For a long time, the United States has been able to sell itself as the home of virtue and in most cases we have been. We *ARE* terrible resource hogs, but We've actually tried to overcome our systematic racism; we've tried to bring people of other cultures in other countries to our notion of civil rights and tried to make other nations 'nations of laws and not nations of men.' Despite our failings (the Texas death penalty that affects *only* the poor and/or black) We have been and are a yardstick by which you can measure the rights of the citizen.
That's all true and it's all good, but the United States is and always has been a churning cauldron of tension in the attempt to balance the rights and privileges of the individual against large interests.
Unfortunately, With the current aberrant administration in office, we are presented with the ugly and bizarre scenario of the U.S. working government hard to take care of its friends in business. Unfortunately for all concerned, both here and in Australia, the administration believes in its various agendas and can't see the sheer magnitude of how nasty and ridiculous actions like this make us look in the world.
We're the post-9/11 United States and, unlike every other government in history, we are infinitely good and infinitely righteous: every country, every nation, can trust us to treat those of its citizens who have offended our lobbyists sponsors wonderfully.
Lastly, I would agree we are making a mistake in our handling of the Iraqi Situation - I think we should just pack up & leave. We accomplished the removal of Saddam, they can figure out their own destiny without further US handholding. If they go fundamentalist, so be it, it's their sovereign right to make that decision.
Thank god this has probably gone below the radar of moderation, because this opinion is not going to make me in any way popular.
There is a thing in history called, 'Realpolitik,' a German word meaning 'real politics'--'politics in the real world. In essence, it is what policymakers use to make political judgements before the ideas behind those judgements are brought into the light of day--what they are before they are sold to a congress or 'spun' to the media.
One of the reasons the Iraq war and occupation suck is that it is a policy which ignores history and sociology. It is easy to say that we should let them sort it out, but the simple fact is, now that we've gone this far, we can't do that without risking our real and imagined interests in the region.
Our interests in the region involves the absence of conflict between the countries there and their alliance with or respect for the west because we in the United States are trapped in a culture that is dependent on the overuse of energy.
We don't conserve energy. We don't protect against greenhouse gasses and the current administration has even offered a tax-credit equaling the price of the vehicle for companies which choose to buy fuel-inefficient vehicles (i,e., if you are in the right tax-bracket and own, or create a company, and have the cash, your Humvee is free courtesy of the U.S. government).
We live in a culture (and under a government) that desires to preserve for as long as possible the illusion that economies dependent upon cheap oil are indefinitely sustainable and without adverse consequences. Our national policy reflects this. With this in mind, using 9/11 as an excuse ('we were attacked'), the Administration has brought us into a war of choice to replace the Iraqi dictator. Unfortunately, this is idiotic policy because Saddam Hussein was the leader of the most modernized Islamic nations--the one with the greatest tolerance for religions other than Islam, and the one which offered the greatest freedom and opportunity for women.
As critics pointed out during the run-in to the invasion, replacing Saddam Hussein released decades religious conflict that Hussein's regime effectively suppressed.
Now that Hussein is gone, the shiite moslems are vying for power, creating the threat that they will join with Iran to increase the population and the economic strength of a known U.S. enemy, while fundamentalists from inside and outside Iraq are working to sabotage the United State's efforts to impress the Iraqi people with our benevolence and desire to create a democracy that is friendly to the west. Add to this the very real possibility of actual civil war which could spread throughout the region and you have a situation that has gone from our using diplomacy to simply keep a cork on a nasty little dictator from a distance to one where it is absolutely vital that we spend billions of dollars and hundreds of lives trying to *bring* stability to a region that already had it.
This brings us at last to question of the morality of leaving the region to its own devices. When it comes to realpolitik, leaders ignore it at their peril as they do all other aspects of reality in their decision-making. Part of the reality of the situation in Iraq is that Saddam Hussein took care of our interests and he did it for free.
More importantly, one thing that is not played up by the U.S. media is that simple fact that had Hussein ever actually abused the Iraqi people to the point where they spontaneously rose up against him, they would have won because the Iraqi people were armed during Hussein's rule a fact which is born out by at least one instance of a U.S. patrol's 'returning fire' at a wedding where fully automatic weapons were fired in the air, just as they were during Hussein's rule.
Of course, I will now be modded down as an anti-German racist
Well, no. You should be modded down as an anti-soldier bigot.
The former poster wrote about the German Government's maintaining pensions to former Nazi soldiers without regard to actions during their service (e.g., a mass-murderer getting extra money for being wounded trying to escape). He suggests that there is an injustice in this because nazi victims often received less compensation.
The latter poster, claiming that the former is bigoted against soldiers is missing or ignoring the former's main (and quite simple) point: people who should have been tried for crimes against humanity should probably not receive more compensation than those who narrowly escaped them.
In arguing for a nation's love for and responsibility to the men who serve it as soldiers, and extending it by obtuse omission to war-criminals, the second poster ignores historical precedent and insults the soldiers of every army that ever had fought for any decent purpose.
The outcome of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem made it perfectly clear that *some* military orders (shooting unarmed civilians, murdering soldiers who surrender, etc.) should not and cannot be obeyed.
When such orders are given, it is the soldier's duty to think not of his country but of civilisation and do whatever is necessary to not carry out those orders and some soldiers have actually done just that--like Israeli pilots who refused to take part in missions against the palestinians.
The comparison of Nazi units charged murdering jews, allied prisoners, securing slave-labor, etc. is particularly insulting in that the United State's invasion and occupation of Iraq is one of the worst decisions an American President has made in decades. The whole thing was and is a bad idea--a stupid and naive pursuit of political gain and personal desire which can in no way be seen as commensurate with the United State's security, nor with the stability of the Middle-East.
I believe all of this is true with respect to the dog's breakfast of policy in Iraq, however the mission brief of U.S. soldiers currently serving in the Gulf probably does not include 'aid in the work of rounding up the intelligentsia for early extermination,' nor any one of scores of other tasks that the Nazis acommplished throughout occupied Europe.
For the sake of intellectual rigor if nothing else, Please think through your comparisons more thoroughly in future.
If you're not going ot do the real thing, why not just make a software replica?
That's a brilliantly simple, brilliantly clear Idea!
Of course, some of the fun must be a matter of having and assembling some kind of hardware, because when you get to the root of the matter, what you would get with the electronic kit, a software emulation, (or, for that matter, the original machine) would be the ability to generate one of serveral codes that have been cracked for about twice the time that most slashdot readers have been alive.
Only rank beginners (say less than a couple months into chess) ever play to mate. Its obvious who's going to win long before mate happens. To continue playing is a waste of both players' time, not to mention an insult to the opponent's intelligence.
A better way to put it might be to say that only rank beginners play for mate clumsily.
There have been and are games played that would certainly have ended in mate had the player of the losing side chosen not to resign (for a spectacular example, see: Fisher-Benko, U.S. Championship, 1963.)
The safest thing to acknowledge is that all chess games end in mate and by resigning the player of the losing side simply acknowledges that he knows that eventual mate is inevitable.
they just play out an opening move.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. Grandmasters do an enormous amount of research into finding new moves in openings. They don't "memorize" them. There are five volumes of the ECO chess encyclopedia, and that just covers the basics!
