"Middle-Age-Crisis-Ridden Father-in-Law/Community College Electrical Engineering Dropout"
You ARE aware that you, too, will age? And that not everyone graduated from M.I.T.? Only about ten percent (it's a small number, too lazy to look it up) of Americans get a college education, and a tiny fraction of those went to the elite schools.
Most people get their training from technical schools or community colleges, and people DO occasionally want to learn something after they are twenty-five years old. And damned few middle-aged people have the cash to wander into CalTech to learn electrical engineering, and frankly not many would hire them afterwards, even if.
The population is rapidly ageing. YOU are ageing. Get used to older people learning new things, because they will be pretty much everyone.
The world cannot be run by and for teenagers and twentysomethings pretending to be teenagers. I used to think it could be, but time just kicks you inna fork, and I learned.
I'm curious what all you yunguns think will happen when you turn forty. Suicide? Retirement? Retirement with suicide?
God, what happens if life extension becomes a reality? I hope LE comes with rejuvenation, 'cause then I can use my l33t oldman skills to steal the girlfriends of all the hapless 22 year old dudes. Delusional fantasy revenge is the best revenge.
Seriously, elitism and ageism won't be much of a help where we are all going. The U.S. (and everywhere else where population growth is stabilizing or reducing) will need to integrate a hell of a lot of older people with the will to learn new things, and we also need people who learn skills at non-l33t places like community colleges, like how to fix cars and industrial machinery and build things, as well as the hotshots from top tier college programs.
"And you care if the police know your location... why?"
Because it't none of their fucking business, frankly. If you don't understand why that's important, then, welcome to Big Brother.
They've rounded up plenty of people on a whim, called them terrorists, tortured them, found they were clean, and then deported them. It's already happened.
People LIKE fascism. It makes them warm and comfy. Safe streets; the wrong sort of people rounded up, or in this case, tracked like dangerous dogs; prosperous companies making useful systems for a government that increasingly is owned by the businesses themselves; voting machines compromised; election tabulation in private, secret, partisan corporate hands; wrong sort of people kept penned away in assigned neighborhoods, kept of of decent people's hair; a nice assortment of external enemies to blow up and excoriate; eternal war against a non-existent (at first!) enemy; lovely merging of fundamentalist church and state; science brought to heel, made to serve the needs of business and government; charismatic leaders; news media brought down like errant servants, dishing up only prescribed information, those refusing being brought down and ruined by either smear or executive fiat; lobbying organizations brought under the control of the ruling party; permanent suspension of constitutional liberties; secret laws; secret prisons; torture; questioning the omnipotent ruler is labeled violently as a lack of patriotism; the ruler is equated with the nation itself; the ruler is equated with the armed forces; opposition is clearly labeled as treason, madness, badthinking... we've got it all. Fascism is the most popular form of government known to man. Democracy is HARD WORK, and America no longer has the patience or the education to maintain one, much less export it by means of rains of white phosphorus.
Fascisms only fall when they overreach themselves. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But rarely do they fall because the majority of those ruled despise it.
It's welcomed with open arms. And much waving of flags. As Jerry Pournelle actually said when Bush assumed super-constitional power, "Ave, Caesar". Hail Caesar, he who will protect us and tell us what we want to hear.
Remember, it's not what they'll do with their power right now. The power is new to them, and they are still men who remember what a democratic society is like. They'll go easy with it. What you have to know is that the next generation, the one that was raised with dog searches of their school lockers, with strip searches in 2nd grade, random drug tests, secret prisons, secret police searches and arrests, listening to police state crap on TV every day of their lives... THEY'LL bring hell to Earth, because they will think police states are the way things should be. They'll not understand why anyone would object. Slavery will be normal to them.
Nyet. Nope. No: monopolies are not "created" by governments, not in cases like this. Companies become monopolies by vicious competition, OR a natural monopoly is created by, say, one company deciding to lay cable lines to all the houses in the neighborhood while other companies decide it wouldn't be profitable to do the same. Competition fails in such cases because companies can create "duopolies", each building lines into their own areas and carefully respecting borders. Governments are often "requested" (required by extortion) to set these thieves guilds into law on pain of removal of monoploy service.
Local governments are forced to grant monopolies exclusive rights because they are monopolies, not because they wish to, or even can, "create" monopoly situations. Businesses decided to go into some neighborhoods, yet not others, not soley for profit, but in order to create artificial scarcity and additional costs. Governments can't force them to do anything -- unless they are declared monopolies, in which case the goverment steps in to keep the hyenas from eating everyone's livers. Goverments regulate monopolies because raw capitalism can't. Left to their own devices, AT&T (get used to the name, as SBC will be brought in soon) will gut the market and drive prices even higher -- and start acting like feudal overlords in the bargain. Thus we have Microsoft declared monopoly (tho the Bush admin does not believe in monopoly regulation, so it is a dead letter until they are removed), thus AT&T WAS DISMANTLED in '84 for precisely what they are doing now: abusing their monopoly position. Sigh.
Has there been even one, single, solitary instance of a "terrorist" being caught by all this nonsense? What exactly is all this good for, other than spying on citizens at will?
