What was on them looked like SysV but wasn't. And yes, I had intended to write slackware. Upstart however was absolutely fantastic compared to systemd - it was just atrocious compared to the best alternatives like OpenRC or simpleinit.
Guess you don't remember a little something called Spyglass Mosaic ? The browser microsoft basically stole, rebranded and called Internet Explorer which then turned this product of a now bankrupted company into a flagship microsoft product that dominated the web for nearly two decades, destroyed the original netscape and for a very long time made large parts of the web entirely inaccesible to anybody who didn't use windows.
But that history goes back much further. They did the exact same thing with 86-DOS - killing Seattle Computer Products in the process, and not long after that the used an even dirtier trick to effectively kill MacOS before it even launched. The decline of apple (which did not end until the return of Jobs and the launch of the Imac around 1999 - which was only possible because M$ gave them a bunch of cash to stave of the DOJ) began with the launch of Windows which was a flagrant rip-off of the upcoming macOS that they did while under contract to develop apps for the prototype OS. Apple sued them - the court found Microsoft definitely DID commit copyright violation in creating windows, it's just that apple didn't have standing to sue since the technologies being sued over were not created by Apple but by XEROX (who had allowed Jobs to use it freely but still technically owned the copyright).
Hell Microsoft has a history of embrace, extend, extinguish that is literally the entire history of the company. Hell they themselves admitted it (albeit unintentionally). Ever heard of the Halloween Papers ? A leaked internal memo about how to deal with the "Linux threat" in which microsoft outlines a plan based on a step-by-step description of what we would come to call "embrace, extend, extinguish". To quote them: "The key reason why competing products like Linux is viable is because of commodity protocols like HTTP which allows non-microsoft products to use the internet just like our own products do. The best way to destroy this competition is to decomodify all protocols by adding proprietory extensions only our own products understand thus ensuring that other operating system users on the internet get inferior or no access to internet services like websites and email".
What do you think exchange was created for if not to decomodify SMTP/POP/Imap ?
Hell Microsoft even tried to pull an EEE on the tcp/ip stack standard handshake protocol. This is well documented, IIS flagrantly violated the standard handshake protocol, I.E. violated it the same way. The double violation would allow IE to instantly connect to IIS hosted websites, but any other standards-compliant browser would be forced into a time-out sequence (IIS would then switch to the proper standard upon the reconnect attempt) before managing to connect. Which made Linux browsers (and even windows versions of netscape and firefox) appear to have much slower performance than I.E. at least when connecting to ISS hosted sites.
Just how many examples do you actually want ?
Now is THIS an example of EEE ? It doesn't look like it to me, but to pretend that EEE was not a thing, and a major thing, which has done incalculable harm to the computer industry is just bold-faced lying. Frankly it's very easy to calculate the cost that EEE has imposed upon the computer industry. The number is readily available, this is one externality where the the cost is absolutely transparent. The cost of EEE to the entire IT industry is exactly equal to the combined total profits of Microsoft over the entirety of it's existence.
So ? Has ANY distro used sysv in ten years anyway ? We've had numerous alternatives for two decades now. Slashdot has had BSD-style inits since 1993. Richard Gooch had a parallel init system based on make's approach to dependencies as early as 2001. Gentoo has defaulted to OpenRC for many years, Ubuntu had upstart (which was actually a very nice init system) for almost as long.
Comparing systemd to sysv is a strawman fallacy. Compare it to the OTHER contemporary init systems that ALL managed to solve the issues that make sysv less than desirable and none of which strayed outside managing the init process.
Interesting thing to note: I know Americans can never contemplate the idea that anybody may have freedom who isn't American let alone have MORE freedom in some ways but just bare with me okay. Here in my country - guess who does NOT run the country TLD. That's right - the government. They have no control over the TLD assigned to the country. When they tried to claim it was theirs to control - the people who do control it (a non-profit) shifted it to a foreign server and a massive revolt made the government back down very fast. They also don't control any of the core second-level subdomains beneath the country TLD. In fact, none of THOSE are for profit entitites EITHER - they are all run by non-profit charities. When I say charities I mean it, the commercial subdomain rests with it's only registrar -a non-profit, the result is that the cost of a domain here is less than 10% of what it costs to register a.com and despite that the charity has too much money. They buy infrastructure, expand infrastructure, maintain it and pay salaries and still have cash left over - which they spend on charity projects, I managed quite a few of those which were about providing technology access to some of the poorest schools on earth.
It's perfectly possible for key DNS infrastructure to be managed perfectly with neither government NOR corporate control - neither socialist nor profiteering motives - and the ENTIRE country has gotten NOTHING but benefit from this arrangement. No negative side effects observable whatsoever.
