", as their performance has shown for over a decade. Someone has fucked us in the collective asses, and then used the outcome to remove the assfucking detectors.
Bingo. I am an olde tyme computer fart, the kind that started in BASIC back in the day. In business, they taught us COBOL and various add-on packages like FOCUS.
I noticed the rise of object-based code when I was very young, and unlike most, I said "What the HELL is this crap? Are they trying to get rid of normal humans in the coding business?" and like statements.
Unlike most who jumped in and swam with the OO fishes, I declined the honor. Explanations, in my ignorance:
OO code was developed by people who think in calculus and set theory. It seems natural to them. Most people don't know calculus and never will. The opinions of math majors are immaterial; people don't need calculus, matrix algebra, set theory, information theory, all that you need to even begin to write good code in OO languages.
Math major are usually geniuses, or have aberational mental processes that let them focus on a problem for days or weeks at a time. I know, I'm one of those people. But most people aren't geniuses, don't care to work on code for days, and don't know why anyone would want to. But OO is designed by those people for those people. It's like a lodge of math geeks.
This reliance on mathematical geniuses to use languages created by mathematical geniuses lead to some nice job security. But it doesn't help the actualy world, because the world needs code that is simple to write, debug, and maintain. OO is NONE of those things, and yes, I do know about spaghetti code in BASIC and the simple reusability etc. of OO code. But resuability and such can be done in non-OO languages as well; it just takes discipline.
We are moving into a world where absolutely everything is dependent on code, and the code is incomprehensible to people who haven't had four or five years of solid math training, then years of CS instruction. This is intolerable because there aren't enough such people in the world. People usually don't want to spend a decade of their lives reading books and drinking Jolt just to write a banking app.
The usual counter argument is "Fuck you, learn math and CS, the past is over, etc.". But I've been both in and out of CS and I have to say that fundamental problems in the real world are not being solved because of the bottleneck caused by the mountain placed in the way of coding for apps needed on the fly. David Brin is right: students and businesses are now consumers of code, not producers.
Perl is good, Ruby is good, these are things that alleviate the problem a lot. But even now, they are OO-ing Perl and making the CS profs happy -- and it's becoming yet another incomprehensible language with a steep learning curve.
Um, let me make a simpler argument, the same one I'm responding to, and it's a damned good one. Look at the VERBIAGE on those "modern" programs. What the HELL are you people thinking? Just typing all that slows down development enormously.
I guess the next thing to do (if I'm so clever) would be to develop a simple, usable language for non-CS students. I kinda think someone did it already, many times. But no students will ever see it.
CS professors and coders are logjamming development of simpler solutions, because they are fundamentally conservative, deeply so. They have invested most of their lives in learning Rube Goldbergian code architecture and aren't going to change.
LOTR was one book, one novel. The publisher split the work into three books, not Tolkien. The book was just too big to be published commercially as one volume.
A seventeen year old can legally carry a rifle and shoot people, and be shot in return, if they join the armed forces. You can kill, but you can't have sex. The comparisons are endless.
And if everyone who had crossed the age-limit lines in real life were actually identified and arrested, over half the damned country would be in prison.
This kiddie porn scare is the witchhunt of our times. No actual numbers, just fear, accusation and intimidation.
And to put some gasoline onto the fire here, I say with fervor that those who chase the pedophiles are almost certainly pedos themselves. I mean who else has the biggest kiddie porn collections but the kiddie porn crusaders? Think about it. Kick in a door of a righteous preacher and he's always closeted with the demons he rails most against.
Thinking about it, all a government, a cult, or a business has to do now to bring down any network is to slip some kiddie porn into the cloud. Instant shutdown, confiscation and imprisonment of anyone who moved a packet.
Orwell was too optimistic. No prison was ever this monitored.
I was reading the http://www.mises.org/story/1568 ten economic fallacies article the other day, and an eleventh fallacy occured to me:
Intellectual property is indispensible to a free market economy.
The question actually is: what does intellectual property cost our economy, and does the balance accrue in our favor?
