EVERY OBJECT ON EARTH IS SLIGHTLY RADIOACTIVE. C-14 is present in in all carbon compounds. There's nothing more radioactive about a lot of liquid CO2 than the CO2 floating about the atmosphere. The gasoline in your car is slightly radioactive. C-14 is used to date organic objects because it has a half-life. YOU are slightly radioactive.
Okay, but: CO2 doesn't explode, so a catastrophic leak would require a refrigeration breakdown or a major physical breach of multiple storage tanks.
To engineer around a disaster that could cause lives, you could do multiple things. Store the LCO2 in multiple cells, so that any leak would only release a small amount of the entire amount on the farm. You could move it offsite to other storage farms, to minimize the amount stored at the power plant or any single farm. You could also build a venting "chimney" much like we do with the smokestacks on current plants, designed to vent any leaked gaseous CO2 to a higher altitude so that it could easily disperse enough to not be threat to any living creature.
And we store much, MUCH MUCH more dangerous stuff than this all the time. And think about the rolling bombs on our highways that refuel filling stations -- we don't worry about those much. It's mostly psychological. Fear. Analyze the risk quantitatively: storing CO2 in liquid form would mitigate the warming effect, saving unbeliveable economic damage and loss of life that will result from the climate change. If three hundred people die from a CO2 leak from a really lousy design of a CO2 storage farm, it's far less than those killed by gasoline bombs every year, which we never notice.
Does it? Quite a lot would have to be released, and also, does gaseous CO2 roll down mountains? Are there power plants on mountains? I mean, does gaseous CO2 not simply disperse pretty quickly? You'd have to be pretty close to that leak to get an O2 deprived state.
We also transport methane in liquid form by the billions of liters every year, all over the world. THAT stuff is explosive, yet we seem to be doing okay.
And nuke waste is pretty easy to store, and additionally physicists could find some way to deal with it some century, or frankly antigravity it off the planet. We can think of a lot of new ways of moving materiel in a few centuries. I don't worry about it. Let's do both; retrofit fossil fuel plants to store the LCO2, and build new nuke plants.
But letting the CO2 go free as we do now is not an option.
Um. The obvious point is this: the CO2 will have been released anyway if the fuel were burned as it is now. Even if some of the liquid gets out and turns gaseous during a catastrophic leak, it would be a tiny, tiny percentage of the CO2 that would have been released, correction, will be released from the current plants. And the LCO2 would be in thousands of farms, so there would be no major disaster.
CO2 also doesn't explode, so it's safe to store. And simple methods could be used in the future to turn it back into hydrocarbons, if someone wants to go to the trouble.
And here's a thought: we could eventually learn to regulate the heat buildup in the earth's atmosphere by controlled release of the stored LCO2. If an ice age cometh, we can stopeth it by metering out the LCO2 just enough to increase the greenhouse effect to stop the cooling. Conversely, we can mitigate the atmospheric warming we are definitely experiencing today by not flooding the atmosphere with the CO2 we are currently tossing up.
Fahrenheit 911: facts never disputed. Mike's still waiting for someone to dispute: Bush's connections with the Sauds, the 7 minute wait (actually more like 19 - there was a photo session after "My Pet Goat"), the redirection of the "war" from AQ to Saddam with baseless accusations, the creation of a police state, the profiteering, the ignored death of the Iraqi civilians, the SS guarding the Saudi embassy... it's all true, and frankly not exactly news to people who read the news every day. The 'pubs HATE Moore, but that is not a contention of the facts. They can't contend with the facts, so they go for the man.
Stolen Honor: accusers were discredited, facts nonexistent, pure ad hominem by political opponents. One of the signed vets was never told he had signed the accusation, a surprise to him. Not a "disputed" matter except in the minds of the operatives and those who want to believe the accusers.
Actually, the cards can be read from a great distance away, if the transmitter power is jacked up. They will have no problem reading your ID from a block away, if not more, barring interference.
There is no way to "fix" it. A "terrorist" looks and sounds just like everyone else, until he acts. There is no screening, no government agency, no METHOD that can predict what a man will do in the future.
Insisting that the problem be fixed is what gives the police state dreamers the ammunition to create these horrors.
Accept uncertainty. There isn't any way to stop someone from hurting you if they don't mind dying to do so.
