We are hearing more like this every day. If we as a People don't act decisively to correct the course of our country, we will soon have no recourse but to shed blood. Note, this is not a partisan question of which party holds power, because the reality is that both are fronts for the same power. They are so corrupted and the system so thoroughly gamed that there are few and rapidly dwindling non-violent courses left to a People who want their will done. I love my life and my kids and my family and my country, but I would gladly sacrifice the first if it meant the latter could live in freedom. I believe there are still many patriots from both sides of the political spectrum who would as well.
Do not work for the government, and this includes the USPTO. There are many people who are young, smart, idealistic, and/or unaware of what it means to work for the government who go to work for the government, but they do not stay for long because they immediately see what a hopelessly dysfunctional soup of sociopaths it is. They leave. What remains are, you guessed it, sociopaths and the lowest common denominator denizens of DC for whom Uncle Sam is a big sugar daddy that gives you get full health benefits, lets you work from 10-3pm, and expects nothing of you but putting an ass in a chair. The sociopaths don't even pretend to work because they're sociopaths and devote 99.9% of their energy maintaining the facade they use to fool everyone. So that leaves the mouth breathers to do things like evaluate patents. Small wonder that they make great decisions like granting patents for things that clearly have prior art like the Thinkpad convertible tablets that had the ability to convert to/from landscape view based on position and whose touchscreen worked with a pen.
Of course the military isn't ready for cyberwarfare. They are always fighting the last war. Recent articles have come out about how the Pentagon is finally restructuring itself to fight terrorism, meaning they've done away with mass troop movements in favor of lots of small actions. Which will work great until we get into a war with China, which will both hack our systems and require mass troop movements. Chinese military doctrine has expressly stated it means to do just that along with financial warfare (suddenly dumping all dollar reserves), shutting off the Panama Canal (which they now control) to impede the American navy, and lots of other outside-the-box thinking.
It must have taken them a long time to figure out what happened unless he wasn't spoofing MAC addresses. It wouldn't occur to most people that their wifi was hacked. Most would assume someone had hacked their individual machines. Wonder if the target was technical, in which case the hacker would have been stupid to do what he did (not to mention evil).
Phasing out the shuttles is part of the opportunity cost of giving all our money to greedy banks. They salt it away in their numbered accounts (reports say they're sitting on $1.7 trillion of our bailout money) and science, education, and other sectors are cut to the bone or killed. They're even cutting the Small Business Innovation & Research (SBIR) grants, which are meant to encourage entrepreneurship in America and, you know, generate jobs.
The SuperCollider in Texas was the first big death in modern American science. Killing the shuttle program is another. Cancer research or something equally huge and important may be next. And the more they disinvest in the future, the faster it will recede.
Seemed like an easier and cheaper system to build. Accelerate a large enough mass fast enough and it will travel as far and a conventional warhead or farther, and the shells themselves are dirt cheap, being nothing but shaped hunks of metal.
Human senses, not merely be another way to surf the web. A HUD style implant in the retina or the ability to see other spectra of light like Jordi's visor would be useful. You know, general bionic man stuff. That's cool
there's a slight value proposition for FB users. They can connect easily with people they've lost touch with. That was fun at first, but I quickly found that the people I've lost touch with I also grew apart from. There's always the "So...what are you up to now?" conversation that iterates twice, three times at most. Then, silence. It's like a high school reunion split up into hundreds of mini interactions and stretched out over years, and it's just as awkward.
As a sociological study and advertising behavioral resource, it's a gold mine. That's why Goldman Sachs and the usual evil suspects are all over it.
But in the end, FB and all its peers and predecessors implode because they bring nothing of lasting value to the user. It's just another way to waste time. Invent something that makes me a better mathematician or improves my golf swing or earns me money or teaches me how to lay out a circuit board while I do it, and at the same time have it be entertaining and not bore the hell out of me like a standard text book does, and then you'll be onto something lasting.
Add a serious level to entertainment or an entertaining level to something serious that taps into that level of absorption, of total focus, and it will be huge for humanity. And no, serious games aren't there yet.
When I was in junior high I went to a gaming convention where I played D&D with Gary Gygax, Tracy Hickman (author of the Dragonlance series), and Larry Niven. It was the Ravenloft module that Tracy had written, so naturally he was the DM. Watching those guys spin the fable was an amazing experience I've never forgotten, and it set a bar for fantasy gaming that no computer game has ever come close to surpassing. Maybe it's because in a computer game no one ever gets into character and brings pathos to the role. Sure, the mechanics and special effects of computers are great, but nobody really gets emotionally attached to their character (beyond how much time they spend levelling up) and...the storytelling just isn't there.