The "evidence" against Padilla was apparently obtained by waterboarding (drowning reflex torturing) two al Queda members until they made up something that the torturers wanted to hear. No case, no evidence, no "dirty bombs", no admin officals declaring him guilty without trial on TV anymore. And he was one of their Big Wins By Using Theeir New Freedom To Find Terrorists.
Still, people don't understand what's happening to their rights. And they won't care. Torture, false imprisonment, stripping a US citizen of his constitutional rights by executive fiat based on stories made up under torture, keeping him prisoner and helpless to answer his accusers for over three years, then a nonsense charge to maintain face -- and he's still under the King's justice, unable to examine the evidence against him -- because there never was any. Why is a US citizen in a secret gulag under trumped up charges? Why don't people care? How many others are out there?
They demanded trust, and they blew it. They don't care about justice, just power. Don't give them more.
Interesting. Well, okay, but "4K" scanning is used for archiving old films. And all that data will just fritter away on hard drives, until media and home video tech catches up and then we'll see some use for super-ultra-mega-etc sized media. Won't be for a while tho.
Master reels of old films are being scanned in, today, at 4K (4000+) lines of resolution for archival purposes. The film media are deteriorating; it's a pity we couldn't do it before thousands of films faded away in IP vaults. Lucas recorded Star Wars 1-3 in 4K digital; movies in the future will be in 4K format.
Eventually, if a capacious enough media exists, those 4K scans will be released to the consumer market, along with 4K video systems.
"Actually, infrequently, Hollywood appeals to the geeks and smarter folk by making smarter movies - more varied an intelligent (if flawed, movies). The audience responds by not seeing them at all."...Serenity.
I am playing the "wait 'til it tanks -- then you buy" game. But, I'm not wealthy, and any misjudgements I make may well ruin me when I swoop in to buy, vulture-like. Billionaires never starve, but I soon may. Also, buying cheap is an easy game, if you're wealthy, because up or down, you're fine. Inevitably, the market will go up, the real estate prices will grow again, no matter if it takes 1 year or 20. If you're mega-wealthy, you take losses, wait it out, and eventually you will make enormous profit.
But guess what -- while the wealthy play the waiting game, sitting on stocks and depressed properties, waiting for the ships to come in, the job market will collapse, poverty will escalate, health insurance will evaporate, and purchase of consumer goods will plummet. It's called a depression. Spending on property and stocks don't create jobs, don't bring the country out of a death spiral. As a matter of fact, the worse it gets, the better for the 3 percent or so who will own everything worth owning. Wages depress, insurance is a joke, rents go WAAAAY up as the housing market bounces former buyers into rental spaces -- it's a damned Willy Wonka scenario for those holding liquid capital as the bubble bursts.
They've (the wealthy, like the Waltons ) been spending their no-tax windfall by buying other companies, and buying back their own company's stock to privatize their corporations. What they aren't doing with the money is spending it on new jobs, which is what the putative purpose of the cuts are for; no less authority than the American Enterprise Institute states that, to their surprise, the newly released wealth is not returning to the economy at large, but is "going into the matresses".
When the economy tanks in the next year or so, all that hoarded wealth will be released to purchase stock and real estate at greatly deflated prices. They'll make a bundle on our economic disaster, eventually, when the US climbs out of its debt hole (by raising taxes and cutting public spending) and the value of the holdings they will purchase at fire-sale prices go back up.
Supply side economics, as Reagan's budget director David Stockman admitted, is a con to lower taxes on the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. He should know, as he was Reagan's salesman to congress.
Supply side cuts have failed. Jobs are gone, poverty is up, aid to the poor is going, we're trillions in the hole in debt to China, the wealthy are insanely wealthy and poised to become mega-wealthy after the crash caused by the tax cuts and borrowing. Bush believes in his supply side cuts. But, as we've seen, his beliefs are gut-based, not fact-based, and his gut is unbelieveably incorrect about reality. He simply didn't believe in his own college education, and certainly had his own ideas about economics, his Harvard professor says. Faith-based economics, welfare is communism, government is evil, all that.
Economic booms are based on the price of oil, not tax cuts. Reagan cut taxes and increased spending, sending us into a spiral that mirrors today's death swirl, but he was saved by one thing: OPEC's pricing discipline collapsed in the early Eighties. So much wealth, which had been hemorraging to the middle eastern princes since 1973, suddenly flooded into the American economy. We sang with power and money and grew, even as the debt ballooned. Reagan was a lucky bugger: his supply side con would have ruined him had OPEC not collapsed.
Bush the senior had to raise taxes to stop the disaster that supply side created. He paid for it by losing a chance at a second term.
Bush the junior came into office believing, as all the other conservatives did, in the Reagan Miracle. He was wrong: the miracle was the OPEC collapse that saved the old fool from the folly of believing the pack of thieves that sold him on the supply-side con.
So, Bush slammed straight into OPEC and the oil companies ascendant, believing that tax cuts were the solution to all, that government was the problem, and that debt would eventually force the death of the New Deal programs the wealthy hated so. It's five years later, and the International Monetary Fund is telling us we can crash hard or crash soft -- but we will crash, when the Chinese and all the others lending us money cut us off. They will dictates terms to US. And Bush will probably react by screaming at his aides and locking himself away from the public, which is pretty much his reponse to every challenge.
