Not only do I know this, but I was born in the USSR (repatriated to Finland in early childhood). I can tell you that besides the standard propaganda bullshit being spewed by official sources, there was little to no effort to hide the reality of Afghan hell, and there was most certainly no doubt that massive war crimes were taking place there. The point I was making is that in US, there are actually a lot of people that truly BELIEVE in the US propaganda.
By comparison, in USSR almost no one believed it. People just listened to it, paid homage to it in official party meetings, and then went home, got drunk and laughed about how ridiculous the official line sounded and pitied both soldiers who had to fight there as well as locals. No one except for a few truly stupid officials believed any of it, and most certainly would not come to defend the war on their own volition like you're seeing here and now.
I must say, I've never seen so much "+1 informative, +1 insightful, -1 overrated, -1 troll" ratings on a single post. My post above in this thread has so many of them according to the daily moderation page, it's just hilarious. It shows that people really do believe in the propaganda efforts of US, something you can never accuse USSR and its (former) citizens of.
P.S. I'm very surprised that someone would even entertain a thought that main support of Vietcong was Chinese. USSR not only pumped it full of weapons, there are known cases of Russian fighter pilots flying missions there during the war. Chinese support was non-existent in comparison, both size- and quality-wise.
P.P.S. There is a very old soviet joke about "communist socialism" that was implemented in Warsaw pact countries. It goes like this:
A moscovite party honcho arrives at kolhoz to promote the party line. Entire village gathers, and he starts a fiery speech noting that "while one of our feet still stands in socialism, our other foot has bravely stepped into communism". After the speech is done, an old granny from the back asks: "Sonny, just how long do we have to stand in this uncomfortable position?".
The blending of OGL and OGL ES is huge - it essentially underscores that smart phones are now a major 3D gaming platform. I'm really surprised that most poeple here are talking about PC support rather then note the fact that essentially any PC game built for OGL can be ported far more easily to moble platforms now.
Additionally with Nokia's Meego and Google's Android being essentially modified Linux and both likely offering support for this, this may give us a renaissance of linux gaming. And by this I mean proper linux gaming and not "wine" gaming.
To slightly add to the above, the meaning is that when people present you with the facts, you should not necessarily care about their agenda. Agenda matters if it makes aforementioned people MODIFY the facts, to fit their point of view, such as what happened with the gunship video (to an extent).
In this case, it's clearly not so. Therefore I don't care if they're cannibalistic fascists, as long as facts presented are straight.
You'll note that most people like me don't care if the agenda matches mine or not if it sticks to the facts. I'm just as glad to be wrong as I am to be right, because if I'm wrong, then I have been educated on something I didn't know before.
It's the definition of scientific approach that many of us geeks take towards politics and history as well. And it always makes me sad when smart people prefer to dig in and defend their opinion even when they're clearly presented with evidence of them being wrong, instead of accepting the evidence and modifying their point of view, like yourself.
Yet there's little we (or more so, news reporters in our place) can do to catch them in act and tell them "this is a lie". It's sources like this that allow critical reporting.
If you're actually on the ground in Afghanistan, then you know that mujahideen learn fast, and know SOP described in the documents to a tee without ever having access to them. Again, information here isn't fresh - it's mostly several years old. If there's any real military value in it, then it's something that every single raghead knows as is relevant to his position and has known for a while. You know that they know what weapons are deployed and where within days or weeks tops, they know of troop deployments etc. That's why they are so damn effective - they have eyes everywhere, because every single afghan you hire to help you is likely talking to them after he's done working for you. This isn't new, this is exactly how Soviets lost their war too.
The only way to remain blind to this is to not be on the ground. Hell, don't take it from me, the documents leaked tell this same story many times over.
Several year old deployment and weapon info isn't going to endanger anyone in a meaningful way, and those that can be endangered by in some way can be taken care of through minor force shifting (which will still likely to be found out and accessed very fast by mujahideen anyway). And even so, the needed transparency and corruption purge is well worth the risk - especially considering the total death toll and the adventurous "let's go hit Iran next" rhetoric. If anything, the documents leaked are not enough, but sadly it's highly unlikely that those really responsible, sitting high up will leave incriminating trails that are this easily taken.
