In a world where in all developed countries, birth rates are negative, what is a chance to go to a place where birth rates are likely to be positive worth? A plane ride to India? A trip to sea? Hell, just stop using a condom and make a positive contribution to the birthrate in your own home. It isn't that people in developed nations can't have babies, they just don't want to. Moving beyond Earth is not going to make you suddenly want to start cranking out kids again.
There are only two good reasons I can think of for leaving Earth.
The first is for economic reasons. It is possible that you could find a resource beyond the atmosphere that makes economic sense to exploit. It would have to be pretty damn valuable, but I could envision it happening. In that case, you might very well end up with small towns off Earth that are centered around exploiting a resource. Even then, I am pretty damn skeptical. Earth is a big place,the crust is deep, and the oceans are nearly untouched, unexplored, and FAR easier to exploit than something outside of the old gravity well.
The only other reason I can come up with that would make living off world desirable would be to open up some sort of corporation/society/cult/commune/utopia/whatever that is, for whatever reason, outside the law of nations. Even than, you could probably accomplish something that is much the same by colonizing the middle of the ocean... and do it at bargain big prices compared to trying to live off world. As an added bonus, if you get sick of your utopia ocean society, you are an airplane or boat ride away from going home. If you are stuck on the lifeless vacuum that is Mars, not only are you supremely fucked and without escape if a critical component fails, you also can't exactly jump on a rocket and go to see your mother on mothers day.
My point is this; there is nothing off world colonization offers that simply colonizing the uncolonized parts of Earth (namely the oceans) doesn't already offer. The only thing going off world does is give you more ways to die, fewer ways to escape screw ups, and it costs hand over fist a hell of a lot more.
Answer this question; if a simple sea colony is not worthwhile enough for anyone to build, why would anyone ever want to head to space? The day someone can point to a real and viable sea colony that sticks around for a few years, I'll buy arguments thats that perhaps space is next. Until we have colonized that massive 2/3 of the plant that has been totally ignored, I find it pretty doubtful we will spend the money to try and colonize space.
What if they offer a 15% discount and allow you to walk in the shop take what you want and leave without ever having to stop (they bill you later), it would be a fantastic convenience, sure you might not like it but many other people would think its great. Then they wouldn't be forcing it on you. If you let someone track your movements for 15% off the worthless shit you buy, well, that is your own fault. Let me tell you what I would do in your 'Orwellian nightmare' scenario....Ready to learn the secret of defeating this Orwellian nightmare?...
I would NOT implant myself with an RFID chip and NOT get a 15% savings. I would buy less shit than the people around me. Wow. That was hard. I bet Orwell is rolling in his grave (isn't he still alive?).
This is what makes the terror of the market so laughable. The solution to pretty much all of these fears is to just go out and not buy something. Unless evil government storm troopers of d00m are lining people up to get their chips implanted, than you really and honestly have a choice. If you are willing to line up and get yours for a fucking iPod, that is your own damn fault.
Forget for a moment the simple fact that the notion is completely absurd when a company could just as easily offer you a 15% savings for swiping your loyalty card and get the exact same information without this pissed off customer. If some company was to absurdly demand you get implanted with an RFID tag, your response should be to not shop there. If lots of companies start demanding it, than you should probably think about opening up your own damn company and beating them into the ground with your "you don't need surgery to shop here" policy.
Corporations, especially ones that directly service consumers, are dreadfully easy to destroy. It doesn't take a government SWAT team, and it doesn't take a peasant rebellion. It just takes for people to not shop there for a few days. You could tank just about any consumer company in existence by getting everyone to just not buy their shit for a few days. If a corporation is manhandling you, especially one selling consumer goods, it is your own damn fault. If your manage to get yourself implanted with an RFID chip by a corporation you shop at, the company isn't acting evil, you are just a moron.
Even beyond the cost of space travel making exporting people to space and beyond silly, there is the simple fact that Earth is jammed full of resources. Even if you could magically dump a billion people on Mars, why on earth would you? Would you rather go to the frozen and lifeless radiation filled near vacuum that is Mars... or simply go live in northern Canada or on the ocean? It isn't like Earth has a great shortage of surface area, especially if you are willing to make a few floating or sunken colonies. As far as resources, the Earth is far more abundant than the alternatives. Mining from the ocean floor is certainly going to be cheaper than running around on Mars a few million miles from the nearest factory or breathable atmosphere. We have not even begun to tap the resources this planet has. 2/3 of the world is nearly completely untouched and uncolonized. It is silly to think we would go a few million miles to a lifeless vacuum when there is plenty of unexploited territory right off the coast.
If there is going to be some movement to colonize due to population or resource pressure, it will be the oceans that we go after first. To be honest, I doubt that population pressure will ever be a real issue. Either a nation is far too poor to contemplate exotic over population problems like heading to sea or going to space and simply solve over population the old fashion way (genocide, disease, revolutions, mass starvation, etc.), or the nation is wealthy and has zero or negative population growth. The people with the money to 'solve' over population through pioneering new frontiers are the people who don't need to do it.
The only good reason to head to space is for financial gain. If someone can make space travel profitable, space travel will happen. If colonization happens, it won't be because we need more land and resources, it will be because some pioneering person found a way to get up into space, collect some resource, and sell it with enough profit to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. That very well might lead a human presence off world, but it will happen in the same way the US was founded. Europe didn't depopulate to fill up the US. A handful of Europeans came to the US without even making a dent in their home nations population, had a pile of a babies, and a few hundred years later you had 300 million people.
Sure, but the Department of Commerce would be lynched by the courts if they tried to even think about this level of bullshit. In fact, that is exactly what has happened. Various regulatory branches and legislators made up of in-bred idiots who have apparently never read the constitution have tried multiple times to pull such worthless crap and been shot down.
Say what you will about the US, but that Bill of Rights is a mighty fine thing to have. It certainly has been eroded over time, but it did just fine smacking down another handful of anti-video game laws this year.
Personally, I find Germany a nice to place visit, but considering the crap going on there, I wouldn't want to live there.
Massive breadth? If by that you mean the sheer volume of games, you are right. If you mean the large number of games with different gameplay experiences... not so much.
Amen.
The MMORPG market has been downright pathetic ever since EQ1 was a success. Before EQ, you could see people experimenting and trying different styles of gameplay. UO in particular was a truly unique and interesting experience for a while after it opened. Today though, the difference between EQ and WoW is cosmetics and a refinement of the whack-a-mole gameplay.
Personally, I hope someone grows some guts and tries something innovative. Instead of making a game based upon getting your users to hit the 'feed crack button' over and over again until they are level 60, it would be nice to see a game with gameplay that relies on fun instead of addiction and a love of watching numbers rise. Well, I can hope at least. Until than though, there is always my wonderful perm death MUD.
So long as compatibility with the rest of the world is an issue, Linux and OO are never going to make strides much bigger than the ones they have now. There are some small businesses that can probably get away with going to a nice open standard, but for the majority of the corporate world, the demand to operate with everyone else inside and outside of your company means that you need to use the standard, even if the standard is closed. OO is nice and all, but you would have to put a gun to my head before I would make something in OO and send it to a client who is using windows. I would want to see the file working in the windows environment before I would be willing to send anything important to a client... and if you have to double check on a windows box to make sure that what you made in OO looks the same in MS, other than feeling good about yourself, what exactly is your company gaining from the switch?
Linux and open standards would work awesome for companies if everyone was to adopt them. The problem is that a significant chunk of companies need to adopt them before you get any real benefits other than a slightly small software bill and a warm fuzzy feeling, which are quickly erased when a customer drops a contract because your OO document screwed up when running on MS. To make matters worse, OO really is not as good as MS in many respects. Excel and Power Point trounce the OO equivalents. Sure, you can tack on extra capability because OO is well, open, but your average HR person or busy engineer is very unlikely to pick up an extra programming language so that they can add tools that they need.
Linux and OO faces a chick and egg problem. An open standard and open software that has everyone working on it would produce a massive amount of capability and probably lead to a very competitive product. Open standards would ensure that everyone could talk to each other, while open software would lead to rapid advances in capability. Until a critical mass goes for it though, it is a pretty hard sell to most companies.
