Okay, fair enuf. Two companies have extentions. But they will have to comply sometime. (Who are they, BTW?)
And, even though they may not comply by reading your GPS information, the *phones* made after 2004 must have the feature, enabled at the company or no.
And yep triangulation is sometimes possible with multiple tower reads and such, I can see that. They could always at least know which tower you are currently using. But the accuracy is so-so, within hundreds of feet or yards. Not exactly the he-was-standing-right-here-at-the-time-Mr.-Homelan d-Security-Official accuracy, or more evil, the ability to produce a real time map of your movements while the phone is switched on for the rest of your bloody life.
I can discuss the situation, but I cannot transmit a sense of outrage to people who just can't feel it because of their acclimation to a growing police state mentality. People do like police states: the right kind of unpopular opinions and people get swept away, and that is always happy-making for most.
I like the freedom to go places without being logged. It's just a preference. I don't like police states. They breed fools and monsters whilst their streets are clean of criminals and badthinkers. All they have to do is redefine the concept of "criminal", and the mind boggles.
Nope, not triangulation. All new cell phones in the U.S. produced 2005 and beyond are reading real GPS satellite signals, noting your location, and transmitting it to the cell phone company. A 2001 federal law mandates the GPS. You cannot opt out. You can shut off the feature via the menu, but I somehow doubt that it stays off if someone wants it turned back on, esp. without your consent.
As a matter of fact, US Cellular customers without GPS enabled phones received a nasty letter from the company demanding that we buy a GPS phone immediately (free with new 2 year contract) or risk being charged a monthly penalty, which they would later determine. After a LOT of customers screamed, including me, the company sent an apology letter stating the phones would be free, and no contract would be necessary. I still haven't purchased a GPS phone, and probably never will. I detest, loathe, being tracked.
I had no idea that some people didn't know about all this. Learn something new every day. Glad to raise some awareness.
Yes, they do. And it scares me that people don't know this. ALL cell phones models sold in the U.S. post 2004 have GPS as a mandatory feature. And yes, they can track you, if for some reason someone wants such at thing done, by making your phone transmit your current location at whatever interval they desire.
It was mandated in 2001 and justified for use in 911 calls for assistance. It doesn't take a think tank to noodle out that the spooks and Homeland Security (I always want to snap off a heil at the sound of that name. "Homeland"? Who calls the U.S. the "homeland"?) wanted the feature to track, well, anyone at anytime they'd like.
You can disable the feature in a menu. Except, of course, for the override code they can transmit with or without notifying your phone. Trivial to turn it on in stealth mode. I can't believe such a code doesn't exist. Please. THIS bunch not demand that such a feature be enabled? Even if somehow it doesn't exist in current models, the U.S. will quietly boil the frog some more in a year or two and mandate the override code. If it can be done, they will do it. It's a gift from god to cops, spooks, cults, corporations, and overexcitable parents (like Leo Laporte. Aw Leo, you actually subscribe to a tracking service using the GPS on your kids' phone?).
Actually, there was a bit of a problem with webcams being activated by hackery a few years back. Solution: put a paper cup over the thing, or turn it to face the wall, if you're not into uncabling it when it's not in use. You really don't know if it is transmitting, if the power is on and the cable hooked up. Since you mention it as though it were maaad to think about a webcam as remotely controlled, I refer you to the olden days of a few years back when the odd remote-activate webcam hacks were popular.
Now. If the screen is a camera, activated by *software*, there is obviously a HUGE problem with remove activation. And after the last forty years of watching the frogs boiling happily in their pots, I see no reason why people won't eventually be convinced that camscreens should be mandated for, I dunno, catching pedos. There is nothing so rare or so stupid that the current majority of the U.S. won't swallow as an excuse for more monitoring. And after much thought, I've concluded that the diff between oldsters like me and the yunguns who pooh pooh privacy rights is that I *had* privacy rights as a kid, and the yunguns were raised in schools that I would consider prisons. I shudder to think of what my kid would become, raised in the mini-police states that schools are. Glad I don't have one.
I'm sure the next generation will happily rat out their parents for terrorist sympathies. Might have to move to Norway, Canada now undergoing bushification under the new regime. BID.
Here's a bit more ranting for you, happy-with-the-world one: cellphone microphones can be activated without your permission as well. Why not? And if you care, what do you have to hide, terrorist-coddler?
I'm not kidding here. After all, if I'd told you ten years ago that by 2005, all cell phones would have a mandatory GPS tracker broadcasting your location to the phone company as you move about, with a nominal abilty to be switched off (ha), would you have believed me?
