We're hurting each other and also other animals and plant life on this planet. How many species of animal and plant have become extinct since man became the dominant species on this planet?
Every single species vanishes. Go back far enough and every single species that once was is no longer. Everything goes extinct in the end. I am not advocating wanton destruction, but simply pointing out that the "ideal" of dropping the world into a Ziploc bag and preserving it forever is a completely human desire that evolution and natural selection doesn't give a shit about. All the humans could vanish tomorrow and that still wouldn't prevent every single species on Earth from going extinct at one point or another.
So, instead of worshipping and unchanging Earth as some quasi-mystical religion, how about we focus on something that matters? We should be preserving our own asses. Part of saving ourselves might very well mean taking a good hard look at how we are changing the planet. Mother Nature does not give two shits if we cook the Earth and will happily (if nature could feel feelings - which it can't) cook up some happily little bacteria that loves CO2 and warm weather. The humans on the other hand might find it getting mighty uncomfortable.
So screw this quasi-mystical Mother Nature crap. Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about the species of this planet and it doesn't care if all the bunnies die. We are the ones who care. We care if the world becomes inhospitable to us. We should be working to improve the environment not because of some deluded worship of the Earth in its exact current state which is going to pass regardless if we like it or not, but should be working to improve the environment for our own sake.
If you read the original design documents for UO... that is pretty much what I envisioned in 1993. UO proposed everything from a functional justice system, ecology, and in general a living and breathing world where leveling treadmills were all but non-existent. It was supposed to be the kind of game where if you killed all the bunnies, wolves, the bunnies would breed until they were all over the place. If you want around murdering at random, people would gang up and take you down. The entire game was built to be a living world that spawned its own events and where the drive to "level " didn't exist. Anyone who played in the UO beta knows exactly what happened, it failed - horribly.
It is sad. It is like what might have happened if the first attempt to land on the moon crashed and everyone get to hear the astronauts final despite cries as air escaped the capsule. Granted, it isn't like a successful moon launch spawned trips to Mars or anything, but you get the my point. Ultima Online had a grand vision that was first massively cut back on, and then proceeded to fail (in many people's eyes) despite the cutbacks. The crap that followed UO was the absolute safest most boring piles of shit that have been spawned on this earth when it comes to computer games. The MMORPGs that have followed have been safe, boring, and utterly uninspired. They all represent marginal improvements on the "safe" Diablo like formula that Everquest pioneered (if you can such spinelessness pioneering).
Look, if you strip the leveling and equipment hording system from your game and it falls apart, it is probably just a glorified remake of Evercrack. If the gameplay can survive on its own merit without constantly holding out exp and equipment in a constant drive race down the treadmill, then you probably have something. UO of old tried this and met limited success. It is just sad and pathetic that no game in the near decade since UO came out has even managed to come close to what the original UO did with what we would consider archaic technology.
Some day someone is going to envision and execute a living and breathing online world that isn't a glorified leveling treadmill. I'll pass up the current Diablo mind numbing hack and slash orgies waiting for that day. Any "fun game play" as killing a few million mindless NPCs is a sick and twisted sociological experiment for exploring the roots of compulsion, not a game worth playing.
Why go for the cheap knockoff (WoW) when you can go directly to the game that they got their inspiration from?
So are you saying that Warhammer will offer a Genuine Treadmill(TM) instead of just a normal Treadmill?
Don't get me wrong, I like the Warhammer setting as much as anyone, but that doesn't change the fact that another shitty MMORPG with a different setting is still just a shitty MMORPG with a different setting.
I don't know about anyone else, but back in the days of Doom when computer games started to really become multiplayer I had dreams of logging into a massive online world one day. If me of the future had gone back in time and showed me of the Doom era the crap that they were passing off as MMORPGs in the future, people would be dead. I would have hunted down the first asshat that thought that killing 10^12 monsters for exp and l00t so that you can kill some more monsters was "massive multiplayer online gameplay". In hunting down that first idiot, I would hope to prevent the current crop of shit for game play MMORPGs out there.
The MMORPGs out there today are absolute crap. They are glorified mouse experiments where the stupid mouse keeps pressing a lever for a shot of dopamine until it forgets to eat and dies of starvation. If the best vision of a massive online world is an online world where the gameplay consists of mindlessly killing tens of thousands of NPCs to kill more NPCs with the occasional sub-game play distraction, the human race needs to be shot in the face.
Personally, I don't believe that this levelfest crap gameplay that we see today is the pinnacle of game design. So, my question is this:
Is Warhammer going to offer up some new game play that would not send me of 1993 into a homicidal rage seeking to prevent the creation of the first crappy MMORPGs, or is Warhammer going to offer up gameplay that transcends the brain damage causing "killing NPCs 4 l00t and 3xp" game play?
Almost all things labeled as "organic" have a branded label on them. That is to say that they are certified organic by an organization that does such certifications. It is the same sort of system that certifies if a piece of lumber comes from the rainforest or not. The way to figure out if something is 'truly' organic or not is to look up the organization that certified it as organic. A quick web search is more then sufficient. You will find what they certify as organic and probably get any criticisms of that organizations that might be floating around in the Internet.
Perhaps even easier, you can find stores that specialize in organic foods. If it is inconvenient to look up the labels yourself, then you can look up a stores record and trust the store. So, you could look up Whole Foods and decide for yourself if you trust that what they certify in their store is organic is really organic. If you think that they are trustworthy then simply buy just from that store and spare yourself looking up every single organic label.
Is this the most convenient system in the world? No. It isn't as easy as going to your local grocer and reading FDA approved labels. That said, you are probably better off for it. FDA labeling is labeling by committee. The FDA food pyramid for example is considered absolute crap by many nutritionist. That said, if you put in an ounce of effort, you will find that it isn't that hard to find real organic products. If the simple research is takes to buy organic is too much for you, it is unlikely that you care enough to really be bothered. If a few minutes of research online is too much, just do yourself a favor, save yourself the pain of a few minutes on the Internet, and just by the shit they put out in every single grocer.
Your characters Grow! Have you never played an MMORPG and wished that as you level up your characters get bigger physically?
Wow!!!111!! Your avatar changes? OMFG, it is like a whole new game!!!!!1!!!
Really, if the only thing they have to offer is that your character gets bigger and the setting, I think I'll pass. Those are both purely cosmetic changes. A grindfest with comestic changes is still a grindfest. And for the love of god, screw the story. Every single MMORPG since UO has sworn up and down that they have a story that matters. They have all been full of shit. They have all been leveling tredmils with perks.
You can still "vote with your dollars" even without mandated labeling. Simply find suppliers that offer organic products. There are more then enough people out there happy to sell you organic stuff at a mark up. Simply check the label to make sure that "cloning" is not considered organic. All of that said, "cloned" beef is easily the last thing in the world to worry about. There are lots of farming practices that make me reach for organic alternatives, cloning isn't one of them.
Honestly, if you have the choice between a cloned cow raised organically and a non-cloned industrial cow, don't let the irrational terror of twins stop you from getting the cloned cow. Cloning just means that there is more then one cow in the world that has the same genetic code. The only danger cloning brings in it of itself is that disease could potentially wipe out an entire stock of cows where no cow has a resistance. The only people who should be uneasy about cloning should be cow suppliers, not the people that eat them.
Whether the game manufacturers say it has legal value or not, if you cash in, that's income, and you have to pay tax on it.
That simply is not true. You don't have to pay any income taxes on it if they don't know about it. Saying that you must pay taxes is like saying that you can't buy drugs. Sure you can. You just take some level of risk in doing so.