All in all, this is a VERY dead animal. It won't come to life no matter how you try beat the poor thing. Although I imagine the western media will try very very hard. Reminds me of the "yes men" video where media tried to nail them real hard for "raising false hopes" when they duped BBC into believing that DOW would pay for the clean-up of the worst chemical spill in the history of the world. "They caused pain to the locals" screamed every western news outlet. When the guys responsible headed to the site, they were taken in as guests of honor, publically thanked for raising awareness of the issue.
Demonising people who bring up things that western elite really doesn't want to be brought up is nothing new. Try to think critically beyond the arguments presented in mainstream media, to see if there's really any trace of truth in it. Like now, when the entire Afghan war strategy has been shifted MASSIVELY in 2010 (which you would also know if you were on the ground), essentially meaning that this materials will most likely cause confusion for taleban intelligence rather then help as it renders most of the things you describe above changed.
US: there were plenty of supporters of southern regime in the north and vice versa. These were suppressed, often violently, especially in the south.
Russia: White vs Red civil war that started in 1917. It was the pinnacle of WW1 in many regards, as it forced GB and France to adapt as Russia pulled out of war, and it was one of the nastiest civil wars in the world - we're looking at huge death toll and classic "brother vs brother" action where even families would end up split and go against each other. This was caused by the fact that there were more then two sides to the conflict, all with different (often foreign) benefactors.
Cyrpus: I'm not sure what relations you're talking about, I've been to the place (Greek side), and there is very little friendliness towards Turks who are viewed as conquerors. Greeks also voted against reunification. Perhaps you're referring to sentiments in Turkish part, which is much poorer and would love a reunion to raise the quality of life. Greeks don't want that, and this is confirmed by a vote on reunification which largely killed any attempt of Turkish side to be able to become an EU member.
All in all, modern reactions don't really matter, as we're talking about wartime, not peacetime after the tension has boiled out. Cyprus is a textbook case scenario of ethnic cleansing in relation to civil war - Greek side has been ethnically cleansed of Turks, and Turkish part ethnically cleansed of Greeks. After this occurred, the refugee Turks from Greek side were housed in housing that used to belong to Greeks that lived on Turkish side and vice versa. As it stand now, there are almost no Turks living on Greek side and almost no Greeks living on Turk side.
This isn't an issue of something written on paper. The problem is that despite polarisation, these two faction would be living all across the country side by side. Geographical division is impossible in those circumstances, hence it results in civil war where sides battle for supremacy. In the end, it may end with victory of one side and unification (i.e. US, Russia), or it can end up in two-sided ethnic cleansing and division into two countries (i.e. Cyprus).
Note the PRESENT tense rather then past one used here.
Also note that if you want to go down that road, you'd have to look very hard at the actions done all across former colonies in the name of the profit and ask how would they evolve if West didn't interfere. While that kind of macro-level math would be extremely hard to do, we'd be comparing millions to millions, and it's not all that certain that we'd end in the black.
It's not really. The only one stressed by drama is usually the person with responsibility to hold stuff together, i.e. guild master, raid leader. The participants themselves are usually venting, and letting out steam.
All of this information is long known to taleban though their massive contact network and extensive history of skirmishes. This is news to us, sitting in living rooms and never having taken part in combat there. Taliban know US SOP probably better then many US servicemen.
Remember, the data here is OLD. We're talking 2004-2009, which means that SOP from those times is well known, documented and trained to counter by vast majority of taleban foces. And those still not trained are not going to be people with access to internet to get those documents, nor language skills to study them.
The bottom line here is that we elect people who's job it is to decide what happens, when and how and they appoint others to do the same. If things go bad, then they are ultimately held accountable. Maybe not as fast as you want and maybe not to the degree you want, but that's the system that we have.
Your naivete is charming. These are the people that will NEVER be brought to justice - even now they'll just let someone else take the fall. Instead they will be very, very rich, and live long and prosperous lives, like most proper successful sociopaths do in modern western society.
And no, it's not all the same to me. When you put a fox to guard the hen house, and then claim that it's "proper and right, because he's been democratically elected there by the local fox community", it's not a correct thing to do - it's a travesty and a rape of justice.
Frankly, I could care less what Assange's motivations are, so long as his acts stick to delivering the facts, rather then opinionated crap. The video released some time ago was borderline material for me, because it wasn't ALL of the relevant material. In this case, he clearly learned his lesson and went for what people are asking for - as many relevant facts as possible.
