Oversimplifications aside, which one is Google? The visionary? Or the profiteer?
Yes.
Visionary profiteers is what the US was built on. Google just joins a very long list of them. Have a vision, bring it to the masses, make a pile of money. That is as American of a mentality as you can get.
That is a poor analogy. There are lots of legitimate uses for weapons. Granted, "shooting bottles and small animals" might not rank up their as a terribly productive use, but they are legitimate. The vast majority of firearms in the US are owned legally and used legally. Criminal uses of firearms make up only a very small percentage of the total firearms. If you want to talk analogy, firearms are more like Google. It has some illegal uses, but the vast majority of people use it for perfectly legal uses.
I think there is a reson to believe that more guns are used in robberies, murders and other unlawful cases compared to the gun usage for self-defense and shooting practice. Guns have legitimate uses, but most times they are used, the use is illegal. See a pattern here?
Uh, no, I don't see a pattern. No because what you said is completely and utterly untrue. The vast majority of guns used (at least in the US) are used legally. I am going to go ahead and go out on a limb here and guess that you have never lived in rural America. Hicks and red necks shoot off more ammunition for the purpose of killing innocent bottles and deer then the fucking army does. Hell, I bet the private populace of the US legally owns more guns then the army does.
Search engines are indeed a-okay in the US and are shielded for the most part for the content that they help you find. However, as the Supreme Court case against Gorkster showed, there it isn't an absolute protection. If it can be shown that piracy is a significant portion of the traffic, they can be shut down. Sure, these torrent sights might have legit torrents, but what portion of them are legit? I am not saying I have an opinion one way or the other, just that the law is almost certainly not on their side.
You need to replace the word "US" with "everyone in the world". China is a cheap factory and everyone wants to use it. No country is standing up on principle to argue against hooking China into the global economy. In fact, if I recall it was the US that was the one whacking the EU over the head for trying to sell them more frigging weapons. The US is one of the LEAST enthusastic first world nations about China getting a free pass into the world market. If US is one of the least enthusastic, that says something about how the rest of the world feels.
Now, the argument can be made that hooking China up to the world market is the easiest and safest way to affect change in China. Is this true or not? The hell if know. What I do know is that nowhere in the world does anyone show must interest in trying to start up another Cold War.
I do read the press from other countries. I read US, UK, Al-jazeerah, Chinese, a litte Russian, and just about anything I can find in English. The difference between me and a guy from China is that I can do the above, he can't.
The problem the US has is NOT censorship. Does US media have a different slant then other medias? Sure. It is always fun to watch the difference between what Al-Jazeerah reports and what the US media reports. All of the time they have headlines that the other doesn't even bother to cover. Neither is an 'objective' source of information (if there is such a thing). Simply by picking to report one thing over another you introduce some level of subjectivity.
The problem the US has is not censorship. Any American citizen with a computer and a modem can read anything they damn well please from anywhere in the world. The US government isn't going to stop them. The problem Americans have is apathy. Apathy is not censorship. Confusing the two is foolish because they stem from two entirely different root problems. Censorship comes from a government. The US is easily one of the least censored nations in the world. Apathy comes from culture. Apathy is the problem the US has.
Will they also be sending letters to the US Government over the attempted suppression of the Iraqi prisoner of war abuse images?
No, I imagine they won't be sending a letter to the US government. There is a big difference between being pissed off that the images got out and saying some nasty words, yet having the imagines remain...
Complain about what Bush is doing in your own home and see how quick the feds show up to see if you are a threat. It's happened when people have made statements disparging the administration in public.
I totally agree with parent. That fucking Nazi terrorist G.W. sopping wet Bush y vagina will fucking kill you if you talk shit about him in public. How can we let a complete fucking retard like Bush ruin our nation? He is a baby eating, woman raping, Nazi. He fucks little boys in the ass just to make them bleed. He is the sort of sick fucker that makes Hitler and Mao look like nice guys. His entire administation is run by mother fucking Nazi-terrorist.
What has happened to our great nation? It used to be that we could talk about child raping presidents like Bush in our own home or under and easily traced logged in name without fear that the feds will burst in through the windows and drag us off to jail! These days you can't log into slashdot under your own name and write terrible public comments about Bush because his gestapo storm troopers will fucking kill you.
Parent is right on. We have totally lost our freedom of speech. We can't say bad things about the prez any more. Parent needs a big mod up BEFORE THE NAZI STORM TROOPERS OF DEATH GET HIM. Let him die with positive karma.
The US has over a quarter of a million people in it. Does the mad ranting of one idiot need to make front page news every time they say something stupid? Even if the guy is in a position of authority what he 'proposes' will never come into existence. In order to get what he wants he would need the following:
First, he would need to convince a legislative branch of the state government to allow such an atrocity. This law would be promptly struck down by state courts as it clearly violates the article 1, section 9 of the Texas constitution. So, Texas would need to change its constitution, which is no small task. If Texas changed its constitution, this law would again be struck down by federal courts as it is clear violation of AT LEAST the 4th and 5th amendment in the US bill of rights. So, you would need to go and change not one, but TWO of the original amendments to the bill of rights.
Unless anyone out there really believes that this ass hole is going to change a state constitution and rewrite the bill of rights, this is a non-story. The title of this article should have been "Dumb ass police chief doesn't understand the laws of his government and is an ass hat"
The only thing that about this story worth reporting is that there exists a police chief this stupid. This jack ass should be put out of a job for displaying such a gross level of ignorance, especially when it his job to uphold the two respective constitutions that he suggests violating.
What would I do if I could watch any camera in any house? Three words. Free amateur porn.