The only case where I can see taxation having any success is when a company facilitates it in a direct way. So, if I can cash money out of the game directly, you might very well be forced to pay a tax in the same way you are forced to pay a tax when you get a paycheck from work.
That said, that sort of transaction where a legitimate business is facilitating a cash transfer is pretty rare. The real money trading hands in MMORPG economies is almost exclusively person to person transaction, non-legal companies, or legal companies outside of the US. In all of those cases you are about as likely to get a drug dealer to voluntary tax report his taxes as you are to get some guy working over e-bay to report his income.
The only reason I can think of to voluntarily report MMORPG income is if you are making so much that it makes up a substantial part of your income. In that case, you might report some fraction of it just to avoid looking like a drug dealer.
I expect the vast majority of people to simply ignore any efforts to improve taxation about as easily as they ignore laws against a few guys playing poker on Friday night and smoking small quantities of marijuana. Yeah, those activities are illegal if you are caught, but unless you are running an underground casino or smuggling pounds of drugs, no one really cares and the penalties for being caught are a slap on the wrist.
Did you know that the original plan for the US/NATO defense of Western Germany did NOT call for nuclear weapons? Why? We didn't want to start trading nukes with the Soviet Union. It was hoped that the fear of nukes would keep any East/West German war "limited" in scope.
This brings us to the first danger of a nuclear armed North Korea. North Korea could see nuclear power as its license to conduct military operations. With a nuclear missile held over the head of a few million Japanese, the US would have to think very long and very hard about involving itself with a militant North Korea. The math might very well involve giving concessions to North Korea rather then losing a few million very close and very dear allies. The US would be VERY hard pressed to ignore the demands of Japan in dealing with North Korea. Nuclear weapons make very effective blackmail for anyone willing to play that game.
Funny enough, the Soviet invasion plan called for the use of tactical nukes which almost certainly would have been met in kind. Another story from the Cold War is from right before it ended. The Soviet knew that they were fucked. They had two options. They could either surrender like they historically did, or launch an invasion of Western Germany and a desperate and futile attempt to keep pushing forward. The planned invasion of Western Germany was basically a suicide pact. There was no hope of defeating NATO. At best, they could hope for a draw... and by draw I mean nukes get fired and every is dead. Thankfully, cooler minds won out and we got our slightly less authoritarian Russia of today.
This brings us to a second and very real danger of a nuclear armed North Korea. North Korea is run by a fanatical cult of personality. The brainwashing going on in North Korea makes the days of Mao and Stalin look like happy fun time. A North Korea that is internally collapsing could very well do something stupid if the wrong military leader decides he would rather go in a blaze of glory then follow the path that Russia went down. It doesn't even need to be a high level leader. One idiot in command of a bank of artillery pointed at Seoul could launch enough chemical weapons to turn Seoul into a wasteland and provoke a South Korean response that would surely provoke the rest of the North Korean military. In such an encounter, it would be far better to only have to deal with chemical weapons then it would be to throw nuclear weapons into the mix.
Simply put, a nuclear armed North Korea is a bad thing for all parties and should be avoided at all costs. This is a nation that has managed to kill over 10% of its population in the past decade. These are not cool rational thinkers. These are not people you want splitting atoms.
"develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries"
This is what the government SHOULD be doing. Defense agencies should always be "developing capabilities, plans, and options" for every single possible threat. That doesn't mean we need to build a space cruiser, but that does mean that having a plan to build one is not a bad idea. Hell, having a plan to invade Canada on hand is a good idea. Expecting and being prepared for the unexpected is what intelligence and defense agencies are there for.
I very much want my government to have a plan to deny space to whomever might need space denied to them. Sure, there are no enemies right now that demand such a wasteful and expensive capability, but it does not take a lot of imagination to envision a future where it might be prudent. Russia is one government change away from getting a hardline nationalist who feels nostalgic about the Cold War. China is one tiny democratic island (Taiwan) away from all out war with the US. North Korea... well fuck... who knows what they are thinking, but having something that can knock down their ICBMs on the drawing board is not a bad idea.
Look, I would agree that this is an overreaction if it said, "Make me some god damn space battle cruisers! Muhahahahaha!" But it doesn't. It directs that the government should plan to conduct military operations in space because it isn't an insane fear that some day in an unforeseen future those plans might be needed.
Crap like this makes me hate politics. Arguing against anti or pro Bush zombie is almost a waste of time. The polarization of the nation is nauseating. Nothing is more sickening then the nation getting duped into believing that there are exactly two sides to an issue and that "their" side always shares there opinion while the "enemy" is always wrong and blatantly evil. You would think people would get suspicious when every single election comes down to the wire and it seems like the population has magically split 50/50 into idiots and people who know what is going on. If you truly and honestly believe that Bush is 100% evil or a 100% right, you can count yourself among the dupes of the world that has let political parties chop of the population into two equal halves. That said, let's look at your "arguments".
1. Bush is putting nukes in space, after proving he can't do anything right, which makes him do more. All dangerous. Now upping the ante to space nukes. Insane.
I don't even know where to begin. First, Bush is not putting nuclear weapons up in space. As the previous poster stated, and you conveniently ignored, putting nukes in space serves no purpose. We have a few thousand ICBMs that can do the job just fine, not to mention a few dozen subs if you need it done even quicker. You can't even produce a reason for "Bush" (like Bush is the only person making decisions... I bet you think Bush wrote this policy paper personally, don't you?) wanting nuclear weapons up in space. I suppose you do try and justify it with the sentences, "All dangerous." and "Insane."
2. Bush specifically said in that policy that we should use nukes to put weapons in space. Of course that's his #1 priority.
Pull out a quote and prove to me this point. Otherwise your belief that Bush said "put nukes in space" comes from poor reading comprehension skills or self delusionment. I personally suspect later. Bush stated in the new policy gives a green light to considering putting nuclear reactors in space that might have violated the old test ban treaties. That is it.
Everyone knows he hates science, that he put a Republican flack to work censoring "big bang" science because it reinforced evolution science rather than Creationism.
Again, you are an idiot if you think that the 24 year old that was appointed to the PR job in NASA was appointed by Bush. That ranks right up there with thinking that Ronald McDonald hires every single burger flipper. Far more likely, some Republican page asked for a job after serving a senator or working on campaigning and got one. After it turned out that he was an idiot, he was sacked. No, it wasn't Bush's evil plan to destroy NASA. If Bush wanted to do that I imagine he would stop giving them money instead of boosting their funding. At best, you can call it a failure of hiring oversight. Judging by some of the jackasses I work with, it is a pretty universal problem.
3. "We" are only a long way from worrying about space combat because you are in denial of the apocalyptic dreams Bush pursues at every chance.
Of for fuck's sake. Bush is not the devil in disguise who spends his nights dreaming up ways to end the world. If you really believe that Bush is the embodiment of evil and is here for your soul, it makes any sort of rational conversation pretty much pointless. I think I would have an easier time convincing the Pope that there is no God... and I imagine even he would listen better then you do.
4. The Rumsfeld "issue"? That berzerk loser is unfit to command a garbage scow, and you're calling him an "issue"? Rumsfeld has been putting nukes on US missiles for years, changing our policy to "preemptive strike" even while bathing in the blood of that strategy's Iraq failure.