Actually, grandmasters *do* memorize opening variations, more of them and more deeply than you or I will ever imagine doing and then they do deep research into the continuations that result from them.
The ability to keep all the stuff in your head that you have to have to play well-known openings in modern master-and-above praxis is one of the things that differentiates great players from us mere mortals. When you are exposed to really high-level chess players, you find yourself astounded and frightened by the casual ability of some many Grandmasters to demonstrate that they are at least aware of important 'lines,' spread over literally thousands of pages of opening theory.
You can't let the words 'openings theory,' say too much to you though. Opening theory is a misnomer which a computer-savvy age like ours might just as easilly call a 'database of openings practice.' Theory as found in the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (ECO) and elsewhere only means that someone somewhere reached a given position in the opening of a chess game and that someone else has appraised that position as being either favorable for one side, unclear, or balanced--it isn't chemistry.
and whoever has the upper hand at the end takes the game
No of course they don't. This is simply false, period. Why do you think there are things called "middlegame" and "endgame"??
The second poster is dead right here. The amazing number of possible ways of conducting an attack, or following a strategic plan, or clawing one's way out of a disadvantageous situation are stunning and their quality--their elegance, their cleverness, depth or tenacity--are one thing that makes chess more than arithmetic and geometry. The ability of the player of the weaker side to find a way to come back from the edge to salvage a draw from a losing position or to actually win is what makes the game a thing that goes beyond pure computation as a struggle between two people.
Its sad that because most moderators aren't chess players, anyone can write ridiculous BS and get modded up "+5, interesting".
Yes, some of the things that get attention as chess commentary here can be pretty strange. I think one of the most interesting things about this thread so far is that it seems that no one has actually commented on the actual *game*.
IMHO, it was a pretty dull game featuring some very unimaginative, passive, play on black's part. Just because the chess program was distributed across many processors doesn't actually mean that it was a very good program. It made you wonder how well the human player might have done against a fully tricked-out copy of Crafty--with a few huge game databases installed.
We're getting closer and closer to the days when humans won't be able to compete with computer's at chess. Even so I don't think this is such a big deal. We haven't be able to compete with computers at arithmetic for half a century and this doesn't bother anyone.
As perceptive as that statement might be on the surface (and it is *VERY* perceptive), it draws a false analogy between chess and arithmetic. First off, arithmetic is a human activity that is engaged in by most people only as a matter of necessity and the removal of the need for deep ability in it brought about by the development of the electronic calculator is a universal boon (people no longer need a facility for calculation, a *talent,* to apply formulae).
Chess on the other hand, is an activity engaged in on a purely elective basis and it is a contest between two people. It touches upon and broadens our instinctive need for comparison and competition. Unlike the algorithmic provisions of arithmetic, chess has a soul and that soul is the simple wager between two people who bring their respective talents and knowledge (tactics, strategy, knowledge of opening and endgame theory) to the board and each of the players wagers that he/she knows enough and is talented enough to reach an-as-yet-unknown set of winning criteria against any opposition the other player can create with no more information to work with than the initial position.
Your reasoning ignores the need for competition and the glories that come from it. It is true the combination of better and better hardware and software will certainly make a computer the strongest chess-player in the world, sooner rather than later, but that day will mark a small diminishing of human worth in the world. Of course, this is a matter of opinion, an esthetic judgement and not logically demonstrable but the strength of it can be shown by three simple questions:
1. Would a football game where all the players were robots be interesting?
2. Would a world-class violin performance have meaning if the player was a pair of mechanical arms?
3. Would anything be permanantly lost to the world if any of the above players was smashed to pieces?
No, they are called morons because they do not have any common sense.
In order to think through the problem clearly, you should probably avoid elevating what you know to the level of instinct.
What you call 'common sense,' is the result of a mindset shaped by instincts and education that began to be shaped in your childhood.
If I.Q. tests were written around computers, you would probably be one of the cleverest people in the room. However, when it comes to the end-user, throwing up your hands and mumbling, 'that CEO... stupid idiot...' under your breath in your cubicle is not going to do anything good for you or your company.
Basically, by not reacting to it in a way that assumes that some people are smarter than labrador retrievers, you are setting yourself up for the next virus attack where your reaction will be what I can only assume your messages suggest it is now.
1. Wait for it to happen. 2. Fix it. 3. Hate everybody.
Instead of that, you might consider using your amazing compu-clever(tm) and elite slashdot-reading skills when a virus strikes to email everyone with a message from your exalted self telling everyone that there was a virus around, to be extra-careful and to engage in a set of simple-to-follow steps, like not opening any mails or attachments to mails from people they've never heard of.
When some few actually *DO* do that, despite your precautions, then go to them and remind them personally, using techniques from social engineering,; telling them how cool it would be if they could watch out for viral threats, following the instructions in your memo and in your email alert because they know how it is when you've got to work late like you have to when your company gets hit with a virus.
And, since your listeners are the cool people that they are, they should actually pass along the memo instructions for you which might actually help them remember it--and with a little luck, your enemy will become your little helper.
Oh, and don't forget to mention--as a deep, dark secret that only you and the listener should know is that the least-pleasant-person-in-the-office is wondering *WHO* keeps letting in viruses while you shudder at the recollection of your last encounter with him.
Never mind, your way is better. Forget I said anything. This message will self-destruct in five sec...Bang!
Ow!!!
and...
it's your responsibility to know what you need to do to maintain it.
Do you need a sign telling you to look both ways before crossing the street?
Two quick questions:
1. Which of the two behaviors you mention is not a learned behavior?
2. Who, or what is, 'ludacris,' (paragraph, 2: word 17 of your note.):-)
Actually, the guys you call 'morons' are just average people with respect to your chosen field of endeavor.
They're not geeks and calling them morons on the basis of their not understanding computers is like calling someone a moron for not being a great chef, a gifted pianist, a brilliant chess-player, or an insightful auto-mechanic.
Ceteris paribus, knowing nothing else about the poor schmuck panicking with his hot little hand on the mouse button, the word makes no sense. In fact, it may very well say more about the person who needs to reach for it than it does about the one to whom it's applied.
After TNG, in order to achieve measureable novelty, the producers of Star Trek series painted themselves into corners that became progressively narrower and more bizarre with each series.
And each move led lessened possibilities for the creation of interesting plots.
Deep Space Nine rapidly dissolved into soap-opera on a space station with war and all the other goings on an adjunct to love stories and the spiritual evolution of the Ferengi.
Voyager was an obscenity in terms of story. Essentially, a big-budget version of 'Lost in Space,' Voyager left a bad taste in your mouth as a show never failed to call attention to its artificiality since you knew they could never solve the gigantic main problem of the series without, in fact, ending it.
Enterprise breaks the grip of the plot reduction problem but only by doing a 180-degree turn with regard to everything interesting about science fiction. Enterprise 'worked' by sacrificing the future as it was understood by its loyal fan-base and that has got to be one of the stupidest and least-perceptive decisions in television history.
Part of Star Trek's attraction for intelligent watchers is the wonder of it, it's solidity as a fiction with something in it for the mind to grab--particularly in its history and technology.
In Enterprise, everything the producers have done has worked to destroy that source of charm while alienating the previous geeks that form(-ed) the show's core audience.
