Both Google and HTC two of the few companies that are blameless. They pay ransom to a bunch of other companies, but they are currently only being sued and not suing anyone else. That said, yes, Apple is as bad and as nasty as Microsoft. I don't own an iPhone either. I actually have an HTC Evo.
It is a bit more complicated than "they come from China", but not much. Speaking as someone who actually works for a supplier of cell phone parts (accelerometers), most supply chains involve a few high end parts and a bunch of cheap parts. The high end parts often come from the US and Europe (though not always). So, what I do, a tiny MEMs chip that is your accelerometer comes from the US in a very specialized fab. We then send that chip across the ocean for packaging and assembly. Asia pumps out all of the lower end components. The final assembly tends to be in places like China. If you were to draw a flow diagram it would be a crap ton of lines flowing in and out of Asia to a few hubs in the US and Europe.
The more important piece is that everything is off the shelf. If you want to buy an accelerometer from my company, we wouldn't care who you are and we would support you and set you up to use it. If you wanted someone to assemble it, they would happily do it. There is absolutely no reason in the world why a startup with a few million in venture funding couldn't build a cellphone and sell it, other than they would be murdered by lawyers.
I don't know where Nokia assembles their parts, but I can pretty much bet you my soul that the vast majority of parts they don't actually make. Cell phone companies design and assemble phones. They don't actually make most of the components.
like software patents either, but development does take its time and money and you currently still have to play by the rules like everyone else. Just because you're not selling as many devices as HTC doesn't mean you don't have to pay the same royalties. Even Google, like every other company, is asking for patent royalties, so why suddenly Microsoft shouldn't? Sure, hate the software patents, but twisting this as something like Microsoft demanding manufacturers to pay if they want to install Linux is just... wrong.
Shit like this is why the cell phone industry is in as sorry of a shape as it is. Mobile devices are hotter than hell right now. EVERYONE makes them in fucking China. The only thing you need as a producer is to design some hardware from some off the shelf components, add your spin on it, and flip on a switch in China. What is happening? Not this.
What is happening is that only people armed to the teeth with both piles of money and patents dares step a foot into this market. Every single pissant start up Silicon Valley should be building a phone, but instead it is limited to only people armed to the teeth for a legal fight. This is fucked up, and for a consumer, it is hitting you in the pocketbook. Further, absolutely none of these patents are novel. It isn't like a company hits on a great idea no one will ever think of and patents it to protect themselves. What is happening is that everyone is patenting the obvious next step, and than suing when everyone goes to take that obvious next step.
What people forget is that patents are not some sort of moral fucking right. They are a completely artificial creation made by governments. It is a government granted monopoly, and it isn't granted for some fucked up sense of morality. It is granted for the singular reason of "promoting the useful arts". It is written into the fucking US constitution. When it fails at this, we are doing it wrong. If patents are stepping in the way of competition and innovation, they are failing in their singular purpose. Clearly, they are failing.
Patent law is so horribly fucked up these days there are no words for it. Consumers, small and medium sized businesses, and the economy are getting screwed. Microsoft is leading the charge. They can't compete in an open market, so they swing a government enforced sledgehammer at the competition.
I almost considered looking into getting a WiMo7 phone, but after this sort of anti-consumer crap, fuck those guys.
These projections are bunk. Every Malthusian since, well, Malthus, has predicted the end of resources, and they have all been wrong. I'm not saying that there are not challenges ahead, but these predictions are trite and all based upon the idea that humans are just going to plow forward doing exactly what they have always been doing. This is clearly crap. We change our consumption patterns, discover new resources, recycle old ones, and in general are horribly unpredictable over the timescale of a decade, much less decades or centuries.
Resources are recyclable. Anything not shoved into a nuclear isn't going to ever be really 'used'. There is no shortage of matter on earth to make stuff with. We are not going to run out of matter. At most, it is just going to become more expensive for some kinds. Food is easily scalable. We waste horrific amounts of food with a bad transportation system and by feeding livestock. Supermarkets dumped amazing amounts of food just to cater to our finicky tastes, and a massive amount of food production goes over to feeding cattle. Both practices I am going to go out on a limb and say we would abort before we starved. That doesn't even being to take into account new technology that will allow for more production with less. As far as energy, there is a big fucking ball of fusion in the sky, lots of stuff laying around to do a little fission, and at least in the US, gobs of coal to burn. We are not going to run out.
I don't want to downplay the environmental challenges we face. There are real environmental challenges. The developing world in particular has to grapple with some serious questions about how they want to balance development and pollution. We do need to watch what levers we are slamming in regards to the climate, and we might even need to think about how the fuck we are going to decide where to set the world thermostat if it comes down to it. That said, humanity isn't doomed. We are not going to slide backwards. There is going to be no mass starvation in any place except where the government is too fucked and corrupt up to function for the benefit of the people. Technology isn't going to vanish.
Predicting the end of the world every year for the past millennium has to be getting dull and old. The only people with a more consistent record of being wrong about the end of the world than Malthusians are religious cults... and even then, cults tend to break up after the world fails to end a few times. Malthusians on the other hand are utterly relentless in seeing the end being just around the corner, finding themselves completely wrong, and making the same prediction around the next corner. Get over it.
Meh, I think this can be used in an entirely appropriate way to solve a social problem. Anyone who says technology doesn't solves social problems had has had their eyes closed for the past span of human civilization. If a company sets a copy machine to not copy a certain "this is secret, do not copy" logo or seal, it will go a long way to solving most innocent violations of rules.
It is like a shitty bike lock. Is a shitty bike lock going to prevent anyone who wants to steal your bike from stealing it? No, but it will stop your bike from being stolen 99% of the time. People are lazy and opportunistic. Someone who wouldn't normally steal a bike will steal one if they see one without a lock. Throw eve the most shitty low grade lock on, and only people out to steal bikes will bother to steal it.
If I want to copy the secret document, it is pretty trivial to circumvent. Just slap a post-it note over the logo. That said, if I go to copy something confidential and have no nefarious intentions, if the copy machine tells me to screw off and says it sent a letter to the boss, I will probably back off. A little light will click in your head and you will think, "gee, I guess they are serious about this rule". Compliance with the rule will shoot up to almost total compliance because to circumvent the machine you are going to have to very intentionally break the rule and circumvent some shitty protection preventing you from doing so. There probably are places where something like this makes sense. Some records are sensitive either by their nature or by the law (like in medical records). This would probably help people actually comply with the rule.
I don't think people fully grasp how important Taiwan is to the electronics industry. I work in the semiconductor industry (that is computer chips for the layman) and can assure you that anything but a peaceful Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan would send the entire consumer economy into... well, I have no idea what it would do, but it would do something. Taiwan is a massive chunk of the worlds chip making capacity AND a large chunk of the support services surrounding the industry. We would instantly be out of capacity and all of your electronics, consumer or otherwise, would skyrocket drastically in price. This would cause the price of EVERYTHING else to go up. Even as the world tried to build new facilities to replace the missing capacity, it would drive prices up. New facilities are horrifically expensive and take years to build. It would take at least half a decade to recover the lost capacity.
For me personally, it would actually probably be pretty awesome. My facility would probably have to try and rapidly expand and get a torrent of cash. We would need to scramble to get some of our supplies from elsewhere, but we could probably pull it off. For everyone else in the world though, it would really suck. The only thing worse than China stomping Taiwan, is China stomping Taiwan and the US and China going into a trade war over the issue. It would spell pretty total and absolute economic d00m.
If there is one great downside to globalization, it is that we are now completely interconnected. Interconnectedness is awesome for efficiency and driving down prices. The downside though is that efficiency is the exact opposite of robustness. An efficient and optimized system is one that fails very badly when you tear a hunk of it out. I am pretty pro globalization, but there is something to be said for robustness. A system that is so efficient that it is one unknown disaster from total collapse should make people nervous.
