If the government is permitted to know our every thought, word, phone call, and whereabouts then we should be able to do the same to them. After all, we are the employers and they are the employees. In fact, it's more critical for us to know their every action and movement because they are such lazy, rotten, unscrupulous, and sometimes just plain evil buggers. If we can't and don't keep an exact eye on them, they'll certainly get up to no good.
How refreshing it would be to clean house and build a political culture like that expressed by the Dutch policeman in the article: transparency makes governance easier.
well, it's not in spain, but pretty sure provence is close enough to pump out the mediterranean and re-seal the pillars of hercules and the suez. the best farmland is on the bottom near Rome and Marseille and Istanbul. but best be sure to have a boat handy in case pesky eco-terrorists bomb the fusion plant...
The only way to change this situation is to get a Democratic majority in Congress. Sorry, Republicans and Independents, the Republican majority has already substantially demonstrated they have no interest in protecting and upholding the Constitution. They must out. A Democratic majority will investigate and impeach, and the Republic will be safe once again. Conservatives have an edge in SCOTUS; fine, they can stay for a while so we have balance again. But the administration and corrupt members of Congress must be impeached and imprisoned.
How do you make this happen? Work for a Democratic candidate where you live and help elect them. If you're in New York, there's a great organization called New Democratic Majority (newdemmajority.org) that has been working since 2003 on the grassroots level to win seats back from Republicans. Elsewhere there are lots of organizations working on the same thing. Pick one and pitch in. Personally, I like grassroots because you can do more interesting things than stuff envelopes, but pick whatever suits your fancy. Just do something. Heck, even if you're a disaffected Republican, it's really important to the future of the country that you put your shoulder to the wheel too. There are lots of groups that aren't loosie-goosie hippy-cum-bleeding hearts, in fact. Most are eminently reasonable and pragmatic.
wonder if they're reconsidering their uncritical coverage of the Bush agenda? maybe they're finally catching up to where most of us have been since 2 years before Bush was selected president the first time around, ie. that their agenda portends nothing good for the future of the American republic and human rights generally?
Sorry if this has been discussed in the past, but what prevents recipients of spam from turning around and nuking the spammer's machine into oblivion? If you spam 10,000 machines, and then they turn around and tell you to quit it, repeatedly, until you stop, then mathematically it would seem the culprit's machine would be rapidly overwhelmed.
By historical necessity. When you start out as a frontier society spending every day in the hard-scrabble for existence, that sort of experience leaves a deep impression for generations. Voters in the West do support tightening the purse strings. You may recall that Ross Perot's central theme was paying off the national debt. He did very well across the western states.
On other economic issues, too, people in the West are unhappy with the way things are going. It's not like the urban centers where public transportation is available. Across the whole of the West everyone drives very long distances to shop, work, and all the other things Americans do. So $3/gallon bites hard. Plus the price of natural gas, which a great many people switched to during the 80's to avoid the high price of oil, has skyrocketed as well. Had the past winter been colder, you would have seen a tremendous uproar over the price of heating. As it was, it hurt too.
There are right-wing pseudo-Christian elements in the West, to be sure, but voters are more independent than anything and supported Republicans where they did more on economic issues. But now the divide is widening.
Agreed. Where there's smoke, there's fire. I hope people keep after government spying. It brought down one administration, and it can bring down another. Once it starts to unravel, we're going to find out more about the vast conspiracy that is the neo-con movement, from rigging the ballot to treason to war profiteering and on and on. It will shake the republic to its very roots. But once we excise them from the body politic and expunge their backers (the ultra-wealthy who are behind it all), we'll be a much stronger country. See, those people think they're born with the divine right of kings and think they can command the rest of us like sheep. What they fail and have ever failed to understand is that America's strength is in her people.
until he retracted his comments. cutting the purse strings would be a nice way to force this little police state program into the light. god, let's hope the democrats win a majority in the fall. the republican party is out of control.
I was excited about a new RPG until hitting the line "Just as in the original, you'll find yourself traveling with Sora, Donald, and Goofy to various world representing Disney movies. Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King are among the properties on display."