Personally, I think that the alcohol detection systems are probably junk. Short of it being installed on a company vehicles (FedEx?) or as some punishment for a DUI, I don't really see the point. Even than, I doubt many shipping companies have alcohol problems so bad that it justifies such silly expenditures. It is pretty easy to tell if you are too drunk to drive, you don't need your car to tell you for you. Besides, a simple pair of gloves will happily void this system, while splashing alcohol on the steering wheel is a great way to piss off your friends.
On the other hand, the sleep detection system would be a godsend. If the price was right, I would happily get one of those things installed. I don't want it turning off my car in the middle of the highway, but tightening my seatbelt, beeping, or in some way warning me that I look like I am nodding off would be wonderful. Obviously, you would want a way to turn off the damn thing so that it doesn't confuse bobbing your head along to music with falling asleep, but so long as you can turn the thing off and it is relatively cheap, I think lots of people would go for it and get it installed voluntarily.
I don't know about the rest of you, but if an armed mini-tanked rolled into my house and started barking orders at me in a foreign language, I'd shoot first and ask questions later! First, it would speak whatever the local language is. Screaming in English is kind of silly. The fact that it is a drone would actually make it easier to get a proper local speaker. It would be a whole hell of a lot easier to get one guy sitting at base doing the translations for a dozen robots at once, than it would be to send out a dozen translators.
Second, if you are jumpy enough to start shooting at a robot, you are probably more than jumpy enough to start shooting at a bunch of heavily armed men kicking down your door screaming a foreign language. The difference is that if you start shooting at armed men, they are going to start shooting back in short order if for no other reason than to preserve their own lives. If you start shooting at an armed robot, the robot operator might take a few extra moments to notice the family behind you and instead of firing back, talk you down. Most likely, an armored robot just gets a few dings and needs its camera replaced. At worst, the armored robot gets destroyed and now the dozen marines outside know that there is someone there with hostile intent. Robots are replaceable.
Speaking of urban entry assaults, I don't think this machine looks all that effective for the task. Sure, it's a better idea than sending in human troops, but the robot seems to move extremely slowly and noisily; at the very least it would be prone to grenades, and I can easily imagine a human being flanking the thing if it were on its own.
Speaking of urban entry assaults, I don't think this machine looks all that effective for the task. Sure, it's a better idea than sending in human troops, but the robot seems to move extremely slowly and noisily; at the very least it would be prone to grenades, and I can easily imagine a human being flanking the thing if it were on its own. You are probably right that this particular drone is not all that useful. It looks to me like a pretty bare bones weapons platform probably not useful for much more than wheeling out of cover where a soldier doesn't really want to go, and popping off a few shots to keep an enemies head down while soldiers flank and do the real work. This is just a first generation model though. Things are going to get more complex and more useful. It will likely be many years before a drone is anywhere near as effective as a soldier, but that isn't the point. A drone doesn't have to be better than a human. A drone just needs to be able go into harms way and offer an alternative sending a bunch of soldiers into an unknown locations with itchy trigger fingers and a fear of death. If someone blows up a drone... well great. It just means that they gave away their location and when the soldiers storm, they are not storming into the unknown.
The logical fallacy is "Al qaeda edited these videos"... perhaps it should be stated as "Al qaeda videos have been edited"... you have no idea WHO actually edited them.
Not that I'm pointing fingers or anything. ahem (wag the dog) OMG!!! You found the evil conspiracy! Before Al-Jazera gets their hands on the latest juicy tidbits from Al-Qaeda, the CIA magically teleports away the video and edits them. They don't edit the speech... oh no... the CIA is far too shifty for that. They edit the background and then pass it on to Al-Jazera without ANYONE EVER KNOWING. Why you ask??!?!?!?! Because you can't hide the 9/11 truth!!!1!!!!...
Either that, or Al-qaeda really does edit their own videos so that a US analyst doesn't see something in the background and decide to see what a few thousand pound bombs or a few army rangers can do to the place. Seeing as how these are propaganda videos that are not exactly going out to the most technologically discriminating of audiences, sprucing up the scene a little and putting it in a location more exciting than a dank basement is not a bad idea. If some world government comes out and points out that it has been doctored, it isn't like the people watching it are going to believe them or care.
I know screaming OMG conspiracy scores karma points on Slashdot, but could we at least mull over the inane conspiracy theories just a little bit before posting them? I am not saying that your conspiracy theory has to be true, but maybe it should at least make a small scrap of sense.
There are whole families behind those doors, cowering in fear, especially given the American strategy of concentrated firepower and fire first, ask questions later.
Imagine you are a marine. You have a report that some house somewhere might have some insurgents merrily making bombs to go blow up in crowds of Shiites trying to go shopping. You come to a house in a residential neighborhood. You now have two options.
1) You can kick in the door and send in a dozen of heavily armed teenagers scared shitless that a bomb is about to go off or that a dozen armed men are about to ambush them. Like must humans facing the potential for imminent death, they are hopped up on adrenaline and probably more than a little twitchy. Once inside they run the risk of coming face to face with some equally scared armed fellow who think she is defending his family by standing in the doorway with an AK-47 pointed at their face. This is how the majority of civilians get gunned down. Two groups of armed people scared to death of each other come face to face with each other, one side flinches, and before you know it you have a home riddled in bullets.
2) You send in an armed robot. Said armed robot comes face to face with a guy with an AK-47, but the calm controller who is in not in harms way and not terrified for his own life wavers, assesses the situation, and sees that it is just some poor scared daddy standing in front of his kids worried that a Shiite militia has come to kill them all. Instead of turning daddy and family into a bloody mess, the marines can now assess the situation, tell him to drop the gun, keep his hands up, and in general keep the two twitchy fingered parties away from each other until everyone has calmed down enough to make rational decisions.
Drones are what are going to lead in dramatic drops in civilian casualties. Civilians die when scared soldiers either make poor snap judgments about a threat, or soldiers have to pick between returning fire into an area that might kill civilians or dying. Drones can help to eliminate these decisions. It is okay for a drone to die. Drones can be the first ones in so that soldiers can remotely assess the situation and have more then a split seconds to decide if they have stepped into a room full of bomb makers gearing up to blow away some civilians (intentionally), or if they have stumbled into a family with a couple of scared and armed brothers and fathers thinking that they are defending their family. Further, even when encountering resistance, drones can be sacrificed to save civilians. Telling an American teenager armed to the teeth and trained for war to not fire when someone is pointing an RPG his way under the cover of civilians is a damn hard thing to do. Most people are pretty unwilling to let themselves die. On the other hand, a drone can face down an RPG and die without firing a shot if that is what the rule of engagement call for.
I am not saying that drones are a magical cure all. Drones are still pathetic substitutes for human soldiers. What drones do bring to the table is a the ability to send a pair of armed eyes forward into situations where sending a few men forward might result in they or civilians being killed. If nothing else, they are a tool to assess the situation calmly, rather than while being pumped with adrenaline and being forced to make life and death decisions in split seconds.
Stories aren't limited to national concerns and international news is featured prominently, something that never happens in the states.
While I am no fan of Americans news, I imagine that a large part of this is due to the fact that 'national' news for the American crowd covers over 300 million people while national news for NZ covers 4 million people. The result, unsurprisingly, is that a lazy ass national news programs in the US has a few thousand affiliate news stations to dreg up crappy national 'news' (OMG!!! PARIS IS IN JAIL!11!!!1!!) while NZ has only a handful (OMG!!11!! SOME DUDE FUCKED A SHEEP!!!!). I am not saying it is a happy state of affairs, but it isn't a terribly surprising one.
For me personally, you need to put a gun to my head before I will watch national American news. God gave us Google News for a reason... or maybe it is the other way around... whatever the case, with the Internet these days there is no excuse for watching such crap.
Corporations are really simple and stupid creatures. For the most part, they simply follow the law, whatever the law happens to be. Granted, some times it happens where a higher up will violate the law using the corporation(Enron), but for the most part, corporations just blindly follow the law to the letter. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Yahoo follows in this tradition and simply shrugs and hands over records when presented with a warrant, regardless of what nation it is in. Unless Yahoo think that they are better off to simply pull out of the nation, they are going to blindly follow whatever laws are enforced in that nation. It isn't Yahoo's responsibility to act as the morality police. They are unapologetically amoral in all things.