As a grown adult who uses birth control responsibility, let me just say, fuck the kids. I am pretty fucking tired of my civil liberties being stripped because some lazy ass parent can't keep their little spawn in check without the full brutal force of government beating everyone over the head. If you find the world too scary to have kids in, don't fucking breed. If you feel you must, America is big, so go find an unused corner away from other humans and do it there. I like violent video games, sex, and if I want to use a drug that is one step below herbal tea in terms of potency, please fuck right off and let me use it without your moaning about your little spawn being influenced by my naughty behavior (in my own fucking house).
As a general rule of thumb, any politician that declares "OMFG THE CHILDREN" doesn't get my vote. I have handed in more than one blank voting ballot.
Personally, I think you just sound like a romantic, not someone who has stumbled upon a magic productivity method. What gets your rocks off is thinking that you are doing something old sk00l. It is pretty dead easy to make MS Word 2040 or whatever version they are on a blank white screen where words appear when you type. Your other old sk00l romanticism is just that, romanticism. A fixie really isn't better than a bike with gears unless you like having your legs sheared off when you go too fast. Gears are actually awesome when you need to go up a steep hill or want to haul ass down a steep hill. Power steering, computer control traction, and all of that goodness is likewise is awesome when something dives in front of your car and you need to make a sharp dodge. Touchy feel decelerations that you can feel the road better and that somehow improves your not hitting shit skills don't stand up the statistical reality that power steering, traction control, and fun stuff like that reduces accidents.
There is nothing wrong with being a romantic who idealizes simplicity, and there certainly is something to be said for keeping thing simple, but your methods are almost certainly useless to someone who doesn't see the romanticism in using old obscure text editors. For those people, if the editor is really distracting, they should just take a few seconds to pair down the interface to MS Word or Open Office (or whatever), rather than run an archaic text editor. If you are a romantic and need to be in a mood to write, find what gets your rocks off and go for it. Neal Stephenson wrote the 4000 or so page series with a freaking fountain pen. Inefficient? Sure, but if acting a little archaic gets your creative juices flowing, go for it.
I agree that the Intertubes without flash is not a horrible place, but I feel the same way about a lot of things. None the less, what people seem to be missing is that with Android you have the option. So for instance, I was on a website today with flash videos on my Evo. Until I click on it, it is just a icon. It isn't hurting me, it isn't using any of my phones resources, and it isn't spamming me with flash ads. If I had an iOS device, that would be the end of it... a dead icon. With Android, I decided, "eh, what the hell, lets see what it is". I clicked on it and it loaded the flash content. In this case, it worked out pretty good and the video worked fine. Other times the resolution has been completely fucked and it didn't work fine.
An Android device is exactly like an iOS device when it runs into flash content... it does nothing. The singular difference is that after it does nothing have the option of telling my Android OS to give it a try.
This is the difference between iOS and Android. iOS is going to do whatever it does in the way that Jobs wanted it to do it. Nothing more and nothing less. Your home screen WILL be a bunch of app icons with the Apple built in buttons on the bottom. If you like that, great. It is going to be exactly what you expect, generally never break, and your phone is going to look almost identical to every other phone of the same model. I was actually a little shocked when Jobs let people change their background with iOS4 and potentially ruin the Apple aesthetic.
With Android, you can do also make your home screen the exact same as an iOS device. You can also radically customize it, strip your stock launcher and replace it with something else, toss a dozen widgets into your home screen, give yourself some moving live wall paper, and run whatever you please in the background... and that is without rooting device. While Android (at least 2.2) is pretty good about unloading things when you are starting to toast your device, I imagine you can probably slow it down and make it ugly in a way that an iOS device will never allow.
Apple offers enforced aesthetics and a basic level of functionality at the cost of dramatically reduced customization and potential utility. Android offers the potential for radical customization and vastly expanded capability at the expense of giving you the power to make your device slow and ugly. As a techie, the choice is pretty easy. I like that I replaced my launcher, radically changed my dock, added a bunch of interesting widgets to my home screens, altered the aesthetics of my device such that it looks like no other, and built the interface to my device to conform exactly to my needs. For my mother, she might be better off with a device that might have reduced utility but that she can't possibility screw up. The Apple home screen are app short cuts and a built in dock. You can't possibly screw it up. With Android you can load a badly designed widget that eats your CPU. I can hunt down and kill such a widget. My mom probably can't. She might be better off never even being given the option.
Eh, take your pick. Either way, the competition is good. I am sure Apple will cave and offer limited widgets with their next upgrade like the way they offered limited multi tasking because of Android. On the flip side, I am sure Android will work on its aesthetics and device makers will push their hardware specs to keep up with Android. Seems like a win for everyone. I actually hope that WiMo7 isn't a total failure because I want the OSs to really battle it out and bloody each other up. Competition drives everyone forward.
If we do exactly nothing and the population keeps growing we will starve. Malthus was right in this regard. What made Malthus an idiot is that humans don't do that. We change the environment when it is getting ready to kill us. The idea that a few billion humans will merrily walk off into the abyss is absurd.
So the soil dies without synthetic fertilizers? Are you utterly convinced that it is simply impossible that there exists a technology to take the next leap? Last time I checked we have no shortage of matter or energy around here. It doesn't even take much in the way of imagination see solutions. Genetically engineered crops for fallow fields to restore the soil faster is one solution. Modified plants to survive in depleted soil is another. Hell, boring old good and sustainable crop practices eliminate much of the dangers of soil degradation and are only avoided because synthetics are so damned cheap.
That doesn't even include the pretty dull social changes we could make to keep starvation at bay. Simply eliminating absurd waste of calories that go into luxury meat production would let us feed many billions of more people without a drop of new tech. Toss onto the top of that heap the fact that human populations have been throttling back their growth rate steadily from the 70s, and it shows that once again, the Malthusians in the room are wrong... as they have been continiously despite prophecies of doom for the past 200 freaking years.
I hope that if I ever come up with a prediction that is proven continuously wrong for two-hundred-fucking-years I have idiots in the far future still singing my praise convinced that the idiots singing the same praise (who were also wrong) for the past 200 years were just a little too early.
Malthus was wrong in every single conceivable sense of the word and continues to be so. He has the same track record as alien doomsday cults. Actually, I take that back. Alien doomsday cults tend to only have a record of being wrong for a decade or two at the most. Malthus outstrips them all with his 200 year history of complete failure to understand humanity and its very strong desire to not starve. Only Bible nuts predicting the Armageddon for the past couple thousand years manage to put Malthus to shame.
I really hope that if one of my dooms day predictions is shown to be absolutely and completely wrong by a few hundred years worth of data, people still cite me like I contributed something to human knowledge. Whenever people cite Malthus, I have to really wonder if they realize that we talk about Malthus because the dude was wrong, NOT because he developed a new and working theory to predict the future. Food production kept up with population growth and has continued to consistently for hundreds of years. The only time people start to starve is when the politics of the area buggers it up. Humans kick ass at making food... seriously, we are not going to starve. We could turn around and feed a population five times the current one by simply using land for crops that we don't already use and going vegan... toss in a little technology to that magic and we could feed more.
Humans hate starving and we really put our minds to it to prevent it from happening. There are lots of things to worry about in the future. Food isn't one of them.
Repeat after me.
MALTHUS. WAS. WRONG. He was wrong when he made his prediction. He was wrong a few hundred years after his prediction failed to come true. He will continue to be wrong into the future. If humans start starving world wide, it will because an asteroid blocked out the sun, we had a nuclear war, or we unleashed a genetically engineered crop blight. It wont be because the population simply out stripped supply in food. Stop citing that dumb asshole like he made a worthy prediction.
I must have missed where I declared I achieve true lasting spiritual happiness from changing my background or spraying graffiti on walls.