I see no outrage over Homeland Security, your phone company, Scientology, and any random corporation with a legal staff being capable of tracking your movements for the rest of your lives. Where is the outrage?
I see no problem with camscreens becoming mandatory in the next 15 years. Even the techiest of the techies have no problem with the tracking devices in their phones, cameras on the streets, and eventually mandatory trackers in our cars, so letting Mr. X watch you as you all watch your computer screens is not a biggie. I can see an infinite number of excuses to make it required by law. Hell, even the emergency health care bit that they used for the cell phones could be re-rigged for this one.
And the generation of kids coming up through school have been seen drug tests, dog searches, RFID trackers, and lie detectors. They've been told they have no rights as minors, and I doubt they'll be any more rebellious as adults. They're also convinced they are surrounded by enemies wanting the kill them in their schoolbuses and office buildings, so the fear excuse is a big Go.
Such a neat device, a camscreen. Here's what I'd like: separate power circuits for the screen and the camera element array. So I *know* that the thing cannot operate without my permission. But I wanted that for my cell phone's tracking device, and so far the phone salesmen look at me like I'm bin Laden or a specially-abled adult who left his house without his nurse. (big thought: look overseas for a phone capable of giving me the option of being untracked, import the damned thing. Maybe I am a little slow).
The fact that the oil companies are gaming the system Enron-style to jack up their profits to 30+ billion dollars a quarter is itself a piece of intellectual property to the person who gathers the evidence for the story.
EVERYTHING written, EVERYTHING imagined can be "intellectual property", a term I loathe.
Including the very facts you need to make sane decisions. Control the spigot of knowledge, and you control the world. There's more going on than just movies and Coca Cola recipes. This is a setup for an authoritarian state with power to control facts via commericial IP laws. The government can just make a phone call to the owner of the "property" and the hammer of the law via the "owners" will shut inconvenient voices up.
READ. Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez made the terrorism comment when he released a statement supporting the bill. Gonzales = Bush.
If AG_Gonzales NE Bush then WhoTheFuckIsRunningTheWhiteHouse; endif
Congress is an appendage of Bush in this era. No arguments. Congress is under the neocons' control; the congresscritters are rubberstamping Bushism.
Bush/Cheney/Rove are running Congress, running the courts, gaming the news, making the laws. And through Gonzales, Mr. Torture is Okay and Fuck the Geneva Accords, proponent of the Unitary Executive (President is not subject to the law, President IS the law, and cannot by definition break a law), they have made their wishes known. And that wish is that this law passes, and that people are told IP crime funds terrorists.
If you don't follow any of this, you haven't been paying attention these past five years, have been watching FOX News, or both.
1. Create draconian laws to deal with "terrorism". Suspend the constitution, create secret prisons and torture chambers, kidnap thousands of people. Hooray for us against evil terrorism.
2. Redefine terrorism to whatever pisses the government off.
The US has tree farms, true. But we are a small part of the world, and the rest of humanity is trying to copy our model of consumption. They're making textbooks etc. out of trees that are simply chopped out of the jungles of Indonesia, India, and South America, and those trees are not being replanted. Deforestation is a global problem, not just an American one. We do have national forests, thank gods, and in spite of all the inroads the lumber corps have made under, especially, Reagan and Bush, we still have a lot of trees left. But the satellites do not lie. The world is being denuded of forested areas, for paper, for firewood, for furniture, for farm and grazing lands. The removal of significant numbers of trees will of course reduce the photosynthesis process worldwide, increasing the CO2 buildup a smidge, not to mention that trees do cool the air somewhat during their respiration cycle. Every good bit helps, every bad bit hinders. The warming cycle can be accelerated or it can be throttled down, it's up to us. It's a game of feet and inches. The average temperature can go up 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or it can go up 5. There's a HUGE difference between that numberically small spread, the difference between New Orleans under water, and London and Florida under water. Greenland can melt, or it can mostly stay ice.
We don't know how to affect this process other than increasing O2 production and decreasing our CO2 production. Kicking up O2 means either planting trees and stop burning carbon, or we start building some terraforming CO2/O2 converters and start pumping O2 into the air, Kim Stanley Robinson style.
Well, I overstated. Trees won't eliminate global warming by reducing the CO2, but adding trees will mitigate the heatup, which is pretty much all we can hope for now; the die is cast.
Cutting down the trees aready in place, tho, is defining insanity.
Basic textbooks for K-12 courses should be electronic and free. Mathematics, reading primers, languages... such things don't need new books every year. Schools are bankrupting themselves trying to keep up with buying uselessly new books.
