Gates was a director of VoteHere, the biggest lobbyist/briber to install HAVA, the new law that's replacing fieldtested voting machines with untrustworthy digital devices. The cosponsors of HAVA were convicted Abramoff gangster Bob Ney (R-OH/Leavenworth), and Steny Hoyer. Hoyer is now the leading candidate to become Democratic House Majority Leader under Pelosi. Somehow I doubt he'll be herding Democrats to stop Gates. Or stop the rigged machines from electing Jeb in 2008.
Gates is on the Jim Baker / Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group. Hamilton was the "Democratic" "cochair" of the 9/11 Commission with NJ Gov Kean Sr. Hamilton served the same gig whitewashing Iran/Contra, and thereby Robert Gates, for Bush Sr. The real question is why do Democrats allow Lee Hamilton to represent the 50M Americans who vote for them?
So now that American voters have stripped the Terminator down to bare titanium, the ugly guts are starting to show in its desperation. The bipartisan Iran/Contra machine, from Gates to Bolton to Poindexter, has to come out of the closet to go back to work in its old offices. If some of the other Democrats, and maybe some Republicans who got cut out of all those deals, can rip off their remaining mask (too late for Schwarzenegger, the ultimate fascist masquerade), then 2008 might finally kill some of the robot army bred by Bush Sr.
I don't think McCain's "rightward" grope this Summer/Fall will alienate many independents. Rather just a waste of time: the evangelicals will stick with him now that Kuo's book and the loss of power makes those theocrats lose faith in Bush and their old Haggard shepherds. And most of the rest of independents don't pay attention to politics. McCain played both sides of his mouth to mutually exclusive media, so only the rightwingers got his rightist message. To most, especially the news media, he's the "maverick" Republican who "can be trusted" to do their corporatist work, while appealing to a broader Nielsen base. He is the biggest, perhaps only, Republican winner this year. Inheriting the machine, especially as it sheds its old skin, like probably Ken Mehlmann (especially if Bill Maher does out him as gay tonight, as rumored).
Another big loser was the entire Republican print media. The National Review will also do a "realism retake", if it is to keep any readers and influence in the long dark Winter of Bush's lame duckery. I'd love to read their hatchetjob on Giuliani to mine memes that will continue to swirl in the fragmented Republican repressed subconscious that defines their every move. But the Republican affinity for lying, denial and spinning on a point makes their coverage notable only in giving Giuliani press. They took a shot at him while they were still committed to Bush, while they were still in power to do so. But Republican logic goes "Giuliani was bad when Bush was good, so he must be good now that Bush is bad" - and at least half the Republican Party line is now "Bush is bad".
If Giuliani is the spokesmodel by April for Republican defense of their terrorism brand, then he's the one to watch. The one who isn't babysitter Jim Baker's pick, anyway. Jeb vs Giuliani is the contest to whip into a frenzy for the next 2 years, Stalin vs Hitler, so our FDR can step into the rubble and claim victory.
OTOH, I'm interested in your pick for 2008 Republican nominee. And who for the Democrats, if they're even on the radar at this point?
"Not as bad as no docs at all", the typical state of other OSS projects, isn't good enough. And the "lack of a full releass" kills the entire point of Slashdot users working on the Slashcode - it's a different app. CPAN pointers are great - and probably the product of a single enthusiast's single night up. Saying that following the INSTALL exactly produces a working install is kinda weak praise. That's the best you can say?
Slashdot's complaining programmer user community is a huge pool. If the Slashdot org encouraged us with better docs, not just silence or the arch, obnoxious attitude you just displayed, more of use would join the team to produce a better Slashcode. More would use it. Sixteen million user-produced items isn't so much. And if you think that none of the many programmer users would have noticed the index datatype change in one scope but not the necessary one in another, you don't even understand Slashdot.
In fact, you've just shown you don't understand how OSS projects work, though you apparently understand how the OSS code works in this one. Exactly my point. No wonder the Slashcode project is so unpopular, and therefore irrelevant. Which you seem more than happy about - defensive of, even. Congratulations.
OK, at a nanocent per byte storage and a nanocent per Gbps, we still need a nanocent per instruction per second processor for this new computer to be born. And not just a CPU IPS. These huge machines are churning not shift/add/multiply/jump instructions, but object relational operations. Just a stack of CPUs doesn't make Google, AOL and Microsoft in a higher class of tech than the rest of us paying nanocents per byte/GPS.
When their app requirements drive massive parallelism to deliver object-relational nanocent IPS, then the new age of info factories will dawn.
"An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind." - Mohandas Ghandi
NTP will sue others on its patents to pay those who sue NTP on its patents. And a rhumba line of lawyers will all collect the fees, ultimately from consumers.
If Slashdot released the Slashcode more frequently, with more/better comments/docs, and encouraged some of the many of us who complain about bugs/features to help the project, then it's more likely that someone would have debugged this bug earlier.
Open source - it's not just a buzzword, it's a way of life.
Well of course you can't override later than the total count. You can override later than your original vote, but before the winner or any counts are known. That thwarts vote buying, because they don't know whether the vote they're buying will count.
