Why don't we all become permanent members of the U.S. Army Reserves, subject everyone to military law, and cancel all public gatherings? Safety First! Who needs freedom when you can have ultimate safety.
I hear Halliburton is getting to build more mass detention camps on U.S. soil. Watch what you say, watch what you do...
Exactly. Then they start adding commercials. I'm not joking. You boil the frog one degree at a time. Then the censors imbed. Then the anti-terrorist monitors are installed permanently.
And, oh, yes, mesh networks will be declared illegal pretty soon. They'll blame terrorists or something.
"My final thought is to remind everyone to consider the source here: This is obviously a pretty liberal site. Did anyone catch the stab at the republican controlled government at the end? How about the brief, vague mentions that laws would have to be changed in order for all of this to happen? Not to say that one party is less trustworthy than the other, but scare tactics are a favorite weapon of the liberals lately."
What you are feeling is cognitive dissonance. You're being exposed to a short, sharp shock of reality from the outside world that doesn't have Fox News, NBC, MS-NBC, Limbaugh and all the others.
Out here, this Congress is the most corrupt, cash-siphoning assemblage since the 19th century. The corporations are now their own regulators, and thanks to DeLay's "K street Strategy", every lobbying group MUST be staffed by Republicans or they are cut OUT. So staffers are shuttling between serving the Congress and manning the lobbying outfits. They are printing money. One party, controlling every lever, and they are raping us blind.
Why not? The municipality (that's us, the people) granted them monopoly rights and rights of way through municipal property. If the company screws the municipality, I'd argue that the municipal corporation has the duty to confiscate a runaway player's toys. The telcos need to remember that they are a tolerated nuisance, no more. They've no "right" to municipal rights-of-way. They have what they have because it was the only way to finance the infrastructure.
As corporations say to that star employee they lay off, what have you done for us lately? We don't owe you a damned thing. Get out, don't let the door hit you in the transformer on the way out.
Exactly. And now we have a textbook case of why free markets break down over time. Consolidation cuts the players down to a few, or a pair, and then they non-collude with each other to fix prices. The curve, if not regulated by government, winds up at this point every time. Monopoly is not the only way free markets are eliminated by the players.
We need a name for this. Economics students, anyone know a term for this sort of non-collusion collusion?
Under current law, yes. But the telcos will simply write new versions of the common carrier laws that will take tiered services into account, and then call up their slaves in the Congress to pass it. Old law doesn't count, didn't y'all hear? It's a different world, after 9-1.....
Altering the words or application of the Constitution itself, as the Congress or Supreme court would try, doesn't NOT alter your human rights to free speech and assembly.
The Constitution, the government, or Mr. Unitary Exectutive Supreme WarMaster Bush, cannot take away your rights. They can write down that they don't think you should have them, but they would, wouldn't they.
Your rights are not granted to you by them. You, and every person alive on this planet were born with those rights, and no one can claim they don't exist. They can deny you your rights, but they can't take them away.
The framers of the Constitution, esp. Jefferson, believed that human rights were "natural". Some said granted by Providence, but that's not really important. The idea is that they exist because we believe that they do. Call it religious. Call it the ultimate ethical stand. But they exist because we say they do, because we demand that they do. WE THE PEOPLE.
Jefferson was codifying something that exists with or without the Bill of Rights. He didn't create the rights, he merely put them on paper. That was his Original Intention, kids. With the immortal 9th reminding us that just because he forgot to write one in, he didn't intend to say that it didn't exist. Privacy, no doubt, would be covered under the 9th.
Some asshat at a law firm doesn't get to nullify your human rights. Neither does Alito. No "business", which is a fake front for a bunch of men anyway, gets to deny them. Businesses are just legal structures granted by the people. They don't govern, and they don't get to pick and choose which natural rights apply to people they deign to hire.
They exist at our sufferance. We are not supplicants begging for the right to eat at their feet. They should beg us for mercy. We've forgotten who's in charge here.
