Moore mentions, IN THE FILM, that the people who left were interviewed. Go see the film and listen.
The point was not that they were not interviewed. The point is that they were permitted to leave at all. At the same time. In chartered or private craft. At the behest of the Saudi government, at a time that roommates of friends of hijackers were getting tortured in police stations.
No "interview" on Sept 13 by the FBI would have been sufficient for law enforcement purposes. That's madness. There was only two days to investigate this group of evacuees. It didn't happen. They were jacked out of the country, out of our jurisdiction, even though they were relatives of bin Laden and might have had information as to his whereabouts.
Sources in the FBI have stated definitively that they wanted to talk to those people, and someone at a very high level (read White House) let them all go.
The White House and the FBI have denied that those people left when they did, how they did, for years. Now that they are admitting the truth, they are playing parsing games like this one.
Moore stated that they were interviewed. The point was that the interviews were valueless, and that the White House directed the Saudis be permitted to evacuate.
One other thing, not in the film: the current rap is that Moore is claiming they left during the no-fly period. He did not. But he could have mentioned that the Saudis were flying around U.S. airspace on chartered jets during the no-fly period!
Parsing games. They didn't fly out of the country before the no-fly period. But they were flying around IN the country during that period, amassing for the Sept 13 evacuation.
Cheney says he gave the order to shoot down the airliners after he spoke to Bush. He said this because he doesn't have the authority to issue that order, and needed to imply he was given the order by Bush.
The film clearly shows Bush wasn't giving anyone any orders. He was looking at a book about "My Pet Goat" while the airliners were on their way to kill thousands.
He was grossly derelict in his duty. If we can impeach a man about his sex life, we can impeach a moron who won't stir himself to find out what's going on when we're under attack.
"One of the things he rants about is how the US government got Bin Laden's family out of the States during the grounding."
Why is a statement of fact a rant? What is a rant? A statement that you disagree with?
Someone in the White House DID grant secret, special instructions to get the Saudis out of the U.S., even though it was blindlingly obvious the FBI would want to detain at least some of them for questioning. And that someone has not come forward. For years, various government agencies denied the flights even occured. They've finally admitted the flights happened. The WH would not cooperate with the 9/11 commission, and did not give up the man who gave the orders.
Moore is justified in "ranting" about WH pressure to let possible material witnesses flee the country because the Saudi's asked them to.
Other middle eastern men have been detained and tortured for over two years now, men who have no defenders. Men who are most certainly innocent have languished in our "disappeared" prisons for years, naked and freezing and begging for mercy. The Saudi prince asked Bush for help getting the royals out, and he got it.
If that is a rant, or biased, I submit that, like the case of music "stealing", English has yet again been corrupted. Making a conclusion based on evidence is not "bias", and speaking about injustice or corruption is not "ranting".
If ranting means speaking often, then Moore is guilty only because he was the only man covering the subject in the entire U.S. All the "liberal" networks and papers have not covered the Royal Evacuation, nor have they, until they got nekkid pictures, noticed the torture camps in Gitmo, Afganistan, or Iraq.
Do you have evidence that what Michael says is not true? If you do, it would be amazing. He has the flight lists, with the names of the Saudis, shown on the screen. He simply cites investigations performed by newspaper journalists. To disprove what Mike says, the FAA, all the reporters, the FBI agents, the White House itself, would have to be lying in the exact same way. Occam's Razor! The planes left when the flag dropped! It happened! It's not "bias" to point it out!
"Weird. But in either case, they're doing it to prevent lawsuits. Someone convinced them that lawsuits of this nature were less of an issue in Europe. "
Answer: The German autobahns. No speed limit, (last I heard) other than your own judgement. If you screw up and go too fast, YOU are responsible for the consequences.
Thats it, equate a democratic government protecting property rights with fascism. I'm sure all those who died in the Holocaust are thankful for you honoring their memory.
The Nazis were elected to office in a nice democratic fashion. Hitler was a democratically selected protector of property rights. For select people.
Fascism is not the opposite of democracy. Fascism ARISES from democracies. For the keystone of any really successful fascist takeover is the mainstream support of the majority of the population.
Fascism: popular leader. fingering of the Enemy. State support of corporate power -- that's Mussolini's definition, by the way. Militarism (war porn). Dismissal or suppression of dissent -- especially when the suppression comes from the majority of the people themselves.
This definition of fascism contrasts with dictatorship, which is imposed with or without the consent of the governed. Fascism is popular support of a suppressive government.
On the other hand, this is a good indication of how prosperous our lives these days. Instead of worrying about being killed in a concentration camp so your race can be ethnically cleansed, we are worried about not being able to get a free copy of a Brittney Spears song.
Or reading the Secret Scriptures of a highly corrupt corporate/religious cult. All you have do do after declaring copyright violations a federal crime is simply change the definition of what a copyright IS, and then you can control what people can and cannot read, forever. For instance, simply redefine copyright terms as unlimited. Ooops -- already done.
The concept of copyright was a compromise. In exchange for the ownership of the right to copy, the owners have to give up the copyright after a brief period so that the work could enrich the commons.