And I am aware there are open source style e-textbooks becoming available, and more power to them.
People always ask why there should be cheap, low power ebook readers. This is why. The world needs them to teach its children without popping for several thousands of dollars per student to enrich paper mills and book publishers. And there's the small matter of losing our forests to this idiocy. Global warming is caused by an overabundance of CO2; the solution is TREES, as many as we can plant. That, and not killing the microplants living on the surface of the world's oceans, which produce half of the photsynthesis activity, but I digress.
But we're cutting more down every year. More parking lots, more gated communities, more cattle grazing lands, nore and more books and newspapers and magazines and laser printer paper. We need green growing things, STAT. And ebooks. Screw the market, some things are more important than making Bill Gates or whomever is used to making money even richer. Mandate the things by law. We need to start making a lot of things mandatory by law with a view to surviving the upcoming weather changes.
We've no problem with volunteering our troops or people in other countries to die as a sacrifice. Will we even volunteer a small a thing as giving up our paper books to save the world, or is that too much for our hidebound conservative asses?
We supported the death squads in Nicaragua, actually trained them to murder thousands of "leftist sympathizers" in the 80's. It brought tears of joy to Reagan's eyes. We've aided an abetted the slaughter of millions in the last century in the name of the Dole Pinapple company and United Fruit. We slaughtered over 2,000 Panamanians in the name of capturing Manuel Noriega for some secret crime no one has told us about.
Evil? We just don't bother to write it down where we can read it. Not to mention we set up Saddam with his chemical weaponry, as long as he was fighting Iran. We have no problems with evil. Bush has a messianic complex, is talking to his god just a tad too much, and has no grasp of the history of his own country, much less others. We're being "led" by a delusional alchohol-damaged moron. Watch old Bush speechs from ten years back, and compare his older clear, intelligent delivery to today's mumbled, incoherent ramblings. He's brain-damaged.
Bush is brain damaged, and Reagan was not very bright and senile to boot. THESE are the heroes of the right wing?
AND. Don't forget that Saddam threw open the country to the inspectors over a month before Bush had his invasion planned to begin. BUSH told the inspectors to leave Iraq - NOT SADDAM. Bush smeared the reputation of Blix for months, had the CIA spy on the team, then told him to leave Iraq or be blown up with the Iraqis. Keep in mind that Blix had complete access to Iraq at that point, and was concluding that the WMD programs were dead and the stockpiles gone (keep in mind the anthrax was dead years before as a matter of biology). Bush didn't want that to happen, so he destroyed the team's reputation, then cut their mission short. As we've conclusively seen from the British meetings, Bush had his invasion plan ready before the inspectors ever went in. And Bush STILL insists that Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in. He's either a colossal liar or, let's say it out loud, insane.
There are no arguments, there is no evidence. Chalabists just made the shit up for Bush to parrot. They just fed him what he wanted to hear, and bingo, instant reality, just add meathead. there are no WMDs, and Saddam didn't give anything to anyone.
You've all been snookered for five years. Time to face up to it.
Quantum crypto, a technology that can finally enable private communications for the masses, without being snooped on by the bosses and the government, and what killer app do we see?
Surveillance, on us. Unbreakable, uncrackable without detection, so our paranoia-clamped citizenry can rest easy that our boss and our government can surveil anyone they like without fear of having some third party, such as a lawyer, see what they are watching.
Mind-boggling. A pro-authoritarian mindset slipped in so easily.
The Thinkpads are now branded Lenovo. They are made by the same company and the same engineers. IBM just stuck a label on the Lenovo machines! Nothing has changed.
The Soviet Union was never going to commit suicide by launching missiles. Russia will never commit suicide by launching missiles. China only has what, a dozen warheads? China, a four thousand year old civilization, is also not particularly suicidal. They have a track record of not dying. North Korea is merely desperate, not suicidal, and doesn't really have a missle worth firing.
"Terrorists" don't actually exist, as a real entity that one can point at, but even if they did, over in Terroraland, their goals are to make points or to alter the policies of countries that they can't take in a proper war. They won't use missiles; they don't need missiles. Any country that hosted the launcher, even accidently, like say Afghanistan did with the al Quaeda bastards who ran away and let the innocent Afghans die in their stead, would be exterminated by whatever President was in office. It is in no nation's interest to give a lawn chair to people playing with rocketry or homemade cruise missiles.
The only people about to use nuclear tipped missles is the U.S., and soon. Read the news; Bush is enamored with using nuclear tipped bunker busters on Iran -- a nation that is not threatening us, but merely trying to stave us off from attacking them. A number of the high command are ready to resign if he goes ahead with this idea.