>Just remember, boys and girls, nationalizing a utility generally doesn't result in better service for the end users because there's little incentive to innovate.
Just remember, boys and girls, it's impossible to "nationalize" something that was built by government in the first place. You cannot take from the private sector that which the private sector has never had.
And I say this as somebody who is strongly in favor of this move - and defended it hugely in yesterday's story about Cruz's opposition. This is a good move, but I would prefer that instead of a bunch of corporations the control shift to an international coalition of non-profit non-governmental organisations. I even suggested that the US be represented by the EFF and the ACLU.
This is a job where both corporations and governments are imminently untrustable. Mind you that describes just about every job ever, but in this case it is even more critical than usual.
>I think Tenant Assured might find that European law has quite a different view on that.
Well it seems rather a lot of British people would love to get European Law to cease mattering in the UK - and I am willing to bet this company and many others like them are really hoping to just avoid prosecution long enough for the referendum to happen and legalize their business. Afterwards, the picture changes, they can actually have laws made to mandate people use them "The landlord protection act of 2017" or some shit because all they would need to do is bribe some David Cameron cronies, a group of people who are imminently bribable and and rather cheaper than those Belgians.
Oh and in case you were wondering, the US government would be well aware of what happens if you try to appease the mass uprising, promise to submit yourself to their new constitution, and surrender power to a new parliament they elect. History has a few examples of that... it never ended well for the former power-holders. They had a tendency to get their heads chopped off. The last king of France for example, when the revolution began decided that fighting the revolutionaries was futile and instantly surrendered power to them, subjected himself to their new constitution and declared their newly elected parliament the new official government of the land. It only bought him a few years, it wasn't long before the bloodlust that centuries of abuse had unleashed came calling for his neck on the guilotine. He went even before the revolutionary leaders started decapitating each other.
> They could not risk using force against these people for fear of triggering a civil war
So your entire plan is based on assuming the US would not risk what every other government in history has done when faced with that? In recent times see Syria, Libia, Egypt, Tunisia and more.
Every single government responded to mass armed protest with effectively declaring war on the citizens. Some lost, some won and and some are still fighting. Not ONE of those governments ceded power or surrendered without a bloodbath.
What bizarre idiocy makes you think that if the US government became so far disconnected from their founding principles as to actually inspire a mass armed revolt (which would imply it has reached a level of power-madness akin to those governments) that it would respond any differently to a popular uprising against this which threatened their power ? If anything their vastly superior military might and tools would make the odds of the population actually winning much smaller.
If there is a war between the citizens and the government in the USA, the government WILL fight and they will probably win.
>You are more retarded than a sack of monkey balls.
Wait... I need to know, who measured the IQ of a sack of monkey balls ? Is this an objective measurement ? Like, is "Sacks of Monkey Balls" the official unit of measurement for retardation ? Is that SI or Imperial units ?
Tell that to the Dutch. The siege of Amsterdam alone killed thousands by starvation over an 80-year period - the Inquisition was at least as much a military power as a policing power and should be equally blames for the crimes of their navy. The very concept of "heresy" being a crime flies in the face of any concept of justice. Now only an idiot would claim the protestants were any BETTER. John Calvin executed his best friend for heresy and protestants in Iceland had habit of invading monasteries and forcing priests and nuns to copulate at gunpoint. Which wouldn't even save their lives, it would just get them a quick death rather than a slow torture death.
But to suggest that the inquisition was some precursor of modern justice is flagrantly ignorant. There are actual precursors of modern concepts of justice like innocent-until-proven-guilty out there. The Magna Carta for example. But none of them came from a church. They came, mostly, from philosophers - a group of people who have, throughout history, been more likely to be accused of heresy than support the church. Especially that faction known as "natural philosophers" (the precursors of science) - such as Copernicus or Spinoza for example but to no lesser extent the philosophers who thought about politics, statecraft and power - after all, any time they said something sensible it was a threat to the power-relationship (read: circle-jerk) between nobility and religion. Examples here would be philosophers like John Locke.
>Government constraints on spending as social programs inhale ever-larger chunks
Bullshit. The thing that sucks the government's budgets dry is the military. The COMBINED cost of ALL American social programs is less than 5% of the entire budget. It's a convenient republican lie that this tiny expense is the reason for budget problems - because those are the only programs they will ever consider cutting.
If anything - law enforcement is OVERFUNDED to begin with (massively so - they should not be able to afford, let alone allowed to have, military equipment). They don't need to supplement their budgets, they need their budgets massively reduced.
We can use the savings to fund increased social programs.