That deal is broken. Now we simply have corporations owning blocks of human endeavor for all time, never giving it up, trading the knowledge and lore of humanity like blocks of downtown real estate.
This is not what copyright was meant for. This new corporate power grab spells the end of the line for human arts, since every new work is in some way linked to something done before.
Mea culpa. Didn't finish reading the article. Must have spaced -- was too cranky about the charges angle. But I still stand with the "why do you get to imprison/kill us" rant.
I do know some of the history of the area around Groom; last I heard, they informally treated the area around Groom as their own, tracking people down and evicting them. But it was not formal. They haven't fenced it in or set up guards everywhere, because they don't control that area. Sitting around the wide spaces around Groom Lake and watching out for bizzare aircraft has been a sport for decades now. The watchers were tolerated before, but gradually the spooky types have asserted their power over areas they DON'T control, and that pisses me off. They can't control the entire area of the U.S. where the test craft can be seen -- but they seem to be thinking that they can watch the watchers, even on public land. The Terrorist hysteria may have led to this overreaching, but still, it's public land.
I've heard that the theft of government property charge was disputed.
I think that you are confusing trademark and copyright. One has to vigorously defend a trademark, or it's lost. Copyright does not require defense; published works are automatically copyrighted, and although the owner may seek restitution, he does not have to do so to maintain the copyright.
If he so wishes, under this new law, Ashcroft can prosecute at will. If he wants to be a dick about it, he can do it without bothering to consult with the copyright holder. Hell, even if the holder decides to release the disputed work into the public domain, Ashcroft could still prosecute the "thief" under the "the Law is the Law" clause of reactionary lore -- the work was copyrighted at the time of the "crime", so the wishes of the holder would be irrelevant.
This is the final stage in the criminalization of what once was a civil offense, if it was an offense at all -- copying a musical work. It used to be criminal if it were done for profit. Now it will be criminal whenever the AG wants to nail someone.
The Church of Scientology is turning cartwheels right now. This has been their pet evil project since the early ninties. They will get to file FEDERAL CRIMINAL CHARGES against people who quote Hubbard's works about the great galactic federation and the atom bombs and the volcanoes. (Hell, I can't even say the "X" word, because the owners of Slashdot will pull my post if the COS says "boo!") This isn't a digression: they have instigated this crusade from '91 to the present day, ever since their flying saucer religion got outed on anon.penet.fi and up to the present day.
And as for Ashcroft and the Justice Department: what an incredible tool for harrassment. Political enemy? Check the ISP logs, see if the Enemy of the State or a member of his family ever downloaded music. Break his financial back, put him or his own in prison. How many people have downloaded tunes? How many are eligible for Club Fed if this law gets passed? If you ever hose some public official, you can spend years dreading the email summoning you to years of court-run hell because you hosted some Guess Who tracks in '02.
Damn, if only we could take over a country somewhere and declare freedom from the Berne Convention...
It also doesn't matter if the DOD name was on it or not, it doesn't belong to you, so why take it? Basic theft.
Let's think about it.
Was the device actually removed? If so, was it labelled as U.S. Government property? Since the base doesn't exist, and there isn't anything going on there, I doubt they labelled the device.
If the device wasn't labelled, and the guys didn't remove it as well, then what the hell crime did they commit?
Is annoying the shadow police now an automatic prison sentence? With "material witness" crap, they can keep these guys forever and a day without charges.
Okay, call out to all those who label the warnings as "tinfoil hat paranoia": what do you have when shadowy people can disappear you at will for merely annoying them? Those devices were on public property. People keep calling it "government" property, as tho the government was some business somewhere in DC with really tough security guards. The property is "publicly" owned, not "government" owned. We get to walk on it, and detect any damned thing we want on it, especially if it's not labelled and is hidden.
What is this -- the spooks can hide detectors anywhere they like, and the very act of discovering them is enough to get you financially ruined by lawyers, and your body hauled off to prison?
If the spooks don't want us on the public land next to the base, then they should bloody damn well annex it and shut it down. Hell, maybe they should just choose a southwestern state and declare it Spookland. Wall it off. Shoot anyone that approaches, and imprison anyone who tries to find out what's going on inside.
Here's a thought: what the hell are they doing that is worth imprisoning or killing even one American citizen?
Who exactly are they hiding FROM? *US*?
Who's in charge here, damn it! This is OUR COUNTRY! You want to talk slippery slopes? This is it. We can't even watch what they are doing without being made an example of. And what is with the "you will be shot dead" signs around that base? Under whose damned authority can they kill us? When did this start, and how do we stop it?
"If your crops are aquiring DNA from neigboring GM crops then it seem difficult to call falt on behalf of the farmer."
It would be, if this were a sane world. The judge found that the farmer infringed Monsanto's patent -- the cross-pollinated crop the farmer grew is best described by that favorite term of the music industry's defenders: stolen property.
The seed blew into his fields, crossed with his crops, and he grew "their property".