Disney has over-merchandized itself for years. Just don't have the heart to help them do it some more.
i see your point about the car. but about the groceries and everything else, try delivery. tipping the grocery delivery man costs a couple bucks. bigger things cost more, but it's still cheaper, way cheaper, than owning a car.
of Human Rights. Clearly ethics, common sense, and human decency are not memes that been internalized by business leaders and politicians enough to know that issues like this are not permissible. We need to update the Bill of Rights and Universal Declaration of Human Rights to make it absolutely crystal clear that these actions are not permissible. Then we should provide harsh penalities for all those who choose to violate them.
The law should read, "under NO circumstances will any RFID tag or chip ever, ever be implanted in a human being," and the penalty for those CEOs or brain-dead MBAs who violate that law should be dispossessed, disenfranchised, and sentenced to hard labor cleaning up pig fecies with occasional breaks so they can be beaten with a clue-stick. The repugnance of this technology should be obvious to people from all segments of the political spectrum, even those right-wing pseudo-Christian jokers for "number of the beast" reasons.
I don't doubt that there are those who think that windmills would ruin their property values. To them I say, gee, windmills didn't seem to hurt Holland too much that way. On a nasty thought, I think that the utilities trying to build the windfarm should have first proposed a garbage or coal-powered plant that would belch thick black soot all over their mansions, and then backed off to a wind farm saying, "OK, OK, FINE! We'll build a wind farm instead."
However, my suspicious side wonders if this isn't a subtle and carefully orchestrated case of Big Oil FUD. Who better to benefit in times of astronomic oil prices when the public is screaming to politicians then to point to these anti-wind groups and say, see, they're no better.
it's not a rant, it's pure chicago school economics. the "value" of intellectual property is not market driven, but a result of government interference in the markets in the form of "copyright" and "intellectual property." so trying to settle on the value of software by looking for its market price is flawed because as it stands today, that "market price" is actually a monopoly rent sanctioned by an interventionist government. if you wanted to get to the true market price, you'd do better to find out what pirated versions of windows are going for in silk alley in beijing, which is the cost of burning a cd plus whatever surplus they can get people to pay for. under classical economics, however, in a free market the price of a good or service will get competed to the point where price=marginal cost, or where profit=price-marginal cost=0.
yeah, but the marginal cost of production of IP is zero, so in a true free market without government interference the market price should and would be competed to the point where profit is zero, or a price of zero. that's why invoking "market economics" to justify the price or cost or loss of intellectual "property" is disingenuous and goofy.
i blame the rise in drug use and lawlessness on the teletubbies. have you ever SEEN the baby-faced sun? if that's not a drug-inspired and -inspiring image, i don't know what is.
as an aside, claiming that GTA:SA encourages drug use is silly. everyone knows GTA:SA encourages wreckless driving, beating hookers, assassination, and theft.
Another very impassioned post, and I say right on! But it's still an argument for how we're powerless to do anything. Dunno if you'll see this reply since this is an older topic, but no one in power is ever going to give up their power just to make you happy. You have to take power from them. And speaking as someone who's done it, the hardest part about taking power away from them is convincing yourself you can. Once you've done that, it's as easy as stealing candy from a baby to take them down. A lot of work, to be sure, but not intellectually difficult. And a lot of times it's not even all that much work.
So stop Thinking about being active; just Be active. Start locally, if you like. Mayor of your town's a jerk? Get up some friends and neighbors and start a letter-writing campaign. Put out a press release to the local paper--they're always hungry for stories and will likely pick yours up. Start a local political blog and get your friends and neighbors to join.
There are a ton of things you can do by yourself or with just a couple people that can be very effective. If you want someone to bounce ideas off of, drop me an email at dakong27@yahoo.com.
Is to learn to play an instrument and make your own music. As a non-musician I always assumed that learning to play and read notes was a task on par with quantum mechanics, and that it required thousands of hours of lessons and matriculation to Juilliard. It took a lifetime of wanting to learn and 6 years of raging against the RIAA to finally pick up a guitar. And I've discovered that it's really, really easy to learn, and in less than a week of noodling around for an hour here or there you can pick up enough chords to play a large swath of rock 'n' roll. It's also quite fun.
And as you play your happy little tunes you also get a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that you've become the RIAA's ultimate nightmare, an artistically and culturally liberated producer of music who will never again have need of their crap.