Sorry, but I would much rather have my taxes feed a hungry child than putting him in jail for smoking a joint.
> Below that level, lots of crime; above it, relatively little.
The line of conviction is not a line of criminality, just a line of "can afford good lawyers". The vast majority of black prisoners are convicted of non-violent offenses, mostly marijuana posession. White people are arrested for the same crime just as often, but convicted far less frequently. And that's without considering the fact that EVERY wall street banker belongs in jail for life and not one of them actually went.
>When it comes to freedom of speech, NOBODY is as liberal as the US government
You guys really believe that ? Well try showing a pair of tits on daytime broadcast TV or saying the word 'pussy' on the radio. Both those things are quite common in Europe. Hell in some European countries you can find hardcore fetish porn on daytime broadcast television and government makes no attempt to sensor what in the US will invariably be labelled "obsenity" and kept of the public airwaves.
If zero censorship is the goal - Germany would probably be a better choice. But the fact is, that censorship has nothing to DO with what's broken. What's broken is having a core piece of infrastructure in the hands of government, any government at all. Look at what the bill says. It does not say "it can't be given to another government" - it specifically prohibits giving that control to a NON-governmental organisation. Which is exactly where it ought to lie. Just like we've moved every OTHER part of internet control to private organisations and the internet has consistently gotten better for it. I would love to see a consortium of international non-governmental organisations taking control. With engineers handling the day to day stuff and policy controlled by organisations that have long track records of fighting their governments on censorship issues. The US for example could be represented on such a board by the ACLU and the EFF.
> The US is far more trustworthy than NK, and plenty of non-Americans absolutely agree with that.
Then they are fools. All governments are exactly equally evil. Specifically: absolutely evil. Yours is no different.
>I'm not constantly accused of imperialism or unspeakable arrogance. You think people saying that about America are somehow always adding "Except that guy Anonymous Cow Ward on slashdot". It's an accusation levelled against America on a daily basis by everybody from politicians to streetsweepers. And it's not an undeserved reputation.
>The US certainly throws its weight around, and I'm often not a fan of US foreign policy, but it's arguably the most well-behaved superpower the world has seen. Unless of course you lived in Brazil or Nicaraqua or Iraq or Panama or any of the other place where the US decided they didn't approve of who the people elected and replaced them with some puppet dictator. Hell when a few nations recently decided to overthrow some of your friendly dictators the biggest debates in America was about how concerned everybody was that these newly free people may use their democracy to elect leaders who would not care very much about "US interests". Even if your assessment was true (and I don't believe it is) then that's such an incredibly low bar that it is utterly meaningless. How about being a good neighbour to the rest of the world instead ?
>Oh, Americans know a lot of the world isn't grateful Well, some Americans, but I would add that many of them would have to be grateful for the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of the US or dictators installed by the US. Grateful to see their economies crashed by US policies. Grateful to see their livelihoods destroyed to serve some US corporation. They are not grateful because, by and large, if you are not American then American foreign policy will screw your or kill you nine times out of ten. The one time you actually appointed a president who seemed to respect the idea that other people have rights and liberties and that they do not just exist to server US interests and actually said so the US media was filled with pundits calling him a traitor for "apologising for America". It never occurred to them that America in fact has a great deal to apologise for.
>On the other hand, America gives out loads of foreign aid, Oh really ? You think it is "loads" ? We'll ignore that whenever the US has a crisis the rest of the world gives aid to you just as readily. You think it's a lot ? Funny, just last year the African Union asked you to please close a few loopholes that allow American investors in Africa to avoid paying taxes on the money they make there - and offered to forego all future foreign aid in return. They would be happy to do so - since the taxes that American investors evade in their countries are roughly 65 times the amount that America gives in foreign aid. Your "loads" is a mere 65th of what Americans steal from the same countries it is paid to - and those countries know it and know they are getting a pretty damn rotten deal.
>Some countries are actually grateful for the Pax Americana Mostly the ones who play nice lapdog and act like little more than colonies or are powerful enough to actually set some terms in negotiations. There are not very many of those.
>and the American military in general, despite its misuse. I think that's pretty much Israel, and that's because the utterly one-sided US support for Israel is a prime example of the misuse of the US military. If America wants my respect, they would sign the Rome statute and haul the Netanyahu and Bush before the court in the Hague on the same plane.
>You do not get to speak for every non-American I did no such thing. I merely expressed a common sentiment. I never said everybody thinks the US government is as evil as I think they are. But I did say that 7 billion people out there would prefer not to be dominated by a government they have no say in. That's a pretty universal thing, every Ame
Try reading the actual constitution - not just the amendments.