That said, I don't think that the transparent society really advocates stuffing a camera into everyone's house. The idea is really about how to deal with the commons. Granted, there is still possible abuse when used in the commons.
Kamen is a really skilled inventor. He comes up with interesting solutions to problems and made some really impressive devices before the Segway. His problem is that his head is logged pretty firmly up his ass when it comes to predicitng broad social outcomes. He can invent things for clearly defined problems where money is only a minor issue (medical equipment), but his handling of the Segway shows his attempts to tackle more abstract problems are pathetic. The guy invented a multithousand dollar scooter with an hour battery life. Uh, good job. You took the scooter and managed to make it more expensive and have a shorter drive time. Awesome.
I am highly skeptical that he has anything other then smoke and mirrors. I think he doesn't have a clue in the world when it comes to broad abstract problems. This is a guy who really need to sit down and talk to an economist and a marketer before trying to build something.
WoW is as complex as any other MMORPG. What WoW did differently is that for the first 40 levels or so they made it so that the game wasn't a massive time sink. They realized that tedious (ie "hard") games drove casual gamers away. EQ is a perfect example of a game that was "hard" for power gamers, and utterly intolerable for casual gamers. It wasn't that EQ had superior and more complex mechanisms to master. What made EQ was the fact that it was such a horrible time sink. Your average casual gamer played it for about a month before realizing that their leveling had slowed to a crawl and that they were doing the same thing every single fucking time they logged on. The only thing "hard" about it was mustering up the will power to waste so much of one's time.
WoW took an entirely different path. They made the first 40 or so levels quick. You could log on for an hour each day and end that day feeling rewarded as you leveled up and moved onto different areas. WoW discovered what everyone else already knew with common sense. Casual gamers don't like games that require you to spend 40 hours a week on in order to get anywhere. It has nothing to do with complexity and difficulty, and everything to do with the amount of time you need to dump into a video game to get somewhere.
Put a copy of some game or music CD on your website, or how about some photoshopped piccies of Bush strung up from a tree? See how fast you get censored.
It takes a pretty broad stretch to connect taking someone else's work, copying it, and handing it out for free as a violation of free speech. It is even harder to try and compare that to tens of thousands of people disappearing in jail without trial for a decade for trying to hold a pro-democracy rally.
The US has a political system where the masses have little say in governance. For instance two thirds of US citizens want some sort of state health insurance system but it's not going to happen against the wishes of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
We already have "some sort" of state health insurance in every single state. Medicare and the various programs being tried in many states is "some sort" of state health insurance. The US is a federal system. The point is that we have 50 different states that can try 50 different experiments. The problem is that none of them have been so resoundingly successful yet that anyone has felt much motivation to try any of them on the federal level. That isn't to say we are not trying. Many states have altered their health insurance programs. Time will tell if any of them find anything successful.
More to the point, wanting something and getting something are two different things. I bet 99% of all people "want a good economy" too. Politicians don't deliver a "good economy" for lack of trying.
No it isn't. The apathy of the majority will ensure the continuity of business as usual as it does everywhere else.
74,000 incidents of unrest in a single year and growing doesn't sound terribly apathetic. People have this delusion that China is a big happy fairytale land where everyone considers each other brothers and bows their head does what they are told. China is in fact a very fractured state. Incidents like Tiananmen Square show this. Do you realize that during the Tiananmen Square incident that the first attempt by the Red Army to enter the city was actually repulsed by the citizens of the city? There is video footage of army trucks being physically dragged away by the crowds.
You can gamble all you want with fake money. There is nothing wrong with playing poker. The regulated part of gambling is in exchanging money. Exchanging money is commerce. One of the duties of any state is to regulate commerce. I don't particuarlly agree with how gambling is regulated today, but it is hardly a free speech issue.
I've bolded the funny parts. So you agree that the US government only has to keep you content enough to prevent revolution. As long as prices don't rise too much and the tv works, you're content to let your rights wither away.
I love how any discussion on China immediately degrades into a "Well the US could be better then it is!" discussion.
The simple fact of the matter is that the US government is able to maintain itself such that the thought of violent revolution is not even considered. What you fail to realize is that there is a stark difference between a government you disagree with, and one that is so broken that it has tens of thousands of instances of civil disorder each year.
One of the biggest issues in China is that the government can seize property at will without any sort of due process. This is often done completely outside of the rule of law. Further, it is not a small isolated incident. This happens to literally millions of people in China. They have their homes cleared away to make room for industrial complexes. The people have absolutely no recourse when this happens. There are no court hearings or ways to fight these actions.
Now, consider this same situation in the US. After a lengthy court battle in which the common man was resented by a multitude of civil organizations, the Supreme Court went against a long held belief that the government could NOT take private property and use it for commercial projects. As soon as this happened a pile of civil institutions started pushing for am immediate change to the law to make it clear that this was not acceptable. Currently, a bill is in the works in congress to change the law to make it such that the state can not seize land from private individuals for commercial purposes.
What is the difference in this instance? The US has a functional court system, rule of law, and a legislative branch that responds. Is it perfect? Hell no. Does it beat having thousands of local governments sieze land and give it to corporations without any sort of real compensation like what happens in China? Hell yes.
How many military actions have been shelved because the chinese won't let it happen.
Two. The US has not blatantly parked a fleet between the democratic nation of Taiwan and China because it doesn't want to fight China. The US also called off the Korean war because it didn't want to continue fighting a million Chinese. As a result, we have the picture perfect North Korea of today.