After the crash, the very people who keep selling the supply side con will be flush with offshore cash. They will swoop in and buy cheap, while taxes for the lesser mortals go up 20% to try to stop the bleeding. And oh yep -- they will be the ones who'll be lending us money to shore up the tax base, so they'll make a trillion bucks in interest alone in the next couple of decades -- paid for by tax payers.
TV sets, cell phones, cars, that sort of thing? really?
must be hard to digitize. bandwidth's pretty expensive for transporting physical objects.some sort of macro version of quantum teleportation.
OH, you mean ideas, like music? i didn't know one could steal music from people. wow.
the only solution to this problem will come from further advances in fMRI mind monitoring technology over the next couple of decades. we will finally stop the theft of immaterial objects from people's minds when we can stick their heads in a scanner and search for stolen intellectual property. then, and only then, will the world be safe from this unprecedented criminal activity.
Poll Shock Off by 40 points, newspaper's predictions may be disturbingly accurate
By ROBERT C. KOEHLER Tribune Media Services
November 24, 2005
One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process -- and democracy itself.
But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."
And Rowland's right, as far as I can tell: The Columbus Dispatch's survey of voters, conducted by mail, has historically been a reliable poll; it has been cited for its precision in the scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly and is considered far more accurate than telephone surveys. There is no faulty O-ring, in other words; the methodology doesn't need changing.
And that's why there's a story here that must not be allowed to vanish.
The story is about how America votes, and evidence that pandemic chaos and perhaps even centrally orchestrated malfeasance are accompanying the spread of electronic voting machines to the nation's precincts. We know there's cause to worry about the state of our democracy because of the historical accuracy of the Columbus Dispatch voter poll.
Of the five proposed amendments on the Ohio ballot, only the first -- a $2 billion state bond initiative to promote high-tech industry -- was not related to the conduct of elections, and oddly enough its results were accurately forecast in the poll (predicted yes vote, 53 percent; final yes vote, 54 percent). Then it gets hairy.
Issue 2 would have made absentee voting easier in the state. It had lots of high-profile support, and the Dispatch poll predicted a cakewalk for it: 59 percent yes, 33 percent no, 9 percent undecided. The actual result: 36 percent yes, a whopping 63 percent no.
Then there was issue 3, which would have lowered the campaign-contribution limits that a lame-duck state legislature had raised a year ago. Prediction: 61 percent yes, 25 percent no, 14 percent undecided. Actual result: 33 percent yes, 66 percent no.
The results of issue 4, to control gerrymandering by establishing an independent board to draw congressional districts, were only slightly less dramatic. Prediction: 31 percent yes, 45 percent no, 25 percent undecided. Result: 30 percent yes, 69 percent no. And for issue 5, to establish an independent board instead of the secretary of state's office to oversee elections, a 41 percent predicted yes vote shrank to 29 percent, while the no vote ballooned from 43 to 70 percent.
Ka-boom goes the Challenger.
Here's the telling thing. The Dispatch, member in good standing of the mainstream media, has no interest in raising doubts about the integrity of the U.S. electoral system, and so hasn't looked in that direction for an explanation of what voting-rights activist Bob Fitrakis called a polling error of "Landon beats FDR" proportions.
Instead, the paper blames the notorious volatility of statewide referendum issues. Rowland hypothesized "a huge shift in the electorate in the last few
Open source, no open source, it doesn't matter! There is no way to know what code is running on the voting machines, the PC card, the accumulator PC at the voting station, the modem box, or the upline accumulators at any one time. No "verification" is possible. Even if the code were open, how would anyone know, in real time, that any piece of this long chain of bit crunching has been altered? And how would you figure it out afterwards?
Diebold doesn't have to alter every single result across the country; they can simply tweak a couple dozen districts via the accumulators, and no one would ever know. The machines keep "breaking" during elections, and techs go in to "fix" the totals. This is inexcusable, obvious bull, obvious cheating. Diebold -- which builds ATMs for crissake! -- says that paper records as a backup are unnecessary. Uh, what??!? No one is that dense, especially a company that deals with trillions of dollars in transactions for a living. They don't want a trail, they've fought like maniacs to keep inspectors out. They are cheating. It may only be a select one or three people who know it's happening at Diebold, but they know what the backdoors are. "Exit Polls are unreliable" my aching butt. If they were unreliable, they'd ALWAYS be unreliable, not just in Ohio, in 2004, in the contested districts, where Diebold machines are running.
"whereas you'd need some engineers with logic analyzers to really track everything a totally computerized system is doing."
And they couldn't possibly monitor the situation. Are all the voting machines running approved code? Impossible to know. Is the code locked down, or is it being replaced dynamically to cover tracks? Unknown. Is the code, a closed binary, full of triggers and cheats that only activate within certain parameters? Human nature says probably. Have the flash card couriers been tampered with? Who knows. Are the MS Windows machines acting as accumulators tampered with? Shrug. Is the easily modified Access database on the accumulator protected from tampering with Notepad? Impossible. Is there anyone around who is both 1) suspicious 2) knowledgeable enough to spot gross tampering? Nope. Are the vote totals modified when the technicians are called in to fix the machines during elections? Yes, Virginia, they are and it is a fact.