The US government has a very long history of trampling on the freedoms of people in other countries, and a particular love for removing their elected leaders whenever any of those leaders get the bizarre idea that they are supposed to serve the needs of their electorates rather than of US corporations in order to replace them with pliant dictators and an even more comprehensive history of propping up and supporting some of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world whenever such support can ensure somebody's profits.
That whole "consent of the governed" thing has never been applied to anybody OUTSIDE the USA - what makes you think that the rest of it does ?
Only to Americans. The rest of the world would very much prefer NOBODY had as much power internationally as America does. No, it's not about who is best suited to have that power - its that it should not exist. No government should be able to influence the lives of non-citizens that much.
Why do you think you are constantly accused of imperialism and unspeakable arrogance ? The former because America keeps messing in the lives of people who have no say in it's decisions, the latter because Americans honestly can't seem to even consider the possibility that anybody else may be less than grateful for this.
America tends to be tolerated by the world only because the world has no choice. But if there was a third world war, we all rather hope you and China and Russia all destroy each other to the point where none of you have any power left.
>But if there was a successful, technological, intelligent species of dinosaurs they would have left signs.
You're assuming we would 1) Find the signs 2) Recognise the signs
Whenever a scientists says "there is no evidence of" you should always ask him three questions: 1) Did anybody look ? 2) If they did - would they expect to find anything ? (sorry - scientists are human and expectations influence what they see) 3) If they did find it, would they dare consider that it means what you think it means ?
Again I say, you're making unsupportable assumptions. In a completely different environment it's highly likely that any technology would have born zero resemblence to what we developed. Dinosaurs didn't look like us, they didn't live in a world like ours - if one developed tools to live better, those tools would be intended for purposes we can't begin to imagine, and designed for use by creatures we are nothing like. What would dinosaur tools even look like ? For most of our existence our tools were made of wood and bone, we didn't even get to stone until the equivalent of about 30 seconds ago. And there is no doubt we were a technologically advanced species even when our most advanced technology was the bow and arrow.
Just consider this - there are absolutely no stone tools whatsoever in China. None has ever been found. Yet China was settled by descendants of people who made stone tools - they damn sure knew how. Did they LOSE their toolmaking ability ? Of course not, we know they didn't since the Chinese were pretty technologically advanced when the west rediscovered them. So what happened ? One word: bamboo. China had a resource the west didn't have, that could do almost anything stone (and even early iron) could do - with a great deal less effort. I've seen a man throw a bamboo spear through a car door. That stuff is fantastic. But it's also completely biodegradable. It left very little traces. We only found any because the settlement of china is geologically speaking yesterday.
The resources available, the shape of the bodies that need to use the tools, the problems presented by the environment all radically influence what sorts of technology a culture would come up with - it's silly to assume that we would even be able to recognize a dinosaur tool if we found one. Especially if you consider the likelihood that such a creature may have existed closer to the end than the beginning of the dinosaur reign and thus likely met their end most abruptly with the K/T event. They could have been anywhere along a line that took us 90-thousand years without ever sharpening a stone.
>it's not like dinosaurs didn't have a shit ton of time to get stuff done.
That's rather my point. The thing is - for the vast majority of humanity's time on earth WE did nothing that we would recognize as technology today. Wooden bows don't preserve, fire doesn't preserve. It wasn't until we started making stone tools that we built anything that was recognizable later - and that was only about 10-thousand years ago. The only recognizably intelligent thing we did before that is draw on rocks and that is hardly something with a million year lifespan. I just think that the more than 350 million years where every land animal larger than a small dog was a dinosaur and their close relatives the icthyosaurs, mosasaurs and pterosaurs ruled the skies and the oceans - is more than enough time for something at least smart as us to have evolved and maybe even got some pretty advanced technology done before leaving the place again. Any technology they had would likely have born very little resemblance to ours - after all it would be intended to solve different problems for a different species in a radically different environment - but to assume nothing is just pushing credulity. If velociraptors had taken to keeping some smaller dinos in pens and farming them - how would we know ? If mosasaurs had taken to farming some early ancestor of kelp - what evidence would that leave ?
And considering that would be on par with us just before Mesopotamia (a geological blink of an eye ago - and less than 1% of the time they had) would that not be impressive enough ?
Slashdot Mirror
What was on them looked like SysV but wasn't. And yes, I had intended to write slackware. Upstart however was absolutely fantastic compared to systemd - it was just atrocious compared to the best alternatives like OpenRC or simpleinit.
The constitution does, in fact, mandate that the federal government be responsible for the welfare of the citizens.
Hah. At that stage I was running netBSD on an old dead MCSE's brain in a peanut butter jar.