That honestly are all the actions that China has managed to stop. There have been other conflicts that China tried to stop, but failed. NATO ending the Kosovo genocide comes to mind. China tried to prevent the UN from passing a resolution authorizing force, but finally relented AFTER NATO had by-passed the UN and simply started dropping bombs.
The only real 'speech' laws that the US has that it activly tries to enforce over the Internet are child porn laws. Those are enforced because compelling a minor to strip naked and fuck a dog or whatever is illegal. China and the West are night and day when it comes to Internet content. The West makes almost no attempt to regulate the content that goes up. The US is actually the most extreme case that does the absolutely least regulation. If you want to throw up a Nazi hate site, that is a-okay in the US.
China is full of shit if they think there is any parallel between what the US does and what they do in terms of Internet censorship.
China's problem is that at some point they are going to have to turn around and face their internal problems in a constructive non-authoritarian manner. The US can have neo-Nazi websites because it has a stable political system that, while certainly not perfect, does a good job at keeping the masses content enough that rebellion doesn't linger on anyone's mind. China on the other hand has a political system where the masses have little say in governance. China has left the only opposition to government policies to be rebellion. As a result, China deals with constant (and little reported on) riots and instances of civil unrest that are completely alien to most Western governments.
A day of reckoning is coming for China, and their tardiness in opening up their government to oversight by the general populace is going to make this reckoning all the worse. China needs to take some more serious steps towards instituting good civil governance.
Don't believe that China has a serious problem with their ability to govern? Consider this fact. Official figures admit 74,000 individual incidents of unrest in 2004.*
To this day, the Piss Christ is still shrouded in controversy. At least Christians aren't asking for the heads to be chopped off or the decimation of every man, woman, and child in western countries. Want to guess what religious culture im referring too? It's easy. Give it a try...
You miss the point. "Shrouded in controversy" is a good reaction to something you disagree with. No one has any problem if you say, "that shit sucks". The problem is when you say "that shit sucks, lets go burn the embassy that has no control over the source of our discontent and murder someone. Hell, let's put a fucking bounty on someone's head. d3ath t0 teh INFIDALS!"
It is okay to respond negatively to speech you don't like. You can merrily go out and tell everyone how much you hate that speech. You can call them all sorts of names. The problem comes in when you start to burn property and kill people. I know it is a really grey line between writing an angry editorial and destroying another nation's embassy, but try and see it.
Do me a favor and type 9 11 cartoon into google image. Click on the first cartoon. If that is not enough, just keep scrolling. Oh, is that a flaming pile of disproved I see? Why yes it is.
You can't offend the average American bad enough to get them to form a mob and burn down another nations embassy. Period, end of story. We are far too used to freedom of speech. We don't really give a shit what another nation's media says. Hell, we don't care what our media says. The acceptance of freedom of speech overrides everything.
These cultures are backwards 10th centaury cultures 20th centaury population exposed mass media and armed. They do have problems and they are dysfunctional (at least by our standards). That is not to say that are not completely broken. They have modern moderate elements in rather large proportions. The problem they are having is that they are culturally advancing a 1000 years or so almost overnight. You can't drive forward the culture and the technology of a nation a 1000 years into the future without some serious issues and dysfunctional elements.
Seriously though, the problem with the Middle East is that you basically have a people that have a 10th centaury mentality armed like a 20th centaury nation and population. It is like opening up a time warp, increasing their numbers a few orders of magnitude, and then arming them.
Personally, I think the Middle East has its days numbered. The oil is running out. They have about 20 years to get their shit together and culturally evolve out of the 10th centaury. Once the oil is out, the rest of the world is going to lose interest mighty fast, and when happens they are going to get roughly the same amount of attention as Africa. We might still send aid and feel bad when something goes really wrong and millions die, but in the end, they will just be ignored. Think of the US response to the genocide in Rwanda or the horrible wars that have taken place in Ethiopia. Did the rest of the world life a finger, risk life and limb, or even much money to intervene? Nope.
I give the Middle East 20 years before the fundamentalist get their wish. The rest of the world is going to stop caring about the area and simply leave. At that point, they can make their own little Taliban 'paradise' without anyone's interference.
The moderate Muslims desperately need to grow a pair and stand up for their continued survival. The clock is ticking. If they keep letting ignorant zealots have their way, their children will reap what their parents sowed.
There is a Twilight Zone episode where this guy ends up dying and finds himself in the afterlife. He was a big gambler in life, so his after life has him in a Casino. In his afterlife, he always winds. Every single hand, every roll of the dice, every spin of the wheel is a win. After a while he asks his after life guide what kind of heaven this is. He complains that winning is meaningless if you never lose. The guide responds with, "What makes you think you are in heaven?"
Quite the contrary. Terrorists are not out to win hearts and minds, or win political support. They are out to terrorize the public and disrupt the political system. The latter can mean either weakening it or forcing it to overreact to the point where it destroys itself. A few dudes with boxcutters bringing an end to freedom and democracy in America, and saddling it with huge debt that may cripple it for generations? That's quite a return on a relatively puny investment! They would love to see GWB serving up more of the same.
I am not entirely sure that they would do another 9/11 if they could go back in time and change things. Recall that before 9/11 they had an entire state that supported them and was a model utopia (err, in their eyes). They also enjoyed a great deal of tolerance in many other states. Now, that state has been utterly conquered, their Islamic fundamentalist utopia has been dismantled, and you won't catch any nation openly supporting a terrorist organization that is committed to launching attacks against the US.
Certainly they gained something, but you need to realize that they lost A LOT. I don't think what they got was the gamble they expected to take.