Even paper backups won't work, and here is why: Paper ballots would not be counted unless a recount is triggered when the vote total could go either way because of a minute spread, OR obvious fraud is committed. If one is controlling the vote tallies at a district level, all you have to do, say, if the trigger is 1%, is to make sure the spread is greater than 1% -- and the RECOUNT NEVER HAPPENS. The paper ballots are not manually counted under scrutiny and compared to the computer counted votes.
And this is beyond the maddening fact that Americans don't understand computers, cheating, or how to avoid this mess. The persistent idiocy I always hear from officials or reporters is the "print a receipt to take home with you" concept. Hair. Pull. Out. Receipts are useless! Paper ballots must be printed for each vote, shown the the voter, and placed in a ballot box.
Here's a simple fix for the recount trigger problem: random manual recounts for every election. IF even ONE of the races turn up as fixed, the lid is blown and we go back to hand counts. I can only hope.
Diebold has fought a manual recount system so ferociously that (Occam's Razor) they have indeed fixed elections. Their have been a lot of stories and sources stating that the employees know something is crooked, altho they are afraid for their jobs. Jobs in IT are scarce. The top management is far-rightist and saw it's duty as electing Bush; the details are tiresome.
Notice exit polls are no longer conducted? They "broke" during 2000, so no news organization will have them anymore. This in spite of the fact that statistics don't "break" during only one extremely critical election, and no other. They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality.
Now we have these damned cheating machines in my precinct. I will vote absentee. To stop me, they'll have to "lose" boxes like the last election.
The defunding of public schools has produced a nation of incurious people who can't understand how simple it now is to change election totals to suit those who run the machines.
Exactly. It was just an identity badge. And they went bonkers. Totally disproportionate response.
Yell at the authority-maddened idiots who thought they could harrass Stallman, not Stallman. He made the point beautifully. It's about the POWER, not about security.
What do you think the guvmint or the cops will do when you block THEIR tracking, even symbolically? Arrest, jail, prison, inevitably.
For months as this RFID contraversy has progressed, people on the 'dot have said, "well, you can always block it with a piece of foil if you don't want to be tracked".
Well, guess what? As predicted by a quick examination of human nature, they WON'T let you block your tracking devices. You will not have a choice as to when and where you will be tracked. This is just the very beginning, the closing of the gate, of our World Prison.
Tell me why again we have to have tracking devices embedded on our persons? I seem to have missed the reasoning. Terrorism?
The President, the VP, Attorney General Gonzalez and a cooperative bunch at the Pentagon and the various intelligence services have decided to kidnap people and imprison them around the world, with various flavors of continual torture and mind breaking, because they believe national security trumps "human rights" and established law.
What's the moral difference between that, and grabbing "Patient Omega" in the name of finding an immunity factor for a disease killing millions? To up the stakes "24" style, what if HIV mutates and finds an easier vector? How about then?
As a libertarian, small "l", I believe that patient Omega here has the right to refuse to cooperate. However, we've collectively flushed human rights away for the sake of "security", in exchange for which we've got a lot of dreamed-up terrorist plots from men under the knife. In the case of Omega, we could actually stop a superepidemic.
Kidnapping is moral for the sake of fear, but not for saving millions or billions of lives? This is not an idle question in philosophy class. This is real and it is now. We've decided collectively that abduction and torture for an individual's lifetime is okay if we're afraid. Given that, what's the problem with putting Omega under the microscope, even against his will?
Under disaster conditions in Louisiana, people are being blocked by the armed forces and some private killers hired by the U.S. from returning to their homes. Force? Yup. No one cares.
Bush has straightforwardly declared he wants martial law and dictator powers if avian flu hits the U.S. Soldiers will grab people and lock them away, people will be shot if a soldier believes they warrant death. How is it okay to remove EVERYONE'S human rights if a bird flu epidemic hits, but not okay to drag one guy in for testing if the epidemic is HIV? Remember, HIV has killed millions. It's just not a quick as avian flu. HIV hits people doing naughty things, in the view of moralists, so it's not a priority?
"Ethics" is about more than fetuses and stem cells. Ethics is what we decide to care about, and we have to decide every day. Who gets shot, who gets their knees broken, who loses their freedom if we decide it should be so?
Well, why pass the "you can't go bankrupt" laws for poor schmucks? Because it makes debtors into permanent slaves of the debt holders. Lovely.
I don't see debtors prisons coming back. I think they'd just throw poor people who owe money into real prison. OR: I forsee the return of indentured servitude, in one form or another. Bonded labor until you pay off your debt, with all terms of salary, repayment terms, and interest determined by the debt holders.
Hillary Clinton, not one for the bon mot, actually nailed one to the wall when she said that the Republicans are repealing the twentieth century.
When you can buy the laws you like, anything can happen.
Apparently the War on Terror is over, and we've got the country sewed up and secure. Otherwise, they wouldn't be wasting all this manpower and money to keep people from downloading music.
Slashdot Mirror
"Middle-Age-Crisis-Ridden Father-in-Law/Community College Electrical Engineering Dropout"
You ARE aware that you, too, will age? And that not everyone graduated from M.I.T.? Only about ten percent (it's a small number, too lazy to look it up) of Americans get a college education, and a tiny fraction of those went to the elite schools.