"youd think that the seed companies would have a real desire to keep these things sterile... otherwise other people will start to do this to develop their own private strains of GM crops... you cant sue them all... but I suppose you could try"
They don't want sterile crops. This is a win-win for Monsanto. They can continue to let their "privately owned" genes float on the winds to any field in the world, and it's the world's lookout to discover "Monsanto's" genes embedded in the world's crops. Failure to root out Monsanto's intellectual property will result in an IP lawsuit, with the likely outcome that the sued lose their property to pay damages to Monsanto.
"for what its worth, my confusion about the source of the seeds came from this quote in the article:
"Schmeiser argued the canola seed blew onto his property from a nearby farm. He has said the plants "polluted" his fields."
assuming of course that he isnt simply lying. "
How could he have "stolen" the genes? How can he lie? The basic facts are not disputed by Monsanto. Monsanto's seed, patented and protected Canadian law, blew into the farmer's field. He grew the crops. Monsanto owns his ass therefore.
I can't think of any clearer argument for throwing out "genetic patents". This gives Monsanto, or any other genetic "IP" company, the ability to grab land and cash at will.
There is no provision in the patent law to force Monsanto to stop permitting "their" genes to fly downwind and "contaminate" some else's crops, generating criminals by the thousands.
There also is no way to stop the seed from blowing around. That's what seeds do!
That's the problem I've always had with people who believe government is the source of evil.
Government can be controlled. In one manner or another.
But the "free market" doesn't hold itself to any limits. I am far more afraid of a production company (or even a pseudo-religious cult) having access to what used to be our private lives. There are untold numbers of ways that they can bully us, and there is really nothing that can stop them, especially pro-free market goverments.
For instance, it became widely known yesterday that the cell phone companies are putting together a national phone book of all customers. That may sound innocuous to some, but guess what: if you, Mr. Customer, want to exempt yourself from the Book, you're going to have to ante up some cash on a regular basis to bribe them into NOT letting your number out to other businesses.
IF we had some decent laws protecting our privacy as a default, this would never even have been a business model.
I wouldn't be surprised if someday you in the UK have to pay a monthly fee to keep your image off of the TV!
Government/business partnerships are the ultimate in tyranny.
The CIA is and was in fine shape. Their analyses were solid. They were correct on every recommendation.
What happened was the insertion of civilian ideologues into the analysis process. They cherry-picked what Bush wanted to hear, disregarded the rest, forced analysts to shut up or resign. On the Wilson matter, they outed the analyst's wife as a CIA agent, crippling a front company and endangering many lives -- just to make sure that any CIA boy who cared to call them liars would know how they would be dealt with. Even the mafia doesn't go after your wife.
Please. Let's not parrot the main talking point that the "CIA gave the president bad intelligence". They gave him great advice. They were disregarded.
Oh, and let us pray there is a hell so George Tenet will get a choice seat in the ninth circle.
I have this suspicion that most people posting don't understand that the Skycar can glide. It's a plane. With wings. Control surfaces. It has eight wankel engines producing vented thrust coordinated by redundant controllers. Most of the flying chores are automagically smoothed out by the flight computers.
It can fly like any normal plane with only two of the eight engines operational. It doesn't have to VTOL; it can take off or land in the normal fashion. Since the engines are not mechanically linked in the normal sense, it would take a catastrophic failure to lose more than a few engines. You might lose the near-VTOL capability, but a pilot could land a troubled Moeller with less trouble than your average Cessna, theoretically. The power and control systems are far more redundant in a Moeller.
It's not a flying saucer. You might be confusing the Skycar with the "flying saucer" hovering testbed he made +-30 years ago?
If I'm not mistaken, the craft also has a 'chute that fires in an emergency. Or would, if someone would fund the poor man enough to build the full-scale prototype.
Anyone flying the Moeller would have to be a licensed pilot; this would cut down the "oops" factor.
Moeller has spent a lifetime thinking the engineering matters through. I wish he and Burt Rutan would have lunch sometime.
Damn straight. Some of the stupider government officials might think that they are tracking "terrorists", but the smart boys know they are building exit detectors at the national gates that will provide seamless information integration about their own citizens. We're being locked in.
Question: income taxes may be higher in the provinces than in the states, but how do property taxes compare? In the US, they fund schools from local property taxes, which leads to the really obvious degradation of some districts compared to the spectacular successes of the more wealthy ones.
I won't buy property in Chicago anymore. The taxes on my condo were closing on $7K a year, and would be more like 9K if I had not sold a few years back.
Can you own a condo or home in Canada without being taxed to death? Another way of saying it: do you fund schools from general revenues, distributed through a per capita formula, or through local levies?
I mean it. This is getting worse than the commies-under-the-bed meme of the last century.
If you've never searched for kiddy porn, how would you know it's so widespread that we need to monitor the net bit-by-bit for it? Just the act of searching for it is borderline illegal. How can anyone know about the availability of such things?
Occam's razor: it's not out there, because people aren't insane. People "know" it is out there because they are constantly told it is. But it is a handy meme for turning the net into a giant listening device.
This will be technically offtopic, but so is almost half of the postings here (not that I mind - lots of fun to be found).