The rules of the game are now a little more complex. While their State was destroyed, they have managed to stir up Islamic fundamentalist unrest in many other nations that otherwise did not have unified rallying calls. In doing so, they have directly entered into conflict with the more secular nationalist governments. Unfortunately for the US, the nationalist governments are all wildly unpopular and corrupt. Palestine voting out Fatah wasn't a vote to cut off funding to Palestine and start instituting religious law, it was a vote against corruption.
Personally, I don't think anything went the way anyone planned it to. Attacking the US again will just change the nature of the game in even more unpredictable ways. An enraged US could be Islamic fundamentalisms best recruitment pitch or the beginning of the end as 1/5th of the worlds economy violently swings to crush a threat.
You need to remember that Islamic fundamentalism has precedents. It is a movement that is remarkably similar to World War II style fascism. It is an extremely intolerant, exclusive, and violent way of operating. Once that form of ideology grew into power it was tolerated less then 20 years before being violently put down.
While I'll agree that the described actions are moronic, they are also in complete accord with the President's evident personal evangelistic religious agenda, and impeding the work of serious science and science education.
It's also not the first time we've seen evidence that Bush has appointed a political ally to a sensitive position who later proved grossly underqualified.
I think the second statement is more accurate then the first. I really don't think that the conspiracy to bring down science is as big as the NYT article makes it out to be. I think the important point to take away is the second statement you made. They have an ugly habit of appointing grossly under qualified people.
It would be one thing if they had appointed a master of PR manipulation with years of experience to distort the picture coming out of NASA. If that had happened, I would line up with "evil plot!" line of thinking. They didn't though. They appointed some 24 year with no experience. He is probably someone's son, kissed the right ass, or earned his position in some other non-merit based manner. THAT is the problem. This isn't a case of "evil plot!" it is a case of "we are an incompetent at governing!"
More simply put, don't attribute to evil what you can attribute to stupidity and incompetence.
When an appointee from a government known to be big on pushing religious viewpoints into science (from the morning after pill to high school biology), asks that the big bang be specially marked out because it's a religious issue (his words), you've got to suspect something's going on.
The appointee was 24. I didn't really state it clearly, but what my original point is that people are implying that this was a push by the administration to impose religious values on NASA, when I really think they were just being morons and appointed someone who was incompetent.
You don't appoint 24 year olds to execute your evil plots. If they had appointed an experienced PR pro, I would buy that this was an evil plot.
In other words, I think people are attributing to evil what could more likely be attributed to stupidity and incompetence. I am not saying that there isn't a story here. I am just saying the story isn't "Bush uses appointees to influence science, theology to trump science at NASA!" It is "Bush administration appoints incompetent civil servants, are there others out there mucking up the system?"
You miss my point. What happened wasn't an organized effort to disrupt NASA. What happened was an idiot was appointed to a position that he should not have been appointed to. The hype around OMFG Bush hates science utterly misses the real crime. The crime was that he, or more likely idiot in his administration, appointed a moron. The issue isn't science taking a hit. The issue is shitty civil servant appointments.
In fact, I think you put it best. They appointed a 24 year old. I don't know about you, but if I had an evil conspiracy to take down NASA, I wouldn't appoint a 24 year old to do it. I am pretty damn sure I could find someone older and with more experience. The issue is that somewhere along the line they appointed an idiot to civil servant position, not that they were trying to use that appointment to affect NASA.
The article implies that what happened was that a civil servant position was intentionally used to manipulate NASA. I am saying that what really happened was that they utterly failed to appoint competent civil servant.
What it boils down to was, where they being evil, or were they being stupid. From what the NYT article describes happens, it looks like they were just being stupid. Like the old saying goes, don't attribute to evil what you can attribute to stupidity or incompetence.
After reading the NYT article, I think a lot of this was over blown. Basically the accusations boil down throwing the word theory after big bang, NASA press releases trying to tie absolutely everything to the presidential vision, and earth sciences taking a hit.
Throwing the word "theory" after big bang is technically the right treatment for the word. It is a theory. It is a pretty damn strong theory, but theory none the less.
As far as the PR office stuffing a reference to the presidential vision on space exploration in every single press release, while irritating, really isn't much of a crime in my opinion. Press releases are not scientific journals; they are the PR office at work. Part of the PR offices job is to drum up support for various initiatives. Claiming everything under the sun could help the study of other plants is probably technically correct. The NASA earth scientist are really just pissed that they got their work mentioned in the context that it could do something good for the presidential vision. NASA earth science and the rest of NASA have always had a problem with each other. I am not terribly surprised to see them feuding over the wording of press releases.
As far as earth sciences taking a hit and going under major restructuring, this shouldn't come as a surprise. The president pretty explicitly stated that NASA was to be realigned to focus on manned missions to space. Unsurprisingly, the means cuts in everything unrelated. Now, you might very well disagree with this, but it is certainly not secret sinister plot.
The only thing "scary" going on that the NYT article brought up is that they let some 24 year old idiot who clearly has no idea what he is doing into NASA's PR office. This "gem" shows pretty clearly that his head is deeply implanted up his ass.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator." It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
Now yes, the big bang theory IS a theory and should e called as such. That said, it isn't called a theory for religious reasons. Further, this fucking moron seems to be under the delusion that the big bang theory is something that religious folks don't like. Most Christians absolutely LOVE the big bang theory as it upset the long held scientific belief that the universe was forever and stats that the universe has a beginning.
Honestly, I think the news story here is that an idiot 24 year old kid got appointed into a job way over his head and acted like a moron.
Slashdot Mirror
Oversimplifications aside, which one is Google? The visionary? Or the profiteer?