But being anti-invasion is correct and obvious. The naysayers were right; there were no weapons, the inspectors were booted out before they could pronounce Iraq clean, we were lied to, the CIA was made the fall guy, and we, as George HW Bush predicted, are mired in a occupation that can only end in failure.
Anyone pro-Bush at this time has amnesia.
Bushites were wrong, anti-Bushies were right. That's reality-based, not truthiness based. If Slashdot moderation kicks pro-Bush comments down, then they merely reflect the national political consensus. The majority think Bush lied, the majority think he should be impeached and removed if so, the majority think we are in deep trouble. The poll numbers are steady with Bush at 37-40 percent approval ratings.
Pro-war people are a distinct, and WRONG, minority. What you are complaining about doesn't reflect "bias"; what you are displaying is cognitive dissonance. You think that the war is doing well, Bush is a great leader, and commie hippy types have invaded with their "bias". The truth is you are becoming a dismissed minority, a fringe group that watches a Balkanized political news feed from Fox, MS-NBC, and sadly, CNN after its "cultural change" under the new regime that wants a "balanced" CNN. You are becoming a marginalized cult.
Damned near nobody else on the planet shares your war views. They don't see American news outlets. They see actual news. They're informed, we're not. They've been anti-Bush since he used 9-11 to invade Iraq. If we take them into account, you're not a 39% minority, you're more like 5%! Pro-Bush people are right up their with communists with mindshare of the wired world.
Since most Bushites think only a dismissed minority disagrees with them, they keep experiencing shock when they meet up with the pissed-off majority, and deny its reality, and disparage their motivations and affiliations.
The thing to keep in mind is, as Orwell said, delusional nations meet up with reality eventually, usually on a battlefield. We're on ours. We've slaughtered between 33,000 and 100,000 innocent people, killed over 2000 of our own troops. We're going to be kicked out of Iraq one way or another. NO ONE is on our side, because we are wrong. This is not a coffee house political argument. People have been burned and shot and blown up and tortured, TODAY, and there will be a cost. The trick is not to let Bushists take the results of our mistakes -- angry billion muslims who want us to die -- and use it as retroactive justification for the killing. (Look! We were right! They're blowing us up everywhere! TERRORIST MONSTERS! Kill more of them before they kill us! Craaaazzzzy people want us dead...)
The idea, you see, is not that they would fire hire for wrongthought, but that you should be outraged that private free speech is forbidden if you want a paycheck.
Read "What's the Matter with Kansas?". The question for you is, why aren't you outraged? Don't you care that you have give up your first amendment right to free speech because your bosses want dissent silenced in all venues that they can possibly affect?
Free speech is anulled if the cost is starvation. It think it was Adams or Hancock who mentioned that that to hold a man's living hostage is to hold him hostage.
We need a new reaffirmation of our human rights under corporate rule. But that's exactly what Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas will NOT rule for. They will rule that a company can fire whom it likes, and the constitution is not applicable.
There are two schools of thought: one that the individual is supreme, and the other that the individual is supreme through the congress of trade. Jefferson vs. Adams. Individualism vs. Corporatism.
Guess where we're going.
What is the matter with Kansas, indeed. People are so indoctrinated with the business virus that they will vote against their own sacred rights in favor of businesses.
Here's the thing: businesses are fake individuals, licensed by the government (us) to exist. They are granted superpowers that no individual has, and are absolved of personal responsiblities that any individual is held to.
We can grant a business the power to live, and we can take it away if they are naughty. They will destroy anyone who actually tries it, but that's how it is supposed to work.
No business should have the power to deny individual liberties guaranteed under the constitution and under "natural law". Period.
Almost certainly the phones will have GPS built-in. And of course, spooks could instruct the phone company to override a GPS shutoff by the user of the phone.
So, using this phone as an internet connection tells anyone who cares to know where the user is within a couple of meters. Fab.
Somehow, I think that this concept will be happily supported by governments and employers everywhere in the third world. Damned hard to organize a union or write a political diatribe against the powers that be if the internet connection is pinned down like a bug on a map.
Re:People are Obese regarless of Income or Geograp
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"It might be interesting to ask why so many people *aren't* becoming obese."