1. Big common border with Iran, and worlds biggest poppy production, allowing for nice destruction of Iran from inside out through flooding it with opium and heroin. 2. Large amounts of rare earths in local "rocks".
Actually, if you watch the video on guardian, Assange specifically addresses the problem of "safety" that is being lauded here, noting how wikileaks take great care not to endanger people, other then politicians and military making the decisions leading to these occurrences of course. He points out why "this endangers the safety" argument is beating on a dead horse - the data here is so old, that the real meat that could in fact endanger lives of NATO soldiers, namely positional info is long beyond any reasonable secrecy requirements, while names are being redacted.
Anyone parroting the "endangers lives of out troops" is doing nothing but repeating drivel meant to discredit wikileaks at this point. Sensitive negotiations on the other hand usually imply "crimes behind them", which brings us to judicial responsibility - i.e. how many children are you willing to have raped, mutilated and killed in the name of Aghanistan, before it gets to be too many? Perhaps it's time to note that NATO has quite a few sociopaths installed in positions of power, and they need to be replaced rather then be taking part in "sensitive negotioations"? On the other hand, the people dead because of what NATO is doing in Afghanistan are actually dying, in droves. And as these documents show, NATO sweeps many of them under the rug, and who are the people responsible for that accountable for, and who are people covering them accountable for?
And mind you, he's not American. He's Australian, and he claims to speak for no one least of all Americans. He simply offers facts, and allows everyone to formulate their opinion on their own. This is quite different from most modern mass media, that tends to be opinionated to no end nowadays rather then offer facts and let people think for themselves.
US is also the only country in the world that is constantly in war with other countries, bullies them and has a history of supporting enemies of its enemies
You realize that every country in the history of humanity has done the exact same things, right?
But very few have been so smugly two-faced and hypocritical about it, claiming their acts are done "in the name of safety and freedom" "to help free the local populace from horrible dictators", etc. This is what being revealed here, yet again - that cute and shiny pretences are lies, and the reality on the ground is that we Westerners kill more children then we save.
It should be noted that many of the better (if not best) encoding programs can be found on the shame list for one reason or another. MediaCoder, FormatFactory, etc. There are some that are for the reason such as FormatFactory that seems to be there out of total ignorance (no one seems to even have bothered to email the program developer with grievances). There are some cases where the dev honestly comes to ask "how can I comply?" and the answer he gets is summarizable in "RTFM nub! Follow the licence!" with no hints on what exactly is supposed to be done about it (such as the issue with mediacoder).
FormatFactory is probably an easier choice to get into for a beginner because it features built-in optimized settings for vast majority of phones. Not just Android/Iphone but many other makers like Nokia, Samsung, Sony Eriksson etc.
www.pcfreetime.com
It's yet another ffmpeg frontend, but it supports far more output options then handbrake that went h.264 only this year. Personally I use it also because it allows very easy handling of subtitles in addition to wide device support.
I'm not really sure where to start, so I'll get straight to the point. You appear to have the common misconception, very much promoted in US that democracy = freedom, socialism = political system and socialism = totalitarianism.
None of above are true, and most comparison compare two different things to each other. Democracy (political system) is the rule of the mob. Nothing says that you can't oppress the hell out of minority, forbid free speech and still not have a complete and total democracy. Best modern example of this is Nazi Germany. Hitler was democratically elected, and majority was elated to hear that jews were the main source of their problems. They were democratically oppressed by majority (Kristallnacht). Of course he later revoked democracy to allow for passing of less popular policies, but most Germans really hated jews, and loved Hitlers policies which oppressed them in early 1930s. So, they were oppressed democratically. History is full of similar cases if you just bother to look. Democracy is in no way about freedom unless you mandate freedom separately.
At the same time, you also equate socialism (social system) to democracy as its opposite (i.e. comparing meters to kilograms), using the political strong arming of North Ireland as example. Socialism is not a political system - it's a social system that takes as idea that stronger members of society have an obligation to support weaker ones. This is opposed to capitalism where weak are losers who should be allowed to perish to make room for those who succeeded. Incidentally socialism on societal level is one of the most if not the most important reason why humans evolved from cavemen into what they are today - because tribes recognised that weak and smart people were to be protected, even if they couldn't pull their own weight as well as strong but dumb ones when it came to survival.