It's still got a hole, because there's got to be a last vote. A buyer/intimidator could just make you send an "override" out at the last minute, preventing the voter from overriding.
Secret voting in public is still the surest way, though it's got its own problems with turnout and count rigging. So it's really a question of comparing their actual respective defects, which are quantitative - and of which neither of us have documentation.
I'd remake the whole thing. In-person secret voting with unofficial digital counts of official handcounted paper, in public or by mail, in multiple rounds, for "instant runoff" candidates. Paper anonymous receipts redeemable for a Federal holiday any time until the next election when voting in person. The resulting rush to the polls would swamp out most rigging.
Brzezinski's recent admission of guilt in kicking off the Afghan hellhole is even less known than the spelling of his name:). The US has obligations of every kind to support Afghans in fixing their own country into a stable nation ruled by its own people, not superpowers, global theocracies, its neighbors, or the warlords who are the latest market for the ages-old weapons trade that's always shipped through their country.
A peaceful, productive Afghanistan could be the key to constructive peace across the region, even among Iran, Pakistan and India. It borders China, too. The fact that the US is holding the Afghanistan bag is really a tremendous asset. But now that Bush Sr's CIA director Robert "Iran/Contra" Gates is chosen to replace Rumsfeld, we'll probably make things even worse. I hope the new Democratic Senate rejects Gates in favor of someone without the history of failure in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan failure is essential to the Bush dynasty and its courtiers.
We probably have a chance only if Democrats take down McCain and stop new Bush babysitter Jim Baker from installing Jeb. Stopping Giuliani will probably have to be up to the rest of us. Then maybe a person who isn't already guilty of perverting Afghanistan will have a chance to protect it, and us.
It sounds like we're on the same page, especially regarding universal inalienable human rights. Which is really redundant - everyone is on the same page on those rights, by definition, whether we realize it or not. Some of us have set ourselves more free than others, usually because we were lucky enough not to get imprisoned as children by people around us. All of us more free people I've met have the same compulsion to protect universal freedom, regardless of specific policies and implementations under that freedom.
"I believe you understand that in the future, it may become necessary to beat upon the Democrats instead."
That's one reason why I'm the tech advisor to the NYC City Council, which is 97% Democrats, leading a state now with a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, majority Democratic House representatives... They get nothing but the facts and analysis from me. I'm probably the most activist advisor they've had, getting several "libertarian" subjects into the hearings that are the basis of policymaking, though I comment only on the tech merits/costs/risks and pragmatic effects of the policies that they consider. The NYC political machine, not my responsibility by any means (other than as voter), has plenty of problems, but the literal machines get good oversight, and a good kick whenever I'm in the room.
In the US, bars and other venues for live and recorded music "performance" (playing in public) usually pay a blanket subscription fee to ASCAP and BMI, which each collect royalties for the different artists they represent. They record a random setlist, either one day a month or so, or one hour a day for several days, depending on the royalty agency, to send to the royalty agencies. Then the agency sends fractions of the subscription for the whole month to the artists in the random playlist. The artist's pay has the royalties already deducted before being paid.
Of course, that's the way it's supposed to work. In practice, many venues, especially smaller ones, don't even bother sending in their royalty subscriptions. And BMI/ASCAP don't represent all artists - SOCAN represents lots of Canadian artists, there are other even tinier agencies with their own exclusive artist list, and of course many smaller-producing artists don't register with any agency. The venues that do report usually don't report the random samples. When they do, they often just make them up. And of course those samples are not really random, or represent their total performance lists, except in venues which play the same 5 songs over and again (there are certainly too many of those). But artists with fewer repeats get left out of the sample, and the biggest artists obviously get even more favoritism, and therefore much more royalties - the little ones get some random trickle, if anything. And then the agencies often don't pay their artists, who have no way to know how much they're being cheated, while the agencies keep a much larger percentage of the collected royalties than necessary, for supporting their fat, lazy, lying, cheating, stealing corporations and shareholders. And then there are the gangs that blackmail venues by threatening them with "royalty enforcement" (which can stop their music activities), no matter what their compliance, if the venue doesn't pay the gang the extra bribes - while the gang pockets any legit payments instead of sending it to the agencies.
I've worked in and with the music industry for over 20 years. Including some of the biggest promoters/producers in the US. Some of my best friends still make their living in the criminal music industry, mostly musicians, but some venue owners/operators and some even label execs. They prefer the European model, which is mostly the same, but which at least requires the venue to report every song played. Which at least starts with a more fair requirement, but which is abused about as much as in the US.
Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run. They all ran after the farmer's wife Who cut off their tails with a carving knife. Did you ever see such a thing in your life As three blind mice?
Nah, none of those invasions had the power of the US at their disposal, nor faced an Afghan government so feared by its own people, nor so recently installed - itself an invasion from Pakistan.
