It used to be that Corporations were a temporary construct granted a charter by the government. The terms were usually 10-20 years. If the government did not like what the corporation did during the first term, the corporation's charter was not renewed and the corporation disbanded.
Then corporations finagled life in perpetuity from governments, and the long slide into unchecked power began. In 1886, a landmark Supreme Court ruling deemed corporations "artificial persons" with nearly all the rights due a natural person. With that, they won the right to lobby the government and twist our system to their sociopathic ends.
Now here we are after more than 200 years of this experiment in democracy, watching corporations not only lie, cheat, steal, kill, and corrupt with impunity, but subvert our government so thoroughly that it no longer matters which political party holds power; and now they are preparing to sweep away the last vestigial check on their abuses by sidestepping public shareholders and stock markets in favor of private equity where they are beholden to no one but themselves and their buddies in other mega corporations.
The body politic must wake up soon and correct this, or we will definitely arrive at a very dark place as fast as unfettered avarice can take us. Stripping corporations of the right to lobby and live in perpetuity would be a very significant first step. Applying anti-trust legislation ("Trust" was the previous term for cartels and monopolies) to break up the "too big to fail" companies would be an excellent follow-up. But whatever is done, it must be across the board, with no loopholes, or we will find ourselves back in the same place in a fortnight.
I can confirm this. The illusion surrounding celebrities is wafer thin. Up close and personal, they are quite empty vessels. But after the fact, it rather makes sense. The celebrities of the world are not superhuman. They are not smarter or more talented or better in any way than the average person. They just have coaching and representation.
That said, Jennifer Connelly is a stone. cold. fox.
I already don't fly because of the TSA. I will not condone their behavior by complying like a sheep. They are a profoundly un-American entity, and must be de-funded and dismantled with prejudice immediately. Anyone who has chosen to work for them has self-selected for a one-way ticket to North Korea where they can enjoy the totalitarian paradise they're so strenuously trying to impose on the rest of us. They are not Americans who choose to do this; they are not my countrymen.
And here we are seeing a wave of democracy sweeping the Arab world, facilitated in part by these very technologies. At the same time, the U.S. government is positioning itself to prevent those very tools being used against it.
There are still those here who will say that it's hyperbole, but the same tipping point is approaching here. Our real rulers (hint: neither political party, but those behind both) are getting nervous and moving to keep their grip on our society. They have perpetrated the most massive theft in the history of mankind, absconding with trillions of dollars of our money, selling our children into a lifetime of debt servitude while theirs party on; they know it, and we know it, and they're starting to realize that we know it too.
I bought a Thinkpad X41 Convertible Tablet 6 years ago with Emperor Linux on it. It's quite light, and has all the virtues of a tablet and all the advantages of a laptop. It's the first computer I've ever had that I feel emotional about.
It has been so thoroughly gamed by our real rulers that it doesn't matter which party is elected. The United States Constitution 1.0 worked OK for the first 200 years. Now it has become clear that there are flaws that monied interests have worked very hard to exploit.
So we need a complete reset. A second constitutional convention to which no elected official above the local level (or in the case of New York or LA, above the neighborhood level) or person with a net worth of more than $1 million is invited to participate. We fix the flaws, turn out Constitution 2.0, and put it to a plebecite. We run new elections for the new government, and simply stop paying taxes to the old one. We de-fund it.
It's the indiscriminate use of Adwords and the Search-Based Keyword Tool (SBKT) to siphon lots of traffic that really isn't relevant to your goods or services.
For example, yesterday I was searching for stamp-sized LCD screens to incorporate into some hobby projects of mine. I. could. not. get. anything. but. Amazon.com. They wanted to sell me watches or personal DVD players or anything but what I was looking for. This has been happening with every search for information for the past month.
Google needs to really tighten up their advertising policies, because their search engine is teetering on the event horizon of uselessness.
is to never use anything but FOSS. Yes I know there will be those who respond, "But I work for a specialized X company doing Y and we have to use specialized software Z that only runs on Windows. Therefore, there is no way we could ever switch to FOSS." And that describes exactly 1% of all companies in the world.
The vast majority of companies use a browser, a file server, word processor, spreadsheet, and email. Those problems were solved by FOSS long, long ago.
So use FOSS exclusively in your company and the BSA is a bag of troubles you'll never have to worry about.
Apart from having evanescent battery life, smartphones kill productivity and turn co-workers into semi-functional zombies with the attention spans and memories of gnats. You can communicate an important message to a Blackberry-wielding colleague using clear, simple words, and 20 seconds later they can't repeat what the message was.
