Two attacks. Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, remember? Fertilizer bomb.
Funny how no U.S. rightist militias were rounded up and sent to "processing" in Cuba for the rest of their lives, just-in-case and to keep-us-safe. No roundups of crew-cut guvmint haters. No searches of all pickup trucks and rental vans until the end of time. No permanent military surveillance of interstate rest stops, which is where McVeigh practically lived. No color coded "alerts". Could it be that they vote? That they're white? Could it be that all this "security" would have been as nonsensical then as it is now? Is it because Americans really, really think they are Christ's army in the war against a false god, or at least against dark people far away, and no torture, no suspension of the constitution is too much if we kill some more?
Sigh. Try finding the BBC Documentary "The Power of Nightmare". Lokitorrent has it at the moment. I've come to agree with the premise: there really was no such organization as "Al Qaeda", that it was the construction of a prosecutor that Bush used as a blueprint, that the attack was the last gasp of a desperate and failing jihadist movement, and that we have been taken to a near-dictatorship on nothing but the power to create a constant state of fear by extremely ruthless and self-deluded men who've methodically eliminated all contention of their assertions in the military, the intelligence community and the media. Even to question the simplest of their premises gets you branded a loon. We need to wake up. But I don't see how. Malignant egophrenia, aka "mad emperor's disease", has taken complete hold of the U.S. We've gone nuts, and we're taking everyone down with us.
The NYT is the ultimate American source of unbiased, excellent journalism. O'Reilly and Hannity and Fox News are agitprop broadcasters.
"Bias" does not mean "disagrees with far right ideology". Fox IS exceptionally, violently, over-the-top biased, every minute, every day.
There is no comparison between RW agitprop and the NYT. If you think all newspapers are "liberal" and "biased", you might want to rethink your view of the universe. Just might be you fell over the right side of the flat earth some time back.
"I would suspect it would be first for the rich. And they don't need SS."
It's even sillier than that. Earned income over $80,000 is not taxed for social security. Gates and Bezos pay FICA on 80K, and that's that. And investment income is not FICA'ed.
In 1938, the Social Security Act was only three years old, but its future was already very much in doubt. Conservatives claimed it would bankrupt the nation, and independent critics argued that the way it was financed amounted to ''financial hocus-pocus,'' as one editorial in The New York Times put it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt defended the program, said by a cabinet member to be his favorite, with some of his trademark oratory. ''Because it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to build their own security,'' the president told a national radio audience, ''government must now step in and help them lay the foundation stones.''
Social Security did become the cornerstone -- not only the biggest government entitlement plan but also the most universal, the most popular and the most enduring. But the debate over Social Security never ended. Barry Goldwater wanted to repeal it; Milton Friedman wrote in 1962 that it was an unjustifiable incursion on personal liberty; and David Stockman, the budget director who personified Ronald Reagan's efforts to shrink the federal government, tried to take a hatchet to Social Security, which he called a ''monster.''
But in this 70-year struggle, no other conservative has ever come as close to transforming the program as George W. Bush. He is making Social Security reform, including a partial privatization, a centerpiece of his second term. If the most ardent ideologues have their way, such a reform would be a first step toward a wholly new approach to retirement security -- one that would set aside the notion of collective insurance and guaranteed minimums for that of personal investing and responsibility.
This could do more to reverse the New Deal, and even the Great Society, than Goldwater, Stockman and Reagan ever dreamed of. ''We call it a conservative New Deal,'' says Stephen Moore, author of ''Bullish on Bush: How George W. Bush's Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger.'' In Moore's words, it will be a fundamental shift ''from an entitlement society to an ownership society.'' The key to this transformation, according to a generation of conservative thinkers and crusaders, is reducing the size and changing the nature of Social Security, which now pays benefits of half a trillion a year, and which will only grow bigger as America grows older.
The campaign to privatize has not only been about ideology; it has also focused on Social Security's supposed insolvency. Moore's book calls Social Security a ''Titanic . . . headed toward the iceberg'' and a program ''on the verge of collapse.'' A stream of other conservatives have bombarded the public, over years and decades, with prophecies of trillion-dollar liabilities and with metaphors intended to frighten -- ''train wreck,'' ''bankruptcy,'' ''cancer'' and so forth. Recently, a White House political deputy wrote a strategy note in which he said that Social Security is ''on an unsustainable course. That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness.''