Depression, with a corresponding lack of appetite? Such people have always been with us. Genetic.
Then there're people in the world who have to spend a lot of their income on food, so they're careful about what and how much they eat.
There're people who have found better things to do than eat?
There're people who just have been brought up eating soyburgers and vitamins. THEY'RE depressing. They're so healthy that they glow in the dark. Makes you feel like a decript old malnourished geezer, 'cause you are.
Scientists, btw, don't vouch for polygraphs. Courts and our new corporate overlords believe in their efficacy because they need them to be efficacious.
Polygraphs are worthless. Hell, scientologists use a bastardized version of the original polygraph as their testing tool, the "e-meter".
As for the fMRI, I saw this coming for the last couple of years. Welcome to hell; they think they have another way to read our minds.
I fear the day when they really do find a way to watch what we're thinking. No Mars mission, no energy program will have the resources committed to it that the endgame machine, a true mind monitor, will receive. It's the holy grail of this line of research. It's only a matter of time before IT and the understanding of the physiology of the brain intersect, and they have the ultimate tool for... whatever they want. It will happen. They'll want it too badly. (And god knows if it would really work -- like the polygraph and the fMRI, they'll assume it works because they need it to.)
We should have laws and treaties in place NOW that forbid such devices, but with the Terror of Everything being fanned in the West and the rise of Godly Government in the Islamic world, there'll be too much demand for it.
And what will really break my heart is that people will line up to be tested to keep their jobs, their kids, their "safety".
are you aware that the current president and congress has mandated that all future highways(tollways?) be built, owned and operated by private corporations?
game set match. i guess you could walk across America without being tracked -- if you disable the gps in your cell phone.
Lissen, to do business in China, you have to bribe damned near everybody. IF that's an issue, everyone is screwed. I'd better start selling Google stock; apparently the administration's got a mad-on about China.
In other news, nearly all the money spent in Iraq for recontruction was stolen by American contractors. Bribes are paid out in every direction. No news there.
In other other news, the K Street Project has made the Republicans the most paid off people since the Teapot Dome scandal. Bush's people are stonewalling the investigation, and the pictures of Bush with Abramoff are being destroyed as the President says they aren't relevant to the investigation (which he is not cooperating with). Nice to know that the Unitary Executive can tell the Congress what is and isn't pertinent to any investigations of the Unitary Executive.
Damned straight. LIMITED TIME. A hundred years plus is a word game. 100+ years = forever and a day. That's four generations. The case gets revisited in a hundred years, and then they decide that's long enough in 2106? Copyright as we know it will have been dead for a century -- no one will notice if it goes on past that date, or maybe the successor to the U.S. government will just rule the term extensions eternal by the Unitary Executive law making process -- one man, one vote, and George Bush the Seventh will be that man.
And damn the Supreme Court for ignoring that bit of sanity. "If there is a time limit, then that's okee. The Congress can decide what a reasonable limit is. It's not up to the Court to decide what the law should be...". Retch!!!!
The "Strict Constructionist" nonsense. The framers weren't inspired by God, their word isn't holy writ, and if they were alive today they would tar and feather those weaseling sons and a daughter of a bitch. OF course they were supposed to fix that damned law!! They are a check on sporadically overweening powers of the legislative and the executive branches.
And they selectively decide when they will be so literal. I notice Thomas and Roberts and the other dingos had no problem second-guessing the lawmakers when it was about right-to-die law in Oregon. They were ALL OVER smacking down legislators when it came to their religious views and the War on Some Drugs.
The analogy about requiring a driver's license to drive is not quite right. Say it this way to understand the implications:
needing identification to travel in a car as a passenger.
If you have no right to travel by a particular conveyance, as this court said, then game over. The police state is here, and it is worldwide. You can try walking out, but that would be a suspicious act in itself: walking. What are you doing on foot near the Canadian border, citizen? Where's your ID? Explain your purpose here...
We frogs still sit in the pot, and the water's nearly boiling.