China does have built-up infrastructure. They have trains that go all over the place. And they have roads. They even have--get this--canals. Every major city (by our definition, anything with 1 million + people, which is a minor city by their definition) has an airport. Planes fly to all of them, a lot. So, that point of yours is quite wrong and uninformed.
China is also an extremely large country in terms of area. It is larger than the United States and only exceeded by Canada and Russia. So they have long distances, and how.
The rail system in the United States does not work 'just fine' for passenger service. As other posters have accurately pointed out, passenger traffic is secondary to freight traffic here so it always has to yield right-of-way to freight trains.
Naysayers often base their objections on population density. Either it's too small here (ie. not enough profit per mile of track) or it's too high, meaning too much trouble securing right-of-way. Both arguments are ridiculous because American urban centers were built around and developed around railways, because it was the way to move large amounts of goods and passengers before the airplane was invented. That is, the United States today was built and optimized for rail travel.
It is hard to argue that high-speed rail will replace planes for coast-to-coast trips, but then, most travel is regional. For that high-speed rail competes rather well. If you throw in overnight travel with sleeping berths, the range over which rail can compete with planes grows; how pleasant it is to go to your local train station, hop into a sleeper in the evening, and wake up the next morning at your destination.
Try living in and experiencing other parts of the world before declaring that the status quo in America is the only way to do things.
Step 1: Find something that might seem scary/wrong to the average schmuck
Step 2: Use hyperbole and outright lies to whip said schmucks into a frenzy about it.
Step 3: Declare that you're absolutely opposed to this newfound "threat."
Step 4: Get elected.
Step 5: Profit.
Always has been that way, always will be that way with politicians. It's why the American Experiment in Democracy version 1.0 has failed.
We need to convene another Constitutional Convention to release version 2.0 with its necessary structural overhaul and numerous bug fixes. The new system must promote sanity, competence, justice, freedom, and opportunity.
The incompetent lying demagogic psychopathic sacks of shit version 1.0 has outputted will be cleared away by version 2.0's enhanced garbage collection. Bachman, Baucus, I'm looking at you...
Since I cursed at my computer. That's when I switched to linux. No more virii, no more systems crashes, no more lost data, no more spy|adware, no more crappy performance. Yes, in the early days linux applications did not always work, but you didn't expect them to when you didn't have to pay anything to get them.
Nowadays with user-friendly distros like Ubuntu most of the core programs you use on a regular basis work extremely well. Esoteric programs can still be hit-or-miss, but you understand that they're hobbyists who make them in their spare time. No reason to get upset if they don't work.
That's some terrific inside-the-box thinking you're doing there. You think man-in-the-middle is something that will only happen if we create mesh networks? Try setting your work computer to promiscuous mode in the office tomorrow. You already are receiving everyone's packets.
Freenet has never lived up to its promise, but its core idea of spreading encrypted files to more nodes, the more that the encrypted file is demanded, suggests that we can come up with novel and interesting ways to make ad-hoc mesh networks that minimize the potential downsides.
With something as important as the future of the freedom of speech on the line, let's put our heads together and figure it out.
Need a very overdue, very serious attitude correction. We are not subjects to be commanded. We are citizens, which means we employ them, and they ought to obey us, not the other way around. They perform their duties at our sufferance.
Folks, we are long past the time for a reboot of our country. Those who like to play Masters of the Universe with our lives seem to think they can do so with impunity forever, to whatever extreme. But we are not Chinese or Indians or Russians. We are Americans, and freedom is our creed. And we're very heavily armed. Let's remind them and all others around the world why we deserve to be free. Let the Eastern seaboard be lit with the fires from their mansions.
It is clear that the third is the case, and that at this point revolution is the only recourse the American people have to bring their government to heel. Bush started these abuses, Obama is continuing them, and it will get worse. The TSA is groping us; the big banks are plundering our country as fast as they can; Guantanamo is still operating; Congress is proposing a kill switch for the Internet rather than fess up to the misdeeds exposed by Wikileaks; and we still don't have any jobs worth a damn here.
Which also suggests to me that Americans had better go "Cairo" on D.C. before it's too late. It's been 236 years since America 1.0 came out, and the Masters of the Universe (MoU) (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, AIG, McKinsey & Co, any given hedge fund, etc.) have so gamed this system that there is no recourse for average citizens who have serious unmet needs. The MoU have framed the discourse as Red vs. Blue, Right vs. Left, Republican vs. Democrat to keep the citizenry running in circles while they plunder the country no matter who's in power.