I've noticed similar trend in most expats and people who come to live in EU from US. It appears to be a very popular and well financed misconception deliberately spread there. In reality, political strong-arming has far worse examples in US on both govermental (NAFTA, current ACTA, etc) and state (federal laws) levels. None of these make it a socialist country by any reasonable margin. At the same time one could easily argue that US isn't a democracy - it is a republic with democratic form of election for top posts with fascist totalitarian government largely run by corporations. This would be a very accurate definition of modern US' (and to a very large extent various EU members') government as far as political sciences go.
Finally, freedom of speech you're talking about is about openly hating someone and making sure to make as much of a nuisance of yourself to that person as possible. In rest of the world, we call it bullying. Which by the way, is a far greater problem in US schools then EU schools in general, often attributed by social sciences professors to a far more competitive environment and culture that due to lack of common ethnic base to round people around rewards grouping based on "common enemy" - i.e. victim of bullying. You can find that "freedom of speech" in the same way that some people find stoning people to death "justice". Imho this is a matter of opinion based on your own world view, and claiming that most EU countries wouldn't allow, say, picketing of burial of war veterans' families with placates saying "god hates you" equals totalitarianism is a proper handing, and the fact that government allows this on basis that this is free speech is a matter of opinion. Many would argue that it's nothing but washing its hands off one of its the main responsibilities - protection of its citizens from extreme and damaging behaviour. In the end, it's all about drawing the line. Different people would draw it in different places.
This is allowed pretty much everywhere in the West, provided you're not purposefully overly offensive, or openly practising hate speech against someone.
And forgive me for assuming that "god hates gays" etc is hate speech. I'm sure it's just an innocent opinion and has no intention of abusing your system in an obvious way to attract attention to an even more obvious attention whore.
Really, where does free speech end and abuse of another person begin? The freedom is only good as long as you don't abuse it to harm another, after that it's just another path to anarchy and law of the jungle.
pull a complete bullshit statistic out of your ass and something made up that the companies plant fake seeds in the torrents... How exactly do you know this? Do you have any links, refrences or resources that points to the studios/companies *planting* seeds
Beauty of the situation: I don't have to present anything, because every single time a popular movie is relase, anyone with internet access connection can verify this.
Follow these simple steps:
1. Wait for popular movie to be released in theatres/DVD 2. Head on to a major torrent indexing/search site (i.e. isohunt). 3. Type [name of the movie] in the search bar. 4. Observe the top 10-top30 hits are well seeded (usually between 100 and 1000 seeds right on the release day or even a few days before), and riddled with negative comments saying "this is fake". 5. Download if you don't believe the comments and negative flags. 6. Enjoy your "stop infringing" letter (if your ISP passes them over to you upon receiving them) and your fake movie file, if those seeds even let you finish it rather then just sit there doing no meaningful uploading.
Have you considered that majority of buyers are not like you - technologically savvy users who know when disconnect comes what's the problem and who to lay blame on?
Most people I see with iphones in northern Europe are what you would call "hipsters". People who buy the phone for the image - not for the function and to show that they belong into the "elite" group of people. To them, if a phone drops a call, they won't care and assume that since they have the most elite and very expensive (expensive = quality!) phone, well, that stuff must happen to everyone, probably even more then us.
In this regard I find it pretty funny how the tech savvy people who buy the phone, while being in a small minority sometimes join into the mindset and tell us that phone is a technological marvel even when talking about obvious flaws like the antenna. Thing is, most tech savvy people who buy the phone usually know about the flaws, and simply accept them as a part of the deal. They're fine with it, and they know how to prepare and mitigate them in various ways.
This study seems to underscore this point - most people are perfectly happy with AT&T, because quality of connection is not a factor they bought the phone for. It serves it's main purpose as long as it's there, making them look good in the eyes of their peers, even if it doesn't work every once in a while.
Slashdot Mirror
Does not their agenda color what facts they release?
Beauty of the difference between "fact" and "truth". Latter indeed does get coloured by agenda. Former does not.
This list is full of former and utterly devoid of latter.