All these years later I realize that that evening with Gary, Larry, and Tracy and the other players was like our generation's equivalent of hanging out with Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg at the height of the Beat era.
I hope they build Gary a monument that pays proper homage all the young imaginations he fired and lives he influenced. RIP, Gary.
Things like this are an inevitable consequence of commoditizing development and outsourcing it to India & China or onshoring it via H1B holders whose certifications and degrees are printed on tissue paper. As an IT manager for years the quality of candidates I have seen coming from those sources is laughable--they code by flowchart. But those are exactly the kind of 'programmers' banks love to hire, because they work cheap and never complain when you work them to death because you can fire them and they get sent back to the old country. Do they do crap work? Yes, absolutely. But that's not the MBA-holding, PHB manager's problem, because they get to claim cost savings and a promotion for it and push like hell to get as far away from the inevitable consequences as they can before it blows up.
If you are an IT manager, please do yourself a favor and hire experienced natives who really know what they're doing. They will cost you a couple 10G's more, but the difference in the product will save you millions it would cost to fix crappy code and the tens of millions more in liability when your customers learn the hard way how lightly you treated the confidentiality and security of their data.
There's been much made the past couple of years about China the Rising Superpower. On balance that's a good thing, because what happens with China this century has existential repercussions the way that Al Qaeda and terrorism has never had and never will have. If things go badly between China and the rest of the world a great many people will die and nations will fall on a scale that would put the previous two world wars to shame.
But the thing that makes China watching such a nail-biter is that it is an exceptionally fractious and brittle society with very little in the way of pressure valves. As Mao and the Communists used to say back in the day, China has 'feet of clay.' Don't like the government? Tough! Big company paid off a local official and the police threw you off your land so they can build a big factory on it, without so much as a by-your-leave? It's for the glory of socialism, comrade, so be a good peasant and go 'eat bitter' (READ: suck it up). And with so many, many officials on all levels running hard to get the bribes they need to buy a black Audi, big house, and keep mistresses, those incidents are piling up by the thousands.
It's only a matter of time before everything reaches the breaking point, and when that happens either China dissolves into bloody civil war with disastrous consequences for the rest of the world, or the Communist Party decides it's time to start a war against foreign oppressors who are trying to humiliate the motherland, with disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
It's not a question of if this will happen, but how. And the how keeps the China watchers up at night. If the latter option comes about, hundreds of millions of people will die and the viability of the Earth for human habitation may become seriously compromised.
Amen, brother! I stopped flying as well. For regional travel in the Northeast I take the train or drive, with a preference for the train. Vastly better travel experience than any plane from any airline to anywhere.
Not being able to easily travel longer distances is a hassle. My grandmother passed away last November out west and I chose to drive to Detroit, pick up my brother, and tag team the 3 day drive out rather than put up with the TSA.
It does make me angry, though, that we have to go to these lengths to travel in our own country. It's long past time we all got into our pickups with axe handles and converged on DC to "redecorate" the place.
Since Egypt I've been wondering about the feasibility of ad-hoc mesh networks. With plentiful wifi nodes and smartphones it seems like it would be somewhat possible to have them relay packets to maintain connectivity. You'd need to implement discretionary throttling for the individual owner of the wifi node / smartphone so their personal usage doesn't suffer too much.
But as long as you have enough people within typical cell tower range of an international border beyond which the regime has no repressive control, there would be no way for a government to prevent internet communications short of confiscating every computer, wifi node, and smartphone in the country. I don't think any government has the ability to do that quickly enough to suppress a mass social movement like this.
I would add that people in Montana have a strong work ethic, work for low wages, speak standard American English, are well-educated (second behind North Dakota for standardized test scores), and understand what customer service means. If I had a company like Amazon, I would definitely move my operations there.
There is never a time in Montana when you can't travel the roads. They are used to snow in winter and plow constantly. Compare that to NYC where I live and an average snow, by Montana standards, brings everything to a standstill for weeks.
Also, you won't find restaurants like Nobu in Montana, but the restaurants there are maintain high quality. Coming from New York you can't often say that about other places, because the competition here is so fierce that if you can't produce world-class food at reasonable prices you won't last a week. Somehow Montana restaurants hit near that same mark. I don't know how they do, but they do.
