You don't need 60% for democratic change. In the US with voter turnout rates of under 50%, you need less then 25% of the population that can vote to take over the government. If you can't muster a simple 25% of the voting population, I am pretty damn sure that you are not going to "break the back" of the government with protests. If you can't muster enough to even register in an election against Republicans or Democrats (pick your evil/stupid party of choice), I am pretty damn certain that your street protests will be crushed by the people in power who have managed to convince at least some noticeable percentage of the population that it is worth their time to at least get off their asses and vote.
Protests are a stupid way to enact a revolution in the government in a liberal democracy like the US. Just vote for someone else. It takes a single day of your time and doesn't involve facing down police or (perhaps more dangerously) commuters pissed off that you are walking in the road with angrily written signs.
Hell, you don't even need 25% of the voting population. If you pirate evenly from Democrats and Republicans you need a paltry 13% of the entire voting population to win. If you can't muster that, it is probably time to rethink the revolution.
Why does the victim have to be 12, and why a girl? You're setting up a straw man.
Why 12 years old and why a girl? Because it is an extreme example of the law that designed specifically provoke people into thinking through the whole implication of shield laws. 12 year old girls getting raped tends to be produce deep disgusted and a complete lack of sympathy in most people, while burning a cop car really doesn't result in all that many tears for most. The point isn't to change anyone's mind, but to make people think through the full implications of the argument that the media should not have to hand over evidence of a crime. In this case the crime isn't "that bad" for most people. The question becomes how "bad" does a crime have to be before people change their minds that perhaps the media doesn't deserve infinite power to withhold evidence of a crime.
The argument isn't a "straw man" argument. It is the natural application of the law that people are advocating. The question is simple. Is it okay for the media to withhold evidence of a crime simply because they are media? Can the media withhold evidence of arson against the state as in this case? What if it was arson committed by the police against the protesters cars? Can they withhold evidence of assault? Can they withhold evidence of manslaughter? What about rape and murder? What exactly is the line that we are supposed to draw with shield laws? These are not "straw man" arguments. This is the natural line of thinking you need to take in a world where anyone can be media.
How much shielding does the media deserve in a world where anyone can be media? Do they received infinite shielding, or some limited shielding only for certain crimes?
The US is still a democracy. Revolutions are simple. Get more then 50% of the vote. Get more then 2/3 the vote and you can completely rewrite the government to whatever you damn well please.
I always find the notion that the US needs a new "revolution" laughable. The US has a functional system already in place to allow revolution. Believe me, getting a 50% or even 2/3 majority is a hell of a lot easier then trying armed rebellion or even a drawn out peaceful demonstration. The issue in the United States is not the oppressed masses. The issue in the United States is the indifferent masses.
If you can't get the average American off their lazy ass to spend a single hour of their time to vote for a candidate, you can pretty much rest assured that you won't get them off their lazy asses for any sort of "revolution", peaceful or otherwise.
Hell, you don't even need to get 2/3 or 50% of the population to vote in your favor. You need to get 2/3 of the VOTING population to vote for you. If you optimistically assume that 50% of Americans who can vote do vote, that means that you need only 25% of the population that can vote to take control of the government. With a paltry 33% of the people who can vote voting in your favor, you can completely rewrite the government and constitution.
Americans don't need a "revolution". They need to get off their lazy asses and vote if they don't like what they see.
This guy has evidence of a crime. Now, in this case it is a crime against the state so people are not terrible sympathetic. Not being sympathetic with the state is as American as guns and apple pie, but people are talking a guy being jailed for not exposing a crime against the state like it is some high moral battle.
What if the role was reversed? What if some pro-police blogger had a video up of protesters getting the shit kicked out of them by police? What if the Rodney King beating had been posted online with the identities of the police officers edited out on a blog? Would we still then be so adamant that a media shield is the best thing?
What if this guy had received a tape of a 12 year old girl getting raped, edited out the rapist, and then posted it onto his blog. Would people still be so adamant that he deserves some sort of media shield?
I think that people are applying the "common sense" test instead of really thinking through the implications of media shield laws, especially in a world where everyone can be the media. It is "common sense" that he would have to give up a video of a little girl getting raped, but not "common sense" that he has to give up a video of a police car being destroyed.
I like the idea of media shield laws to some extent. The press absolutely is an invaluable tool in the regulation of democracy. That said, there needs to be a coherent and consistent approach to such shield laws.
For those who believe that this man is being jailed unfairly, what do you propose the law be? Should the media never be forced to give up evidence of a crime, even in extreme cases like rape and murder? Should some crimes be protected by media shield laws and others not protected?
I don't hang up on people, though I have been hung up on. I was once introducing myself and then somebody started talking over me and said "I'm not interested in donating any money." Before I could tell her I'm only doing polling--which, sincerely, I am--she'd hung up on me. Who's the asshole, here? The asshole who is asking Americans about their political beliefs or the asshole who's hanging up on somebody without letting the other person finish? It's no skin off my back. If someone tells me they don't vote, I'll thank them for their time and get off the phone.
I do hang up on telemarketers in the middle of their sentences (political or otherwise) often, let me share why. When I call someone for anything, I let them answer the phone, and then a give a very brief one or two sentence reason why I am calling. This is polite. You don't spend a minute talking the second someone picks up the phone and says hello. You have called ME. You are wasting MY time. If you try and shove your message down my throat with a minute long opening speech, I am just going to hang up. If you BRIEFLY tell me what the hell it is you want, I am far more inclined to stay on the line.
Further, should I decide that I really am not in the mood to deal with a telemarketer, I will merrily just say "not interested" in the middle of their little speech and hang up. I do this because I have learned that it is utterly impossible to interrupt these people without screaming, and saying "not interested" will ALWAYS result in a failure to end the conversation.
Finally, the reason why I tend to always hang up is because telemarketers, especially political telemarketers have absolutely no information of value to give. If I wanted to hear a one sided report on your candidate, I would go read your candidates website. Personally, I don't want to be "informed" about you, by you. What I want is to see the candidates present their ideas then directly rebut their opponents ideas in a debate format. Throw up a full clip or MP3 of a debate your candidate had with the opponent, and I will happily listen.
Start a conversation over the phone with me by saying something inane like, "Did you know that the Senator So and So is being paid off by big oi..." *click*
It looks like AOL read the comments from Slashdotters saying that 950 employees do not constitute a 'massive' layoff. Several news sites are reporting that AOL is getting ready to cut 5,000 jobs...
I wonder if this works for other things...
One year delay in Vista a "small" delay? Hell, back in my day when the Duke Nukem Forever team said small delay they meant it would only be a few more decades!
The complaints are coming, so let me just preempt them. Yes, money should be spent on feeding people. Yes, they need food, water, and medical care first and foremost. The problem is that the basic necessities of life are not enough.
The rich nations of the world could divert massive portions of their GDP to feed the impoverished world. Even if you could political find the will to do this, it would solve nothing. Poverty is a symptom of a much larger problem. The core of the problem lies in education. If they can be educated, they can save themselves. Hence, things like cheap Wi-fi while certainly is not a silver bullet, it at least begins to pick away at the problem.
Education is the key. With education and access to information other problems can start be solved. Good democratic governance absolutely demands an education population that is able to vote outside of tribal ties. Educated leaders are need to tackle both social and economic problems, and not just in government, but in business as well. The core of a functional democratic government is an educated population. We can feed the impoverished nations of the world from now until the end of time, but until educated leaders step up they will remain impoverished.
So yes to those that will surely complain about this "waste" of money, these people need food and clean water. Food and water is not the cure though. Education, information, a fiscal boost once good governance is in place are the solution. Throwing money at the worlds poor just to feed them is like pumping blood into a man with a severed artery; the problem isn't that he is running out of blood, the problem is that he has a severed artery.