Yes.
Visionary profiteers is what the US was built on. Google just joins a very long list of them. Have a vision, bring it to the masses, make a pile of money. That is as American of a mentality as you can get.
That is a poor analogy. There are lots of legitimate uses for weapons. Granted, "shooting bottles and small animals" might not rank up their as a terribly productive use, but they are legitimate. The vast majority of firearms in the US are owned legally and used legally. Criminal uses of firearms make up only a very small percentage of the total firearms. If you want to talk analogy, firearms are more like Google. It has some illegal uses, but the vast majority of people use it for perfectly legal uses.
I think there is a reson to believe that more guns are used in robberies, murders and other unlawful cases compared to the gun usage for self-defense and shooting practice. Guns have legitimate uses, but most times they are used, the use is illegal. See a pattern here?
Uh, no, I don't see a pattern. No because what you said is completely and utterly untrue. The vast majority of guns used (at least in the US) are used legally. I am going to go ahead and go out on a limb here and guess that you have never lived in rural America. Hicks and red necks shoot off more ammunition for the purpose of killing innocent bottles and deer then the fucking army does. Hell, I bet the private populace of the US legally owns more guns then the army does.
Search engines are indeed a-okay in the US and are shielded for the most part for the content that they help you find. However, as the Supreme Court case against Gorkster showed, there it isn't an absolute protection. If it can be shown that piracy is a significant portion of the traffic, they can be shut down. Sure, these torrent sights might have legit torrents, but what portion of them are legit? I am not saying I have an opinion one way or the other, just that the law is almost certainly not on their side.
You need to replace the word "US" with "everyone in the world". China is a cheap factory and everyone wants to use it. No country is standing up on principle to argue against hooking China into the global economy. In fact, if I recall it was the US that was the one whacking the EU over the head for trying to sell them more frigging weapons. The US is one of the LEAST enthusastic first world nations about China getting a free pass into the world market. If US is one of the least enthusastic, that says something about how the rest of the world feels.
Now, the argument can be made that hooking China up to the world market is the easiest and safest way to affect change in China. Is this true or not? The hell if know. What I do know is that nowhere in the world does anyone show must interest in trying to start up another Cold War.
I do read the press from other countries. I read US, UK, Al-jazeerah, Chinese, a litte Russian, and just about anything I can find in English. The difference between me and a guy from China is that I can do the above, he can't.
The problem the US has is NOT censorship. Does US media have a different slant then other medias? Sure. It is always fun to watch the difference between what Al-Jazeerah reports and what the US media reports. All of the time they have headlines that the other doesn't even bother to cover. Neither is an 'objective' source of information (if there is such a thing). Simply by picking to report one thing over another you introduce some level of subjectivity.
The problem the US has is not censorship. Any American citizen with a computer and a modem can read anything they damn well please from anywhere in the world. The US government isn't going to stop them. The problem Americans have is apathy. Apathy is not censorship. Confusing the two is foolish because they stem from two entirely different root problems. Censorship comes from a government. The US is easily one of the least censored nations in the world. Apathy comes from culture. Apathy is the problem the US has.
No, I imagine they won't be sending a letter to the US government. There is a big difference between being pissed off that the images got out and saying some nasty words, yet having the imagines remain...
http://images.google.com/images?q=Iraqi+prisoner+
Or taking images like this...
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
...and using the force of law to pull a China.
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
Do you understand the difference a little better now?
Complain about what Bush is doing in your own home and see how quick the feds show up to see if you are a threat. It's happened when people have made statements disparging the administration in public.
I totally agree with parent. That fucking Nazi terrorist G.W. sopping wet Bush y vagina will fucking kill you if you talk shit about him in public. How can we let a complete fucking retard like Bush ruin our nation? He is a baby eating, woman raping, Nazi. He fucks little boys in the ass just to make them bleed. He is the sort of sick fucker that makes Hitler and Mao look like nice guys. His entire administation is run by mother fucking Nazi-terrorist.
What has happened to our great nation? It used to be that we could talk about child raping presidents like Bush in our own home or under and easily traced logged in name without fear that the feds will burst in through the windows and drag us off to jail! These days you can't log into slashdot under your own name and write terrible public comments about Bush because his gestapo storm troopers will fucking kill you.
Parent is right on. We have totally lost our freedom of speech. We can't say bad things about the prez any more. Parent needs a big mod up BEFORE THE NAZI STORM TROOPERS OF DEATH GET HIM. Let him die with positive karma.
The US has over a quarter of a million people in it. Does the mad ranting of one idiot need to make front page news every time they say something stupid? Even if the guy is in a position of authority what he 'proposes' will never come into existence. In order to get what he wants he would need the following:
First, he would need to convince a legislative branch of the state government to allow such an atrocity. This law would be promptly struck down by state courts as it clearly violates the article 1, section 9 of the Texas constitution. So, Texas would need to change its constitution, which is no small task. If Texas changed its constitution, this law would again be struck down by federal courts as it is clear violation of AT LEAST the 4th and 5th amendment in the US bill of rights. So, you would need to go and change not one, but TWO of the original amendments to the bill of rights.
Unless anyone out there really believes that this ass hole is going to change a state constitution and rewrite the bill of rights, this is a non-story. The title of this article should have been "Dumb ass police chief doesn't understand the laws of his government and is an ass hat"
The only thing that about this story worth reporting is that there exists a police chief this stupid. This jack ass should be put out of a job for displaying such a gross level of ignorance, especially when it his job to uphold the two respective constitutions that he suggests violating.