Bill Clinton is saying this because he believes the Internet is full of lies, vicious lies, and inaccuracies about him and his legacy. In fact, he has retooled his nonprofit, the mis-named Clinton Foundation (mis-named because it is not a philanthropy and does not give grants), from an organization that nominally tries to do Good Things (tm) to one that exists purely to correct the record about him and his accomplishments. Internally they call it the "Legacy Project."
So this is just him externalizing his own bitterness over his place in the history books (Monica Lewinsky) and the failure of his personal aide Doug Band, his CEO of the Clinton Foundation Bruce Lindsey, and his Chief of Staff/COO of the Clinton Foundation Laura Graham to do anything to change it.
The last thing anyone should do, even on a slow news day, is to work themselves up into a lather over it.
i was centrally involved in relief efforts after the earthquake in Haiti. We worked with the good folks at Ushahidi to implement crisis mapping and the cell provider in Haiti, Digicel, to push important news to the people affected (like where to get first aid, distribution points for food & water, etc). The thing that really blew me away was that we started getting crowd-sourced reports from people buried inside the rubble, calling for help. The US marines operating from the ship offshore later told us they watched the ushahidi crisis map religiously because it was the only source of actionable information available in the entire theater of operations. Having something like this in the US could save a lot of lives if we have another 9/11 or Katrina.
It's less about speed and more about efficiency and quality of travel for the user. Jets are fast but inefficient and the experience is so utterly miserable that more and more people are opting to drive up to 3 days in a row than put up with it.
High speed rail a-la the Japanese Shinkansen or French TGV would be a vast improvement over the creaky air travel system we have in America now. Regional travel or even region-to-adjacent-region travel would compete well on total travel time with air and vastly outstrip air for overall quality of the trip. Plenty of room on trains, outlets next to your seat, space to walk through the train and stretch your legs, better scenery, vastly fewer TSA thugs groping your children and gawking at your genitals. And if you don't mind boarding a train in the evening, sleeping on the train, and waking up in your destination then even coast-to-coast travel is doable.
Air, on the other hand, could be slower and lower. Dirigibles are more efficient and afford their passengers more space than planes. Their speeds are half of jets, but they can land on a dime and don't need much in the way of infrastructure, so you can liberate yourself from the established hub-and-spoke infrastructure and form another layer of air-traffic that won't conflict with jets because they fly at a lower altitude. You would still, of course, need air traffic controllers who don't fall asleep.
Manning is a hero. His act laid bare what Americans of all stripes have increasingly come to believe in the past 10 years, namely that people in government and big business are so corrupt and so intertwined with one another, that those forces in our country are so wrapped up with those forces in other countries, that it has become virtually impossible for the United States of America, the system, to work for Americans and uphold the values Americans purport to hold dear. Our system is a deep and elaborate fraud, and Manning gave us unmistakable evidence of that.
His act has already been credited by some of tipping Tunisia and Egypt over the edge to overthrow their dictators. Time will tell, but he may have set the stage for a serious re-set here, too.
I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, so both kinds of "survival" situations, the stay-put kind and the get-outta-dodge kind, have happened within recent memory, namely 9/11 and the great Blackout of '03.
Both times the overwhelming lesson was that trying to go anywhere is mostly pointless, because 7 million other people are trying to do the same thing at the same time. Stay put if you can with enough food & water for 6 wks and a way to let evac teams know where you are.
But if you have to go, cars are out--total gridlock. If you're in the outer boroughs, a bicycle is your absolute best bet on land; when all the cars are jammed up you can still ride on sidewalks, bike paths in the parks, and between the cars if you have to. If you're in Manhattan, you're flirched, because even on foot, walking, takes hours; there are so many people you cannot even run. The only option there is to grab something that floats and swim the Hudson or East River.
Those are disaster situations, short-term, localized catastrophes. Apocalypses, real collapse-of-civilization stuff, are different. Even then, what you do depends on the manner in which things collapse. If everyone else dies in a plague and you don't, then in terms of survival you're on easy street. There's enough stored canned goods, water, equipment, shelter, gasoline and everything else imaginable out there right now to last a handful of folks for the rest of their lives, even if you factor in panic looting and such. Shoot, park yourself in a suburban Walmart, lock the doors, and you can survive quite happily for 50 years.
But above all else and across all situations you need to be a class A scavenger, a scrounger, and have the will to do what it takes to get by.
but you know what? I don't care because they're already irrelevant. They lost relevance around the time they staffed people like Judith Miller, Adam Nagourney, and Jayson Blair. Do I want to know something real? Well, in English I turn to the BBC. Because I also speak those languages, Der Spiegel and Le Monde as well.
