I'm quite confident that my chance of dying from an in essence unpreventable terrorist attack is just about zero, i.e. I'm totally not afraid. What do you think your chances are of dying of a preventable heart attack? Why wouldn't we attack the bigger more preventable problem pg heart attacks before we attack the smaller more intractable and more expensive (both in terms of money and civil liberties) problem of terrorism? That's just basic logic in the zero sum game of spending tax dollars.
And no I have no great love for the New York Times. Judith Miller of the Times was one of the biggest rah rah for the war mouthpieces for that LIAR Chalabi out there. To the extent that the Times had to apologize for just how wrong they got it. Fortunately the rats like William Buckley and the people in general are starting jump the ship of fake terror based fear mongering. Can you say 35% approval rating for Bush? I knew you could... When will you join them asshat "coward?"
I didn't vote for Bush I voted for Leonard Peltier for prez in 2004. So Bush's marauding is most certainly not my responsibility he's not my president. And neither for that matter was starve a million Iraqis and bomb Serbia Clinton. A pox on both their parties.
No dumbass I chose to worry about things that have a high probability of killing me like heart attacks which is 1 in 5 day after day, year after year, as opposed to things that have a low probability of killing me like the one off event 911 that only killed as many people as heart attacks kill every 4 days. I know it's dispointing to you constitution shredder wannabees but some of us are paying attention to what the actual dangers are.
Interesting that you are so outraged about the idea of the nanny state doing anything about a serious health crisis that has real consequences for 1/3rd of the U.S. population yet you are quite comfortable with the government become a huge authoritarian spying apparatus. How about taking individual responsibility for our own self defense? Hmmmmmm...
It's OK for the government to abrogate our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties but not to attempt to educate people about the obesity epidemic that is directly causing the deaths of 1 in 5 Americans that die every year? Is that really the way you want to go?
Here's the real secret, many that call themselves "conservatives" are right wing authoritarians who actually believe in a strong centralized Federal police state. The founding fathers who were decentralists would be appalled at this type of thinking. Far from being conservative and respectful of tradition you people are in fact radical authoritarians in the same vein as fascists.
Witnessing the decay of our Democratic Republic in real time is fucking depressing.
Ronald McDonald was just an example obviously the education campaign has to be about all fatty unhealthy food. The Colonel and the Hamburgler also have the blood of millions on their hands.
31% of adults seriously overweight is a SERIOUS crisis not to just be be blown off with some quasi Libertarian rhetoric. It is a FAR bigger threat to "national security" than terrorism. If the U.S. were actually invaded, you know by a real enemy with a real army (say China), a nation of fatties would be easy pickings. The founding fathers would be quite appalled I'm certain about how fat, and helpless we have become. And least you think this is just random lefty ramblings I think a real citizens militia similar to what Switzerland now has is part of the solution. What ever happened to rugged individualism which requires people to be gasp in shape?
Except in a zero sum system like spending tax dollars this is not a false dichotomy. There is an opportunity cost to spending our money on a paranoid police stateeque spying apparatus. I'd rather my tax dollars were spent on something that won't infringe my civil liberties and would be guaranteed to save lives like a serious educational campaign about Americans poor dietary habits.
A nation of people that according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has a 20% obesity rate has FAR more serious problems to deal with FIRST besides the almost non existent threat of terrorism.
Yeah we sure have made life better for the Iraqi people. You have to wonder why they aren't grateful we are there to steal their oil and leave their society in ruins:
" Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84% of the higher education establishments have been "destroyed, damaged and robbed".
The intellectual stock has been further depleted as many thousands of academics and other professionals have fled abroad or have been mysteriously kidnapped or assassinated in Iraq; hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class, have left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after receiving death threats.
"Now I am isolated," said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave. "I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash."[1]
Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public's health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are rampaging through the country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely damaged by the war and looting.
The UN's World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were suffering from "dangerous deficiencies of protein". Deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly amongst children, already a problem because of the 12 years of US-imposed sanctions, have increased as poverty and disorder have made access to a proper diet and medicines ever more difficult.
Thousands of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, particularly children.
Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed babies. During the few weeks of war in spring 2003, A10 "tankbuster" planes, which use munitions containing depleted uranium, fired 300,000 rounds.
And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous.
The American military has attacked hospitals to prevent them from giving out casualty figures of US attacks that contradicted official US figures, which the hospitals had been in the habit of doing.
Numerous homes have been broken into by US forces, the men taken away, the women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the family has said that the American soldiers helped themselves to some of the family's money. Iraq has had to submit to a degrading national strip search.