Guess you don't remember a little something called Spyglass Mosaic ? The browser microsoft basically stole, rebranded and called Internet Explorer which then turned this product of a now bankrupted company into a flagship microsoft product that dominated the web for nearly two decades, destroyed the original netscape and for a very long time made large parts of the web entirely inaccesible to anybody who didn't use windows.
But that history goes back much further. They did the exact same thing with 86-DOS - killing Seattle Computer Products in the process, and not long after that the used an even dirtier trick to effectively kill MacOS before it even launched. The decline of apple (which did not end until the return of Jobs and the launch of the Imac around 1999 - which was only possible because M$ gave them a bunch of cash to stave of the DOJ) began with the launch of Windows which was a flagrant rip-off of the upcoming macOS that they did while under contract to develop apps for the prototype OS. Apple sued them - the court found Microsoft definitely DID commit copyright violation in creating windows, it's just that apple didn't have standing to sue since the technologies being sued over were not created by Apple but by XEROX (who had allowed Jobs to use it freely but still technically owned the copyright).
Hell Microsoft has a history of embrace, extend, extinguish that is literally the entire history of the company. Hell they themselves admitted it (albeit unintentionally). Ever heard of the Halloween Papers ? A leaked internal memo about how to deal with the "Linux threat" in which microsoft outlines a plan based on a step-by-step description of what we would come to call "embrace, extend, extinguish". To quote them: "The key reason why competing products like Linux is viable is because of commodity protocols like HTTP which allows non-microsoft products to use the internet just like our own products do. The best way to destroy this competition is to decomodify all protocols by adding proprietory extensions only our own products understand thus ensuring that other operating system users on the internet get inferior or no access to internet services like websites and email".
What do you think exchange was created for if not to decomodify SMTP/POP/Imap ?
Hell Microsoft even tried to pull an EEE on the tcp/ip stack standard handshake protocol. This is well documented, IIS flagrantly violated the standard handshake protocol, I.E. violated it the same way. The double violation would allow IE to instantly connect to IIS hosted websites, but any other standards-compliant browser would be forced into a time-out sequence (IIS would then switch to the proper standard upon the reconnect attempt) before managing to connect. Which made Linux browsers (and even windows versions of netscape and firefox) appear to have much slower performance than I.E. at least when connecting to ISS hosted sites.
Just how many examples do you actually want ?
Now is THIS an example of EEE ? It doesn't look like it to me, but to pretend that EEE was not a thing, and a major thing, which has done incalculable harm to the computer industry is just bold-faced lying. Frankly it's very easy to calculate the cost that EEE has imposed upon the computer industry. The number is readily available, this is one externality where the the cost is absolutely transparent. The cost of EEE to the entire IT industry is exactly equal to the combined total profits of Microsoft over the entirety of it's existence.
Considering the libreoffice runs on a whole bunch of operating systems - including Mac and Windows as well as Linux, I sincerely doubt that.
You take your phone with you when you shit ? Remind me to never, ever call you.
So ? Has ANY distro used sysv in ten years anyway ?
We've had numerous alternatives for two decades now. Slashdot has had BSD-style inits since 1993. Richard Gooch had a parallel init system based on make's approach to dependencies as early as 2001. Gentoo has defaulted to OpenRC for many years, Ubuntu had upstart (which was actually a very nice init system) for almost as long.
Comparing systemd to sysv is a strawman fallacy. Compare it to the OTHER contemporary init systems that ALL managed to solve the issues that make sysv less than desirable and none of which strayed outside managing the init process.
Interesting thing to note: I know Americans can never contemplate the idea that anybody may have freedom who isn't American let alone have MORE freedom in some ways but just bare with me okay. Here in my country - guess who does NOT run the country TLD. That's right - the government. They have no control over the TLD assigned to the country. .com and despite that the charity has too much money. They buy infrastructure, expand infrastructure, maintain it and pay salaries and still have cash left over - which they spend on charity projects, I managed quite a few of those which were about providing technology access to some of the poorest schools on earth.
When they tried to claim it was theirs to control - the people who do control it (a non-profit) shifted it to a foreign server and a massive revolt made the government back down very fast.
They also don't control any of the core second-level subdomains beneath the country TLD. In fact, none of THOSE are for profit entitites EITHER - they are all run by non-profit charities. When I say charities I mean it, the commercial subdomain rests with it's only registrar -a non-profit, the result is that the cost of a domain here is less than 10% of what it costs to register a
It's perfectly possible for key DNS infrastructure to be managed perfectly with neither government NOR corporate control - neither socialist nor profiteering motives - and the ENTIRE country has gotten NOTHING but benefit from this arrangement. No negative side effects observable whatsoever.