Here's some gristle for you religionists out there -- I'm not calling you Christians, for its rather silly to give southern American fundamentists the impression that they represent THE Christianity.
Here we have the story of das Boot that survived the wrath of god about a dozen generations after the earth was created.
Apparently god, a supernatural superpowerful spirit that refers to itself in the plural, decides that the entire world, except for this one family, was too "evil". He decides to kill every last thing on the plate (not planet - its flat), while Noah races against time before the god kills him along with everything else before the deadline. Fair's fair; if Noah is too slow, EVERYTHING dies. The god is a bit of a sportsman here. Move it or lose it, human!
Now, here's the thing. This god apparently wants more than anything else to be flattered. To be begged, cajoled, importuned, deferred to,have animals sliced up and charcoaled (a bit of a Texan). People just aren't properly on their knees (both meanings intended).
The angry god kills everyone. Noah and his terrified and emotionally destroyed brood find dry land and tell the god that they will do what he wants, please don't hurt us.
The now appeased god promises never to do it again.
Now, what is the difference between a Luciferian embodiment of all evil and this murdering psychotic all-powerful spirit?
If I lived in a world controlled by such a lunatic power, I'd deny its divinity and work to take the motherfucker DOWN every minute of my life!
The true measure of a god is to compare its actions with that of a good man.
What kind of man would murder a plate of people and animals because they weren't paying attention to him?
A man who ain't no god, that for sure. And I expect better behavior from all-powerful Yahweh -- or it's just an evil demonic power, to be opposed at all costs.
Apparently SF is not read anymore. Only "SciFi" like Andromeda and Star Trek stays in the collective memory, it seems. And those are derivative of much older and far more literate work.
Heinlein, Asimov, DeCamp, Pohl, Anderson, Campbell. Kuttner, Clarke, Stephenson, Gibson... all that history, all that work in vain? No one reads anymore?
This is OUR history! I grew up reading stories from the 30's, 40's and 50's. The source material for the people who grew up and built the present world. Snow Crash pretty much predicted the present so well that it doesn't even read like fiction.
I guess I'm spooked because I can't find people of a certain younger age who read SF anymore. A culture is built on stories, and geek culture is losing its own.
As I was told, the GIMP was named after the character I described in Pulp Fiction.
It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, of course, but in sadomasochistic circles it's a male sex slave, dressed head-to-toe in leather. THE Gimp is of course the poor bugger in the basement at Zed's place.
"Bring out the GIMP" is the first thing that pops into my head whenever someone brings the name up. Since they started developing the GIMP in '95, and Pulp Fiction was out in '94, it's a short line to draw to deduce geekly humor.
Now that I've thunk about the scenes a bit more, Zed's Gimp was probably NOT a prisoner. He may have wanted to be in the box.
I have maligned the GIMP project's name! The sex slavery may have been voluntary. My bad.
Why, OH WHY, can't nerds come up with names for their projects that don't sound like overt attempts to make the straights grimace?
Names matter.
Ogg Vorbis? I get where the name comes from, being a rabid Pratchett fan, but what does it have to do with a sound file format? Why not.snd or.mus or.tun or.trx? OGG? How do you market that? It sounds like someone trying to cough up mucus! You're supposed to be marketing to people who like music! The name should be as cool as the tunes it's playing.
No one gets the joke, even if there was a joke (or a bad pun). PRATCHETT people don't get it. A combination of the torturer priest inSmall Gods and the family name of the witch Gytha Ogg of Lancre? WTF??
The GIMP? The name of some poor bastard imprisoned in a box, zipped up in filthy leather from head to toe, tortured for months until he loses his mind and identifies with his torturers? This is a name you want to drop at the art department at Cosmo when you're trying to convince them that it's better to use open source than Photoshop? You want to put up a name meaning ultimate degradation to people who want to deal with beauty? Are you TRYING to fail?
Now a bloody seagull. Not just a seagull, but a freaked out, stoned seagull. For kids. And the office environment.
ARRGGGHHHHH.
Now I can hear the snorks and wheezing laughter out there as all the geeks cut loose. It is ultimate geek humor, I know, to make up a totally inappropriate name to describe a prosaic project. If the dumbasses out there can't take a joke, fuck 'em.
Which is why geeks don't do marketing. They don't do GUI's either. Not much into making music. They don't identify with the common herd, so there it is: they torpedo their own projects in the real world.
I mean, what else can I say? Ogg should have been OpenSound, GIMP should have been OpenDraw, and OpenOffice should have a more mainstream symbol.
Slashdot Mirror
Moore mentions, IN THE FILM, that the people who left were interviewed. Go see the film and listen.
The point was not that they were not interviewed. The point is that they were permitted to leave at all. At the same time. In chartered or private craft. At the behest of the Saudi government, at a time that roommates of friends of hijackers were getting tortured in police stations.
No "interview" on Sept 13 by the FBI would have been sufficient for law enforcement purposes. That's madness. There was only two days to investigate this group of evacuees. It didn't happen. They were jacked out of the country, out of our jurisdiction, even though they were relatives of bin Laden and might have had information as to his whereabouts.
