Very clever. My point is that Tunsinian muslims aren't going to do anything to Anonymous. They'll get mad and blame Israel, but Anonymous is beyond the reach of their beheading tools.
The full list of "enemies" seems to be: Bahrain
Belarus
Burma
China
Cuba
Iran
North Korea
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan and
Vietnam
There's a subtle difference between "We're shutting you down because you're giving people free movies that you don't have the rights to" and "We're keeping you from accessing these websites because they say we are corrupt assholes." Or "We're going to kill you for saying things we don't like online."
Both are bad in my opinion, the US could easily slide into outright internet censorship, and the US is also hypocritical on this matter, but for right now I feel we're not in the same league as, say, Syria.
There are more than enough bad guys out there that CAN'T reach you, I'd rather have them pestering "safe targets" for a while rather than them going after the bigger fish, and getting killed or deported.
I also thought the whole thing with "Targeting the Zetas" was probably just "for the lulz," in the first place. I mean, it's a pretty low-tech operation. I wasn't quite clear how Anonymous would have gotten their hands on identities of corrupt officials working with the zetas, proof of their corruption, identities of zetas members (who are not exactly supervillian secret identities anyway), or how they would interfere via internet with the zetas ability to make meth in a bathtub and drive it into the US.
The media certainly was trolled hard. Hopefully a few mexican mafia members were also trolled. But I think the whole drug cartel thing was pretty safe to begin with, compared to interfering with the US government.
Apple has a Cloud service which mirrors your music to all your devices, regardless of where it came from. Sony?
In their defense, they probably realize that the only people who would entrust their music with sony after that whole rootkit thing are utterly and completely uninformed as to what else is out there, so no need to add features like "being able to upload your music and play it on your devices."
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
This is a bit like saying Religion is more about how you conduct yourself than about judging other people or justifying wars. Sure, theoretically that could be true, but it's not actually true. ID proponents in practice focus more on casting FUD against science than they do working scientific findings into a belief system.
Put another way, it's fine to say "Evolution is the how, my religion is they why" but that's not what they're doing. What they're actually doing is saying "Science is wrong because my holy book says so!" Religious people who don't reject science, whose understanding of evolutionary theory doesn't contradict their beliefs about higher powers, they don't call themselves "intelligent design."
Don't we have a left wing liberal as a president right now?
It hurts too much take this as a joke, so I'm just going to say no, we have a moderate conservative as president right now.
If you do not like who is running the country and making the policies, you can vote them out of office.
Not really. Every election comes down to two candidates who, on the middle east, differ only in terms of whether they want to start wars or not. AIPAC and other pro-war interests are too strong to allow anyone into the short list who will say things like "The Israeli government is the aggressor in this situation, not Iran." The powers that be will not give us that option.
We're basically rigging the system to LOOK like war is inevitable no matter what we do.
That sounds accurate to me! All the politicians are falling over themselves to say they're going to kill the other guys. It's not the peasants asking for it. The nobles are the ones leading it. The military industrial complex, conservative pundits, and a few other rich individuals who for one reason or another want to see a big fight are the few leading the charge. Aside from locking them up, what can we do?
Oh, sorry for not being clear, that was not my objection. You're right that coal or oil is bad for the environment compared to nuclear. Not disputing that at all. Oil for electricity though is still a dumber option than coal because oil is more expensive and we need to reserve oil for plastics and transport.
Are you sure they're making up the difference by using oil for electricity? I was under the impression that due to cost reasons, coal for electricity, oil for cars. Last I heard, only Iran burned oil for electricity. Is it a matter of "You can build a petroelum power plant really quickly, the coal ones aren't online yet?" I'm also aware and have heard from numerous Japanese residents that corporations basically run the government (like moreso than the US), is this a case of super corporation convincing bureaucrats to buy oil from them at a steeper markup than they could get away with for coal?
That's why it should be significantly reformed (i.e., gutted).
But to prevent them from screwing it up worse than it was before, we would first need to have the industry lobbyists and executives themselves reformed (i.e., gutted).
3.-attempted to set up a false flag to take away your second amendment rights with "Fast & Furious" which led to dozens being murdered by guns provided by the US government to terrorists.
I'm unclear as to how you arrived at infringement of second amendment rights with "fast and furious." I thought the guns were going into Mexico. You'd have to have very low esteem of gun control advocates if you're suggesting they'd try to use the agency who is supposed to be regulating firearms screwing up and arming mexican gangs as an argument against the second amendment.