First up is the cost of the absolutely overwhelming, inescapable and expensive, Cold War insanity expensive, police state that we are building here and around the world to create a regulated economy for non-existent property. We actually have to monitor what people say, what they watch, what they hear, what they write, where they go, where they point recording devices. Then we have to build the prisons to house all those miscreants, and fund the courts and the lawyers to lock 'em all up. And this criminalization industry adds nothing to the economy (Broken Window fallacy) -- it merely costs.
The next and killer cost is the cost of lost opportunity. Let's take what used to fuel the growth of science: free and open dissemination of information for all to share. This freedom fired the intellectual explosion that gave us calculus and steam engines, an explosion that sadly is being contained by IP firewalls around corporations and universities as they become profit engines. The shrouding of research is slowing science and technology growth by a significant amount. The question is: what could have been learned by now had these new IP lords not restricted the flow of knowledge? This is not covered by cost accounting, which picks and chooses a narrow field of debits and credits that merely cover what profit IP gives the cost accountants, not the civilization as a whole. The advance of science since the Renaissance has been derailed in the last fifty years.
Extending that idea, what could be the profit to the civilization as a whole if every single book, all movies, all magazines, all sound recordings, all designs, were released in a timely fashion, as the Constititution's writers ordained, and inventors and artists could access everything that mankind has ever created, anytime they liked? What new Renaissance is being throttled by the greedy little men who have sold the idea that ideas and visions are not only their private property, subject to packaging and resale like stock, but theirs for all time to come?
What is this new paradigm of eternal ownership of mankind's knowledge in ever more concentrated (read wealthy) hands giving us, as a people, in comparison to what it is denying us?
Are we losing knowledge that could counter global warming? Breakthroughs in chemistry that could neutralize waste? Genetic breakthroughs that could cure cancer, diabetes, AIDS? Breakthroughs in propulsion that could give us space for pennies? Organic printers that could create infinite amounts of food from garbage? What books could be written?
Most importantly, what young minds could be sparked if children could sit down at a screen and feed the Elephant's Child, reading and watching and listening to anything and everything that interests them?
As a child, in my city school, there were only a few science fiction books on the shelves. I read "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" and "Time for the Stars" twenty times each or more. When I arrived at high school, I found rows of SF, and "wasted" time reading each and every one. What could I have done, what could I have imagined my life to be, had I access to all that had been written, for free, since the time I could read at the age of eight?
"As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture. It is rooted in our history and has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in the country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti- intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian."
"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. . . . The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue."
". . . Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not -- but a combination of the dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday's efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, Anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti- furriners' in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening -- particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington."
". . . Impossible? Remember the Klan in the Twenties and how far it got without even a dynamic leader. . . The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed."
It's time to tear up the old left/right scale. William Randolph Hearst and his ilk are dead, and it's past time to throw out the trash.
The basic division are this: people who believe business is the path to freedom, and want no government interference, and those who believe business is as coercive as any government, and needs to be controlled by government. Corporatism is the ultimate expression of the first, and is an outgrowth of the worldview of the Gilded Age financiers of the 19th century. The other division is hard to define as a named group, as it merely expresses opposition to the corporatists' outlook.
Some people believe in a balance, a "moderate" split between the two positions, but in reality the "corporatist" model doesn't believe in compromise and thus war is joined. This has been the central conflict of the last 150 years.
In the Future History timeline, there was one unwritten novel, "The Sound of His Wings", the story of the rise of southern backwoods preacher Neremiah Scudder to the Presidency of the United States, whereupon he suspended the Constitution, declared himself dictator under God's Law and declared himself the First Prophet.
Heinlein decided not to write the novel because he detested the bastard. But the fall of the U.S. into religious dicatorship (written in 1941!) as chronicled in "If This Goes On --" and subsequent FH stories needs to be completed, I've thought, since I first read it in 1976. Hell, it let me recognize Jerry Falwell and Robertson in 1977 in their march on Washington for what they were. Heinlein grew up in Missouri and knew what the people he came from were capable of. The story is being written every day, as preachers get special White House briefings and all personnel in the WH are expected to attend Bible class every day. Bush's core 30 percent truly believe he was selected by God (as Bush himself has stated, although more guardedly that his supporters) to convert the US to a Christian nation and prepare the way to the end of days as described by St. John of Patmos in the Book of Revelations. The US as always been primed for a religious dictatorship, and will be so even after this bunch of clowns are voted out. This tendency needs a good thrashing out in a novel.