There aren't any nations who hanker to use nukes. Or missiles, for that matter. Maybe Israel, because we have their backs with 100K warheads of our own. And even they live in a pretty small fishbowl, and aren't about to contaminate themselves.
What we have is the dawn of the age of beam weapons. Yadda yadda missles, what these monsters will be used for is assassination and pinpoint destruction. No noise, no warning, just megawatt and eventually gigawatt death from afar for those who displease us.
What I dread more than airborne or truckborne beam weapons is handheld units in the hands of police or the military. The sign to look for is a breakthrough in miniaturizing power supplies -- fuel cells, high density batteries, however -- which will lead in short order to troops standing over protesters with megawatt laser rifles, or tripod mounted laser cannon. The criminals will snatch up cheap imitations shortly after that. No crack of a gunshot, no triangulation via microphones to local the killer -- just silent death, death by flashlight.
And think -- it's not like Star Wars or the other un-science-fiction flicks. They always depict lasers as operating like a chattergun in WWII -- pulses, the shooter choosing his shots. A beam weapon is different in that you can sweep a crowd -- targeting is not necessary other than running the line of the focus across the target, like a water hose. And lasers are their own targeting system -- low power to light up the target, than high beam to kill. It's a perfect hand weapon.
It's called "building the police state". No thanks. I will not participate in ending the Jefersonian dream. I will not make my own prison. I will not build machines to imprison my nation.
The story was in the Rolling Stone, oh moderators. Not to mention every decent paper in the country for the last ten years or so. Ralph Reed, Norquist, and Abramoff were old buddies in the Reagan era college scene, and they've been part of the Dewey, Fleeceum and Howe circuit since at least then.
Wird fact I read: Abramoff wrote "Red Scorpion", a movie produced basically by the South African secret service and the CIA. Interesting stuff: seems Abramoff got his start working as a factotum for the South African secret service goon squad.
Troll to Fox News watchers, maybe. Blindingly obvious to everyone else. Water's wet, news at 11.
Abramoff worked for ANYBODY that would give him cash. His buddies of old, Ralph Reed, Norquist, would often take the opposing sides. And they made millions, unprecedented wealth, in using DeLay as an on/off switch for introducing or burying legislation. It was government for sale.
And NO, kids, it was not business as usual. This is what happens when one party takes over everything, and that party only represents moneyed interests.
Of course. Sitting at a computer for eight hours a day is not a social job. It doesn't attract outgoing people, at least not in the sense that most people mean. The misfits, the unattractive, the nonathletic, those not into participating in sports, the unsocialized, they will and do fit comfortably into a job with little human interaction. And they are overwhelmingly male.
Women will *tend* not to enter a profession loaded with misfit, not-conventionally attractive males with odd social habits. This is what it is.
A quick look at more social occupations shows attractive, outgoing, hypersocial people who would go mad sitting at a desk analyzing code all day. Obviously there is a natural filter in place here, altho of course there are exceptions. Some people who would do well in a hypersocial career such as advertising might just have a yen for solving puzzles and do quite well in CS. But you will see that they become managers and move up that ladder very quickly.
The population that was removed at gunpoint, and kept out at gunpoint? You mean those people who weren't let back into the city until the landlords dumped their furniture out on the street and re-rented the apartments at twice the price? The home owners who are being dispossessed? The people who were told to get stuffed a couple of months ago when their bennies were cut off?
EVERYONE WANTS BACK IN. Those that weren't rich or connected are being robbed as we speak of their property. The city government has been taken out by neocons who have dissolved the public schools and non-profit hospitals -- the poor are NOT being let back in and it is intentional. Unions are now illegal. Slave immigrant and "guest" workers are paid pennies and are housed in tents, while NOLA residents who could have been paid to rebuild are told to get stuffed. The connected Republican contractors are using slave labor to build their profits. Tens of thousands of mobile homes are sitting out of state, rotting, because the shadowy figures making the decisions have made it so. The construction workers are fed by out-of-state caterers thru friendly connections in the congress and white house. In other words, all the money spent on new orleans is not going to the actual people who would work there if they could. the cash is going to republican out-of-state contract whores who are looting the place blind. the city will be rebuilt as a white, condo-tall, high-rise republican bastion of neo-con values (looting), and the state of Louisiana will be a republican state henceforth. mission accomplished.
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Okay, fair enuf. Two companies have extentions. But they will have to comply sometime. (Who are they, BTW?)
n d-Security-Official accuracy, or more evil, the ability to produce a real time map of your movements while the phone is switched on for the rest of your bloody life.