Sources in the FBI have stated definitively that they wanted to talk to those people, and someone at a very high level (read White House) let them all go.
The White House and the FBI have denied that those people left when they did, how they did, for years. Now that they are admitting the truth, they are playing parsing games like this one.
Moore stated that they were interviewed. The point was that the interviews were valueless, and that the White House directed the Saudis be permitted to evacuate.
One other thing, not in the film: the current rap is that Moore is claiming they left during the no-fly period. He did not. But he could have mentioned that the Saudis were flying around U.S. airspace on chartered jets during the no-fly period!
Parsing games. They didn't fly out of the country before the no-fly period. But they were flying around IN the country during that period, amassing for the Sept 13 evacuation.
Um, it's true. And it is relevant.
Cheney says he gave the order to shoot down the airliners after he spoke to Bush. He said this because he doesn't have the authority to issue that order, and needed to imply he was given the order by Bush.
The film clearly shows Bush wasn't giving anyone any orders. He was looking at a book about "My Pet Goat" while the airliners were on their way to kill thousands.
He was grossly derelict in his duty. If we can impeach a man about his sex life, we can impeach a moron who won't stir himself to find out what's going on when we're under attack.
"One of the things he rants about is how the US government got Bin Laden's family out of the States during the grounding."
Why is a statement of fact a rant? What is a rant? A statement that you disagree with?
Someone in the White House DID grant secret, special instructions to get the Saudis out of the U.S., even though it was blindlingly obvious the FBI would want to detain at least some of them for questioning. And that someone has not come forward. For years, various government agencies denied the flights even occured. They've finally admitted the flights happened. The WH would not cooperate with the 9/11 commission, and did not give up the man who gave the orders.
Moore is justified in "ranting" about WH pressure to let possible material witnesses flee the country because the Saudi's asked them to.
Other middle eastern men have been detained and tortured for over two years now, men who have no defenders. Men who are most certainly innocent have languished in our "disappeared" prisons for years, naked and freezing and begging for mercy. The Saudi prince asked Bush for help getting the royals out, and he got it.
If that is a rant, or biased, I submit that, like the case of music "stealing", English has yet again been corrupted. Making a conclusion based on evidence is not "bias", and speaking about injustice or corruption is not "ranting".
If ranting means speaking often, then Moore is guilty only because he was the only man covering the subject in the entire U.S. All the "liberal" networks and papers have not covered the Royal Evacuation, nor have they, until they got nekkid pictures, noticed the torture camps in Gitmo, Afganistan, or Iraq.
Do you have evidence that what Michael says is not true? If you do, it would be amazing. He has the flight lists, with the names of the Saudis, shown on the screen. He simply cites investigations performed by newspaper journalists. To disprove what Mike says, the FAA, all the reporters, the FBI agents, the White House itself, would have to be lying in the exact same way. Occam's Razor! The planes left when the flag dropped! It happened! It's not "bias" to point it out!
Think of having a super-strong kid in your womb. Oh, that must have been an interesting birth. Ow. You don't want a newborn with a three-pound grip.
"Weird. But in either case, they're doing it to prevent lawsuits. Someone convinced them that lawsuits of this nature were less of an issue in Europe. "
Answer: The German autobahns. No speed limit, (last I heard) other than your own judgement. If you screw up and go too fast, YOU are responsible for the consequences.
I was reading respectfully, and at the end, and evil thought came stealing into my cynical mind:
:)
his girlfriend is reading this, aint't she?
"You can't copy or distribute that logo without their permission."
Other than for purposes of Fair Use, you'd agree. Satire, criticism, etc.
The creeping doom here is the removal of Fair Use by all means subvert and obvert.
Why not incorporate the hard drive into the camcorder and be done with it?
Thats it, equate a democratic government protecting property rights with fascism. I'm sure all those who died in the Holocaust are thankful for you honoring their memory.
The Nazis were elected to office in a nice democratic fashion. Hitler was a democratically selected protector of property rights. For select people.
Fascism is not the opposite of democracy. Fascism ARISES from democracies. For the keystone of any really successful fascist takeover is the mainstream support of the majority of the population.
Fascism: popular leader. fingering of the Enemy. State support of corporate power -- that's Mussolini's definition, by the way. Militarism (war porn). Dismissal or suppression of dissent -- especially when the suppression comes from the majority of the people themselves.
This definition of fascism contrasts with dictatorship, which is imposed with or without the consent of the governed. Fascism is popular support of a suppressive government.
On the other hand, this is a good indication of how prosperous our lives these days. Instead of worrying about being killed in a concentration camp so your race can be ethnically cleansed, we are worried about not being able to get a free copy of a Brittney Spears song.
Or reading the Secret Scriptures of a highly corrupt corporate/religious cult. All you have do do after declaring copyright violations a federal crime is simply change the definition of what a copyright IS, and then you can control what people can and cannot read, forever. For instance, simply redefine copyright terms as unlimited. Ooops -- already done.