"Clinton was being deposed on Paula Jones (who later said she was used and dumped by the Arkansas Project actors) and the lawyers got a free pass to depose him on whatever they chose by fibbing to the judge about the relevance to Jones. Lewinsky was only pertinent to destroying Clinton, not the case at hand. They had a party. (And Clinton still managed to dodge the bastards by having the judge rule "sex" as intercourse. Technically, he did not lie. And I'd still like those two bastard lawyers to be brought up on charges for lying as officers of the court. But Clinton got fined instead. A lot of white-hooded types in Arkansas government didn't like Clinton, and got their vengeance that day.)
There are certain types of lawyers that would be considered dangerous sociopaths in any other venue but their day jobs."
Amazing. The simple, reported truth is "flamebait". If it's about Clinton. Lies are acceptable.
The majority of the population doesn't care about school funding, tortured confessions, faked up wars, New Orleans, evolution, Afghanistan, electric cars, space, books, or... you get the idea.
3-10 per cent of the population has always carried the civilization for the mute and disinterested majority, same as it always has. I really don't care about what the majority cares about. (Star Search, or some other "reality" show, isn't that the focus of the age?)
Clinton was being deposed on Paula Jones (who later said she was used and dumped by the Arkansas Project actors) and the lawyers got a free pass to depose him on whatever they chose by fibbing to the judge about the relevance to Jones. Lewinsky was only pertinent to destroying Clinton, not the case at hand. They had a party. (And Clinton still managed to dodge the bastards by having the judge rule "sex" as intercourse. Technically, he did not lie. And I'd still like those two bastard lawyers to be brought up on charges for lying as officers of the court. But Clinton got fined instead. A lot of white-hooded types in Arkansas government didn't like Clinton, and got their vengeance that day.)
There are certain types of lawyers that would be considered dangerous sociopaths in any other venue but their day jobs.
"This may sound like news to you, but your "rights" are granted to you by the same government that can revoke them."
NO.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the purfuit of Happiness."
Rights are what you have, not what you are given. The government and the constitution did not create them for you, and can only be taken from you by a criminal government. This, allegedly is what our soldiers have died for. Apparently no one seems to know what our country is.
The GOVERNMENT is constrained by the constitution, and has no powers not granted to it by the constitution. Your rights as a free human are written in the stars and in your soul, and exist as long as you remember that you possess them, and that no man owns you or your rights. If you have to, you die to keep them. If you can, live and keep them.
How can this country survive when the smartest among us don't understand what we stand for?
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And Bush/Gonzales decided that getting any warrants at all was odious, and ignored the law. A lot of the surveillance has been against ant-Bush and peace groups. And agents provocateurs have been deployed to make such groups do stupid things -- and failed. And that's just a tiny number of offences we know about.
Still waiting for the impeachment proceedings.
Once again, everyone is staring at the golf ball where it lies rather than 18 holes down the course. This is an intermediate step, one of many to come, in which no laws control the dictator president, and they watch everyone they like for whatever purposes they like until the end of time. And people will still be arguing on slashdot that every new law is merely an incremental change on already accepted practices.
And oh yeah. McCain and the others recommended legalizing torture yesterday. Thought you'd all like to know.
Who is "they"? And how are they monitored, exactly? And what is a "viable threat"?
We have laws for this already. But they require courts and warrants. This bill removes those silly impedances. We'll just have nice, smooth secret surveillance of anyone they don't like, forever and ever and ever...
Anti-terror fish? Fish that keep me from freaking out in horror flicks? Are they narcotic? How do they keep fear at bay? Do they fire darts full of tranqullizer? Do they sing happy songs? Do I get a hug when I'm feeling scared?
How exactly do you keep water free of fear, then?
Isn't the "terror" in your own heads? Hard for even a very small fish to get into your actual head. Must be bio-engineered to get in through the sinus cavity.
I powered through school in order to become a programmer, back in the day. 12 months a year, 23 credits a semester, one, two jobs at the same time. I thought I was in a hurry.