Most people get their training from technical schools or community colleges, and people DO occasionally want to learn something after they are twenty-five years old. And damned few middle-aged people have the cash to wander into CalTech to learn electrical engineering, and frankly not many would hire them afterwards, even if.
The population is rapidly ageing. YOU are ageing. Get used to older people learning new things, because they will be pretty much everyone.
The world cannot be run by and for teenagers and twentysomethings pretending to be teenagers. I used to think it could be, but time just kicks you inna fork, and I learned.
I'm curious what all you yunguns think will happen when you turn forty. Suicide? Retirement? Retirement with suicide?
God, what happens if life extension becomes a reality? I hope LE comes with rejuvenation, 'cause then I can use my l33t oldman skills to steal the girlfriends of all the hapless 22 year old dudes. Delusional fantasy revenge is the best revenge.
Seriously, elitism and ageism won't be much of a help where we are all going. The U.S. (and everywhere else where population growth is stabilizing or reducing) will need to integrate a hell of a lot of older people with the will to learn new things, and we also need people who learn skills at non-l33t places like community colleges, like how to fix cars and industrial machinery and build things, as well as the hotshots from top tier college programs.
"And you care if the police know your location... why?"
... we've got it all. Fascism is the most popular form of government known to man. Democracy is HARD WORK, and America no longer has the patience or the education to maintain one, much less export it by means of rains of white phosphorus.
Because it't none of their fucking business, frankly. If you don't understand why that's important, then, welcome to Big Brother.
They've rounded up plenty of people on a whim, called them terrorists, tortured them, found they were clean, and then deported them. It's already happened.
People LIKE fascism. It makes them warm and comfy. Safe streets; the wrong sort of people rounded up, or in this case, tracked like dangerous dogs; prosperous companies making useful systems for a government that increasingly is owned by the businesses themselves; voting machines compromised; election tabulation in private, secret, partisan corporate hands; wrong sort of people kept penned away in assigned neighborhoods, kept of of decent people's hair; a nice assortment of external enemies to blow up and excoriate; eternal war against a non-existent (at first!) enemy; lovely merging of fundamentalist church and state; science brought to heel, made to serve the needs of business and government; charismatic leaders; news media brought down like errant servants, dishing up only prescribed information, those refusing being brought down and ruined by either smear or executive fiat; lobbying organizations brought under the control of the ruling party; permanent suspension of constitutional liberties; secret laws; secret prisons; torture; questioning the omnipotent ruler is labeled violently as a lack of patriotism; the ruler is equated with the nation itself; the ruler is equated with the armed forces; opposition is clearly labeled as treason, madness, badthinking
Fascisms only fall when they overreach themselves. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But rarely do they fall because the majority of those ruled despise it.
It's welcomed with open arms. And much waving of flags. As Jerry Pournelle actually said when Bush assumed super-constitional power, "Ave, Caesar". Hail Caesar, he who will protect us and tell us what we want to hear.
Remember, it's not what they'll do with their power right now. The power is new to them, and they are still men who remember what a democratic society is like. They'll go easy with it. What you have to know is that the next generation, the one that was raised with dog searches of their school lockers, with strip searches in 2nd grade, random drug tests, secret prisons, secret police searches and arrests, listening to police state crap on TV every day of their lives... THEY'LL bring hell to Earth, because they will think police states are the way things should be. They'll not understand why anyone would object. Slavery will be normal to them.
Nyet. Nope. No: monopolies are not "created" by governments, not in cases like this. Companies become monopolies by vicious competition, OR a natural monopoly is created by, say, one company deciding to lay cable lines to all the houses in the neighborhood while other companies decide it wouldn't be profitable to do the same. Competition fails in such cases because companies can create "duopolies", each building lines into their own areas and carefully respecting borders. Governments are often "requested" (required by extortion) to set these thieves guilds into law on pain of removal of monoploy service.
Local governments are forced to grant monopolies exclusive rights because they are monopolies, not because they wish to, or even can, "create" monopoly situations. Businesses decided to go into some neighborhoods, yet not others, not soley for profit, but in order to create artificial scarcity and additional costs. Governments can't force them to do anything -- unless they are declared monopolies, in which case the goverment steps in to keep the hyenas from eating everyone's livers. Goverments regulate monopolies because raw capitalism can't. Left to their own devices, AT&T (get used to the name, as SBC will be brought in soon) will gut the market and drive prices even higher -- and start acting like feudal overlords in the bargain. Thus we have Microsoft declared monopoly (tho the Bush admin does not believe in monopoly regulation, so it is a dead letter until they are removed), thus AT&T WAS DISMANTLED in '84 for precisely what they are doing now: abusing their monopoly position. Sigh.
Has there been even one, single, solitary instance of a "terrorist" being caught by all this nonsense? What exactly is all this good for, other than spying on citizens at will?
The "evidence" against Padilla was apparently obtained by waterboarding (drowning reflex torturing) two al Queda members until they made up something that the torturers wanted to hear. No case, no evidence, no "dirty bombs", no admin officals declaring him guilty without trial on TV anymore. And he was one of their Big Wins By Using Theeir New Freedom To Find Terrorists.