There is a complex relationship going on between Apple, media companies, and DRM. Apple and media companies are both "winning" with DRM. They battle between Apple and the media companies is not if DRM is good or bad, but what form that DRM will be.
Media companies like DRM for obvious reasons - they feel that it slows down piracy. To a media company, the ultimate form of DRM would be one which is pirate proof and that works in all devices.
Apple has a slightly different objective. For Apple, DRM is useful for locking people into their proprietary hardware (iPods) and their media delivery mechanism (iTunes). To Apple owns a monopoly share of the MP3 player and legal online music delivery market (~80%). They want DRM that will help keep their monopoly share of the market. For them, they want a DRM that is unobtrusive on their own products, but which is utterly unworkable on other products. Further, they want their products incompatible with other music services. Apple has done exactly this. If you buy from iTunes, you can only use an iPod on your MP3 player. If you have an iPod, you can only download music online legally from iTunes or places selling raw MP3 files. Seeing as how the media companies all but demand DRM, raw MP3 files are rare (legally) from online services.
The idea is simple, once you are locked into Apple, their DRM keeps you there. You can't use Rhapsody or Napster which offer competing services and pricing alternatives (notably, they have all you can eat subscriptions) because the iPod only uses Apple DRM. Rhapsody and Napster can't sell using Apple DRMed music because Apple won't let them. Further, once you start buying from iTunes to fill your iPod, you are locking yourself into the iPod. Your Apple DRMed files won't work in your Creative Zen, so once you have a large collection of Apple DRMed music, you need to give up a hunk of your music collection to leave the iPod. Apple has you locked into both their hardware AND their music service via their DRM.
The interesting companies to watch will be Napster, Yahoo! Music, and Rhapsody. Those are three companies that desperately want a piece of Apple's pie. They can't offer their services to iPod users which make up the majority of the market so long as Apple refuses to let them use Apple DRM and the music companies refuse to let them sell DRM free music. They are being squeezed by Apple on one side and the music companies on the other side. Look to them to try and make some sort of move against DRM, as they have the most to lose from it.
Yahoo! Music in particular has already tried to float some DRM free music in an attempt to show its viability to music companies. Rhapsody on the other hand has reversed engineered Apple's DRM and is actively looking for a chink in Apple's DRM armor.
No, Apple really is built upon cosmetic appeal, marketing, marketing, and more marketing. You can pretty much rest assure that in 10 years (or less) Apple's come back is going to be required reading for anyone even vaguely interested in studying marketing.
I am not saying that Apple doesn't make good products, nor am I saying that Microsoft does. I am saying that Apple capitalized on a product that was workable through cosmetic appeal, marketing, marketing, and more marketing. It isn't like Apple is the only mp3 maker out there.
Hell, they don't even offer the best product for many users. I would argue that my creative Zen Vision M and all you can eat Rhapsody combination beats the piss out of Apple and iTunes. I have an MP3 player filled with 30 gigs of legal music for 15$ / month. That would cost me a solid $7,500 with iTunes or a large chunk of time and effort pirating. That might not be the best deal for you or someone else, but surely there is a market that would find that to be a swell idea. Despite this, iPod dominate. Yes, that scroll wheel is a nifty feature, but that is the extent of the non-cosmetic innovations on it; despite this, it owns a solid 80% of the market.
My mother decided to buy an MP3 player for my little brother. She is utterly computer illiterate and didn't bother asking anyone for help in selecting an MP3 player. She of course went right over to the iPod. She didn't even realize that other types of MP3 players existed. Hell, she didn't even know what the term "MP3 player" meant, much less that an iPod was one and that many other types existed. This is the sort of marketing domination that iPod currently has. Every idiot knows what an iPod is and what it does, but your average non-geek will struggle to tell you even a brand name of another MP3 player. The iPod marketing domination is absolute.
So, do I credit Apple's engineers for a slick product? Hell yes. They have done some awesome stuff. Do I credit their cosmetic design team for making a pretty product? Absolutely. However, the real masters of the show are the marketers and the geniuses behind their marketing campaign. They took a product that might or might not have made it on its own and collected a monopoly sized share of the market. Those guys are fucking Jedi Knights.
Well, if our soldiers can use a $20 million helicopter to watch people having sex, then I don't see why other government employees (teachers, officeholders, etc) shouldn't be allowed to use their $1000 office PC to watch porn while on the job. After all, they are only human.
What makes you think they don't? I am not saying that the soldiers shouldn't be punished, just that I don't think it is a damning revelation to find out that 20 year old kids with thermal imaging devices act like 20 year old kids. The revelation that kids with toys play with them doesn't warp my concept of reality and leave me disgusted with the army. The is true with police officers and teachers that like to close the doors to the offices and watch porn on school computers. I don't think they should be doing it, but it doesn't really have much barring on my opinion of them in general.
Hell, I might even refuse to do it. Unless there is an actual invasion of my homeland going on, I'll stick to jobs that don't require me to carry out mass murder. Trumped up wars started on highly dubious grounds aren't worthing losing my soul over.
Your refusal to carry out a mission because you don't see the immediate utility in it would make you a very bad soldier. Part of being a soldier is killing people. Some times you might very well be kill utterly innocent people. Other times you might be killing mass murders. Unless you are privy to the intelligence that led up to the decision to commit violence, you really have no way of making that determination while you are circling around at a few thousand feet strapped to a pile of guns and explosives.
I am not saying that your attitude is bad, just that it doesn't make for an even vaguely worthwhile soldier.
The trick isn't to train better killers, so much as to find ways of dealing with the world that don't require lots of trained killers.
Like it or not, the world has killers in it. It has had killers in it since before humans were walking up right all the way to this very day. People have been willing to kill other people for countless reasons for the entirety of human history. One nation laying down its arms isn't going to make the killers go away. So long as two people want the same piece of land or one person wants to impose a government or ideology on another person who doesn't want it, there will be violence. The best you can do is work things out diplomatically when you can, and have guns and killers willing to use them for when you can't.
That said, if you know a way to make all of the people in Iraq or Afghanistan happy, please, enlighten us. Maybe we should have just talked Hitler out of World War II, or used naughty language to repulse the North Korean invasion of South Korea, or strongly condemned the genocide in Yugoslavia. Some how though, I think the answer to all of those problems was violence.
WTF would you do if you had a thermal imaging sensor and saw a couple having sex in a car? Maybe I am a bad human, but I would probably watch and laugh with a few guys. 20 years old laughing at sex... how surprising. Soldiers are still human. They still do stupid shit to entertain themselves.
As far as turning slaughtering people into a joke, that is a coping mechanism. An order comes in that some Taliban military leaders are meeting at a certain location. You are the gunner who is ordered to take them out. You very well could have bad intel or the wrong target. You could be gunning down completely innocent civilians. You could also be gunning down people responsible for countless deaths. As a soldier you really can't tell. This is what makes insurgency wars ugly.
If you are going to have to gun down people (regardless if they truly are villains or not) in cold blood, you might be surprised what sorts of coping mechanisms you develop. You might be the grim face of death, you might find yourself weeping and shaking uncontrollably, you might black the whole thing out after it is done, or you might dehumanize your enemy and pretend it is some sick video game.
I wouldn't judge the military to harshly. These are kids, most of whom are too young to legally drink who have been brainwashed out of necessity to be remorseless killers. If they can't kill other humans without hesitation, they are likely to find themselves with their brains leaking on a dirt road in some backwater nation. Unless you know of a better way to train killers, this is the way it has to be.
I doubt it. They are posting this shit as recruiting material... not as a message about how ugly war is. Further, war will never go away so long as there are governments. Governments impose their will with force. Even the most shining democracy imposes its will by force. Some times the only way to respond to force is with force. Some times there is nothing diplomacy can do. Until the entire world lives under 'enlightened' governments that share roughly a similar ideology, war is just going to be a fact of life. The best you can hope for is to make it a last resort.