The best that can be done is to make corporations pick between one nation's laws or the other. If all of the western democracies were to suddenly rise up together and pass uniform laws that law out conduct that must be followed to work in their nations, all multi-national corporations would be forced to follow those laws. If the law was written such that there was a massive penalty to handing over information that might lead to a political dissident being arrested, China would either have to change their laws, or corporations that might run into such warrants would simply be forced to pull out.
The only real question is if cutting off places like China from the world market is worth both the economic pain that would result in the economies of the western world AND if the cause of liberty is better served by an economically isolated China or an open China.
That said, this is all a moot point. As mercenary as Americans can be, they are also the only ones with a government principled enough to ruinously cut off their own hands in a hurt to make some ideological point to China. Europe, which happily sells military equipment to a Chinese army getting ready to invade Taiwan, is very unlikely to follow Americans in castrating corporations that work in China. Americans on the other hand are unwilling to give European corporations the advantage of being able to operate freely in China while their own corporations can't just over an ideological squabble. In fact, I am surprised that the pro cutting off China folks managed to get even that lawsuit law through.
My point is this; beseeching corporations to change is close to pointless. They are not moral entities that can be reasoned with. The consequences to corporations for not operating in China are far too high for them to suddenly grow a sense of morality. Only governments can enact laws to force corporations to act in a manner more conducive to liberty in China. Further, even the most liberty minded governments are unlikely to take the economic hit that action would demand unless all other significant nations were willing to follow along and institute similar laws.
In a world where there is talk even in the US of lifting the Cuban embargo, I find it pretty doubtful that there is any chance of real action being taken try and protect liberty in other nations.
Jesus, I don't even know where to begin. Lets start at the beginning.
We have a lot to worry about when we invade countries and send our kids to die in the name of oil under the disguise of WMDs and democracy. Isn't that the propaganda they tried to shove down our throat with Vietnam? We have to stop the evil spread of communism? Isn't China a communistic state? Shouldn't we have invaded there too instead of a tiny country no one heard of before? Oh yeah, Iraq is a real step up in violence. Unlike World War I, World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam, in Iraq we are REALLY killing people and losing piles of troops. Oh wait a moment... Iraq doesn't even enter in on the same scale of violence and destruction. We have killed more people in single fire bombings during World War II then we have killed in 15 years of bombings and sanctions. We have lost more soldiers in single battles than during the entire conflict, including the first Iraq war. The world is hardly going down hill.
As for why we didn't invade other nations with suspected WMDs (and I assume you mean North Korea), it probably has something to do with the fact that the capital of South Korea is in artillery range of North Korean chemical (not to mention conventional) weapons and Tokyo is well within the range of medium range North Korean missiles. As stupid as Iraq was, no one is stupid enough to suggest attacking North Korea for entirely practical reasons.
According to Al Gore, we may not die in a half a second from nuke landing but rather over decades due to a polluted environment upping cancer rates, causing flooding, and more hurricanes....what's worse? Well, seeing as how life expectancy is still going up irregardless of global warming, pollution, or whatever terrors we manage to scare ourselves with, I am not terribly worried. True, you should deal with global warming and pollution, but screaming that the sky is falling and we are all about to die flies in the face of reality. Further, are you really so out of touch with what is a real risk that you think ANYTHING compares to having every single city in flash fried with a nuclear weapon? Hell, let me answer your question for you, a full scale nuclear attack by the USSR is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR worse than global warming, hurricanes, or any other natural or man made disaster out there short of a comet smashing into the earth. If the only thing you need to worry about is global warming, you live in a FAR safer world than when you had to worry about 10,000 Soviet nuclear missiles landing on your head.
I would like to amend our freedom of speech to only be intolerant of intolerance. Haters hide behind free speech, load mouthed zealot Christians who seem to be haters in sheep's clothing also hide behind it. It isn't free speech than. The whole point of having freedom of speech is such that the government can't set out arbitrary laws to decide what is an is not acceptable. Thankfully, few people share your opinion that the first amendment needs some 'adjustments' and there is absolutely no danger of the bill of rights being over turned any time soon.
Look, you can run around screaming that the sky is falling and that OMG the world is so dangerous. You can run around looking like a jack ass doing this, but the simple facts will not support you. There is one very simple and undeniable reality. On average, you will live far longer than your parents. Further, the thing that is most likely to kill you is eating too much or smoking. Your greatest (rational) fear in life will be that you eat too much food or choose to take up cigarette smoking. Oh dear god, the humanity. What a scary world we live in when the thing most likely to kill you is eating too much.
We grew up (Rather I did [I'm 22]) without the internet. Even when it really started to boom it was not near as bad as it is today. The world is alot more dangerous today then when I was a kid. Hell I could walk to school without fear or rape or something like that.
This is a good hearty laugh. You are safer today than you ever were. Your generation will live longer then any of the humans that came before you, you most likely you are going to die of a very mundane and boring age related disease. Want to talk about scary? Imagine a world where stepping on a nail is potentially lethal, a scrap can lead to an amputated arm, you can die of a sore throat, or you are a few minutes away from nuclear Armageddon.
What do you have to worry about today? Over eating or smoking. Yeah, that is right... the thing to most likely kill you is stuffing too much food down your gullet or a voluntary behavior. Oh god, the horror... the horror. Your pool is dramatically more likely to kill you than a terrorist. You stand a far better chance of being killed in a car accident than being murdered, and the rate of murder and rape in respect to the overall population has been on a nose dive since the 80s*.
The only thing that has changed in this world is that you are far safer and far more likely to live to be a crotchety old bastard than ever before. We don't need politicians "protecting the children" and more than we ever have.
This deserves not a single scrap of wasted time. Just TRY and contemplate the conspiracy that it would take to make this crap credible.
It goes something like this:
The government has decided to snoop on the computers of average Americans, despite the fact that there are countless private and corporate computer researches scrutinizing network traffic. Not only does the government decide to go ahead with a massive invasion of privacy and committing a clearly and blatantly illegal action on all Americans, but they are so fucking incompetent that they don't even bother trying to hide what they are doing. They don't bother taking precautions that even the lowest level of viruses might take, and instead decide to make their super sekret spy virus easily visible to the most basic of free down loadable software. To top this all off, a government that can't keep secret that even limited domestic spying programs has in the course of a year magically developed a way to pull off the greatest hack in the history of man kind without anyone spilling the beans... until one teenager kid looked at his network traffic and caught them! OMG! ponies!!111!!
Even the most vaguely computer literate person should be able to see that no vast evil conspiracy has been uncovered. What has been uncovered is a kid who has discovered that bot networks not only exist, but can easily be blocked with free software.
If the government is reading your e-mail, believe me, it isn't doing it by installing a virus that the most basic of firewalls is able to detect. You would have to be stupid beyond help to install software onto computers that are constantly scrutinized by hundreds of thousands of experts every single day. If the government is watching you watch pr0n on the internet, it is doing it by plugging black boxes onto network backbones.
US has always, and will continue to use ideas developed, or discoveries made by foreigners to make marketable products that profit itself. It is only a matter of time before everybody correctly recognizes US as the sick, money hungry, pointy haired leech that it is. It is also a matter of time that people start to recognize that US students had stopped studying the sciences and engineering since quite some time ago, opting for mindless, control hungry, money making courses such as accounting, finance, law and such. I take personal offense to that sort of tone. I am NOT pointy haired.
On a more serious note...
Before complaining that the US is some how doing to world a disservice by bringing to market product and attracting foreign talent, perhaps you should ask yourself why it is that such foreign talent comes here in the first place? My last boss was an extremely intelligent guy from India who has a stack of publications (and I use no hyperbole) a few hundred pages thick. He didn't come to the US from India because he is a dumb sucker. He came to the US because US PhD programs are some of the best, and after he was done with his PhD he easily found an extremely innovative startup doing work on carbon nanotubes. Finding the same thing in India would have been next to impossible. To top it off, he WAS indeed money hungry and so was more than happy to go along with the 'money hungry' (as you call it) ideal.
The US has a pretty long history of snatching up top talent from poor or displaced nations and groups. It probably is not a terribly nice practice to the nations where these people come from, but for the people themselves it many times lets them bloom and prosper in ways that they could not of in their home country. You can deride this as being evil, but as a decedent of people who fled from impoverished nations, I couldn't be happier about it.