OMFG, he has been putting nukes on missiles for years? Wow. I bet that makes him the first secretary of defense to oversee the continued maintenance of the US nuclear stock pile. The US nuclear arsenal has shrunk
Countries like the US and other powerful nations have nuclear weapons as well, I don't see why North Korea should not get a piece of it.
Because "the US and other powerful nations" have stable governments that won't fire the weapons. North Korea does not. Because "the US and other powerful nations" cares about its citizens enough to not blatantly kill them by the millions. North Korea does not.
When we talk about North Korea we are talking about a nation that has managed to kill of 10% of its fucking population in under a decade. They test chemical weapons on humans. If you want a hell on Earth, you couldn't point to a nation closer to achieving it. To top it all off, it isn't like this is a stable nation. This is a nation that is basically run by military gangsters with a cult of personality figurehead. You couldn't point a nation in this world that giving nukes to is a bad idea even if you tried.
You would be better off to simply give nuclear weapons to the mob... though I suppose you think that the mob has the "right" to nuclear weapons to. The only thing that separates North Korea from every other horrible criminal organization in the world is that North Korea inflicts far more suffering are more people and control enough territory that we recognize them as a nation.
No fucked up sense of justice justifies letting North Korea have nukes. The rest of the world is and rightfully should be doing everything in their power from keeping this insane dictatorship from swinging around more power then it already does.
Thousands dead? That puts dieing in war right up there with drowning (~4000) and well below falling (~14,000). Yeah, the world is a real scary place.
As for this whole confrontation thing... last time I checked the Soviet Union had collapsed and a few dozen Eastern European and Asian nations were getting to know the joys of fun shit like not being executed for voicing disapproval of government policy.
There is nothing but bitching and moaning about the US. Once in a while it would be nice if someone was like "Hey US, thanks for sticking your shit into World War II and sticking with us during the Korean War and Cold War. We really like how you outspent the Soviets and the Germans and threw your sons into battle so that the rest of us could see what nationalized health care is like. Hey, you guys fuck up from time to time do to your lack of omnipotence, but in the end we are glad that you are around. Hey, the next round of drink is on us. P.S. Your beer sucks, be we still love you."
Jesus fucking Christ, the US is not the boogy man looking to eat you.
It doesn't matter. What North Korea does have is the worlds biggest arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and the capital of South Korea in artillery range. To top it off, they have a tens of millions of Japanese in missile range. Nukes are just frosting at this point. A North Korea on a rampage is a few tens of million of allies dead within a few hours.
If anything, this nuke thing is GOOD for the rest of the world. A nuclear armed North Korea is not that much more of a danger then it already it is, but it might be just the thing to send a swift kick in the ass of China. A swift kick in China's ass might get them to take better care of their rabid dog.
North Korea is armed to the teeth with chemical weapons. Any invasion into North Korea is a quick way to turn all the cities within artillery range of North Korea into dead zones. North Korea also has a vast array of short and mid range missiles that will also certainly hit your capital and any major city. In the first hour of any North Korean war, sure as shit, Seoul will be wiped out and Tokyo will be short a few million people.
China wants a North Korea it can control. China doesn't mind North Korea being a pain in the ass for the US and Japan from time to time. What China does mind is a nuclear/chemical/biological war in its back yard, and it minds a few million starving North Koreans throwing themselves at the border trying to escape. China wants a stable North Korea that occasionally acts up.
That said, what North Korea is doing is NOT what China wants. China is probably going to respond, but no one is going to take military action. Military action is not going to bring down North Korea unless a North Korean leader goes (more) insane and starts something. Otherwise, North Korea is going to collapse in an internal military coup. The only thing the rest of the world can do until that day is keep North Korea from making any trouble until then... which is exactly what everyone is trying to do.
There will be no 'regime change' in North Korea except the kind that comes quasi-internally. The US will not invade, and it certainly will not wipe NK off the face of the earth with nukes. It is stupid beyond comprehension to suggest doing so; here is why.
First, North Korea's power has not changed. If you think it has, you don't understand the military capability of North Korea. True, North Korea might now have a nuke, but infant sized nukes are pocket change compared to what already has. North Korea already has a MASSIVE chemical and biological weapons supply. In fact, I would not be terribly surprised if they actually have better chemical/biological then anyone else in the world. Technical skill helps, but having live human documented live human dissidents to test on in the most cruel and inhuman ways possible can make up for skill. The simple truth is that NK already has the capacity to wipe out entire cities. A few low yield nukes is not going to change anything.
Second, forget the thousands of missiles chemical weapon armed missiles aimed at South Korea and Japan; Seoul (that would be the capital for South Korea for anyone not keeping track) is in artillery range of North Korea. The second war broke out the capital of South Korea would be an inhabitable wasteland. Japan would also be hurting more then a little as chemical and biological armed missiles rain down on Tokyo. While I doubt that North Korea could effectively hit the US, it might even be able to get a few missiles all the way to the US armed with chemical weapons. Sure, they would not do any real damage compared to what South Korea and Japan would feel, but it would certainly sting.
At the end of the day, the US could put North Korea out of action if it decided it didn't have any compunctions about slaughtering North Korean civilians in the millions with nuclear weapons. That still would not change the fact that South Korea would be a wasteland and Japan would be missing a few cities. The losses to allies would reach well into the millions, and that says nothing of the poor civilian North Korean bastards whose lives some how managed to get worse.
The entire concept of striking North Korea is stupid and never going to happen. If we did, the South Korea and Japan would rightfully become mortal enemies of the US. Hell, any self respecting nation would inflict retribution on the US. Sure, no one would be stupid enough to attack the US for the loss of millions of allied lives, but you can bet your ass that the economic retribution exacted by the rest of the world would make the cost of a war look like pittance.
I don't know what the proper strategy for dealing with North Korea is. I don't know if it is better to isolate and starve the nation in the hopes that someone internally gets fed up enough to launch a coup, or if it is better to negotiate for stability. Whatever the case, a preemptive military invasion is rightfully not considered so long as Japan and South Korea are considered close allies whose civilian populations we don't want to see massacred. Thankfully, say what you will of Bush, he (or at least the military minds in charge) clearly also recognizes that an assault on a weapon bristiling with chemical and biological weapons a stone's throw away from two close allies is stupid beyond comprehension.
No, actually you cant. Currently the courts consider that outside 'protected' speech.
No, that simply is not true. Almost all speech in the US is legal. It is REALLY hard to cross the line. The only way they can put you away is if you are inciting an imminent crime. If you tell your lover to go kill your husband, you could get in trouble, anything short of that and you are safe.
The Folly case is a good example of this. Folly pretty blatantly is hitting on some underage kids (by Florida age of consent laws, not DC) in the e-mails that have been released to date. While he is in trouble in congress for ethical violations, he isn't in any legal trouble yet. In order to nail Folly with a crime, he has to do more then be a sketchy bastard. He has to be taking blatant active steps to get a kid to go have sex with him before he is in any sort of legal trouble. So, he can legally tell a 15 year old buy that he wants to ram him in the ass all night long, but that isn't illegal. He needs to tell a 15 year old boy to come to his house so that they can have sex in order to get into trouble.
I am not saying that the US is the most liberal democracy in the world. However, when it comes to free speech laws, the US is the most liberal nation in the world. Hate speech is a-okay unless you are advocating an imminent crime. Slander and libel are close to impossible prosecute, and against public figures it is almost literally impossible.