Still, people don't understand what's happening to their rights. And they won't care. Torture, false imprisonment, stripping a US citizen of his constitutional rights by executive fiat based on stories made up under torture, keeping him prisoner and helpless to answer his accusers for over three years, then a nonsense charge to maintain face -- and he's still under the King's justice, unable to examine the evidence against him -- because there never was any. Why is a US citizen in a secret gulag under trumped up charges? Why don't people care? How many others are out there?
They demanded trust, and they blew it. They don't care about justice, just power. Don't give them more.
Interesting. Well, okay, but "4K" scanning is used for archiving old films. And all that data will just fritter away on hard drives, until media and home video tech catches up and then we'll see some use for super-ultra-mega-etc sized media. Won't be for a while tho.
Master reels of old films are being scanned in, today, at 4K (4000+) lines of resolution for archival purposes. The film media are deteriorating; it's a pity we couldn't do it before thousands of films faded away in IP vaults. Lucas recorded Star Wars 1-3 in 4K digital; movies in the future will be in 4K format.
Eventually, if a capacious enough media exists, those 4K scans will be released to the consumer market, along with 4K video systems.
And wasn't 2005 the year of IBM's nonvolatile MRAM memory? Wazzap with that?
"Actually, infrequently, Hollywood appeals to the geeks and smarter folk by making smarter movies - more varied an intelligent (if flawed, movies). The audience responds by not seeing them at all." ...Serenity.
I am playing the "wait 'til it tanks -- then you buy" game. But, I'm not wealthy, and any misjudgements I make may well ruin me when I swoop in to buy, vulture-like. Billionaires never starve, but I soon may. Also, buying cheap is an easy game, if you're wealthy, because up or down, you're fine. Inevitably, the market will go up, the real estate prices will grow again, no matter if it takes 1 year or 20. If you're mega-wealthy, you take losses, wait it out, and eventually you will make enormous profit.
But guess what -- while the wealthy play the waiting game, sitting on stocks and depressed properties, waiting for the ships to come in, the job market will collapse, poverty will escalate, health insurance will evaporate, and purchase of consumer goods will plummet. It's called a depression. Spending on property and stocks don't create jobs, don't bring the country out of a death spiral. As a matter of fact, the worse it gets, the better for the 3 percent or so who will own everything worth owning. Wages depress, insurance is a joke, rents go WAAAAY up as the housing market bounces former buyers into rental spaces -- it's a damned Willy Wonka scenario for those holding liquid capital as the bubble bursts.
Falmebait, informative, whatever. It's the simple truth.
They've (the wealthy, like the Waltons ) been spending their no-tax windfall by buying other companies, and buying back their own company's stock to privatize their corporations. What they aren't doing with the money is spending it on new jobs, which is what the putative purpose of the cuts are for; no less authority than the American Enterprise Institute states that, to their surprise, the newly released wealth is not returning to the economy at large, but is "going into the matresses".
When the economy tanks in the next year or so, all that hoarded wealth will be released to purchase stock and real estate at greatly deflated prices. They'll make a bundle on our economic disaster, eventually, when the US climbs out of its debt hole (by raising taxes and cutting public spending) and the value of the holdings they will purchase at fire-sale prices go back up.
Supply side economics, as Reagan's budget director David Stockman admitted, is a con to lower taxes on the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. He should know, as he was Reagan's salesman to congress.
Supply side cuts have failed. Jobs are gone, poverty is up, aid to the poor is going, we're trillions in the hole in debt to China, the wealthy are insanely wealthy and poised to become mega-wealthy after the crash caused by the tax cuts and borrowing. Bush believes in his supply side cuts. But, as we've seen, his beliefs are gut-based, not fact-based, and his gut is unbelieveably incorrect about reality. He simply didn't believe in his own college education, and certainly had his own ideas about economics, his Harvard professor says. Faith-based economics, welfare is communism, government is evil, all that.
Economic booms are based on the price of oil, not tax cuts. Reagan cut taxes and increased spending, sending us into a spiral that mirrors today's death swirl, but he was saved by one thing: OPEC's pricing discipline collapsed in the early Eighties. So much wealth, which had been hemorraging to the middle eastern princes since 1973, suddenly flooded into the American economy. We sang with power and money and grew, even as the debt ballooned. Reagan was a lucky bugger: his supply side con would have ruined him had OPEC not collapsed.
Bush the senior had to raise taxes to stop the disaster that supply side created. He paid for it by losing a chance at a second term.
Bush the junior came into office believing, as all the other conservatives did, in the Reagan Miracle. He was wrong: the miracle was the OPEC collapse that saved the old fool from the folly of believing the pack of thieves that sold him on the supply-side con.
So, Bush slammed straight into OPEC and the oil companies ascendant, believing that tax cuts were the solution to all, that government was the problem, and that debt would eventually force the death of the New Deal programs the wealthy hated so. It's five years later, and the International Monetary Fund is telling us we can crash hard or crash soft -- but we will crash, when the Chinese and all the others lending us money cut us off. They will dictates terms to US. And Bush will probably react by screaming at his aides and locking himself away from the public, which is pretty much his reponse to every challenge.
After the crash, the very people who keep selling the supply side con will be flush with offshore cash. They will swoop in and buy cheap, while taxes for the lesser mortals go up 20% to try to stop the bleeding. And oh yep -- they will be the ones who'll be lending us money to shore up the tax base, so they'll make a trillion bucks in interest alone in the next couple of decades -- paid for by tax payers.