How, EXACTLY, would the 9-11 attackers been stopped if they had been issued RFID drivers licenses? There is no sane connection. I can't think of any easier examples to prove that government and businesses are taking advantage of the 9-11 fear to lock us down. PATRIOT acts, car transponders, GPSed cell phones, RFID armbands, implants, RFIDed ID cards, biometrics... NONE OF THESE THINGS would have stopped those men from crashing those planes into the towers. But that attack is used to justify every possible wet dream of a police state.
Now, onto Project TinFoilHat. If issued such a card, I will build a Faraday cage into a belt pouch, and there their assine tracking device can sit until a POLICEMAN asks to see it. I know damned well they can build RFID detectors that can work at great distances; I will not cooperate and being tracked on a giant Ms. Pac Man screen by whomever can afford the equipment.
As for those of you who don't care about this, you are good Germans. What else can I say.
I am getting really, really sick of the Freepers abusing their moderation points to snuff out posts that contradict their world view.
Here's the post again, 'cause I know that they're slowly modding it down from 5 to negative territory. Mod this down, I post it again, until you knock it the fuck off.
AGAIN:
Actually, no he can't. His relationship with Monica had nothing to do with the deposition that day, which was about some bimbomissle shot at the court system by the Richard Mellon Scaife elves.
The lawyers deposing Clinton lied to the judge about the relevance of the Lewinsky questions. The questions were indeed irrelevant, and designed soley to humiliate and ruin Clinton. The lawyers should have been disciplined, but the judge would have been ruined by the powers that were after Clinton. The victim was punished instead. Much easier.
And Clinton DID NOT LIE UNDER OATH. A bloody, fat lie. He had the judge define sex; what he did did not qualify under the judge's definition; he did not lie. He outsmarted the bastards.
And it wasn't a trial. It was a deposition. There was no case. It melted into the sewer lines along with all the other Scaife-driven crap during those years.
I've been quietly terrified my entire life that some nitwit would discover an easy way of creating antimatter and let everyone in the bloody world build a TotalConversion bomb.
Please, paranoid U.S., don't do the research. It'd be the worse catastrophe in the history of the planet. TC bombs would not require rare radioactive materials. Just know-how. I don't know if anyone is trying for a TC bomb, but once someone dreams it up, eventually they will find a way to make it.
I was hoping to be safely dead when people started to build things I used to dream up.
Please don't do the whole let's-splice-a-kiler-virus-to-the-common-cold either. We've not spread through local space yet. One bright boy could loose the death of a world.
We don't need antimatter weapons. We really, REALLY don't. Who the hell are we fighting that we need this horror? Stem cell research is against God's Will but superbombs is okay? What crack is this country on?
Do we really want the people who can't tell the difference between Al Queda and Iraq to have this kind of power?
"British intelligence believed that Iraq possessed such weapons, too. So did Russian intelligence. So did Egyptian intelligence. So did Jordanian intelligence.
Did they all lie, too?"
NO, they did not.
Intelligence agencies really don't "believe" in things, unlike Bush. They work on best-case, bad-case, and worst-case scenarios.
In their worst case scenarios, Iraq had some chemical weaponry. But the best-case was none. Every service in the world, INCLUDING THE CIA, presented their scenarios, but did not give great weight to the worst-case.
What Cheney did (I'm ignoring Bush here) was to go to the CIA and literally sit in the headquarters cherry-picking worst-case scenarios for several weeks. Not many remember this, but I do.
Intelligence analysts were screaming for help on all media wavelengths, shouting that the intel was being politically savaged by the neocons in the Pentagon and in Cheney's little posse. Several resigned in protest. Some even went on record, thus destroying their careers. Few in the US bothered to hear them.
Here's the beauty part. Tenet the CIA director decided to play ball with the neocons and fluff the intel by ignoring the analysts recommendations and going with all worst-case scenarios for presentation to the President. He though he was covering his ass.
I figured immediately that the poor dingo was being classically set up, and I was dead right.
After the WMDs and all the other nonsense was finally shown to be just that, guess who became the fall guys? YESSSSSSSSSS, Neo, the intelligence services. They very people who screamed that they were being overruled were being set up for suckers.
And it was TECHNICALLY true; the intel did come from the CIA, Jordan, yadda yadda. If you view English words the way Bushites do. The intel was from the CIA, bad CIA.