And by "power", I don't just mean firepower. The US is also part of the drug trade that the Afghan economy depended on before the Taliban cut it back, to make Afghans instead dependent on Taliban services funded by Osama. If the US invaded, and spent $100B making Afghans trade legit goods while educating all their people, with religious freedom (including the diversity hated by the Taliban), the US could have rebuilt that country. And in so doing, created a tough ally on Iran's border, increasing pressure among Iranians to trade with their fellow Farsis. Giving Pakistan a role of guaranteeing moderate Islam's freedom, rather than letting their own theocrats fester on the Afghan border, and provoke India in Kashmir.
In other words, Afghanistan was like a bad kid crying out for help. We could have given that help, tough "love" that included killing thousands of Taliban and Qaeda. With a vision of actually building allies out of enemies, and letting those allies do it their way, with our help.
Kurdistan is proof of this. The benign neglect the US has shown in Iraqi Kurdistan has let them do exactly what Afghans could have done. Kurdistan's diverse people could have taken Afghanistan as a model, if we'd actually freed it. Invading Afghanistan didn't mean invading it the way we did. Now it's too late to invade the right way, and probably too late to change the way we're working there. But unless you're saying that Afghans and Kurds - the people, no their warlords - don't want to be free, it's not really Afghans who are the problem. It's the Americans - Rumsfeld's Americans - who were the problem.
Practically no one allied with the US saw the US invasion of Afghanistan as anything but justified self-defense. To stop the regime that sponsored the 9/11/2001 attack, and fix the country which incubated the alliance that attacked us.
What Bush did to screw up that invasion is another story. Like if the US had invaded a medieval Japan after they'd planebombed Pearl Harbor, and just killed every Japanese male.
Anonymous Coward, let's have some examples of US allies alienated by our Afghanistan invasion, and justification for letting the Taliban continue to run that country for Osama's Qaeda network. Or just shut up.
Unfortunately, even Bennet (R-UT) is next up for firing, but only in 2010. At least Hatch has much less influence, especially as a moron, with a Democratic Congressional majority. Which is a pity for the reasonably intelligent people of Utah. But, given Hatch's stupid positions on intellectual property (as an IP owner himself), it's probably good news for Slashdotters.
If you felt good about voting for Ashdown, you'll probably feel good about supporting the people in the Utah statehouse races Ashdown probably supports. The statehouse creates the rules by which Utahans can run to represent Utahans, so a longterm project that will be rewarding is remaking Utah politics in the image of the best Utah has to offer.
The idea is that the overall reality is more important than the convention within which everyone lives. So even a limited view of the reality can give the only person to have that view more power than everyone else. That power derives from knowledge of the true state of the world, not just the ignorant interactions of the people in it.
The king doesn't have to deal with most stuff in society, just the best stuff that he alone can see to pick.
In the realm beyond our senses, into which we extend with necessarily limited technology, we're all pretty blind in one way or another, often literally.
Not just accuracy, but reliability. I don't want the "infostructure" of the rest of my life, full of networked physical objects, to depend on one source of GPS, whether US, EU, China, or any one other. Politics is too unreliable. Competition among politics is the only stability we've got.
As for "speedy CPU and large antenna", that's why I'm talking about smart antennas, SW radios, all preferably on reconfigurable HW (like FPGA). Multiple GPS, multiple data networks, etc. Only when these mobile devices have ample signal diversity will they be reliable.
I'm really looking forward to those "universal antennas" of all frequencies at once, run through parallel "software radios". I want my mobile devices to get competing GPS data for averaging. It's like having two or three eyes in the land of the blind.
I'm glad I won't have to put down nearly as much of this kind of Republican propaganda recycled into Slashdot posts anymore, now that the Republicans don't have a monopoly on power.
Let's remember that the Democrats voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq if necessary to protect immediate US security. You know, the "mushroom cloud". Rumsfeld was the one certain they had those WMD (having sold them to Saddam). Rumsfeld had even started the airbombing of Iraq before that AUMF, stealing from the Afghanistan budget. Saying "no good targets in Afghanistan, but better ones in Iraq". Rumsfeld signed the PNAC plan to attack Iraq on whatever pretext was available, any "Pearl Harbor" moment like the 9/11/2001 planebombings that were his dream come true. Rumsfeld was hellbent on invading Iraq. Democrats, though a too-compliant minority that didn't stop Rumsfeld, did not have Rumsfeld's agenda to invade Iraq, no matter what the consequences.
Besides, we're not talking about whether the Democrats didn't stop Rumsfeld. We're talking about whether a competent Defense Sect'y would have done what Rumsfeld ensured we do. Hillary Clinton wasn't the Defense Sect'y. And even when the Clintons were in the White House, their Iraq War wasn't anywhere near a catastrophic invasion. Instead, it was containment that disarmed Saddam Hussein and rotted his regime to the point where its collapse in face of popular revolt was at least plausible. A better hypothetical hindsight argument about those years would be whether a Democratic Congress would have backed Clinton supporting a sustainable dismantling of Saddam's government, rather than leaving Clinton little options.
Again, I'm glad I won't have to corral these attempts to change the argument from questions about the incompetence of Rumsfeld to the standard "But Clinton..." of the past 6 years. But for old times sake, here's more:
"Well, if you take the neocons at their word, that was a big part of it."