We need to reboot America. Completely rip out all the levers of power and representation above the local level (and even at the local level in the case of the largest cities). Freeze all assets of the top 1%, prevent them from absconding with their ill-gotten gains. Prepare to crack open the Cayman, Swiss, Manx, and all the other complicit banks to claw back our stolen national wealth. Then we hold a second Constitutional Convention to revise the "damn piece of paper" to a document with teeth.
You know, I agree with you. Except I'd settle for bringing in a fleet of moving vans, helping all those good folks evacuate, then nuking it. The denizens who are behind all this mess can be housed in Guantanamo until we decide to figure out what to do with them.
Please let us choose the original design in our user preferences. Ajax kills performance and has no real purpose. Maybe it makes me a curmudgeon, but I've been a slashdot user for more than ten years and would prefer this one site retain the same look & feel so I don't have to relearn the terrain.
It's interesting that the lawyers and people who have controlled our world are brushing up against a reality where their targets/victims can find out who they are and retaliate. It has become absurdly easy to track them, and respond in kind.
Wikileaks is part of this process. The stage has been set for a turning point in human society. Governments and the Powers-that-Be will fight the process, but they will be overcome, at last, by Justice.
Bill Clinton is, however, amazingly incompetent when it comes to managing anything. When he was governor and president, he inherited bureaucracies that mostly ran on auto-pilot. He's never built anything or done anything where he actually had to know what he was doing.
What sheep Americans have become! A guy does a cool, harmless thing like fly a model airplane over the East River and suddenly everybody on this board is biting their fingernails about whether the government will *allow* us to do such a thing. The government does not *allow* us to do anything; in this country, it's what we, the People, allow the government to do that's important. We allow them do very specific, limited things at our sufferance. Everything else we do at our pleasure and the government can fuck off if it doesn't like it.
Let's assume that an F-16 pilot will fire on innocent American civilians. How long will they be able to fly sorties before the fuel that was previously supplied by innocent American civilians runs out?
No, it's you who should go back to looking at celebrities in bikinis. If you think that what the government is doing is normal, then you are either too young to know any better, or you are a doublethink posterchild who will do anything to avoid having to do anything real to correct the course of our country.
Slashdot Mirror
Then corporations finagled life in perpetuity from governments, and the long slide into unchecked power began. In 1886, a landmark Supreme Court ruling deemed corporations "artificial persons" with nearly all the rights due a natural person. With that, they won the right to lobby the government and twist our system to their sociopathic ends.
Now here we are after more than 200 years of this experiment in democracy, watching corporations not only lie, cheat, steal, kill, and corrupt with impunity, but subvert our government so thoroughly that it no longer matters which political party holds power; and now they are preparing to sweep away the last vestigial check on their abuses by sidestepping public shareholders and stock markets in favor of private equity where they are beholden to no one but themselves and their buddies in other mega corporations.
The body politic must wake up soon and correct this, or we will definitely arrive at a very dark place as fast as unfettered avarice can take us. Stripping corporations of the right to lobby and live in perpetuity would be a very significant first step. Applying anti-trust legislation ("Trust" was the previous term for cartels and monopolies) to break up the "too big to fail" companies would be an excellent follow-up. But whatever is done, it must be across the board, with no loopholes, or we will find ourselves back in the same place in a fortnight.
I can confirm this. The illusion surrounding celebrities is wafer thin. Up close and personal, they are quite empty vessels. But after the fact, it rather makes sense. The celebrities of the world are not superhuman. They are not smarter or more talented or better in any way than the average person. They just have coaching and representation.
That said, Jennifer Connelly is a stone. cold. fox.
If you think it's OK for the TSA to do this, would *you* please leave and not come back? We don't need *your* pussified ilk.
I already don't fly because of the TSA. I will not condone their behavior by complying like a sheep. They are a profoundly un-American entity, and must be de-funded and dismantled with prejudice immediately. Anyone who has chosen to work for them has self-selected for a one-way ticket to North Korea where they can enjoy the totalitarian paradise they're so strenuously trying to impose on the rest of us. They are not Americans who choose to do this; they are not my countrymen.
TSA delenda est.
And here we are seeing a wave of democracy sweeping the Arab world, facilitated in part by these very technologies. At the same time, the U.S. government is positioning itself to prevent those very tools being used against it.
There are still those here who will say that it's hyperbole, but the same tipping point is approaching here. Our real rulers (hint: neither political party, but those behind both) are getting nervous and moving to keep their grip on our society. They have perpetrated the most massive theft in the history of mankind, absconding with trillions of dollars of our money, selling our children into a lifetime of debt servitude while theirs party on; they know it, and we know it, and they're starting to realize that we know it too.