What would I do if I could watch any camera in any house? Three words. Free amateur porn.
That said, I don't think that the transparent society really advocates stuffing a camera into everyone's house. The idea is really about how to deal with the commons. Granted, there is still possible abuse when used in the commons.
Kamen is a really skilled inventor. He comes up with interesting solutions to problems and made some really impressive devices before the Segway. His problem is that his head is logged pretty firmly up his ass when it comes to predicitng broad social outcomes. He can invent things for clearly defined problems where money is only a minor issue (medical equipment), but his handling of the Segway shows his attempts to tackle more abstract problems are pathetic. The guy invented a multithousand dollar scooter with an hour battery life. Uh, good job. You took the scooter and managed to make it more expensive and have a shorter drive time. Awesome.
I am highly skeptical that he has anything other then smoke and mirrors. I think he doesn't have a clue in the world when it comes to broad abstract problems. This is a guy who really need to sit down and talk to an economist and a marketer before trying to build something.
WoW is as complex as any other MMORPG. What WoW did differently is that for the first 40 levels or so they made it so that the game wasn't a massive time sink. They realized that tedious (ie "hard") games drove casual gamers away. EQ is a perfect example of a game that was "hard" for power gamers, and utterly intolerable for casual gamers. It wasn't that EQ had superior and more complex mechanisms to master. What made EQ was the fact that it was such a horrible time sink. Your average casual gamer played it for about a month before realizing that their leveling had slowed to a crawl and that they were doing the same thing every single fucking time they logged on. The only thing "hard" about it was mustering up the will power to waste so much of one's time.
WoW took an entirely different path. They made the first 40 or so levels quick. You could log on for an hour each day and end that day feeling rewarded as you leveled up and moved onto different areas. WoW discovered what everyone else already knew with common sense. Casual gamers don't like games that require you to spend 40 hours a week on in order to get anywhere. It has nothing to do with complexity and difficulty, and everything to do with the amount of time you need to dump into a video game to get somewhere.
Put a copy of some game or music CD on your website, or how about some photoshopped piccies of Bush strung up from a tree? See how fast you get censored.
It takes a pretty broad stretch to connect taking someone else's work, copying it, and handing it out for free as a violation of free speech. It is even harder to try and compare that to tens of thousands of people disappearing in jail without trial for a decade for trying to hold a pro-democracy rally.
The US has a political system where the masses have little say in governance. For instance two thirds of US citizens want some sort of state health insurance system but it's not going to happen against the wishes of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
We already have "some sort" of state health insurance in every single state. Medicare and the various programs being tried in many states is "some sort" of state health insurance. The US is a federal system. The point is that we have 50 different states that can try 50 different experiments. The problem is that none of them have been so resoundingly successful yet that anyone has felt much motivation to try any of them on the federal level. That isn't to say we are not trying. Many states have altered their health insurance programs. Time will tell if any of them find anything successful.
More to the point, wanting something and getting something are two different things. I bet 99% of all people "want a good economy" too. Politicians don't deliver a "good economy" for lack of trying.
No it isn't. The apathy of the majority will ensure the continuity of business as usual as it does everywhere else.
74,000 incidents of unrest in a single year and growing doesn't sound terribly apathetic. People have this delusion that China is a big happy fairytale land where everyone considers each other brothers and bows their head does what they are told. China is in fact a very fractured state. Incidents like Tiananmen Square show this. Do you realize that during the Tiananmen Square incident that the first attempt by the Red Army to enter the city was actually repulsed by the citizens of the city? There is video footage of army trucks being physically dragged away by the crowds.
You can gamble all you want with fake money. There is nothing wrong with playing poker. The regulated part of gambling is in exchanging money. Exchanging money is commerce. One of the duties of any state is to regulate commerce. I don't particuarlly agree with how gambling is regulated today, but it is hardly a free speech issue.
I've bolded the funny parts. So you agree that the US government only has to keep you content enough to prevent revolution. As long as prices don't rise too much and the tv works, you're content to let your rights wither away.
I love how any discussion on China immediately degrades into a "Well the US could be better then it is!" discussion.
The simple fact of the matter is that the US government is able to maintain itself such that the thought of violent revolution is not even considered. What you fail to realize is that there is a stark difference between a government you disagree with, and one that is so broken that it has tens of thousands of instances of civil disorder each year.
One of the biggest issues in China is that the government can seize property at will without any sort of due process. This is often done completely outside of the rule of law. Further, it is not a small isolated incident. This happens to literally millions of people in China. They have their homes cleared away to make room for industrial complexes. The people have absolutely no recourse when this happens. There are no court hearings or ways to fight these actions.
Now, consider this same situation in the US. After a lengthy court battle in which the common man was resented by a multitude of civil organizations, the Supreme Court went against a long held belief that the government could NOT take private property and use it for commercial projects. As soon as this happened a pile of civil institutions started pushing for am immediate change to the law to make it clear that this was not acceptable. Currently, a bill is in the works in congress to change the law to make it such that the state can not seize land from private individuals for commercial purposes.
What is the difference in this instance? The US has a functional court system, rule of law, and a legislative branch that responds. Is it perfect? Hell no. Does it beat having thousands of local governments sieze land and give it to corporations without any sort of real compensation like what happens in China? Hell yes.
How many military actions have been shelved because the chinese won't let it happen.
Two. The US has not blatantly parked a fleet between the democratic nation of Taiwan and China because it doesn't want to fight China. The US also called off the Korean war because it didn't want to continue fighting a million Chinese. As a result, we have the picture perfect North Korea of today.