The fact that you couldn't even change the background the phone uses is just a basic example of how iOS treats its users like they are dumb drooling idiots who are lucky to successfully plug the device into the wall. It is such a basic and trivial feature that it speaks volumes that you can't uses. Seriously, how fucking stupid do your users have to be if they can't be trusted with the ability to swap out the background of the home screen?
Need a more concrete example that isn't aesthetics driven? How about the fact that you can't use widgets, the mutli-tasking is gimped, and you sure as shit can't customize the interface in any meaningful way, much less swap it out entirely. Android merrily lets you do all of these things without so much as having to bother to root the phone.
Like I said, maybe decisions, choice, and customizing a device to your needs, be they practical or aesthetic, is too much for someone who finds technology scary. Maybe for those people iOS devices are the right call. For anyone who doesn't wet themselves when when they see tech though, iOS is crap.
No offense, but who gives a flying fuck what your technophobe mom thinks? If I wanted my life to revolve around what the dumb unwashed masses liked I would drink nothing but bud light, only read the sports, celebrity, and horoscope sections of the newspaper, and believe that evolution is an evil lie and that the world is 6000 years old. Most people are fucking stupid. Android forks are probably not for them.
Is Android right for people who are terrified by tech? Fight amongst yourselves because I really don't care what the answer is. I know that it is certainly right for people who like tech and don't wet themselves at the thought of customizing their phone a little for their needs. I mean holy shit, Apple didn't allow you to change your fucking background until iOS4. How stupid does your target audience need to be if you think letting them change their background is just too much responsibility for them to handle?
It is a map of modern science. Do you know what a philosophy map that starts with Plato and Aristotle is? Neither modern, nor science. It is like complaining that a lineage map of Linux OS's doesn't include the complete history of agriculture.
True, but that in large part is because where you put the period at the end of this map has a massive influence on where you begin, especially philosophically. That isn't to suggest that there were not some parallels elsewhere in the world, but due to the great leaps the West made over the East from 16th century on up until the dawn of the 21st, those parallels became dead ends.
China was ahead of the West for a very long time. Right up into and even during the early part of the colonial age China was pretty far ahead of the West in terms of technology and culture. If China had maintained that path we might be in exactly the same place we are today in terms of technology, but instead of being able to trace back philosophical lines from Europe, to Roman, to Greece, you might trace it back from Japan, to Korea, to China with a set of Eastern philosophers to match. Hell, if you were to simply draw the map in the 1500s of where the major technologies trace their schools of thought from you would have two maps, on Eastern and one Western, and the Eastern one would be further ahead.
This isn't even to suggest that the West made its advancements in a vacuum. Lots of technology and thought crossed both ways across Eurasia, but when an idea travels a few thousand miles in the ancient world and suffers a dozen translations you pretty much lose all traceability. Hell, just jumping from an Islamic Empire to a Christian Empire is a pretty sure way to ensure that traceability is lost. It isn't like a Christian scholar in 1,200 AD influenced by an Islamic Arab scholar is going to cite his inspiration. The only reason why we remember those ancient Greek scholars at all is because the empires that came after worship the empires that came before, and were happy to cite them as influences.
Starting the map in the 1500s and working up to today means it is going to be a Western map because that was the period of time when the West dominated world thinking. Draw this map from 2000 BC to 1500 AD, or from 600 AD to 1200 AD, or from many other two points and you would see totally different maps. Hell, I bet the map from 2000 AD to 2500 AD is going to be a wild one with lines crossing all over the world like never before.
I am not sure where you get the idea that the US has a low tolerance for civilian casualties, especially on home soil. History has proven it is exactly the opposite. They have a low tolerance to civilian casualties, but once their tolerance is broken they don't back off, they lose their fucking minds and go from being mildly isolationist to bloody thirsty nation eaters.
Killing US civilians in the US is a pretty sure way to not stop the US. If you nuked US cities and threatened to nuke more, the US would abandon those cities, blow up a few city blocks to get to the bombs if they had too, and turn the aggressor nation into glass. US doctrine is pretty clear on the topic and it isn't joking. Hell, the Cuban missile crisis is a great example of where when the US felt it was "right" and was pretty willing to start a nuclear war to prove the point.
If there is one history lesson that people seem to forget over and over about the US is that attacking the US directly results in the US going fucking bat shit. Whenever it happens, the US goes nuts and beats the piss out of the attacker and at least one other guy who probably didn't even have anything to do with it just for good measure.
No, beating the US is pretty easy, but nuking cities is not the way to do it. The way you beat the US is to make them kill civilians and kill their soldiers. Killing civilians and having soldiers die while fighting civilians and insurgents saps the US will to fight pretty quickly. If the Iraqi insurgents had been more interested in killing US soldiers and less interested in terrorizing their countrymen, the US would have thrown in the towel. The only reason why the US "won" in Iraq was because the insurgents managed to piss of the population badly enough where they started to help the US.
The US population loses its thirst for blood when they feel like they are fighting morally unjust and pointless wars. When they think that they have been wronged, they are willing to throw tens of thousands soldiers into a meat grinder and retool their economy for nation destruction.
Pretty much. The US isn't going to glass a city even though it can. The US will stick to the rules of war (more or less) regardless of what the enemy does. If you are going to fight a nation that spends a couple of orders of magnitude more on its military than you and does so without breaking a sweat, you are going to have break a few rules. The US populace wont stand for glassing cities, and the worst the UN would do is send an angry letter. Seriously, unless you are China or Russia, if you are going to fight the US, don't follow the "rules" of war. You will get your ass kicked.
Fighting according to the rules of war with the US is like a peasant entering a jousting contest on a donkey with a pitch fork against a fully armored knight. If you are a peasant and you need to kill a knight, don't follow his rules. Go slit his throat while he is asleep.
I'm not advocating this. I personally think that if Iran really wanted to kick ass on the global stage they would renounce their nuclear program, put the Imams backs in the Mosque where they belong, turn into a true democracy, and open up. Iran has the capacity to dominate the region. Instead, they are a sad impoverished nation slowly pissing away the advantages they have. Their only savings grace is that every nation around them is almost as screwed up as they are.
I am pretty sure that in the middle of an American invasion that Iran could find national unity rather quickly. Iran isn't Iraq with a small minority of the population brutally repressing the other 70%. That isn't to say that there are probably groups that Iran wouldn't want to arm, but an armed populace in the middle of a US invasion isn't going to launch a general uprising against anyone other than the US. Further, it isn't like the government is going to vanish. If it was built from day one to exert military control in the face of occupation you could still go out and arrest / kill dissidents. In fact, I think kill collaborators would probably be one of the top missions for guerrilla forces. The point is to make your military unable to be targeted by thousand pound bombs, not to give up control and government.
This thing is a gimmick. It is a small cruise missile with remote capabilities. The bomb on it is a tiny little dumb thing that isn't going to hurt anyone unless it hits them directly, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that the avionics on that drone don't amount to much more than a camera bolted on. In defense against the presumed target, the US, this thing is a novelty. The US gets giddy over electronic warfare and this thing is asking have its connection severed. The fuel and explosives are better spent on a missile that doesn't bother to return home and doesn't need an operator to guide it in. This does nothing to help the defense of Iran against the style of combat the US uses.
If you are going to fight the US, and you are not China or Russia, you need to fight dispersed, hidden, and from cover. The only time it is worthwhile to fully stand and fight is if the victory you achieve is worth the destruction of the force you are having stand and fight. It is worthwhile to launch a massive simultaneous missile on a US carrier battle group with everything you have knowing that force will be destroyed. If you kill a carrier, the fact that you just destroyed your missile force is worth it. Outside of that though, you need to fight with the understanding that the US has the capability to glass the shit out of any arbitrary size of land using just conventional weapons. Your goal as the defender is to make it so that your forces are concealed and doing hit and runs, and so never standing around waiting to be glassed, or to fight from a position the US is unwilling to destroy. Namely, if you fight from a city the US won't level the city World War II style. They might knock down the buildings one by one trying to take out suspected military units, but the won't just level the place in one swipe like they could with a few MOABs. This glorified cruise missile doesn't help this style of fighting. It can't be launched by field units, and even if it could, it is going to lead the US back to your position assuming it even makes it back. You are better off to launch a missile that isn't expected to return or, even better, save the money to arm your city bound army with more and better RPGs.