Destruction and looting of the country's ancient heritage, perhaps the world's greatest archive of the human past, left unprotected by the US military, busy protecting oil facilities.
A nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more prevails.
Women's rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing danger under harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas. There is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates physical attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with a male friend.
Men can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing outside in shorts.
Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious issue.
Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security they had enjoyed in Saddam's secular society; many have emigrated.
A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government feature a wide variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psycho
How about we worry about the real killer of Americans heart attacks that kill 1 in 5 Americans that die every year. Time for a war (of words) against big macs. We need to get over allowing the neo-cons to implement a literal police over the statically for all intents and purposes no existent threat of "terror." The only person actually producing terror is Bush.
Because like it or not they control 90+% of the music we can buy out there and they won't change their policies unless we tell them WHY their policies are bad. How hard is that to understand? If they get say 10,000 calls questioning their DRM policies that WILL make them think because they know for everyone that bothers to call there are a 100 who think the same thing who haven't called.
Anyone else notice this?
"The BDR-101A is a 2x Blu-ray recorder, meaning it can theoretically burn a BD-RE disc at 72 megabits per second (9MB per second), which is 6.66 times the data rate of the DVD standard."
That was a joke son.
With the thousands if not millions of documents on modern computers search is the ONLY way to go forward for the future. Spotlight on the Mac comes close to getting this right allowing for easy gui based search of both file titles and search through text of documents including e-mail. While it's default of searching music and fonts is questionable that is easily disables, overall it's pretty good. Ditto for Beagle on Linux, and what google desktop on Windoze?
Meanwhile imagine google as a giant messy pile of papers, hmmm...
Yeah really. It's just like the MSM, like that Dateline special where they entrap people to come visit underage girls. Not only is the show appealing to our worst instincts with a thin veneer of outrage, but entrapment is facilitating these crimes and even creating them out of thin air. The MSM often egages in the very crimes it wants to smear people for, for the purpose of creating fear. Where is the outrage over that?
You mean something like this V.W. that uses.89 liters to go a hundred kilometers. For U.S.ians that's 235 miles per gallon for a non hybrid diesel that is legally drivable, not too bad.
I don't mind a nice looking interface as long as there is no performance penalty. For example I think the clean well rendered interface in Ubuntu Dapper Drake makes using the OS more enjoyable than any other distro I have tried. It's solid, professional looking, and doesn't hurt the eyes in that I'm trying too hard to look like the interface in the Matrix/Minority Report designed by a 14 year old sort of way Linux distros have suffered from in the past. No this isn't a substitute for it's solid Linux underpinnings, but it is a nice usability bonus. Ditto for OS X. And Windows? Lets not go there...
Some of us don't like EITHER the corporations or the government snooping in our lives. The difference as another poster pointed out though is the corporations can't throw you in jail.
I say that however not to let the corporations off the hook what the corporations CAN do is outsource your job, trash the environment for short term profit, and use their monopoly powers to stifle innovation. Just because the corporations are not as big a danger in snooping than the govt., it does not follow they are good or even to be trusted.
Your best bet is to not trust any large unaccountable organization that has great power over your life.
What you don't understand is non geeks are afraid of computers. When people are afraid they cling tightly to what they know whether that's a rational decision or not. To someone who is afraid and who lacks knowledge the unknown is terrifying, what if the new software is worse they think? They have zero understanding of things slasdot geeks take for granted like file formats, Unix user permissions, etc, all they know about the computer is next to nothing and their fear from bad things that have happened in the past
Never mind the fact that the fear of computers in turn comes from from bad engineering decisions from M$. Obviously educating people is the answer but it's not easy when you are dealing with people who are afraid and only want to know the minimum about their computer to just chat, e-mail, surf the web, word process, and look at pictures from the kids from their digital camera.
I could write a whole 'nother diatribe about fear, the "war on terrorism," Bush, and the abrogation of our civil liberties but I'll refrain for now. Suffice it to say fear is a powerful emotion that helps Bush and M$.
Well we can have a new generation of bombs to threaten people to steal the oil, or we could ride high speed trains like the rest of the world. Which will we choose?
No trusted computing on my G5 tower or G3 ibook and I like it that way. I don't see myself "upgrading" anytime soon. If I really need to play Windoze games I'll get a Windoze box for less than 200 from the classified ads.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite confident that my chance of dying from an in essence unpreventable terrorist attack is just about zero, i.e. I'm totally not afraid. What do you think your chances are of dying of a preventable heart attack? Why wouldn't we attack the bigger more preventable problem pg heart attacks before we attack the smaller more intractable and more expensive (both in terms of money and civil liberties) problem of terrorism? That's just basic logic in the zero sum game of spending tax dollars.