Not only do I know this, but I was born in the USSR (repatriated to Finland in early childhood). I can tell you that besides the standard propaganda bullshit being spewed by official sources, there was little to no effort to hide the reality of Afghan hell, and there was most certainly no doubt that massive war crimes were taking place there. The point I was making is that in US, there are actually a lot of people that truly BELIEVE in the US propaganda.
By comparison, in USSR almost no one believed it. People just listened to it, paid homage to it in official party meetings, and then went home, got drunk and laughed about how ridiculous the official line sounded and pitied both soldiers who had to fight there as well as locals. No one except for a few truly stupid officials believed any of it, and most certainly would not come to defend the war on their own volition like you're seeing here and now.
I must say, I've never seen so much "+1 informative, +1 insightful, -1 overrated, -1 troll" ratings on a single post. My post above in this thread has so many of them according to the daily moderation page, it's just hilarious. It shows that people really do believe in the propaganda efforts of US, something you can never
accuse USSR and its (former) citizens of.
P.S. I'm very surprised that someone would even entertain a thought that main support of Vietcong was Chinese. USSR not only pumped it full of weapons, there are known cases of Russian fighter pilots flying missions there during the war. Chinese support was non-existent in comparison, both size- and quality-wise.
P.P.S. There is a very old soviet joke about "communist socialism" that was implemented in Warsaw pact countries. It goes like this:
A moscovite party honcho arrives at kolhoz to promote the party line. Entire village gathers, and he starts a fiery speech noting that "while one of our feet still stands in socialism, our other foot has bravely stepped into communism".
After the speech is done, an old granny from the back asks: "Sonny, just how long do we have to stand in this uncomfortable position?".
The blending of OGL and OGL ES is huge - it essentially underscores that smart phones are now a major 3D gaming platform. I'm really surprised that most poeple here are talking about PC support rather then note the fact that essentially any PC game built for OGL can be ported far more easily to moble platforms now.
Additionally with Nokia's Meego and Google's Android being essentially modified Linux and both likely offering support for this, this may give us a renaissance of linux gaming. And by this I mean proper linux gaming and not "wine" gaming.
Sell the idea to Valve. I mean it.
To slightly add to the above, the meaning is that when people present you with the facts, you should not necessarily care about their agenda. Agenda matters if it makes aforementioned people MODIFY the facts, to fit their point of view, such as what happened with the gunship video (to an extent).
In this case, it's clearly not so. Therefore I don't care if they're cannibalistic fascists, as long as facts presented are straight.
You'll note that most people like me don't care if the agenda matches mine or not if it sticks to the facts. I'm just as glad to be wrong as I am to be right, because if I'm wrong, then I have been educated on something I didn't know before.
It's the definition of scientific approach that many of us geeks take towards politics and history as well. And it always makes me sad when smart people prefer to dig in and defend their opinion even when they're clearly presented with evidence of them being wrong, instead of accepting the evidence and modifying their point of view, like yourself.
Yet there's little we (or more so, news reporters in our place) can do to catch them in act and tell them "this is a lie". It's sources like this that allow critical reporting.
If there is ANYTHING you believe should be kept secret then you would not be supporting wikileaks.
This is a hyperbole, and they are keeping 15k+ reports specifically because they don't think that "nothing should stay secret".
If you're actually on the ground in Afghanistan, then you know that mujahideen learn fast, and know SOP described in the documents to a tee without ever having access to them. Again, information here isn't fresh - it's mostly several years old. If there's any real military value in it, then it's something that every single raghead knows as is relevant to his position and has known for a while. You know that they know what weapons are deployed and where within days or weeks tops, they know of troop deployments etc. That's why they are so damn effective - they have eyes everywhere, because every single afghan you hire to help you is likely talking to them after he's done working for you. This isn't new, this is exactly how Soviets lost their war too.
The only way to remain blind to this is to not be on the ground. Hell, don't take it from me, the documents leaked tell this same story many times over.
Several year old deployment and weapon info isn't going to endanger anyone in a meaningful way, and those that can be endangered by in some way can be taken care of through minor force shifting (which will still likely to be found out and accessed very fast by mujahideen anyway). And even so, the needed transparency and corruption purge is well worth the risk - especially considering the total death toll and the adventurous "let's go hit Iran next" rhetoric. If anything, the documents leaked are not enough, but sadly it's highly unlikely that those really responsible, sitting high up will leave incriminating trails that are this easily taken.