There is absolutely zero reason to take neocons at their word, and every reason to know that they will lie at every chance.
"President Bush especially has faith in democracy, and believes 'all people want to be free, and democracy is freedom' and that democracies are less likely to attack one another."
Bush doesn't believe in anything except his own power. Again, we have every reason to see that Bush suffers whatever democracy is available. He is more likely to say campaign pablum like that as long as voters will buy it. Since they don't anymore, we're not even going to hear it, let alone be asked to believe that he believe it.
Bush has given a bad name to "liberation" and "freedom" by butchering it in Iraq. If he really wanted to spread American democratic ideals, believing in them, he would at least have set up a Congress, presidency, Supreme Court, states with governors, assemblies, etc in Iraq. Instead, he set up a parliament that is a tool for parties to control a country and its trade.
All people want to be free. In the real world, though, Iraqis weren't being freed - they were being massacred. At best, coddled. If the French had invaded the American colonies to "liberate" us from England in 1776, we never would have become free, either. We would have stuck with the English king (as many did anyway) long enough to kick out the French. The French wouldn't have had the example of our revolution to get their own freedom, and the English themselves would not have had to go with that momentum. Bush has shoved Iraq down the other path. It will have to go through a lot more hell before the natural desire of its people for freedom has another chance.
"They did win the war in Afghanistan, although I think they probably could have fought it better. Yes, the Taliban still exists, and yes they may come back into power after we leave. That doesn't change the fact that we fought and killed many of them, and toppled their government."
OK, now that's just Republican delusion. The kind I'm kissi
Somebody else in charge would not have invaded Iraq when we needed to win the war in Afghanistan.
"Bringing western style democracy to Iraq" has never been more than a slogan to win elections. It worked like a charm for 2 in the US, including one presidential.
If Rumsfeld were a competent Defense Secretary, he would have protected the US by winning in Afghanistan and pursuing a counterintel global pursuit of our terrorist enemies. Not created a catastrophic distraction that alienated our allies and our own citizens from each other.
That is such typical Dvorak bullshit. If MS were interested in just running MS proprietary code inside a Linux OS, they could have picked whichever open source distro they wanted, and programmed it themselves. There's no special Novell tech in Novell's Linux that lets MS do so. For $348M, Microsoft could have paid 1000 programmers a quarter-million dollars and all the best toys for a year, to produce whatever MS Linux they wanted, just like anyone else with a third of a $BILLION to spend.
No, what MS got was twofold. One, they've finally destroyed Novell, their only serious "network OS" competition for over a decade. The same way they destroyed IBM on the desktop by coopting OS/2, and destroyed Sybase at the database, by coopting their RDBMS for SQLServer. Just when Novell was starting to look like a contender for #1 in networking again, with SuSE, Ximian and their own groupware competing with MS Exchange. That coup alone was worth $348M, which MS can make back in a few years just by taking business from Novell.
But the bigger strategic win is MS attacking Linux with patents. They'll "cross license" patents with Novell, to protect Novell, then attack every other distro. Driving people to Novell. Then MS will use Novell's dependency on MS to kill Novell.
Maybe Dvorak should get a new keyboard, so he can type straight.
The patents are public. The need to disclose which they are does not diminish their power. The time it takes to replace any patented tech, especially as MS fires patent attacks for years, will stall Linux (if the plan works). While MS rolls out Vista, and "catches up". The biggest battle is for MS to get back the momentum in growth of the respective developer communities, which has always been the main MS job, short of commercial monopoly abuse.
What remains to be seen is whether Linux is open enough, with workable enough development architecture, to mutate quickly in face of any MS patent threat. Which is possibly the most valuable role for IBM and maybe Oracle. Their patents could offer replacements or just defenses for Linux. While offering demand for those other Linux stakeholders to open their patent portfolio for free use by Linux programmers.
The K Street Project was run by Ricky "Frothy" Santorum, who went down in flames in Pennsylvania last night. Along with his Republican majorities in both House and Senate, which determined the "market" for lobbyists. Now the lobbying firms without a Democratic network will have less power. I hope the lobbyists all believed Rove's rosy bullshit predictions for keeping their monocracy, and are not prepared to fill the Democrats' schedules so quickly.
And the rot of the whole lobbyist industry from the radioactivity of the Abramoff network, which created both the K Street industry and the Republican empire, has only begun to take lives. I'm looking forward to their competing Democratic lobbyists forming vigilante posses for investigations and jailtime for their old opponents. The whole business is a bloody mess. But at least we've got competition to clean out the pigs who've monopolized the trough for too long, getting sloppier every year.
Slashdot Mirror
Gates was a director of VoteHere, the biggest lobbyist/briber to install HAVA, the new law that's replacing fieldtested voting machines with untrustworthy digital devices. The cosponsors of HAVA were convicted Abramoff gangster Bob Ney (R-OH/Leavenworth), and Steny Hoyer. Hoyer is now the leading candidate to become Democratic House Majority Leader under Pelosi. Somehow I doubt he'll be herding Democrats to stop Gates. Or stop the rigged machines from electing Jeb in 2008.