You think that is funny until it's your own seven year old that tells a teacher to fuck off, or starts cursing in a WalMart. The idea that an entire form of media should be censored because you don't want to suffer the embarrassment (and that is all it is) of your kid acting like a little shit head in WalMart is fucking ridiculous beyond words. We do not censor entire fucking forms of media so that parents don't have to worry about disciplining their kids.
What SHOULD happen is that on the off chance your kid is watching TV well past his bed time, and on the off chance someone swears on TV, and on the off chance that kid decides to repeat that one word, act like a fucking parent. Tell your kid that that word is not acceptable and discipline the kid if he continues to say it. This is absolutely no different from any other wrong behavior from flinging feces, pushing other kids, or screaming in a high shrill voice because you didn't buy more candy. The only difference is that, god forbid, if the kid hears someone swear on TV the federal fucking government steps in like it is a matter of national security that somewhere some child might of overhead an obscenity.
Hey, maybe we should make swearing in public illegal to. I mean shit, god save the mother fucking children. In fact, I think any website that allows someone to fucking curse like a mother fucker should have an 18+ ID check.
Bah. Fuck the parents for pushing politicians to censor because they can't contemplate parenting, fuck the politicians for being so self serving that they would piss on the 1st amendment in pursuit of political gain, and fuck the FCC.
SOX murders startups that go public. The reporting requirements take an army of accountants to comply with. Only large corporations can effectively go public these days do to the horrific costs that SOX imposes upon small businesses. As a result, most small businesses try and get bought out instead of going public. If they get bought out, the accounting is someone else's problem. SOX has done nothing good for American businesses. The amount of money being lost due to the stock market being a place where small businesses can no longer participate in is far more than whatever money is being saved in higher accountability standards.
Congress could not of thought of a more effective way to hurt small businesses while at the same time bettering large businesses (especially ones that like to buy small businesses) if they had tried. SOX is a financial crime. The only thing worse than the fact that SOX got passed without one fucking congressperson thinking about the consequences of their shitty bill is the fact that they still have not repealed it.
I never said that drones would be 'so powerful they would end war'. I said, 'drones, unlike marines, can't freak their shit out rip apart a few apartment complexes to save their ass'. Drones have accountability because you can record everything it does AND have an army lawyer sitting over your shoulder advising you on rules of engagement. Unlike a squad of marines, for drones, there is no justification for blasting the shit out of civilians if they get surrounded and the rules of engagement say that wiping out potential civilians is not allowed.
New weapons result in new styles of warfare. Gatling guns brought us trench war. Airplanes crippled trench war. Helicopters brought wars of mobility. Non-state suicide bombers brought effective irregular wars. Drones are just another advancement that will bring about a new kind of war. The question is the new style more or less harmful than the old style? Personally, I would rather see a squad of drones with rules of engagement that dictate that they do not harm civilians no matter what than putting a squad of teenagers armed with enough ordnances to level a few city blocks and a healthy love of their own lives over the lives of the civilians around them.
I think what you would find is that "war fatigue" would go down and there might be more incentive to go to war. Eliminating "war fatigue" is not a bad thing in my opinion. The US came close to throwing in the towel during the Korean War because it was getting sick of Americans dying. A Korea united under the North Korean government would have been a disaster for the South Korean people. The same can be said for Vietnam. I don't think that Vietnam became a better place because Americans left. Sure, it became better for America because we stopped throwing drafted teenagers into a meat grinder a gun point, but if you were in South Vietnam, you probably would have been a lot better if things went the way of Korea instead of the way that they did.
Now, I agree that if it just takes money to go to war, we might be more inclined to go to war. That said, there are probably wars that we should have fought and didn't because we didn't want to see our own soldiers tossed into a meat grinder. Rwanda comes to mind as the most stark example of where someone damn well should have stepped in and stopped the killing but didn't. No one wanted to sacrifice their own soldiers and so instead we sent nasty diplomatic letters as Rwanda watch 10% of its population die and countless woman get brutally raped. If it just took money to jump into the think of things, you might actually see the UN do more then just observe ceasefires, but also step up and force ceasefires.
Main Entry: hacker Pronunciation: 'ha-k&r Function: noun 1 : one that hacks 2 : a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity 3 : an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer 4 : a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system
I am pretty damn sure that the thieves in question meet both #3 and #4, hence they are 'hackers'. I probably would not waste time bothering Reuters to complaining that not all hackers are evil. They used the word correctly.
Imagine a robotic squadron destroying YOUR town (and don't caring about all those pesky collateral victims). Why are you so sure you won't be on the receiving end of robotic army? OMG, I never thought of it that way! Hey, I would hate it if human soldiers, airplanes, artillery, or anything came and destroyed my town. I got an idea, lets get rid of weapons and war! Gee, my eyes are now open. Thank you. I recant my position that drone soldiers would be safer for civilians then human soldiers.
In truth, the real answer is for no one to ever hurt anyone ever again! 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3;):0 =)
I think you should run for president and make hurting people illegal! I would vote 4 U.....
Seriously, I would hate to be on the receiving end of any weapon all the way from knives to nuclear bombs and everything in-between. So? That is exactly why I want a pile of guns on my side of the line. We can't even go a single decade without a genocide. It is silly and naive to think that war is on its way out. At the very best, we could go with a 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' approach. Such an approach might not stop another Rwanda, Darfur, Kosovo, Somalia, Congo, or Zimbabwe from descending into genocidal anarchy, but it certainly would be cheaper in terms of money and lives. War is not going to go away any time soon, robot soldiers or no.
The games that you're talking about are all about hitting the right target and the right target only. They reward you for doing that, that's how you build a better score, progress through the game, etc, but in real life there are no such incentives.
Uh... no. It is in fact the exact opposite of what you say. In a video game, if you hit civilians that video game slaps you on the wrist. In the real world... especially a real world where you are sitting in a comfortable chair piloting a drone and you have no danger to your own life and everything is being recorded, you will get court marshaled and sent to jail if you decide to start blowing up civilians.
Currently, if a squad of marines get surrounded and the rules of engagement is that you do not risk civilian life, the marines can decide that their lives are worth more then rules of engagement and a few civilians and blast their way out to safety. Unless someone snitches, they will suffer no consequences. Even then, in a battlefield doing any sort of real forensic work is extremely hard and open to easy manipulation by the enemy. If your squad of drone soldiers gets surrounded and some decides to blow away civilians to save his drone in clear violation of his orders, not only is his decision completely unjustified do the fact that his life is not in danger, but the whole damn thing is recorded from his perspective.
Drone soldiers would bring accountability and strict adherence to the rules of engagement. Unsurprisingly, sending out a squad of teenagers with guns into an area surrounded with hostile folks dressed as civilians and who speak a different language results in far more unneeded death and destruction then someone controlling a drone with an army lawyer sitting over his shoulder.
Imagine if NATO dropped a few squads of robot warrior drones and worker drones in each town in Afghanistan. Imagine if the drones for the most part did mundane things like direct traffic, dig wells, dig irrigation ditches, and serve as communication devices with the tribal elders. Now imagine a report comes into central command that Taliban fighters have entered town and are in a building near the town center. You have two options.
You can either drop a bomb into the center of town and wipe out the suspected Taliban fighters, or you could surround the building with drones and sending a communications drone to the front door to demand that it be let in to search the house. Believe me, a squad of drones (if they actually had capacity to do all this) would be the first choice. NATO commanders are not stupid. They realize that dropping a few thousand pound bombs into the village center is a really shitty way to get the locals on your side. Civilian casualties never do anything good for your cause. A soldier that doesn't sleep and doesn't care if it dies is a soldier that can go out of its way to avoid civilian casualties.
As an added bonus, you could drop a few drones into every single little village. You could easily have 50,000 drones spread throughout the country controlled by just a few thousand people. That means that you literally could be everywhere at once and not have to worry about protecting your soldiers. You can't leave a single squad in a tiny villages because they might be overrun. You can leave a single squad of robots in a village to report back on what is happening there because if they are overrun, eh, now you know where the enemy is and you only lost some equipment.