Put another way, if that's what you think second amendment opponents are cooking up, then why are you so worried they're going to succeed in taking away your rights? That's a terrible plan. I don't see any politicians standing up and suggesting we need gun control. Even after Giffords was shot, I didn't hear anyone seriously talking about gun regulation. Where is this paranoia coming from? Especially while the other things you said are ACTUAL erosions of your rights.
I seem to recall a slashdot article about law enforcement people whose job it is to patrol the internet for child porn, or search through hard drives suspected of containing child porn. I'd guess they see higher concentrations of that than facebook moderators. I'd also guess that "seeing people getting cut into pieces" is easier to get desensitized to.
Pay is likely worse, but I'd rather police facebook, assuming I wasn't going to starve.
If you codify opinion that pretty much everyone shares and apply it to specific technical situations, then no, that's not as bullshit. Many people fail to understand the Tuskegee syphilis experiments as 100% abhorrent. It's not as clear cut as that. At the start of the experiment, there was no treatment to syphillis, it was lethal, and there was little data on how the disease progressed in black patients. That's a significant gap in clinical knowledge. Arguably, the experiment was ethical at the start.
It immediately became unquestionably unethical when penicillin got approved and the researchers prevented their patients from getting treated. There was no longer any use to the data as to how the disease affected black patients. With their heads wrapped up in their pointless study, the researchers were obviously in no position to judge the ethics. It was not pure racism either: some of the senior scientists were themselves black. A bioethicist obviously may not have solved the situation before it became a tragedy, but it would have been an additional safeguard against that happening. Maybe at the start, laying down conditions for ending the study.
Contrast that outcome with what happened with the antiviral "cocktail" for treating HIV: clinical trials were ended before they were scheduled to be completed because it became clear that they worked, and it was unethical to continue giving placebos instead of the real thing. A bioethics panel likely made that call or put the mechanism in place to ensure that. What if the disease was not 100% fatal like AIDS is? If it was 20% fatal? 5%?
At a minimum, you want bioethicists to limit the liability. Say "This study passed an internal review board, we have these standards for what is ethical study and what isn't" rather than "Well, it seemed like we should continue the study to us because... well... "
No, we want them working for companies that have some merit. I think the critics who are upset at this would say the company in question is beyond redemption and should just be closed down completely. Get the bioethicists working for Pfizer or other drug companies, or research universities that need to stay around but stray all to often into unethical territory.
I think many of us cell biologists would disagree about the hopeful bit. Hopeful means "It's been proven to work," not "We don't know that this WON'T work in your specific case even though it hasn't worked before!"
I'm not sure what you mean by "FDA isn't equipped to test the safety of stem cells" either. Stem cells can be injected into mice. If they grow tumors, that ain't a safe test. Fun fact: injecting stem cells into mice CAN cause teratomas. It evidently doesn't happen every time, and typically these scam artists inject stem cell lines that your immune system instantly tears apart, but still, this is foolish.
Finally, if you use people as test subjects, you need to inform them of the facts, which in this case is that there is no data to suggest that injecting these cells will do anything that injecting salt water wouldn't (aside from maybe cause cancer). And you get volunteers, you don't make them pay for the privilege of possibly giving you data.
This is snake oil salesmanship. The only thing not shady about this is that the charlatans aren't hiding, they're doing this out in the open. I'm not sure that qualifies as the opposite of shady though, I'd say that's closer to arrogance.
What terrorist would talk in plain text on social networks about serious stuff?
I dunno, one stupid enough to believe his god wanted him to blow up a plane full of people and the reward for doing this will be 40 eternal virgins?
The rest of your post I agree with, we're wasting too much money on an insignificant threat. Just lets not act like terrorists are smarter than DHS. It's idiots fighting idiots, all on the taxpayers expense, and all designed to distract the taxpayer.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly would hate to mix the two up. After a few beers. "Hold on guys, let me take a picture!"
Very clever. My point is that Tunsinian muslims aren't going to do anything to Anonymous. They'll get mad and blame Israel, but Anonymous is beyond the reach of their beheading tools.
The full list of "enemies" seems to be: Bahrain Belarus Burma China Cuba Iran North Korea Saudi Arabia Syria Turkmenistan Uzbekistan and Vietnam
There's a subtle difference between "We're shutting you down because you're giving people free movies that you don't have the rights to" and "We're keeping you from accessing these websites because they say we are corrupt assholes." Or "We're going to kill you for saying things we don't like online."
Both are bad in my opinion, the US could easily slide into outright internet censorship, and the US is also hypocritical on this matter, but for right now I feel we're not in the same league as, say, Syria.