In my old age, I know realize that the facts I learned weren't the education. I missed an education. I never had time to make friends or go to a party or watch TV.
The education is being with people as smart as you, as young as you. It's watching Battlestar Galactica together and learning about how other people think about moral questions... it's about making friends with your professors and the TA's. College is where you start making the friends that will connect you with the world as you leave school, giving you access to jobs and communities and a life.
If I had a summary, it would be: goof off in college. Spend an extra year there. Talk to everyone. Take a difficult course twice. Don't be afraid to change concentrations. Go to parties. Get drunk. Meet the opposite sex, even the same sex if that floats your boat. Maybe even at the same time. Live. Learn everything. Cheat authority at every turn, 'cause that disrespect and ability to bypass idiot rules will give you real success at life -- conformity makes you a loser, no matter what toys they give you. There is no other time or place in your whole life that will let you be yourself again, so grab it while you can.
This kid has educated himself into mediocrity.
Neh. No. It's not that the aims of big oil and big tobacco are the same; it's that the tobacco industry developed the methodology of creating bullshit "science" foundations and fake citizens' groups, combined with professional and surgical insertion of false memes into the popular culture through shills in the media.
I assume that big oil just wanted big tobacco's expertise in suppressing science and creating false "controversy" in the garbage news industry. I think we've witnessed our first corporate memetic mitosis.
The aim isn't to fund science, it's to create a false air of debate when the facts just don't warrant it. "Reasonable people can disagree on this matter" is the meme they want floating through the blow-dried heads of the media gods. But of course, reasonable people don't disagree. Unreasonable liars disagree. But no one is allowed to call a corporate shill a liar anymore, I guess. That wouldn't be "balanced".
Journalists are now inculated with the idea that their job is to present both "sides" of an "issue", where "reasonable" people can disagree. They don't take sides. The result of this is that PR masters can create BS "sides" and create fake debate that dethrone reason and install "balance". (I'd like to see this done with religious talking heads. Fat chance.)
A reasonable news industry would winnow out and dismiss the robots dancing to their masters tune. There would be no "debate". Hell, you can't find any opinion to the "left" of Ronald Reagan in the news shows anymore, so they apparently *can* filter out what they consider nuts; they unfortunately can't seem to apply their debate filters to fake science corporate fronts and economic looting institutes.
How about a world where we aren't spied on every moment of our lives to monitor the possiblity that we are listening to music without paying -- what used to be normal until the twentieth century.How about no commercial police state?
How about, oh, artists being paid for performances rather than recordings? Almost no artists make money from deals with record companies, as the companies have their own private accounting theories. Artists get real money from live performances, hence the record companies buying up concert venues to rip off that cash stream.
Buy creating the commercial police state to monitor transfers of non-existent "property", what we really would be doing is giving the record companies an eternal revenue stream, making them immortal rather than letting them die as the useless parasites they really are. And they will rape the artists. Not a prediction: they already are cutting down the percentages on digital downloads payable to the artists themselves. They are stealing the money, and the commercial police state will simply lock artists into being their victims until the end of time.
Almost everything Tolkien wrote, he wrote for his own pleasure, and his writings were always a work in progress. For example, the Silmarillion is a compendium of hundreds of writings, with many versions of the same stories spread over decades of J.R.R.'s life. The elves were originally called gnomes, for instance. Tolkien just didn't have enough time to finish his evolving mythology.
His son has been publishing those writings for years in the Lost Tales series of books. I think there's no one better qualified or knowledgable to do the work than he. If he managed to pull together a Hurin book, I'll be the first in line to buy it.
Reminds me of the "Long Range Foundation" in Heinlein's juvenile, "Time for the Stars". A foundation dedicated to pouring enormous amounts of money into basic research that no business wants to touch.
.com, eventually. American business culture has forgotten that "bread cast upon the water comes back sevenfold", the charter of the LRF. Non-military basic research. We don't do that anymore. Even the universities have become proprietary corporate entities.
Google.org is going to be richer than the
How much has the Cold War and the "War on Terror" cost us by pouring money into better ways of killing instead of say, the trivial task of building a decent battery/capacitor? We're not rich at all now, compared to what we could have gained had we been sane and financed research and infrastructure instead of ways of microwaving protestors and blowing up the world.
"Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"
Yes. So was 2000. So, also, will 2008 be stolen.
Get rid of those damned voting machines, now. If the Republicans didn't know for th most part that the voting machines were being manipulated, they know now, after so many studies have shown how to do it. Even if you think no one stole an election using those damned things before, they will be stolen now. They've step-by-step instructions. How can they possibly stop themselves? You think a little vote change is going to present moral problems to the party that gave us an Iraqi invasion, an executive who claims he has authority to cancel the constitution, 14,000 people kidnapped into secret prisons, that gave us Swift-boating and Ken Starr?
Why just the Republicans? I've noodled it for years now (soapbox time) and I've narrowed it down to this: business morality. All seem to be profoundly religious, seem to anyway, and profess godly morality and all that. BUT. It's a party of businessmen, whereas Democrats tend to be a populist party. Businessmen, have you ever noticed, no matter their private morality, shut off the Ten Commandments as soon as they're on the clock? Lying, cheating, and stealing, even killing, is okay if you do it in the name of winning. This businessman's exemption to common ideas of morality is overwhelmingly present in the Republican party's situational ethics. Lying isn't just a necessity, it's practically a sport with them. There's so much BS pouring forth per second on Fox News that the heads are strangling, trying not to break out laughing in wonder at how much crap they can say without losing any professional credibilty.
Unfortunately, business's preocupation with fibbing and ignoring reality to make short-term gains inevitably butts up with reality. Cognitive dissonance, big time. Even a country that watches "Lost" instead of the news -- and who can blame it, considering how "balanced" and useless the news is now -- is noticing that the buggers are lying to them.
"It's just that only around now has technology reached the point where HDTV is practical. (Wasn't the original HDTV rollout years something like 1997, 2000, 2003, and so on until technology became cheap and available?)"
I'm probably the only one here who is 1) old enough to remember, and 2) actually paying attention to the HDTV fiasco from 1985 onwards.
Analog HDTV was rolled out in Japan in the 1980's. A bit stung, the American television manufactures and the networks hammered together a proposal to broadcast 1080p in the following way: standard def over the usual VHF channels, while the HD component would be broadcast over unused channels. Thus, Channel 2 CBS would go out as normal, while an HDTV set would take that signal and add information broadcast over channel, say, 3. All analog. All broadcast. The rollout would have been around 1990 or so.
A funny thing happened. Digital video. The broadcasters saw what digital compression could do for them. Why just one channel, using all that bandwidth, when we can now use the same two channels and broadcast 4 programs simo? We promise that sometimes we'll broadcast in HD; just most of the time, we'd like to make more money with four low-def channels. And they demanded, and got, 1080 (i), to halve the signal and enable more channels on the side thereby.
And their wish was granted. These were the years of no-regulation, after all. The issue of public ownership of the airwaves was going bye-bye, and the government would like to auction off those frequencies anyway, which leads us to
Cable. Since so much programming was going over cable, the Gov decided that public regulation of public airwaves was silly and undermining competition. So long Fairness Doctrine, so long limits on corporate ownership and monopoly control. And so additionally, why force public airwaves to go digital when cable could deliver it so much better than they?
And network TV didn't really want to pay to upgrade, either, so that slowed it down a lot. Delay after delay...
THEN the kicker. The "content owners" saw that in the digital age they had a chance to lock down signals and force people to pay each time they accessed their "property". They wanted taping to go away as well -- they hated VCR's and almost killed the tech in 1984. They could win this one, and so was born the Broadcast Flag, a digital lock on transmissions that controlled the use of the program. Cue a big delay as HDMI, HTCP and all the other locks were developed and approved by the "content" industry.
Now... it's the 21st century. almost 20 years late, and we've crappy 1080i signals going over the air, infomercials clogging all those channels we can access for free, and we can't record the standard 1080i signal.
Remember, the public airwaves are supposed to belong to we the people, and the broadcasters and producers are supposed to dance to our tune. Somehow they are now the masters, and we those begging for mercy.
"That said, I'm convinced there were shennanigans from both sides in 2000 and 2004 -- but taking exit polls as fact is fundamentally flawed."