The only three possible exceptions I can think of that US has in its free speech laws are copyright violations, campaign contribution spending limits, and limits on holding multiple demonstrations in the same area. If you toss copyright into the real of free speech you could make the argument that the US could be more liberal in its speech laws, but even then copyright violations are civil violations that you can not go to jail for. The only other 'liberal' loophole is campaign donations. There is a limit to donations to campaigns and you could argue that this is inhibiting free speech, though even in that regards the US would still be considered more liberal then most of Europe. Finally, the US does prevent rival demonstrations from being held in the same area. A pile of bible nuts can't march around a gay pride parade telling them that they are going to be damned to hell, and a pile of democrats can't start shouting and waving signs during a Republican rally.
If you want to march around the White House with a BUSH IS A FUCKING NAZI SIGN and then cover the sign with swastikas, you can, and people do. The secret service will probably watch you like a hawk, but so long as you don't do anything stupid like block traffic, you will be fine. I have been to gay pride rallies with bible nuts next door waving signs about everyone being damned to hell, and to anti-KKK counter rallies next to a bunch of sad sack of shit "white power" rallies. Really, there are a lot of things to trash the US on, but free speech limits isn't one of them.
No, I imagine the AI will happily ignore such threats. I doubt the AI is looking for "kill the infidels!" I imagine that it is far more interested in exploding airplanes and embassies. If the British embassy in France, India, and Germany blow up with a few minutes of each other, the AI should be going nuts to warn its operator that someone ought to send a pile of men with guns to the British embassy in the US to protect it. The same goes for if a US airliner goes down over Sweden, Brazil, and Japan within a few minutes of each other, the AI should be screaming warnings that something is up.
The idea isn't so much to get intelligence that they couldn't get the old fashion way, it is to get that intelligence faster in the hopes of stopping something bad in action.
True, terrorist do not report themselves in the news, but if a bomb goes off in British embassies in Pakistan, Indian, and Indonesia, having an AI freaking out and calling attention to it within seconds or minutes might save the British embassy in the US. All nations of the world already monitor newspapers from around the world. The advantage that an AI has is that it can send up warning signals faster then a human operator might. In the case of embassies exploding, learning what is going on 10 minutes faster might be all it takes to take preventative action.
I can think of lots of scenarios where learning that something is up a few minutes faster could save lives.
Eh... is anyone REALLY woried about the US government reading press from around the world? I mean... once you sell something on the street or post it to the web you kind of assume that everyone can read it.
I have a feeling that what this program really is doing is looking for "major events" as fast as possible. So, if a news agency reports in London that an airplane just blew up, an AI in the US shouts out a warning to its operator. This way, events that might signal something for the US worry about are brought to light within minutes instead of hours. In the case of an airplane blowing up in the UK, it might signal that a larger operation was on to blow up American airplanes as well. This way, you can start assessing the threat right away and decide if anything should be done.
Such a program could also act as a political heads up. If a Pakistani papers is reporting that a coo is in progress, that is a damn nice thing to know ASAP so that you can decide how to deal with a nuclear armed nation with a collapsing government.
I am sure that the US has piles of people already scanning newspapers from around the world, I imagine that this AI is simply an attempt to cut delays down from hours to minutes.
"Health insurance" is a misnomer. There are no nations in the world with "health insurance". There are nations with socialized medicine (Europe) and nations with a quasi-market based medical payment plans. I don't think that socialized medicine needs much explanation. The particulars vary, but socialized medicine boils down to that the government redistributes wealth it gets from taxation into government controlled health plans. The American system is much more strange and really is an artifact that unions created.
Basically, in the US you get health insurance from your employer. Further, it isn't health insurance, it is a medical payment plan. Insurance is something you take out incase something unexpected happens. Health insurance in the US is something you get not only for unexpected medical bills, but also expected medical bills (like drugs, regular doctor visits, ect.). Think of it as a quasi-socialist, quasi-market based program.
Now, if insurance had been left to its own market based devices as most things in the US are, the system would look very different from what it does today. You would still buy health insurance, but you would buy it for the same reason you buy car insurance. You don't buy car insurance knowing that you are going to wreck your car. You buy it in case you wreck your car. In the same way, you would buy insurance incase you need a major operation, not to pay for your drugs or regular doctor visits.
If the laws were different, the market would look very different. People in good health would likely pay dramatically less then what they do now. The drugs that they would need would be open to market competition and so would have lower prices. Healthy people would be much better off (pocket book wise at least). People who get catastrophically ill would also be perfectly fine in a market based system. They would have insurance that would kick in when they need a double bypass or a new organ. The people would be in trouble would be people with chronic conditions with expensive treatment. The US would almost certainly need some sort of socialized medical program to take care of such people.
Basically, the reason why healthcare in the US is neither market based nor socialized is because of Union laws. Laws were written in place to force employers to be the primary providers of health insurance. This gave unions another bargaining chip in negotiations and "solved" the healthcare issues at the time. Today it is pretty obvious the flaws in this system. The problem is that Americans are very resistant to socializing medicine simply because they don't trust socialism, and at the same time they have the idea that healthcare is something that you get for "free" through an employer very strongly ingrained in their head. Neither a market based solution nor a socialized social are politically viable in the US... hence you get the current mess where we stick with a bad system that is the worst of both worlds.
Personally, I think that the benefits to be gained from spying on your kids using loggers is pretty small compared to the potential price you are going to pay. Think of it this way, if you were to go and try and tail your kids whenever they left the house, how do you think they would respond? How would you kids respond if they walked in on you reading their journal?
You take a risk when you spy on your kid in such an intrusive manner. Whatever evils you might catch them doing is nothing compared to the kinds of evils that you will provoke them into by showing such deep mistrust. It is far better to have something close to a harmonious relationship then to try and control and monitor your kids actions. You need to set rules, but you are delusional if you think that you can enforce the rules without your kid's consent.
Now, I am not saying that kids don't need (to quote the Dog Whisperer) rules, boundaries, and limitations. They do. What I am saying is that those rules and boundaries are not there to keep them from doing bad or destructive things. If your kid wants to go out and be destructive against others or against themselves, there is little you can do to stop a determined youth. The rules and boundaries that and adult sets up are there to teach the kids not to do bad or destructive things.
So, could online monitoring catch your kid watching porn or acting like a jackass on AIM? Sure, but realize that in the process you are pretty flatly declaring your complete lack of trust in your child and setting up an antagonistic relationship that your child. I personally would rather my kid sneak in a little porn while I am away then sneak out at night to get away from what he sees as a malevolent dictator who has no trust in him.
The use this would have would be on a purely troop level sort of thing. You might throw one to see what is on the other side of some trees or a hill. You would hide it so that the enemy doesn't instantly spot where it is coming from and infer that soldiers are also there. Being harder to see, it is also resistant against being shot down by visual means. Does this thing show up like a big blip on radar? Probably, but what would the enemy do in response? Shoot a multi-thousand dollar SAM at a 100 dollar toy? If an enemy wants to give away its AAA defense locations shooting at cheap drones, more power to them.
All of that said, I doubt this thing will be much of a hit. You can make smaller drones with more payloads that are probably quieter using cheaper more conventional techniques. If I were a soldier, I would much rather have a drone that can move to a location faster and get a GPS coordinate on a target for a mortar/air/artillery strike. A little extra visual 'stealth' that is probably lost in increased noise isn't a big concern. If a skill shot manages to knock out a drone with a visually aimed weapon... well, if there is something the US army doesn't lack, it is more toys then the enemy has bullets.
Slashdot Mirror
We're hurting each other and also other animals and plant life on this planet. How many species of animal and plant have become extinct since man became the dominant species on this planet?