And, even though they may not comply by reading your GPS information, the *phones* made after 2004 must have the feature, enabled at the company or no.
And yep triangulation is sometimes possible with multiple tower reads and such, I can see that. They could always at least know which tower you are currently using. But the accuracy is so-so, within hundreds of feet or yards. Not exactly the he-was-standing-right-here-at-the-time-Mr.-Homela
I can discuss the situation, but I cannot transmit a sense of outrage to people who just can't feel it because of their acclimation to a growing police state mentality. People do like police states: the right kind of unpopular opinions and people get swept away, and that is always happy-making for most.
I like the freedom to go places without being logged. It's just a preference. I don't like police states. They breed fools and monsters whilst their streets are clean of criminals and badthinkers. All they have to do is redefine the concept of "criminal", and the mind boggles.
Nope, not triangulation. All new cell phones in the U.S. produced 2005 and beyond are reading real GPS satellite signals, noting your location, and transmitting it to the cell phone company. A 2001 federal law mandates the GPS. You cannot opt out. You can shut off the feature via the menu, but I somehow doubt that it stays off if someone wants it turned back on, esp. without your consent.
As a matter of fact, US Cellular customers without GPS enabled phones received a nasty letter from the company demanding that we buy a GPS phone immediately (free with new 2 year contract) or risk being charged a monthly penalty, which they would later determine. After a LOT of customers screamed, including me, the company sent an apology letter stating the phones would be free, and no contract would be necessary. I still haven't purchased a GPS phone, and probably never will. I detest, loathe, being tracked.
I had no idea that some people didn't know about all this. Learn something new every day. Glad to raise some awareness.
Yes, they do. And it scares me that people don't know this. ALL cell phones models sold in the U.S. post 2004 have GPS as a mandatory feature. And yes, they can track you, if for some reason someone wants such at thing done, by making your phone transmit your current location at whatever interval they desire.
It was mandated in 2001 and justified for use in 911 calls for assistance. It doesn't take a think tank to noodle out that the spooks and Homeland Security (I always want to snap off a heil at the sound of that name. "Homeland"? Who calls the U.S. the "homeland"?) wanted the feature to track, well, anyone at anytime they'd like.
You can disable the feature in a menu. Except, of course, for the override code they can transmit with or without notifying your phone. Trivial to turn it on in stealth mode. I can't believe such a code doesn't exist. Please. THIS bunch not demand that such a feature be enabled? Even if somehow it doesn't exist in current models, the U.S. will quietly boil the frog some more in a year or two and mandate the override code. If it can be done, they will do it. It's a gift from god to cops, spooks, cults, corporations, and overexcitable parents (like Leo Laporte. Aw Leo, you actually subscribe to a tracking service using the GPS on your kids' phone?).
Actually, there was a bit of a problem with webcams being activated by hackery a few years back. Solution: put a paper cup over the thing, or turn it to face the wall, if you're not into uncabling it when it's not in use. You really don't know if it is transmitting, if the power is on and the cable hooked up. Since you mention it as though it were maaad to think about a webcam as remotely controlled, I refer you to the olden days of a few years back when the odd remote-activate webcam hacks were popular.
Now. If the screen is a camera, activated by *software*, there is obviously a HUGE problem with remove activation. And after the last forty years of watching the frogs boiling happily in their pots, I see no reason why people won't eventually be convinced that camscreens should be mandated for, I dunno, catching pedos. There is nothing so rare or so stupid that the current majority of the U.S. won't swallow as an excuse for more monitoring. And after much thought, I've concluded that the diff between oldsters like me and the yunguns who pooh pooh privacy rights is that I *had* privacy rights as a kid, and the yunguns were raised in schools that I would consider prisons. I shudder to think of what my kid would become, raised in the mini-police states that schools are. Glad I don't have one.
I'm sure the next generation will happily rat out their parents for terrorist sympathies. Might have to move to Norway, Canada now undergoing bushification under the new regime. BID.
Here's a bit more ranting for you, happy-with-the-world one: cellphone microphones can be activated without your permission as well. Why not? And if you care, what do you have to hide, terrorist-coddler?
When does a camscreen become mandatory?
I'm not kidding here. After all, if I'd told you ten years ago that by 2005, all cell phones would have a mandatory GPS tracker broadcasting your location to the phone company as you move about, with a nominal abilty to be switched off (ha), would you have believed me?
I see no outrage over Homeland Security, your phone company, Scientology, and any random corporation with a legal staff being capable of tracking your movements for the rest of your lives. Where is the outrage?