BUT -- it wasn't complete and it wasn't nuanced. All other-case scenarios were dumped, and only that which Bush needed was presented to the EXTREMELY lazy and cowed reporters in the White House.
The CIA et al did their jobs, and actually DID get the facts straight. But the Cheney neocons twisted worst-case scenarios into real "data" and got their war.
And now, as a reward to himself for his own faith-based reinterpretation of the CIA's facts, Bush has created a superdirector of the intelligence services who will report directly to him: President Bush. After crushing the CIA revolt against the neocons, he now has demonised the CIA as idiots and TAKEN DIRECT CONTROL OF THE AGENCY.
How can Bush get so many facts wrong? Listen to the debate with Kerry again. Bush doesn't understand, literally has no erudition about foreign policy matters. He goes with his gut, and never second-guesses himself. He never *doubts*. He *knows* something is true, such as WMD's, and will not listen to arguments that fault his beliefs. He is impervious to logic or facts. He knows what his people tell him, and that is Cheney once more feeding him like a mushroom.
I know what a lot of you are thinking. Where do I get all this stuff? I got it by READING THE NEWS for the last three years. It's surprising what you get when you read, especially if you stop getting your "facts" from the thoroughly whipped American mainstream news and reading, well, news from anywhere else but here. There are no surprises concerning the Bush manipulation of the CIA if you read the Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, any Candaian news outlet.
Actually, no he can't. His relationship with Monica had nothing to do with the deposition that day, which was about some bimbomissle shot at the court system by the Richard Mellon Scaife elves.
The lawyers deposing Clinton lied to the judge about the relevance of the Lewinsky questions. The questions were indeed irrelevant, and designed soley to humiliate and ruin Clinton. The lawyers should have been disciplined, but the judge would have been ruined by the powers that were after Clinton. The victim was punished instead. Much easier.
And Clinton DID NOT LIE UNDER OATH. A bloody, fat lie. He had the judge define sex; what he did did not qualify under the judge's definition; he did not lie. He outsmarted the bastards.
And it wasn't a trial. It was a deposition. There was no case. It melted into the sewer lines along with all the other Scaife-driven crap during those years.
"In the late 1800's the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same protections as people under the Bill of Rights."
Interesting note: some scholars think that the ruling was an improper read of a SC clerk's writings. Ye gods, the whole corp-is-a-person nonsense may be based on a legal error!
Um, just to toss in a comment: Corps may have the same rights as an individual, but they have none of the responsiblities of an individual. The "responsibility for your own actions" that conservative people believe in so strongly just doesn't exist for a corporation.
Since a corporation really really ISN'T a fake individual, the U.S.'s corporation law enables really real individuals to break the civil and criminal law with alsmost complete immunity. They're more powerful every year, paying fewer taxes, moving offshore, buying laws, buying presidencies... Cheney is the first corporate president, a CEO of Haliburton pretending to be off the payroll. Bush doesn't count: the corporate lords are really in charge of the U.S. right now.
Microsoft broke the law. They were taken to court. They were in the wrong, and they created a lobbying monster to get out of it. By spending cash liberally and lying like hell, they lost.
Clinton didn't "solicit" money any more than Bush did. It's very FreeRepublican of you to slime Clinton by implying that the prosecution was caused by *not getting a campaign contribution*.
Microsoft was prosecuted because it had broken previous agreements and was guilty as hell. I was here for the last twenty three years and I remember everything they did to bring the wrath of the DOJ on them.
If solicitation is the issue, then Bill Gates got his money's worth and more from the Bush, because Bush decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting the case drop AFTER THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ALREADY WON. The antitrust division at the DOJ is gutted and dead, killed by the neocons. Gates is on his way to owning every video and audio recording device on the planet, as well as nearly all the PC's.
It's laughable that Freepers accuse the DOJ of making MS into a lobbying powerhouse because of their terrible persecution by evil liberals. MS was and is a vicious monopoly, proving by it's behavior that we need anti-monopoly laws. Those laws are meant to prevent a monoply player from extending itself into new monopolies by the sheer force of its clout and cash. They abused the monoply, were prosecuted. Boo fucking hoo. They bought their way out of it and helped install a business fascist into the presidency who dropped all the charged and then executed the DOJ. And that, my friend, is the real crime.
Don't call obvious processes "conspiracy theories". It doesn't take much of a conspiracy to pop a law into being.