And no I have no great love for the New York Times. Judith Miller of the Times was one of the biggest rah rah for the war mouthpieces for that LIAR Chalabi out there. To the extent that the Times had to apologize for just how wrong they got it. Fortunately the rats like William Buckley and the people in general are starting jump the ship of fake terror based fear mongering. Can you say 35% approval rating for Bush? I knew you could... When will you join them asshat "coward?"
I didn't vote for Bush I voted for Leonard Peltier for prez in 2004. So Bush's marauding is most certainly not my responsibility he's not my president. And neither for that matter was starve a million Iraqis and bomb Serbia Clinton. A pox on both their parties.
No dumbass I chose to worry about things that have a high probability of killing me like heart attacks
which is 1 in 5 day after day, year after year, as opposed to things that have a low probability of killing me like the one off event 911 that only killed as many people as heart attacks kill every 4 days. I know it's dispointing to you constitution shredder wannabees but some of us are paying attention to what the actual dangers are.
Interesting that you are so outraged about the idea of the nanny state doing anything about a serious health crisis that has real consequences for 1/3rd of the U.S. population yet you are quite comfortable with the government become a huge authoritarian spying apparatus. How about taking individual responsibility for our own self defense? Hmmmmmm...
It's OK for the government to abrogate our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties but not to attempt to educate people about the obesity epidemic that is directly causing the deaths of 1 in 5 Americans that die every year? Is that really the way you want to go?
Here's the real secret, many that call themselves "conservatives" are right wing authoritarians who actually believe in a strong centralized Federal police state. The founding fathers who were decentralists would be appalled at this type of thinking. Far from being conservative and respectful of tradition you people are in fact radical authoritarians in the same vein as fascists.
Witnessing the decay of our Democratic Republic in real time is fucking depressing.
p.p.s. We are in the fat decadent stage of empire like Rome under Nero.
p.s. 31% figure comes from this CBS report:
m ain623412.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/16/health/
Ronald McDonald was just an example obviously the education campaign has to be about all fatty unhealthy food. The Colonel and the Hamburgler also have the blood of millions on their hands.
31% of adults seriously overweight is a SERIOUS crisis not to just be be blown off with some quasi Libertarian rhetoric. It is a FAR bigger threat to "national security" than terrorism. If the U.S. were actually invaded, you know by a real enemy with a real army (say China), a nation of fatties would be easy pickings. The founding fathers would be quite appalled I'm certain about how fat, and helpless we have become. And least you think this is just random lefty ramblings I think a real citizens militia similar to what Switzerland now has is part of the solution. What ever happened to rugged individualism which requires people to be gasp in shape?
Except in a zero sum system like spending tax dollars this is not a false dichotomy. There is an opportunity cost to spending our money on a paranoid police stateeque spying apparatus. I'd rather my tax dollars were spent on something that won't infringe my civil liberties and would be guaranteed to save lives like a serious educational campaign about Americans poor dietary habits.
s /
A nation of people that according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has a 20% obesity rate has FAR more serious problems to deal with FIRST besides the almost non existent threat of terrorism.
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/trend/map
Hint Ronald McDonald has killed quite literally thousands as times as many people as Osama Bin Laden,
chew on that for a while.
No I'm asking for an education campaign so people will stop eating fatty unhealthy food dumbass.
Yeah we sure have made life better for the Iraqi people. You have to wonder why they aren't grateful we are there to steal their oil and leave their society in ruins:
http://counterpunch.org/blum06222006.html
" Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84% of the higher education establishments have been "destroyed, damaged and robbed".
The intellectual stock has been further depleted as many thousands of academics and other professionals have fled abroad or have been mysteriously kidnapped or assassinated in Iraq; hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class, have left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after receiving death threats.
"Now I am isolated," said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave. "I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash."[1]
Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public's health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are rampaging through the country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely damaged by the war and looting.
The UN's World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were suffering from "dangerous deficiencies of protein". Deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly amongst children, already a problem because of the 12 years of US-imposed sanctions, have increased as poverty and disorder have made access to a proper diet and medicines ever more difficult.
Thousands of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, particularly children.
Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed babies. During the few weeks of war in spring 2003, A10 "tankbuster" planes, which use munitions containing depleted uranium, fired 300,000 rounds.
And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous.
The American military has attacked hospitals to prevent them from giving out casualty figures of US attacks that contradicted official US figures, which the hospitals had been in the habit of doing.