That honestly are all the actions that China has managed to stop. There have been other conflicts that China tried to stop, but failed. NATO ending the Kosovo genocide comes to mind. China tried to prevent the UN from passing a resolution authorizing force, but finally relented AFTER NATO had by-passed the UN and simply started dropping bombs.
The only real 'speech' laws that the US has that it activly tries to enforce over the Internet are child porn laws. Those are enforced because compelling a minor to strip naked and fuck a dog or whatever is illegal. China and the West are night and day when it comes to Internet content. The West makes almost no attempt to regulate the content that goes up. The US is actually the most extreme case that does the absolutely least regulation. If you want to throw up a Nazi hate site, that is a-okay in the US.
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China is full of shit if they think there is any parallel between what the US does and what they do in terms of Internet censorship.
China's problem is that at some point they are going to have to turn around and face their internal problems in a constructive non-authoritarian manner. The US can have neo-Nazi websites because it has a stable political system that, while certainly not perfect, does a good job at keeping the masses content enough that rebellion doesn't linger on anyone's mind. China on the other hand has a political system where the masses have little say in governance. China has left the only opposition to government policies to be rebellion. As a result, China deals with constant (and little reported on) riots and instances of civil unrest that are completely alien to most Western governments.
A day of reckoning is coming for China, and their tardiness in opening up their government to oversight by the general populace is going to make this reckoning all the worse. China needs to take some more serious steps towards instituting good civil governance.
Don't believe that China has a serious problem with their ability to govern? Consider this fact. Official figures admit 74,000 individual incidents of unrest in 2004.*
*Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
To this day, the Piss Christ is still shrouded in controversy. At least Christians aren't asking for the heads to be chopped off or the decimation of every man, woman, and child in western countries. Want to guess what religious culture im referring too? It's easy. Give it a try...
You miss the point. "Shrouded in controversy" is a good reaction to something you disagree with. No one has any problem if you say, "that shit sucks". The problem is when you say "that shit sucks, lets go burn the embassy that has no control over the source of our discontent and murder someone. Hell, let's put a fucking bounty on someone's head. d3ath t0 teh INFIDALS!"
It is okay to respond negatively to speech you don't like. You can merrily go out and tell everyone how much you hate that speech. You can call them all sorts of names. The problem comes in when you start to burn property and kill people. I know it is a really grey line between writing an angry editorial and destroying another nation's embassy, but try and see it.
Do me a favor and type 9 11 cartoon into google image. Click on the first cartoon. If that is not enough, just keep scrolling. Oh, is that a flaming pile of disproved I see? Why yes it is.
You can't offend the average American bad enough to get them to form a mob and burn down another nations embassy. Period, end of story. We are far too used to freedom of speech. We don't really give a shit what another nation's media says. Hell, we don't care what our media says. The acceptance of freedom of speech overrides everything.
These cultures are backwards 10th centaury cultures 20th centaury population exposed mass media and armed. They do have problems and they are dysfunctional (at least by our standards). That is not to say that are not completely broken. They have modern moderate elements in rather large proportions. The problem they are having is that they are culturally advancing a 1000 years or so almost overnight. You can't drive forward the culture and the technology of a nation a 1000 years into the future without some serious issues and dysfunctional elements.
Lets burn down the Turkish embassy! w00t!
Seriously though, the problem with the Middle East is that you basically have a people that have a 10th centaury mentality armed like a 20th centaury nation and population. It is like opening up a time warp, increasing their numbers a few orders of magnitude, and then arming them.
Personally, I think the Middle East has its days numbered. The oil is running out. They have about 20 years to get their shit together and culturally evolve out of the 10th centaury. Once the oil is out, the rest of the world is going to lose interest mighty fast, and when happens they are going to get roughly the same amount of attention as Africa. We might still send aid and feel bad when something goes really wrong and millions die, but in the end, they will just be ignored. Think of the US response to the genocide in Rwanda or the horrible wars that have taken place in Ethiopia. Did the rest of the world life a finger, risk life and limb, or even much money to intervene? Nope.
I give the Middle East 20 years before the fundamentalist get their wish. The rest of the world is going to stop caring about the area and simply leave. At that point, they can make their own little Taliban 'paradise' without anyone's interference.
The moderate Muslims desperately need to grow a pair and stand up for their continued survival. The clock is ticking. If they keep letting ignorant zealots have their way, their children will reap what their parents sowed.
There is a Twilight Zone episode where this guy ends up dying and finds himself in the afterlife. He was a big gambler in life, so his after life has him in a Casino. In his afterlife, he always winds. Every single hand, every roll of the dice, every spin of the wheel is a win. After a while he asks his after life guide what kind of heaven this is. He complains that winning is meaningless if you never lose. The guide responds with, "What makes you think you are in heaven?"
Quite the contrary. Terrorists are not out to win hearts and minds, or win political support. They are out to terrorize the public and disrupt the political system. The latter can mean either weakening it or forcing it to overreact to the point where it destroys itself. A few dudes with boxcutters bringing an end to freedom and democracy in America, and saddling it with huge debt that may cripple it for generations? That's quite a return on a relatively puny investment! They would love to see GWB serving up more of the same.
I am not entirely sure that they would do another 9/11 if they could go back in time and change things. Recall that before 9/11 they had an entire state that supported them and was a model utopia (err, in their eyes). They also enjoyed a great deal of tolerance in many other states. Now, that state has been utterly conquered, their Islamic fundamentalist utopia has been dismantled, and you won't catch any nation openly supporting a terrorist organization that is committed to launching attacks against the US.
Certainly they gained something, but you need to realize that they lost A LOT. I don't think what they got was the gamble they expected to take.