They ARE trying to create legislation to make free digital content illegal. It's not a Area 51-has-alien-spacecraft related idea that they are doing so. It's in their interest, there is a history of them trying to do such things, and they are indeed getting it done.
" Freenet's data is all encrypted. They wouldn't be able to prove you were sharing illegal content."
They could easily make sharing encrypted data a federal offense. Just invoke "terrorism", and watch the roundup of commies, er, terrorists.
They could also, under the Patriot Acts 1 and 2, simply go into your house and monitor your PC. They don't have to see the data in transit. They can simply see what's on your monitor, or peek at what's coming out of your speakers or printer. They don't need a judge, a reason, or a warrant. And if they arrest you, they don't have to tell anyone, or show cause to hold you, or tell you what they arrested you for. You can be shipped offshore for "processing", ie torture. That would be starvation, filth, terror, beatings, despair, pain, and the horror of 18 year old literally ignorant thugs in uniform controlling your every bowel movement. And if it turns out that they were wrong, they'll contine holding you anyway, because they can.
And no one will in the U.S. will care. CBS news might have, but they are being railroaded as we speak and soon will be turned into Fox News jr.
And it happened in my lifetime. Seig Heil, everybody.
"Newsflash: Corporations pay taxes too. Ever stop and think that maybe its their taxes that are funding these prosecutions?"
Newsflash: not if they don't want to. Research how much in taxes the biggest corps pay. Ready? They not only don't pay taxes, they get rebates on taxes they didn't even pay. Microsoft, for instance, doesn't pay income tax. They have no income.
Actually, yes, sometimes they can subpoena you with an email. If you don't respond, you lose by default. I don't know the limit of this ability, but that horror is definitely on the loose.
Slashdot Mirror
EVERY OBJECT ON EARTH IS SLIGHTLY RADIOACTIVE. C-14 is present in in all carbon compounds. There's nothing more radioactive about a lot of liquid CO2 than the CO2 floating about the atmosphere. The gasoline in your car is slightly radioactive. C-14 is used to date organic objects because it has a half-life. YOU are slightly radioactive.
Okay, but: CO2 doesn't explode, so a catastrophic leak would require a refrigeration breakdown or a major physical breach of multiple storage tanks.
To engineer around a disaster that could cause lives, you could do multiple things. Store the LCO2 in multiple cells, so that any leak would only release a small amount of the entire amount on the farm. You could move it offsite to other storage farms, to minimize the amount stored at the power plant or any single farm. You could also build a venting "chimney" much like we do with the smokestacks on current plants, designed to vent any leaked gaseous CO2 to a higher altitude so that it could easily disperse enough to not be threat to any living creature.
And we store much, MUCH MUCH more dangerous stuff than this all the time. And think about the rolling bombs on our highways that refuel filling stations -- we don't worry about those much. It's mostly psychological. Fear. Analyze the risk quantitatively: storing CO2 in liquid form would mitigate the warming effect, saving unbeliveable economic damage and loss of life that will result from the climate change. If three hundred people die from a CO2 leak from a really lousy design of a CO2 storage farm, it's far less than those killed by gasoline bombs every year, which we never notice.
Does it? Quite a lot would have to be released, and also, does gaseous CO2 roll down mountains? Are there power plants on mountains? I mean, does gaseous CO2 not simply disperse pretty quickly? You'd have to be pretty close to that leak to get an O2 deprived state.
We also transport methane in liquid form by the billions of liters every year, all over the world. THAT stuff is explosive, yet we seem to be doing okay.
And nuke waste is pretty easy to store, and additionally physicists could find some way to deal with it some century, or frankly antigravity it off the planet. We can think of a lot of new ways of moving materiel in a few centuries. I don't worry about it. Let's do both; retrofit fossil fuel plants to store the LCO2, and build new nuke plants.
But letting the CO2 go free as we do now is not an option.
Um. The obvious point is this: the CO2 will have been released anyway if the fuel were burned as it is now. Even if some of the liquid gets out and turns gaseous during a catastrophic leak, it would be a tiny, tiny percentage of the CO2 that would have been released, correction, will be released from the current plants. And the LCO2 would be in thousands of farms, so there would be no major disaster.
CO2 also doesn't explode, so it's safe to store. And simple methods could be used in the future to turn it back into hydrocarbons, if someone wants to go to the trouble.