Numerous homes have been broken into by US forces, the men taken away, the women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the family has said that the American soldiers helped themselves to some of the family's money. Iraq has had to submit to a degrading national strip search.
Destruction and looting of the country's ancient heritage, perhaps the world's greatest archive of the human past, left unprotected by the US military, busy protecting oil facilities.
A nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more prevails.
Women's rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing danger under harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas. There is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates physical attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with a male friend.
Men can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing outside in shorts.
Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious issue.
Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security they had enjoyed in Saddam's secular society; many have emigrated.
A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government feature a wide variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psycho
How about we worry about the real killer of Americans heart attacks that kill 1 in 5 Americans that die every year. Time for a war (of words) against big macs. We need to get over allowing the neo-cons to implement a literal police over the statically for all intents and purposes no existent threat of "terror." The only person actually producing terror is Bush.
Because like it or not they control 90+% of the music we can buy out there and they won't change their policies unless we tell them WHY their policies are bad. How hard is that to understand?
If they get say 10,000 calls questioning their DRM policies that WILL make them think because they know for everyone that bothers to call there are a 100 who think the same thing who haven't called.
Anyone else notice this? "The BDR-101A is a 2x Blu-ray recorder, meaning it can theoretically burn a BD-RE disc at 72 megabits per second (9MB per second), which is 6.66 times the data rate of the DVD standard." That was a joke son.
With the thousands if not millions of documents on modern computers search is the ONLY way to go forward for the future. Spotlight on the Mac comes close to getting this right allowing for easy gui based search of both file titles and search through text of documents including e-mail. While it's default of searching music and fonts is questionable that is easily disables, overall it's pretty good. Ditto for Beagle on Linux, and what google desktop on Windoze?
Meanwhile imagine google as a giant messy pile of papers, hmmm...
Yeah really. It's just like the MSM, like that Dateline special where they entrap people to come visit underage girls. Not only is the show appealing to our worst instincts with a thin veneer of outrage, but entrapment is facilitating these crimes and even creating them out of thin air. The MSM often egages in the very crimes it wants to smear people for, for the purpose of creating fear. Where is the outrage over that?
You mean something like this V.W. that uses .89 liters to go a hundred kilometers. For U.S.ians that's 235 miles per gallon for a non hybrid diesel that is legally drivable, not too bad.
. php&carnum=1316
http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/frame.php?file=car
I don't mind a nice looking interface as long as there is no performance penalty. For example I think the clean well rendered interface in Ubuntu Dapper Drake makes using the OS more enjoyable than any other distro I have tried. It's solid, professional looking, and doesn't hurt the eyes in that I'm trying too hard to look like the interface in the Matrix/Minority Report designed by a 14 year old sort of way Linux distros have suffered from in the past. No this isn't a substitute for it's solid Linux underpinnings, but it is a nice usability bonus. Ditto for OS X. And Windows? Lets not go there...
Some of us don't like EITHER the corporations or the government snooping in our lives. The difference as another poster pointed out though is the corporations can't throw you in jail.
I say that however not to let the corporations off the hook what the corporations CAN do is outsource your job, trash the environment for short term profit, and use their monopoly powers to stifle innovation. Just because the corporations are not as big a danger in snooping than the govt., it does not follow they are good or even to be trusted.
Your best bet is to not trust any large unaccountable organization that has great power over your life.
What like sell their data to the government? Hmmmmm...
Nice one you zinged that greedy SOB a good one.
What you don't understand is non geeks are afraid of computers. When people are afraid they cling tightly to what they know whether that's a rational decision or not. To someone who is afraid and who lacks knowledge the unknown is terrifying, what if the new software is worse they think? They have zero understanding of things slasdot geeks take for granted like file formats, Unix user permissions, etc, all they know about the computer is next to nothing and their fear from bad things that have happened in the past
Never mind the fact that the fear of computers in turn comes from from bad engineering decisions from M$. Obviously educating people is the answer but it's not easy when you are dealing with people who are afraid and only want to know the minimum about their computer to just chat, e-mail, surf the web, word process, and look at pictures from the kids from their digital camera.
I could write a whole 'nother diatribe about fear, the "war on terrorism," Bush, and the abrogation of our civil liberties but I'll refrain for now. Suffice it to say fear is a powerful emotion that helps Bush and M$.
Just to render the vapor surrounding this announcement.
Well we can have a new generation of bombs to threaten people to steal the oil, or we could ride high speed trains like the rest of the world. Which will we choose?
No trusted computing on my G5 tower or G3 ibook and I like it that way. I don't see myself "upgrading" anytime soon. If I really need to play Windoze games I'll get a Windoze box for less than 200 from the classified ads.