The concept of copyright was a compromise. In exchange for the ownership of the right to copy, the owners have to give up the copyright after a brief period so that the work could enrich the commons.
That deal is broken. Now we simply have corporations owning blocks of human endeavor for all time, never giving it up, trading the knowledge and lore of humanity like blocks of downtown real estate.
This is not what copyright was meant for. This new corporate power grab spells the end of the line for human arts, since every new work is in some way linked to something done before.
Mea culpa. Didn't finish reading the article. Must have spaced -- was too cranky about the charges angle. But I still stand with the "why do you get to imprison/kill us" rant.
I do know some of the history of the area around Groom; last I heard, they informally treated the area around Groom as their own, tracking people down and evicting them. But it was not formal. They haven't fenced it in or set up guards everywhere, because they don't control that area. Sitting around the wide spaces around Groom Lake and watching out for bizzare aircraft has been a sport for decades now. The watchers were tolerated before, but gradually the spooky types have asserted their power over areas they DON'T control, and that pisses me off. They can't control the entire area of the U.S. where the test craft can be seen -- but they seem to be thinking that they can watch the watchers, even on public land. The Terrorist hysteria may have led to this overreaching, but still, it's public land.
I've heard that the theft of government property charge was disputed.
I think that you are confusing trademark and copyright. One has to vigorously defend a trademark, or it's lost. Copyright does not require defense; published works are automatically copyrighted, and although the owner may seek restitution, he does not have to do so to maintain the copyright.
If he so wishes, under this new law, Ashcroft can prosecute at will. If he wants to be a dick about it, he can do it without bothering to consult with the copyright holder. Hell, even if the holder decides to release the disputed work into the public domain, Ashcroft could still prosecute the "thief" under the "the Law is the Law" clause of reactionary lore -- the work was copyrighted at the time of the "crime", so the wishes of the holder would be irrelevant.
This is the final stage in the criminalization of what once was a civil offense, if it was an offense at all -- copying a musical work. It used to be criminal if it were done for profit. Now it will be criminal whenever the AG wants to nail someone.
The Church of Scientology is turning cartwheels right now. This has been their pet evil project since the early ninties. They will get to file FEDERAL CRIMINAL CHARGES against people who quote Hubbard's works about the great galactic federation and the atom bombs and the volcanoes. (Hell, I can't even say the "X" word, because the owners of Slashdot will pull my post if the COS says "boo!") This isn't a digression: they have instigated this crusade from '91 to the present day, ever since their flying saucer religion got outed on anon.penet.fi and up to the present day.
And as for Ashcroft and the Justice Department: what an incredible tool for harrassment. Political enemy? Check the ISP logs, see if the Enemy of the State or a member of his family ever downloaded music. Break his financial back, put him or his own in prison. How many people have downloaded tunes? How many are eligible for Club Fed if this law gets passed? If you ever hose some public official, you can spend years dreading the email summoning you to years of court-run hell because you hosted some Guess Who tracks in '02.
Damn, if only we could take over a country somewhere and declare freedom from the Berne Convention...
It also doesn't matter if the DOD name was on it or not, it doesn't belong to you, so why take it? Basic theft.
Let's think about it.
Was the device actually removed? If so, was it labelled as U.S. Government property? Since the base doesn't exist, and there isn't anything going on there, I doubt they labelled the device.
If the device wasn't labelled, and the guys didn't remove it as well, then what the hell crime did they commit?
Is annoying the shadow police now an automatic prison sentence? With "material witness" crap, they can keep these guys forever and a day without charges.
Okay, call out to all those who label the warnings as "tinfoil hat paranoia": what do you have when shadowy people can disappear you at will for merely annoying them? Those devices were on public property. People keep calling it "government" property, as tho the government was some business somewhere in DC with really tough security guards. The property is "publicly" owned, not "government" owned. We get to walk on it, and detect any damned thing we want on it, especially if it's not labelled and is hidden.
What is this -- the spooks can hide detectors anywhere they like, and the very act of discovering them is enough to get you financially ruined by lawyers, and your body hauled off to prison?
If the spooks don't want us on the public land next to the base, then they should bloody damn well annex it and shut it down. Hell, maybe they should just choose a southwestern state and declare it Spookland. Wall it off. Shoot anyone that approaches, and imprison anyone who tries to find out what's going on inside.
Here's a thought: what the hell are they doing that is worth imprisoning or killing even one American citizen?
Who exactly are they hiding FROM? *US*?
Who's in charge here, damn it! This is OUR COUNTRY! You want to talk slippery slopes? This is it. We can't even watch what they are doing without being made an example of. And what is with the "you will be shot dead" signs around that base? Under whose damned authority can they kill us? When did this start, and how do we stop it?
"If your crops are aquiring DNA from neigboring GM crops then it seem difficult to call falt on behalf of the farmer."
It would be, if this were a sane world. The judge found that the farmer infringed Monsanto's patent -- the cross-pollinated crop the farmer grew is best described by that favorite term of the music industry's defenders: stolen property.
The seed blew into his fields, crossed with his crops, and he grew "their property".