Gates is on the Jim Baker / Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group. Hamilton was the "Democratic" "cochair" of the 9/11 Commission with NJ Gov Kean Sr. Hamilton served the same gig whitewashing Iran/Contra, and thereby Robert Gates, for Bush Sr. The real question is why do Democrats allow Lee Hamilton to represent the 50M Americans who vote for them?
So now that American voters have stripped the Terminator down to bare titanium, the ugly guts are starting to show in its desperation. The bipartisan Iran/Contra machine, from Gates to Bolton to Poindexter, has to come out of the closet to go back to work in its old offices. If some of the other Democrats, and maybe some Republicans who got cut out of all those deals, can rip off their remaining mask (too late for Schwarzenegger, the ultimate fascist masquerade), then 2008 might finally kill some of the robot army bred by Bush Sr.
I don't think McCain's "rightward" grope this Summer/Fall will alienate many independents. Rather just a waste of time: the evangelicals will stick with him now that Kuo's book and the loss of power makes those theocrats lose faith in Bush and their old Haggard shepherds. And most of the rest of independents don't pay attention to politics. McCain played both sides of his mouth to mutually exclusive media, so only the rightwingers got his rightist message. To most, especially the news media, he's the "maverick" Republican who "can be trusted" to do their corporatist work, while appealing to a broader Nielsen base. He is the biggest, perhaps only, Republican winner this year. Inheriting the machine, especially as it sheds its old skin, like probably Ken Mehlmann (especially if Bill Maher does out him as gay tonight, as rumored).
Another big loser was the entire Republican print media. The National Review will also do a "realism retake", if it is to keep any readers and influence in the long dark Winter of Bush's lame duckery. I'd love to read their hatchetjob on Giuliani to mine memes that will continue to swirl in the fragmented Republican repressed subconscious that defines their every move. But the Republican affinity for lying, denial and spinning on a point makes their coverage notable only in giving Giuliani press. They took a shot at him while they were still committed to Bush, while they were still in power to do so. But Republican logic goes "Giuliani was bad when Bush was good, so he must be good now that Bush is bad" - and at least half the Republican Party line is now "Bush is bad".
If Giuliani is the spokesmodel by April for Republican defense of their terrorism brand, then he's the one to watch. The one who isn't babysitter Jim Baker's pick, anyway. Jeb vs Giuliani is the contest to whip into a frenzy for the next 2 years, Stalin vs Hitler, so our FDR can step into the rubble and claim victory.
OTOH, I'm interested in your pick for 2008 Republican nominee. And who for the Democrats, if they're even on the radar at this point?
"Not as bad as no docs at all", the typical state of other OSS projects, isn't good enough. And the "lack of a full releass" kills the entire point of Slashdot users working on the Slashcode - it's a different app. CPAN pointers are great - and probably the product of a single enthusiast's single night up. Saying that following the INSTALL exactly produces a working install is kinda weak praise. That's the best you can say?
Slashdot's complaining programmer user community is a huge pool. If the Slashdot org encouraged us with better docs, not just silence or the arch, obnoxious attitude you just displayed, more of use would join the team to produce a better Slashcode. More would use it. Sixteen million user-produced items isn't so much. And if you think that none of the many programmer users would have noticed the index datatype change in one scope but not the necessary one in another, you don't even understand Slashdot.
In fact, you've just shown you don't understand how OSS projects work, though you apparently understand how the OSS code works in this one. Exactly my point. No wonder the Slashcode project is so unpopular, and therefore irrelevant. Which you seem more than happy about - defensive of, even. Congratulations.
OK, at a nanocent per byte storage and a nanocent per Gbps, we still need a nanocent per instruction per second processor for this new computer to be born. And not just a CPU IPS. These huge machines are churning not shift/add/multiply/jump instructions, but object relational operations. Just a stack of CPUs doesn't make Google, AOL and Microsoft in a higher class of tech than the rest of us paying nanocents per byte/GPS.
When their app requirements drive massive parallelism to deliver object-relational nanocent IPS, then the new age of info factories will dawn.
"An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind." - Mohandas Ghandi
NTP will sue others on its patents to pay those who sue NTP on its patents. And a rhumba line of lawyers will all collect the fees, ultimately from consumers.
If Slashdot released the Slashcode more frequently, with more/better comments/docs, and encouraged some of the many of us who complain about bugs/features to help the project, then it's more likely that someone would have debugged this bug earlier.
Open source - it's not just a buzzword, it's a way of life.
Well of course you can't override later than the total count. You can override later than your original vote, but before the winner or any counts are known. That thwarts vote buying, because they don't know whether the vote they're buying will count.
It's still got a hole, because there's got to be a last vote. A buyer/intimidator could just make you send an "override" out at the last minute, preventing the voter from overriding.
Secret voting in public is still the surest way, though it's got its own problems with turnout and count rigging. So it's really a question of comparing their actual respective defects, which are quantitative - and of which neither of us have documentation.