And here's a thought: we could eventually learn to regulate the heat buildup in the earth's atmosphere by controlled release of the stored LCO2. If an ice age cometh, we can stopeth it by metering out the LCO2 just enough to increase the greenhouse effect to stop the cooling. Conversely, we can mitigate the atmospheric warming we are definitely experiencing today by not flooding the atmosphere with the CO2 we are currently tossing up.
Have to say it:
Fahrenheit 911: facts never disputed. Mike's still waiting for someone to dispute:
Bush's connections with the Sauds, the 7 minute wait (actually more like 19 - there was a photo session after "My Pet Goat"), the redirection of the "war" from AQ to Saddam with baseless accusations, the creation of a police state, the profiteering, the ignored death of the Iraqi civilians, the SS guarding the Saudi embassy... it's all true, and frankly not exactly news to people who read the news every day. The 'pubs HATE Moore, but that is not a contention of the facts.
They can't contend with the facts, so they go for the man.
Stolen Honor: accusers were discredited, facts nonexistent, pure ad hominem by political opponents. One of the signed vets was never told he had signed the accusation, a surprise to him. Not a "disputed" matter except in the minds of the operatives and those who want to believe the accusers.
The WH has denied he was wearing any armor during the debate.
Check up on this story at Newshounds (We watch Fox so you don't have to) on June 5th of this year. There is some question as to whether Bush has been using a radio prompt all along.
and (c) the White House press flaks said he wasn't wearing a vest
Actually, the cards can be read from a great distance away, if the transmitter power is jacked up. They will have no problem reading your ID from a block away, if not more, barring interference.
There is no way to "fix" it. A "terrorist" looks and sounds just like everyone else, until he acts. There is no screening, no government agency, no METHOD that can predict what a man will do in the future.
Insisting that the problem be fixed is what gives the police state dreamers the ammunition to create these horrors.
Accept uncertainty. There isn't any way to stop someone from hurting you if they don't mind dying to do so.
"Now a mugger can scan identities as he goes down the street and zero in on someone known to be wealthy."
Wealthy people will hire drivers. They won't carry RFID themselves. The very wealthy don't follow ordinary rules.
How, EXACTLY, would the 9-11 attackers been stopped if they had been issued RFID drivers licenses? There is no sane connection. I can't think of any easier examples to prove that government and businesses are taking advantage of the 9-11 fear to lock us down. PATRIOT acts, car transponders, GPSed cell phones, RFID armbands, implants, RFIDed ID cards, biometrics... NONE OF THESE THINGS would have stopped those men from crashing those planes into the towers. But that attack is used to justify every possible wet dream of a police state.
Now, onto Project TinFoilHat. If issued such a card, I will build a Faraday cage into a belt pouch, and there their assine tracking device can sit until a POLICEMAN asks to see it. I know damned well they can build RFID detectors that can work at great distances; I will not cooperate and being tracked on a giant Ms. Pac Man screen by whomever can afford the equipment.
As for those of you who don't care about this, you are good Germans. What else can I say.
Lump it in with the GIMP, Ogg Vorbis, GNU, and all the other geek naming catastrophes.
You are aware, of course, that the Europeans are fighting and dying at our side in Afghanistan right now? That they went in with us after 9-11?
I am getting really, really sick of the Freepers abusing their moderation points to snuff out posts that contradict their world view.
Here's the post again, 'cause I know that they're slowly modding it down from 5 to negative territory. Mod this down, I post it again, until you knock it the fuck off.
AGAIN:
Actually, no he can't. His relationship with Monica had nothing to do with the deposition that day, which was about some bimbomissle shot at the court system by the Richard Mellon Scaife elves.
The lawyers deposing Clinton lied to the judge about the relevance of the Lewinsky questions. The questions were indeed irrelevant, and designed soley to humiliate and ruin Clinton. The lawyers should have been disciplined, but the judge would have been ruined by the powers that were after Clinton. The victim was punished instead. Much easier.
And Clinton DID NOT LIE UNDER OATH. A bloody, fat lie. He had the judge define sex; what he did did not qualify under the judge's definition; he did not lie. He outsmarted the bastards.
And it wasn't a trial. It was a deposition. There was no case. It melted into the sewer lines along with all the other Scaife-driven crap during those years.
I've been quietly terrified my entire life that some nitwit would discover an easy way of creating antimatter and let everyone in the bloody world build a TotalConversion bomb.