The campaign is potentially self-fulfilling: persuade enough people that Social Security is going bankrupt, and it will lose public support. Then Congress will be forced to act. And thanks to such unceasing alarums, many, and perhaps most, people today think the program is in serious financial trouble.
But is it? After Bush's re-election, I carefully read the 225-page annual report of the Social Security trustees. I also talked to actuaries and economists, inside and outside the agency, who are expert in the peculiar science of long-term Social Security forecasting. The actuarial view is that the system is probably i
I see a lot of ad hominem nastiness here. Try some arguments. Screaming that someone is stupid, a communist, or a kid is ripped straight from the Bill O'Reilly handbook. This is what passes for "arguments" on the lunatic right fringe, which unfortunately is pretty much what passes for news for most people today. Falafel-filled sadness. Sigh.
Ideas, images, movies and writings are not property.
Property has physical existence as its primary characteristic. A book may be physical property. But the stream of words and images within are is not.
Secondary characteristic: if you take a property away from the owner, the owner no longer has access to it. Take a book away from me, and you have stolen my property. Take an image of the book, and I still have the book; nothing has been stolen.
No memetic hijacking of the words "property" and "stealing", please.
Your point about "communism"? Jefferson and his allies wanted no copyrights in the constitution. Damned commie. Also, the U.S., until the 20th century, recognized no country's copyright laws save its own. The entire population and government of the U.S. were communistic thieves for over 125 years. We only cared about international copyright when we wanted to make more money.
"what is stopping somebody with bomb-making skills from flying a plane like this loaded with explosives to a high-profile target such as the White House or other government buildings?"
Ans: Don't fuck up other people's countries. Seriously. Blow up a few thousand people and then karma is a bitch.
Despite all the well-fanned paranoia incubated in this country, we really haven't been attacked much. I've a feeling that will change soon. Of course, the attack will recursively be used as justification for attacking foreign soil, and all will applaud our foresight.
If it exists, we are allowed to make Fair Use of it, for criticism, satire, or just to make a point. We always have had this right. BTW: we historically don't have to ask permission to Fair Use a piece.
The DMCA lets producers shut down that right, and Bill's company is doing as they bid and enabling them to stop Fair Use.
WE are the customers too. He's enabled a runaround of copyright law. In my favorite phrase, "they broke the deal". Copyright for a certain term for them, accompanied by Fair Use for us. Now there is no term, and we can't use our Fair Use rights without breaking a sneaky little law. They broke the deal, not us.
They don't like Fair Use? Fine, we don't like copyright. Game on.
Meh, o bullcarper. In the Olden Dayes, there was indeed some fuss about putting cameras on some probes. I read a LOT of space exploration books whilst growing up.
I've no doubt some did love the pictures. I've really no doubt that current scientists enjoy them as well.
Space scientists have always thought cameras onboard space probes weren't of much use to them, other than for marketing the mission to taxpayers. The mission planners in the olden days were forced to put them on at gunpoint. And frankly, the bandwidth used isn't really great for pictures, much less video. Scientist prefer unpronounceable devices for measuring things that will give them ideas for papers. They've a point.
The Hindenburg disaster was caused by an arc that ignited the thermite-like metallic paint that covered the airship. There was no way the skin would have stopped burning, helium or no helium.
But, yes, the U.S. embargo on helium to the Germans was the reason the airship was full of hydrogen -- which was not what the designers intended.
-privacy in moving about the country -privacy in phone calls -privacy in email -privacy in chat -privacy in surfing the Internet(s) -privacy of assemblage and conversation in public places -the right to speak freely anywhere but in our own homes (provided no one outside minds) because all reasonable places to assemble are private property -the right not to be searched without charge or warrant, either at home, school, or work -the right not to provide bodily fluids on demand of anyone on pain of loss of employment or education -the expectation that we will not be watched and/or recorded at any time if we are not sealed in our homes -the right not to be stripped and humiliated at will in order to travel by air -the right to buy without surrendering privacy...
in what way exactly are we not in a giant open-air prison?
"He was working for the company, on company time, at the companys direction (after he asked the company president to be assigned to do work on blue lasers), using company equipment."
And so? He still won. After all, in the U.S., the only thing that matters is winning. That's how corporations got the "if you invent it, it's ours" expectation: they won in court.