They did this from the first minute of the first episode and they've never stopped doing it. They took big risks writing Enterprise and not one of them was good.
Enterprise, blows out Star Trek's unbelievably valuable history and technology for the sake of weak, and increasingly dubious plots that make the show's finding new fans unlikely while its assumption of the worthlessness of the show's past alienates its core audience
If Enterprise dissappears and takes the franchise with it, it will not be a surprise.
How about if Mike Row offers Microsoft $10 for the microsoft.com domain?
That would be a really, really cool idea. Except, if memory serves, the bit on the register includes quotes from, Mike Rowe, the kid in question, and it was he who realized that his total costs were $10 Canadian and not the case that Microsoft had offered it to him.
Were the reverse true, your idea would be truly brilliant.
Actually, no. It's by no means brilliant, but it's certainly explainable.
You're a big company. YOu're huge. You are very, very controversial. When intelligent, well-informed people think about you and your business tactics, they combine images of alien zombies with all-encroaching slime-mold and a coven of satanists whose approach to product design and quality control issues is limited to ferrying suitcases of cash to Washington.
It has been proven in courts of law that you steal code and suppress competition. It is well-known that you are cavalier towards other people's patents and copyrights and fiercely protective of your own. In short, you are scum.
So What is your optimal startegy? In order to keep the great ordinary from hearing that you are scum so often that it clicks one day (I'm paying WHAT?!! HOW?!!), you have to control as much opinion as you can and a websight on a domain that is easily associated with your name is very dangerous to you at; least psychologically and at worst, materially.
It's got to work on your nerves. It has to make things run through your head.
A site on a domain like that might be used to report every time your blithe unconcern for security costs your customers billions; it might be used to post wonderfully funny pieces about how your founder is a, vulgar, fast-food munching, nerd with documented B.O.--a loser who couldn't have gotten a pity-screw from a nymphomaniac saint until his net worth was in the *billions* and even then, as the world's richest man, his choices were limited to an employee who looks the worse for wear--who looks more and more like a frump with a case of nerves in each royal portrait.
When you've little to offer but a lot to lose, you have to control what people say about you. You have to find the channels and close them: it's a trend that shows your internet savvy which is why 'Georgebushsucks.com' used to take you to a site and ask you for a contribution to his campaign.
Sorry to hear they didn't just pay the damned kid. One thing about being scum is the psychological inability to realize that writing the kid a check--even one for ten times what he asked for--with a handshake and hinting at an internship one day would beat all hell out of reaching for your lawyers and generating news coverage that proves that even your worst critics are dead right about you.
Of course, if their mindset embraced ideas like this, they would have leaned harder on their quality than on their lobbyists and the would have had nothing to worry about in the first place.
contract.. agreeing to pay 20% interest on my car loan. Ok, that's arguably bullshit. My friend has the same car, make the same amount of money, and pays 5%. That's unfair. Can I file a lawsuit?
No, you can't.
You can't because in your example, you have made a bad market decision. Instead of getting your car loan from scores(?) of other lenders, you choose the one that charged you a price greater than your friend's by a factor of four.
You didn't listen to advice so old the Romans gave it to one another, "caveat emptor," "let the buyer beware."
In Microsoft's case, they have worked behind the scenes since the beginning of desktop computinng to define buying a computer at all as buying an operating system from Microsoft. To maintain this state of affairs, Microsoft has stolen innovative code from startups and used other tactics to block innovators from entering the market, and offering choices other than Microsoft's products.
By doing this, they have prevented the consumer from enjoying the benefits of choice in a free market--by your example, no choice for any computer user but paying 20 points on the loan in order to own any car regardless of the car's quality.
Since the whole thread is started by an analogy (economics: monopoly, biology: monoculture) it is good to use one to finish up here.
Monopolies like Microsoft's are worse than bad governments in that you can leave a country with bad government and not pay taxes to it. As a citizen, you can escape and cease to support a bad government with your money and effort. But as a computer-user, you can sneak out of China and escape to India--and still find yourself using microsoft's software, with its unaddressed vulnerabilities in both places.
Someone said that, in a free market, you enjoy rational choice--you can use reason to pursue your own fairness or your own advantage--and Microsoft's monopoly prevents this.
Someone else said, 'Hell is the impossibility of reason.'
The company that thought trying to swindle *everyone* who didn't know the market price of domain registration by sending out pseudo-bills is the company that the Gov'mint thinks is worthy of keeping tabs on, well, on everything?
Okay, I got it.
I understand the future: no company will be entrusted with sensitive, and potentially vital security work unless they combine incompetence with malfeasance.
Counterfeiting has changed and grown with the proliferation of high-speed, highpowered computers and other information management devices and the action by Adobe is an interesting attempt to close the door long after the horse has bolted.
Before computers and high-resolution printers, counterfeiting had to rely on (photo)lithographic methods to produce high-resolution, multiple-pass prints on paper that was treated in some way to resemble the paper(s) on which currency is printed.
In the old days, printing technology itself placed the bar to the counterfeiter far higher than it is today. Once, generating counterfeits required a lab where one could generate plates, the skills of a (bribable) lithographer, inks, paper, other materials and techniques to 'age' the counterfeit notes, and expensive, difficult-to-transport equipment in the form of printers capable of making acurate, multiple-pass copies of high-resolution material at high speed.
That was in the old days.
Now, the advent and dessemination of better and better copying/printing/color printing technology has certainly given better tools to the professional counterfeiter who needs to burn plates for large(r) print runs, but, more importantly, these technologies have given birth to the 'casual counterfeiter': a person or an organization that specializes in small-scale counterfeiting operations which are difficult to detect and shut down because the equipment and techniques they employ are (comparatively) cheap and easily abandoned while the techniques they employ largely eliminate the need to approach someone with a high-level of skill.
A second problem in stopping the casual counterfeiter (who may be simply someone with access to a color copier) is that his/her product is most often used against especially vulnerable targets; places where business conditions make counterfeit detection difficult like crowded bars at peak times or in places where the staff's low-training level in spotting counterfeit currency makes a counterfeit note's acceptance more likely.
It is response to both high- and low-level threats that has driven U.S. currency design for the last decade or so and prompted the adoption of numerous currency authentication features, including the readable, embedded strip that glows under ultraviolet light, the microprint which commercial-grade laser printers cannot reproduce and the color-changing ink (a swiss patent used by the U.S. Government under license) and the now ubiquitous watermark.
This brings us back to Adobe Photoshop and where the most recent versions of the software contain provisions for detecting when the image the software is to manipulate is an image of U.S. and other currencies. Without further information, it is easy to imagine that Adobe's introduction of the plug-in is little more than a conciliatory gesture in terms of its effectiveness.
First, it must be taken into consideration that unless the plug-in in question is woven into the fabric of the software so that it cannot be used without it, tech-savvy criminals using photoshop will certainly find the plug-in and remove it.
Second, all things being equal, it is by no means unimaginable that all versions of Photoshop previous to the one under discussion still possess the ability to manipulate images of U.S. currency without hindrance, and it is highly unlikely that clever criminals will find an upgrade-path irresistable.