Corporations *should* have a social responsibility and conscience.
Let me rewrite that for you.
Corporations *should* have a nationalistic responsibility and conscience.
When a corporation outsources, the US might very well have some lost jobs. Whether or not those jobs are made up somewhere else is debatable, but what is not debatable is that somewhere someone much poorer then an American scores a job. If corporations are trying to be "socially responsible", outsourcing makes complete sense. Outsourcing to a third world nation ensures that the poorest and neediest are given the chance to earn some income and bring up a deeply impoverished area.
What you are really complaining about is nationalism. Giving a tech support job to someone in India doesn't hurt India. It improves India. You can keep a handful of Indian workers living on sustainable wages for the cost of a single American worker. The only way you can possibly believe that the greater good has been harmed is if you are talking about the greater American good. If you are talking about the greater American good, you are not talking about "social responsibility and conscience", you are talking about nationalistic responsibility and conscience.
Big brother is not controlling your life. You can basically do and say what you want these days without any worry that anyone gives a shit. That goes double and triple if you live in New York. The best you can say is that Big Brother is watching you. Big Brother is paranoid because we live in a time when a handful of nuts can kill tens of thousands.
Iraq is a perfect example. The number of fighters compared to the number of civilians is a very small ratio. Despite this, a handful of fighters have been able to kill tens of thousands. Further, these fighters are not even a formal army, just a bunch of poor Joe Nobodies with access to explosives. The fighters in Iraq are hardly the worst that can happen. In Iraqi fighters have not yet armed themselves with truly horrific weapons like the infamous "WMDs".
My guess is that the US government (and many other governments) are terrified that someone is going to get a hold of a real weapon and employ it. The consequences of a nuclear bomb going off in New York are too horrific to even contemplate. Forget the lives lost (which would be in the tens or hundreds of millions), but the economic and political impact would be world shattering.
Even if the US didn't respond to a nuclear attack militarily, the economic damage would be almost immeasurable. The economic damage would not just send the US into a deep depression, but it would drag the entire world with it. We are talking about Great Depression style depression that hits every corner of the Earth. The damage to the economies could take decades to repair, massively cut life expectancy all around the world, and in general do very bad things.
That isn't even the worst of it.
The US wouldn't take the nuking of New York kindly. Nukes would reign down somewhere else in the world - sure as shit. US troops would invade, the draft would be called up, and the world remember what it was like when nations fought total war where civilian casualties meant absolutely nothing. No laser targeted bombs and silk gloves trying to put nations back together. We are talking about B-52's carpet bombing cities flat so that when troops move in there is nothing over 3 feet tall to hide behind. It doesn't matter who is the president at the time. The US will scream out for blood and no US president, democrat or republican, will deny them.
The Western world is in a tough spot and I am sympathetic with their concerns, even if I am leery about their methods. They understand the consequences of failure. Ratcheting up surveillance is the only thing they can think of to defend themselves without true Big Brother / USSR style changes in society. I imagine they think of it as, better to watch the people and let them remain free in action, rather then to clamp down securely in ways that would require the tossing of the constitution. I think they have picked between the lesser of two evils.
Doom and gloom aside, the world is not such a bad place yet. There was a protest outside of the Israeli embassy a week or two ago. These protestors might be in a government database somewhere, but I doubt they have vanished. I particularly like the "Islam Will Dominate" sign that has a picture of the White House with a black flag on top of it.
I think you over estimate the challenge of the problem. Good SR is indeed hard, I will give you that. That said, I expect in 300+ years when Star Trek is set, our AI will beat the piss out of Star Trek AI. Hell, the computer has been around for only a little over 50 years. A little over 100 years ago we had just first discovered electricity and flight.
If anything, Star Trek is a massive under estimate as to our technological prowess in 300 year. In 300 years I do not expect humans to be running around in massive ships that take hundreds of people to crew because computers are incapable of doing it. If anything will be floating around in space, it will be ships run purely by strong AI doing whatever it is strong AI would want to do in space.
As far as us feeble humans, I imagine that in 300 years we are going to try our hand at living like near gods being served by strong AI, will have merged with strong AI and become something entirely different then what we are today, or will have been stomped out by strong AI.
Republicans control the house, but not all of the house. Yeah, so 15 that voted nay were dems. The other 183 dem assholes (not to mention the 226 republicans) are the issue. So yeah, the democrats have a slightly better record then the republicans on this one issue. They are however far from spotless. If every single Republican had not voted this stupid bill would have still passed by veto proof margins by democrats.
Stop defending the democrats just because they are not republicans. Yes, republicans suck, but that doesn't prevent the democrats from sucking ass too.
Anything the Republics can agree on is evil. Anything the Democrats can agree on is stupid. Anything that both Republicans and Democrats agree on is both evil and stupid.
I would say that the vote count that passed this bill (410-15) pretty much proves the saying true. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed to this stupid bill by massive margins and what is the result? A bill that is both stupid and evil.
Good job guys. I am glad you could not agree on balancing the budget, fixing social security, streamlining the tax code, dealing with healthcare, or any number of things that need addressing, but you dumb fucks managed to agree on crippling public access to the Internet to ensure that people without private Internet access stand not a slimmest chance in hell from getting equal access.
Awesome.
If I did much praying, I would pray for gridlock each and every election. Our worthless government works best when it doesn't do any work at all. Better the fucked up status quo then letting these idiots find bigger iceberg to crash into.
Too bad nearly every single represenative, democract and republican is wasted their time and voted yes for this. If it had been a party line vote, I wouldn't be so pissed. What pisses me off is that you can bet your balls that these ass wipes who "represent" us read the title of this bill or (at best) scanned the words of the bill, thought maybe a full 2 seconds, then voted yes. You can tell which of these assholes actually thought through the implications of this bill... the 15 that voted no. If you have a represenative on that no list, keep voting for him as he/she is certainly a keeper. Any one that voted yes is either an idiot and doesn't see the implications or incompetent and didn't read past the bills title. Either way, they don't deserve your vote.
1) Nowhere does it state that a single code was used to turn off the human ships. What was stated was that most human military ships got an update in code and that the lead scientist on the project help the Cylons break his programs. It isn't a very hard stretch of the imagination to imagine that a race of robots and AI could break into a program if they have already been given the plans for it. In fact, the Cylon's skill at hacking is a major attribute that comes into play more then once. They manage to cripple the BSG via hacking WITHOUT help, so it is not a stretch to imagine that with help they be quickly and easily disable a fleet. The assumption that it was a "single code" is a stupid and wrong assumption.
2) The next complaint seems to be "no aliens!!111!!!" and "I don't know how they r going 2 win!11!!!!" Do I even need to respond to this?
Sci-fi does not have to have aliens in it. Lots of very good sci-fi has no aliens because aliens are 99% of the time downright silly. BSG clearly is going for a more realistic feel. BSG is supposed to be a world that humans might see in a couple hundred or so years. It is no stretch of the imagination to see modern humans getting overthrown by intelligent machines. It is a stretch to see them running from star to star talking to aliens.
As far as the complaint that there is no obvious path for victory, someone was not paying attention. Where exactly is the BSG running to? They are running to a fabled 13th colony which they hope can fight off the Cylons. Is the situation desperate? Certainly. Is it irresolvable? Certainly not. They have pretty blatantly already offered at least two avenues of solving the problem. The Cylons clearly have the capacity to negotiate and have their opinions swayed as we see in the second season. A negotiated peace is certainly possible. Failing that, there is a 13th colony somewhere that might be hundreds of years more advanced and able to fight off the Cylons.
The criticism you present is the inane criticism of someone who has watched way too much Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek, but it has not rotted my mind so badly that I freak out when Sci-Fi doesn't have aliens.
As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform. We've also been saying that DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!