Democracy may have a killing genetic defect built in. The right to do what you like, learn what you like, stay as ignorant as you like, has produced nations full of people who believe in magic and the principle of least effort. We don't have enough intelligent, informed, educated people to do the hard work of being free. The Marching Morons are winning, as they were fated to.
Judge Jackson was absolutely hated by those judges. It was out in the open at the time that they were gunnin' for him, and it had little to do with his "overzealousness" and everything to do with their hate for his "liberal" decisions. They and Jackson had a war on, and Jackson knew, as soon as he heard they had "randomly" been chosen to review, that Microsoft was safe from breakup.
Microsoft had, with full executive collusion, lied at the trial. They faked video evidence. If they'd been treated as individuals before the bench and not an incorporeal corporation, they'd have been jailed for contempt. They lost on the facts, they lost on their deceptions, they lost period.
The only bright side of the "review" of Jackson's decision was that the Federalist Society boys couldn't overturn the finding of fact which determined that Microsoft was a monopoly.
What is important to know about the judicial system right now is that there are two main schools: one evaluates based on the primacy of the individual, the consumer, and the other believes deeply in the primacy of business interests. There was a complicated article which I wish I could recall which outlined the historical basis for this split; something to do with interpretations of two constitutional amendments. One is for people, one is for business. The pro-business side does NOT believe in the anti-trust legislation of the last century,and will chip away at it.
Jackson actually is a rock-ribbed conservative, but he doesn't have the pro-business blinders on that his opponents at the Appellate level have. Microsoft was an abusive monopoly that lied to his face and showed his court doctored evidence. The obvious solution under antitrust was to break them up so that the abuses would stop, given that their history in the field and in his court showed that they had no plans to knock it off.
But his nemises nailed him, and whatever good came of the trial was firmly stamped out by the newly emplanted Bush Justice Department, which promptly snatched defeat from the hands of victory. Then the budget for anti-trust was cut, lawyers at Justice were shown the door, and the fat lady sang for antitrust in our lifetimes.
By the way, no one can own music. You can own an object, like a CD or if you're a record company, the master. But music is not property and you can't own it. You can hold a copyright, but that's it. Music belongs to the world. That's sanity. That's how it works.
The idea is to give the copy-rights to someone for a limited time, to encourage the arts and help the artist get paid. Then the music is released into the commons.
This has stopped. The contract has been broken; copyright is forever. We didn't break the deal, they did. So let the war continue, the sane versus the greedy. The war ends when copyrights stop being construed as "owning the music" whereever it exists, and become 15 year limited exclusive rights granted by the law. When music and ideas are not "property", a mad concept designed to meter people's minds.
Ticket sales account for less than half of movie revenues. DVD sales represent the majority of studio profits nowadays.
The movie was a miracle, and I humbly thank Universal for taking a chance on intelligent writing. They'll make a little profit after a year or so; good on them.
But, this is exciting as a concept. Subsription TV shows! Serenity costs about a million an episode. If Whedon says "go", if we can get pour in twenty million bucks into escrow, we can make history here.
A million fans donate $20 each. This is do-able.
While we're at it: Mr. Whedon, how much to finish up the Angel series? Wha' happened? It was a nice, open-ended apocalypse for Angel Investigations, but how about an ending? Did Angel get his dragon? Did Spike kill a couple thousand demons? How about Blue Girl? I assume she did some major damage, since she was a Lovecraftian Old God with a major need to kill someone. Did the slayer army show up and lend a hand -- it was a major breach, I assume they'd show. Come on, it'd be fun!
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we all become permanent members of the U.S. Army Reserves, subject everyone to military law, and cancel all public gatherings? Safety First! Who needs freedom when you can have ultimate safety.
I hear Halliburton is getting to build more mass detention camps on U.S. soil. Watch what you say, watch what you do...
Exactly. Then they start adding commercials. I'm not joking. You boil the frog one degree at a time. Then the censors imbed. Then the anti-terrorist monitors are installed permanently.
And, oh, yes, mesh networks will be declared illegal pretty soon. They'll blame terrorists or something.