>Just remember, boys and girls, nationalizing a utility generally doesn't result in better service for the end users because there's little incentive to innovate.
Just remember, boys and girls, it's impossible to "nationalize" something that was built by government in the first place. You cannot take from the private sector that which the private sector has never had.
And I say this as somebody who is strongly in favor of this move - and defended it hugely in yesterday's story about Cruz's opposition. This is a good move, but I would prefer that instead of a bunch of corporations the control shift to an international coalition of non-profit non-governmental organisations. I even suggested that the US be represented by the EFF and the ACLU.
This is a job where both corporations and governments are imminently untrustable. Mind you that describes just about every job ever, but in this case it is even more critical than usual.
>Bootlickers
Only if you have a very strong Canadian accent.
>I think Tenant Assured might find that European law has quite a different view on that.
Well it seems rather a lot of British people would love to get European Law to cease mattering in the UK - and I am willing to bet this company and many others like them are really hoping to just avoid prosecution long enough for the referendum to happen and legalize their business. Afterwards, the picture changes, they can actually have laws made to mandate people use them "The landlord protection act of 2017" or some shit because all they would need to do is bribe some David Cameron cronies, a group of people who are imminently bribable and and rather cheaper than those Belgians.
Oh and in case you were wondering, the US government would be well aware of what happens if you try to appease the mass uprising, promise to submit yourself to their new constitution, and surrender power to a new parliament they elect. History has a few examples of that... it never ended well for the former power-holders. They had a tendency to get their heads chopped off. The last king of France for example, when the revolution began decided that fighting the revolutionaries was futile and instantly surrendered power to them, subjected himself to their new constitution and declared their newly elected parliament the new official government of the land.
It only bought him a few years, it wasn't long before the bloodlust that centuries of abuse had unleashed came calling for his neck on the guilotine. He went even before the revolutionary leaders started decapitating each other.
> They could not risk using force against these people for fear of triggering a civil war
So your entire plan is based on assuming the US would not risk what every other government in history has done when faced with that? In recent times see Syria, Libia, Egypt, Tunisia and more.
Every single government responded to mass armed protest with effectively declaring war on the citizens. Some lost, some won and and some are still fighting. Not ONE of those governments ceded power or surrendered without a bloodbath.
What bizarre idiocy makes you think that if the US government became so far disconnected from their founding principles as to actually inspire a mass armed revolt (which would imply it has reached a level of power-madness akin to those governments) that it would respond any differently to a popular uprising against this which threatened their power ?
If anything their vastly superior military might and tools would make the odds of the population actually winning much smaller.
If there is a war between the citizens and the government in the USA, the government WILL fight and they will probably win.
>You are more retarded than a sack of monkey balls.
Wait... I need to know, who measured the IQ of a sack of monkey balls ? Is this an objective measurement ? Like, is "Sacks of Monkey Balls" the official unit of measurement for retardation ? Is that SI or Imperial units ?
Tell that to the Dutch. The siege of Amsterdam alone killed thousands by starvation over an 80-year period - the Inquisition was at least as much a military power as a policing power and should be equally blames for the crimes of their navy. The very concept of "heresy" being a crime flies in the face of any concept of justice. Now only an idiot would claim the protestants were any BETTER. John Calvin executed his best friend for heresy and protestants in Iceland had habit of invading monasteries and forcing priests and nuns to copulate at gunpoint. Which wouldn't even save their lives, it would just get them a quick death rather than a slow torture death.
But to suggest that the inquisition was some precursor of modern justice is flagrantly ignorant. There are actual precursors of modern concepts of justice like innocent-until-proven-guilty out there. The Magna Carta for example. But none of them came from a church. They came, mostly, from philosophers - a group of people who have, throughout history, been more likely to be accused of heresy than support the church. Especially that faction known as "natural philosophers" (the precursors of science) - such as Copernicus or Spinoza for example but to no lesser extent the philosophers who thought about politics, statecraft and power - after all, any time they said something sensible it was a threat to the power-relationship (read: circle-jerk) between nobility and religion. Examples here would be philosophers like John Locke.
>Government constraints on spending as social programs inhale ever-larger chunks
Bullshit. The thing that sucks the government's budgets dry is the military. The COMBINED cost of ALL American social programs is less than 5% of the entire budget. It's a convenient republican lie that this tiny expense is the reason for budget problems - because those are the only programs they will ever consider cutting.
If anything - law enforcement is OVERFUNDED to begin with (massively so - they should not be able to afford, let alone allowed to have, military equipment). They don't need to supplement their budgets, they need their budgets massively reduced.