All in all, this is a VERY dead animal. It won't come to life no matter how you try beat the poor thing. Although I imagine the western media will try very very hard. Reminds me of the "yes men" video where media tried to nail them real hard for "raising false hopes" when they duped BBC into believing that DOW would pay for the clean-up of the worst chemical spill in the history of the world. "They caused pain to the locals" screamed every western news outlet. When the guys responsible headed to the site, they were taken in as guests of honor, publically thanked for raising awareness of the issue.
Demonising people who bring up things that western elite really doesn't want to be brought up is nothing new. Try to think critically beyond the arguments presented in mainstream media, to see if there's really any trace of truth in it. Like now, when the entire Afghan war strategy has been shifted MASSIVELY in 2010 (which you would also know if you were on the ground), essentially meaning that this materials will most likely cause confusion for taleban intelligence rather then help as it renders most of the things you describe above changed.
US: there were plenty of supporters of southern regime in the north and vice versa. These were suppressed, often violently, especially in the south.
Russia: White vs Red civil war that started in 1917. It was the pinnacle of WW1 in many regards, as it forced GB and France to adapt as Russia pulled out of war, and it was one of the nastiest civil wars in the world - we're looking at huge death toll and classic "brother vs brother" action where even families would end up split and go against each other. This was caused by the fact that there were more then two sides to the conflict, all with different (often foreign) benefactors.
Cyrpus: I'm not sure what relations you're talking about, I've been to the place (Greek side), and there is very little friendliness towards Turks who are viewed as conquerors. Greeks also voted against reunification. Perhaps you're referring to sentiments in Turkish part, which is much poorer and would love a reunion to raise the quality of life. Greeks don't want that, and this is confirmed by a vote on reunification which largely killed any attempt of Turkish side to be able to become an EU member.
All in all, modern reactions don't really matter, as we're talking about wartime, not peacetime after the tension has boiled out. Cyprus is a textbook case scenario of ethnic cleansing in relation to civil war - Greek side has been ethnically cleansed of Turks, and Turkish part ethnically cleansed of Greeks. After this occurred, the refugee Turks from Greek side were housed in housing that used to belong to Greeks that lived on Turkish side and vice versa. As it stand now, there are almost no Turks living on Greek side and almost no Greeks living on Turk side.
This isn't an issue of something written on paper. The problem is that despite polarisation, these two faction would be living all across the country side by side. Geographical division is impossible in those circumstances, hence it results in civil war where sides battle for supremacy. In the end, it may end with victory of one side and unification (i.e. US, Russia), or it can end up in two-sided ethnic cleansing and division into two countries (i.e. Cyprus).
Note the PRESENT tense rather then past one used here.
Also note that if you want to go down that road, you'd have to look very hard at the actions done all across former colonies in the name of the profit and ask how would they evolve if West didn't interfere. While that kind of macro-level math would be extremely hard to do, we'd be comparing millions to millions, and it's not all that certain that we'd end in the black.
It's not really. The only one stressed by drama is usually the person with responsibility to hold stuff together, i.e. guild master, raid leader. The participants themselves are usually venting, and letting out steam.
All of this information is long known to taleban though their massive contact network and extensive history of skirmishes. This is news to us, sitting in living rooms and never having taken part in combat there. Taliban know US SOP probably better then many US servicemen.
Remember, the data here is OLD. We're talking 2004-2009, which means that SOP from those times is well known, documented and trained to counter by vast majority of taleban foces. And those still not trained are not going to be people with access to internet to get those documents, nor language skills to study them.
Really, this is a dead animal. Don't beat on it.
The bottom line here is that we elect people who's job it is to decide what happens, when and how and they appoint others to do the same. If things go bad, then they are ultimately held accountable. Maybe not as fast as you want and maybe not to the degree you want, but that's the system that we have.
Your naivete is charming. These are the people that will NEVER be brought to justice - even now they'll just let someone else take the fall. Instead they will be very, very rich, and live long and prosperous lives, like most proper successful sociopaths do in modern western society.
And no, it's not all the same to me. When you put a fox to guard the hen house, and then claim that it's "proper and right, because he's been democratically elected there by the local fox community", it's not a correct thing to do - it's a travesty and a rape of justice.