Personally, if I had to organize the defense of Iran from the US, the only conventional forces I would bother with would be sea mines and easily concealed cruise missiles. The only point of those forces would be to try and sacrifice themselves in doing damage to the ocean going invasion force. The rest of my defense would involve the army stripping down into civilian clothing the second the invasion hits and dispersing into the population with a plan, and giving everyone a (civilians included) gun. Train the army in guerrilla tactics, cache weapons and explosives all over the place, and never even make the pretense of fighting with uniforms on. Encourage the civilians to fight in their own amateurish way not to inflict any real harm, but to blur the line between military and civilian in the eyes of the enemy as much as possible. The only military tech worthwhile would be the kind useful to guerrilla forces. Bike bombs, all manner of concealed explosives, easily concealed weapons, concealed body armor, methods of communicating across cells and receiving orders, methods of smuggling, modified civilian vehicles (that still look civilian) with military applications, and that sort of thing are the techs worth developing in earnest. You still need the capacity to fight a conventional war against your neighbors, but the real threat, the US, is a fight you don't want to do standing up. The US loves nothing more than to see massive troop formations all lined up nice and orderly in a big open desert. See Iraq War part 1 for what happens to armies that stand.
Unfortunately, even a rape kit isn't concrete evidence one way or the other if a national spy agency wants to destroy your reputation. A rape kit just proves that you had sex with a person and an examination might show damaged genitals. Step 1, seduce nerd. Step 2, damage your genitals with a dildo... or reverse the order. It doesn't matter.
It takes only one vaguely credible Swedish national with sympathy for one of the many spy agencies that have been pissed off by Wikileaks and a willingness for an embarrassed spy agency to do something mildly nasty. The actual faking of the evidence is trivial, especially if you can seduce one ugly nerd. Do I think there exists spy agencies willing to fake a rape? Well, they are willing to start coups, fund rebels, snag European nation and torture them, and assassinate world leaders... so yes. Smearing Assange is pretty low on the list of nasty things spy agencies have done.
Now, what would be REALLY interesting is if a spy agency gets caught trying to smear Assange. Imagine if Assange is a paranoid motherfucker and worries about exactly this sort of thing, so he always has a hidden camera and microphone on him and is able to prove whatever version of events he gives.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Short of someone having secretly had a camera going I don't think anyone is ever going to be fully satisfied with whatever the outcome is. When you have multiple spy agencies hunting you down, paranoid conspiracy can explain pretty much anything, and it isn't all that paranoid.
It wasn't US government bashing. If he was releasing English documents or French documents at this moment I would swap out US for France or England. He just so happens to be releasing a few thousand US military classified documents making the US kind of high on the suspect list these days. I would expect pretty much any government in the world would be more than happy to do far worse to protect military secrets.
As for the "but he is still alive!"... seriously, Assange dying wouldn't be a LITTLE suspicious? Assange himself isn't the problem. It isn't like if he dies it all goes away. Turning him into a martyr, which is exactly what will happen if he ends up dead, won't solve anything. If anything, it will make it a thousand times worse. Wikileaks would just release everything, the US (or whatever nation he has pissed off recently) would look like shit, and everyone would agree Wikileaks is justified if governments are resorting to murdering disgruntle open government advocates.
Pinning him with a couple of rape charges which don't even need to stick to be effective is exactly the most ideal move you could make. You don't turn him into a martyr, but you do damage the public face of Wikileaks. Further, like I said, it is a pretty damn easy charge to hit him with. It is certainly easier than martyring the guy. Just get a woman to make the accusation. Bonus points if she seduces him and then after (or before) the fact goes to town on her va-ja-ja with a dildo to give it some physical evidence of rape. Trivial, nearly impossible to disprove, and well within the capability of pretty much any spy agency.
I am generally pretty much not into conspiracy theories, but in this case, extreme skepticism is called for. More than one government has the incentive to do it, it is brain dead easy to pull off, and it is the single most damaging thing you could possibly do to wiki leaks. As an added bonus, it doesn't even have to stick to do damage. Sweden could drop the charges tomorrow saying there isn't enough evidence and the damage would already be done.
I'm not saying he couldn't be a rapist, but some hardcore skepticism is needed when someone who has pissed off every spy agency in the world is suddenly having his reputation trashed.
It doesn't take a paranoid to see the US government (or another government) having an agent find a way to get alone with Assange for a half an hour and then accusing him of rape. Hell, just get an agent to sleep with him (he is a male, it isn't hard) and have her give it a little extra twist and now you have physical evidence of a rape. What is generally physical evidence of rape is just a vagina that has seen been used a little too hard. It is pretty trivial to fake. Rough sex will do it (easy to do if the plant is the aggressor), but you don't even need the person you intend to frame. Just grab a nearby vegetable and give yourself a few rough ins and outs when you are not in the mood and that will pretty much do it.
Framing Assange is pretty trivial. 1) Molest yourself with a dildo when you are not in the mood. 2) Seduce Assange to score yourself some physical evidence 3) Complain to the authorities 4) ??? 5) Profit
We are never going to know the truth unless someone has a high quality video of the alleged rape, or the accuser is proven to have ties to an intelligence agency. There will be good reason to suspect that it is a frame (easy to do), yet no proof to the contrary.
My advice to anyone who is fucking around with the US government... tape yourself 24/7 and never for any reason turn it off. If they want to make it look like you committed a crime, it is trivial.
It is true, zombie outbreaks are pretty much doomed from the start. I mean shit, just jump in a tank and start killing. It isn't like they can hurt you. It isn't hard to devise a shelter that zombies can't get into where you can safely kill hundreds or thousands. The military alone could probably kill a few thousand per soldier. You might think we have more people than bullets, but seriously, we don't.
That said, there is way to get around this and let the zombie apocalypse happen. Imagine if zombies come about from a rapture type event. In other words, imagine if all of a sudden 90% of the world drops dead and rises as a zombies all at once. If 9 out of 10 people are suddenly are brainz eating zombies, you would overwhelm the militarys of the world in a few seconds. Imagine if in a barracks of 100 people suddenly all but 10 are zombies. The 10 living folks are probably dead before they wake up. The same goes for all of those well armed red necks. Sure, some will survive, but most are going to either turn into zombies themselves or find their wife or kids chomping on them before they realize anything is wrong. I would rate my scenario like this:
Before the event - 0 zombies, 6.5 billion humans
At the moment of the event - 5.85 billion zombies 650 million humans
5 minutes after the event - ~6.43 billion zombies and 65 million humans (assumes another 90% of the population is killed in the first few moments... basically anyone standing next to someone else is about to get attacked)
12 hours after the event - I wont do the calculation, but you can safely assume that the vast majority of humans that survived the first 5 minutes inside of a city are dead and the only people left are isolated, rural, and had to kill or flee from everyone they were with when the event happened. You might have just a few million or less humans in all of the world, and a 6.5 billion zombies wandering around.
I think you would have a pretty convincing zombie apocalypse.
Personally, I hope that Apple is granted this patent and that they VIGOROUSLY defend their "intellectual property". I hope that they unleash their lawyers upon anyone who dares to "steal" their IP and strike such terror in the industry that no one is willing to copy this brilliant innovation. Go Apple!