The rules of the game are now a little more complex. While their State was destroyed, they have managed to stir up Islamic fundamentalist unrest in many other nations that otherwise did not have unified rallying calls. In doing so, they have directly entered into conflict with the more secular nationalist governments. Unfortunately for the US, the nationalist governments are all wildly unpopular and corrupt. Palestine voting out Fatah wasn't a vote to cut off funding to Palestine and start instituting religious law, it was a vote against corruption.
Personally, I don't think anything went the way anyone planned it to. Attacking the US again will just change the nature of the game in even more unpredictable ways. An enraged US could be Islamic fundamentalisms best recruitment pitch or the beginning of the end as 1/5th of the worlds economy violently swings to crush a threat.
You need to remember that Islamic fundamentalism has precedents. It is a movement that is remarkably similar to World War II style fascism. It is an extremely intolerant, exclusive, and violent way of operating. Once that form of ideology grew into power it was tolerated less then 20 years before being violently put down.
While I'll agree that the described actions are moronic, they are also in complete accord with the President's evident personal evangelistic religious agenda, and impeding the work of serious science and science education.
It's also not the first time we've seen evidence that Bush has appointed a political ally to a sensitive position who later proved grossly underqualified.
I think the second statement is more accurate then the first. I really don't think that the conspiracy to bring down science is as big as the NYT article makes it out to be. I think the important point to take away is the second statement you made. They have an ugly habit of appointing grossly under qualified people.
It would be one thing if they had appointed a master of PR manipulation with years of experience to distort the picture coming out of NASA. If that had happened, I would line up with "evil plot!" line of thinking. They didn't though. They appointed some 24 year with no experience. He is probably someone's son, kissed the right ass, or earned his position in some other non-merit based manner. THAT is the problem. This isn't a case of "evil plot!" it is a case of "we are an incompetent at governing!"
More simply put, don't attribute to evil what you can attribute to stupidity and incompetence.
When an appointee from a government known to be big on pushing religious viewpoints into science (from the morning after pill to high school biology), asks that the big bang be specially marked out because it's a religious issue (his words), you've got to suspect something's going on.
The appointee was 24. I didn't really state it clearly, but what my original point is that people are implying that this was a push by the administration to impose religious values on NASA, when I really think they were just being morons and appointed someone who was incompetent.
You don't appoint 24 year olds to execute your evil plots. If they had appointed an experienced PR pro, I would buy that this was an evil plot.
In other words, I think people are attributing to evil what could more likely be attributed to stupidity and incompetence. I am not saying that there isn't a story here. I am just saying the story isn't "Bush uses appointees to influence science, theology to trump science at NASA!" It is "Bush administration appoints incompetent civil servants, are there others out there mucking up the system?"
You miss my point. What happened wasn't an organized effort to disrupt NASA. What happened was an idiot was appointed to a position that he should not have been appointed to. The hype around OMFG Bush hates science utterly misses the real crime. The crime was that he, or more likely idiot in his administration, appointed a moron. The issue isn't science taking a hit. The issue is shitty civil servant appointments.
In fact, I think you put it best. They appointed a 24 year old. I don't know about you, but if I had an evil conspiracy to take down NASA, I wouldn't appoint a 24 year old to do it. I am pretty damn sure I could find someone older and with more experience. The issue is that somewhere along the line they appointed an idiot to civil servant position, not that they were trying to use that appointment to affect NASA.
The article implies that what happened was that a civil servant position was intentionally used to manipulate NASA. I am saying that what really happened was that they utterly failed to appoint competent civil servant.
What it boils down to was, where they being evil, or were they being stupid. From what the NYT article describes happens, it looks like they were just being stupid. Like the old saying goes, don't attribute to evil what you can attribute to stupidity or incompetence.
After reading the NYT article, I think a lot of this was over blown. Basically the accusations boil down throwing the word theory after big bang, NASA press releases trying to tie absolutely everything to the presidential vision, and earth sciences taking a hit.
Throwing the word "theory" after big bang is technically the right treatment for the word. It is a theory. It is a pretty damn strong theory, but theory none the less.
As far as the PR office stuffing a reference to the presidential vision on space exploration in every single press release, while irritating, really isn't much of a crime in my opinion. Press releases are not scientific journals; they are the PR office at work. Part of the PR offices job is to drum up support for various initiatives. Claiming everything under the sun could help the study of other plants is probably technically correct. The NASA earth scientist are really just pissed that they got their work mentioned in the context that it could do something good for the presidential vision. NASA earth science and the rest of NASA have always had a problem with each other. I am not terribly surprised to see them feuding over the wording of press releases.
As far as earth sciences taking a hit and going under major restructuring, this shouldn't come as a surprise. The president pretty explicitly stated that NASA was to be realigned to focus on manned missions to space. Unsurprisingly, the means cuts in everything unrelated. Now, you might very well disagree with this, but it is certainly not secret sinister plot.
The only thing "scary" going on that the NYT article brought up is that they let some 24 year old idiot who clearly has no idea what he is doing into NASA's PR office. This "gem" shows pretty clearly that his head is deeply implanted up his ass.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
Now yes, the big bang theory IS a theory and should e called as such. That said, it isn't called a theory for religious reasons. Further, this fucking moron seems to be under the delusion that the big bang theory is something that religious folks don't like. Most Christians absolutely LOVE the big bang theory as it upset the long held scientific belief that the universe was forever and stats that the universe has a beginning.
Honestly, I think the news story here is that an idiot 24 year old kid got appointed into a job way over his head and acted like a moron.