Please, paranoid U.S., don't do the research. It'd be the worse catastrophe in the history of the planet. TC bombs would not require rare radioactive materials. Just know-how. I don't know if anyone is trying for a TC bomb, but once someone dreams it up, eventually they will find a way to make it.
I was hoping to be safely dead when people started to build things I used to dream up.
Please don't do the whole let's-splice-a-kiler-virus-to-the-common-cold either. We've not spread through local space yet. One bright boy could loose the death of a world.
We don't need antimatter weapons. We really, REALLY don't. Who the hell are we fighting that we need this horror? Stem cell research is against God's Will but superbombs is okay? What crack is this country on?
Do we really want the people who can't tell the difference between Al Queda and Iraq to have this kind of power?
"British intelligence believed that Iraq possessed such weapons, too. So did Russian intelligence. So did Egyptian intelligence. So did Jordanian intelligence.
Did they all lie, too?"
NO, they did not.
Intelligence agencies really don't "believe" in things, unlike Bush. They work on best-case, bad-case, and worst-case scenarios.
In their worst case scenarios, Iraq had some chemical weaponry. But the best-case was none. Every service in the world, INCLUDING THE CIA, presented their scenarios, but did not give great weight to the worst-case.
What Cheney did (I'm ignoring Bush here) was to go to the CIA and literally sit in the headquarters cherry-picking worst-case scenarios for several weeks. Not many remember this, but I do.
Intelligence analysts were screaming for help on all media wavelengths, shouting that the intel was being politically savaged by the neocons in the Pentagon and in Cheney's little posse. Several resigned in protest. Some even went on record, thus destroying their careers. Few in the US bothered to hear them.
Here's the beauty part. Tenet the CIA director decided to play ball with the neocons and fluff the intel by ignoring the analysts recommendations and going with all worst-case scenarios for presentation to the President. He though he was covering his ass.
I figured immediately that the poor dingo was being classically set up, and I was dead right.
After the WMDs and all the other nonsense was finally shown to be just that, guess who became the fall guys? YESSSSSSSSSS, Neo, the intelligence services. They very people who screamed that they were being overruled were being set up for suckers.
And it was TECHNICALLY true; the intel did come from the CIA, Jordan, yadda yadda. If you view English words the way Bushites do. The intel was from the CIA, bad CIA.
BUT -- it wasn't complete and it wasn't nuanced. All other-case scenarios were dumped, and only that which Bush needed was presented to the EXTREMELY lazy and cowed reporters in the White House.
The CIA et al did their jobs, and actually DID get the facts straight. But the Cheney neocons twisted worst-case scenarios into real "data" and got their war.
And now, as a reward to himself for his own faith-based reinterpretation of the CIA's facts, Bush has created a superdirector of the intelligence services who will report directly to him: President Bush. After crushing the CIA revolt against the neocons, he now has demonised the CIA as idiots and TAKEN DIRECT CONTROL OF THE AGENCY.
How can Bush get so many facts wrong? Listen to the debate with Kerry again. Bush doesn't understand, literally has no erudition about foreign policy matters. He goes with his gut, and never second-guesses himself. He never *doubts*. He *knows* something is true, such as WMD's, and will not listen to arguments that fault his beliefs. He is impervious to logic or facts. He knows what his people tell him, and that is Cheney once more feeding him like a mushroom.
I know what a lot of you are thinking. Where do I get all this stuff? I got it by READING THE NEWS for the last three years. It's surprising what you get when you read, especially if you stop getting your "facts" from the thoroughly whipped American mainstream news and reading, well, news from anywhere else but here. There are no surprises concerning the Bush manipulation of the CIA if you read the Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, any Candaian news outlet.
Actually, no he can't. His relationship with Monica had nothing to do with the deposition that day, which was about some bimbomissle shot at the court system by the Richard Mellon Scaife elves.
The lawyers deposing Clinton lied to the judge about the relevance of the Lewinsky questions. The questions were indeed irrelevant, and designed soley to humiliate and ruin Clinton. The lawyers should have been disciplined, but the judge would have been ruined by the powers that were after Clinton. The victim was punished instead. Much easier.
And Clinton DID NOT LIE UNDER OATH. A bloody, fat lie. He had the judge define sex; what he did did not qualify under the judge's definition; he did not lie. He outsmarted the bastards.