This translates into:
OMFG, for the love of god, PLEASE LET US SELL OUR SHIT TO IPOD USERS!!1!!!!!!1!1111!
Basically, what is happening is that all the non-iTunes are getting trounced by iTunes and the iPod. The music industry won't let them sell their music unless it has DRM. Apple isn't selling them the rights to use the DRM that the iPod uses and Apple sure as shit is not going to build in WMA DRM capabilities into the iPod. With iPods being roughly 80% of the MP3 market, this is a massive audience that Yahoo, Napster, Rhapsody, exc can't touch. They desperately want to sell, but they are not allowed to sell unless the music has DRM. Apple won't let them us an iPod compatible form of DRM.
This isn't a marketing ploy to pretend to be anti-DRM when they are not, and this is not being done because they "want to work on other stuff". This is being done because DRM free music is the only way Yahoo and company can break into the monopoly iTunes has over the iPod, which itself has a near monopoly on MP3 players.
This is a play of self interested corporations. Apple wants to lock down the iPod not because they want to set music free, but because they want a monopoly over the service that fills iPods. Yahoo wants to sell DRM free music not because they give a shit about how irritating DRM is to you and me, but because they want to sell music to iPod users. The RIAA, well, they are just evil and eat babies.
I would like the G8 summit to address the lack of good sci-fi TV shows (with the exception being BSG). Somehow though, I think global health, poverty, and energy is going to get what I want pushed to the bottom of the list, right next to discussions about AllOfMyMP3.com.
This isn't news. This is a PR stunt. If they actually do discuss this at the G8 summit (they wont), I would call this news worthy. At best, the US might make a quick speech about curbing piracy in the context of improving global trade and then sit down.
The music industry can want and wish all it wants. As the old saying goes though, wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which hand fills up first.
I think what this ruling shows is a simple way to avoid getting nailed by the RIAA. Simply run your internet connection through a wireless hub. If the person who owns the connection is not responsible for its use, then by having an open connection you can easily deny that you were the offender.
Granted, this ruling hold no precedence for anywhere other then the county it was ruled in, but it does show that at least one judge interprets these fishing expeditions against Internet connection owners as unacceptable.
I hate to burst your bubble, but we need people who kill for a living. Until we live in a happy utopia we will need men and women with guns to protect us from other people with guns. We sure as shit don't live in that happy utopia yet. There is a reason why there is not a single nation in this world that doesn't have men with guns protecting their border or allies with guns protecting their border. Do you think World War II would have ended better if just Germany and Japan were the only people with militaries?
As far as the "unquestioning" part, that is simply foolish. Soldiers question their actions all the time. There are few things in this world more stressful then having a guy on a battlefield using a woman or child as a human shield while shooting at you. Questioning is done constantly on all levels of the military. If we were not constantly questioning we would simply nuke our enemies killing them all, go home, and call it a life.
Finally, ultimate responsibility in a democracy rests on the people. We elected out government. We put into power the officials that are now making the decisions. Through ignorance or through intentional action, we picked the leaders that order the military. If you live in a democracy, it is completely the fault of the civilians how that military operates. The civilians elect the government and the military is an unquestioning slave to the constitution and the government that we elected.
If anyone should be denied medical care on the basis of morality, it should be the civilians who have voted for the men giving the orders, not the military that unquestioningly obeys the commands of the populace.
You just hit on the fundamental problem with democracy. Democracy is stupid. Democracy encourages politicians to frame their arguments in the simplest and most basic terms so that every idiot can understand their point. Politicians SHOULD be arguing over macro and micro economics. When was the last time you heard an argument for or against a free trade agreement that boiled down to anything more complex before bickering over whether or not it will add jobs to the US? Occasionally you will see hints at a larger picture, but politicians mostly keep their arguments simple and stupid.
If two politicians stand up and one declares that a free trade deal will increase jobs in both nations and the other declares it will hurt jobs in both nations, neither of them are lying. They are approaching the problem through different economic philosophies. The problem is that neither bothers to spend the time to explain exactly what principles are guiding their declarations. I am not pissed off at the politicians for this. They are just taking the path of least resistance. Argue your point of view from a macroeconomic perspective in front of an audience, and you will never see the light of day. The stupid masses will not understand your arguments and refuse to vote you in.
The result is that we approach politics like nationalism. A solid 60% of Americans go to the polls and vote the same way each time without reflecting for even a moment on their decision. Half vote democrat every single time, while the other half votes Republicans. The rest do not do much better. They come to their beliefs via a mixture of their own largely unsubstantiated views on the world and single issues for which they do understand. They are inclined to vote on a feeling and roll the dice. The only silver lining is that the "feelings" of the masses are a better method of leader selection then selecting guy of the highest rank who is still alive after a coup (think Saddam).
So how do I think this Wiki will turn out? I think it will fail. You will have people who are hardened zealots to their side that hold nationalist like fanaticism to their unsubstantiated life view. Democracies breed political zealots who act on blind belief in the lack of information. Even when handed information these zealots will often times refuse to believe what they see because they have become so entrenched with their belief.
The best you can hope for is for the zealots to build their own little wiki pages, build a mechanism to keep them from defacing the other side's stuff, and watch the peons in the middle figure out which sides demagoguery they like better. I imagine all views in the middle who don't have an army defending them will be quickly swept aside.
It is called DIPLOMACY. US and Britain aren't used to it, because they want to stick to verified, true to bone methods - power and more power.
Ask a Tutsi from Rwanda what he thinks of diplomacy. You might have to look a little harder then before seeing as double digit percentages of their population were lost while we look for a diplomatic solution.
The simple fact of the matter is that while diplomacy should always be the first choice because it is the best choice, it sometimes fails. While the powers of the world dick around trying to figure out how exactly the fix something without damaging their interest or spending money/lives on a military intervention, people die in the hundreds of thousands and millions.
We watched Yugoslavia destroy itself for 10 years in some of the most horrible crimes against humanity for nearly 10 years before acting (no thanks to the UN which blocked all attempts to intervene). Is Yugoslavia still a mess? Sure. Is it better off then it was? Hell yes. If you think Yugoslavia was a better place during the genocide when women and children were raped and killed in the hundreds of thousands, let me smoke some of what you are smoking.
We also tried to find a "diplomatic" solution to Rwanda. The UN called the Rwanda government nasty names while not lifting a finger. Not even the US was aching to jump in and do something other then talk after smarting from their failure to bring humanitarian aid to Somalia.
Diplomacy is nice, but it is also some times a complete farce. Diplomacy only has value when you have something the other side wants. Some times the other side wants nothing more then death and destruction (see Yugoslavia and Rwanda). Some times it takes the barrel of a gun to pull warring factions apart and save lives. The UN is great at diplomacy, but utterly worthless at using guns.
Can you even name an intervention where the US dropped a significant number of ground force and actually did something militarily? Don't bother looking it up, I can name both of the interventions.
The UN was beaten into acting during the first Iraq war when it was absolutely crystal clear that Saddam had indeed invaded another nation and all the nations of the world (the US certainly included, but not alone) felt uneasy that one nation held a majority of the worlds oil supply.
The only other major military intervention the UN has made was the Korean War. This out of character action happened for a single reason; the USSR made an infamously stupid mistake and walked out of a security council meeting. When the USSR walked out, the US put forward a motion to authorize UN intervention in Korean to halt the North's attack against the South. The US basically abused the system and through a procedural trick got their defense of South Korea authorized by the UN. That is it. That is the complete history of real military interventions by the UN. Unless your argument is that since the UN's creation we have not needed a single military intervention anywhere in the world, it can not help but be realized that the UN has failed in its duty. The UN is utterly incapable of military intervention. As long as this world needs guns to pull people apart, then UN won't be doing its job.