Every single species vanishes. Go back far enough and every single species that once was is no longer. Everything goes extinct in the end. I am not advocating wanton destruction, but simply pointing out that the "ideal" of dropping the world into a Ziploc bag and preserving it forever is a completely human desire that evolution and natural selection doesn't give a shit about. All the humans could vanish tomorrow and that still wouldn't prevent every single species on Earth from going extinct at one point or another.
So, instead of worshipping and unchanging Earth as some quasi-mystical religion, how about we focus on something that matters? We should be preserving our own asses. Part of saving ourselves might very well mean taking a good hard look at how we are changing the planet. Mother Nature does not give two shits if we cook the Earth and will happily (if nature could feel feelings - which it can't) cook up some happily little bacteria that loves CO2 and warm weather. The humans on the other hand might find it getting mighty uncomfortable.
So screw this quasi-mystical Mother Nature crap. Mother Nature doesn't give a shit about the species of this planet and it doesn't care if all the bunnies die. We are the ones who care. We care if the world becomes inhospitable to us. We should be working to improve the environment not because of some deluded worship of the Earth in its exact current state which is going to pass regardless if we like it or not, but should be working to improve the environment for our own sake.
If you read the original design documents for UO... that is pretty much what I envisioned in 1993. UO proposed everything from a functional justice system, ecology, and in general a living and breathing world where leveling treadmills were all but non-existent. It was supposed to be the kind of game where if you killed all the bunnies, wolves, the bunnies would breed until they were all over the place. If you want around murdering at random, people would gang up and take you down. The entire game was built to be a living world that spawned its own events and where the drive to "level " didn't exist. Anyone who played in the UO beta knows exactly what happened, it failed - horribly.
It is sad. It is like what might have happened if the first attempt to land on the moon crashed and everyone get to hear the astronauts final despite cries as air escaped the capsule. Granted, it isn't like a successful moon launch spawned trips to Mars or anything, but you get the my point. Ultima Online had a grand vision that was first massively cut back on, and then proceeded to fail (in many people's eyes) despite the cutbacks. The crap that followed UO was the absolute safest most boring piles of shit that have been spawned on this earth when it comes to computer games. The MMORPGs that have followed have been safe, boring, and utterly uninspired. They all represent marginal improvements on the "safe" Diablo like formula that Everquest pioneered (if you can such spinelessness pioneering).
Look, if you strip the leveling and equipment hording system from your game and it falls apart, it is probably just a glorified remake of Evercrack. If the gameplay can survive on its own merit without constantly holding out exp and equipment in a constant drive race down the treadmill, then you probably have something. UO of old tried this and met limited success. It is just sad and pathetic that no game in the near decade since UO came out has even managed to come close to what the original UO did with what we would consider archaic technology.
Some day someone is going to envision and execute a living and breathing online world that isn't a glorified leveling treadmill. I'll pass up the current Diablo mind numbing hack and slash orgies waiting for that day. Any "fun game play" as killing a few million mindless NPCs is a sick and twisted sociological experiment for exploring the roots of compulsion, not a game worth playing.
Why go for the cheap knockoff (WoW) when you can go directly to the game that they got their inspiration from?
So are you saying that Warhammer will offer a Genuine Treadmill(TM) instead of just a normal Treadmill?
Don't get me wrong, I like the Warhammer setting as much as anyone, but that doesn't change the fact that another shitty MMORPG with a different setting is still just a shitty MMORPG with a different setting.
I don't know about anyone else, but back in the days of Doom when computer games started to really become multiplayer I had dreams of logging into a massive online world one day. If me of the future had gone back in time and showed me of the Doom era the crap that they were passing off as MMORPGs in the future, people would be dead. I would have hunted down the first asshat that thought that killing 10^12 monsters for exp and l00t so that you can kill some more monsters was "massive multiplayer online gameplay". In hunting down that first idiot, I would hope to prevent the current crop of shit for game play MMORPGs out there.
The MMORPGs out there today are absolute crap. They are glorified mouse experiments where the stupid mouse keeps pressing a lever for a shot of dopamine until it forgets to eat and dies of starvation. If the best vision of a massive online world is an online world where the gameplay consists of mindlessly killing tens of thousands of NPCs to kill more NPCs with the occasional sub-game play distraction, the human race needs to be shot in the face.
Personally, I don't believe that this levelfest crap gameplay that we see today is the pinnacle of game design. So, my question is this:
Is Warhammer going to offer up some new game play that would not send me of 1993 into a homicidal rage seeking to prevent the creation of the first crappy MMORPGs, or is Warhammer going to offer up gameplay that transcends the brain damage causing "killing NPCs 4 l00t and 3xp" game play?
Almost all things labeled as "organic" have a branded label on them. That is to say that they are certified organic by an organization that does such certifications. It is the same sort of system that certifies if a piece of lumber comes from the rainforest or not. The way to figure out if something is 'truly' organic or not is to look up the organization that certified it as organic. A quick web search is more then sufficient. You will find what they certify as organic and probably get any criticisms of that organizations that might be floating around in the Internet.
Perhaps even easier, you can find stores that specialize in organic foods. If it is inconvenient to look up the labels yourself, then you can look up a stores record and trust the store. So, you could look up Whole Foods and decide for yourself if you trust that what they certify in their store is organic is really organic. If you think that they are trustworthy then simply buy just from that store and spare yourself looking up every single organic label.
Is this the most convenient system in the world? No. It isn't as easy as going to your local grocer and reading FDA approved labels. That said, you are probably better off for it. FDA labeling is labeling by committee. The FDA food pyramid for example is considered absolute crap by many nutritionist. That said, if you put in an ounce of effort, you will find that it isn't that hard to find real organic products. If the simple research is takes to buy organic is too much for you, it is unlikely that you care enough to really be bothered. If a few minutes of research online is too much, just do yourself a favor, save yourself the pain of a few minutes on the Internet, and just by the shit they put out in every single grocer.
Your characters Grow! Have you never played an MMORPG and wished that as you level up your characters get bigger physically?
Wow!!!111!! Your avatar changes? OMFG, it is like a whole new game!!!!!1!!!
Really, if the only thing they have to offer is that your character gets bigger and the setting, I think I'll pass. Those are both purely cosmetic changes. A grindfest with comestic changes is still a grindfest. And for the love of god, screw the story. Every single MMORPG since UO has sworn up and down that they have a story that matters. They have all been full of shit. They have all been leveling tredmils with perks.
You can still "vote with your dollars" even without mandated labeling. Simply find suppliers that offer organic products. There are more then enough people out there happy to sell you organic stuff at a mark up. Simply check the label to make sure that "cloning" is not considered organic. All of that said, "cloned" beef is easily the last thing in the world to worry about. There are lots of farming practices that make me reach for organic alternatives, cloning isn't one of them.
Honestly, if you have the choice between a cloned cow raised organically and a non-cloned industrial cow, don't let the irrational terror of twins stop you from getting the cloned cow. Cloning just means that there is more then one cow in the world that has the same genetic code. The only danger cloning brings in it of itself is that disease could potentially wipe out an entire stock of cows where no cow has a resistance. The only people who should be uneasy about cloning should be cow suppliers, not the people that eat them.
I love whoever came up with the title for this topic. Excuse me while I get into my flame proof bunker and hide this war out.
Whether the game manufacturers say it has legal value or not, if you cash in, that's income, and you have to pay tax on it.
That simply is not true. You don't have to pay any income taxes on it if they don't know about it. Saying that you must pay taxes is like saying that you can't buy drugs. Sure you can. You just take some level of risk in doing so.