And it wasn't a trial. It was a deposition. There was no case. It melted into the sewer lines along with all the other Scaife-driven crap during those years.
"In the late 1800's the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same protections as people under the Bill of Rights."
Interesting note: some scholars think that the ruling was an improper read of a SC clerk's writings. Ye gods, the whole corp-is-a-person nonsense may be based on a legal error!
Um, just to toss in a comment: Corps may have the same rights as an individual, but they have none of the responsiblities of an individual. The "responsibility for your own actions" that conservative people believe in so strongly just doesn't exist for a corporation.
Since a corporation really really ISN'T a fake individual, the U.S.'s corporation law enables really real individuals to break the civil and criminal law with alsmost complete immunity. They're more powerful every year, paying fewer taxes, moving offshore, buying laws, buying presidencies... Cheney is the first corporate president, a CEO of Haliburton pretending to be off the payroll. Bush doesn't count: the corporate lords are really in charge of the U.S. right now.
"All the crumbs stay in the bathtub which you hose down with the telephone shower before taking a shower."
Ye gods. Do not try this trick with clay-based cat litter unless you like playdough fileld pipes.
Microsoft broke the law. They were taken to court.
They were in the wrong, and they created a lobbying monster to get out of it. By spending cash liberally and lying like hell, they lost.
Clinton didn't "solicit" money any more than Bush did. It's very FreeRepublican of you to slime Clinton by implying that the prosecution was caused by *not getting a campaign contribution*.
Microsoft was prosecuted because it had broken previous agreements and was guilty as hell. I was here for the last twenty three years and I remember everything they did to bring the wrath of the DOJ on them.
If solicitation is the issue, then Bill Gates got his money's worth and more from the Bush, because Bush decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by letting the case drop AFTER THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ALREADY WON. The antitrust division at the DOJ is gutted and dead, killed by the neocons. Gates is on his way to owning every video and audio recording device on the planet, as well as nearly all the PC's.
It's laughable that Freepers accuse the DOJ of making MS into a lobbying powerhouse because of their terrible persecution by evil liberals. MS was and is a vicious monopoly, proving by it's behavior that we need anti-monopoly laws. Those laws are meant to prevent a monoply player from extending itself into new monopolies by the sheer force of its clout and cash. They abused the monoply, were prosecuted. Boo fucking hoo. They bought their way out of it and helped install a business fascist into the presidency who dropped all the charged and then executed the DOJ. And that, my friend, is the real crime.
Semantic War Journal Entry #1:
Don't call obvious processes "conspiracy theories". It doesn't take much of a conspiracy to pop a law into being.
They ARE trying to create legislation to make free digital content illegal. It's not a Area 51-has-alien-spacecraft related idea that they are doing so. It's in their interest, there is a history of them trying to do such things, and they are indeed getting it done.
" Freenet's data is all encrypted. They wouldn't be able to prove you were sharing illegal content."
They could easily make sharing encrypted data a federal offense. Just invoke "terrorism", and watch the roundup of commies, er, terrorists.
They could also, under the Patriot Acts 1 and 2, simply go into your house and monitor your PC. They don't have to see the data in transit. They can simply see what's on your monitor, or peek at what's coming out of your speakers or printer. They don't need a judge, a reason, or a warrant. And if they arrest you, they don't have to tell anyone, or show cause to hold you, or tell you what they arrested you for. You can be shipped offshore for "processing", ie torture. That would be starvation, filth, terror, beatings, despair, pain, and the horror of 18 year old literally ignorant thugs in uniform controlling your every bowel movement. And if it turns out that they were wrong, they'll contine holding you anyway, because they can.
And no one will in the U.S. will care. CBS news might have, but they are being railroaded as we speak and soon will be turned into Fox News jr.
And it happened in my lifetime. Seig Heil, everybody.
"Newsflash: Corporations pay taxes too. Ever stop and think that maybe its their taxes that are funding these prosecutions?"
Newsflash: not if they don't want to. Research how much in taxes the biggest corps pay. Ready? They not only don't pay taxes, they get rebates on taxes they didn't even pay. Microsoft, for instance, doesn't pay income tax. They have no income.
Really.
Actually, yes, sometimes they can subpoena you with an email. If you don't respond, you lose by default. I don't know the limit of this ability, but that horror is definitely on the loose.
The backup plan is: you die. Sometimes life is like that. Pioneers usually didn't have escape hatches.