I bought a Thinkpad X41 Convertible Tablet 6 years ago with Emperor Linux on it. It's quite light, and has all the virtues of a tablet and all the advantages of a laptop. It's the first computer I've ever had that I feel emotional about.
It has been so thoroughly gamed by our real rulers that it doesn't matter which party is elected. The United States Constitution 1.0 worked OK for the first 200 years. Now it has become clear that there are flaws that monied interests have worked very hard to exploit.
So we need a complete reset. A second constitutional convention to which no elected official above the local level (or in the case of New York or LA, above the neighborhood level) or person with a net worth of more than $1 million is invited to participate. We fix the flaws, turn out Constitution 2.0, and put it to a plebecite. We run new elections for the new government, and simply stop paying taxes to the old one. We de-fund it.
Revolution achieved.
It's the indiscriminate use of Adwords and the Search-Based Keyword Tool (SBKT) to siphon lots of traffic that really isn't relevant to your goods or services.
For example, yesterday I was searching for stamp-sized LCD screens to incorporate into some hobby projects of mine. I. could. not. get. anything. but. Amazon.com. They wanted to sell me watches or personal DVD players or anything but what I was looking for. This has been happening with every search for information for the past month.
Google needs to really tighten up their advertising policies, because their search engine is teetering on the event horizon of uselessness.
is to never use anything but FOSS. Yes I know there will be those who respond, "But I work for a specialized X company doing Y and we have to use specialized software Z that only runs on Windows. Therefore, there is no way we could ever switch to FOSS." And that describes exactly 1% of all companies in the world.
The vast majority of companies use a browser, a file server, word processor, spreadsheet, and email. Those problems were solved by FOSS long, long ago.
So use FOSS exclusively in your company and the BSA is a bag of troubles you'll never have to worry about.
Apart from having evanescent battery life, smartphones kill productivity and turn co-workers into semi-functional zombies with the attention spans and memories of gnats. You can communicate an important message to a Blackberry-wielding colleague using clear, simple words, and 20 seconds later they can't repeat what the message was.
China does have built-up infrastructure. They have trains that go all over the place. And they have roads. They even have--get this--canals. Every major city (by our definition, anything with 1 million + people, which is a minor city by their definition) has an airport. Planes fly to all of them, a lot. So, that point of yours is quite wrong and uninformed.
China is also an extremely large country in terms of area. It is larger than the United States and only exceeded by Canada and Russia. So they have long distances, and how.
The rail system in the United States does not work 'just fine' for passenger service. As other posters have accurately pointed out, passenger traffic is secondary to freight traffic here so it always has to yield right-of-way to freight trains.
Naysayers often base their objections on population density. Either it's too small here (ie. not enough profit per mile of track) or it's too high, meaning too much trouble securing right-of-way. Both arguments are ridiculous because American urban centers were built around and developed around railways, because it was the way to move large amounts of goods and passengers before the airplane was invented. That is, the United States today was built and optimized for rail travel.
It is hard to argue that high-speed rail will replace planes for coast-to-coast trips, but then, most travel is regional. For that high-speed rail competes rather well. If you throw in overnight travel with sleeping berths, the range over which rail can compete with planes grows; how pleasant it is to go to your local train station, hop into a sleeper in the evening, and wake up the next morning at your destination.
Try living in and experiencing other parts of the world before declaring that the status quo in America is the only way to do things.
Step 1: Find something that might seem scary/wrong to the average schmuck
Step 2: Use hyperbole and outright lies to whip said schmucks into a frenzy about it.
Step 3: Declare that you're absolutely opposed to this newfound "threat."
Step 4: Get elected.
Step 5: Profit.
Always has been that way, always will be that way with politicians. It's why the American Experiment in Democracy version 1.0 has failed.
We need to convene another Constitutional Convention to release version 2.0 with its necessary structural overhaul and numerous bug fixes. The new system must promote sanity, competence, justice, freedom, and opportunity.
The incompetent lying demagogic psychopathic sacks of shit version 1.0 has outputted will be cleared away by version 2.0's enhanced garbage collection. Bachman, Baucus, I'm looking at you...
Since I cursed at my computer. That's when I switched to linux. No more virii, no more systems crashes, no more lost data, no more spy|adware, no more crappy performance. Yes, in the early days linux applications did not always work, but you didn't expect them to when you didn't have to pay anything to get them.