Slashdot Mirror
Both Google and HTC two of the few companies that are blameless. They pay ransom to a bunch of other companies, but they are currently only being sued and not suing anyone else. That said, yes, Apple is as bad and as nasty as Microsoft. I don't own an iPhone either. I actually have an HTC Evo.
It is a bit more complicated than "they come from China", but not much. Speaking as someone who actually works for a supplier of cell phone parts (accelerometers), most supply chains involve a few high end parts and a bunch of cheap parts. The high end parts often come from the US and Europe (though not always). So, what I do, a tiny MEMs chip that is your accelerometer comes from the US in a very specialized fab. We then send that chip across the ocean for packaging and assembly. Asia pumps out all of the lower end components. The final assembly tends to be in places like China. If you were to draw a flow diagram it would be a crap ton of lines flowing in and out of Asia to a few hubs in the US and Europe.
The more important piece is that everything is off the shelf. If you want to buy an accelerometer from my company, we wouldn't care who you are and we would support you and set you up to use it. If you wanted someone to assemble it, they would happily do it. There is absolutely no reason in the world why a startup with a few million in venture funding couldn't build a cellphone and sell it, other than they would be murdered by lawyers.
I don't know where Nokia assembles their parts, but I can pretty much bet you my soul that the vast majority of parts they don't actually make. Cell phone companies design and assemble phones. They don't actually make most of the components.
like software patents either, but development does take its time and money and you currently still have to play by the rules like everyone else. Just because you're not selling as many devices as HTC doesn't mean you don't have to pay the same royalties. Even Google, like every other company, is asking for patent royalties, so why suddenly Microsoft shouldn't? Sure, hate the software patents, but twisting this as something like Microsoft demanding manufacturers to pay if they want to install Linux is just... wrong.
Shit like this is why the cell phone industry is in as sorry of a shape as it is. Mobile devices are hotter than hell right now. EVERYONE makes them in fucking China. The only thing you need as a producer is to design some hardware from some off the shelf components, add your spin on it, and flip on a switch in China. What is happening? Not this.
What is happening is that only people armed to the teeth with both piles of money and patents dares step a foot into this market. Every single pissant start up Silicon Valley should be building a phone, but instead it is limited to only people armed to the teeth for a legal fight. This is fucked up, and for a consumer, it is hitting you in the pocketbook. Further, absolutely none of these patents are novel. It isn't like a company hits on a great idea no one will ever think of and patents it to protect themselves. What is happening is that everyone is patenting the obvious next step, and than suing when everyone goes to take that obvious next step.
What people forget is that patents are not some sort of moral fucking right. They are a completely artificial creation made by governments. It is a government granted monopoly, and it isn't granted for some fucked up sense of morality. It is granted for the singular reason of "promoting the useful arts". It is written into the fucking US constitution. When it fails at this, we are doing it wrong. If patents are stepping in the way of competition and innovation, they are failing in their singular purpose. Clearly, they are failing.
Patent law is so horribly fucked up these days there are no words for it. Consumers, small and medium sized businesses, and the economy are getting screwed. Microsoft is leading the charge. They can't compete in an open market, so they swing a government enforced sledgehammer at the competition.
I almost considered looking into getting a WiMo7 phone, but after this sort of anti-consumer crap, fuck those guys.
These projections are bunk. Every Malthusian since, well, Malthus, has predicted the end of resources, and they have all been wrong. I'm not saying that there are not challenges ahead, but these predictions are trite and all based upon the idea that humans are just going to plow forward doing exactly what they have always been doing. This is clearly crap. We change our consumption patterns, discover new resources, recycle old ones, and in general are horribly unpredictable over the timescale of a decade, much less decades or centuries.
Resources are recyclable. Anything not shoved into a nuclear isn't going to ever be really 'used'. There is no shortage of matter on earth to make stuff with. We are not going to run out of matter. At most, it is just going to become more expensive for some kinds. Food is easily scalable. We waste horrific amounts of food with a bad transportation system and by feeding livestock. Supermarkets dumped amazing amounts of food just to cater to our finicky tastes, and a massive amount of food production goes over to feeding cattle. Both practices I am going to go out on a limb and say we would abort before we starved. That doesn't even being to take into account new technology that will allow for more production with less. As far as energy, there is a big fucking ball of fusion in the sky, lots of stuff laying around to do a little fission, and at least in the US, gobs of coal to burn. We are not going to run out.
I don't want to downplay the environmental challenges we face. There are real environmental challenges. The developing world in particular has to grapple with some serious questions about how they want to balance development and pollution. We do need to watch what levers we are slamming in regards to the climate, and we might even need to think about how the fuck we are going to decide where to set the world thermostat if it comes down to it. That said, humanity isn't doomed. We are not going to slide backwards. There is going to be no mass starvation in any place except where the government is too fucked and corrupt up to function for the benefit of the people. Technology isn't going to vanish.
Predicting the end of the world every year for the past millennium has to be getting dull and old. The only people with a more consistent record of being wrong about the end of the world than Malthusians are religious cults... and even then, cults tend to break up after the world fails to end a few times. Malthusians on the other hand are utterly relentless in seeing the end being just around the corner, finding themselves completely wrong, and making the same prediction around the next corner. Get over it.
Meh, I think this can be used in an entirely appropriate way to solve a social problem. Anyone who says technology doesn't solves social problems had has had their eyes closed for the past span of human civilization. If a company sets a copy machine to not copy a certain "this is secret, do not copy" logo or seal, it will go a long way to solving most innocent violations of rules.
It is like a shitty bike lock. Is a shitty bike lock going to prevent anyone who wants to steal your bike from stealing it? No, but it will stop your bike from being stolen 99% of the time. People are lazy and opportunistic. Someone who wouldn't normally steal a bike will steal one if they see one without a lock. Throw eve the most shitty low grade lock on, and only people out to steal bikes will bother to steal it.
If I want to copy the secret document, it is pretty trivial to circumvent. Just slap a post-it note over the logo. That said, if I go to copy something confidential and have no nefarious intentions, if the copy machine tells me to screw off and says it sent a letter to the boss, I will probably back off. A little light will click in your head and you will think, "gee, I guess they are serious about this rule". Compliance with the rule will shoot up to almost total compliance because to circumvent the machine you are going to have to very intentionally break the rule and circumvent some shitty protection preventing you from doing so. There probably are places where something like this makes sense. Some records are sensitive either by their nature or by the law (like in medical records). This would probably help people actually comply with the rule.
I don't think people fully grasp how important Taiwan is to the electronics industry. I work in the semiconductor industry (that is computer chips for the layman) and can assure you that anything but a peaceful Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan would send the entire consumer economy into... well, I have no idea what it would do, but it would do something. Taiwan is a massive chunk of the worlds chip making capacity AND a large chunk of the support services surrounding the industry. We would instantly be out of capacity and all of your electronics, consumer or otherwise, would skyrocket drastically in price. This would cause the price of EVERYTHING else to go up. Even as the world tried to build new facilities to replace the missing capacity, it would drive prices up. New facilities are horrifically expensive and take years to build. It would take at least half a decade to recover the lost capacity.
For me personally, it would actually probably be pretty awesome. My facility would probably have to try and rapidly expand and get a torrent of cash. We would need to scramble to get some of our supplies from elsewhere, but we could probably pull it off. For everyone else in the world though, it would really suck. The only thing worse than China stomping Taiwan, is China stomping Taiwan and the US and China going into a trade war over the issue. It would spell pretty total and absolute economic d00m.
If there is one great downside to globalization, it is that we are now completely interconnected. Interconnectedness is awesome for efficiency and driving down prices. The downside though is that efficiency is the exact opposite of robustness. An efficient and optimized system is one that fails very badly when you tear a hunk of it out. I am pretty pro globalization, but there is something to be said for robustness. A system that is so efficient that it is one unknown disaster from total collapse should make people nervous.
How do you think kids feel now.