What I find fascinating is that in America these days people think that being an employee means you're a serf or slave, with your own identity/rights/privacy/humanity suspended during working hours, as though you suddenly cease to have a family or civic/religious obligations. In actual fact, if people are unable to perform at least minimal maintenance of those outside obligations during the day, then society and business break down even quicker than not. Because if you can't tell the delivery man to leave the package with the building superintendant, then you have to take a whole day off to receive a package and the business loses your work for the whole day instead of the 10 minutes you need to place the call.
There are so many. If cities would build decent public transportation that went radially as well as from suburbs to city centers, so many good things would happen. First, every household would have an extra couple hundred dollars a month that they're not spending on car payments, car insurance, gasoline, repairs, parking, tolls, and maintenance. Second, instead of playing chicken and road rage on the way to and from work every day, commuters could read a book or the paper or whatever, and generally arrive far less stressed out. And maybe they'd get a little exercise in walking to and from the station, with all the good things that that confers. With fewer people driving, there'd be less wear-and-tear on the roads, which means there would be fewer levies and taxes to repair them. Fewer people driving means fewer people dying in auto accidents. With fewer people driving, there would be a drop in demand for oil. That does a lot of good things, like bringing down the cost of plane tickets and consumer goods that have petroleum-based components (plastic, anyone?). And oh yeah, take the heat out of the oil market and suddenly all the money that Saudi Arabia and others flow to terrorists goes away. And oh yeah, fewer people driving also helps the environment.
we can do something about it. Voting is not bullshit, and neither is taking action. That's the first and best way that the powers-that-be defeat you, by convincing you that you are powerless to fight them. In reality, we hold all the cards and only have to do a very little to upset their applecart. But first, this "the whole system's rigged and there's nothing we can do about it" whine has to be thrown right out. If you're smart, and I'm assuming you are, and motivated, which I gather from your post you are, then you have everything you need to change the country. Get online and do a little reading about citizen activism. Join the millions of us who already have and are actively working to bring these bastards down.
And in addition to that, I humbly submit that we should form a class action suit to sue the Department of Justice and the United States for violating our constitutional rights, since the current crop of congressmen don't seem terribly interested in upholding the Constitution. If we can get members of the Slashdot community to sign on, that's already a sizeable body. And I say we sue for damages of $10,000K each. That would quickly bankrupt the entire anti-American Republican movement.
To those who are pooh-poohing this story, there have been congressional white papers that document China's widespread efforts to acquire technology and intelligence. The one I read in 1998 detailed how they're using non-intelligence service channels (ie. industrial espionage, etc) to collect that information. But why is that surprising? The CIA's done similar things in the past, so thinking that China, which is expressly expansionist, would not use every means they can think of to strengthen their hand in the looming showdown over Taiwan, is pretty naive.
I read the EW review yesterday, and it sounds awesome. I never go to musicals or opera hardly, but I'd go see this. Unfortunately, it's not going to come to New York for at least 18 months.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government is permitted to know our every thought, word, phone call, and whereabouts then we should be able to do the same to them. After all, we are the employers and they are the employees. In fact, it's more critical for us to know their every action and movement because they are such lazy, rotten, unscrupulous, and sometimes just plain evil buggers. If we can't and don't keep an exact eye on them, they'll certainly get up to no good.
How refreshing it would be to clean house and build a political culture like that expressed by the Dutch policeman in the article: transparency makes governance easier.
well, it's not in spain, but pretty sure provence is close enough to pump out the mediterranean and re-seal the pillars of hercules and the suez. the best farmland is on the bottom near Rome and Marseille and Istanbul. but best be sure to have a boat handy in case pesky eco-terrorists bomb the fusion plant...
The only way to change this situation is to get a Democratic majority in Congress. Sorry, Republicans and Independents, the Republican majority has already substantially demonstrated they have no interest in protecting and upholding the Constitution. They must out. A Democratic majority will investigate and impeach, and the Republic will be safe once again. Conservatives have an edge in SCOTUS; fine, they can stay for a while so we have balance again. But the administration and corrupt members of Congress must be impeached and imprisoned.
How do you make this happen? Work for a Democratic candidate where you live and help elect them. If you're in New York, there's a great organization called New Democratic Majority (newdemmajority.org) that has been working since 2003 on the grassroots level to win seats back from Republicans. Elsewhere there are lots of organizations working on the same thing. Pick one and pitch in. Personally, I like grassroots because you can do more interesting things than stuff envelopes, but pick whatever suits your fancy. Just do something. Heck, even if you're a disaffected Republican, it's really important to the future of the country that you put your shoulder to the wheel too. There are lots of groups that aren't loosie-goosie hippy-cum-bleeding hearts, in fact. Most are eminently reasonable and pragmatic.