The only case where I can see taxation having any success is when a company facilitates it in a direct way. So, if I can cash money out of the game directly, you might very well be forced to pay a tax in the same way you are forced to pay a tax when you get a paycheck from work.
That said, that sort of transaction where a legitimate business is facilitating a cash transfer is pretty rare. The real money trading hands in MMORPG economies is almost exclusively person to person transaction, non-legal companies, or legal companies outside of the US. In all of those cases you are about as likely to get a drug dealer to voluntary tax report his taxes as you are to get some guy working over e-bay to report his income.
The only reason I can think of to voluntarily report MMORPG income is if you are making so much that it makes up a substantial part of your income. In that case, you might report some fraction of it just to avoid looking like a drug dealer.
I expect the vast majority of people to simply ignore any efforts to improve taxation about as easily as they ignore laws against a few guys playing poker on Friday night and smoking small quantities of marijuana. Yeah, those activities are illegal if you are caught, but unless you are running an underground casino or smuggling pounds of drugs, no one really cares and the penalties for being caught are a slap on the wrist.
Did you know that the original plan for the US/NATO defense of Western Germany did NOT call for nuclear weapons? Why? We didn't want to start trading nukes with the Soviet Union. It was hoped that the fear of nukes would keep any East/West German war "limited" in scope.
This brings us to the first danger of a nuclear armed North Korea. North Korea could see nuclear power as its license to conduct military operations. With a nuclear missile held over the head of a few million Japanese, the US would have to think very long and very hard about involving itself with a militant North Korea. The math might very well involve giving concessions to North Korea rather then losing a few million very close and very dear allies. The US would be VERY hard pressed to ignore the demands of Japan in dealing with North Korea. Nuclear weapons make very effective blackmail for anyone willing to play that game.
Funny enough, the Soviet invasion plan called for the use of tactical nukes which almost certainly would have been met in kind. Another story from the Cold War is from right before it ended. The Soviet knew that they were fucked. They had two options. They could either surrender like they historically did, or launch an invasion of Western Germany and a desperate and futile attempt to keep pushing forward. The planned invasion of Western Germany was basically a suicide pact. There was no hope of defeating NATO. At best, they could hope for a draw... and by draw I mean nukes get fired and every is dead. Thankfully, cooler minds won out and we got our slightly less authoritarian Russia of today.
This brings us to a second and very real danger of a nuclear armed North Korea. North Korea is run by a fanatical cult of personality. The brainwashing going on in North Korea makes the days of Mao and Stalin look like happy fun time. A North Korea that is internally collapsing could very well do something stupid if the wrong military leader decides he would rather go in a blaze of glory then follow the path that Russia went down. It doesn't even need to be a high level leader. One idiot in command of a bank of artillery pointed at Seoul could launch enough chemical weapons to turn Seoul into a wasteland and provoke a South Korean response that would surely provoke the rest of the North Korean military. In such an encounter, it would be far better to only have to deal with chemical weapons then it would be to throw nuclear weapons into the mix.
Simply put, a nuclear armed North Korea is a bad thing for all parties and should be avoided at all costs. This is a nation that has managed to kill over 10% of its population in the past decade. These are not cool rational thinkers. These are not people you want splitting atoms.
Try using the whole quote.
"develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries"
This is what the government SHOULD be doing. Defense agencies should always be "developing capabilities, plans, and options" for every single possible threat. That doesn't mean we need to build a space cruiser, but that does mean that having a plan to build one is not a bad idea. Hell, having a plan to invade Canada on hand is a good idea. Expecting and being prepared for the unexpected is what intelligence and defense agencies are there for.
I very much want my government to have a plan to deny space to whomever might need space denied to them. Sure, there are no enemies right now that demand such a wasteful and expensive capability, but it does not take a lot of imagination to envision a future where it might be prudent. Russia is one government change away from getting a hardline nationalist who feels nostalgic about the Cold War. China is one tiny democratic island (Taiwan) away from all out war with the US. North Korea... well fuck... who knows what they are thinking, but having something that can knock down their ICBMs on the drawing board is not a bad idea.
Look, I would agree that this is an overreaction if it said, "Make me some god damn space battle cruisers! Muhahahahaha!" But it doesn't. It directs that the government should plan to conduct military operations in space because it isn't an insane fear that some day in an unforeseen future those plans might be needed.
Crap like this makes me hate politics. Arguing against anti or pro Bush zombie is almost a waste of time. The polarization of the nation is nauseating. Nothing is more sickening then the nation getting duped into believing that there are exactly two sides to an issue and that "their" side always shares there opinion while the "enemy" is always wrong and blatantly evil. You would think people would get suspicious when every single election comes down to the wire and it seems like the population has magically split 50/50 into idiots and people who know what is going on. If you truly and honestly believe that Bush is 100% evil or a 100% right, you can count yourself among the dupes of the world that has let political parties chop of the population into two equal halves. That said, let's look at your "arguments".
1. Bush is putting nukes in space, after proving he can't do anything right, which makes him do more. All dangerous. Now upping the ante to space nukes. Insane.
I don't even know where to begin. First, Bush is not putting nuclear weapons up in space. As the previous poster stated, and you conveniently ignored, putting nukes in space serves no purpose. We have a few thousand ICBMs that can do the job just fine, not to mention a few dozen subs if you need it done even quicker. You can't even produce a reason for "Bush" (like Bush is the only person making decisions... I bet you think Bush wrote this policy paper personally, don't you?) wanting nuclear weapons up in space. I suppose you do try and justify it with the sentences, "All dangerous." and "Insane."
2. Bush specifically said in that policy that we should use nukes to put weapons in space. Of course that's his #1 priority.
Pull out a quote and prove to me this point. Otherwise your belief that Bush said "put nukes in space" comes from poor reading comprehension skills or self delusionment. I personally suspect later. Bush stated in the new policy gives a green light to considering putting nuclear reactors in space that might have violated the old test ban treaties. That is it.
Everyone knows he hates science, that he put a Republican flack to work censoring "big bang" science because it reinforced evolution science rather than Creationism.
Again, you are an idiot if you think that the 24 year old that was appointed to the PR job in NASA was appointed by Bush. That ranks right up there with thinking that Ronald McDonald hires every single burger flipper. Far more likely, some Republican page asked for a job after serving a senator or working on campaigning and got one. After it turned out that he was an idiot, he was sacked. No, it wasn't Bush's evil plan to destroy NASA. If Bush wanted to do that I imagine he would stop giving them money instead of boosting their funding. At best, you can call it a failure of hiring oversight. Judging by some of the jackasses I work with, it is a pretty universal problem.
3. "We" are only a long way from worrying about space combat because you are in denial of the apocalyptic dreams Bush pursues at every chance.
Of for fuck's sake. Bush is not the devil in disguise who spends his nights dreaming up ways to end the world. If you really believe that Bush is the embodiment of evil and is here for your soul, it makes any sort of rational conversation pretty much pointless. I think I would have an easier time convincing the Pope that there is no God... and I imagine even he would listen better then you do.
4. The Rumsfeld "issue"? That berzerk loser is unfit to command a garbage scow, and you're calling him an "issue"? Rumsfeld has been putting nukes on US missiles for years, changing our policy to "preemptive strike" even while bathing in the blood of that strategy's Iraq failure.