For everything else, I read eyewitness reports. And why shouldn't I? Media channels like the NYTimes long ago spun down their foreign operations. They rely on eyewitnesses too, same as me. Except when I read them, I get them straight without the corporate spin.
Opinion? I believe my opinion, based on congressional whitepapers and original documents, is at least as valid as the semi-literate people who populate the New York Times and its cousins these days.
News as an activity will always exist. But newspapers and news channels on TV and news sites on the web surrendered their authority when they decided it was cheaper and more profitable to report opinion as fact and eschew the whole fact part entirely. You don't get that authority back, after you've taken that drastic step, so if you based your business model on it then you are out of luck, my friend. Welcome to the dustbin of history!
Someone is tinkering with the timeline. And it's someone from a period +- 50 yrs Current time. They're trying to produce outcomes that bear on our current geopolitical status. There are changes embedded in ancient periods:
There are better-known examples closer to Europe, and more modern: the Antikythera mechanism or the batteries of Sumer, the Jacquard loom or the automata of Rhodes or China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton
All of these happened. They are indisputable fact. Yet, they have not disrupted the general sweep of accepted history. For example, if the mother culture of the Central and South American cultures the Spanish encountered, namely the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, far pre-dated even the Egyptians, then why did the peoples of the New World not stand on par with those of the Old? If the Amazonian basin sported a sophisticated culture of millions of people far before the same was achieved by Rome, then why do we scarcely know about them today?
Closer to home, meaning the here and the now, we have attempts to introduce advanced technology far prior to their realization now. Yet, they have not changed the here and the now. Rather, they remain outliers.
Certain parties have tried to alter the timeline. But they've done so in scattershot fashion, trying to get history to pivot on a dime by introducing innovations before their time or deeper, longer term ploys to get the engine of history moving in a different direction earlier (ie. Ecuador or Brazil). If they had succeeded, then we would not now know the difference. It would simply be as it has always been. There would be no alternate outcomes.
That there is a disparity suggests that the timeline is a massively multi-variate system whose movements defy simple interpretations or solutions. Kill Hitler and WWII and the Holocaust would never have happened? Well, the disparity suggests it may have changed the timing, but that one event, Hitler's death, may not have avoided the thing altogether. There was much more in play than that one man.
There is a lot more than a/. post can accommodate, but it's something to consider. There have been many revelations of late, but none have changed the narrative.
The one thing the United States has to deter Cold War 2.0 with China is a massive number of ICBMs, and even more effectively, a robust fleet of nuclear submarines. Without those, China figures it can buy a bunch of shore-to-ship missiles to neutralize American carrier battle groups, a bunch of amphibious landing craft, and it can "re-patriate" Taiwan.
China is embarked upon a massive, comprehensive, and long-term strategy to counter American power and seize hegemony for itself. Read about it in Congressional whitepapers. Accumulating U.S. debt and dollar currency reserves, gaining control of key locations (eg. Panama Canal) and resources (eg. rare-earth metals), perfecting cyber-warfare, anti-satellite measures, and the like are all explicitly part of the same strategy.
The one trump card the United States still holds is our subs. Park a couple off-shore in the Yellow Sea, and game over in 15 minutes for the People's Republic of China. They know this, so why not open another front by buying off our supposed 'Cold Warriors' to say that nukes are counter-productive? How wonderful it would be to convince your adversary to disarm himself...
If you mean to say the revolution will happen through the system we have, then you are mistaken. There are vested interests who are past masters at gaming the system we have. That's why whether Republicans or Democrats hold power in Washington, everything continues to get worse for the vast majority of Americans. Those vested interests have recently decided they're gonna go for broke, and wipe out the most hospitable nest for their kind that has ever existed in human history (READ: the United States). Where they think they're going to go, I don't know. Has China promised them a better deal? Is North Korea more to their liking?
I do know that the American people, despite the debilitation of the past 50 years, do retain their fundamental orneriness. They are a reasonably well-educated and motivated bunch with a deeply set sense of justice and fair play. If you cross that, they will rouse themselves with all the strength, creativity, and daring of their forefathers and bring injustice down. America the country is down on its last legs. America the people, and the spirit, is rising.