We can use the savings to fund increased social programs.
Sorry, but I would much rather have my taxes feed a hungry child than putting him in jail for smoking a joint.
> Below that level, lots of crime; above it, relatively little.
The line of conviction is not a line of criminality, just a line of "can afford good lawyers". The vast majority of black prisoners are convicted of non-violent offenses, mostly marijuana posession. White people are arrested for the same crime just as often, but convicted far less frequently.
And that's without considering the fact that EVERY wall street banker belongs in jail for life and not one of them actually went.
Yeah... white criminals never get a free pass. Just ask Brock Turner.
and you can get refunded if you can prove you are innocent - without, of course, having any cash to hire a lawyer with.
Yep, America's justice system takes another dive off the deep-end.
>When it comes to freedom of speech, NOBODY is as liberal as the US government
You guys really believe that ? Well try showing a pair of tits on daytime broadcast TV or saying the word 'pussy' on the radio. Both those things are quite common in Europe. Hell in some European countries you can find hardcore fetish porn on daytime broadcast television and government makes no attempt to sensor what in the US will invariably be labelled "obsenity" and kept of the public airwaves.
If zero censorship is the goal - Germany would probably be a better choice. But the fact is, that censorship has nothing to DO with what's broken. What's broken is having a core piece of infrastructure in the hands of government, any government at all.
Look at what the bill says. It does not say "it can't be given to another government" - it specifically prohibits giving that control to a NON-governmental organisation. Which is exactly where it ought to lie.
Just like we've moved every OTHER part of internet control to private organisations and the internet has consistently gotten better for it. I would love to see a consortium of international non-governmental organisations taking control. With engineers handling the day to day stuff and policy controlled by organisations that have long track records of fighting their governments on censorship issues. The US for example could be represented on such a board by the ACLU and the EFF.
> The US is far more trustworthy than NK, and plenty of non-Americans absolutely agree with that.
Then they are fools. All governments are exactly equally evil. Specifically: absolutely evil. Yours is no different.
>I'm not constantly accused of imperialism or unspeakable arrogance.
You think people saying that about America are somehow always adding "Except that guy Anonymous Cow Ward on slashdot". It's an accusation levelled against America on a daily basis by everybody from politicians to streetsweepers. And it's not an undeserved reputation.
>The US certainly throws its weight around, and I'm often not a fan of US foreign policy, but it's arguably the most well-behaved superpower the world has seen.
Unless of course you lived in Brazil or Nicaraqua or Iraq or Panama or any of the other place where the US decided they didn't approve of who the people elected and replaced them with some puppet dictator. Hell when a few nations recently decided to overthrow some of your friendly dictators the biggest debates in America was about how concerned everybody was that these newly free people may use their democracy to elect leaders who would not care very much about "US interests". Even if your assessment was true (and I don't believe it is) then that's such an incredibly low bar that it is utterly meaningless. How about being a good neighbour to the rest of the world instead ?
>Oh, Americans know a lot of the world isn't grateful
Well, some Americans, but I would add that many of them would have to be grateful for the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of the US or dictators installed by the US. Grateful to see their economies crashed by US policies. Grateful to see their livelihoods destroyed to serve some US corporation. They are not grateful because, by and large, if you are not American then American foreign policy will screw your or kill you nine times out of ten. The one time you actually appointed a president who seemed to respect the idea that other people have rights and liberties and that they do not just exist to server US interests and actually said so the US media was filled with pundits calling him a traitor for "apologising for America". It never occurred to them that America in fact has a great deal to apologise for.
>On the other hand, America gives out loads of foreign aid,
Oh really ? You think it is "loads" ? We'll ignore that whenever the US has a crisis the rest of the world gives aid to you just as readily. You think it's a lot ? Funny, just last year the African Union asked you to please close a few loopholes that allow American investors in Africa to avoid paying taxes on the money they make there - and offered to forego all future foreign aid in return. They would be happy to do so - since the taxes that American investors evade in their countries are roughly 65 times the amount that America gives in foreign aid. Your "loads" is a mere 65th of what Americans steal from the same countries it is paid to - and those countries know it and know they are getting a pretty damn rotten deal.
>Some countries are actually grateful for the Pax Americana
Mostly the ones who play nice lapdog and act like little more than colonies or are powerful enough to actually set some terms in negotiations. There are not very many of those.
>and the American military in general, despite its misuse.
I think that's pretty much Israel, and that's because the utterly one-sided US support for Israel is a prime example of the misuse of the US military. If America wants my respect, they would sign the Rome statute and haul the Netanyahu and Bush before the court in the Hague on the same plane.