Apparently, custom and law is different in Japan than in the U.S.
"The guy who invented the Flourescent lightbulb for GE didn't get as much as the company initially offered this guy."
Too bad for that schmuck, then, that he worked for GE in America.
Seriously, what incentive is there for an engineer to create something world-changing if he gets $200 and an attaboy memo for his trouble? Maybe a wave of innovation will now sweep Japan's R&D labs. The kids can make some bucks now. Maybe we should be turnin' Japanese, I really think so.
If the lasers were cheap enough, why not remove all movement - get rid of the spinning disk, and just have an insertable card read by a matrix of lasers. Inevitable, I think. Moving parts must go...
I'm curious: how do you contact Microsoft's site for Windows critical updates with Firefox? The site claims it works only with IE. Do you fib and pretend FF is IE? Does that work?
"Anarchist government" is an oxymoron. True anarchy arises from lack of order spontaneously, and a lot of scores get settled with blood. Everyone: the US killed over 300,000 Filipinos alone in the Spanish-American war. We've killed 12,000-100,000 in Iraq; the exact number is classified. "Communism" didn't kill anyone any more than our "democracy" has. Nothing about the theories demand you murder people. The ideologies don't kill. People kill. Stalin and Lenin killed millions for political and economic advantage, and we are killing for the same reasons now. And the Russians thought they were defending their motherland and freedom as well. And were as deluded as we are now, for the exact same reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Two attacks. Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, remember? Fertilizer bomb.
Funny how no U.S. rightist militias were rounded up and sent to "processing" in Cuba for the rest of their lives, just-in-case and to keep-us-safe. No roundups of crew-cut guvmint haters. No searches of all pickup trucks and rental vans until the end of time. No permanent military surveillance of interstate rest stops, which is where McVeigh practically lived. No color coded "alerts". Could it be that they vote? That they're white? Could it be that all this "security" would have been as nonsensical then as it is now? Is it because Americans really, really think they are Christ's army in the war against a false god, or at least against dark people far away, and no torture, no suspension of the constitution is too much if we kill some more?
Sigh. Try finding the BBC Documentary "The Power of Nightmare". Lokitorrent has it at the moment. I've come to agree with the premise: there really was no such organization as "Al Qaeda", that it was the construction of a prosecutor that Bush used as a blueprint, that the attack was the last gasp of a desperate and failing jihadist movement, and that we have been taken to a near-dictatorship on nothing but the power to create a constant state of fear by extremely ruthless and self-deluded men who've methodically eliminated all contention of their assertions in the military, the intelligence community and the media. Even to question the simplest of their premises gets you branded a loon. We need to wake up. But I don't see how. Malignant egophrenia, aka "mad emperor's disease", has taken complete hold of the U.S. We've gone nuts, and we're taking everyone down with us.
The NYT is the ultimate American source of unbiased, excellent journalism. O'Reilly and Hannity and Fox News are agitprop broadcasters.
"Bias" does not mean "disagrees with far right ideology". Fox IS exceptionally, violently, over-the-top biased, every minute, every day.
There is no comparison between RW agitprop and the NYT. If you think all newspapers are "liberal" and "biased", you might want to rethink your view of the universe. Just might be you fell over the right side of the flat earth some time back.
"I would suspect it would be first for the rich. And they don't need SS."
It's even sillier than that. Earned income over $80,000 is not taxed for social security. Gates and Bezos pay FICA on 80K, and that's that. And investment income is not FICA'ed.
Their payout is capped too, I suppose.
Well, then the subject seems to live forever, which is apropos.
Point:
Only about one third of SS payouts go to retirees. Another third goes to the disabled, and the rest goes for survivor benefits.
Oh, I remember that Khan conquered in the '90's. But the show doesn't remember that... so the past isn't the future... this way lies drain bramage.
" The Social Security System will fail Shortly after 2031."
No. An utter lie.
The New York Times:
A Question of Numbers
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN
Published: January 16, 2005
THE CONSERVATIVE NEW DEAL
In 1938, the Social Security Act was only three years old, but its future was already very much in doubt. Conservatives claimed it would bankrupt the nation, and independent critics argued that the way it was financed amounted to ''financial hocus-pocus,'' as one editorial in The New York Times put it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt defended the program, said by a cabinet member to be his favorite, with some of his trademark oratory. ''Because it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to build their own security,'' the president told a national radio audience, ''government must now step in and help them lay the foundation stones.''