"My final thought is to remind everyone to consider the source here: This is obviously a pretty liberal site. Did anyone catch the stab at the republican controlled government at the end? How about the brief, vague mentions that laws would have to be changed in order for all of this to happen? Not to say that one party is less trustworthy than the other, but scare tactics are a favorite weapon of the liberals lately."
What you are feeling is cognitive dissonance. You're being exposed to a short, sharp shock of reality from the outside world that doesn't have Fox News, NBC, MS-NBC, Limbaugh and all the others.
Out here, this Congress is the most corrupt, cash-siphoning assemblage since the 19th century. The corporations are now their own regulators, and thanks to DeLay's "K street Strategy", every lobbying group MUST be staffed by Republicans or they are cut OUT. So staffers are shuttling between serving the Congress and manning the lobbying outfits. They are printing money. One party, controlling every lever, and they are raping us blind.
Why not? The municipality (that's us, the people) granted them monopoly rights and rights of way through municipal property. If the company screws the municipality, I'd argue that the municipal corporation has the duty to confiscate a runaway player's toys. The telcos need to remember that they are a tolerated nuisance, no more. They've no "right" to municipal rights-of-way. They have what they have because it was the only way to finance the infrastructure.
As corporations say to that star employee they lay off, what have you done for us lately? We don't owe you a damned thing. Get out, don't let the door hit you in the transformer on the way out.
Exactly. And now we have a textbook case of why free markets break down over time. Consolidation cuts the players down to a few, or a pair, and then they non-collude with each other to fix prices. The curve, if not regulated by government, winds up at this point every time. Monopoly is not the only way free markets are eliminated by the players.
We need a name for this. Economics students, anyone know a term for this sort of non-collusion collusion?
Under current law, yes. But the telcos will simply write new versions of the common carrier laws that will take tiered services into account, and then call up their slaves in the Congress to pass it. Old law doesn't count, didn't y'all hear? It's a different world, after 9-1.....
What I'd like to know, for the record, is the text of the very last telegram.
The first was sent on May 24th, 1844 from Washington DC to Baltimore, and read:
"What hath God wrought?".
One other thing:
Altering the words or application of the Constitution itself, as the Congress or Supreme court would try, doesn't NOT alter your human rights to free speech and assembly.
The Constitution, the government, or Mr. Unitary Exectutive Supreme WarMaster Bush, cannot take away your rights. They can write down that they don't think you should have them, but they would, wouldn't they.
Your rights are not granted to you by them. You, and every person alive on this planet were born with those rights, and no one can claim they don't exist. They can deny you your rights, but they can't take them away.
The framers of the Constitution, esp. Jefferson, believed that human rights were "natural". Some said granted by Providence, but that's not really important. The idea is that they exist because we believe that they do. Call it religious. Call it the ultimate ethical stand. But they exist because we say they do, because we demand that they do. WE THE PEOPLE.
Jefferson was codifying something that exists with or without the Bill of Rights. He didn't create the rights, he merely put them on paper. That was his Original Intention, kids. With the immortal 9th reminding us that just because he forgot to write one in, he didn't intend to say that it didn't exist. Privacy, no doubt, would be covered under the 9th.
Some asshat at a law firm doesn't get to nullify your human rights. Neither does Alito. No "business", which is a fake front for a bunch of men anyway, gets to deny them. Businesses are just legal structures granted by the people. They don't govern, and they don't get to pick and choose which natural rights apply to people they deign to hire.
They exist at our sufferance. We are not supplicants begging for the right to eat at their feet. They should beg us for mercy. We've forgotten who's in charge here.
But being anti-invasion is correct and obvious. The naysayers were right; there were no weapons, the inspectors were booted out before they could pronounce Iraq clean, we were lied to, the CIA was made the fall guy, and we, as George HW Bush predicted, are mired in a occupation that can only end in failure.
Anyone pro-Bush at this time has amnesia.
Bushites were wrong, anti-Bushies were right. That's reality-based, not truthiness based. If Slashdot moderation kicks pro-Bush comments down, then they merely reflect the national political consensus. The majority think Bush lied, the majority think he should be impeached and removed if so, the majority think we are in deep trouble. The poll numbers are steady with Bush at 37-40 percent approval ratings.