I see no problem with camscreens becoming mandatory in the next 15 years. Even the techiest of the techies have no problem with the tracking devices in their phones, cameras on the streets, and eventually mandatory trackers in our cars, so letting Mr. X watch you as you all watch your computer screens is not a biggie. I can see an infinite number of excuses to make it required by law. Hell, even the emergency health care bit that they used for the cell phones could be re-rigged for this one.
And the generation of kids coming up through school have been seen drug tests, dog searches, RFID trackers, and lie detectors. They've been told they have no rights as minors, and I doubt they'll be any more rebellious as adults. They're also convinced they are surrounded by enemies wanting the kill them in their schoolbuses and office buildings, so the fear excuse is a big Go.
Such a neat device, a camscreen. Here's what I'd like: separate power circuits for the screen and the camera element array. So I *know* that the thing cannot operate without my permission. But I wanted that for my cell phone's tracking device, and so far the phone salesmen look at me like I'm bin Laden or a specially-abled adult who left his house without his nurse. (big thought: look overseas for a phone capable of giving me the option of being untracked, import the damned thing. Maybe I am a little slow).
The fact that the oil companies are gaming the system Enron-style to jack up their profits to 30+ billion dollars a quarter is itself a piece of intellectual property to the person who gathers the evidence for the story.
EVERYTHING written, EVERYTHING imagined can be "intellectual property", a term I loathe.
Including the very facts you need to make sane decisions. Control the spigot of knowledge, and you control the world. There's more going on than just movies and Coca Cola recipes. This is a setup for an authoritarian state with power to control facts via commericial IP laws. The government can just make a phone call to the owner of the "property" and the hammer of the law via the "owners" will shut inconvenient voices up.
READ. Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez made the terrorism comment when he released a statement supporting the bill. Gonzales = Bush.
If AG_Gonzales NE Bush then WhoTheFuckIsRunningTheWhiteHouse;
endif
Congress is an appendage of Bush in this era. No arguments. Congress is under the neocons' control; the congresscritters are rubberstamping Bushism.
Bush/Cheney/Rove are running Congress, running the courts, gaming the news, making the laws. And through Gonzales, Mr. Torture is Okay and Fuck the Geneva Accords, proponent of the Unitary Executive (President is not subject to the law, President IS the law, and cannot by definition break a law), they have made their wishes known. And that wish is that this law passes, and that people are told IP crime funds terrorists.
If you don't follow any of this, you haven't been paying attention these past five years, have been watching FOX News, or both.
1. Create draconian laws to deal with "terrorism". Suspend the constitution, create secret prisons and torture chambers, kidnap thousands of people. Hooray for us against evil terrorism.
2. Redefine terrorism to whatever pisses the government off.
3. Police state achieved.
The US has tree farms, true. But we are a small part of the world, and the rest of humanity is trying to copy our model of consumption. They're making textbooks etc. out of trees that are simply chopped out of the jungles of Indonesia, India, and South America, and those trees are not being replanted. Deforestation is a global problem, not just an American one. We do have national forests, thank gods, and in spite of all the inroads the lumber corps have made under, especially, Reagan and Bush, we still have a lot of trees left. But the satellites do not lie. The world is being denuded of forested areas, for paper, for firewood, for furniture, for farm and grazing lands. The removal of significant numbers of trees will of course reduce the photosynthesis process worldwide, increasing the CO2 buildup a smidge, not to mention that trees do cool the air somewhat during their respiration cycle. Every good bit helps, every bad bit hinders. The warming cycle can be accelerated or it can be throttled down, it's up to us. It's a game of feet and inches. The average temperature can go up 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or it can go up 5. There's a HUGE difference between that numberically small spread, the difference between New Orleans under water, and London and Florida under water. Greenland can melt, or it can mostly stay ice.
We don't know how to affect this process other than increasing O2 production and decreasing our CO2 production. Kicking up O2 means either planting trees and stop burning carbon, or we start building some terraforming CO2/O2 converters and start pumping O2 into the air, Kim Stanley Robinson style.
Wow. What a fantastically rude asshole.
People stop reading your post after the first sentence, get it? Being a dick doesn't grant you more authority.
Well, I overstated. Trees won't eliminate global warming by reducing the CO2, but adding trees will mitigate the heatup, which is pretty much all we can hope for now; the die is cast.
Cutting down the trees aready in place, tho, is defining insanity.
Basic textbooks for K-12 courses should be electronic and free. Mathematics, reading primers, languages... such things don't need new books every year. Schools are bankrupting themselves trying to keep up with buying uselessly new books.