Frankly, I could care less what Assange's motivations are, so long as his acts stick to delivering the facts, rather then opinionated crap. The video released some time ago was borderline material for me, because it wasn't ALL of the relevant material. In this case, he clearly learned his lesson and went for what people are asking for - as many relevant facts as possible.
The real issue that after dropping nukes in near vicinity of Russia and China, US would cease to exist after nuclear retaliation.
Technically there are:
1. Big common border with Iran, and worlds biggest poppy production, allowing for nice destruction of Iran from inside out through flooding it with opium and heroin.
2. Large amounts of rare earths in local "rocks".
Actually, if you watch the video on guardian, Assange specifically addresses the problem of "safety" that is being lauded here, noting how wikileaks take great care not to endanger people, other then politicians and military making the decisions leading to these occurrences of course. He points out why "this endangers the safety" argument is beating on a dead horse - the data here is so old, that the real meat that could in fact endanger lives of NATO soldiers, namely positional info is long beyond any reasonable secrecy requirements, while names are being redacted.
Anyone parroting the "endangers lives of out troops" is doing nothing but repeating drivel meant to discredit wikileaks at this point. Sensitive negotiations on the other hand usually imply "crimes behind them", which brings us to judicial responsibility - i.e. how many children are you willing to have raped, mutilated and killed in the name of Aghanistan, before it gets to be too many? Perhaps it's time to note that NATO has quite a few sociopaths installed in positions of power, and they need to be replaced rather then be taking part in "sensitive negotioations"?
On the other hand, the people dead because of what NATO is doing in Afghanistan are actually dying, in droves. And as these documents show, NATO sweeps many of them under the rug, and who are the people responsible for that accountable for, and who are people covering them accountable for?
And mind you, he's not American. He's Australian, and he claims to speak for no one least of all Americans. He simply offers facts, and allows everyone to formulate their opinion on their own. This is quite different from most modern mass media, that tends to be opinionated to no end nowadays rather then offer facts and let people think for themselves.
US is also the only country in the world that is constantly in war with other countries, bullies them and has a history of supporting enemies of its enemies
You realize that every country in the history of humanity has done the exact same things, right?
But very few have been so smugly two-faced and hypocritical about it, claiming their acts are done "in the name of safety and freedom" "to help free the local populace from horrible dictators", etc.
This is what being revealed here, yet again - that cute and shiny pretences are lies, and the reality on the ground is that we Westerners kill more children then we save.
It should be noted that many of the better (if not best) encoding programs can be found on the shame list for one reason or another. MediaCoder, FormatFactory, etc. There are some that are for the reason such as FormatFactory that seems to be there out of total ignorance (no one seems to even have bothered to email the program developer with grievances). There are some cases where the dev honestly comes to ask "how can I comply?" and the answer he gets is summarizable in "RTFM nub! Follow the licence!" with no hints on what exactly is supposed to be done about it (such as the issue with mediacoder).
FormatFactory is probably an easier choice to get into for a beginner because it features built-in optimized settings for vast majority of phones. Not just Android/Iphone but many other makers like Nokia, Samsung, Sony Eriksson etc.
www.pcfreetime.com
It's yet another ffmpeg frontend, but it supports far more output options then handbrake that went h.264 only this year. Personally I use it also because it allows very easy handling of subtitles in addition to wide device support.
I'm not really sure where to start, so I'll get straight to the point. You appear to have the common misconception, very much promoted in US that democracy = freedom, socialism = political system and socialism = totalitarianism.
None of above are true, and most comparison compare two different things to each other. Democracy (political system) is the rule of the mob. Nothing says that you can't oppress the hell out of minority, forbid free speech and still not have a complete and total democracy. Best modern example of this is Nazi Germany. Hitler was democratically elected, and majority was elated to hear that jews were the main source of their problems. They were democratically oppressed by majority (Kristallnacht). Of course he later revoked democracy to allow for passing of less popular policies, but most Germans really hated jews, and loved Hitlers policies which oppressed them in early 1930s. So, they were oppressed democratically. History is full of similar cases if you just bother to look. Democracy is in no way about freedom unless you mandate freedom separately.