As a grown adult who uses birth control responsibility, let me just say, fuck the kids. I am pretty fucking tired of my civil liberties being stripped because some lazy ass parent can't keep their little spawn in check without the full brutal force of government beating everyone over the head. If you find the world too scary to have kids in, don't fucking breed. If you feel you must, America is big, so go find an unused corner away from other humans and do it there. I like violent video games, sex, and if I want to use a drug that is one step below herbal tea in terms of potency, please fuck right off and let me use it without your moaning about your little spawn being influenced by my naughty behavior (in my own fucking house).
As a general rule of thumb, any politician that declares "OMFG THE CHILDREN" doesn't get my vote. I have handed in more than one blank voting ballot.
Personally, I think you just sound like a romantic, not someone who has stumbled upon a magic productivity method. What gets your rocks off is thinking that you are doing something old sk00l. It is pretty dead easy to make MS Word 2040 or whatever version they are on a blank white screen where words appear when you type. Your other old sk00l romanticism is just that, romanticism. A fixie really isn't better than a bike with gears unless you like having your legs sheared off when you go too fast. Gears are actually awesome when you need to go up a steep hill or want to haul ass down a steep hill. Power steering, computer control traction, and all of that goodness is likewise is awesome when something dives in front of your car and you need to make a sharp dodge. Touchy feel decelerations that you can feel the road better and that somehow improves your not hitting shit skills don't stand up the statistical reality that power steering, traction control, and fun stuff like that reduces accidents.
There is nothing wrong with being a romantic who idealizes simplicity, and there certainly is something to be said for keeping thing simple, but your methods are almost certainly useless to someone who doesn't see the romanticism in using old obscure text editors. For those people, if the editor is really distracting, they should just take a few seconds to pair down the interface to MS Word or Open Office (or whatever), rather than run an archaic text editor. If you are a romantic and need to be in a mood to write, find what gets your rocks off and go for it. Neal Stephenson wrote the 4000 or so page series with a freaking fountain pen. Inefficient? Sure, but if acting a little archaic gets your creative juices flowing, go for it.
I agree that the Intertubes without flash is not a horrible place, but I feel the same way about a lot of things. None the less, what people seem to be missing is that with Android you have the option. So for instance, I was on a website today with flash videos on my Evo. Until I click on it, it is just a icon. It isn't hurting me, it isn't using any of my phones resources, and it isn't spamming me with flash ads. If I had an iOS device, that would be the end of it... a dead icon. With Android, I decided, "eh, what the hell, lets see what it is". I clicked on it and it loaded the flash content. In this case, it worked out pretty good and the video worked fine. Other times the resolution has been completely fucked and it didn't work fine.
An Android device is exactly like an iOS device when it runs into flash content... it does nothing. The singular difference is that after it does nothing have the option of telling my Android OS to give it a try.
This is the difference between iOS and Android. iOS is going to do whatever it does in the way that Jobs wanted it to do it. Nothing more and nothing less. Your home screen WILL be a bunch of app icons with the Apple built in buttons on the bottom. If you like that, great. It is going to be exactly what you expect, generally never break, and your phone is going to look almost identical to every other phone of the same model. I was actually a little shocked when Jobs let people change their background with iOS4 and potentially ruin the Apple aesthetic.
With Android, you can do also make your home screen the exact same as an iOS device. You can also radically customize it, strip your stock launcher and replace it with something else, toss a dozen widgets into your home screen, give yourself some moving live wall paper, and run whatever you please in the background... and that is without rooting device. While Android (at least 2.2) is pretty good about unloading things when you are starting to toast your device, I imagine you can probably slow it down and make it ugly in a way that an iOS device will never allow.
Apple offers enforced aesthetics and a basic level of functionality at the cost of dramatically reduced customization and potential utility. Android offers the potential for radical customization and vastly expanded capability at the expense of giving you the power to make your device slow and ugly. As a techie, the choice is pretty easy. I like that I replaced my launcher, radically changed my dock, added a bunch of interesting widgets to my home screens, altered the aesthetics of my device such that it looks like no other, and built the interface to my device to conform exactly to my needs. For my mother, she might be better off with a device that might have reduced utility but that she can't possibility screw up. The Apple home screen are app short cuts and a built in dock. You can't possibly screw it up. With Android you can load a badly designed widget that eats your CPU. I can hunt down and kill such a widget. My mom probably can't. She might be better off never even being given the option.
Eh, take your pick. Either way, the competition is good. I am sure Apple will cave and offer limited widgets with their next upgrade like the way they offered limited multi tasking because of Android. On the flip side, I am sure Android will work on its aesthetics and device makers will push their hardware specs to keep up with Android. Seems like a win for everyone. I actually hope that WiMo7 isn't a total failure because I want the OSs to really battle it out and bloody each other up. Competition drives everyone forward.
If we do exactly nothing and the population keeps growing we will starve. Malthus was right in this regard. What made Malthus an idiot is that humans don't do that. We change the environment when it is getting ready to kill us. The idea that a few billion humans will merrily walk off into the abyss is absurd.
So the soil dies without synthetic fertilizers? Are you utterly convinced that it is simply impossible that there exists a technology to take the next leap? Last time I checked we have no shortage of matter or energy around here. It doesn't even take much in the way of imagination see solutions. Genetically engineered crops for fallow fields to restore the soil faster is one solution. Modified plants to survive in depleted soil is another. Hell, boring old good and sustainable crop practices eliminate much of the dangers of soil degradation and are only avoided because synthetics are so damned cheap.
That doesn't even include the pretty dull social changes we could make to keep starvation at bay. Simply eliminating absurd waste of calories that go into luxury meat production would let us feed many billions of more people without a drop of new tech. Toss onto the top of that heap the fact that human populations have been throttling back their growth rate steadily from the 70s, and it shows that once again, the Malthusians in the room are wrong... as they have been continiously despite prophecies of doom for the past 200 freaking years.
I hope that if I ever come up with a prediction that is proven continuously wrong for two-hundred-fucking-years I have idiots in the far future still singing my praise convinced that the idiots singing the same praise (who were also wrong) for the past 200 years were just a little too early.
Malthus was wrong in every single conceivable sense of the word and continues to be so. He has the same track record as alien doomsday cults. Actually, I take that back. Alien doomsday cults tend to only have a record of being wrong for a decade or two at the most. Malthus outstrips them all with his 200 year history of complete failure to understand humanity and its very strong desire to not starve. Only Bible nuts predicting the Armageddon for the past couple thousand years manage to put Malthus to shame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_increase_history.svg
I really hope that if one of my dooms day predictions is shown to be absolutely and completely wrong by a few hundred years worth of data, people still cite me like I contributed something to human knowledge. Whenever people cite Malthus, I have to really wonder if they realize that we talk about Malthus because the dude was wrong, NOT because he developed a new and working theory to predict the future. Food production kept up with population growth and has continued to consistently for hundreds of years. The only time people start to starve is when the politics of the area buggers it up. Humans kick ass at making food... seriously, we are not going to starve. We could turn around and feed a population five times the current one by simply using land for crops that we don't already use and going vegan... toss in a little technology to that magic and we could feed more.
Humans hate starving and we really put our minds to it to prevent it from happening. There are lots of things to worry about in the future. Food isn't one of them.
Repeat after me.
MALTHUS. WAS. WRONG. He was wrong when he made his prediction. He was wrong a few hundred years after his prediction failed to come true. He will continue to be wrong into the future. If humans start starving world wide, it will because an asteroid blocked out the sun, we had a nuclear war, or we unleashed a genetically engineered crop blight. It wont be because the population simply out stripped supply in food. Stop citing that dumb asshole like he made a worthy prediction.
I must have missed where I declared I achieve true lasting spiritual happiness from changing my background or spraying graffiti on walls.