Pro-war people are a distinct, and WRONG, minority. What you are complaining about doesn't reflect "bias"; what you are displaying is cognitive dissonance. You think that the war is doing well, Bush is a great leader, and commie hippy types have invaded with their "bias". The truth is you are becoming a dismissed minority, a fringe group that watches a Balkanized political news feed from Fox, MS-NBC, and sadly, CNN after its "cultural change" under the new regime that wants a "balanced" CNN. You are becoming a marginalized cult.
Damned near nobody else on the planet shares your war views. They don't see American news outlets. They see actual news. They're informed, we're not. They've been anti-Bush since he used 9-11 to invade Iraq. If we take them into account, you're not a 39% minority, you're more like 5%! Pro-Bush people are right up their with communists with mindshare of the wired world.
Since most Bushites think only a dismissed minority disagrees with them, they keep experiencing shock when they meet up with the pissed-off majority, and deny its reality, and disparage their motivations and affiliations.
The thing to keep in mind is, as Orwell said, delusional nations meet up with reality eventually, usually on a battlefield. We're on ours. We've slaughtered between 33,000 and 100,000 innocent people, killed over 2000 of our own troops. We're going to be kicked out of Iraq one way or another. NO ONE is on our side, because we are wrong. This is not a coffee house political argument. People have been burned and shot and blown up and tortured, TODAY, and there will be a cost. The trick is not to let Bushists take the results of our mistakes -- angry billion muslims who want us to die -- and use it as retroactive justification for the killing. (Look! We were right! They're blowing us up everywhere! TERRORIST MONSTERS! Kill more of them before they kill us! Craaaazzzzy people want us dead...)
The idea, you see, is not that they would fire hire for wrongthought, but that you should be outraged that private free speech is forbidden if you want a paycheck.
Read "What's the Matter with Kansas?". The question for you is, why aren't you outraged? Don't you care that you have give up your first amendment right to free speech because your bosses want dissent silenced in all venues that they can possibly affect?
Free speech is anulled if the cost is starvation. It think it was Adams or Hancock who mentioned that that to hold a man's living hostage is to hold him hostage.
We need a new reaffirmation of our human rights under corporate rule. But that's exactly what Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas will NOT rule for. They will rule that a company can fire whom it likes, and the constitution is not applicable.
There are two schools of thought: one that the individual is supreme, and the other that the individual is supreme through the congress of trade. Jefferson vs. Adams. Individualism vs. Corporatism.
Guess where we're going.
What is the matter with Kansas, indeed. People are so indoctrinated with the business virus that they will vote against their own sacred rights in favor of businesses.
Here's the thing: businesses are fake individuals, licensed by the government (us) to exist. They are granted superpowers that no individual has, and are absolved of personal responsiblities that any individual is held to.
We can grant a business the power to live, and we can take it away if they are naughty. They will destroy anyone who actually tries it, but that's how it is supposed to work.
No business should have the power to deny individual liberties guaranteed under the constitution and under "natural law". Period.
This country needs a mental enema.
Here's a thought.
Almost certainly the phones will have GPS built-in. And of course, spooks could instruct the phone company to override a GPS shutoff by the user of the phone.
So, using this phone as an internet connection tells anyone who cares to know where the user is within a couple of meters. Fab.
Somehow, I think that this concept will be happily supported by governments and employers everywhere in the third world. Damned hard to organize a union or write a political diatribe against the powers that be if the internet connection is pinned down like a bug on a map.
"It might be interesting to ask why so many people *aren't* becoming obese."
Depression, with a corresponding lack of appetite? Such people have always been with us. Genetic.
Then there're people in the world who have to spend a lot of their income on food, so they're careful about what and how much they eat.
There're people who have found better things to do than eat?
There're people who just have been brought up eating soyburgers and vitamins. THEY'RE depressing. They're so healthy that they glow in the dark. Makes you feel like a decript old malnourished geezer, 'cause you are.
Time for another Pepsi...