WHAT?!?! Kiss my ass. 6 months is jail is NOT lax! I don't want to spend 6 hours in the custody of the state.
First offense drunk drivers don't get 6 months in jail in Ohio.
Thank you!
I bought exactly one (ONE!) bootlegged first-run movie off the street. It was a copy of 'tears of the sun,' that was videotaped off the screen in some theater somewhere. It had subtitles in Chinese. It was a dull and murky and, frankly speaking, unwatchable.
Months later, I spent three dollars and twenty-five cents to rent the DVD and I got to watch Bruce Willis have an unbelievable crisis of conscience involving a young doctor with great breasts and a shirt that would never, ever button up correctly and as this passed before my eyes,I experienced a moment of rhapsody, of pure religious bliss.
I started sweating and shaking as the spirit took me. I fell to my knees and tears streamed down my face as the words of my new-found faith spilled from my mouth:
'Thank GOD I didn't pay ten bucks to see this crap!! I believe! Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus!! Thank you!!...'
Laws like the one in this post, the one in California and now, Ohio, are meant to protect corporate profits at the expense of the consumer; they are meant to insure that the only way of finding out that reviewers foaming at the mouth with rage and disgust weren't wrong, involves a lot of money and watery soft drinks that taste ever so slightly of metal.
You've got to love it. You've got to admire laws built to make corporations happy. In the real world, a law against taping off the screen would be really simple: a ticket for a thousand-dollars and your camera taking pictures at a policeman's wedding.
Instead of this, you've got a law that's there to scare the peasants: one that envisions the state's spending money to to overcome your legal defense, demanding more money than you could possibly have, and then paying for your food, lodging and medical expenses--the kind of law you only get when the law is written by lobbyists.
Basically out cryptographica today, is so advanced that it now only can break most common encryptions, but it can infact break the differences between most langauges if guided by human sense.
I think that this is an interesting curiosity but possibly a sad one for our age. It's hard to find people with heavy skills in dead languages nowadays.
On a more discouraging note, once you throw encryption into the picture and add it to an unknown(?) inflected language, you see that the problem will require the assembly of rare intellectual resources to even adequately define the problem. Talking about human sense is one thing, finding humans capable of applying the sense could well be problematic.
I've studied several modern languages and I don't want to even *think* about what's being discussed here. Good luck!
To the morons going on about how the criminals can hack the limiter on their cars in the safety of their own garages...
This is a solution to a _different problem_, e.g. when a criminal hijacks another car to escape. You're telling me he's going to spend five minutes dicking around under the car to disable the limiter first? Get a fucking clue!
If mad carjacking is so prevelant where you live that police cars by the score aren't enough, and surveillance cameras aren't enough, and helicopters aren't...
if it's really thatMad Max where you are for anyone who steps behind the wheel and turns the key that the police need a solution built into every car on the assembly line, I suggest that you come here to the United States where you can move to the bad parts of the South Bronx, or South Central L.A.--into any of the deepest, nastiest ghettos we've got--so you can finally breathe easy.
Essentially, this is one of those things that recapitulates the (old and creaky) truism by the NRA:'...if guns are outlawed,' etc.
If the authorities set up an intrusive technology which gives them the ability to control an ordinary law-abiding citizen's property without any legal process, chances are it will only effect ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
Barring a technology so intimately interwoven into your cars ignition system that your car actually comes apart if you try to remove it, criminals and pranksters will hack the system making the authorities look a lot like keystone cops in situations where it really counts.
You've got to wonder about the people who come up with stuff like this: you imagine guys with sunken cheeks mumbling about power. All of them suffer from a dangerous cramp in their right hands...
Don't know why I'm responding to an AC but this stuff is not too badly written and fairly juicy.
I think the selectivity of the use of the independent prosecutor law and who chooses to use it is a moral gray area. In retrospect, it is easy to say, 'Clinton should have come clean,' and suffered the embarrasment that apparently terrified him more than lying under oath.
However, that Clinton underwent an investigation because of his extending a law providing for independent prosecutors and then suffered because of it is not 'justice,' at best, someone half-clever might would call it 'irony,' while someone who'd read three books might throw in some French and call it, 'being hoist by one's own petard.'
Considering the nature and intensity of the investigation, with its expansion into any and all areas at a cost to the taxpayer in the tens of millions, it's very surprising to see that all the investigation turned up can be summed up by saying, a. 'While in office, President Clinton possessed a male libido' and b. President Clinton acted on its urgings.
You could say, in fact, that the investigation was the last bastion of ultimate lameness, because actual 'investigation,' had nothing to do with its success: as the O.C. himself pointed out, only someone's ratting out Clinton to the I.C. led to the discovery of the pecadillo and subsequent perjury.
When you talk about the independent prosecutor law being something the Republican party wanted to do away with, you have to take into account what the law was meant for and what it reacted to. In the right hands it can be used as a tool to root out real, genuine crimes against the people of this country and the democratic process like, uh, well, Watergate.
While in the wrong hands--in malicious hands--it spends forty million plus to uncover the fact that the Leader of the Free World can get it up in a closet and it needed a lucky break to do it.
Time to sound like a lawyer during a summation:...Ahem, ahem....
"There are times when you have to let your emotions rule your actions. Yes, granted, the lawyers make the money, but the threat of the class-action lawsuit really is one of the only weapons the consumer has."
Think of the things that the threat of class-action lawsuits have made possible in the area of consumer protection. From detonating fuel tanks on cars and trucks decades ago (Ford Pinto), to delaminating tires just a few years ago (Firestone), the threat of someone, somehwere's suing the well-tailored pants off of corporations makes them act like they're listening to their mothers instead of their accountants (Burger King's rapid and responsible Poke-ball toy recall).
I can't prove it, but I honestly believe the record clearly shows that it is only the threat of class-actions sucking them dry that keeps corporations from making things that don't work before they blow up and leaving them in the hands of children.
I don't care who gets the money. Lawsuits keep corporations honest and if the government is too pro-corporate to levy fines and collect them (Microsoft Case), it's good to see the courts do it for them.
Okay, when I originally got my sprintpcs-capable phone, a Sanyo 4900, I read up on the location feature and it essentially told you that if you turned it off, the only ones who would have access to your location info would be the police. I didn't like the way it sounded, and between the bad ears and Big Brother, it went back to The Shack inside a day.
I later bought the same phone again and decided to use a headset for the hearing problem.
The real problem with the technology is not that the cops can track you. As far as I know, they have *always* had that ability: the machinery knows that the signal from your phone is strongest between n points on the network and if you make a call, your approximate location is knowable by the system in realtime.
Another problem, of course, are what they keep mentioning on 'Law and Order,' your LUDs or 'Local Usage Details.' It's a record of everyone you call and everyone who calls you.
Big hint, before calling anyone for a criminal transaction from your own cell phone, try on some bright-orange clothing and make sure you look good in it. It is one of the stupidest things you could possibly do--especially when you can buy anonymous, 'pay-as-you-go' cell phone service for minor amounts of money.
The real problem that the 'Law-and-Order' people, the ones who never met a form of privacy they didn't loath, is not that the cops can track you, illegally search you, or sweat a false confession out of you. All in all, American police can be great, but they can and have done all these things at one time or another.