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We are hearing more like this every day. If we as a People don't act decisively to correct the course of our country, we will soon have no recourse but to shed blood. Note, this is not a partisan question of which party holds power, because the reality is that both are fronts for the same power. They are so corrupted and the system so thoroughly gamed that there are few and rapidly dwindling non-violent courses left to a People who want their will done. I love my life and my kids and my family and my country, but I would gladly sacrifice the first if it meant the latter could live in freedom. I believe there are still many patriots from both sides of the political spectrum who would as well.
Do not work for the government, and this includes the USPTO. There are many people who are young, smart, idealistic, and/or unaware of what it means to work for the government who go to work for the government, but they do not stay for long because they immediately see what a hopelessly dysfunctional soup of sociopaths it is. They leave. What remains are, you guessed it, sociopaths and the lowest common denominator denizens of DC for whom Uncle Sam is a big sugar daddy that gives you get full health benefits, lets you work from 10-3pm, and expects nothing of you but putting an ass in a chair. The sociopaths don't even pretend to work because they're sociopaths and devote 99.9% of their energy maintaining the facade they use to fool everyone. So that leaves the mouth breathers to do things like evaluate patents. Small wonder that they make great decisions like granting patents for things that clearly have prior art like the Thinkpad convertible tablets that had the ability to convert to/from landscape view based on position and whose touchscreen worked with a pen.
Of course the military isn't ready for cyberwarfare. They are always fighting the last war. Recent articles have come out about how the Pentagon is finally restructuring itself to fight terrorism, meaning they've done away with mass troop movements in favor of lots of small actions. Which will work great until we get into a war with China, which will both hack our systems and require mass troop movements. Chinese military doctrine has expressly stated it means to do just that along with financial warfare (suddenly dumping all dollar reserves), shutting off the Panama Canal (which they now control) to impede the American navy, and lots of other outside-the-box thinking.
It must have taken them a long time to figure out what happened unless he wasn't spoofing MAC addresses. It wouldn't occur to most people that their wifi was hacked. Most would assume someone had hacked their individual machines. Wonder if the target was technical, in which case the hacker would have been stupid to do what he did (not to mention evil).
Phasing out the shuttles is part of the opportunity cost of giving all our money to greedy banks. They salt it away in their numbered accounts (reports say they're sitting on $1.7 trillion of our bailout money) and science, education, and other sectors are cut to the bone or killed. They're even cutting the Small Business Innovation & Research (SBIR) grants, which are meant to encourage entrepreneurship in America and, you know, generate jobs.
The SuperCollider in Texas was the first big death in modern American science. Killing the shuttle program is another. Cancer research or something equally huge and important may be next. And the more they disinvest in the future, the faster it will recede.
Seemed like an easier and cheaper system to build. Accelerate a large enough mass fast enough and it will travel as far and a conventional warhead or farther, and the shells themselves are dirt cheap, being nothing but shaped hunks of metal.
Human senses, not merely be another way to surf the web. A HUD style implant in the retina or the ability to see other spectra of light like Jordi's visor would be useful. You know, general bionic man stuff. That's cool
there's a slight value proposition for FB users. They can connect easily with people they've lost touch with. That was fun at first, but I quickly found that the people I've lost touch with I also grew apart from. There's always the "So...what are you up to now?" conversation that iterates twice, three times at most. Then, silence. It's like a high school reunion split up into hundreds of mini interactions and stretched out over years, and it's just as awkward.
As a sociological study and advertising behavioral resource, it's a gold mine. That's why Goldman Sachs and the usual evil suspects are all over it.
But in the end, FB and all its peers and predecessors implode because they bring nothing of lasting value to the user. It's just another way to waste time. Invent something that makes me a better mathematician or improves my golf swing or earns me money or teaches me how to lay out a circuit board while I do it, and at the same time have it be entertaining and not bore the hell out of me like a standard text book does, and then you'll be onto something lasting.
Add a serious level to entertainment or an entertaining level to something serious that taps into that level of absorption, of total focus, and it will be huge for humanity. And no, serious games aren't there yet.
When I was in junior high I went to a gaming convention where I played D&D with Gary Gygax, Tracy Hickman (author of the Dragonlance series), and Larry Niven. It was the Ravenloft module that Tracy had written, so naturally he was the DM. Watching those guys spin the fable was an amazing experience I've never forgotten, and it set a bar for fantasy gaming that no computer game has ever come close to surpassing. Maybe it's because in a computer game no one ever gets into character and brings pathos to the role. Sure, the mechanics and special effects of computers are great, but nobody really gets emotionally attached to their character (beyond how much time they spend levelling up) and...the storytelling just isn't there.