The fact that you couldn't even change the background the phone uses is just a basic example of how iOS treats its users like they are dumb drooling idiots who are lucky to successfully plug the device into the wall. It is such a basic and trivial feature that it speaks volumes that you can't uses. Seriously, how fucking stupid do your users have to be if they can't be trusted with the ability to swap out the background of the home screen?
Need a more concrete example that isn't aesthetics driven? How about the fact that you can't use widgets, the mutli-tasking is gimped, and you sure as shit can't customize the interface in any meaningful way, much less swap it out entirely. Android merrily lets you do all of these things without so much as having to bother to root the phone.
Like I said, maybe decisions, choice, and customizing a device to your needs, be they practical or aesthetic, is too much for someone who finds technology scary. Maybe for those people iOS devices are the right call. For anyone who doesn't wet themselves when when they see tech though, iOS is crap.
No offense, but who gives a flying fuck what your technophobe mom thinks? If I wanted my life to revolve around what the dumb unwashed masses liked I would drink nothing but bud light, only read the sports, celebrity, and horoscope sections of the newspaper, and believe that evolution is an evil lie and that the world is 6000 years old. Most people are fucking stupid. Android forks are probably not for them.
Is Android right for people who are terrified by tech? Fight amongst yourselves because I really don't care what the answer is. I know that it is certainly right for people who like tech and don't wet themselves at the thought of customizing their phone a little for their needs. I mean holy shit, Apple didn't allow you to change your fucking background until iOS4. How stupid does your target audience need to be if you think letting them change their background is just too much responsibility for them to handle?
It is a map of modern science. Do you know what a philosophy map that starts with Plato and Aristotle is? Neither modern, nor science. It is like complaining that a lineage map of Linux OS's doesn't include the complete history of agriculture.
True, but that in large part is because where you put the period at the end of this map has a massive influence on where you begin, especially philosophically. That isn't to suggest that there were not some parallels elsewhere in the world, but due to the great leaps the West made over the East from 16th century on up until the dawn of the 21st, those parallels became dead ends.
China was ahead of the West for a very long time. Right up into and even during the early part of the colonial age China was pretty far ahead of the West in terms of technology and culture. If China had maintained that path we might be in exactly the same place we are today in terms of technology, but instead of being able to trace back philosophical lines from Europe, to Roman, to Greece, you might trace it back from Japan, to Korea, to China with a set of Eastern philosophers to match. Hell, if you were to simply draw the map in the 1500s of where the major technologies trace their schools of thought from you would have two maps, on Eastern and one Western, and the Eastern one would be further ahead.
This isn't even to suggest that the West made its advancements in a vacuum. Lots of technology and thought crossed both ways across Eurasia, but when an idea travels a few thousand miles in the ancient world and suffers a dozen translations you pretty much lose all traceability. Hell, just jumping from an Islamic Empire to a Christian Empire is a pretty sure way to ensure that traceability is lost. It isn't like a Christian scholar in 1,200 AD influenced by an Islamic Arab scholar is going to cite his inspiration. The only reason why we remember those ancient Greek scholars at all is because the empires that came after worship the empires that came before, and were happy to cite them as influences.
Starting the map in the 1500s and working up to today means it is going to be a Western map because that was the period of time when the West dominated world thinking. Draw this map from 2000 BC to 1500 AD, or from 600 AD to 1200 AD, or from many other two points and you would see totally different maps. Hell, I bet the map from 2000 AD to 2500 AD is going to be a wild one with lines crossing all over the world like never before.
I am not sure where you get the idea that the US has a low tolerance for civilian casualties, especially on home soil. History has proven it is exactly the opposite. They have a low tolerance to civilian casualties, but once their tolerance is broken they don't back off, they lose their fucking minds and go from being mildly isolationist to bloody thirsty nation eaters.
Killing US civilians in the US is a pretty sure way to not stop the US. If you nuked US cities and threatened to nuke more, the US would abandon those cities, blow up a few city blocks to get to the bombs if they had too, and turn the aggressor nation into glass. US doctrine is pretty clear on the topic and it isn't joking. Hell, the Cuban missile crisis is a great example of where when the US felt it was "right" and was pretty willing to start a nuclear war to prove the point.
If there is one history lesson that people seem to forget over and over about the US is that attacking the US directly results in the US going fucking bat shit. Whenever it happens, the US goes nuts and beats the piss out of the attacker and at least one other guy who probably didn't even have anything to do with it just for good measure.
No, beating the US is pretty easy, but nuking cities is not the way to do it. The way you beat the US is to make them kill civilians and kill their soldiers. Killing civilians and having soldiers die while fighting civilians and insurgents saps the US will to fight pretty quickly. If the Iraqi insurgents had been more interested in killing US soldiers and less interested in terrorizing their countrymen, the US would have thrown in the towel. The only reason why the US "won" in Iraq was because the insurgents managed to piss of the population badly enough where they started to help the US.
The US population loses its thirst for blood when they feel like they are fighting morally unjust and pointless wars. When they think that they have been wronged, they are willing to throw tens of thousands soldiers into a meat grinder and retool their economy for nation destruction.
Pretty much. The US isn't going to glass a city even though it can. The US will stick to the rules of war (more or less) regardless of what the enemy does. If you are going to fight a nation that spends a couple of orders of magnitude more on its military than you and does so without breaking a sweat, you are going to have break a few rules. The US populace wont stand for glassing cities, and the worst the UN would do is send an angry letter. Seriously, unless you are China or Russia, if you are going to fight the US, don't follow the "rules" of war. You will get your ass kicked.
Fighting according to the rules of war with the US is like a peasant entering a jousting contest on a donkey with a pitch fork against a fully armored knight. If you are a peasant and you need to kill a knight, don't follow his rules. Go slit his throat while he is asleep.
I'm not advocating this. I personally think that if Iran really wanted to kick ass on the global stage they would renounce their nuclear program, put the Imams backs in the Mosque where they belong, turn into a true democracy, and open up. Iran has the capacity to dominate the region. Instead, they are a sad impoverished nation slowly pissing away the advantages they have. Their only savings grace is that every nation around them is almost as screwed up as they are.
I am pretty sure that in the middle of an American invasion that Iran could find national unity rather quickly. Iran isn't Iraq with a small minority of the population brutally repressing the other 70%. That isn't to say that there are probably groups that Iran wouldn't want to arm, but an armed populace in the middle of a US invasion isn't going to launch a general uprising against anyone other than the US. Further, it isn't like the government is going to vanish. If it was built from day one to exert military control in the face of occupation you could still go out and arrest / kill dissidents. In fact, I think kill collaborators would probably be one of the top missions for guerrilla forces. The point is to make your military unable to be targeted by thousand pound bombs, not to give up control and government.
This thing is a gimmick. It is a small cruise missile with remote capabilities. The bomb on it is a tiny little dumb thing that isn't going to hurt anyone unless it hits them directly, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that the avionics on that drone don't amount to much more than a camera bolted on. In defense against the presumed target, the US, this thing is a novelty. The US gets giddy over electronic warfare and this thing is asking have its connection severed. The fuel and explosives are better spent on a missile that doesn't bother to return home and doesn't need an operator to guide it in. This does nothing to help the defense of Iran against the style of combat the US uses.
If you are going to fight the US, and you are not China or Russia, you need to fight dispersed, hidden, and from cover. The only time it is worthwhile to fully stand and fight is if the victory you achieve is worth the destruction of the force you are having stand and fight. It is worthwhile to launch a massive simultaneous missile on a US carrier battle group with everything you have knowing that force will be destroyed. If you kill a carrier, the fact that you just destroyed your missile force is worth it. Outside of that though, you need to fight with the understanding that the US has the capability to glass the shit out of any arbitrary size of land using just conventional weapons. Your goal as the defender is to make it so that your forces are concealed and doing hit and runs, and so never standing around waiting to be glassed, or to fight from a position the US is unwilling to destroy. Namely, if you fight from a city the US won't level the city World War II style. They might knock down the buildings one by one trying to take out suspected military units, but the won't just level the place in one swipe like they could with a few MOABs. This glorified cruise missile doesn't help this style of fighting. It can't be launched by field units, and even if it could, it is going to lead the US back to your position assuming it even makes it back. You are better off to launch a missile that isn't expected to return or, even better, save the money to arm your city bound army with more and better RPGs.