Social Security did become the cornerstone -- not only the biggest government entitlement plan but also the most universal, the most popular and the most enduring. But the debate over Social Security never ended. Barry Goldwater wanted to repeal it; Milton Friedman wrote in 1962 that it was an unjustifiable incursion on personal liberty; and David Stockman, the budget director who personified Ronald Reagan's efforts to shrink the federal government, tried to take a hatchet to Social Security, which he called a ''monster.''
But in this 70-year struggle, no other conservative has ever come as close to transforming the program as George W. Bush. He is making Social Security reform, including a partial privatization, a centerpiece of his second term. If the most ardent ideologues have their way, such a reform would be a first step toward a wholly new approach to retirement security -- one that would set aside the notion of collective insurance and guaranteed minimums for that of personal investing and responsibility.
This could do more to reverse the New Deal, and even the Great Society, than Goldwater, Stockman and Reagan ever dreamed of. ''We call it a conservative New Deal,'' says Stephen Moore, author of ''Bullish on Bush: How George W. Bush's Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger.'' In Moore's words, it will be a fundamental shift ''from an entitlement society to an ownership society.'' The key to this transformation, according to a generation of conservative thinkers and crusaders, is reducing the size and changing the nature of Social Security, which now pays benefits of half a trillion a year, and which will only grow bigger as America grows older.
The campaign to privatize has not only been about ideology; it has also focused on Social Security's supposed insolvency. Moore's book calls Social Security a ''Titanic . . . headed toward the iceberg'' and a program ''on the verge of collapse.'' A stream of other conservatives have bombarded the public, over years and decades, with prophecies of trillion-dollar liabilities and with metaphors intended to frighten -- ''train wreck,'' ''bankruptcy,'' ''cancer'' and so forth. Recently, a White House political deputy wrote a strategy note in which he said that Social Security is ''on an unsustainable course. That reality needs to be seared into the public consciousness.''
The campaign is potentially self-fulfilling: persuade enough people that Social Security is going bankrupt, and it will lose public support. Then Congress will be forced to act. And thanks to such unceasing alarums, many, and perhaps most, people today think the program is in serious financial trouble.
But is it? After Bush's re-election, I carefully read the 225-page annual report of the Social Security trustees. I also talked to actuaries and economists, inside and outside the agency, who are expert in the peculiar science of long-term Social Security forecasting. The actuarial view is that the system is probably i
Five or ten years down the road would be in the timeframe of the Star Trek universe! Timelines colliding, Mr. Spock...
I see a lot of ad hominem nastiness here. Try some arguments. Screaming that someone is stupid, a communist, or a kid is ripped straight from the Bill O'Reilly handbook. This is what passes for "arguments" on the lunatic right fringe, which unfortunately is pretty much what passes for news for most people today. Falafel-filled sadness. Sigh.
Ideas, images, movies and writings are not property.
Property has physical existence as its primary characteristic. A book may be physical property. But the stream of words and images within are is not.
Secondary characteristic: if you take a property away from the owner, the owner no longer has access to it. Take a book away from me, and you have stolen my property. Take an image of the book, and I still have the book; nothing has been stolen.
No memetic hijacking of the words "property" and "stealing", please.
Your point about "communism"? Jefferson and his allies wanted no copyrights in the constitution. Damned commie. Also, the U.S., until the 20th century, recognized no country's copyright laws save its own. The entire population and government of the U.S. were communistic thieves for over 125 years. We only cared about international copyright when we wanted to make more money.
"what is stopping somebody with bomb-making skills from flying a plane like this loaded with explosives to a high-profile target such as the White House or other government buildings?"
Ans: Don't fuck up other people's countries. Seriously. Blow up a few thousand people and then karma is a bitch.
Despite all the well-fanned paranoia incubated in this country, we really haven't been attacked much. I've a feeling that will change soon. Of course, the attack will recursively be used as justification for attacking foreign soil, and all will applaud our foresight.
If it exists, we are allowed to make Fair Use of it, for criticism, satire, or just to make a point. We always have had this right. BTW: we historically don't have to ask permission to Fair Use a piece.