All these years later I realize that that evening with Gary, Larry, and Tracy and the other players was like our generation's equivalent of hanging out with Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg at the height of the Beat era.
I hope they build Gary a monument that pays proper homage all the young imaginations he fired and lives he influenced. RIP, Gary.
Things like this are an inevitable consequence of commoditizing development and outsourcing it to India & China or onshoring it via H1B holders whose certifications and degrees are printed on tissue paper. As an IT manager for years the quality of candidates I have seen coming from those sources is laughable--they code by flowchart. But those are exactly the kind of 'programmers' banks love to hire, because they work cheap and never complain when you work them to death because you can fire them and they get sent back to the old country. Do they do crap work? Yes, absolutely. But that's not the MBA-holding, PHB manager's problem, because they get to claim cost savings and a promotion for it and push like hell to get as far away from the inevitable consequences as they can before it blows up.
If you are an IT manager, please do yourself a favor and hire experienced natives who really know what they're doing. They will cost you a couple 10G's more, but the difference in the product will save you millions it would cost to fix crappy code and the tens of millions more in liability when your customers learn the hard way how lightly you treated the confidentiality and security of their data.
There's been much made the past couple of years about China the Rising Superpower. On balance that's a good thing, because what happens with China this century has existential repercussions the way that Al Qaeda and terrorism has never had and never will have. If things go badly between China and the rest of the world a great many people will die and nations will fall on a scale that would put the previous two world wars to shame.
But the thing that makes China watching such a nail-biter is that it is an exceptionally fractious and brittle society with very little in the way of pressure valves. As Mao and the Communists used to say back in the day, China has 'feet of clay.' Don't like the government? Tough! Big company paid off a local official and the police threw you off your land so they can build a big factory on it, without so much as a by-your-leave? It's for the glory of socialism, comrade, so be a good peasant and go 'eat bitter' (READ: suck it up). And with so many, many officials on all levels running hard to get the bribes they need to buy a black Audi, big house, and keep mistresses, those incidents are piling up by the thousands.
It's only a matter of time before everything reaches the breaking point, and when that happens either China dissolves into bloody civil war with disastrous consequences for the rest of the world, or the Communist Party decides it's time to start a war against foreign oppressors who are trying to humiliate the motherland, with disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
It's not a question of if this will happen, but how. And the how keeps the China watchers up at night. If the latter option comes about, hundreds of millions of people will die and the viability of the Earth for human habitation may become seriously compromised.
Amen, brother! I stopped flying as well. For regional travel in the Northeast I take the train or drive, with a preference for the train. Vastly better travel experience than any plane from any airline to anywhere.
Not being able to easily travel longer distances is a hassle. My grandmother passed away last November out west and I chose to drive to Detroit, pick up my brother, and tag team the 3 day drive out rather than put up with the TSA.
It does make me angry, though, that we have to go to these lengths to travel in our own country. It's long past time we all got into our pickups with axe handles and converged on DC to "redecorate" the place.
Since Egypt I've been wondering about the feasibility of ad-hoc mesh networks. With plentiful wifi nodes and smartphones it seems like it would be somewhat possible to have them relay packets to maintain connectivity. You'd need to implement discretionary throttling for the individual owner of the wifi node / smartphone so their personal usage doesn't suffer too much.
But as long as you have enough people within typical cell tower range of an international border beyond which the regime has no repressive control, there would be no way for a government to prevent internet communications short of confiscating every computer, wifi node, and smartphone in the country. I don't think any government has the ability to do that quickly enough to suppress a mass social movement like this.
I would add that people in Montana have a strong work ethic, work for low wages, speak standard American English, are well-educated (second behind North Dakota for standardized test scores), and understand what customer service means. If I had a company like Amazon, I would definitely move my operations there.
There is never a time in Montana when you can't travel the roads. They are used to snow in winter and plow constantly. Compare that to NYC where I live and an average snow, by Montana standards, brings everything to a standstill for weeks.
Also, you won't find restaurants like Nobu in Montana, but the restaurants there are maintain high quality. Coming from New York you can't often say that about other places, because the competition here is so fierce that if you can't produce world-class food at reasonable prices you won't last a week. Somehow Montana restaurants hit near that same mark. I don't know how they do, but they do.