I'd remake the whole thing. In-person secret voting with unofficial digital counts of official handcounted paper, in public or by mail, in multiple rounds, for "instant runoff" candidates. Paper anonymous receipts redeemable for a Federal holiday any time until the next election when voting in person. The resulting rush to the polls would swamp out most rigging.
Moderation -1
70% Redundant
30% Informative
Not "Redundant" when posted in its entirety at 9:45PM.
Brzezinski's recent admission of guilt in kicking off the Afghan hellhole is even less known than the spelling of his name :). The US has obligations of every kind to support Afghans in fixing their own country into a stable nation ruled by its own people, not superpowers, global theocracies, its neighbors, or the warlords who are the latest market for the ages-old weapons trade that's always shipped through their country.
A peaceful, productive Afghanistan could be the key to constructive peace across the region, even among Iran, Pakistan and India. It borders China, too. The fact that the US is holding the Afghanistan bag is really a tremendous asset. But now that Bush Sr's CIA director Robert "Iran/Contra" Gates is chosen to replace Rumsfeld, we'll probably make things even worse. I hope the new Democratic Senate rejects Gates in favor of someone without the history of failure in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan failure is essential to the Bush dynasty and its courtiers.
We probably have a chance only if Democrats take down McCain and stop new Bush babysitter Jim Baker from installing Jeb. Stopping Giuliani will probably have to be up to the rest of us. Then maybe a person who isn't already guilty of perverting Afghanistan will have a chance to protect it, and us.
It sounds like we're on the same page, especially regarding universal inalienable human rights. Which is really redundant - everyone is on the same page on those rights, by definition, whether we realize it or not. Some of us have set ourselves more free than others, usually because we were lucky enough not to get imprisoned as children by people around us. All of us more free people I've met have the same compulsion to protect universal freedom, regardless of specific policies and implementations under that freedom.
"I believe you understand that in the future, it may become necessary to beat upon the Democrats instead."
That's one reason why I'm the tech advisor to the NYC City Council, which is 97% Democrats, leading a state now with a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, majority Democratic House representatives... They get nothing but the facts and analysis from me. I'm probably the most activist advisor they've had, getting several "libertarian" subjects into the hearings that are the basis of policymaking, though I comment only on the tech merits/costs/risks and pragmatic effects of the policies that they consider. The NYC political machine, not my responsibility by any means (other than as voter), has plenty of problems, but the literal machines get good oversight, and a good kick whenever I'm in the room.
The future is now.
In the US, bars and other venues for live and recorded music "performance" (playing in public) usually pay a blanket subscription fee to ASCAP and BMI, which each collect royalties for the different artists they represent. They record a random setlist, either one day a month or so, or one hour a day for several days, depending on the royalty agency, to send to the royalty agencies. Then the agency sends fractions of the subscription for the whole month to the artists in the random playlist. The artist's pay has the royalties already deducted before being paid.
Of course, that's the way it's supposed to work. In practice, many venues, especially smaller ones, don't even bother sending in their royalty subscriptions. And BMI/ASCAP don't represent all artists - SOCAN represents lots of Canadian artists, there are other even tinier agencies with their own exclusive artist list, and of course many smaller-producing artists don't register with any agency. The venues that do report usually don't report the random samples. When they do, they often just make them up. And of course those samples are not really random, or represent their total performance lists, except in venues which play the same 5 songs over and again (there are certainly too many of those). But artists with fewer repeats get left out of the sample, and the biggest artists obviously get even more favoritism, and therefore much more royalties - the little ones get some random trickle, if anything. And then the agencies often don't pay their artists, who have no way to know how much they're being cheated, while the agencies keep a much larger percentage of the collected royalties than necessary, for supporting their fat, lazy, lying, cheating, stealing corporations and shareholders. And then there are the gangs that blackmail venues by threatening them with "royalty enforcement" (which can stop their music activities), no matter what their compliance, if the venue doesn't pay the gang the extra bribes - while the gang pockets any legit payments instead of sending it to the agencies.
I've worked in and with the music industry for over 20 years. Including some of the biggest promoters/producers in the US. Some of my best friends still make their living in the criminal music industry, mostly musicians, but some venue owners/operators and some even label execs. They prefer the European model, which is mostly the same, but which at least requires the venue to report every song played. Which at least starts with a more fair requirement, but which is abused about as much as in the US.
The industry wants everyone moved to a blanket license - covering everyone, even if not a "bulk rate". Their holy grail is music recognition software, which reports every person/place's performance for network royalty payments. When they can, they will make everyone's phones monitor everyone all the time, reporting any music we perform and taxing us. That includes playing recordings, pianos, singing in the shower, "Happy Birthday"©, gospel in church, probably even air guitar. All tracked, charged, stored, datamined, and used to micromarket everything to you, along with your favorite songs.
Nah, none of those invasions had the power of the US at their disposal, nor faced an Afghan government so feared by its own people, nor so recently installed - itself an invasion from Pakistan.