Yup, the money is in the mattress - for now.
"there is no deduction for morgtage interest for non-investment property in Canada"
The Republican necons in our Congress are trying to remove the mortgage interest deduction as we speak. Now how does the US look if that's gone?
www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf
w ww.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf+GAO+voting+report& hl=en
or html:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:KoqXAm72WqYJ:
theft rampant?
TV sets, cell phones, cars, that sort of thing? really?
must be hard to digitize. bandwidth's pretty expensive for transporting physical objects.some sort of macro version of quantum teleportation.
OH, you mean ideas, like music? i didn't know one could steal music from people. wow.
the only solution to this problem will come from further advances in fMRI mind monitoring technology over the next couple of decades. we will finally stop the theft of immaterial objects from people's minds when we can stick their heads in a scanner and search for stolen intellectual property. then, and only then, will the world be safe from this unprecedented criminal activity.
http://www.commonwonders.com/
Poll Shock
Off by 40 points, newspaper's predictions may be disturbingly accurate
By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services
November 24, 2005
One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process -- and democracy itself.
But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."
And Rowland's right, as far as I can tell: The Columbus Dispatch's survey of voters, conducted by mail, has historically been a reliable poll; it has been cited for its precision in the scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly and is considered far more accurate than telephone surveys. There is no faulty O-ring, in other words; the methodology doesn't need changing.
And that's why there's a story here that must not be allowed to vanish.
The story is about how America votes, and evidence that pandemic chaos and perhaps even centrally orchestrated malfeasance are accompanying the spread of electronic voting machines to the nation's precincts. We know there's cause to worry about the state of our democracy because of the historical accuracy of the Columbus Dispatch voter poll.
Of the five proposed amendments on the Ohio ballot, only the first -- a $2 billion state bond initiative to promote high-tech industry -- was not related to the conduct of elections, and oddly enough its results were accurately forecast in the poll (predicted yes vote, 53 percent; final yes vote, 54 percent). Then it gets hairy.
Issue 2 would have made absentee voting easier in the state. It had lots of high-profile support, and the Dispatch poll predicted a cakewalk for it: 59 percent yes, 33 percent no, 9 percent undecided. The actual result: 36 percent yes, a whopping 63 percent no.
Then there was issue 3, which would have lowered the campaign-contribution limits that a lame-duck state legislature had raised a year ago. Prediction: 61 percent yes, 25 percent no, 14 percent undecided. Actual result: 33 percent yes, 66 percent no.
The results of issue 4, to control gerrymandering by establishing an independent board to draw congressional districts, were only slightly less dramatic. Prediction: 31 percent yes, 45 percent no, 25 percent undecided. Result: 30 percent yes, 69 percent no. And for issue 5, to establish an independent board instead of the secretary of state's office to oversee elections, a 41 percent predicted yes vote shrank to 29 percent, while the no vote ballooned from 43 to 70 percent.
Ka-boom goes the Challenger.
Here's the telling thing. The Dispatch, member in good standing of the mainstream media, has no interest in raising doubts about the integrity of the U.S. electoral system, and so hasn't looked in that direction for an explanation of what voting-rights activist Bob Fitrakis called a polling error of "Landon beats FDR" proportions.
Instead, the paper blames the notorious volatility of statewide referendum issues. Rowland hypothesized "a huge shift in the electorate in the last few
Open source, no open source, it doesn't matter! There is no way to know what code is running on the voting machines, the PC card, the accumulator PC at the voting station, the modem box, or the upline accumulators at any one time. No "verification" is possible. Even if the code were open, how would anyone know, in real time, that any piece of this long chain of bit crunching has been altered? And how would you figure it out afterwards?
Diebold doesn't have to alter every single result across the country; they can simply tweak a couple dozen districts via the accumulators, and no one would ever know. The machines keep "breaking" during elections, and techs go in to "fix" the totals. This is inexcusable, obvious bull, obvious cheating. Diebold -- which builds ATMs for crissake! -- says that paper records as a backup are unnecessary. Uh, what??!? No one is that dense, especially a company that deals with trillions of dollars in transactions for a living. They don't want a trail, they've fought like maniacs to keep inspectors out. They are cheating. It may only be a select one or three people who know it's happening at Diebold, but they know what the backdoors are. "Exit Polls are unreliable" my aching butt. If they were unreliable, they'd ALWAYS be unreliable, not just in Ohio, in 2004, in the contested districts, where Diebold machines are running.
"whereas you'd need some engineers with logic analyzers to really track everything a totally computerized system is doing."
And they couldn't possibly monitor the situation. Are all the voting machines running approved code? Impossible to know. Is the code locked down, or is it being replaced dynamically to cover tracks? Unknown. Is the code, a closed binary, full of triggers and cheats that only activate within certain parameters? Human nature says probably. Have the flash card couriers been tampered with? Who knows. Are the MS Windows machines acting as accumulators tampered with? Shrug. Is the easily modified Access database on the accumulator protected from tampering with Notepad? Impossible. Is there anyone around who is both 1) suspicious 2) knowledgeable enough to spot gross tampering? Nope. Are the vote totals modified when the technicians are called in to fix the machines during elections? Yes, Virginia, they are and it is a fact.