Bill Clinton is saying this because he believes the Internet is full of lies, vicious lies, and inaccuracies about him and his legacy. In fact, he has retooled his nonprofit, the mis-named Clinton Foundation (mis-named because it is not a philanthropy and does not give grants), from an organization that nominally tries to do Good Things (tm) to one that exists purely to correct the record about him and his accomplishments. Internally they call it the "Legacy Project."
So this is just him externalizing his own bitterness over his place in the history books (Monica Lewinsky) and the failure of his personal aide Doug Band, his CEO of the Clinton Foundation Bruce Lindsey, and his Chief of Staff/COO of the Clinton Foundation Laura Graham to do anything to change it.
The last thing anyone should do, even on a slow news day, is to work themselves up into a lather over it.
i was centrally involved in relief efforts after the earthquake in Haiti. We worked with the good folks at Ushahidi to implement crisis mapping and the cell provider in Haiti, Digicel, to push important news to the people affected (like where to get first aid, distribution points for food & water, etc). The thing that really blew me away was that we started getting crowd-sourced reports from people buried inside the rubble, calling for help. The US marines operating from the ship offshore later told us they watched the ushahidi crisis map religiously because it was the only source of actionable information available in the entire theater of operations. Having something like this in the US could save a lot of lives if we have another 9/11 or Katrina.
It's less about speed and more about efficiency and quality of travel for the user. Jets are fast but inefficient and the experience is so utterly miserable that more and more people are opting to drive up to 3 days in a row than put up with it.
High speed rail a-la the Japanese Shinkansen or French TGV would be a vast improvement over the creaky air travel system we have in America now. Regional travel or even region-to-adjacent-region travel would compete well on total travel time with air and vastly outstrip air for overall quality of the trip. Plenty of room on trains, outlets next to your seat, space to walk through the train and stretch your legs, better scenery, vastly fewer TSA thugs groping your children and gawking at your genitals. And if you don't mind boarding a train in the evening, sleeping on the train, and waking up in your destination then even coast-to-coast travel is doable.
Air, on the other hand, could be slower and lower. Dirigibles are more efficient and afford their passengers more space than planes. Their speeds are half of jets, but they can land on a dime and don't need much in the way of infrastructure, so you can liberate yourself from the established hub-and-spoke infrastructure and form another layer of air-traffic that won't conflict with jets because they fly at a lower altitude. You would still, of course, need air traffic controllers who don't fall asleep.
Manning is a hero. His act laid bare what Americans of all stripes have increasingly come to believe in the past 10 years, namely that people in government and big business are so corrupt and so intertwined with one another, that those forces in our country are so wrapped up with those forces in other countries, that it has become virtually impossible for the United States of America, the system, to work for Americans and uphold the values Americans purport to hold dear. Our system is a deep and elaborate fraud, and Manning gave us unmistakable evidence of that.
His act has already been credited by some of tipping Tunisia and Egypt over the edge to overthrow their dictators. Time will tell, but he may have set the stage for a serious re-set here, too.
I vote for Chicago to be next. Screw that place!
I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, so both kinds of "survival" situations, the stay-put kind and the get-outta-dodge kind, have happened within recent memory, namely 9/11 and the great Blackout of '03.
Both times the overwhelming lesson was that trying to go anywhere is mostly pointless, because 7 million other people are trying to do the same thing at the same time. Stay put if you can with enough food & water for 6 wks and a way to let evac teams know where you are.
But if you have to go, cars are out--total gridlock. If you're in the outer boroughs, a bicycle is your absolute best bet on land; when all the cars are jammed up you can still ride on sidewalks, bike paths in the parks, and between the cars if you have to. If you're in Manhattan, you're flirched, because even on foot, walking, takes hours; there are so many people you cannot even run. The only option there is to grab something that floats and swim the Hudson or East River.
Those are disaster situations, short-term, localized catastrophes. Apocalypses, real collapse-of-civilization stuff, are different. Even then, what you do depends on the manner in which things collapse. If everyone else dies in a plague and you don't, then in terms of survival you're on easy street. There's enough stored canned goods, water, equipment, shelter, gasoline and everything else imaginable out there right now to last a handful of folks for the rest of their lives, even if you factor in panic looting and such. Shoot, park yourself in a suburban Walmart, lock the doors, and you can survive quite happily for 50 years.
But above all else and across all situations you need to be a class A scavenger, a scrounger, and have the will to do what it takes to get by.
but you know what? I don't care because they're already irrelevant. They lost relevance around the time they staffed people like Judith Miller, Adam Nagourney, and Jayson Blair. Do I want to know something real? Well, in English I turn to the BBC. Because I also speak those languages, Der Spiegel and Le Monde as well.