Pondering the consequences of our actions is not what causes a reduction in civilian casualties. What in fact causes civilian casualties is when soldiers are subject to constant attack by irregular military units and start to dehumanize the people they are there trying to not kill. The horrific massacres of Vietnam occurred when soldier started seeing EVERYONE who wasn't wearing an American uniform as a potential enemy and started to kill indiscriminately. Having people pound the ground in civilian areas surrounded by enemies wearing the clothing of civilians is a sure way to jack up civilian casualties. Not only will the soldiers happily kick over an apartment complex to kill a single sniper rather then die themselves, but they might also start seeing every civilian as an enemy resulting in massacres of people who are clearly civilians.
Drones don't face this problem. Drones can follow the rules of engagement to the letter while soldiers can't. If you tell a drone operator to never use heavy weapons on civilian buildings where there is a reasonable chance that civilians are inside, they won't. For a drone operator, it is nothing for their drone to 'die'. Further, the entire thing is constantly being recorded and any misconduct is easily rooted out. You can have strict rules of engagement and the drone soldiers will follow them to the death.
I am not saying that a drone army doesn't have a slightly higher potential for abuse in some instances. Certainly, it is a easier to line up and shoot civilians using a drone then it is to be there in person. That said, only two things lead to civilians being lined up and shot, crazy soldiers who have been under constant fire from people dressed in civilian clothing, or genocidal leaders. Drones eliminate crazy soldiers and eliminate soldiers putting their lives before the mission. As far as genocidal leaders, well, I doubt even the most hearty cynics believe that anyone will get elected on the "let's kill all the woman and children so they can't breed any more" campaign.
Civilian casualties the American inflict comes from soldiers and leaders picking the lives of soldiers over the lives of civilians, not some concerted effort of the higher up leadership commit genocide for shits and giggles. Reduce the number of soldiers that need to be protected in combat and you will see the number of civilians that die drop dramatically.
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There are only two good reasons I can think of for leaving Earth.
The first is for economic reasons. It is possible that you could find a resource beyond the atmosphere that makes economic sense to exploit. It would have to be pretty damn valuable, but I could envision it happening. In that case, you might very well end up with small towns off Earth that are centered around exploiting a resource. Even then, I am pretty damn skeptical. Earth is a big place,the crust is deep, and the oceans are nearly untouched, unexplored, and FAR easier to exploit than something outside of the old gravity well.
The only other reason I can come up with that would make living off world desirable would be to open up some sort of corporation/society/cult/commune/utopia/whatever that is, for whatever reason, outside the law of nations. Even than, you could probably accomplish something that is much the same by colonizing the middle of the ocean... and do it at bargain big prices compared to trying to live off world. As an added bonus, if you get sick of your utopia ocean society, you are an airplane or boat ride away from going home. If you are stuck on the lifeless vacuum that is Mars, not only are you supremely fucked and without escape if a critical component fails, you also can't exactly jump on a rocket and go to see your mother on mothers day.
My point is this; there is nothing off world colonization offers that simply colonizing the uncolonized parts of Earth (namely the oceans) doesn't already offer. The only thing going off world does is give you more ways to die, fewer ways to escape screw ups, and it costs hand over fist a hell of a lot more.
Answer this question; if a simple sea colony is not worthwhile enough for anyone to build, why would anyone ever want to head to space? The day someone can point to a real and viable sea colony that sticks around for a few years, I'll buy arguments thats that perhaps space is next. Until we have colonized that massive 2/3 of the plant that has been totally ignored, I find it pretty doubtful we will spend the money to try and colonize space.
I would NOT implant myself with an RFID chip and NOT get a 15% savings. I would buy less shit than the people around me. Wow. That was hard. I bet Orwell is rolling in his grave (isn't he still alive?).
This is what makes the terror of the market so laughable. The solution to pretty much all of these fears is to just go out and not buy something. Unless evil government storm troopers of d00m are lining people up to get their chips implanted, than you really and honestly have a choice. If you are willing to line up and get yours for a fucking iPod, that is your own damn fault.
Forget for a moment the simple fact that the notion is completely absurd when a company could just as easily offer you a 15% savings for swiping your loyalty card and get the exact same information without this pissed off customer. If some company was to absurdly demand you get implanted with an RFID tag, your response should be to not shop there. If lots of companies start demanding it, than you should probably think about opening up your own damn company and beating them into the ground with your "you don't need surgery to shop here" policy.
Corporations, especially ones that directly service consumers, are dreadfully easy to destroy. It doesn't take a government SWAT team, and it doesn't take a peasant rebellion. It just takes for people to not shop there for a few days. You could tank just about any consumer company in existence by getting everyone to just not buy their shit for a few days. If a corporation is manhandling you, especially one selling consumer goods, it is your own damn fault. If your manage to get yourself implanted with an RFID chip by a corporation you shop at, the company isn't acting evil, you are just a moron.
Even beyond the cost of space travel making exporting people to space and beyond silly, there is the simple fact that Earth is jammed full of resources. Even if you could magically dump a billion people on Mars, why on earth would you? Would you rather go to the frozen and lifeless radiation filled near vacuum that is Mars... or simply go live in northern Canada or on the ocean? It isn't like Earth has a great shortage of surface area, especially if you are willing to make a few floating or sunken colonies. As far as resources, the Earth is far more abundant than the alternatives. Mining from the ocean floor is certainly going to be cheaper than running around on Mars a few million miles from the nearest factory or breathable atmosphere. We have not even begun to tap the resources this planet has. 2/3 of the world is nearly completely untouched and uncolonized. It is silly to think we would go a few million miles to a lifeless vacuum when there is plenty of unexploited territory right off the coast.
If there is going to be some movement to colonize due to population or resource pressure, it will be the oceans that we go after first. To be honest, I doubt that population pressure will ever be a real issue. Either a nation is far too poor to contemplate exotic over population problems like heading to sea or going to space and simply solve over population the old fashion way (genocide, disease, revolutions, mass starvation, etc.), or the nation is wealthy and has zero or negative population growth. The people with the money to 'solve' over population through pioneering new frontiers are the people who don't need to do it.
The only good reason to head to space is for financial gain. If someone can make space travel profitable, space travel will happen. If colonization happens, it won't be because we need more land and resources, it will be because some pioneering person found a way to get up into space, collect some resource, and sell it with enough profit to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. That very well might lead a human presence off world, but it will happen in the same way the US was founded. Europe didn't depopulate to fill up the US. A handful of Europeans came to the US without even making a dent in their home nations population, had a pile of a babies, and a few hundred years later you had 300 million people.
Sure, but the Department of Commerce would be lynched by the courts if they tried to even think about this level of bullshit. In fact, that is exactly what has happened. Various regulatory branches and legislators made up of in-bred idiots who have apparently never read the constitution have tried multiple times to pull such worthless crap and been shot down.
Say what you will about the US, but that Bill of Rights is a mighty fine thing to have. It certainly has been eroded over time, but it did just fine smacking down another handful of anti-video game laws this year.
Personally, I find Germany a nice to place visit, but considering the crap going on there, I wouldn't want to live there.
Massive breadth? If by that you mean the sheer volume of games, you are right. If you mean the large number of games with different gameplay experiences... not so much.
Amen.
The MMORPG market has been downright pathetic ever since EQ1 was a success. Before EQ, you could see people experimenting and trying different styles of gameplay. UO in particular was a truly unique and interesting experience for a while after it opened. Today though, the difference between EQ and WoW is cosmetics and a refinement of the whack-a-mole gameplay.
Personally, I hope someone grows some guts and tries something innovative. Instead of making a game based upon getting your users to hit the 'feed crack button' over and over again until they are level 60, it would be nice to see a game with gameplay that relies on fun instead of addiction and a love of watching numbers rise. Well, I can hope at least. Until than though, there is always my wonderful perm death MUD.
So long as compatibility with the rest of the world is an issue, Linux and OO are never going to make strides much bigger than the ones they have now. There are some small businesses that can probably get away with going to a nice open standard, but for the majority of the corporate world, the demand to operate with everyone else inside and outside of your company means that you need to use the standard, even if the standard is closed. OO is nice and all, but you would have to put a gun to my head before I would make something in OO and send it to a client who is using windows. I would want to see the file working in the windows environment before I would be willing to send anything important to a client... and if you have to double check on a windows box to make sure that what you made in OO looks the same in MS, other than feeling good about yourself, what exactly is your company gaining from the switch?