And by "power", I don't just mean firepower. The US is also part of the drug trade that the Afghan economy depended on before the Taliban cut it back, to make Afghans instead dependent on Taliban services funded by Osama. If the US invaded, and spent $100B making Afghans trade legit goods while educating all their people, with religious freedom (including the diversity hated by the Taliban), the US could have rebuilt that country. And in so doing, created a tough ally on Iran's border, increasing pressure among Iranians to trade with their fellow Farsis. Giving Pakistan a role of guaranteeing moderate Islam's freedom, rather than letting their own theocrats fester on the Afghan border, and provoke India in Kashmir.
In other words, Afghanistan was like a bad kid crying out for help. We could have given that help, tough "love" that included killing thousands of Taliban and Qaeda. With a vision of actually building allies out of enemies, and letting those allies do it their way, with our help.
Kurdistan is proof of this. The benign neglect the US has shown in Iraqi Kurdistan has let them do exactly what Afghans could have done. Kurdistan's diverse people could have taken Afghanistan as a model, if we'd actually freed it. Invading Afghanistan didn't mean invading it the way we did. Now it's too late to invade the right way, and probably too late to change the way we're working there. But unless you're saying that Afghans and Kurds - the people, no their warlords - don't want to be free, it's not really Afghans who are the problem. It's the Americans - Rumsfeld's Americans - who were the problem.
Practically no one allied with the US saw the US invasion of Afghanistan as anything but justified self-defense. To stop the regime that sponsored the 9/11/2001 attack, and fix the country which incubated the alliance that attacked us.
What Bush did to screw up that invasion is another story. Like if the US had invaded a medieval Japan after they'd planebombed Pearl Harbor, and just killed every Japanese male.
Anonymous Coward, let's have some examples of US allies alienated by our Afghanistan invasion, and justification for letting the Taliban continue to run that country for Osama's Qaeda network. Or just shut up.
Osama, is that you?
Unfortunately, even Bennet (R-UT) is next up for firing, but only in 2010. At least Hatch has much less influence, especially as a moron, with a Democratic Congressional majority. Which is a pity for the reasonably intelligent people of Utah. But, given Hatch's stupid positions on intellectual property (as an IP owner himself), it's probably good news for Slashdotters.
If you felt good about voting for Ashdown, you'll probably feel good about supporting the people in the Utah statehouse races Ashdown probably supports. The statehouse creates the rules by which Utahans can run to represent Utahans, so a longterm project that will be rewarding is remaking Utah politics in the image of the best Utah has to offer.
The idea is that the overall reality is more important than the convention within which everyone lives. So even a limited view of the reality can give the only person to have that view more power than everyone else. That power derives from knowledge of the true state of the world, not just the ignorant interactions of the people in it.
The king doesn't have to deal with most stuff in society, just the best stuff that he alone can see to pick.
In the realm beyond our senses, into which we extend with necessarily limited technology, we're all pretty blind in one way or another, often literally.
Not just accuracy, but reliability. I don't want the "infostructure" of the rest of my life, full of networked physical objects, to depend on one source of GPS, whether US, EU, China, or any one other. Politics is too unreliable. Competition among politics is the only stability we've got.
As for "speedy CPU and large antenna", that's why I'm talking about smart antennas, SW radios, all preferably on reconfigurable HW (like FPGA). Multiple GPS, multiple data networks, etc. Only when these mobile devices have ample signal diversity will they be reliable.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
TrollMods never say die. Which is why we destroy them with elections, rather that try to use their accursed rings against them.
I'm really looking forward to those "universal antennas" of all frequencies at once, run through parallel "software radios". I want my mobile devices to get competing GPS data for averaging. It's like having two or three eyes in the land of the blind.
I'm glad I won't have to put down nearly as much of this kind of Republican propaganda recycled into Slashdot posts anymore, now that the Republicans don't have a monopoly on power.
Let's remember that the Democrats voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq if necessary to protect immediate US security. You know, the "mushroom cloud". Rumsfeld was the one certain they had those WMD (having sold them to Saddam). Rumsfeld had even started the airbombing of Iraq before that AUMF, stealing from the Afghanistan budget. Saying "no good targets in Afghanistan, but better ones in Iraq". Rumsfeld signed the PNAC plan to attack Iraq on whatever pretext was available, any "Pearl Harbor" moment like the 9/11/2001 planebombings that were his dream come true. Rumsfeld was hellbent on invading Iraq. Democrats, though a too-compliant minority that didn't stop Rumsfeld, did not have Rumsfeld's agenda to invade Iraq, no matter what the consequences.
Besides, we're not talking about whether the Democrats didn't stop Rumsfeld. We're talking about whether a competent Defense Sect'y would have done what Rumsfeld ensured we do. Hillary Clinton wasn't the Defense Sect'y. And even when the Clintons were in the White House, their Iraq War wasn't anywhere near a catastrophic invasion. Instead, it was containment that disarmed Saddam Hussein and rotted his regime to the point where its collapse in face of popular revolt was at least plausible. A better hypothetical hindsight argument about those years would be whether a Democratic Congress would have backed Clinton supporting a sustainable dismantling of Saddam's government, rather than leaving Clinton little options.