Even paper backups won't work, and here is why: Paper ballots would not be counted unless a recount is triggered when the vote total could go either way because of a minute spread, OR obvious fraud is committed. If one is controlling the vote tallies at a district level, all you have to do, say, if the trigger is 1%, is to make sure the spread is greater than 1% -- and the RECOUNT NEVER HAPPENS. The paper ballots are not manually counted under scrutiny and compared to the computer counted votes.
And this is beyond the maddening fact that Americans don't understand computers, cheating, or how to avoid this mess. The persistent idiocy I always hear from officials or reporters is the "print a receipt to take home with you" concept. Hair. Pull. Out. Receipts are useless! Paper ballots must be printed for each vote, shown the the voter, and placed in a ballot box.
Here's a simple fix for the recount trigger problem: random manual recounts for every election. IF even ONE of the races turn up as fixed, the lid is blown and we go back to hand counts. I can only hope.
Diebold has fought a manual recount system so ferociously that (Occam's Razor) they have indeed fixed elections. Their have been a lot of stories and sources stating that the employees know something is crooked, altho they are afraid for their jobs. Jobs in IT are scarce. The top management is far-rightist and saw it's duty as electing Bush; the details are tiresome.
Notice exit polls are no longer conducted? They "broke" during 2000, so no news organization will have them anymore. This in spite of the fact that statistics don't "break" during only one extremely critical election, and no other. They didn't break, kids, the election totals were altered and no longer matched reality.
Now we have these damned cheating machines in my precinct. I will vote absentee. To stop me, they'll have to "lose" boxes like the last election.
The defunding of public schools has produced a nation of incurious people who can't understand how simple it now is to change election totals to suit those who run the machines.
Exactly. It was just an identity badge. And they went bonkers. Totally disproportionate response.
Yell at the authority-maddened idiots who thought they could harrass Stallman, not Stallman. He made the point beautifully. It's about the POWER, not about security.
What do you think the guvmint or the cops will do when you block THEIR tracking, even symbolically? Arrest, jail, prison, inevitably.
Sorry. So sorry, responded to wrong post. I blame the sunlight on the monitor this morning.
Um, Stallman was harrassed and was kept prisoner, more or less. Privacy invaded, ding. Next.
For months as this RFID contraversy has progressed, people on the 'dot have said, "well, you can always block it with a piece of foil if you don't want to be tracked".
Well, guess what? As predicted by a quick examination of human nature, they WON'T let you block your tracking devices. You will not have a choice as to when and where you will be tracked. This is just the very beginning, the closing of the gate, of our World Prison.
Tell me why again we have to have tracking devices embedded on our persons? I seem to have missed the reasoning. Terrorism?
For flavor try: forced-pregnancy-and-childbirth. Words are fun...
Well.
The President, the VP, Attorney General Gonzalez and a cooperative bunch at the Pentagon and the various intelligence services have decided to kidnap people and imprison them around the world, with various flavors of continual torture and mind breaking, because they believe national security trumps "human rights" and established law.
What's the moral difference between that, and grabbing "Patient Omega" in the name of finding an immunity factor for a disease killing millions? To up the stakes "24" style, what if HIV mutates and finds an easier vector? How about then?
As a libertarian, small "l", I believe that patient Omega here has the right to refuse to cooperate. However, we've collectively flushed human rights away for the sake of "security", in exchange for which we've got a lot of dreamed-up terrorist plots from men under the knife. In the case of Omega, we could actually stop a superepidemic.
Kidnapping is moral for the sake of fear, but not for saving millions or billions of lives? This is not an idle question in philosophy class. This is real and it is now. We've decided collectively that abduction and torture for an individual's lifetime is okay if we're afraid. Given that, what's the problem with putting Omega under the microscope, even against his will?
Under disaster conditions in Louisiana, people are being blocked by the armed forces and some private killers hired by the U.S. from returning to their homes. Force? Yup. No one cares.
Bush has straightforwardly declared he wants martial law and dictator powers if avian flu hits the U.S. Soldiers will grab people and lock them away, people will be shot if a soldier believes they warrant death. How is it okay to remove EVERYONE'S human rights if a bird flu epidemic hits, but not okay to drag one guy in for testing if the epidemic is HIV? Remember, HIV has killed millions. It's just not a quick as avian flu. HIV hits people doing naughty things, in the view of moralists, so it's not a priority?
"Ethics" is about more than fetuses and stem cells. Ethics is what we decide to care about, and we have to decide every day. Who gets shot, who gets their knees broken, who loses their freedom if we decide it should be so?
Well, why pass the "you can't go bankrupt" laws for poor schmucks? Because it makes debtors into permanent slaves of the debt holders. Lovely.
I don't see debtors prisons coming back. I think they'd just throw poor people who owe money into real prison. OR: I forsee the return of indentured servitude, in one form or another. Bonded labor until you pay off your debt, with all terms of salary, repayment terms, and interest determined by the debt holders.
Hillary Clinton, not one for the bon mot, actually nailed one to the wall when she said that the Republicans are repealing the twentieth century.
When you can buy the laws you like, anything can happen.
Apparently the War on Terror is over, and we've got the country sewed up and secure. Otherwise, they wouldn't be wasting all this manpower and money to keep people from downloading music.
I feel so safe now.