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You don't need 60% for democratic change. In the US with voter turnout rates of under 50%, you need less then 25% of the population that can vote to take over the government. If you can't muster a simple 25% of the voting population, I am pretty damn sure that you are not going to "break the back" of the government with protests. If you can't muster enough to even register in an election against Republicans or Democrats (pick your evil/stupid party of choice), I am pretty damn certain that your street protests will be crushed by the people in power who have managed to convince at least some noticeable percentage of the population that it is worth their time to at least get off their asses and vote.
Protests are a stupid way to enact a revolution in the government in a liberal democracy like the US. Just vote for someone else. It takes a single day of your time and doesn't involve facing down police or (perhaps more dangerously) commuters pissed off that you are walking in the road with angrily written signs.
Hell, you don't even need 25% of the voting population. If you pirate evenly from Democrats and Republicans you need a paltry 13% of the entire voting population to win. If you can't muster that, it is probably time to rethink the revolution.
Why does the victim have to be 12, and why a girl? You're setting up a straw man.
Why 12 years old and why a girl? Because it is an extreme example of the law that designed specifically provoke people into thinking through the whole implication of shield laws. 12 year old girls getting raped tends to be produce deep disgusted and a complete lack of sympathy in most people, while burning a cop car really doesn't result in all that many tears for most. The point isn't to change anyone's mind, but to make people think through the full implications of the argument that the media should not have to hand over evidence of a crime. In this case the crime isn't "that bad" for most people. The question becomes how "bad" does a crime have to be before people change their minds that perhaps the media doesn't deserve infinite power to withhold evidence of a crime.
The argument isn't a "straw man" argument. It is the natural application of the law that people are advocating. The question is simple. Is it okay for the media to withhold evidence of a crime simply because they are media? Can the media withhold evidence of arson against the state as in this case? What if it was arson committed by the police against the protesters cars? Can they withhold evidence of assault? Can they withhold evidence of manslaughter? What about rape and murder? What exactly is the line that we are supposed to draw with shield laws? These are not "straw man" arguments. This is the natural line of thinking you need to take in a world where anyone can be media.
How much shielding does the media deserve in a world where anyone can be media? Do they received infinite shielding, or some limited shielding only for certain crimes?
The US is still a democracy. Revolutions are simple. Get more then 50% of the vote. Get more then 2/3 the vote and you can completely rewrite the government to whatever you damn well please.
I always find the notion that the US needs a new "revolution" laughable. The US has a functional system already in place to allow revolution. Believe me, getting a 50% or even 2/3 majority is a hell of a lot easier then trying armed rebellion or even a drawn out peaceful demonstration. The issue in the United States is not the oppressed masses. The issue in the United States is the indifferent masses.
If you can't get the average American off their lazy ass to spend a single hour of their time to vote for a candidate, you can pretty much rest assured that you won't get them off their lazy asses for any sort of "revolution", peaceful or otherwise.
Hell, you don't even need to get 2/3 or 50% of the population to vote in your favor. You need to get 2/3 of the VOTING population to vote for you. If you optimistically assume that 50% of Americans who can vote do vote, that means that you need only 25% of the population that can vote to take control of the government. With a paltry 33% of the people who can vote voting in your favor, you can completely rewrite the government and constitution.
Americans don't need a "revolution". They need to get off their lazy asses and vote if they don't like what they see.
This guy has evidence of a crime. Now, in this case it is a crime against the state so people are not terrible sympathetic. Not being sympathetic with the state is as American as guns and apple pie, but people are talking a guy being jailed for not exposing a crime against the state like it is some high moral battle.
What if the role was reversed? What if some pro-police blogger had a video up of protesters getting the shit kicked out of them by police? What if the Rodney King beating had been posted online with the identities of the police officers edited out on a blog? Would we still then be so adamant that a media shield is the best thing?
What if this guy had received a tape of a 12 year old girl getting raped, edited out the rapist, and then posted it onto his blog. Would people still be so adamant that he deserves some sort of media shield?
I think that people are applying the "common sense" test instead of really thinking through the implications of media shield laws, especially in a world where everyone can be the media. It is "common sense" that he would have to give up a video of a little girl getting raped, but not "common sense" that he has to give up a video of a police car being destroyed.
I like the idea of media shield laws to some extent. The press absolutely is an invaluable tool in the regulation of democracy. That said, there needs to be a coherent and consistent approach to such shield laws.
For those who believe that this man is being jailed unfairly, what do you propose the law be? Should the media never be forced to give up evidence of a crime, even in extreme cases like rape and murder? Should some crimes be protected by media shield laws and others not protected?
I don't hang up on people, though I have been hung up on. I was once introducing myself and then somebody started talking over me and said "I'm not interested in donating any money." Before I could tell her I'm only doing polling--which, sincerely, I am--she'd hung up on me. Who's the asshole, here? The asshole who is asking Americans about their political beliefs or the asshole who's hanging up on somebody without letting the other person finish? It's no skin off my back. If someone tells me they don't vote, I'll thank them for their time and get off the phone.
I do hang up on telemarketers in the middle of their sentences (political or otherwise) often, let me share why. When I call someone for anything, I let them answer the phone, and then a give a very brief one or two sentence reason why I am calling. This is polite. You don't spend a minute talking the second someone picks up the phone and says hello. You have called ME. You are wasting MY time. If you try and shove your message down my throat with a minute long opening speech, I am just going to hang up. If you BRIEFLY tell me what the hell it is you want, I am far more inclined to stay on the line.
Further, should I decide that I really am not in the mood to deal with a telemarketer, I will merrily just say "not interested" in the middle of their little speech and hang up. I do this because I have learned that it is utterly impossible to interrupt these people without screaming, and saying "not interested" will ALWAYS result in a failure to end the conversation.
Finally, the reason why I tend to always hang up is because telemarketers, especially political telemarketers have absolutely no information of value to give. If I wanted to hear a one sided report on your candidate, I would go read your candidates website. Personally, I don't want to be "informed" about you, by you. What I want is to see the candidates present their ideas then directly rebut their opponents ideas in a debate format. Throw up a full clip or MP3 of a debate your candidate had with the opponent, and I will happily listen.
Start a conversation over the phone with me by saying something inane like, "Did you know that the Senator So and So is being paid off by big oi..." *click*
It looks like AOL read the comments from Slashdotters saying that 950 employees do not constitute a 'massive' layoff. Several news sites are reporting that AOL is getting ready to cut 5,000 jobs...
I wonder if this works for other things...
One year delay in Vista a "small" delay? Hell, back in my day when the Duke Nukem Forever team said small delay they meant it would only be a few more decades!
The complaints are coming, so let me just preempt them. Yes, money should be spent on feeding people. Yes, they need food, water, and medical care first and foremost. The problem is that the basic necessities of life are not enough.
The rich nations of the world could divert massive portions of their GDP to feed the impoverished world. Even if you could political find the will to do this, it would solve nothing. Poverty is a symptom of a much larger problem. The core of the problem lies in education. If they can be educated, they can save themselves. Hence, things like cheap Wi-fi while certainly is not a silver bullet, it at least begins to pick away at the problem.
Education is the key. With education and access to information other problems can start be solved. Good democratic governance absolutely demands an education population that is able to vote outside of tribal ties. Educated leaders are need to tackle both social and economic problems, and not just in government, but in business as well. The core of a functional democratic government is an educated population. We can feed the impoverished nations of the world from now until the end of time, but until educated leaders step up they will remain impoverished.
So yes to those that will surely complain about this "waste" of money, these people need food and clean water. Food and water is not the cure though. Education, information, a fiscal boost once good governance is in place are the solution. Throwing money at the worlds poor just to feed them is like pumping blood into a man with a severed artery; the problem isn't that he is running out of blood, the problem is that he has a severed artery.
There is a complex relationship going on between Apple, media companies, and DRM. Apple and media companies are both "winning" with DRM. They battle between Apple and the media companies is not if DRM is good or bad, but what form that DRM will be.