The problem with technology is that the law is a game and it has to be a game for it to work. It would be bad for society if it were possible to automatically find someone guilty and technology is bringing us closer to the day when that will be possible in more and more areas.
From traffic-cams to face-recognition software, technologies are bringing us closer to a national security state where you don't do only good things because you want to, but because common sense tells you you should be scared shitless of doing anything else.
Actually, I've seen people pay more for it... especially in packages combinating basic television, premium/movie channels, data services and what have you.
Considering that in New York city at least, Time Warner Cable appears to have withdrawn pay-per-view movie access from all but its digital customers without bothering to mention that it has done so, there is a strong pressure for its customers to pay more.
It is also easy to see why some people see nothing wrong with trying to avoid paying eight-hundred-forty dollars per year for access to the USA network and, eventually, Gigli shown and repeated again and again and again...
Gotta say, when I saw your note, I broke into a cold sweat. I've been proven wrong, at least twice in my life, and neither time made me like it.:-D
What I can say about my (admittedly modest) understading of subsidies and their effects is that they support the price of commodities and that without these subsidies, the price and profitability of agricultural products would be very low.
If the way I've been given to understand it by many talks with a friend who has a master's in economics is correct, the subsidies work not to make people produce more--and thus increase supply, lowering prices, but by having subsidies work to artificially support the price of agricultural products despite what is essentially over-production.
Let me know if I'm wrong. Now that the question's been cast this way, I'd love to know more.
The problem with subsistance farming in the Amazon basin is that the techniques used to farm are a cycle of wild inefficeincy:
1. Farmer clears a piece of forest of trees by cutting and burning. 2. Farmer plants on soil that isn't very rich in nutrients for plant growth. 3. Farmer finds his latest plot of ground is giving reduced yields within a year or two. 4. Farmer goes to step one.
I think it would be possible to slow or stop this trend WIth soil management, equipment, fertilizers and greater agricultural know-how...basically, by having the farmers down there turn into the farmers up here.
Slashdot Mirror
Big problems in a changing world.
For a long time, the United States has been able to sell itself as the home of virtue and in most cases we have been. We *ARE* terrible resource hogs, but We've actually tried to overcome our systematic racism; we've tried to bring people of other cultures in other countries to our notion of civil rights and tried to make other nations 'nations of laws and not nations of men.' Despite our failings (the Texas death penalty that affects *only* the poor and/or black) We have been and are a yardstick by which you can measure the rights of the citizen.
That's all true and it's all good, but the United States is and always has been a churning cauldron of tension in the attempt to balance the rights and privileges of the individual against large interests.
Unfortunately, With the current aberrant administration in office, we are presented with the ugly and bizarre scenario of the U.S. working government hard to take care of its friends in business. Unfortunately for all concerned, both here and in Australia, the administration believes in its various agendas and can't see the sheer magnitude of how nasty and ridiculous actions like this make us look in the world.
We're the post-9/11 United States and, unlike every other government in history, we are infinitely good and infinitely righteous: every country, every nation, can trust us to treat those of its citizens who have offended our lobbyists sponsors wonderfully.
Insert anger here.
Thank god this has probably gone below the radar of moderation, because this opinion is not going to make me in any way popular.
There is a thing in history called, 'Realpolitik,' a German word meaning 'real politics'--'politics in the real world. In essence, it is what policymakers use to make political judgements before the ideas behind those judgements are brought into the light of day--what they are before they are sold to a congress or 'spun' to the media.
One of the reasons the Iraq war and occupation suck is that it is a policy which ignores history and sociology. It is easy to say that we should let them sort it out, but the simple fact is, now that we've gone this far, we can't do that without risking our real and imagined interests in the region.
Our interests in the region involves the absence of conflict between the countries there and their alliance with or respect for the west because we in the United States are trapped in a culture that is dependent on the overuse of energy.
We don't conserve energy. We don't protect against greenhouse gasses and the current administration has even offered a tax-credit equaling the price of the vehicle for companies which choose to buy fuel-inefficient vehicles (i,e., if you are in the right tax-bracket and own, or create a company, and have the cash, your Humvee is free courtesy of the U.S. government).
We live in a culture (and under a government) that desires to preserve for as long as possible the illusion that economies dependent upon cheap oil are indefinitely sustainable and without adverse consequences. Our national policy reflects this. With this in mind, using 9/11 as an excuse ('we were attacked'), the Administration has brought us into a war of choice to replace the Iraqi dictator. Unfortunately, this is idiotic policy because Saddam Hussein was the leader of the most modernized Islamic nations--the one with the greatest tolerance for religions other than Islam, and the one which offered the greatest freedom and opportunity for women.
As critics pointed out during the run-in to the invasion, replacing Saddam Hussein released decades religious conflict that Hussein's regime effectively suppressed.
Now that Hussein is gone, the shiite moslems are vying for power, creating the threat that they will join with Iran to increase the population and the economic strength of a known U.S. enemy, while fundamentalists from inside and outside Iraq are working to sabotage the United State's efforts to impress the Iraqi people with our benevolence and desire to create a democracy that is friendly to the west. Add to this the very real possibility of actual civil war which could spread throughout the region and you have a situation that has gone from our using diplomacy to simply keep a cork on a nasty little dictator from a distance to one where it is absolutely vital that we spend billions of dollars and hundreds of lives trying to *bring* stability to a region that already had it.
This brings us at last to question of the morality of leaving the region to its own devices. When it comes to realpolitik, leaders ignore it at their peril as they do all other aspects of reality in their decision-making. Part of the reality of the situation in Iraq is that Saddam Hussein took care of our interests and he did it for free.
More importantly, one thing that is not played up by the U.S. media is that simple fact that had Hussein ever actually abused the Iraqi people to the point where they spontaneously rose up against him, they would have won because the Iraqi people were armed during Hussein's rule a fact which is born out by at least one instance of a U.S. patrol's 'returning fire' at a wedding where fully automatic weapons were fired in the air, just as they were during Hussein's rule.
Peace be with you.
The former poster wrote about the German Government's maintaining pensions to former Nazi soldiers without regard to actions during their service (e.g., a mass-murderer getting extra money for being wounded trying to escape). He suggests that there is an injustice in this because nazi victims often received less compensation.
The latter poster, claiming that the former is bigoted against soldiers is missing or ignoring the former's main (and quite simple) point: people who should have been tried for crimes against humanity should probably not receive more compensation than those who narrowly escaped them.
In arguing for a nation's love for and responsibility to the men who serve it as soldiers, and extending it by obtuse omission to war-criminals, the second poster ignores historical precedent and insults the soldiers of every army that ever had fought for any decent purpose.
The outcome of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem made it perfectly clear that *some* military orders (shooting unarmed civilians, murdering soldiers who surrender, etc.) should not and cannot be obeyed.
When such orders are given, it is the soldier's duty to think not of his country but of civilisation and do whatever is necessary to not carry out those orders and some soldiers have actually done just that--like Israeli pilots who refused to take part in missions against the palestinians.
The comparison of Nazi units charged murdering jews, allied prisoners, securing slave-labor, etc. is particularly insulting in that the United State's invasion and occupation of Iraq is one of the worst decisions an American President has made in decades. The whole thing was and is a bad idea--a stupid and naive pursuit of political gain and personal desire which can in no way be seen as commensurate with the United State's security, nor with the stability of the Middle-East.