Linux and open standards would work awesome for companies if everyone was to adopt them. The problem is that a significant chunk of companies need to adopt them before you get any real benefits other than a slightly small software bill and a warm fuzzy feeling, which are quickly erased when a customer drops a contract because your OO document screwed up when running on MS. To make matters worse, OO really is not as good as MS in many respects. Excel and Power Point trounce the OO equivalents. Sure, you can tack on extra capability because OO is well, open, but your average HR person or busy engineer is very unlikely to pick up an extra programming language so that they can add tools that they need.
Linux and OO faces a chick and egg problem. An open standard and open software that has everyone working on it would produce a massive amount of capability and probably lead to a very competitive product. Open standards would ensure that everyone could talk to each other, while open software would lead to rapid advances in capability. Until a critical mass goes for it though, it is a pretty hard sell to most companies.
Personally, I think that the alcohol detection systems are probably junk. Short of it being installed on a company vehicles (FedEx?) or as some punishment for a DUI, I don't really see the point. Even than, I doubt many shipping companies have alcohol problems so bad that it justifies such silly expenditures. It is pretty easy to tell if you are too drunk to drive, you don't need your car to tell you for you. Besides, a simple pair of gloves will happily void this system, while splashing alcohol on the steering wheel is a great way to piss off your friends.
On the other hand, the sleep detection system would be a godsend. If the price was right, I would happily get one of those things installed. I don't want it turning off my car in the middle of the highway, but tightening my seatbelt, beeping, or in some way warning me that I look like I am nodding off would be wonderful. Obviously, you would want a way to turn off the damn thing so that it doesn't confuse bobbing your head along to music with falling asleep, but so long as you can turn the thing off and it is relatively cheap, I think lots of people would go for it and get it installed voluntarily.
Second, if you are jumpy enough to start shooting at a robot, you are probably more than jumpy enough to start shooting at a bunch of heavily armed men kicking down your door screaming a foreign language. The difference is that if you start shooting at armed men, they are going to start shooting back in short order if for no other reason than to preserve their own lives. If you start shooting at an armed robot, the robot operator might take a few extra moments to notice the family behind you and instead of firing back, talk you down. Most likely, an armored robot just gets a few dings and needs its camera replaced. At worst, the armored robot gets destroyed and now the dozen marines outside know that there is someone there with hostile intent. Robots are replaceable.
Speaking of urban entry assaults, I don't think this machine looks all that effective for the task. Sure, it's a better idea than sending in human troops, but the robot seems to move extremely slowly and noisily; at the very least it would be prone to grenades, and I can easily imagine a human being flanking the thing if it were on its own. Speaking of urban entry assaults, I don't think this machine looks all that effective for the task. Sure, it's a better idea than sending in human troops, but the robot seems to move extremely slowly and noisily; at the very least it would be prone to grenades, and I can easily imagine a human being flanking the thing if it were on its own. You are probably right that this particular drone is not all that useful. It looks to me like a pretty bare bones weapons platform probably not useful for much more than wheeling out of cover where a soldier doesn't really want to go, and popping off a few shots to keep an enemies head down while soldiers flank and do the real work. This is just a first generation model though. Things are going to get more complex and more useful. It will likely be many years before a drone is anywhere near as effective as a soldier, but that isn't the point. A drone doesn't have to be better than a human. A drone just needs to be able go into harms way and offer an alternative sending a bunch of soldiers into an unknown locations with itchy trigger fingers and a fear of death. If someone blows up a drone... well great. It just means that they gave away their location and when the soldiers storm, they are not storming into the unknown.
Not that I'm pointing fingers or anything. ahem (wag the dog) OMG!!! You found the evil conspiracy! Before Al-Jazera gets their hands on the latest juicy tidbits from Al-Qaeda, the CIA magically teleports away the video and edits them. They don't edit the speech... oh no... the CIA is far too shifty for that. They edit the background and then pass it on to Al-Jazera without ANYONE EVER KNOWING. Why you ask??!?!?!?! Because you can't hide the 9/11 truth!!!1!!!!
Either that, or Al-qaeda really does edit their own videos so that a US analyst doesn't see something in the background and decide to see what a few thousand pound bombs or a few army rangers can do to the place. Seeing as how these are propaganda videos that are not exactly going out to the most technologically discriminating of audiences, sprucing up the scene a little and putting it in a location more exciting than a dank basement is not a bad idea. If some world government comes out and points out that it has been doctored, it isn't like the people watching it are going to believe them or care.
I know screaming OMG conspiracy scores karma points on Slashdot, but could we at least mull over the inane conspiracy theories just a little bit before posting them? I am not saying that your conspiracy theory has to be true, but maybe it should at least make a small scrap of sense.
There are whole families behind those doors, cowering in fear, especially given the American strategy of concentrated firepower and fire first, ask questions later.
Imagine you are a marine. You have a report that some house somewhere might have some insurgents merrily making bombs to go blow up in crowds of Shiites trying to go shopping. You come to a house in a residential neighborhood. You now have two options.
1) You can kick in the door and send in a dozen of heavily armed teenagers scared shitless that a bomb is about to go off or that a dozen armed men are about to ambush them. Like must humans facing the potential for imminent death, they are hopped up on adrenaline and probably more than a little twitchy. Once inside they run the risk of coming face to face with some equally scared armed fellow who think she is defending his family by standing in the doorway with an AK-47 pointed at their face. This is how the majority of civilians get gunned down. Two groups of armed people scared to death of each other come face to face with each other, one side flinches, and before you know it you have a home riddled in bullets.
2) You send in an armed robot. Said armed robot comes face to face with a guy with an AK-47, but the calm controller who is in not in harms way and not terrified for his own life wavers, assesses the situation, and sees that it is just some poor scared daddy standing in front of his kids worried that a Shiite militia has come to kill them all. Instead of turning daddy and family into a bloody mess, the marines can now assess the situation, tell him to drop the gun, keep his hands up, and in general keep the two twitchy fingered parties away from each other until everyone has calmed down enough to make rational decisions.
Drones are what are going to lead in dramatic drops in civilian casualties. Civilians die when scared soldiers either make poor snap judgments about a threat, or soldiers have to pick between returning fire into an area that might kill civilians or dying. Drones can help to eliminate these decisions. It is okay for a drone to die. Drones can be the first ones in so that soldiers can remotely assess the situation and have more then a split seconds to decide if they have stepped into a room full of bomb makers gearing up to blow away some civilians (intentionally), or if they have stumbled into a family with a couple of scared and armed brothers and fathers thinking that they are defending their family. Further, even when encountering resistance, drones can be sacrificed to save civilians. Telling an American teenager armed to the teeth and trained for war to not fire when someone is pointing an RPG his way under the cover of civilians is a damn hard thing to do. Most people are pretty unwilling to let themselves die. On the other hand, a drone can face down an RPG and die without firing a shot if that is what the rule of engagement call for.
I am not saying that drones are a magical cure all. Drones are still pathetic substitutes for human soldiers. What drones do bring to the table is a the ability to send a pair of armed eyes forward into situations where sending a few men forward might result in they or civilians being killed. If nothing else, they are a tool to assess the situation calmly, rather than while being pumped with adrenaline and being forced to make life and death decisions in split seconds.
Stories aren't limited to national concerns and international news is featured prominently, something that never happens in the states.
While I am no fan of Americans news, I imagine that a large part of this is due to the fact that 'national' news for the American crowd covers over 300 million people while national news for NZ covers 4 million people. The result, unsurprisingly, is that a lazy ass national news programs in the US has a few thousand affiliate news stations to dreg up crappy national 'news' (OMG!!! PARIS IS IN JAIL!11!!!1!!) while NZ has only a handful (OMG!!11!! SOME DUDE FUCKED A SHEEP!!!!). I am not saying it is a happy state of affairs, but it isn't a terribly surprising one.
For me personally, you need to put a gun to my head before I will watch national American news. God gave us Google News for a reason... or maybe it is the other way around... whatever the case, with the Internet these days there is no excuse for watching such crap.