The DMCA lets producers shut down that right, and Bill's company is doing as they bid and enabling them to stop Fair Use.
WE are the customers too. He's enabled a runaround of copyright law. In my favorite phrase, "they broke the deal". Copyright for a certain term for them, accompanied by Fair Use for us. Now there is no term, and we can't use our Fair Use rights without breaking a sneaky little law. They broke the deal, not us.
They don't like Fair Use? Fine, we don't like copyright. Game on.
Meh, o bullcarper. In the Olden Dayes, there was indeed some fuss about putting cameras on some probes. I read a LOT of space exploration books whilst growing up.
I've no doubt some did love the pictures. I've really no doubt that current scientists enjoy them as well.
I, for one, welcome their departure. The boxes of the inpatient and advice-deaf are the very sources of a lot of the spam infecting the net.
Don't forget to not write!
Space scientists have always thought cameras onboard space probes weren't of much use to them, other than for marketing the mission to taxpayers. The mission planners in the olden days were forced to put them on at gunpoint. And frankly, the bandwidth used isn't really great for pictures, much less video. Scientist prefer unpronounceable devices for measuring things that will give them ideas for papers. They've a point.
But WE want pictures!
Um, actually, the new iMac is designed for user upgradability. Nice layout, easy to open.
The Hindenburg disaster was caused by an arc that ignited the thermite-like metallic paint that covered the airship. There was no way the skin would have stopped burning, helium or no helium.
But, yes, the U.S. embargo on helium to the Germans was the reason the airship was full of hydrogen -- which was not what the designers intended.
Sometimes, a prison is built slowly.
...
If we have no expectation of:
-privacy in moving about the country
-privacy in phone calls
-privacy in email
-privacy in chat
-privacy in surfing the Internet(s)
-privacy of assemblage and conversation in public places
-the right to speak freely anywhere but in our own homes (provided no one outside minds) because all reasonable places to assemble are private property
-the right not to be searched without charge or warrant, either at home, school, or work
-the right not to provide bodily fluids on demand of anyone on pain of loss of employment or education
-the expectation that we will not be watched and/or recorded at any time if we are not sealed in our homes
-the right not to be stripped and humiliated at will in order to travel by air
-the right to buy without surrendering privacy
in what way exactly are we not in a giant open-air prison?
Are you all feeling safer now?
Under current law, the Woz would probably be in Federal prison until he was dead, dead, dead. Hell, he might be a Terrorist(TM)!
Change a word's definition, and amaze your friends! Kill your enemies! Imprison the annoying!
copyright v. patent.
A book is copyrighted, the ideas in it are not.
A patent is a protected idea, stated most simply.
"He was working for the company, on company time, at the companys direction (after he asked the company president to be assigned to do work on blue lasers), using company equipment."
And so? He still won. After all, in the U.S., the only thing that matters is winning. That's how corporations got the "if you invent it, it's ours" expectation: they won in court.
Apparently, custom and law is different in Japan than in the U.S.
"The guy who invented the Flourescent lightbulb for GE didn't get as much as the company initially offered this guy."
Too bad for that schmuck, then, that he worked for GE in America.
Seriously, what incentive is there for an engineer to create something world-changing if he gets $200 and an attaboy memo for his trouble? Maybe a wave of innovation will now sweep Japan's R&D labs. The kids can make some bucks now. Maybe we should be turnin' Japanese, I really think so.
Nah. Looks more like a walnut.
If the lasers were cheap enough, why not remove all movement - get rid of the spinning disk, and just have an insertable card read by a matrix of lasers. Inevitable, I think. Moving parts must go...
I'm curious: how do you contact Microsoft's site for Windows critical updates with Firefox? The site claims it works only with IE. Do you fib and pretend FF is IE? Does that work?
"Anarchist government" is an oxymoron. True anarchy arises from lack of order spontaneously, and a lot of scores get settled with blood. Everyone: the US killed over 300,000 Filipinos alone in the Spanish-American war. We've killed 12,000-100,000 in Iraq; the exact number is classified. "Communism" didn't kill anyone any more than our "democracy" has. Nothing about the theories demand you murder people. The ideologies don't kill. People kill. Stalin and Lenin killed millions for political and economic advantage, and we are killing for the same reasons now. And the Russians thought they were defending their motherland and freedom as well. And were as deluded as we are now, for the exact same reasons.