Nowadays with user-friendly distros like Ubuntu most of the core programs you use on a regular basis work extremely well. Esoteric programs can still be hit-or-miss, but you understand that they're hobbyists who make them in their spare time. No reason to get upset if they don't work.
Gesture interfaces are all about looking cool and getting babes.
That's some terrific inside-the-box thinking you're doing there. You think man-in-the-middle is something that will only happen if we create mesh networks? Try setting your work computer to promiscuous mode in the office tomorrow. You already are receiving everyone's packets.
Freenet has never lived up to its promise, but its core idea of spreading encrypted files to more nodes, the more that the encrypted file is demanded, suggests that we can come up with novel and interesting ways to make ad-hoc mesh networks that minimize the potential downsides.
With something as important as the future of the freedom of speech on the line, let's put our heads together and figure it out.
Need a very overdue, very serious attitude correction. We are not subjects to be commanded. We are citizens, which means we employ them, and they ought to obey us, not the other way around. They perform their duties at our sufferance.
Folks, we are long past the time for a reboot of our country. Those who like to play Masters of the Universe with our lives seem to think they can do so with impunity forever, to whatever extreme. But we are not Chinese or Indians or Russians. We are Americans, and freedom is our creed. And we're very heavily armed. Let's remind them and all others around the world why we deserve to be free. Let the Eastern seaboard be lit with the fires from their mansions.
It is clear that the third is the case, and that at this point revolution is the only recourse the American people have to bring their government to heel. Bush started these abuses, Obama is continuing them, and it will get worse. The TSA is groping us; the big banks are plundering our country as fast as they can; Guantanamo is still operating; Congress is proposing a kill switch for the Internet rather than fess up to the misdeeds exposed by Wikileaks; and we still don't have any jobs worth a damn here.
How much more evidence do you need, America?
Which also suggests to me that Americans had better go "Cairo" on D.C. before it's too late. It's been 236 years since America 1.0 came out, and the Masters of the Universe (MoU) (Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, AIG, McKinsey & Co, any given hedge fund, etc.) have so gamed this system that there is no recourse for average citizens who have serious unmet needs. The MoU have framed the discourse as Red vs. Blue, Right vs. Left, Republican vs. Democrat to keep the citizenry running in circles while they plunder the country no matter who's in power.
We need to reboot America. Completely rip out all the levers of power and representation above the local level (and even at the local level in the case of the largest cities). Freeze all assets of the top 1%, prevent them from absconding with their ill-gotten gains. Prepare to crack open the Cayman, Swiss, Manx, and all the other complicit banks to claw back our stolen national wealth. Then we hold a second Constitutional Convention to revise the "damn piece of paper" to a document with teeth.
That's the only Change You Can Believe In.
You know, I agree with you. Except I'd settle for bringing in a fleet of moving vans, helping all those good folks evacuate, then nuking it. The denizens who are behind all this mess can be housed in Guantanamo until we decide to figure out what to do with them.
Please let us choose the original design in our user preferences. Ajax kills performance and has no real purpose. Maybe it makes me a curmudgeon, but I've been a slashdot user for more than ten years and would prefer this one site retain the same look & feel so I don't have to relearn the terrain.
Thanks
It's interesting that the lawyers and people who have controlled our world are brushing up against a reality where their targets/victims can find out who they are and retaliate. It has become absurdly easy to track them, and respond in kind.
Wikileaks is part of this process. The stage has been set for a turning point in human society. Governments and the Powers-that-Be will fight the process, but they will be overcome, at last, by Justice.
Bill Clinton is, however, amazingly incompetent when it comes to managing anything. When he was governor and president, he inherited bureaucracies that mostly ran on auto-pilot. He's never built anything or done anything where he actually had to know what he was doing.
What sheep Americans have become! A guy does a cool, harmless thing like fly a model airplane over the East River and suddenly everybody on this board is biting their fingernails about whether the government will *allow* us to do such a thing. The government does not *allow* us to do anything; in this country, it's what we, the People, allow the government to do that's important. We allow them do very specific, limited things at our sufferance. Everything else we do at our pleasure and the government can fuck off if it doesn't like it.
Let's assume that an F-16 pilot will fire on innocent American civilians. How long will they be able to fly sorties before the fuel that was previously supplied by innocent American civilians runs out?
No, it's you who should go back to looking at celebrities in bikinis. If you think that what the government is doing is normal, then you are either too young to know any better, or you are a doublethink posterchild who will do anything to avoid having to do anything real to correct the course of our country.