Corporations are really simple and stupid creatures. For the most part, they simply follow the law, whatever the law happens to be. Granted, some times it happens where a higher up will violate the law using the corporation(Enron), but for the most part, corporations just blindly follow the law to the letter. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Yahoo follows in this tradition and simply shrugs and hands over records when presented with a warrant, regardless of what nation it is in. Unless Yahoo think that they are better off to simply pull out of the nation, they are going to blindly follow whatever laws are enforced in that nation. It isn't Yahoo's responsibility to act as the morality police. They are unapologetically amoral in all things.
The best that can be done is to make corporations pick between one nation's laws or the other. If all of the western democracies were to suddenly rise up together and pass uniform laws that law out conduct that must be followed to work in their nations, all multi-national corporations would be forced to follow those laws. If the law was written such that there was a massive penalty to handing over information that might lead to a political dissident being arrested, China would either have to change their laws, or corporations that might run into such warrants would simply be forced to pull out.
The only real question is if cutting off places like China from the world market is worth both the economic pain that would result in the economies of the western world AND if the cause of liberty is better served by an economically isolated China or an open China.
That said, this is all a moot point. As mercenary as Americans can be, they are also the only ones with a government principled enough to ruinously cut off their own hands in a hurt to make some ideological point to China. Europe, which happily sells military equipment to a Chinese army getting ready to invade Taiwan, is very unlikely to follow Americans in castrating corporations that work in China. Americans on the other hand are unwilling to give European corporations the advantage of being able to operate freely in China while their own corporations can't just over an ideological squabble. In fact, I am surprised that the pro cutting off China folks managed to get even that lawsuit law through.
My point is this; beseeching corporations to change is close to pointless. They are not moral entities that can be reasoned with. The consequences to corporations for not operating in China are far too high for them to suddenly grow a sense of morality. Only governments can enact laws to force corporations to act in a manner more conducive to liberty in China. Further, even the most liberty minded governments are unlikely to take the economic hit that action would demand unless all other significant nations were willing to follow along and institute similar laws.
In a world where there is talk even in the US of lifting the Cuban embargo, I find it pretty doubtful that there is any chance of real action being taken try and protect liberty in other nations.
As for why we didn't invade other nations with suspected WMDs (and I assume you mean North Korea), it probably has something to do with the fact that the capital of South Korea is in artillery range of North Korean chemical (not to mention conventional) weapons and Tokyo is well within the range of medium range North Korean missiles. As stupid as Iraq was, no one is stupid enough to suggest attacking North Korea for entirely practical reasons. According to Al Gore, we may not die in a half a second from nuke landing but rather over decades due to a polluted environment upping cancer rates, causing flooding, and more hurricanes....what's worse? Well, seeing as how life expectancy is still going up irregardless of global warming, pollution, or whatever terrors we manage to scare ourselves with, I am not terribly worried. True, you should deal with global warming and pollution, but screaming that the sky is falling and we are all about to die flies in the face of reality. Further, are you really so out of touch with what is a real risk that you think ANYTHING compares to having every single city in flash fried with a nuclear weapon? Hell, let me answer your question for you, a full scale nuclear attack by the USSR is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR worse than global warming, hurricanes, or any other natural or man made disaster out there short of a comet smashing into the earth. If the only thing you need to worry about is global warming, you live in a FAR safer world than when you had to worry about 10,000 Soviet nuclear missiles landing on your head. I would like to amend our freedom of speech to only be intolerant of intolerance. Haters hide behind free speech, load mouthed zealot Christians who seem to be haters in sheep's clothing also hide behind it. It isn't free speech than. The whole point of having freedom of speech is such that the government can't set out arbitrary laws to decide what is an is not acceptable. Thankfully, few people share your opinion that the first amendment needs some 'adjustments' and there is absolutely no danger of the bill of rights being over turned any time soon.
Look, you can run around screaming that the sky is falling and that OMG the world is so dangerous. You can run around looking like a jack ass doing this, but the simple facts will not support you. There is one very simple and undeniable reality. On average, you will live far longer than your parents. Further, the thing that is most likely to kill you is eating too much or smoking. Your greatest (rational) fear in life will be that you eat too much food or choose to take up cigarette smoking. Oh dear god, the humanity. What a scary world we live in when the thing most likely to kill you is eating too much.
We grew up (Rather I did [I'm 22]) without the internet. Even when it really started to boom it was not near as bad as it is today. The world is alot more dangerous today then when I was a kid. Hell I could walk to school without fear or rape or something like that.
This is a good hearty laugh. You are safer today than you ever were. Your generation will live longer then any of the humans that came before you, you most likely you are going to die of a very mundane and boring age related disease. Want to talk about scary? Imagine a world where stepping on a nail is potentially lethal, a scrap can lead to an amputated arm, you can die of a sore throat, or you are a few minutes away from nuclear Armageddon.
What do you have to worry about today? Over eating or smoking. Yeah, that is right... the thing to most likely kill you is stuffing too much food down your gullet or a voluntary behavior. Oh god, the horror... the horror. Your pool is dramatically more likely to kill you than a terrorist. You stand a far better chance of being killed in a car accident than being murdered, and the rate of murder and rape in respect to the overall population has been on a nose dive since the 80s*.
The only thing that has changed in this world is that you are far safer and far more likely to live to be a crotchety old bastard than ever before. We don't need politicians "protecting the children" and more than we ever have.
*http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_01.html
This deserves not a single scrap of wasted time. Just TRY and contemplate the conspiracy that it would take to make this crap credible.
It goes something like this:
The government has decided to snoop on the computers of average Americans, despite the fact that there are countless private and corporate computer researches scrutinizing network traffic. Not only does the government decide to go ahead with a massive invasion of privacy and committing a clearly and blatantly illegal action on all Americans, but they are so fucking incompetent that they don't even bother trying to hide what they are doing. They don't bother taking precautions that even the lowest level of viruses might take, and instead decide to make their super sekret spy virus easily visible to the most basic of free down loadable software. To top this all off, a government that can't keep secret that even limited domestic spying programs has in the course of a year magically developed a way to pull off the greatest hack in the history of man kind without anyone spilling the beans... until one teenager kid looked at his network traffic and caught them! OMG! ponies!!111!!
Even the most vaguely computer literate person should be able to see that no vast evil conspiracy has been uncovered. What has been uncovered is a kid who has discovered that bot networks not only exist, but can easily be blocked with free software.
If the government is reading your e-mail, believe me, it isn't doing it by installing a virus that the most basic of firewalls is able to detect. You would have to be stupid beyond help to install software onto computers that are constantly scrutinized by hundreds of thousands of experts every single day. If the government is watching you watch pr0n on the internet, it is doing it by plugging black boxes onto network backbones.
On a more serious note...
Before complaining that the US is some how doing to world a disservice by bringing to market product and attracting foreign talent, perhaps you should ask yourself why it is that such foreign talent comes here in the first place? My last boss was an extremely intelligent guy from India who has a stack of publications (and I use no hyperbole) a few hundred pages thick. He didn't come to the US from India because he is a dumb sucker. He came to the US because US PhD programs are some of the best, and after he was done with his PhD he easily found an extremely innovative startup doing work on carbon nanotubes. Finding the same thing in India would have been next to impossible. To top it off, he WAS indeed money hungry and so was more than happy to go along with the 'money hungry' (as you call it) ideal.
The US has a pretty long history of snatching up top talent from poor or displaced nations and groups. It probably is not a terribly nice practice to the nations where these people come from, but for the people themselves it many times lets them bloom and prosper in ways that they could not of in their home country. You can deride this as being evil, but as a decedent of people who fled from impoverished nations, I couldn't be happier about it.
What SHOULD happen is that on the off chance your kid is watching TV well past his bed time, and on the off chance someone swears on TV, and on the off chance that kid decides to repeat that one word, act like a fucking parent. Tell your kid that that word is not acceptable and discipline the kid if he continues to say it. This is absolutely no different from any other wrong behavior from flinging feces, pushing other kids, or screaming in a high shrill voice because you didn't buy more candy. The only difference is that, god forbid, if the kid hears someone swear on TV the federal fucking government steps in like it is a matter of national security that somewhere some child might of overhead an obscenity.
Hey, maybe we should make swearing in public illegal to. I mean shit, god save the mother fucking children. In fact, I think any website that allows someone to fucking curse like a mother fucker should have an 18+ ID check.
Bah. Fuck the parents for pushing politicians to censor because they can't contemplate parenting, fuck the politicians for being so self serving that they would piss on the 1st amendment in pursuit of political gain, and fuck the FCC.