Statistically, no. They were never flawed. The polls match the vote results, as statisticians know what they are doing, and history backs me up. Not to mention that the elections in Chechnya were anulled and redone because the exit polls didn't match the counts -- and the polls were right, and the votes WERE manipulated in the first election as the second election (far better monitored) changed the results enormously.
The idea that exit polls are flawed came from the Republicans in 2000 on those talking head shows, trying to explain away the obvious fact that someone rigged the election results in the contested areas, as those were the only places where statistics magically stopped functioning. The networks threw up their hands at their own exit-poll operations, which were fantastically accurate until they hit Florida in 2000, and decided rather than conclude that statistic work and vote counts were fishy, that Republicans were right and statistics somehow didn't work anymore ipso facto. Bullshit, of course. But the Republicans were in power in both the government and their own network boardrooms, and butting heads with them has been shown not to be a good career move.
So now we don't have exit polls. Hooray! Now there is absolutely NO evidence if someone electronically rigs an election, no backup system as we used to have. Exit poll stats don't match outcome, stats therefore are "flawed", therefore get rid exit polls, end of problem. This is magical thinking, and works well in the US which is a magic-based nation, anyway.
Exit polls were never "flawed", as their performance has shown for over a decade. Someone has fucked us in the collective asses, and then used the outcome to remove the assfucking detectors.
Bingo. I am an olde tyme computer fart, the kind that started in BASIC back in the day. In business, they taught us COBOL and various add-on packages like FOCUS.
I noticed the rise of object-based code when I was very young, and unlike most, I said "What the HELL is this crap? Are they trying to get rid of normal humans in the coding business?" and like statements.
Unlike most who jumped in and swam with the OO fishes, I declined the honor. Explanations, in my ignorance:
OO code was developed by people who think in calculus and set theory. It seems natural to them.
Most people don't know calculus and never will. The opinions of math majors are immaterial; people don't need calculus, matrix algebra, set theory, information theory, all that you need to even begin to write good code in OO languages.
Math major are usually geniuses, or have aberational mental processes that let them focus on a problem for days or weeks at a time. I know, I'm one of those people. But most people aren't geniuses, don't care to work on code for days, and don't know why anyone would want to. But OO is designed by those people for those people. It's like a lodge of math geeks.
This reliance on mathematical geniuses to use languages created by mathematical geniuses lead to some nice job security. But it doesn't help the actualy world, because the world needs code that is simple to write, debug, and maintain. OO is NONE of those things, and yes, I do know about spaghetti code in BASIC and the simple reusability etc. of OO code. But resuability and such can be done in non-OO languages as well; it just takes discipline.
We are moving into a world where absolutely everything is dependent on code, and the code is incomprehensible to people who haven't had four or five years of solid math training, then years of CS instruction. This is intolerable because there aren't enough such people in the world. People usually don't want to spend a decade of their lives reading books and drinking Jolt just to write a banking app.
The usual counter argument is "Fuck you, learn math and CS, the past is over, etc.". But I've been both in and out of CS and I have to say that fundamental problems in the real world are not being solved because of the bottleneck caused by the mountain placed in the way of coding for apps needed on the fly. David Brin is right: students and businesses are now consumers of code, not producers.
Perl is good, Ruby is good, these are things that alleviate the problem a lot. But even now, they are OO-ing Perl and making the CS profs happy -- and it's becoming yet another incomprehensible language with a steep learning curve.
Um, let me make a simpler argument, the same one I'm responding to, and it's a damned good one. Look at the VERBIAGE on those "modern" programs. What the HELL are you people thinking? Just typing all that slows down development enormously.
I guess the next thing to do (if I'm so clever) would be to develop a simple, usable language for non-CS students. I kinda think someone did it already, many times. But no students will ever see it.
CS professors and coders are logjamming development of simpler solutions, because they are fundamentally conservative, deeply so. They have invested most of their lives in learning Rube Goldbergian code architecture and aren't going to change.
I'll just continue to watch the meltdown.
LOTR was one book, one novel. The publisher split the work into three books, not Tolkien. The book was just too big to be published commercially as one volume.
Nope. Elrond is at least 2,000 years old.