Media companies like DRM for obvious reasons - they feel that it slows down piracy. To a media company, the ultimate form of DRM would be one which is pirate proof and that works in all devices.
Apple has a slightly different objective. For Apple, DRM is useful for locking people into their proprietary hardware (iPods) and their media delivery mechanism (iTunes). To Apple owns a monopoly share of the MP3 player and legal online music delivery market (~80%). They want DRM that will help keep their monopoly share of the market. For them, they want a DRM that is unobtrusive on their own products, but which is utterly unworkable on other products. Further, they want their products incompatible with other music services. Apple has done exactly this. If you buy from iTunes, you can only use an iPod on your MP3 player. If you have an iPod, you can only download music online legally from iTunes or places selling raw MP3 files. Seeing as how the media companies all but demand DRM, raw MP3 files are rare (legally) from online services.
The idea is simple, once you are locked into Apple, their DRM keeps you there. You can't use Rhapsody or Napster which offer competing services and pricing alternatives (notably, they have all you can eat subscriptions) because the iPod only uses Apple DRM. Rhapsody and Napster can't sell using Apple DRMed music because Apple won't let them. Further, once you start buying from iTunes to fill your iPod, you are locking yourself into the iPod. Your Apple DRMed files won't work in your Creative Zen, so once you have a large collection of Apple DRMed music, you need to give up a hunk of your music collection to leave the iPod. Apple has you locked into both their hardware AND their music service via their DRM.
The interesting companies to watch will be Napster, Yahoo! Music, and Rhapsody. Those are three companies that desperately want a piece of Apple's pie. They can't offer their services to iPod users which make up the majority of the market so long as Apple refuses to let them use Apple DRM and the music companies refuse to let them sell DRM free music. They are being squeezed by Apple on one side and the music companies on the other side. Look to them to try and make some sort of move against DRM, as they have the most to lose from it.
Yahoo! Music in particular has already tried to float some DRM free music in an attempt to show its viability to music companies. Rhapsody on the other hand has reversed engineered Apple's DRM and is actively looking for a chink in Apple's DRM armor.
No, Apple really is built upon cosmetic appeal, marketing, marketing, and more marketing. You can pretty much rest assure that in 10 years (or less) Apple's come back is going to be required reading for anyone even vaguely interested in studying marketing.
I am not saying that Apple doesn't make good products, nor am I saying that Microsoft does. I am saying that Apple capitalized on a product that was workable through cosmetic appeal, marketing, marketing, and more marketing. It isn't like Apple is the only mp3 maker out there.
Hell, they don't even offer the best product for many users. I would argue that my creative Zen Vision M and all you can eat Rhapsody combination beats the piss out of Apple and iTunes. I have an MP3 player filled with 30 gigs of legal music for 15$ / month. That would cost me a solid $7,500 with iTunes or a large chunk of time and effort pirating. That might not be the best deal for you or someone else, but surely there is a market that would find that to be a swell idea. Despite this, iPod dominate. Yes, that scroll wheel is a nifty feature, but that is the extent of the non-cosmetic innovations on it; despite this, it owns a solid 80% of the market.
My mother decided to buy an MP3 player for my little brother. She is utterly computer illiterate and didn't bother asking anyone for help in selecting an MP3 player. She of course went right over to the iPod. She didn't even realize that other types of MP3 players existed. Hell, she didn't even know what the term "MP3 player" meant, much less that an iPod was one and that many other types existed. This is the sort of marketing domination that iPod currently has. Every idiot knows what an iPod is and what it does, but your average non-geek will struggle to tell you even a brand name of another MP3 player. The iPod marketing domination is absolute.
So, do I credit Apple's engineers for a slick product? Hell yes. They have done some awesome stuff. Do I credit their cosmetic design team for making a pretty product? Absolutely. However, the real masters of the show are the marketers and the geniuses behind their marketing campaign. They took a product that might or might not have made it on its own and collected a monopoly sized share of the market. Those guys are fucking Jedi Knights.
Well, if our soldiers can use a $20 million helicopter to watch people having sex, then I don't see why other government employees (teachers, officeholders, etc) shouldn't be allowed to use their $1000 office PC to watch porn while on the job. After all, they are only human.
What makes you think they don't? I am not saying that the soldiers shouldn't be punished, just that I don't think it is a damning revelation to find out that 20 year old kids with thermal imaging devices act like 20 year old kids. The revelation that kids with toys play with them doesn't warp my concept of reality and leave me disgusted with the army. The is true with police officers and teachers that like to close the doors to the offices and watch porn on school computers. I don't think they should be doing it, but it doesn't really have much barring on my opinion of them in general.
Hell, I might even refuse to do it. Unless there is an actual invasion of my homeland going on, I'll stick to jobs that don't require me to carry out mass murder. Trumped up wars started on highly dubious grounds aren't worthing losing my soul over.
Your refusal to carry out a mission because you don't see the immediate utility in it would make you a very bad soldier. Part of being a soldier is killing people. Some times you might very well be kill utterly innocent people. Other times you might be killing mass murders. Unless you are privy to the intelligence that led up to the decision to commit violence, you really have no way of making that determination while you are circling around at a few thousand feet strapped to a pile of guns and explosives.
I am not saying that your attitude is bad, just that it doesn't make for an even vaguely worthwhile soldier.
The trick isn't to train better killers, so much as to find ways of dealing with the world that don't require lots of trained killers.
Like it or not, the world has killers in it. It has had killers in it since before humans were walking up right all the way to this very day. People have been willing to kill other people for countless reasons for the entirety of human history. One nation laying down its arms isn't going to make the killers go away. So long as two people want the same piece of land or one person wants to impose a government or ideology on another person who doesn't want it, there will be violence. The best you can do is work things out diplomatically when you can, and have guns and killers willing to use them for when you can't.
That said, if you know a way to make all of the people in Iraq or Afghanistan happy, please, enlighten us. Maybe we should have just talked Hitler out of World War II, or used naughty language to repulse the North Korean invasion of South Korea, or strongly condemned the genocide in Yugoslavia. Some how though, I think the answer to all of those problems was violence.
WTF would you do if you had a thermal imaging sensor and saw a couple having sex in a car? Maybe I am a bad human, but I would probably watch and laugh with a few guys. 20 years old laughing at sex... how surprising. Soldiers are still human. They still do stupid shit to entertain themselves.
As far as turning slaughtering people into a joke, that is a coping mechanism. An order comes in that some Taliban military leaders are meeting at a certain location. You are the gunner who is ordered to take them out. You very well could have bad intel or the wrong target. You could be gunning down completely innocent civilians. You could also be gunning down people responsible for countless deaths. As a soldier you really can't tell. This is what makes insurgency wars ugly.
If you are going to have to gun down people (regardless if they truly are villains or not) in cold blood, you might be surprised what sorts of coping mechanisms you develop. You might be the grim face of death, you might find yourself weeping and shaking uncontrollably, you might black the whole thing out after it is done, or you might dehumanize your enemy and pretend it is some sick video game.
I wouldn't judge the military to harshly. These are kids, most of whom are too young to legally drink who have been brainwashed out of necessity to be remorseless killers. If they can't kill other humans without hesitation, they are likely to find themselves with their brains leaking on a dirt road in some backwater nation. Unless you know of a better way to train killers, this is the way it has to be.
I doubt it. They are posting this shit as recruiting material... not as a message about how ugly war is. Further, war will never go away so long as there are governments. Governments impose their will with force. Even the most shining democracy imposes its will by force. Some times the only way to respond to force is with force. Some times there is nothing diplomacy can do. Until the entire world lives under 'enlightened' governments that share roughly a similar ideology, war is just going to be a fact of life. The best you can hope for is to make it a last resort.
Corporations *should* have a social responsibility and conscience.