SOX murders startups that go public. The reporting requirements take an army of accountants to comply with. Only large corporations can effectively go public these days do to the horrific costs that SOX imposes upon small businesses. As a result, most small businesses try and get bought out instead of going public. If they get bought out, the accounting is someone else's problem. SOX has done nothing good for American businesses. The amount of money being lost due to the stock market being a place where small businesses can no longer participate in is far more than whatever money is being saved in higher accountability standards.
Congress could not of thought of a more effective way to hurt small businesses while at the same time bettering large businesses (especially ones that like to buy small businesses) if they had tried. SOX is a financial crime. The only thing worse than the fact that SOX got passed without one fucking congressperson thinking about the consequences of their shitty bill is the fact that they still have not repealed it.
I never said that drones would be 'so powerful they would end war'. I said, 'drones, unlike marines, can't freak their shit out rip apart a few apartment complexes to save their ass'. Drones have accountability because you can record everything it does AND have an army lawyer sitting over your shoulder advising you on rules of engagement. Unlike a squad of marines, for drones, there is no justification for blasting the shit out of civilians if they get surrounded and the rules of engagement say that wiping out potential civilians is not allowed.
New weapons result in new styles of warfare. Gatling guns brought us trench war. Airplanes crippled trench war. Helicopters brought wars of mobility. Non-state suicide bombers brought effective irregular wars. Drones are just another advancement that will bring about a new kind of war. The question is the new style more or less harmful than the old style? Personally, I would rather see a squad of drones with rules of engagement that dictate that they do not harm civilians no matter what than putting a squad of teenagers armed with enough ordnances to level a few city blocks and a healthy love of their own lives over the lives of the civilians around them.
I think what you would find is that "war fatigue" would go down and there might be more incentive to go to war. Eliminating "war fatigue" is not a bad thing in my opinion. The US came close to throwing in the towel during the Korean War because it was getting sick of Americans dying. A Korea united under the North Korean government would have been a disaster for the South Korean people. The same can be said for Vietnam. I don't think that Vietnam became a better place because Americans left. Sure, it became better for America because we stopped throwing drafted teenagers into a meat grinder a gun point, but if you were in South Vietnam, you probably would have been a lot better if things went the way of Korea instead of the way that they did.
Now, I agree that if it just takes money to go to war, we might be more inclined to go to war. That said, there are probably wars that we should have fought and didn't because we didn't want to see our own soldiers tossed into a meat grinder. Rwanda comes to mind as the most stark example of where someone damn well should have stepped in and stopped the killing but didn't. No one wanted to sacrifice their own soldiers and so instead we sent nasty diplomatic letters as Rwanda watch 10% of its population die and countless woman get brutally raped. If it just took money to jump into the think of things, you might actually see the UN do more then just observe ceasefires, but also step up and force ceasefires.
Main Entry: hacker
Pronunciation: 'ha-k&r
Function: noun
1 : one that hacks
2 : a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity
3 : an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4 : a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system
I am pretty damn sure that the thieves in question meet both #3 and #4, hence they are 'hackers'. I probably would not waste time bothering Reuters to complaining that not all hackers are evil. They used the word correctly.
In truth, the real answer is for no one to ever hurt anyone ever again! 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3
I think you should run for president and make hurting people illegal! I would vote 4 U.
Seriously, I would hate to be on the receiving end of any weapon all the way from knives to nuclear bombs and everything in-between. So? That is exactly why I want a pile of guns on my side of the line. We can't even go a single decade without a genocide. It is silly and naive to think that war is on its way out. At the very best, we could go with a 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' approach. Such an approach might not stop another Rwanda, Darfur, Kosovo, Somalia, Congo, or Zimbabwe from descending into genocidal anarchy, but it certainly would be cheaper in terms of money and lives. War is not going to go away any time soon, robot soldiers or no.
The games that you're talking about are all about hitting the right target and the right target only. They reward you for doing that, that's how you build a better score, progress through the game, etc, but in real life there are no such incentives.
Uh... no. It is in fact the exact opposite of what you say. In a video game, if you hit civilians that video game slaps you on the wrist. In the real world... especially a real world where you are sitting in a comfortable chair piloting a drone and you have no danger to your own life and everything is being recorded, you will get court marshaled and sent to jail if you decide to start blowing up civilians.
Currently, if a squad of marines get surrounded and the rules of engagement is that you do not risk civilian life, the marines can decide that their lives are worth more then rules of engagement and a few civilians and blast their way out to safety. Unless someone snitches, they will suffer no consequences. Even then, in a battlefield doing any sort of real forensic work is extremely hard and open to easy manipulation by the enemy. If your squad of drone soldiers gets surrounded and some decides to blow away civilians to save his drone in clear violation of his orders, not only is his decision completely unjustified do the fact that his life is not in danger, but the whole damn thing is recorded from his perspective.
Drone soldiers would bring accountability and strict adherence to the rules of engagement. Unsurprisingly, sending out a squad of teenagers with guns into an area surrounded with hostile folks dressed as civilians and who speak a different language results in far more unneeded death and destruction then someone controlling a drone with an army lawyer sitting over his shoulder.
Imagine if NATO dropped a few squads of robot warrior drones and worker drones in each town in Afghanistan. Imagine if the drones for the most part did mundane things like direct traffic, dig wells, dig irrigation ditches, and serve as communication devices with the tribal elders. Now imagine a report comes into central command that Taliban fighters have entered town and are in a building near the town center. You have two options.
You can either drop a bomb into the center of town and wipe out the suspected Taliban fighters, or you could surround the building with drones and sending a communications drone to the front door to demand that it be let in to search the house. Believe me, a squad of drones (if they actually had capacity to do all this) would be the first choice. NATO commanders are not stupid. They realize that dropping a few thousand pound bombs into the village center is a really shitty way to get the locals on your side. Civilian casualties never do anything good for your cause. A soldier that doesn't sleep and doesn't care if it dies is a soldier that can go out of its way to avoid civilian casualties.
As an added bonus, you could drop a few drones into every single little village. You could easily have 50,000 drones spread throughout the country controlled by just a few thousand people. That means that you literally could be everywhere at once and not have to worry about protecting your soldiers. You can't leave a single squad in a tiny villages because they might be overrun. You can leave a single squad of robots in a village to report back on what is happening there because if they are overrun, eh, now you know where the enemy is and you only lost some equipment.
Pondering the consequences of our actions is not what causes a reduction in civilian casualties. What in fact causes civilian casualties is when soldiers are subject to constant attack by irregular military units and start to dehumanize the people they are there trying to not kill. The horrific massacres of Vietnam occurred when soldier started seeing EVERYONE who wasn't wearing an American uniform as a potential enemy and started to kill indiscriminately. Having people pound the ground in civilian areas surrounded by enemies wearing the clothing of civilians is a sure way to jack up civilian casualties. Not only will the soldiers happily kick over an apartment complex to kill a single sniper rather then die themselves, but they might also start seeing every civilian as an enemy resulting in massacres of people who are clearly civilians.
Drones don't face this problem. Drones can follow the rules of engagement to the letter while soldiers can't. If you tell a drone operator to never use heavy weapons on civilian buildings where there is a reasonable chance that civilians are inside, they won't. For a drone operator, it is nothing for their drone to 'die'. Further, the entire thing is constantly being recorded and any misconduct is easily rooted out. You can have strict rules of engagement and the drone soldiers will follow them to the death.
I am not saying that a drone army doesn't have a slightly higher potential for abuse in some instances. Certainly, it is a easier to line up and shoot civilians using a drone then it is to be there in person. That said, only two things lead to civilians being lined up and shot, crazy soldiers who have been under constant fire from people dressed in civilian clothing, or genocidal leaders. Drones eliminate crazy soldiers and eliminate soldiers putting their lives before the mission. As far as genocidal leaders, well, I doubt even the most hearty cynics believe that anyone will get elected on the "let's kill all the woman and children so they can't breed any more" campaign.
Civilian casualties the American inflict comes from soldiers and leaders picking the lives of soldiers over the lives of civilians, not some concerted effort of the higher up leadership commit genocide for shits and giggles. Reduce the number of soldiers that need to be protected in combat and you will see the number of civilians that die drop dramatically.