You have seen what many Muslim people do when they are upset/mad/in a bad mood, right?
The Tunsinian fundamentalist Muslims? No... nope. Haven't the foggiest what they're like when they're mad, living as I do in the US.
You do bring up a good point: Anonymous members should avoid Tunsinia. Though, everyone else should too.
There are more than enough bad guys out there that CAN'T reach you, I'd rather have them pestering "safe targets" for a while rather than them going after the bigger fish, and getting killed or deported.
I also thought the whole thing with "Targeting the Zetas" was probably just "for the lulz," in the first place. I mean, it's a pretty low-tech operation. I wasn't quite clear how Anonymous would have gotten their hands on identities of corrupt officials working with the zetas, proof of their corruption, identities of zetas members (who are not exactly supervillian secret identities anyway), or how they would interfere via internet with the zetas ability to make meth in a bathtub and drive it into the US.
The media certainly was trolled hard. Hopefully a few mexican mafia members were also trolled. But I think the whole drug cartel thing was pretty safe to begin with, compared to interfering with the US government.
Takes that long for the ritualistic sacrifices and dark prayers to Satan to be chanted.
Not really integral to the function, the design team was just really goth.
Apple has a Cloud service which mirrors your music to all your devices, regardless of where it came from. Sony?
In their defense, they probably realize that the only people who would entrust their music with sony after that whole rootkit thing are utterly and completely uninformed as to what else is out there, so no need to add features like "being able to upload your music and play it on your devices."
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
This is a bit like saying Religion is more about how you conduct yourself than about judging other people or justifying wars. Sure, theoretically that could be true, but it's not actually true. ID proponents in practice focus more on casting FUD against science than they do working scientific findings into a belief system.
Put another way, it's fine to say "Evolution is the how, my religion is they why" but that's not what they're doing. What they're actually doing is saying "Science is wrong because my holy book says so!" Religious people who don't reject science, whose understanding of evolutionary theory doesn't contradict their beliefs about higher powers, they don't call themselves "intelligent design."
Insightful? Dude was a computer scientist, not a xenobiologist
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Dude was fired for being an idiot, not for his beliefs on biology.
Don't we have a left wing liberal as a president right now?
It hurts too much take this as a joke, so I'm just going to say no, we have a moderate conservative as president right now.
If you do not like who is running the country and making the policies, you can vote them out of office.
Not really. Every election comes down to two candidates who, on the middle east, differ only in terms of whether they want to start wars or not. AIPAC and other pro-war interests are too strong to allow anyone into the short list who will say things like "The Israeli government is the aggressor in this situation, not Iran." The powers that be will not give us that option.
We're basically rigging the system to LOOK like war is inevitable no matter what we do.
That sounds accurate to me! All the politicians are falling over themselves to say they're going to kill the other guys. It's not the peasants asking for it. The nobles are the ones leading it. The military industrial complex, conservative pundits, and a few other rich individuals who for one reason or another want to see a big fight are the few leading the charge. Aside from locking them up, what can we do?
Oh, sorry for not being clear, that was not my objection. You're right that coal or oil is bad for the environment compared to nuclear. Not disputing that at all. Oil for electricity though is still a dumber option than coal because oil is more expensive and we need to reserve oil for plastics and transport.
I would kind of suspect they know terrorists are already aware of the vulnerability
They're too busy exploiting the much much much larger security holes we opened up when we invaded two countries.
Which, I guess ironically actually DOES us safer. Just at an unfathomable cost.
Releasing nude pictures of the reporters from when they went through one of those scanners. The scanners are VERY effective at their true purpose.
Are you sure they're making up the difference by using oil for electricity? I was under the impression that due to cost reasons, coal for electricity, oil for cars. Last I heard, only Iran burned oil for electricity. Is it a matter of "You can build a petroelum power plant really quickly, the coal ones aren't online yet?" I'm also aware and have heard from numerous Japanese residents that corporations basically run the government (like moreso than the US), is this a case of super corporation convincing bureaucrats to buy oil from them at a steeper markup than they could get away with for coal?
That's why it should be significantly reformed (i.e., gutted).
But to prevent them from screwing it up worse than it was before, we would first need to have the industry lobbyists and executives themselves reformed (i.e., gutted).
Um, does this not seem odd?
No, it's copyright law. "Odd" with copyright law would be "Appears to have some logic behind it other than greed."
And if things ever DO seem "odd" (in the sense that they make sense) with copyright law, be very afraid: they REALLY have you where they want you.
3.-attempted to set up a false flag to take away your second amendment rights with "Fast & Furious" which led to dozens being murdered by guns provided by the US government to terrorists.