Personally, if I had to organize the defense of Iran from the US, the only conventional forces I would bother with would be sea mines and easily concealed cruise missiles. The only point of those forces would be to try and sacrifice themselves in doing damage to the ocean going invasion force. The rest of my defense would involve the army stripping down into civilian clothing the second the invasion hits and dispersing into the population with a plan, and giving everyone a (civilians included) gun. Train the army in guerrilla tactics, cache weapons and explosives all over the place, and never even make the pretense of fighting with uniforms on. Encourage the civilians to fight in their own amateurish way not to inflict any real harm, but to blur the line between military and civilian in the eyes of the enemy as much as possible. The only military tech worthwhile would be the kind useful to guerrilla forces. Bike bombs, all manner of concealed explosives, easily concealed weapons, concealed body armor, methods of communicating across cells and receiving orders, methods of smuggling, modified civilian vehicles (that still look civilian) with military applications, and that sort of thing are the techs worth developing in earnest. You still need the capacity to fight a conventional war against your neighbors, but the real threat, the US, is a fight you don't want to do standing up. The US loves nothing more than to see massive troop formations all lined up nice and orderly in a big open desert. See Iraq War part 1 for what happens to armies that stand.
Unfortunately, even a rape kit isn't concrete evidence one way or the other if a national spy agency wants to destroy your reputation. A rape kit just proves that you had sex with a person and an examination might show damaged genitals. Step 1, seduce nerd. Step 2, damage your genitals with a dildo... or reverse the order. It doesn't matter.
It takes only one vaguely credible Swedish national with sympathy for one of the many spy agencies that have been pissed off by Wikileaks and a willingness for an embarrassed spy agency to do something mildly nasty. The actual faking of the evidence is trivial, especially if you can seduce one ugly nerd. Do I think there exists spy agencies willing to fake a rape? Well, they are willing to start coups, fund rebels, snag European nation and torture them, and assassinate world leaders... so yes. Smearing Assange is pretty low on the list of nasty things spy agencies have done.
Now, what would be REALLY interesting is if a spy agency gets caught trying to smear Assange. Imagine if Assange is a paranoid motherfucker and worries about exactly this sort of thing, so he always has a hidden camera and microphone on him and is able to prove whatever version of events he gives.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Short of someone having secretly had a camera going I don't think anyone is ever going to be fully satisfied with whatever the outcome is. When you have multiple spy agencies hunting you down, paranoid conspiracy can explain pretty much anything, and it isn't all that paranoid.
It wasn't US government bashing. If he was releasing English documents or French documents at this moment I would swap out US for France or England. He just so happens to be releasing a few thousand US military classified documents making the US kind of high on the suspect list these days. I would expect pretty much any government in the world would be more than happy to do far worse to protect military secrets.
As for the "but he is still alive!"... seriously, Assange dying wouldn't be a LITTLE suspicious? Assange himself isn't the problem. It isn't like if he dies it all goes away. Turning him into a martyr, which is exactly what will happen if he ends up dead, won't solve anything. If anything, it will make it a thousand times worse. Wikileaks would just release everything, the US (or whatever nation he has pissed off recently) would look like shit, and everyone would agree Wikileaks is justified if governments are resorting to murdering disgruntle open government advocates.
Pinning him with a couple of rape charges which don't even need to stick to be effective is exactly the most ideal move you could make. You don't turn him into a martyr, but you do damage the public face of Wikileaks. Further, like I said, it is a pretty damn easy charge to hit him with. It is certainly easier than martyring the guy. Just get a woman to make the accusation. Bonus points if she seduces him and then after (or before) the fact goes to town on her va-ja-ja with a dildo to give it some physical evidence of rape. Trivial, nearly impossible to disprove, and well within the capability of pretty much any spy agency.
I am generally pretty much not into conspiracy theories, but in this case, extreme skepticism is called for. More than one government has the incentive to do it, it is brain dead easy to pull off, and it is the single most damaging thing you could possibly do to wiki leaks. As an added bonus, it doesn't even have to stick to do damage. Sweden could drop the charges tomorrow saying there isn't enough evidence and the damage would already be done.
I'm not saying he couldn't be a rapist, but some hardcore skepticism is needed when someone who has pissed off every spy agency in the world is suddenly having his reputation trashed.
It doesn't take a paranoid to see the US government (or another government) having an agent find a way to get alone with Assange for a half an hour and then accusing him of rape. Hell, just get an agent to sleep with him (he is a male, it isn't hard) and have her give it a little extra twist and now you have physical evidence of a rape. What is generally physical evidence of rape is just a vagina that has seen been used a little too hard. It is pretty trivial to fake. Rough sex will do it (easy to do if the plant is the aggressor), but you don't even need the person you intend to frame. Just grab a nearby vegetable and give yourself a few rough ins and outs when you are not in the mood and that will pretty much do it.
Framing Assange is pretty trivial.
1) Molest yourself with a dildo when you are not in the mood.
2) Seduce Assange to score yourself some physical evidence
3) Complain to the authorities
4) ???
5) Profit
We are never going to know the truth unless someone has a high quality video of the alleged rape, or the accuser is proven to have ties to an intelligence agency. There will be good reason to suspect that it is a frame (easy to do), yet no proof to the contrary.
My advice to anyone who is fucking around with the US government... tape yourself 24/7 and never for any reason turn it off. If they want to make it look like you committed a crime, it is trivial.
In defense of the US government plant who is making the charges, he does look kind of like a rapist.
It is true, zombie outbreaks are pretty much doomed from the start. I mean shit, just jump in a tank and start killing. It isn't like they can hurt you. It isn't hard to devise a shelter that zombies can't get into where you can safely kill hundreds or thousands. The military alone could probably kill a few thousand per soldier. You might think we have more people than bullets, but seriously, we don't.
That said, there is way to get around this and let the zombie apocalypse happen. Imagine if zombies come about from a rapture type event. In other words, imagine if all of a sudden 90% of the world drops dead and rises as a zombies all at once. If 9 out of 10 people are suddenly are brainz eating zombies, you would overwhelm the militarys of the world in a few seconds. Imagine if in a barracks of 100 people suddenly all but 10 are zombies. The 10 living folks are probably dead before they wake up. The same goes for all of those well armed red necks. Sure, some will survive, but most are going to either turn into zombies themselves or find their wife or kids chomping on them before they realize anything is wrong. I would rate my scenario like this:
Before the event - 0 zombies, 6.5 billion humans
At the moment of the event - 5.85 billion zombies 650 million humans
5 minutes after the event - ~6.43 billion zombies and 65 million humans (assumes another 90% of the population is killed in the first few moments... basically anyone standing next to someone else is about to get attacked)
12 hours after the event - I wont do the calculation, but you can safely assume that the vast majority of humans that survived the first 5 minutes inside of a city are dead and the only people left are isolated, rural, and had to kill or flee from everyone they were with when the event happened. You might have just a few million or less humans in all of the world, and a 6.5 billion zombies wandering around.
I think you would have a pretty convincing zombie apocalypse.
Personally, I hope that Apple is granted this patent and that they VIGOROUSLY defend their "intellectual property". I hope that they unleash their lawyers upon anyone who dares to "steal" their IP and strike such terror in the industry that no one is willing to copy this brilliant innovation. Go Apple!
-This post was written on an HTC Evo 4G