For everything else, I read eyewitness reports. And why shouldn't I? Media channels like the NYTimes long ago spun down their foreign operations. They rely on eyewitnesses too, same as me. Except when I read them, I get them straight without the corporate spin.
Opinion? I believe my opinion, based on congressional whitepapers and original documents, is at least as valid as the semi-literate people who populate the New York Times and its cousins these days.
News as an activity will always exist. But newspapers and news channels on TV and news sites on the web surrendered their authority when they decided it was cheaper and more profitable to report opinion as fact and eschew the whole fact part entirely. You don't get that authority back, after you've taken that drastic step, so if you based your business model on it then you are out of luck, my friend. Welcome to the dustbin of history!
Someone is tinkering with the timeline. And it's someone from a period +- 50 yrs Current time. They're trying to produce outcomes that bear on our current geopolitical status. There are changes embedded in ancient periods:
The mother culture of Central America:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/caraltrans.shtml
Massive civilization in Amazonian Basin:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081119-lost-cities-amazon.html
There are better-known examples closer to Europe, and more modern: the Antikythera mechanism or the batteries of Sumer, the Jacquard loom or the automata of Rhodes or China:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton
All of these happened. They are indisputable fact. Yet, they have not disrupted the general sweep of accepted history. For example, if the mother culture of the Central and South American cultures the Spanish encountered, namely the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, far pre-dated even the Egyptians, then why did the peoples of the New World not stand on par with those of the Old? If the Amazonian basin sported a sophisticated culture of millions of people far before the same was achieved by Rome, then why do we scarcely know about them today?
Closer to home, meaning the here and the now, we have attempts to introduce advanced technology far prior to their realization now. Yet, they have not changed the here and the now. Rather, they remain outliers.
Certain parties have tried to alter the timeline. But they've done so in scattershot fashion, trying to get history to pivot on a dime by introducing innovations before their time or deeper, longer term ploys to get the engine of history moving in a different direction earlier (ie. Ecuador or Brazil). If they had succeeded, then we would not now know the difference. It would simply be as it has always been. There would be no alternate outcomes.
That there is a disparity suggests that the timeline is a massively multi-variate system whose movements defy simple interpretations or solutions. Kill Hitler and WWII and the Holocaust would never have happened? Well, the disparity suggests it may have changed the timing, but that one event, Hitler's death, may not have avoided the thing altogether. There was much more in play than that one man.
There is a lot more than a /. post can accommodate, but it's something to consider. There have been many revelations of late, but none have changed the narrative.
Why?
The one thing the United States has to deter Cold War 2.0 with China is a massive number of ICBMs, and even more effectively, a robust fleet of nuclear submarines. Without those, China figures it can buy a bunch of shore-to-ship missiles to neutralize American carrier battle groups, a bunch of amphibious landing craft, and it can "re-patriate" Taiwan.
China is embarked upon a massive, comprehensive, and long-term strategy to counter American power and seize hegemony for itself. Read about it in Congressional whitepapers. Accumulating U.S. debt and dollar currency reserves, gaining control of key locations (eg. Panama Canal) and resources (eg. rare-earth metals), perfecting cyber-warfare, anti-satellite measures, and the like are all explicitly part of the same strategy.
The one trump card the United States still holds is our subs. Park a couple off-shore in the Yellow Sea, and game over in 15 minutes for the People's Republic of China. They know this, so why not open another front by buying off our supposed 'Cold Warriors' to say that nukes are counter-productive? How wonderful it would be to convince your adversary to disarm himself...
If you mean to say the revolution will happen through the system we have, then you are mistaken. There are vested interests who are past masters at gaming the system we have. That's why whether Republicans or Democrats hold power in Washington, everything continues to get worse for the vast majority of Americans. Those vested interests have recently decided they're gonna go for broke, and wipe out the most hospitable nest for their kind that has ever existed in human history (READ: the United States). Where they think they're going to go, I don't know. Has China promised them a better deal? Is North Korea more to their liking?
I do know that the American people, despite the debilitation of the past 50 years, do retain their fundamental orneriness. They are a reasonably well-educated and motivated bunch with a deeply set sense of justice and fair play. If you cross that, they will rouse themselves with all the strength, creativity, and daring of their forefathers and bring injustice down. America the country is down on its last legs. America the people, and the spirit, is rising.