"youd think that the seed companies would have a real desire to keep these things sterile... otherwise other people will start to do this to develop their own private strains of GM crops... you cant sue them all... but I suppose you could try"
They don't want sterile crops. This is a win-win for Monsanto. They can continue to let their "privately owned" genes float on the winds to any field in the world, and it's the world's lookout to discover "Monsanto's" genes embedded in the world's crops. Failure to root out Monsanto's intellectual property will result in an IP lawsuit, with the likely outcome that the sued lose their property to pay damages to Monsanto.
"for what its worth, my confusion about the source of the seeds came from this quote in the article:
"Schmeiser argued the canola seed blew onto his property from a nearby farm. He has said the plants "polluted" his fields."
assuming of course that he isnt simply lying. "
How could he have "stolen" the genes? How can he lie? The basic facts are not disputed by Monsanto. Monsanto's seed, patented and protected Canadian law, blew into the farmer's field. He grew the crops. Monsanto owns his ass therefore.
I can't think of any clearer argument for throwing out "genetic patents". This gives Monsanto, or any other genetic "IP" company, the ability to grab land and cash at will.
There is no provision in the patent law to force Monsanto to stop permitting "their" genes to fly downwind and "contaminate" some else's crops, generating criminals by the thousands.
There also is no way to stop the seed from blowing around. That's what seeds do!
That's the problem I've always had with people who believe government is the source of evil.
Government can be controlled. In one manner or another.
But the "free market" doesn't hold itself to any limits. I am far more afraid of a production company (or even a pseudo-religious cult) having access to what used to be our private lives. There are untold numbers of ways that they can bully us, and there is really nothing that can stop them, especially pro-free market goverments.
For instance, it became widely known yesterday that the cell phone companies are putting together a national phone book of all customers. That may sound innocuous to some, but guess what: if you, Mr. Customer, want to exempt yourself from the Book, you're going to have to ante up some cash on a regular basis to bribe them into NOT letting your number out to other businesses.
IF we had some decent laws protecting our privacy as a default, this would never even have been a business model.
I wouldn't be surprised if someday you in the UK have to pay a monthly fee to keep your image off of the TV!
Government/business partnerships are the ultimate in tyranny.
The CIA is and was in fine shape. Their analyses were solid. They were correct on every recommendation.
What happened was the insertion of civilian ideologues into the analysis process. They cherry-picked what Bush wanted to hear, disregarded the rest, forced analysts to shut up or resign. On the Wilson matter, they outed the analyst's wife as a CIA agent, crippling a front company and endangering many lives -- just to make sure that any CIA boy who cared to call them liars would know how they would be dealt with. Even the mafia doesn't go after your wife.
Please. Let's not parrot the main talking point that the "CIA gave the president bad intelligence". They gave him great advice. They were disregarded.
Oh, and let us pray there is a hell so George Tenet will get a choice seat in the ninth circle.
A thought occurs: why in hell would anyone be allowed to cruise at 500 feet??
What's the dBa at 5000 feet?
Um, nope. Better mileag (theoretically) in cruising flight than an SUV on the ground, per mile.
To be fair, that's not factoring the fuel necessary to get to cruising mode if you take off in VTOL mode. That'll eat up some crude.
I have this suspicion that most people posting don't understand that the Skycar can glide. It's a plane. With wings. Control surfaces. It has eight wankel engines producing vented thrust coordinated by redundant controllers. Most of the flying chores are automagically smoothed out by the flight computers.
It can fly like any normal plane with only two of the eight engines operational. It doesn't have to VTOL; it can take off or land in the normal fashion. Since the engines are not mechanically linked in the normal sense, it would take a catastrophic failure to lose more than a few engines. You might lose the near-VTOL capability, but a pilot could land a troubled Moeller with less trouble than your average Cessna, theoretically. The power and control systems are far more redundant in a Moeller.
It's not a flying saucer. You might be confusing the Skycar with the "flying saucer" hovering testbed he made +-30 years ago?
If I'm not mistaken, the craft also has a 'chute that fires in an emergency. Or would, if someone would fund the poor man enough to build the full-scale prototype.
Anyone flying the Moeller would have to be a licensed pilot; this would cut down the "oops" factor.
Moeller has spent a lifetime thinking the engineering matters through. I wish he and Burt Rutan would have lunch sometime.
Damn straight. Some of the stupider government officials might think that they are tracking "terrorists", but the smart boys know they are building exit detectors at the national gates that will provide seamless information integration about their own citizens. We're being locked in.
Question: income taxes may be higher in the provinces than in the states, but how do property taxes compare? In the US, they fund schools from local property taxes, which leads to the really obvious degradation of some districts compared to the spectacular successes of the more wealthy ones.
I won't buy property in Chicago anymore. The taxes on my condo were closing on $7K a year, and would be more like 9K if I had not sold a few years back.
Can you own a condo or home in Canada without being taxed to death? Another way of saying it: do you fund schools from general revenues, distributed through a per capita formula, or through local levies?
WHAT child pornography online?
I mean it. This is getting worse than the commies-under-the-bed meme of the last century.