I believe all of this is true with respect to the dog's breakfast of policy in Iraq, however the mission brief of U.S. soldiers currently serving in the Gulf probably does not include 'aid in the work of rounding up the intelligentsia for early extermination,' nor any one of scores of other tasks that the Nazis acommplished throughout occupied Europe.
For the sake of intellectual rigor if nothing else, Please think through your comparisons more thoroughly in future.
That's a brilliantly simple, brilliantly clear Idea!
Of course, some of the fun must be a matter of having and assembling some kind of hardware, because when you get to the root of the matter, what you would get with the electronic kit, a software emulation, (or, for that matter, the original machine) would be the ability to generate one of serveral codes that have been cracked for about twice the time that most slashdot readers have been alive.
As perceptive as that statement might be on the surface (and it is *VERY* perceptive), it draws a false analogy between chess and arithmetic. First off, arithmetic is a human activity that is engaged in by most people only as a matter of necessity and the removal of the need for deep ability in it brought about by the development of the electronic calculator is a universal boon (people no longer need a facility for calculation, a *talent,* to apply formulae).
Chess on the other hand, is an activity engaged in on a purely elective basis and it is a contest between two people. It touches upon and broadens our instinctive need for comparison and competition. Unlike the algorithmic provisions of arithmetic, chess has a soul and that soul is the simple wager between two people who bring their respective talents and knowledge (tactics, strategy, knowledge of opening and endgame theory) to the board and each of the players wagers that he/she knows enough and is talented enough to reach an-as-yet-unknown set of winning criteria against any opposition the other player can create with no more information to work with than the initial position.
Your reasoning ignores the need for competition and the glories that come from it. It is true the combination of better and better hardware and software will certainly make a computer the strongest chess-player in the world, sooner rather than later, but that day will mark a small diminishing of human worth in the world. Of course, this is a matter of opinion, an esthetic judgement and not logically demonstrable but the strength of it can be shown by three simple questions:
1. Would a football game where all the players were robots be interesting?
2. Would a world-class violin performance have meaning if the player was a pair of mechanical arms?
3. Would anything be permanantly lost to the world if any of the above players was smashed to pieces?
In order to think through the problem clearly, you should probably avoid elevating what you know to the level of instinct.
What you call 'common sense,' is the result of a mindset shaped by instincts and education that began to be shaped in your childhood.
If I.Q. tests were written around computers, you would probably be one of the cleverest people in the room. However, when it comes to the end-user, throwing up your hands and mumbling, 'that CEO... stupid idiot...' under your breath in your cubicle is not going to do anything good for you or your company.
Basically, by not reacting to it in a way that assumes that some people are smarter than labrador retrievers, you are setting yourself up for the next virus attack where your reaction will be what I can only assume your messages suggest it is now.
1. Wait for it to happen.
2. Fix it.
3. Hate everybody.
Instead of that, you might consider using your amazing compu-clever(tm) and elite slashdot-reading skills when a virus strikes to email everyone with a message from your exalted self telling everyone that there was a virus around, to be extra-careful and to engage in a set of simple-to-follow steps, like not opening any mails or attachments to mails from people they've never heard of.
When some few actually *DO* do that, despite your precautions, then go to them and remind them personally, using techniques from social engineering,; telling them how cool it would be if they could watch out for viral threats, following the instructions in your memo and in your email alert because they know how it is when you've got to work late like you have to when your company gets hit with a virus.
And, since your listeners are the cool people that they are, they should actually pass along the memo instructions for you which might actually help them remember it--and with a little luck, your enemy will become your little helper.
Oh, and don't forget to mention--as a deep, dark secret that only you and the listener should know is that the least-pleasant-person-in-the-office is wondering *WHO* keeps letting in viruses while you shudder at the recollection of your last encounter with him.
Never mind, your way is better. Forget I said anything. This message will self-destruct in five sec...Bang!
Ow!!!
and...
Two quick questions:
1. Which of the two behaviors you mention is not a learned behavior?
2. Who, or what is, 'ludacris,' (paragraph, 2: word 17 of your note.)
Actually, the guys you call 'morons' are just average people with respect to your chosen field of endeavor.
They're not geeks and calling them morons on the basis of their not understanding computers is like calling someone a moron for not being a great chef, a gifted pianist, a brilliant chess-player, or an insightful auto-mechanic.
Ceteris paribus, knowing nothing else about the poor schmuck panicking with his hot little hand on the mouse button, the word makes no sense. In fact, it may very well say more about the person who needs to reach for it than it does about the one to whom it's applied.
I'm sure someone's done this before, but...
Bill Gates??!! knighted?!...NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
I always dreamt of a knighthood as a kid. It seems to mean a little less now.
A lot of elements. Only some of them good.
After TNG, in order to achieve measureable novelty, the producers of Star Trek series painted themselves into corners that became progressively narrower and more bizarre with each series.
And each move led lessened possibilities for the creation of interesting plots.
Deep Space Nine rapidly dissolved into soap-opera on a space station with war and all the other goings on an adjunct to love stories and the spiritual evolution of the Ferengi.
Voyager was an obscenity in terms of story. Essentially, a big-budget version of 'Lost in Space,' Voyager left a bad taste in your mouth as a show never failed to call attention to its artificiality since you knew they could never solve the gigantic main problem of the series without, in fact, ending it.
Enterprise breaks the grip of the plot reduction problem but only by doing a 180-degree turn with regard to everything interesting about science fiction. Enterprise 'worked' by sacrificing the future as it was understood by its loyal fan-base and that has got to be one of the stupidest and least-perceptive decisions in television history.
Part of Star Trek's attraction for intelligent watchers is the wonder of it, it's solidity as a fiction with something in it for the mind to grab--particularly in its history and technology.
In Enterprise, everything the producers have done has worked to destroy that source of charm while alienating the previous geeks that form(-ed) the show's core audience.
They did this from the first minute of the first episode and they've never stopped doing it. They took big risks writing Enterprise and not one of them was good.
Enterprise, blows out Star Trek's unbelievably valuable history and technology for the sake of weak, and increasingly dubious plots that make the show's finding new fans unlikely while its assumption of the worthlessness of the show's past alienates its core audience
If Enterprise dissappears and takes the franchise with it, it will not be a surprise.
That would be a really, really cool idea. Except, if memory serves, the bit on the register includes quotes from, Mike Rowe, the kid in question, and it was he who realized that his total costs were $10 Canadian and not the case that Microsoft had offered it to him.
Were the reverse true, your idea would be truly brilliant.
Actually, no. It's by no means brilliant, but it's certainly explainable.
You're a big company. YOu're huge. You are very, very controversial. When intelligent, well-informed people think about you and your business tactics, they combine images of alien zombies with all-encroaching slime-mold and a coven of satanists whose approach to product design and quality control issues is limited to ferrying suitcases of cash to Washington.
It has been proven in courts of law that you steal code and suppress competition. It is well-known that you are cavalier towards other people's patents and copyrights and fiercely protective of your own. In short, you are scum.