They can believe it works, and the device still can misread. Belief is irrelevant.
Polygraphs are garbage.
Scientists, btw, don't vouch for polygraphs. Courts and our new corporate overlords believe in their efficacy because they need them to be efficacious.
Polygraphs are worthless. Hell, scientologists use a bastardized version of the original polygraph as their testing tool, the "e-meter".
As for the fMRI, I saw this coming for the last couple of years. Welcome to hell; they think they have another way to read our minds.
I fear the day when they really do find a way to watch what we're thinking. No Mars mission, no energy program will have the resources committed to it that the endgame machine, a true mind monitor, will receive. It's the holy grail of this line of research. It's only a matter of time before IT and the understanding of the physiology of the brain intersect, and they have the ultimate tool for... whatever they want. It will happen. They'll want it too badly. (And god knows if it would really work -- like the polygraph and the fMRI, they'll assume it works because they need it to.)
We should have laws and treaties in place NOW that forbid such devices, but with the Terror of Everything being fanned in the West and the rise of Godly Government in the Islamic world, there'll be too much demand for it.
And what will really break my heart is that people will line up to be tested to keep their jobs, their kids, their "safety".
more like *riding in a car*.
are you aware that the current president and congress has mandated that all future highways(tollways?) be built, owned and operated by private corporations?
game set match. i guess you could walk across America without being tracked -- if you disable the gps in your cell phone.
Lissen, to do business in China, you have to bribe damned near everybody. IF that's an issue, everyone is screwed. I'd better start selling Google stock; apparently the administration's got a mad-on about China.
In other news, nearly all the money spent in Iraq for recontruction was stolen by American contractors. Bribes are paid out in every direction. No news there.
In other other news, the K Street Project has made the Republicans the most paid off people since the Teapot Dome scandal. Bush's people are stonewalling the investigation, and the pictures of Bush with Abramoff are being destroyed as the President says they aren't relevant to the investigation (which he is not cooperating with). Nice to know that the Unitary Executive can tell the Congress what is and isn't pertinent to any investigations of the Unitary Executive.
But he can sure pull the switch on others. Yowza!
Hamas. Snicker. Sorry, couldn't help that.
Damned straight. LIMITED TIME. A hundred years plus is a word game. 100+ years = forever and a day. That's four generations. The case gets revisited in a hundred years, and then they decide that's long enough in 2106? Copyright as we know it will have been dead for a century -- no one will notice if it goes on past that date, or maybe the successor to the U.S. government will just rule the term extensions eternal by the Unitary Executive law making process -- one man, one vote, and George Bush the Seventh will be that man.
And damn the Supreme Court for ignoring that bit of sanity. "If there is a time limit, then that's okee. The Congress can decide what a reasonable limit is. It's not up to the Court to decide what the law should be...". Retch!!!!
The "Strict Constructionist" nonsense. The framers weren't inspired by God, their word isn't holy writ, and if they were alive today they would tar and feather those weaseling sons and a daughter of a bitch. OF course they were supposed to fix that damned law!! They are a check on sporadically overweening powers of the legislative and the executive branches.
And they selectively decide when they will be so literal. I notice Thomas and Roberts and the other dingos had no problem second-guessing the lawmakers when it was about right-to-die law in Oregon. They were ALL OVER smacking down legislators when it came to their religious views and the War on Some Drugs.
The analogy about requiring a driver's license to drive is not quite right. Say it this way to understand the implications:
needing identification to travel in a car as a passenger.
If you have no right to travel by a particular conveyance, as this court said, then game over. The police state is here, and it is worldwide. You can try walking out, but that would be a suspicious act in itself: walking. What are you doing on foot near the Canadian border, citizen? Where's your ID? Explain your purpose here...
We frogs still sit in the pot, and the water's nearly boiling.
Democracy may have a killing genetic defect built in. The right to do what you like, learn what you like, stay as ignorant as you like, has produced nations full of people who believe in magic and the principle of least effort. We don't have enough intelligent, informed, educated people to do the hard work of being free. The Marching Morons are winning, as they were fated to.