If you've never searched for kiddy porn, how would you know it's so widespread that we need to monitor the net bit-by-bit for it? Just the act of searching for it is borderline illegal. How can anyone know about the availability of such things?
Occam's razor: it's not out there, because people aren't insane. People "know" it is out there because they are constantly told it is. But it is a handy meme for turning the net into a giant listening device.
This will be technically offtopic, but so is almost half of the postings here (not that I mind - lots of fun to be found).
Here's some gristle for you religionists out there -- I'm not calling you Christians, for its rather silly to give southern American fundamentists the impression that they represent THE Christianity.
Here we have the story of das Boot that survived the wrath of god about a dozen generations after the earth was created.
Apparently god, a supernatural superpowerful spirit that refers to itself in the plural, decides that the entire world, except for this one family, was too "evil". He decides to kill every last thing on the plate (not planet - its flat), while Noah races against time before the god kills him along with everything else before the deadline. Fair's fair; if Noah is too slow, EVERYTHING dies. The god is a bit of a sportsman here. Move it or lose it, human!
Now, here's the thing. This god apparently wants more than anything else to be flattered. To be begged, cajoled, importuned, deferred to,have animals sliced up and charcoaled (a bit of a Texan). People just aren't properly on their knees (both meanings intended).
The angry god kills everyone. Noah and his terrified and emotionally destroyed brood find dry land and tell the god that they will do what he wants, please don't hurt us.
The now appeased god promises never to do it again.
Now, what is the difference between a Luciferian embodiment of all evil and this murdering psychotic all-powerful spirit?
If I lived in a world controlled by such a lunatic power, I'd deny its divinity and work to take the motherfucker DOWN every minute of my life!
The true measure of a god is to compare its actions with that of a good man.
What kind of man would murder a plate of people and animals because they weren't paying attention to him?
A man who ain't no god, that for sure. And I expect better behavior from all-powerful Yahweh -- or it's just an evil demonic power, to be opposed at all costs.
Apparently SF is not read anymore. Only "SciFi" like Andromeda and Star Trek stays in the collective memory, it seems. And those are derivative of much older and far more literate work.
Heinlein, Asimov, DeCamp, Pohl, Anderson, Campbell. Kuttner, Clarke, Stephenson, Gibson... all that history, all that work in vain? No one reads anymore?
This is OUR history! I grew up reading stories from the 30's, 40's and 50's. The source material for the people who grew up and built the present world. Snow Crash pretty much predicted the present so well that it doesn't even read like fiction.
I guess I'm spooked because I can't find people of a certain younger age who read SF anymore. A culture is built on stories, and geek culture is losing its own.
AHHHH. I see.
As I was told, the GIMP was named after the character I described in Pulp Fiction.
It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, of course, but in sadomasochistic circles it's a male sex slave, dressed head-to-toe in leather. THE Gimp is of course the poor bugger in the basement at Zed's place.
"Bring out the GIMP" is the first thing that pops into my head whenever someone brings the name up. Since they started developing the GIMP in '95, and Pulp Fiction was out in '94, it's a short line to draw to deduce geekly humor.
Now that I've thunk about the scenes a bit more, Zed's Gimp was probably NOT a prisoner. He may have wanted to be in the box.
I have maligned the GIMP project's name! The sex slavery may have been voluntary. My bad.
You beat me to it on the "GIMP" comment.
.snd or .mus or .tun or .trx? OGG? How do you market that? It sounds like someone trying to cough up mucus! You're supposed to be marketing to people who like music! The name should be as cool as the tunes it's playing.
Why, OH WHY, can't nerds come up with names for their projects that don't sound like overt attempts to make the straights grimace?
Names matter.
Ogg Vorbis? I get where the name comes from, being a rabid Pratchett fan, but what does it have to do with a sound file format? Why not
No one gets the joke, even if there was a joke (or a bad pun). PRATCHETT people don't get it. A combination of the torturer priest inSmall Gods and the family name of the witch Gytha Ogg of Lancre? WTF??
The GIMP? The name of some poor bastard imprisoned in a box, zipped up in filthy leather from head to toe, tortured for months until he loses his mind and identifies with his torturers? This is a name you want to drop at the art department at Cosmo when you're trying to convince them that it's better to use open source than Photoshop? You want to put up a name meaning ultimate degradation to people who want to deal with beauty? Are you TRYING to fail?
Now a bloody seagull. Not just a seagull, but a freaked out, stoned seagull. For kids. And the office environment.
ARRGGGHHHHH.
Now I can hear the snorks and wheezing laughter out there as all the geeks cut loose. It is ultimate geek humor, I know, to make up a totally inappropriate name to describe a prosaic project. If the dumbasses out there can't take a joke, fuck 'em.
Which is why geeks don't do marketing. They don't do GUI's either. Not much into making music. They don't identify with the common herd, so there it is: they torpedo their own projects in the real world.
I mean, what else can I say? Ogg should have been OpenSound, GIMP should have been OpenDraw, and OpenOffice should have a more mainstream symbol.