OMFG, he has been putting nukes on missiles for years? Wow. I bet that makes him the first secretary of defense to oversee the continued maintenance of the US nuclear stock pile. The US nuclear arsenal has shrunk
Countries like the US and other powerful nations have nuclear weapons as well, I don't see why North Korea should not get a piece of it.
Because "the US and other powerful nations" have stable governments that won't fire the weapons. North Korea does not. Because "the US and other powerful nations" cares about its citizens enough to not blatantly kill them by the millions. North Korea does not.
When we talk about North Korea we are talking about a nation that has managed to kill of 10% of its fucking population in under a decade. They test chemical weapons on humans. If you want a hell on Earth, you couldn't point to a nation closer to achieving it. To top it all off, it isn't like this is a stable nation. This is a nation that is basically run by military gangsters with a cult of personality figurehead. You couldn't point a nation in this world that giving nukes to is a bad idea even if you tried.
You would be better off to simply give nuclear weapons to the mob... though I suppose you think that the mob has the "right" to nuclear weapons to. The only thing that separates North Korea from every other horrible criminal organization in the world is that North Korea inflicts far more suffering are more people and control enough territory that we recognize them as a nation.
No fucked up sense of justice justifies letting North Korea have nukes. The rest of the world is and rightfully should be doing everything in their power from keeping this insane dictatorship from swinging around more power then it already does.
Thousands dead? That puts dieing in war right up there with drowning (~4000) and well below falling (~14,000). Yeah, the world is a real scary place.
As for this whole confrontation thing... last time I checked the Soviet Union had collapsed and a few dozen Eastern European and Asian nations were getting to know the joys of fun shit like not being executed for voicing disapproval of government policy.
There is nothing but bitching and moaning about the US. Once in a while it would be nice if someone was like "Hey US, thanks for sticking your shit into World War II and sticking with us during the Korean War and Cold War. We really like how you outspent the Soviets and the Germans and threw your sons into battle so that the rest of us could see what nationalized health care is like. Hey, you guys fuck up from time to time do to your lack of omnipotence, but in the end we are glad that you are around. Hey, the next round of drink is on us. P.S. Your beer sucks, be we still love you."
Jesus fucking Christ, the US is not the boogy man looking to eat you.
It doesn't matter. What North Korea does have is the worlds biggest arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and the capital of South Korea in artillery range. To top it off, they have a tens of millions of Japanese in missile range. Nukes are just frosting at this point. A North Korea on a rampage is a few tens of million of allies dead within a few hours.
If anything, this nuke thing is GOOD for the rest of the world. A nuclear armed North Korea is not that much more of a danger then it already it is, but it might be just the thing to send a swift kick in the ass of China. A swift kick in China's ass might get them to take better care of their rabid dog.
North Korea is armed to the teeth with chemical weapons. Any invasion into North Korea is a quick way to turn all the cities within artillery range of North Korea into dead zones. North Korea also has a vast array of short and mid range missiles that will also certainly hit your capital and any major city. In the first hour of any North Korean war, sure as shit, Seoul will be wiped out and Tokyo will be short a few million people.
China wants a North Korea it can control. China doesn't mind North Korea being a pain in the ass for the US and Japan from time to time. What China does mind is a nuclear/chemical/biological war in its back yard, and it minds a few million starving North Koreans throwing themselves at the border trying to escape. China wants a stable North Korea that occasionally acts up.
That said, what North Korea is doing is NOT what China wants. China is probably going to respond, but no one is going to take military action. Military action is not going to bring down North Korea unless a North Korean leader goes (more) insane and starts something. Otherwise, North Korea is going to collapse in an internal military coup. The only thing the rest of the world can do until that day is keep North Korea from making any trouble until then... which is exactly what everyone is trying to do.
There will be no 'regime change' in North Korea except the kind that comes quasi-internally. The US will not invade, and it certainly will not wipe NK off the face of the earth with nukes. It is stupid beyond comprehension to suggest doing so; here is why.
First, North Korea's power has not changed. If you think it has, you don't understand the military capability of North Korea. True, North Korea might now have a nuke, but infant sized nukes are pocket change compared to what already has. North Korea already has a MASSIVE chemical and biological weapons supply. In fact, I would not be terribly surprised if they actually have better chemical/biological then anyone else in the world. Technical skill helps, but having live human documented live human dissidents to test on in the most cruel and inhuman ways possible can make up for skill. The simple truth is that NK already has the capacity to wipe out entire cities. A few low yield nukes is not going to change anything.
Second, forget the thousands of missiles chemical weapon armed missiles aimed at South Korea and Japan; Seoul (that would be the capital for South Korea for anyone not keeping track) is in artillery range of North Korea. The second war broke out the capital of South Korea would be an inhabitable wasteland. Japan would also be hurting more then a little as chemical and biological armed missiles rain down on Tokyo. While I doubt that North Korea could effectively hit the US, it might even be able to get a few missiles all the way to the US armed with chemical weapons. Sure, they would not do any real damage compared to what South Korea and Japan would feel, but it would certainly sting.
At the end of the day, the US could put North Korea out of action if it decided it didn't have any compunctions about slaughtering North Korean civilians in the millions with nuclear weapons. That still would not change the fact that South Korea would be a wasteland and Japan would be missing a few cities. The losses to allies would reach well into the millions, and that says nothing of the poor civilian North Korean bastards whose lives some how managed to get worse.
The entire concept of striking North Korea is stupid and never going to happen. If we did, the South Korea and Japan would rightfully become mortal enemies of the US. Hell, any self respecting nation would inflict retribution on the US. Sure, no one would be stupid enough to attack the US for the loss of millions of allied lives, but you can bet your ass that the economic retribution exacted by the rest of the world would make the cost of a war look like pittance.
I don't know what the proper strategy for dealing with North Korea is. I don't know if it is better to isolate and starve the nation in the hopes that someone internally gets fed up enough to launch a coup, or if it is better to negotiate for stability. Whatever the case, a preemptive military invasion is rightfully not considered so long as Japan and South Korea are considered close allies whose civilian populations we don't want to see massacred. Thankfully, say what you will of Bush, he (or at least the military minds in charge) clearly also recognizes that an assault on a weapon bristiling with chemical and biological weapons a stone's throw away from two close allies is stupid beyond comprehension.
No, actually you cant. Currently the courts consider that outside 'protected' speech.
No, that simply is not true. Almost all speech in the US is legal. It is REALLY hard to cross the line. The only way they can put you away is if you are inciting an imminent crime. If you tell your lover to go kill your husband, you could get in trouble, anything short of that and you are safe.
The Folly case is a good example of this. Folly pretty blatantly is hitting on some underage kids (by Florida age of consent laws, not DC) in the e-mails that have been released to date. While he is in trouble in congress for ethical violations, he isn't in any legal trouble yet. In order to nail Folly with a crime, he has to do more then be a sketchy bastard. He has to be taking blatant active steps to get a kid to go have sex with him before he is in any sort of legal trouble. So, he can legally tell a 15 year old buy that he wants to ram him in the ass all night long, but that isn't illegal. He needs to tell a 15 year old boy to come to his house so that they can have sex in order to get into trouble.
I am not saying that the US is the most liberal democracy in the world. However, when it comes to free speech laws, the US is the most liberal nation in the world. Hate speech is a-okay unless you are advocating an imminent crime. Slander and libel are close to impossible prosecute, and against public figures it is almost literally impossible.