Judge Jackson was absolutely hated by those judges. It was out in the open at the time that they were gunnin' for him, and it had little to do with his "overzealousness" and everything to do with their hate for his "liberal" decisions. They and Jackson had a war on, and Jackson knew, as soon as he heard they had "randomly" been chosen to review, that Microsoft was safe from breakup.
Microsoft had, with full executive collusion, lied at the trial. They faked video evidence. If they'd been treated as individuals before the bench and not an incorporeal corporation, they'd have been jailed for contempt. They lost on the facts, they lost on their deceptions, they lost period.
The only bright side of the "review" of Jackson's decision was that the Federalist Society boys couldn't overturn the finding of fact which determined that Microsoft was a monopoly.
What is important to know about the judicial system right now is that there are two main schools: one evaluates based on the primacy of the individual, the consumer, and the other believes deeply in the primacy of business interests. There was a complicated article which I wish I could recall which outlined the historical basis for this split; something to do with interpretations of two constitutional amendments. One is for people, one is for business. The pro-business side does NOT believe in the anti-trust legislation of the last century,and will chip away at it.
Jackson actually is a rock-ribbed conservative, but he doesn't have the pro-business blinders on that his opponents at the Appellate level have. Microsoft was an abusive monopoly that lied to his face and showed his court doctored evidence. The obvious solution under antitrust was to break them up so that the abuses would stop, given that their history in the field and in his court showed that they had no plans to knock it off.
But his nemises nailed him, and whatever good came of the trial was firmly stamped out by the newly emplanted Bush Justice Department, which promptly snatched defeat from the hands of victory. Then the budget for anti-trust was cut, lawyers at Justice were shown the door, and the fat lady sang for antitrust in our lifetimes.
"STOP SHARING COPYRIGHTED WORKS YOU DON'T OWN"
So if I own the music, it's okay then.
By the way, no one can own music. You can own an object, like a CD or if you're a record company, the master. But music is not property and you can't own it. You can hold a copyright, but that's it. Music belongs to the world. That's sanity. That's how it works.
The idea is to give the copy-rights to someone for a limited time, to encourage the arts and help the artist get paid. Then the music is released into the commons.
This has stopped. The contract has been broken; copyright is forever. We didn't break the deal, they did. So let the war continue, the sane versus the greedy. The war ends when copyrights stop being construed as "owning the music" whereever it exists, and become 15 year limited exclusive rights granted by the law. When music and ideas are not "property", a mad concept designed to meter people's minds.
"Ask Bush, He'll tell ya how well that works."
Giving you a karma boost up.
Shouldn't we focus of give everychild in the UNITED STATES/EU a laptop BEFORE we give a massive amount of funds that will be stolen by warlords?
Okay, then, go to it. No one is stopping you. Give everyone a laptop.
Negroponte figured a way to do it for nearly free. I'm interested in how you are going to pull it off.
Seriously, if you don't like what he's doing, go and do what you think needs to be done yourself.
Give them food and laptops. I never understand the assumption that they can have one or the other, but not both.
If you're worried, then get to work and start helping those people. Negroponte is in the laptop business end of it. You all take care of the rest.
Problem solved.
Nope. He's all for it.
Ticket sales account for less than half of movie revenues. DVD sales represent the majority of studio profits nowadays.
The movie was a miracle, and I humbly thank Universal for taking a chance on intelligent writing. They'll make a little profit after a year or so; good on them.
But, this is exciting as a concept. Subsription TV shows! Serenity costs about a million an episode. If Whedon says "go", if we can get pour in twenty million bucks into escrow, we can make history here.
A million fans donate $20 each. This is do-able.
While we're at it: Mr. Whedon, how much to finish up the Angel series? Wha' happened? It was a nice, open-ended apocalypse for Angel Investigations, but how about an ending? Did Angel get his dragon? Did Spike kill a couple thousand demons? How about Blue Girl? I assume she did some major damage, since she was a Lovecraftian Old God with a major need to kill someone. Did the slayer army show up and lend a hand -- it was a major breach, I assume they'd show. Come on, it'd be fun!