So What is your optimal startegy? In order to keep the great ordinary from hearing that you are scum so often that it clicks one day (I'm paying WHAT?!! HOW?!!), you have to control as much opinion as you can and a websight on a domain that is easily associated with your name is very dangerous to you at; least psychologically and at worst, materially.
It's got to work on your nerves. It has to make things run through your head.
A site on a domain like that might be used to report every time your blithe unconcern for security costs your customers billions; it might be used to post wonderfully funny pieces about how your founder is a, vulgar, fast-food munching, nerd with documented B.O.--a loser who couldn't have gotten a pity-screw from a nymphomaniac saint until his net worth was in the *billions* and even then, as the world's richest man, his choices were limited to an employee who looks the worse for wear--who looks more and more like a frump with a case of nerves in each royal portrait.
When you've little to offer but a lot to lose, you have to control what people say about you. You have to find the channels and close them: it's a trend that shows your internet savvy which is why 'Georgebushsucks.com' used to take you to a site and ask you for a contribution to his campaign.
Sorry to hear they didn't just pay the damned kid. One thing about being scum is the psychological inability to realize that writing the kid a check--even one for ten times what he asked for--with a handshake and hinting at an internship one day would beat all hell out of reaching for your lawyers and generating news coverage that proves that even your worst critics are dead right about you.
Of course, if their mindset embraced ideas like this, they would have leaned harder on their quality than on their lobbyists and the would have had nothing to worry about in the first place.
You've got to love it....
No, you can't.
You can't because in your example, you have made a bad market decision. Instead of getting your car loan from scores(?) of other lenders, you choose the one that charged you a price greater than your friend's by a factor of four.
You didn't listen to advice so old the Romans gave it to one another, "caveat emptor," "let the buyer beware."
In Microsoft's case, they have worked behind the scenes since the beginning of desktop computinng to define buying a computer at all as buying an operating system from Microsoft. To maintain this state of affairs, Microsoft has stolen innovative code from startups and used other tactics to block innovators from entering the market, and offering choices other than Microsoft's products.
By doing this, they have prevented the consumer from enjoying the benefits of choice in a free market--by your example, no choice for any computer user but paying 20 points on the loan in order to own any car regardless of the car's quality.
Since the whole thread is started by an analogy (economics: monopoly, biology: monoculture) it is good to use one to finish up here.
Monopolies like Microsoft's are worse than bad governments in that you can leave a country with bad government and not pay taxes to it. As a citizen, you can escape and cease to support a bad government with your money and effort. But as a computer-user, you can sneak out of China and escape to India--and still find yourself using microsoft's software, with its unaddressed vulnerabilities in both places.
Someone said that, in a free market, you enjoy rational choice--you can use reason to pursue your own fairness or your own advantage--and Microsoft's monopoly prevents this.
Someone else said, 'Hell is the impossibility of reason.'
That's pretty much what's wrong with it.
The company that thought trying to swindle *everyone* who didn't know the market price of domain registration by sending out pseudo-bills is the company that the Gov'mint thinks is worthy of keeping tabs on, well, on everything?
Okay, I got it.
I understand the future: no company will be entrusted with sensitive, and potentially vital security work unless they combine incompetence with malfeasance.
Lovely...
Counterfeiting has changed and grown with the proliferation of high-speed, highpowered computers and other information management devices and the action by Adobe is an interesting attempt to close the door long after the horse has bolted.
Before computers and high-resolution printers, counterfeiting had to rely on (photo)lithographic methods to produce high-resolution, multiple-pass prints on paper that was treated in some way to resemble the paper(s) on which currency is printed.
In the old days, printing technology itself placed the bar to the counterfeiter far higher than it is today. Once, generating counterfeits required a lab where one could generate plates, the skills of a (bribable) lithographer, inks, paper, other materials and techniques to 'age' the counterfeit notes, and expensive, difficult-to-transport equipment in the form of printers capable of making acurate, multiple-pass copies of high-resolution material at high speed.
That was in the old days.
Now, the advent and dessemination of better and better copying/printing/color printing technology has certainly given better tools to the professional counterfeiter who needs to burn plates for large(r) print runs, but, more importantly, these technologies have given birth to the 'casual counterfeiter': a person or an organization that specializes in small-scale counterfeiting operations which are difficult to detect and shut down because the equipment and techniques they employ are (comparatively) cheap and easily abandoned while the techniques they employ largely eliminate the need to approach someone with a high-level of skill.
A second problem in stopping the casual counterfeiter (who may be simply someone with access to a color copier) is that his/her product is most often used against especially vulnerable targets; places where business conditions make counterfeit detection difficult like crowded bars at peak times or in places where the staff's low-training level in spotting counterfeit currency makes a counterfeit note's acceptance more likely.
It is response to both high- and low-level threats that has driven U.S. currency design for the last decade or so and prompted the adoption of numerous currency authentication features, including the readable, embedded strip that glows under ultraviolet light, the microprint which commercial-grade laser printers cannot reproduce and the color-changing ink (a swiss patent used by the U.S. Government under license) and the now ubiquitous watermark.
This brings us back to Adobe Photoshop and where the most recent versions of the software contain provisions for detecting when the image the software is to manipulate is an image of U.S. and other currencies. Without further information, it is easy to imagine that Adobe's introduction of the plug-in is little more than a conciliatory gesture in terms of its effectiveness.
First, it must be taken into consideration that unless the plug-in in question is woven into the fabric of the software so that it cannot be used without it, tech-savvy criminals using photoshop will certainly find the plug-in and remove it.
Second, all things being equal, it is by no means unimaginable that all versions of Photoshop previous to the one under discussion still possess the ability to manipulate images of U.S. currency without hindrance, and it is highly unlikely that clever criminals will find an upgrade-path irresistable.
Thank you!
I bought exactly one (ONE!) bootlegged first-run movie off the street. It was a copy of 'tears of the sun,' that was videotaped off the screen in some theater somewhere. It had subtitles in Chinese. It was a dull and murky and, frankly speaking, unwatchable.
Months later, I spent three dollars and twenty-five cents to rent the DVD and I got to watch Bruce Willis have an unbelievable crisis of conscience involving a young doctor with great breasts and a shirt that would never, ever button up correctly and as this passed before my eyes,I experienced a moment of rhapsody, of pure religious bliss.
I started sweating and shaking as the spirit took me. I fell to my knees and tears streamed down my face as the words of my new-found faith spilled from my mouth:
'Thank GOD I didn't pay ten bucks to see this crap!! I believe! Oh thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus!! Thank you!!...'
Laws like the one in this post, the one in California and now, Ohio, are meant to protect corporate profits at the expense of the consumer; they are meant to insure that the only way of finding out that reviewers foaming at the mouth with rage and disgust weren't wrong, involves a lot of money and watery soft drinks that taste ever so slightly of metal.
You've got to love it. You've got to admire laws built to make corporations happy. In the real world, a law against taping off the screen would be really simple: a ticket for a thousand-dollars and your camera taking pictures at a policeman's wedding.
Instead of this, you've got a law that's there to scare the peasants: one that envisions the state's spending money to to overcome your legal defense, demanding more money than you could possibly have, and then paying for your food, lodging and medical expenses--the kind of law you only get when the law is written by lobbyists.