And I am aware there are open source style e-textbooks becoming available, and more power to them.
People always ask why there should be cheap, low power ebook readers. This is why. The world needs them to teach its children without popping for several thousands of dollars per student to enrich paper mills and book publishers. And there's the small matter of losing our forests to this idiocy. Global warming is caused by an overabundance of CO2; the solution is TREES, as many as we can plant. That, and not killing the microplants living on the surface of the world's oceans, which produce half of the photsynthesis activity, but I digress.
But we're cutting more down every year. More parking lots, more gated communities, more cattle grazing lands, nore and more books and newspapers and magazines and laser printer paper. We need green growing things, STAT. And ebooks. Screw the market, some things are more important than making Bill Gates or whomever is used to making money even richer. Mandate the things by law. We need to start making a lot of things mandatory by law with a view to surviving the upcoming weather changes.
We've no problem with volunteering our troops or people in other countries to die as a sacrifice. Will we even volunteer a small a thing as giving up our paper books to save the world, or is that too much for our hidebound conservative asses?
We supported the death squads in Nicaragua, actually trained them to murder thousands of "leftist sympathizers" in the 80's. It brought tears of joy to Reagan's eyes. We've aided an abetted the slaughter of millions in the last century in the name of the Dole Pinapple company and United Fruit. We slaughtered over 2,000 Panamanians in the name of capturing Manuel Noriega for some secret crime no one has told us about.
Evil? We just don't bother to write it down where we can read it. Not to mention we set up Saddam with his chemical weaponry, as long as he was fighting Iran. We have no problems with evil. Bush has a messianic complex, is talking to his god just a tad too much, and has no grasp of the history of his own country, much less others. We're being "led" by a delusional alchohol-damaged moron. Watch old Bush speechs from ten years back, and compare his older clear, intelligent delivery to today's mumbled, incoherent ramblings. He's brain-damaged.
Bush is brain damaged, and Reagan was not very bright and senile to boot. THESE are the heroes of the right wing?
AND. Don't forget that Saddam threw open the country to the inspectors over a month before Bush had his invasion planned to begin. BUSH told the inspectors to leave Iraq - NOT SADDAM. Bush smeared the reputation of Blix for months, had the CIA spy on the team, then told him to leave Iraq or be blown up with the Iraqis. Keep in mind that Blix had complete access to Iraq at that point, and was concluding that the WMD programs were dead and the stockpiles gone (keep in mind the anthrax was dead years before as a matter of biology). Bush didn't want that to happen, so he destroyed the team's reputation, then cut their mission short. As we've conclusively seen from the British meetings, Bush had his invasion plan ready before the inspectors ever went in. And Bush STILL insists that Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in. He's either a colossal liar or, let's say it out loud, insane.
There are no arguments, there is no evidence. Chalabists just made the shit up for Bush to parrot. They just fed him what he wanted to hear, and bingo, instant reality, just add meathead. there are no WMDs, and Saddam didn't give anything to anyone.
You've all been snookered for five years. Time to face up to it.
Quantum crypto, a technology that can finally enable private communications for the masses, without being snooped on by the bosses and the government, and what killer app do we see?
Surveillance, on us. Unbreakable, uncrackable without detection, so our paranoia-clamped citizenry can rest easy that our boss and our government can surveil anyone they like without fear of having some third party, such as a lawyer, see what they are watching.
Mind-boggling. A pro-authoritarian mindset slipped in so easily.
The Thinkpads are now branded Lenovo. They are made by the same company and the same engineers. IBM just stuck a label on the Lenovo machines! Nothing has changed.
Perception == reality. Scary.
Well, to be fair, it really is cold out past Pluto.
The Soviet Union was never going to commit suicide by launching missiles. Russia will never commit suicide by launching missiles. China only has what, a dozen warheads? China, a four thousand year old civilization, is also not particularly suicidal. They have a track record of not dying. North Korea is merely desperate, not suicidal, and doesn't really have a missle worth firing.
"Terrorists" don't actually exist, as a real entity that one can point at, but even if they did, over in Terroraland, their goals are to make points or to alter the policies of countries that they can't take in a proper war. They won't use missiles; they don't need missiles. Any country that hosted the launcher, even accidently, like say Afghanistan did with the al Quaeda bastards who ran away and let the innocent Afghans die in their stead, would be exterminated by whatever President was in office. It is in no nation's interest to give a lawn chair to people playing with rocketry or homemade cruise missiles.