A seventeen year old can legally carry a rifle and shoot people, and be shot in return, if they join the armed forces. You can kill, but you can't have sex. The comparisons are endless.
And if everyone who had crossed the age-limit lines in real life were actually identified and arrested, over half the damned country would be in prison.
This kiddie porn scare is the witchhunt of our times. No actual numbers, just fear, accusation and intimidation.
And to put some gasoline onto the fire here, I say with fervor that those who chase the pedophiles are almost certainly pedos themselves. I mean who else has the biggest kiddie porn collections but the kiddie porn crusaders? Think about it. Kick in a door of a righteous preacher and he's always closeted with the demons he rails most against.
Thinking about it, all a government, a cult, or a business has to do now to bring down any network is to slip some kiddie porn into the cloud. Instant shutdown, confiscation and imprisonment of anyone who moved a packet.
Orwell was too optimistic. No prison was ever this monitored.
"Why not just give money to the school system?"
The school system did pay for it. They really just paid to have MS create a corportacratic school.
I was reading the http://www.mises.org/story/1568 ten economic fallacies article the other day, and an eleventh fallacy occured to me:
Intellectual property is indispensible to a free market economy.
The question actually is: what does intellectual property cost our economy, and does the balance accrue in our favor?
First up is the cost of the absolutely overwhelming, inescapable and expensive, Cold War insanity expensive, police state that we are building here and around the world to create a regulated economy for non-existent property. We actually have to monitor what people say, what they watch, what they hear, what they write, where they go, where they point recording devices. Then we have to build the prisons to house all those miscreants, and fund the courts and the lawyers to lock 'em all up. And this criminalization industry adds nothing to the economy (Broken Window fallacy) -- it merely costs.
The next and killer cost is the cost of lost opportunity. Let's take what used to fuel the growth of science: free and open dissemination of information for all to share. This freedom fired the intellectual explosion that gave us calculus and steam engines, an explosion that sadly is being contained by IP firewalls around corporations and universities as they become profit engines. The shrouding of research is slowing science and technology growth by a significant amount. The question is: what could have been learned by now had these new IP lords not restricted the flow of knowledge? This is not covered by cost accounting, which picks and chooses a narrow field of debits and credits that merely cover what profit IP gives the cost accountants, not the civilization as a whole. The advance of science since the Renaissance has been derailed in the last fifty years.
Extending that idea, what could be the profit to the civilization as a whole if every single book, all movies, all magazines, all sound recordings, all designs, were released in a timely fashion, as the Constititution's writers ordained, and inventors and artists could access everything that mankind has ever created, anytime they liked? What new Renaissance is being throttled by the greedy little men who have sold the idea that ideas and visions are not only their private property, subject to packaging and resale like stock, but theirs for all time to come?
What is this new paradigm of eternal ownership of mankind's knowledge in ever more concentrated (read wealthy) hands giving us, as a people, in comparison to what it is denying us?
Are we losing knowledge that could counter global warming?
Breakthroughs in chemistry that could neutralize waste?
Genetic breakthroughs that could cure cancer, diabetes, AIDS?
Breakthroughs in propulsion that could give us space for pennies?
Organic printers that could create infinite amounts of food from garbage?
What books could be written?
Most importantly, what young minds could be sparked if children could sit down at a screen and feed the Elephant's Child, reading and watching and listening to anything and everything that interests them?
As a child, in my city school, there were only a few science fiction books on the shelves. I read "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" and "Time for the Stars" twenty times each or more. When I arrived at high school, I found rows of SF, and "wasted" time reading each and every one. What could I have done, what could I have imagined my life to be, had I access to all that had been written, for free, since the time I could read at the age of eight?
Multiply me by a billion. What have we lost?
Heinlein:
"As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture. It is rooted in our history and has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in the country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti- intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian."
"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. . . . The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue."
". . . Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not -- but a combination of the dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday's efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, Anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti- furriners' in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening -- particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington."
". . . Impossible? Remember the Klan in the Twenties and how far it got without even a dynamic leader. . . The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed."
It's time to tear up the old left/right scale. William Randolph Hearst and his ilk are dead, and it's past time to throw out the trash.