I'm unclear as to how you arrived at infringement of second amendment rights with "fast and furious." I thought the guns were going into Mexico. You'd have to have very low esteem of gun control advocates if you're suggesting they'd try to use the agency who is supposed to be regulating firearms screwing up and arming mexican gangs as an argument against the second amendment.
Put another way, if that's what you think second amendment opponents are cooking up, then why are you so worried they're going to succeed in taking away your rights? That's a terrible plan. I don't see any politicians standing up and suggesting we need gun control. Even after Giffords was shot, I didn't hear anyone seriously talking about gun regulation. Where is this paranoia coming from? Especially while the other things you said are ACTUAL erosions of your rights.
Wow, what a deal.
MPAA: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Us: Uh, you're not Darth Vader, and we don't need to take the deal. We're going to continue ripping our movies for backup if we want.
MPAA: I FORCE CHOKE YOU! [extends hand]
Us: This is almost as painful to watch as episode one.
I seem to recall a slashdot article about law enforcement people whose job it is to patrol the internet for child porn, or search through hard drives suspected of containing child porn. I'd guess they see higher concentrations of that than facebook moderators. I'd also guess that "seeing people getting cut into pieces" is easier to get desensitized to.
Pay is likely worse, but I'd rather police facebook, assuming I wasn't going to starve.
If you codify opinion that pretty much everyone shares and apply it to specific technical situations, then no, that's not as bullshit. Many people fail to understand the Tuskegee syphilis experiments as 100% abhorrent. It's not as clear cut as that. At the start of the experiment, there was no treatment to syphillis, it was lethal, and there was little data on how the disease progressed in black patients. That's a significant gap in clinical knowledge. Arguably, the experiment was ethical at the start.
It immediately became unquestionably unethical when penicillin got approved and the researchers prevented their patients from getting treated. There was no longer any use to the data as to how the disease affected black patients. With their heads wrapped up in their pointless study, the researchers were obviously in no position to judge the ethics. It was not pure racism either: some of the senior scientists were themselves black. A bioethicist obviously may not have solved the situation before it became a tragedy, but it would have been an additional safeguard against that happening. Maybe at the start, laying down conditions for ending the study.
Contrast that outcome with what happened with the antiviral "cocktail" for treating HIV: clinical trials were ended before they were scheduled to be completed because it became clear that they worked, and it was unethical to continue giving placebos instead of the real thing. A bioethics panel likely made that call or put the mechanism in place to ensure that. What if the disease was not 100% fatal like AIDS is? If it was 20% fatal? 5%?
At a minimum, you want bioethicists to limit the liability. Say "This study passed an internal review board, we have these standards for what is ethical study and what isn't" rather than "Well, it seemed like we should continue the study to us because... well... "
No, we want them working for companies that have some merit. I think the critics who are upset at this would say the company in question is beyond redemption and should just be closed down completely. Get the bioethicists working for Pfizer or other drug companies, or research universities that need to stay around but stray all to often into unethical territory.
I think many of us cell biologists would disagree about the hopeful bit. Hopeful means "It's been proven to work," not "We don't know that this WON'T work in your specific case even though it hasn't worked before!"
I'm not sure what you mean by "FDA isn't equipped to test the safety of stem cells" either. Stem cells can be injected into mice. If they grow tumors, that ain't a safe test. Fun fact: injecting stem cells into mice CAN cause teratomas. It evidently doesn't happen every time, and typically these scam artists inject stem cell lines that your immune system instantly tears apart, but still, this is foolish.
Finally, if you use people as test subjects, you need to inform them of the facts, which in this case is that there is no data to suggest that injecting these cells will do anything that injecting salt water wouldn't (aside from maybe cause cancer). And you get volunteers, you don't make them pay for the privilege of possibly giving you data.
This is snake oil salesmanship. The only thing not shady about this is that the charlatans aren't hiding, they're doing this out in the open. I'm not sure that qualifies as the opposite of shady though, I'd say that's closer to arrogance.
What terrorist would talk in plain text on social networks about serious stuff?
I dunno, one stupid enough to believe his god wanted him to blow up a plane full of people and the reward for doing this will be 40 eternal virgins?
The rest of your post I agree with, we're wasting too much money on an insignificant threat. Just lets not act like terrorists are smarter than DHS. It's idiots fighting idiots, all on the taxpayers expense, and all designed to distract the taxpayer.
and monitoring Twitter is a cheap way of getting basic coverage for everything everywhere, so why not do it?
Risking being mocked on the internet is a reason not to do it.