Let me rewrite that for you.
Corporations *should* have a nationalistic responsibility and conscience.
When a corporation outsources, the US might very well have some lost jobs. Whether or not those jobs are made up somewhere else is debatable, but what is not debatable is that somewhere someone much poorer then an American scores a job. If corporations are trying to be "socially responsible", outsourcing makes complete sense. Outsourcing to a third world nation ensures that the poorest and neediest are given the chance to earn some income and bring up a deeply impoverished area.
What you are really complaining about is nationalism. Giving a tech support job to someone in India doesn't hurt India. It improves India. You can keep a handful of Indian workers living on sustainable wages for the cost of a single American worker. The only way you can possibly believe that the greater good has been harmed is if you are talking about the greater American good. If you are talking about the greater American good, you are not talking about "social responsibility and conscience", you are talking about nationalistic responsibility and conscience.
Big brother is not controlling your life. You can basically do and say what you want these days without any worry that anyone gives a shit. That goes double and triple if you live in New York. The best you can say is that Big Brother is watching you. Big Brother is paranoid because we live in a time when a handful of nuts can kill tens of thousands.
4 7_Terror_Supporters_Turn_Out_in_US&only
Iraq is a perfect example. The number of fighters compared to the number of civilians is a very small ratio. Despite this, a handful of fighters have been able to kill tens of thousands. Further, these fighters are not even a formal army, just a bunch of poor Joe Nobodies with access to explosives. The fighters in Iraq are hardly the worst that can happen. In Iraqi fighters have not yet armed themselves with truly horrific weapons like the infamous "WMDs".
My guess is that the US government (and many other governments) are terrified that someone is going to get a hold of a real weapon and employ it. The consequences of a nuclear bomb going off in New York are too horrific to even contemplate. Forget the lives lost (which would be in the tens or hundreds of millions), but the economic and political impact would be world shattering.
Even if the US didn't respond to a nuclear attack militarily, the economic damage would be almost immeasurable. The economic damage would not just send the US into a deep depression, but it would drag the entire world with it. We are talking about Great Depression style depression that hits every corner of the Earth. The damage to the economies could take decades to repair, massively cut life expectancy all around the world, and in general do very bad things.
That isn't even the worst of it.
The US wouldn't take the nuking of New York kindly. Nukes would reign down somewhere else in the world - sure as shit. US troops would invade, the draft would be called up, and the world remember what it was like when nations fought total war where civilian casualties meant absolutely nothing. No laser targeted bombs and silk gloves trying to put nations back together. We are talking about B-52's carpet bombing cities flat so that when troops move in there is nothing over 3 feet tall to hide behind. It doesn't matter who is the president at the time. The US will scream out for blood and no US president, democrat or republican, will deny them.
The Western world is in a tough spot and I am sympathetic with their concerns, even if I am leery about their methods. They understand the consequences of failure. Ratcheting up surveillance is the only thing they can think of to defend themselves without true Big Brother / USSR style changes in society. I imagine they think of it as, better to watch the people and let them remain free in action, rather then to clamp down securely in ways that would require the tossing of the constitution. I think they have picked between the lesser of two evils.
Doom and gloom aside, the world is not such a bad place yet. There was a protest outside of the Israeli embassy a week or two ago. These protestors might be in a government database somewhere, but I doubt they have vanished. I particularly like the "Islam Will Dominate" sign that has a picture of the White House with a black flag on top of it.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=216
I think you over estimate the challenge of the problem. Good SR is indeed hard, I will give you that. That said, I expect in 300+ years when Star Trek is set, our AI will beat the piss out of Star Trek AI. Hell, the computer has been around for only a little over 50 years. A little over 100 years ago we had just first discovered electricity and flight.
If anything, Star Trek is a massive under estimate as to our technological prowess in 300 year. In 300 years I do not expect humans to be running around in massive ships that take hundreds of people to crew because computers are incapable of doing it. If anything will be floating around in space, it will be ships run purely by strong AI doing whatever it is strong AI would want to do in space.
As far as us feeble humans, I imagine that in 300 years we are going to try our hand at living like near gods being served by strong AI, will have merged with strong AI and become something entirely different then what we are today, or will have been stomped out by strong AI.
Republicans control the house, but not all of the house. Yeah, so 15 that voted nay were dems. The other 183 dem assholes (not to mention the 226 republicans) are the issue. So yeah, the democrats have a slightly better record then the republicans on this one issue. They are however far from spotless. If every single Republican had not voted this stupid bill would have still passed by veto proof margins by democrats.
Stop defending the democrats just because they are not republicans. Yes, republicans suck, but that doesn't prevent the democrats from sucking ass too.
As the saying goes:
Anything the Republics can agree on is evil.
Anything the Democrats can agree on is stupid.
Anything that both Republicans and Democrats agree on is both evil and stupid.
I would say that the vote count that passed this bill (410-15) pretty much proves the saying true. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed to this stupid bill by massive margins and what is the result? A bill that is both stupid and evil.
Good job guys. I am glad you could not agree on balancing the budget, fixing social security, streamlining the tax code, dealing with healthcare, or any number of things that need addressing, but you dumb fucks managed to agree on crippling public access to the Internet to ensure that people without private Internet access stand not a slimmest chance in hell from getting equal access.
Awesome.
If I did much praying, I would pray for gridlock each and every election. Our worthless government works best when it doesn't do any work at all. Better the fucked up status quo then letting these idiots find bigger iceberg to crash into.
Too bad nearly every single represenative, democract and republican is wasted their time and voted yes for this. If it had been a party line vote, I wouldn't be so pissed. What pisses me off is that you can bet your balls that these ass wipes who "represent" us read the title of this bill or (at best) scanned the words of the bill, thought maybe a full 2 seconds, then voted yes. You can tell which of these assholes actually thought through the implications of this bill... the 15 that voted no. If you have a represenative on that no list, keep voting for him as he/she is certainly a keeper. Any one that voted yes is either an idiot and doesn't see the implications or incompetent and didn't read past the bills title. Either way, they don't deserve your vote.
That is utterly inane criticism.
1) Nowhere does it state that a single code was used to turn off the human ships. What was stated was that most human military ships got an update in code and that the lead scientist on the project help the Cylons break his programs. It isn't a very hard stretch of the imagination to imagine that a race of robots and AI could break into a program if they have already been given the plans for it. In fact, the Cylon's skill at hacking is a major attribute that comes into play more then once. They manage to cripple the BSG via hacking WITHOUT help, so it is not a stretch to imagine that with help they be quickly and easily disable a fleet. The assumption that it was a "single code" is a stupid and wrong assumption.
2) The next complaint seems to be "no aliens!!111!!!" and "I don't know how they r going 2 win!11!!!!" Do I even need to respond to this?
Sci-fi does not have to have aliens in it. Lots of very good sci-fi has no aliens because aliens are 99% of the time downright silly. BSG clearly is going for a more realistic feel. BSG is supposed to be a world that humans might see in a couple hundred or so years. It is no stretch of the imagination to see modern humans getting overthrown by intelligent machines. It is a stretch to see them running from star to star talking to aliens.
As far as the complaint that there is no obvious path for victory, someone was not paying attention. Where exactly is the BSG running to? They are running to a fabled 13th colony which they hope can fight off the Cylons. Is the situation desperate? Certainly. Is it irresolvable? Certainly not. They have pretty blatantly already offered at least two avenues of solving the problem. The Cylons clearly have the capacity to negotiate and have their opinions swayed as we see in the second season. A negotiated peace is certainly possible. Failing that, there is a 13th colony somewhere that might be hundreds of years more advanced and able to fight off the Cylons.
The criticism you present is the inane criticism of someone who has watched way too much Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek, but it has not rotted my mind so badly that I freak out when Sci-Fi doesn't have aliens.