Again, I'm glad I won't have to corral these attempts to change the argument from questions about the incompetence of Rumsfeld to the standard "But Clinton..." of the past 6 years. But for old times sake, here's more:
"Well, if you take the neocons at their word, that was a big part of it."
There is absolutely zero reason to take neocons at their word, and every reason to know that they will lie at every chance.
"President Bush especially has faith in democracy, and believes 'all people want to be free, and democracy is freedom' and that democracies are less likely to attack one another."
Bush doesn't believe in anything except his own power. Again, we have every reason to see that Bush suffers whatever democracy is available. He is more likely to say campaign pablum like that as long as voters will buy it. Since they don't anymore, we're not even going to hear it, let alone be asked to believe that he believe it.
Bush has given a bad name to "liberation" and "freedom" by butchering it in Iraq. If he really wanted to spread American democratic ideals, believing in them, he would at least have set up a Congress, presidency, Supreme Court, states with governors, assemblies, etc in Iraq. Instead, he set up a parliament that is a tool for parties to control a country and its trade.
All people want to be free. In the real world, though, Iraqis weren't being freed - they were being massacred. At best, coddled. If the French had invaded the American colonies to "liberate" us from England in 1776, we never would have become free, either. We would have stuck with the English king (as many did anyway) long enough to kick out the French. The French wouldn't have had the example of our revolution to get their own freedom, and the English themselves would not have had to go with that momentum. Bush has shoved Iraq down the other path. It will have to go through a lot more hell before the natural desire of its people for freedom has another chance.
"They did win the war in Afghanistan, although I think they probably could have fought it better. Yes, the Taliban still exists, and yes they may come back into power after we leave. That doesn't change the fact that we fought and killed many of them, and toppled their government."
OK, now that's just Republican delusion. The kind I'm kissi
"Documentation". Thus spake Doc Ruby, entirely in pun.
Somebody else in charge would not have invaded Iraq when we needed to win the war in Afghanistan.
"Bringing western style democracy to Iraq" has never been more than a slogan to win elections. It worked like a charm for 2 in the US, including one presidential.
If Rumsfeld were a competent Defense Secretary, he would have protected the US by winning in Afghanistan and pursuing a counterintel global pursuit of our terrorist enemies. Not created a catastrophic distraction that alienated our allies and our own citizens from each other.
RUMSFELD DOWN! Onward to Mordor!
That is such typical Dvorak bullshit. If MS were interested in just running MS proprietary code inside a Linux OS, they could have picked whichever open source distro they wanted, and programmed it themselves. There's no special Novell tech in Novell's Linux that lets MS do so. For $348M, Microsoft could have paid 1000 programmers a quarter-million dollars and all the best toys for a year, to produce whatever MS Linux they wanted, just like anyone else with a third of a $BILLION to spend.
No, what MS got was twofold. One, they've finally destroyed Novell, their only serious "network OS" competition for over a decade. The same way they destroyed IBM on the desktop by coopting OS/2, and destroyed Sybase at the database, by coopting their RDBMS for SQLServer. Just when Novell was starting to look like a contender for #1 in networking again, with SuSE, Ximian and their own groupware competing with MS Exchange. That coup alone was worth $348M, which MS can make back in a few years just by taking business from Novell.
But the bigger strategic win is MS attacking Linux with patents. They'll "cross license" patents with Novell, to protect Novell, then attack every other distro. Driving people to Novell. Then MS will use Novell's dependency on MS to kill Novell.
Maybe Dvorak should get a new keyboard, so he can type straight.
The patents are public. The need to disclose which they are does not diminish their power. The time it takes to replace any patented tech, especially as MS fires patent attacks for years, will stall Linux (if the plan works). While MS rolls out Vista, and "catches up". The biggest battle is for MS to get back the momentum in growth of the respective developer communities, which has always been the main MS job, short of commercial monopoly abuse.
What remains to be seen is whether Linux is open enough, with workable enough development architecture, to mutate quickly in face of any MS patent threat. Which is possibly the most valuable role for IBM and maybe Oracle. Their patents could offer replacements or just defenses for Linux. While offering demand for those other Linux stakeholders to open their patent portfolio for free use by Linux programmers.
The K Street Project was run by Ricky "Frothy" Santorum, who went down in flames in Pennsylvania last night. Along with his Republican majorities in both House and Senate, which determined the "market" for lobbyists. Now the lobbying firms without a Democratic network will have less power. I hope the lobbyists all believed Rove's rosy bullshit predictions for keeping their monocracy, and are not prepared to fill the Democrats' schedules so quickly.
And the rot of the whole lobbyist industry from the radioactivity of the Abramoff network, which created both the K Street industry and the Republican empire, has only begun to take lives. I'm looking forward to their competing Democratic lobbyists forming vigilante posses for investigations and jailtime for their old opponents. The whole business is a bloody mess. But at least we've got competition to clean out the pigs who've monopolized the trough for too long, getting sloppier every year.