At the same time, you also equate socialism (social system) to democracy as its opposite (i.e. comparing meters to kilograms), using the political strong arming of North Ireland as example. Socialism is not a political system - it's a social system that takes as idea that stronger members of society have an obligation to support weaker ones. This is opposed to capitalism where weak are losers who should be allowed to perish to make room for those who succeeded. Incidentally socialism on societal level is one of the most if not the most important reason why humans evolved from cavemen into what they are today - because tribes recognised that weak and smart people were to be protected, even if they couldn't pull their own weight as well as strong but dumb ones when it came to survival.
I've noticed similar trend in most expats and people who come to live in EU from US. It appears to be a very popular and well financed misconception deliberately spread there. In reality, political strong-arming has far worse examples in US on both govermental (NAFTA, current ACTA, etc) and state (federal laws) levels. None of these make it a socialist country by any reasonable margin. At the same time one could easily argue that US isn't a democracy - it is a republic with democratic form of election for top posts with fascist totalitarian government largely run by corporations. This would be a very accurate definition of modern US' (and to a very large extent various EU members') government as far as political sciences go.
Finally, freedom of speech you're talking about is about openly hating someone and making sure to make as much of a nuisance of yourself to that person as possible. In rest of the world, we call it bullying. Which by the way, is a far greater problem in US schools then EU schools in general, often attributed by social sciences professors to a far more competitive environment and culture that due to lack of common ethnic base to round people around rewards grouping based on "common enemy" - i.e. victim of bullying. You can find that "freedom of speech" in the same way that some people find stoning people to death "justice". Imho this is a matter of opinion based on your own world view, and claiming that most EU countries wouldn't allow, say, picketing of burial of war veterans' families with placates saying "god hates you" equals totalitarianism is a proper handing, and the fact that government allows this on basis that this is free speech is a matter of opinion. Many would argue that it's nothing but washing its hands off one of its the main responsibilities - protection of its citizens from extreme and damaging behaviour. In the end, it's all about drawing the line. Different people would draw it in different places.
This is allowed pretty much everywhere in the West, provided you're not purposefully overly offensive, or openly practising hate speech against someone.
And forgive me for assuming that "god hates gays" etc is hate speech. I'm sure it's just an innocent opinion and has no intention of abusing your system in an obvious way to attract attention to an even more obvious attention whore.
Really, where does free speech end and abuse of another person begin? The freedom is only good as long as you don't abuse it to harm another, after that it's just another path to anarchy and law of the jungle.
Real classy...
pull a complete bullshit statistic out of your ass and something made up that the companies plant fake seeds in the torrents...
How exactly do you know this? Do you have any links, refrences or resources that points to the studios/companies *planting* seeds
Beauty of the situation: I don't have to present anything, because every single time a popular movie is relase, anyone with internet access connection can verify this.
Follow these simple steps:
1. Wait for popular movie to be released in theatres/DVD
2. Head on to a major torrent indexing/search site (i.e. isohunt).
3. Type [name of the movie] in the search bar.
4. Observe the top 10-top30 hits are well seeded (usually between 100 and 1000 seeds right on the release day or even a few days before), and riddled with negative comments saying "this is fake".
5. Download if you don't believe the comments and negative flags.
6. Enjoy your "stop infringing" letter (if your ISP passes them over to you upon receiving them) and your fake movie file, if those seeds even let you finish it rather then just sit there doing no meaningful uploading.
I hope this clears that issue.
Have you considered that majority of buyers are not like you - technologically savvy users who know when disconnect comes what's the problem and who to lay blame on?
Most people I see with iphones in northern Europe are what you would call "hipsters". People who buy the phone for the image - not for the function and to show that they belong into the "elite" group of people. To them, if a phone drops a call, they won't care and assume that since they have the most elite and very expensive (expensive = quality!) phone, well, that stuff must happen to everyone, probably even more then us.
In this regard I find it pretty funny how the tech savvy people who buy the phone, while being in a small minority sometimes join into the mindset and tell us that phone is a technological marvel even when talking about obvious flaws like the antenna. Thing is, most tech savvy people who buy the phone usually know about the flaws, and simply accept them as a part of the deal. They're fine with it, and they know how to prepare and mitigate them in various ways.
This study seems to underscore this point - most people are perfectly happy with AT&T, because quality of connection is not a factor they bought the phone for. It serves it's main purpose as long as it's there, making them look good in the eyes of their peers, even if it doesn't work every once in a while.