Yahoo said:
As you know, we've been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day -- the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform. We've also been saying that DRM has a cost. It's very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We'd much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!
This translates into:
OMFG, for the love of god, PLEASE LET US SELL OUR SHIT TO IPOD USERS!!1!!!!!!1!1111!
Basically, what is happening is that all the non-iTunes are getting trounced by iTunes and the iPod. The music industry won't let them sell their music unless it has DRM. Apple isn't selling them the rights to use the DRM that the iPod uses and Apple sure as shit is not going to build in WMA DRM capabilities into the iPod. With iPods being roughly 80% of the MP3 market, this is a massive audience that Yahoo, Napster, Rhapsody, exc can't touch. They desperately want to sell, but they are not allowed to sell unless the music has DRM. Apple won't let them us an iPod compatible form of DRM.
This isn't a marketing ploy to pretend to be anti-DRM when they are not, and this is not being done because they "want to work on other stuff". This is being done because DRM free music is the only way Yahoo and company can break into the monopoly iTunes has over the iPod, which itself has a near monopoly on MP3 players.
This is a play of self interested corporations. Apple wants to lock down the iPod not because they want to set music free, but because they want a monopoly over the service that fills iPods. Yahoo wants to sell DRM free music not because they give a shit about how irritating DRM is to you and me, but because they want to sell music to iPod users. The RIAA, well, they are just evil and eat babies.
I would like the G8 summit to address the lack of good sci-fi TV shows (with the exception being BSG). Somehow though, I think global health, poverty, and energy is going to get what I want pushed to the bottom of the list, right next to discussions about AllOfMyMP3.com.
This isn't news. This is a PR stunt. If they actually do discuss this at the G8 summit (they wont), I would call this news worthy. At best, the US might make a quick speech about curbing piracy in the context of improving global trade and then sit down.
The music industry can want and wish all it wants. As the old saying goes though, wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which hand fills up first.
I think what this ruling shows is a simple way to avoid getting nailed by the RIAA. Simply run your internet connection through a wireless hub. If the person who owns the connection is not responsible for its use, then by having an open connection you can easily deny that you were the offender.
Granted, this ruling hold no precedence for anywhere other then the county it was ruled in, but it does show that at least one judge interprets these fishing expeditions against Internet connection owners as unacceptable.
I hate to burst your bubble, but we need people who kill for a living. Until we live in a happy utopia we will need men and women with guns to protect us from other people with guns. We sure as shit don't live in that happy utopia yet. There is a reason why there is not a single nation in this world that doesn't have men with guns protecting their border or allies with guns protecting their border. Do you think World War II would have ended better if just Germany and Japan were the only people with militaries?
As far as the "unquestioning" part, that is simply foolish. Soldiers question their actions all the time. There are few things in this world more stressful then having a guy on a battlefield using a woman or child as a human shield while shooting at you. Questioning is done constantly on all levels of the military. If we were not constantly questioning we would simply nuke our enemies killing them all, go home, and call it a life.
Finally, ultimate responsibility in a democracy rests on the people. We elected out government. We put into power the officials that are now making the decisions. Through ignorance or through intentional action, we picked the leaders that order the military. If you live in a democracy, it is completely the fault of the civilians how that military operates. The civilians elect the government and the military is an unquestioning slave to the constitution and the government that we elected.
If anyone should be denied medical care on the basis of morality, it should be the civilians who have voted for the men giving the orders, not the military that unquestioningly obeys the commands of the populace.
You just hit on the fundamental problem with democracy. Democracy is stupid. Democracy encourages politicians to frame their arguments in the simplest and most basic terms so that every idiot can understand their point. Politicians SHOULD be arguing over macro and micro economics. When was the last time you heard an argument for or against a free trade agreement that boiled down to anything more complex before bickering over whether or not it will add jobs to the US? Occasionally you will see hints at a larger picture, but politicians mostly keep their arguments simple and stupid.
If two politicians stand up and one declares that a free trade deal will increase jobs in both nations and the other declares it will hurt jobs in both nations, neither of them are lying. They are approaching the problem through different economic philosophies. The problem is that neither bothers to spend the time to explain exactly what principles are guiding their declarations. I am not pissed off at the politicians for this. They are just taking the path of least resistance. Argue your point of view from a macroeconomic perspective in front of an audience, and you will never see the light of day. The stupid masses will not understand your arguments and refuse to vote you in.
The result is that we approach politics like nationalism. A solid 60% of Americans go to the polls and vote the same way each time without reflecting for even a moment on their decision. Half vote democrat every single time, while the other half votes Republicans. The rest do not do much better. They come to their beliefs via a mixture of their own largely unsubstantiated views on the world and single issues for which they do understand. They are inclined to vote on a feeling and roll the dice. The only silver lining is that the "feelings" of the masses are a better method of leader selection then selecting guy of the highest rank who is still alive after a coup (think Saddam).
So how do I think this Wiki will turn out? I think it will fail. You will have people who are hardened zealots to their side that hold nationalist like fanaticism to their unsubstantiated life view. Democracies breed political zealots who act on blind belief in the lack of information. Even when handed information these zealots will often times refuse to believe what they see because they have become so entrenched with their belief.
The best you can hope for is for the zealots to build their own little wiki pages, build a mechanism to keep them from defacing the other side's stuff, and watch the peons in the middle figure out which sides demagoguery they like better. I imagine all views in the middle who don't have an army defending them will be quickly swept aside.
It is called DIPLOMACY. US and Britain aren't used to it, because they want to stick to verified, true to bone methods - power and more power.
Ask a Tutsi from Rwanda what he thinks of diplomacy. You might have to look a little harder then before seeing as double digit percentages of their population were lost while we look for a diplomatic solution.
The simple fact of the matter is that while diplomacy should always be the first choice because it is the best choice, it sometimes fails. While the powers of the world dick around trying to figure out how exactly the fix something without damaging their interest or spending money/lives on a military intervention, people die in the hundreds of thousands and millions.
We watched Yugoslavia destroy itself for 10 years in some of the most horrible crimes against humanity for nearly 10 years before acting (no thanks to the UN which blocked all attempts to intervene). Is Yugoslavia still a mess? Sure. Is it better off then it was? Hell yes. If you think Yugoslavia was a better place during the genocide when women and children were raped and killed in the hundreds of thousands, let me smoke some of what you are smoking.
We also tried to find a "diplomatic" solution to Rwanda. The UN called the Rwanda government nasty names while not lifting a finger. Not even the US was aching to jump in and do something other then talk after smarting from their failure to bring humanitarian aid to Somalia.
Diplomacy is nice, but it is also some times a complete farce. Diplomacy only has value when you have something the other side wants. Some times the other side wants nothing more then death and destruction (see Yugoslavia and Rwanda). Some times it takes the barrel of a gun to pull warring factions apart and save lives. The UN is great at diplomacy, but utterly worthless at using guns.
Can you even name an intervention where the US dropped a significant number of ground force and actually did something militarily? Don't bother looking it up, I can name both of the interventions.
The UN was beaten into acting during the first Iraq war when it was absolutely crystal clear that Saddam had indeed invaded another nation and all the nations of the world (the US certainly included, but not alone) felt uneasy that one nation held a majority of the worlds oil supply.
The only other major military intervention the UN has made was the Korean War. This out of character action happened for a single reason; the USSR made an infamously stupid mistake and walked out of a security council meeting. When the USSR walked out, the US put forward a motion to authorize UN intervention in Korean to halt the North's attack against the South. The US basically abused the system and through a procedural trick got their defense of South Korea authorized by the UN.
That is it. That is the complete history of real military interventions by the UN. Unless your argument is that since the UN's creation we have not needed a single military intervention anywhere in the world, it can not help but be realized that the UN has failed in its duty. The UN is utterly incapable of military intervention. As long as this world needs guns to pull people apart, then UN won't be doing its job.