The only three possible exceptions I can think of that US has in its free speech laws are copyright violations, campaign contribution spending limits, and limits on holding multiple demonstrations in the same area. If you toss copyright into the real of free speech you could make the argument that the US could be more liberal in its speech laws, but even then copyright violations are civil violations that you can not go to jail for. The only other 'liberal' loophole is campaign donations. There is a limit to donations to campaigns and you could argue that this is inhibiting free speech, though even in that regards the US would still be considered more liberal then most of Europe. Finally, the US does prevent rival demonstrations from being held in the same area. A pile of bible nuts can't march around a gay pride parade telling them that they are going to be damned to hell, and a pile of democrats can't start shouting and waving signs during a Republican rally.
If you want to march around the White House with a BUSH IS A FUCKING NAZI SIGN and then cover the sign with swastikas, you can, and people do. The secret service will probably watch you like a hawk, but so long as you don't do anything stupid like block traffic, you will be fine. I have been to gay pride rallies with bible nuts next door waving signs about everyone being damned to hell, and to anti-KKK counter rallies next to a bunch of sad sack of shit "white power" rallies. Really, there are a lot of things to trash the US on, but free speech limits isn't one of them.
I could see a Klingon movie in Klingon being pretty nifty. I mean hell, even Shakespeare sounds best in its original Klingon.
No, I imagine the AI will happily ignore such threats. I doubt the AI is looking for "kill the infidels!" I imagine that it is far more interested in exploding airplanes and embassies. If the British embassy in France, India, and Germany blow up with a few minutes of each other, the AI should be going nuts to warn its operator that someone ought to send a pile of men with guns to the British embassy in the US to protect it. The same goes for if a US airliner goes down over Sweden, Brazil, and Japan within a few minutes of each other, the AI should be screaming warnings that something is up.
The idea isn't so much to get intelligence that they couldn't get the old fashion way, it is to get that intelligence faster in the hopes of stopping something bad in action.
True, terrorist do not report themselves in the news, but if a bomb goes off in British embassies in Pakistan, Indian, and Indonesia, having an AI freaking out and calling attention to it within seconds or minutes might save the British embassy in the US. All nations of the world already monitor newspapers from around the world. The advantage that an AI has is that it can send up warning signals faster then a human operator might. In the case of embassies exploding, learning what is going on 10 minutes faster might be all it takes to take preventative action.
I can think of lots of scenarios where learning that something is up a few minutes faster could save lives.
Eh... is anyone REALLY woried about the US government reading press from around the world? I mean... once you sell something on the street or post it to the web you kind of assume that everyone can read it.
I have a feeling that what this program really is doing is looking for "major events" as fast as possible. So, if a news agency reports in London that an airplane just blew up, an AI in the US shouts out a warning to its operator. This way, events that might signal something for the US worry about are brought to light within minutes instead of hours. In the case of an airplane blowing up in the UK, it might signal that a larger operation was on to blow up American airplanes as well. This way, you can start assessing the threat right away and decide if anything should be done.
Such a program could also act as a political heads up. If a Pakistani papers is reporting that a coo is in progress, that is a damn nice thing to know ASAP so that you can decide how to deal with a nuclear armed nation with a collapsing government.
I am sure that the US has piles of people already scanning newspapers from around the world, I imagine that this AI is simply an attempt to cut delays down from hours to minutes.
"Health insurance" is a misnomer. There are no nations in the world with "health insurance". There are nations with socialized medicine (Europe) and nations with a quasi-market based medical payment plans. I don't think that socialized medicine needs much explanation. The particulars vary, but socialized medicine boils down to that the government redistributes wealth it gets from taxation into government controlled health plans. The American system is much more strange and really is an artifact that unions created.
Basically, in the US you get health insurance from your employer. Further, it isn't health insurance, it is a medical payment plan. Insurance is something you take out incase something unexpected happens. Health insurance in the US is something you get not only for unexpected medical bills, but also expected medical bills (like drugs, regular doctor visits, ect.). Think of it as a quasi-socialist, quasi-market based program.
Now, if insurance had been left to its own market based devices as most things in the US are, the system would look very different from what it does today. You would still buy health insurance, but you would buy it for the same reason you buy car insurance. You don't buy car insurance knowing that you are going to wreck your car. You buy it in case you wreck your car. In the same way, you would buy insurance incase you need a major operation, not to pay for your drugs or regular doctor visits.
If the laws were different, the market would look very different. People in good health would likely pay dramatically less then what they do now. The drugs that they would need would be open to market competition and so would have lower prices. Healthy people would be much better off (pocket book wise at least). People who get catastrophically ill would also be perfectly fine in a market based system. They would have insurance that would kick in when they need a double bypass or a new organ. The people would be in trouble would be people with chronic conditions with expensive treatment. The US would almost certainly need some sort of socialized medical program to take care of such people.
Basically, the reason why healthcare in the US is neither market based nor socialized is because of Union laws. Laws were written in place to force employers to be the primary providers of health insurance. This gave unions another bargaining chip in negotiations and "solved" the healthcare issues at the time. Today it is pretty obvious the flaws in this system. The problem is that Americans are very resistant to socializing medicine simply because they don't trust socialism, and at the same time they have the idea that healthcare is something that you get for "free" through an employer very strongly ingrained in their head. Neither a market based solution nor a socialized social are politically viable in the US... hence you get the current mess where we stick with a bad system that is the worst of both worlds.
Personally, I think that the benefits to be gained from spying on your kids using loggers is pretty small compared to the potential price you are going to pay. Think of it this way, if you were to go and try and tail your kids whenever they left the house, how do you think they would respond? How would you kids respond if they walked in on you reading their journal?
You take a risk when you spy on your kid in such an intrusive manner. Whatever evils you might catch them doing is nothing compared to the kinds of evils that you will provoke them into by showing such deep mistrust. It is far better to have something close to a harmonious relationship then to try and control and monitor your kids actions. You need to set rules, but you are delusional if you think that you can enforce the rules without your kid's consent.
Now, I am not saying that kids don't need (to quote the Dog Whisperer) rules, boundaries, and limitations. They do. What I am saying is that those rules and boundaries are not there to keep them from doing bad or destructive things. If your kid wants to go out and be destructive against others or against themselves, there is little you can do to stop a determined youth. The rules and boundaries that and adult sets up are there to teach the kids not to do bad or destructive things.
So, could online monitoring catch your kid watching porn or acting like a jackass on AIM? Sure, but realize that in the process you are pretty flatly declaring your complete lack of trust in your child and setting up an antagonistic relationship that your child. I personally would rather my kid sneak in a little porn while I am away then sneak out at night to get away from what he sees as a malevolent dictator who has no trust in him.
The use this would have would be on a purely troop level sort of thing. You might throw one to see what is on the other side of some trees or a hill. You would hide it so that the enemy doesn't instantly spot where it is coming from and infer that soldiers are also there. Being harder to see, it is also resistant against being shot down by visual means. Does this thing show up like a big blip on radar? Probably, but what would the enemy do in response? Shoot a multi-thousand dollar SAM at a 100 dollar toy? If an enemy wants to give away its AAA defense locations shooting at cheap drones, more power to them.
All of that said, I doubt this thing will be much of a hit. You can make smaller drones with more payloads that are probably quieter using cheaper more conventional techniques. If I were a soldier, I would much rather have a drone that can move to a location faster and get a GPS coordinate on a target for a mortar/air/artillery strike. A little extra visual 'stealth' that is probably lost in increased noise isn't a big concern. If a skill shot manages to knock out a drone with a visually aimed weapon... well, if there is something the US army doesn't lack, it is more toys then the enemy has bullets.