The basic division are this: people who believe business is the path to freedom, and want no government interference, and those who believe business is as coercive as any government, and needs to be controlled by government. Corporatism is the ultimate expression of the first, and is an outgrowth of the worldview of the Gilded Age financiers of the 19th century. The other division is hard to define as a named group, as it merely expresses opposition to the corporatists' outlook.
Some people believe in a balance, a "moderate" split between the two positions, but in reality the "corporatist" model doesn't believe in compromise and thus war is joined. This has been the central conflict of the last 150 years.
In the Future History timeline, there was one unwritten novel, "The Sound of His Wings", the story of the rise of southern backwoods preacher Neremiah Scudder to the Presidency of the United States, whereupon he suspended the Constitution, declared himself dictator under God's Law and declared himself the First Prophet.
Heinlein decided not to write the novel because he detested the bastard. But the fall of the U.S. into religious dicatorship (written in 1941!) as chronicled in "If This Goes On --" and subsequent FH stories needs to be completed, I've thought, since I first read it in 1976. Hell, it let me recognize Jerry Falwell and Robertson in 1977 in their march on Washington for what they were. Heinlein grew up in Missouri and knew what the people he came from were capable of. The story is being written every day, as preachers get special White House briefings and all personnel in the WH are expected to attend Bible class every day. Bush's core 30 percent truly believe he was selected by God (as Bush himself has stated, although more guardedly that his supporters) to convert the US to a Christian nation and prepare the way to the end of days as described by St. John of Patmos in the Book of Revelations. The US as always been primed for a religious dictatorship, and will be so even after this bunch of clowns are voted out. This tendency needs a good thrashing out in a novel.
"Clinton was being deposed on Paula Jones (who later said she was used and dumped by the Arkansas Project actors) and the lawyers got a free pass to depose him on whatever they chose by fibbing to the judge about the relevance to Jones. Lewinsky was only pertinent to destroying Clinton, not the case at hand. They had a party. (And Clinton still managed to dodge the bastards by having the judge rule "sex" as intercourse. Technically, he did not lie. And I'd still like those two bastard lawyers to be brought up on charges for lying as officers of the court. But Clinton got fined instead. A lot of white-hooded types in Arkansas government didn't like Clinton, and got their vengeance that day.)
There are certain types of lawyers that would be considered dangerous sociopaths in any other venue but their day jobs."
Amazing. The simple, reported truth is "flamebait". If it's about Clinton. Lies are acceptable.
The majority of the population doesn't care about school funding, tortured confessions, faked up wars, New Orleans, evolution, Afghanistan, electric cars, space, books, or ... you get the idea.
3-10 per cent of the population has always carried the civilization for the mute and disinterested majority, same as it always has. I really don't care about what the majority cares about. (Star Search, or some other "reality" show, isn't that the focus of the age?)
Clinton was being deposed on Paula Jones (who later said she was used and dumped by the Arkansas Project actors) and the lawyers got a free pass to depose him on whatever they chose by fibbing to the judge about the relevance to Jones. Lewinsky was only pertinent to destroying Clinton, not the case at hand. They had a party. (And Clinton still managed to dodge the bastards by having the judge rule "sex" as intercourse. Technically, he did not lie. And I'd still like those two bastard lawyers to be brought up on charges for lying as officers of the court. But Clinton got fined instead. A lot of white-hooded types in Arkansas government didn't like Clinton, and got their vengeance that day.)
There are certain types of lawyers that would be considered dangerous sociopaths in any other venue but their day jobs.
"This may sound like news to you, but your "rights" are granted to you by the same government that can revoke them."
NO.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the purfuit of Happiness."
Rights are what you have, not what you are given. The government and the constitution did not create them for you, and can only be taken from you by a criminal government. This, allegedly is what our soldiers have died for. Apparently no one seems to know what our country is.
The GOVERNMENT is constrained by the constitution, and has no powers not granted to it by the constitution. Your rights as a free human are written in the stars and in your soul, and exist as long as you remember that you possess them, and that no man owns you or your rights. If you have to, you die to keep them. If you can, live and keep them.
How can this country survive when the smartest among us don't understand what we stand for?