>You do not get to speak for every non-American
I did no such thing. I merely expressed a common sentiment. I never said everybody thinks the US government is as evil as I think they are. But I did say that 7 billion people out there would prefer not to be dominated by a government they have no say in. That's a pretty universal thing, every Ame
Try reading the actual constitution - not just the amendments.
The US government has a very long history of trampling on the freedoms of people in other countries, and a particular love for removing their elected leaders whenever any of those leaders get the bizarre idea that they are supposed to serve the needs of their electorates rather than of US corporations in order to replace them with pliant dictators and an even more comprehensive history of propping up and supporting some of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world whenever such support can ensure somebody's profits.
That whole "consent of the governed" thing has never been applied to anybody OUTSIDE the USA - what makes you think that the rest of it does ?
Only to Americans. The rest of the world would very much prefer NOBODY had as much power internationally as America does. No, it's not about who is best suited to have that power - its that it should not exist.
No government should be able to influence the lives of non-citizens that much.
Why do you think you are constantly accused of imperialism and unspeakable arrogance ? The former because America keeps messing in the lives of people who have no say in it's decisions, the latter because Americans honestly can't seem to even consider the possibility that anybody else may be less than grateful for this.
America tends to be tolerated by the world only because the world has no choice. But if there was a third world war, we all rather hope you and China and Russia all destroy each other to the point where none of you have any power left.
>But if there was a successful, technological, intelligent species of dinosaurs they would have left signs.
You're assuming we would
1) Find the signs
2) Recognise the signs
Whenever a scientists says "there is no evidence of" you should always ask him three questions:
1) Did anybody look ?
2) If they did - would they expect to find anything ? (sorry - scientists are human and expectations influence what they see)
3) If they did find it, would they dare consider that it means what you think it means ?
Again I say, you're making unsupportable assumptions. In a completely different environment it's highly likely that any technology would have born zero resemblence to what we developed. Dinosaurs didn't look like us, they didn't live in a world like ours - if one developed tools to live better, those tools would be intended for purposes we can't begin to imagine, and designed for use by creatures we are nothing like. What would dinosaur tools even look like ?
For most of our existence our tools were made of wood and bone, we didn't even get to stone until the equivalent of about 30 seconds ago. And there is no doubt we were a technologically advanced species even when our most advanced technology was the bow and arrow.
Just consider this - there are absolutely no stone tools whatsoever in China. None has ever been found. Yet China was settled by descendants of people who made stone tools - they damn sure knew how. Did they LOSE their toolmaking ability ? Of course not, we know they didn't since the Chinese were pretty technologically advanced when the west rediscovered them.
So what happened ? One word: bamboo. China had a resource the west didn't have, that could do almost anything stone (and even early iron) could do - with a great deal less effort. I've seen a man throw a bamboo spear through a car door. That stuff is fantastic. But it's also completely biodegradable. It left very little traces. We only found any because the settlement of china is geologically speaking yesterday.
The resources available, the shape of the bodies that need to use the tools, the problems presented by the environment all radically influence what sorts of technology a culture would come up with - it's silly to assume that we would even be able to recognize a dinosaur tool if we found one. Especially if you consider the likelihood that such a creature may have existed closer to the end than the beginning of the dinosaur reign and thus likely met their end most abruptly with the K/T event. They could have been anywhere along a line that took us 90-thousand years without ever sharpening a stone.
>it's not like dinosaurs didn't have a shit ton of time to get stuff done.
That's rather my point. The thing is - for the vast majority of humanity's time on earth WE did nothing that we would recognize as technology today. Wooden bows don't preserve, fire doesn't preserve. It wasn't until we started making stone tools that we built anything that was recognizable later - and that was only about 10-thousand years ago.
The only recognizably intelligent thing we did before that is draw on rocks and that is hardly something with a million year lifespan. I just think that the more than 350 million years where every land animal larger than a small dog was a dinosaur and their close relatives the icthyosaurs, mosasaurs and pterosaurs ruled the skies and the oceans - is more than enough time for something at least smart as us to have evolved and maybe even got some pretty advanced technology done before leaving the place again. Any technology they had would likely have born very little resemblance to ours - after all it would be intended to solve different problems for a different species in a radically different environment - but to assume nothing is just pushing credulity. If velociraptors had taken to keeping some smaller dinos in pens and farming them - how would we know ? If mosasaurs had taken to farming some early ancestor of kelp - what evidence would that leave ?
And considering that would be on par with us just before Mesopotamia (a geological blink of an eye ago - and less than 1% of the time they had) would that not be impressive enough ?