I think that this is an interesting curiosity but possibly a sad one for our age. It's hard to find people with heavy skills in dead languages nowadays.
On a more discouraging note, once you throw encryption into the picture and add it to an unknown(?) inflected language, you see that the problem will require the assembly of rare intellectual resources to even adequately define the problem. Talking about human sense is one thing, finding humans capable of applying the sense could well be problematic.
I've studied several modern languages and I don't want to even *think* about what's being discussed here. Good luck!
If mad carjacking is so prevelant where you live that police cars by the score aren't enough, and surveillance cameras aren't enough, and helicopters aren't...
if it's really that Mad Max where you are for anyone who steps behind the wheel and turns the key that the police need a solution built into every car on the assembly line, I suggest that you come here to the United States where you can move to the bad parts of the South Bronx, or South Central L.A.--into any of the deepest, nastiest ghettos we've got--so you can finally breathe easy.
Essentially, this is one of those things that recapitulates the (old and creaky) truism by the NRA:'...if guns are outlawed,' etc.
If the authorities set up an intrusive technology which gives them the ability to control an ordinary law-abiding citizen's property without any legal process, chances are it will only effect ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
Barring a technology so intimately interwoven into your cars ignition system that your car actually comes apart if you try to remove it, criminals and pranksters will hack the system making the authorities look a lot like keystone cops in situations where it really counts.
You've got to wonder about the people who come up with stuff like this: you imagine guys with sunken cheeks mumbling about power. All of them suffer from a dangerous cramp in their right hands...
Don't know why I'm responding to an AC but this stuff is not too badly written and fairly juicy.
I think the selectivity of the use of the independent prosecutor law and who chooses to use it is a moral gray area. In retrospect, it is easy to say, 'Clinton should have come clean,' and suffered the embarrasment that apparently terrified him more than lying under oath.
However, that Clinton underwent an investigation because of his extending a law providing for independent prosecutors and then suffered because of it is not 'justice,' at best, someone half-clever might would call it 'irony,' while someone who'd read three books might throw in some French and call it, 'being hoist by one's own petard.'
Considering the nature and intensity of the investigation, with its expansion into any and all areas at a cost to the taxpayer in the tens of millions, it's very surprising to see that all the investigation turned up can be summed up by saying, a. 'While in office, President Clinton possessed a male libido' and b. President Clinton acted on its urgings.
You could say, in fact, that the investigation was the last bastion of ultimate lameness, because actual 'investigation,' had nothing to do with its success: as the O.C. himself pointed out, only someone's ratting out Clinton to the I.C. led to the discovery of the pecadillo and subsequent perjury.
When you talk about the independent prosecutor law being something the Republican party wanted to do away with, you have to take into account what the law was meant for and what it reacted to. In the right hands it can be used as a tool to root out real, genuine crimes against the people of this country and the democratic process like, uh, well, Watergate.
While in the wrong hands--in malicious hands--it spends forty million plus to uncover the fact that the Leader of the Free World can get it up in a closet and it needed a lucky break to do it.
Please have your priorities examined at the door.
Time to sound like a lawyer during a summation: ...Ahem, ahem....
"There are times when you have to let your emotions rule your actions. Yes, granted, the lawyers make the money, but the threat of the class-action lawsuit really is one of the only weapons the consumer has."
Think of the things that the threat of class-action lawsuits have made possible in the area of consumer protection. From detonating fuel tanks on cars and trucks decades ago (Ford Pinto), to delaminating tires just a few years ago (Firestone), the threat of someone, somehwere's suing the well-tailored pants off of corporations makes them act like they're listening to their mothers instead of their accountants (Burger King's rapid and responsible Poke-ball toy recall).
I can't prove it, but I honestly believe the record clearly shows that it is only the threat of class-actions sucking them dry that keeps corporations from making things that don't work before they blow up and leaving them in the hands of children.
I don't care who gets the money. Lawsuits keep corporations honest and if the government is too pro-corporate to levy fines and collect them (Microsoft Case), it's good to see the courts do it for them.
Okay, when I originally got my sprintpcs-capable phone, a Sanyo 4900, I read up on the location feature and it essentially told you that if you turned it off, the only ones who would have access to your location info would be the police. I didn't like the way it sounded, and between the bad ears and Big Brother, it went back to The Shack inside a day.
I later bought the same phone again and decided to use a headset for the hearing problem.
The real problem with the technology is not that the cops can track you. As far as I know, they have *always* had that ability: the machinery knows that the signal from your phone is strongest between n points on the network and if you make a call, your approximate location is knowable by the system in realtime.
Another problem, of course, are what they keep mentioning on 'Law and Order,' your LUDs or 'Local Usage Details.' It's a record of everyone you call and everyone who calls you.
Big hint, before calling anyone for a criminal transaction from your own cell phone, try on some bright-orange clothing and make sure you look good in it. It is one of the stupidest things you could possibly do--especially when you can buy anonymous, 'pay-as-you-go' cell phone service for minor amounts of money.
The real problem that the 'Law-and-Order' people, the ones who never met a form of privacy they didn't loath, is not that the cops can track you, illegally search you, or sweat a false confession out of you. All in all, American police can be great, but they can and have done all these things at one time or another.
The problem with technology is that the law is a game and it has to be a game for it to work. It would be bad for society if it were possible to automatically find someone guilty and technology is bringing us closer to the day when that will be possible in more and more areas.
From traffic-cams to face-recognition software, technologies are bringing us closer to a national security state where you don't do only good things because you want to, but because common sense tells you you should be scared shitless of doing anything else.
Please, someone cut off my hand for typing 'combinating.' That last would have been so nice a note without it...
Actually, I've seen people pay more for it... especially in packages combinating basic television, premium/movie channels, data services and what have you.
Considering that in New York city at least, Time Warner Cable appears to have withdrawn pay-per-view movie access from all but its digital customers without bothering to mention that it has done so, there is a strong pressure for its customers to pay more.
It is also easy to see why some people see nothing wrong with trying to avoid paying eight-hundred-forty dollars per year for access to the USA network and, eventually, Gigli shown and repeated again and again and again...
Is this really true? It seems to me that:
:-D
Gotta say, when I saw your note, I broke into a cold sweat. I've been proven wrong, at least twice in my life, and neither time made me like it.
What I can say about my (admittedly modest) understading of subsidies and their effects is that they support the price of commodities and that without these subsidies, the price and profitability of agricultural products would be very low.
If the way I've been given to understand it by many talks with a friend who has a master's in economics is correct, the subsidies work not to make people produce more--and thus increase supply, lowering prices, but by having subsidies work to artificially support the price of agricultural products despite what is essentially over-production.
Let me know if I'm wrong. Now that the question's been cast this way, I'd love to know more.
The problem with subsistance farming in the Amazon basin is that the techniques used to farm are a cycle of wild inefficeincy:
1. Farmer clears a piece of forest of trees by cutting and burning.
2. Farmer plants on soil that isn't very rich in nutrients for plant growth.
3. Farmer finds his latest plot of ground is giving reduced yields within a year or two.
4. Farmer goes to step one.
I think it would be possible to slow or stop this trend WIth soil management, equipment, fertilizers and greater agricultural know-how...basically, by having the farmers down there turn into the farmers up here.