The only people about to use nuclear tipped missles is the U.S., and soon. Read the news; Bush is enamored with using nuclear tipped bunker busters on Iran -- a nation that is not threatening us, but merely trying to stave us off from attacking them. A number of the high command are ready to resign if he goes ahead with this idea.
There aren't any nations who hanker to use nukes. Or missiles, for that matter. Maybe Israel, because we have their backs with 100K warheads of our own. And even they live in a pretty small fishbowl, and aren't about to contaminate themselves.
What we have is the dawn of the age of beam weapons. Yadda yadda missles, what these monsters will be used for is assassination and pinpoint destruction. No noise, no warning, just megawatt and eventually gigawatt death from afar for those who displease us.
What I dread more than airborne or truckborne beam weapons is handheld units in the hands of police or the military. The sign to look for is a breakthrough in miniaturizing power supplies -- fuel cells, high density batteries, however -- which will lead in short order to troops standing over protesters with megawatt laser rifles, or tripod mounted laser cannon. The criminals will snatch up cheap imitations shortly after that. No crack of a gunshot, no triangulation via microphones to local the killer -- just silent death, death by flashlight.
And think -- it's not like Star Wars or the other un-science-fiction flicks. They always depict lasers as operating like a chattergun in WWII -- pulses, the shooter choosing his shots. A beam weapon is different in that you can sweep a crowd -- targeting is not necessary other than running the line of the focus across the target, like a water hose. And lasers are their own targeting system -- low power to light up the target, than high beam to kill. It's a perfect hand weapon.
It's called "building the police state". No thanks. I will not participate in ending the Jefersonian dream. I will not make my own prison. I will not build machines to imprison my nation.
The story was in the Rolling Stone, oh moderators. Not to mention every decent paper in the country for the last ten years or so. Ralph Reed, Norquist, and Abramoff were old buddies in the Reagan era college scene, and they've been part of the Dewey, Fleeceum and Howe circuit since at least then.
Wird fact I read: Abramoff wrote "Red Scorpion", a movie produced basically by the South African secret service and the CIA. Interesting stuff: seems Abramoff got his start working as a factotum for the South African secret service goon squad.
Troll to Fox News watchers, maybe. Blindingly obvious to everyone else. Water's wet, news at 11.
We look forward to your published columns then. Where are they?
Abramoff worked for ANYBODY that would give him cash. His buddies of old, Ralph Reed, Norquist, would often take the opposing sides. And they made millions, unprecedented wealth, in using DeLay as an on/off switch for introducing or burying legislation. It was government for sale.
And NO, kids, it was not business as usual. This is what happens when one party takes over everything, and that party only represents moneyed interests.
Of course. Sitting at a computer for eight hours a day is not a social job. It doesn't attract outgoing people, at least not in the sense that most people mean. The misfits, the unattractive, the nonathletic, those not into participating in sports, the unsocialized, they will and do fit comfortably into a job with little human interaction. And they are overwhelmingly male.
Women will *tend* not to enter a profession loaded with misfit, not-conventionally attractive males with odd social habits. This is what it is.
A quick look at more social occupations shows attractive, outgoing, hypersocial people who would go mad sitting at a desk analyzing code all day. Obviously there is a natural filter in place here, altho of course there are exceptions. Some people who would do well in a hypersocial career such as advertising might just have a yen for solving puzzles and do quite well in CS. But you will see that they become managers and move up that ladder very quickly.
Such is the way of people.
Republicans out in force tonight.
The population that was removed at gunpoint, and kept out at gunpoint? You mean those people who weren't let back into the city until the landlords dumped their furniture out on the street and re-rented the apartments at twice the price? The home owners who are being dispossessed? The people who were told to get stuffed a couple of months ago when their bennies were cut off?
EVERYONE WANTS BACK IN. Those that weren't rich or connected are being robbed as we speak of their property. The city government has been taken out by neocons who have dissolved the public schools and non-profit hospitals -- the poor are NOT being let back in and it is intentional. Unions are now illegal. Slave immigrant and "guest" workers are paid pennies and are housed in tents, while NOLA residents who could have been paid to rebuild are told to get stuffed. The connected Republican contractors are using slave labor to build their profits. Tens of thousands of mobile homes are sitting out of state, rotting, because the shadowy figures making the decisions have made it so. The construction workers are fed by out-of-state caterers thru friendly connections in the congress and white house. In other words, all the money spent on new orleans is not going to the actual people who would work there if they could. the cash is going to republican out-of-state contract whores who are looting the place blind. the city will be rebuilt as a white, condo-tall, high-rise republican bastion of neo-con values (looting), and the state of Louisiana will be a republican state henceforth. mission accomplished.