Just do it!
wonder if they're reconsidering their uncritical coverage of the Bush agenda? maybe they're finally catching up to where most of us have been since 2 years before Bush was selected president the first time around, ie. that their agenda portends nothing good for the future of the American republic and human rights generally?
republican majority delenda est...
from the Christian Science Monitor. It's like they're right there where the action is, except 16 years later.
They had articles about this back during the Usenet days. And this is news how?
Sorry if this has been discussed in the past, but what prevents recipients of spam from turning around and nuking the spammer's machine into oblivion? If you spam 10,000 machines, and then they turn around and tell you to quit it, repeatedly, until you stop, then mathematically it would seem the culprit's machine would be rapidly overwhelmed.
By historical necessity. When you start out as a frontier society spending every day in the hard-scrabble for existence, that sort of experience leaves a deep impression for generations. Voters in the West do support tightening the purse strings. You may recall that Ross Perot's central theme was paying off the national debt. He did very well across the western states.
On other economic issues, too, people in the West are unhappy with the way things are going. It's not like the urban centers where public transportation is available. Across the whole of the West everyone drives very long distances to shop, work, and all the other things Americans do. So $3/gallon bites hard. Plus the price of natural gas, which a great many people switched to during the 80's to avoid the high price of oil, has skyrocketed as well. Had the past winter been colder, you would have seen a tremendous uproar over the price of heating. As it was, it hurt too.
There are right-wing pseudo-Christian elements in the West, to be sure, but voters are more independent than anything and supported Republicans where they did more on economic issues. But now the divide is widening.
Agreed. Where there's smoke, there's fire. I hope people keep after government spying. It brought down one administration, and it can bring down another. Once it starts to unravel, we're going to find out more about the vast conspiracy that is the neo-con movement, from rigging the ballot to treason to war profiteering and on and on. It will shake the republic to its very roots. But once we excise them from the body politic and expunge their backers (the ultra-wealthy who are behind it all), we'll be a much stronger country. See, those people think they're born with the divine right of kings and think they can command the rest of us like sheep. What they fail and have ever failed to understand is that America's strength is in her people.
until he retracted his comments. cutting the purse strings would be a nice way to force this little police state program into the light. god, let's hope the democrats win a majority in the fall. the republican party is out of control.
I was excited about a new RPG until hitting the line "Just as in the original, you'll find yourself traveling with Sora, Donald, and Goofy to various world representing Disney movies. Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King are among the properties on display."
Disney has over-merchandized itself for years. Just don't have the heart to help them do it some more.
But, enjoy...
i see your point about the car. but about the groceries and everything else, try delivery. tipping the grocery delivery man costs a couple bucks. bigger things cost more, but it's still cheaper, way cheaper, than owning a car.
of Human Rights. Clearly ethics, common sense, and human decency are not memes that been internalized by business leaders and politicians enough to know that issues like this are not permissible. We need to update the Bill of Rights and Universal Declaration of Human Rights to make it absolutely crystal clear that these actions are not permissible. Then we should provide harsh penalities for all those who choose to violate them.
The law should read, "under NO circumstances will any RFID tag or chip ever, ever be implanted in a human being," and the penalty for those CEOs or brain-dead MBAs who violate that law should be dispossessed, disenfranchised, and sentenced to hard labor cleaning up pig fecies with occasional breaks so they can be beaten with a clue-stick. The repugnance of this technology should be obvious to people from all segments of the political spectrum, even those right-wing pseudo-Christian jokers for "number of the beast" reasons.
I don't doubt that there are those who think that windmills would ruin their property values. To them I say, gee, windmills didn't seem to hurt Holland too much that way. On a nasty thought, I think that the utilities trying to build the windfarm should have first proposed a garbage or coal-powered plant that would belch thick black soot all over their mansions, and then backed off to a wind farm saying, "OK, OK, FINE! We'll build a wind farm instead."
However, my suspicious side wonders if this isn't a subtle and carefully orchestrated case of Big Oil FUD. Who better to benefit in times of astronomic oil prices when the public is screaming to politicians then to point to these anti-wind groups and say, see, they're no better.
it's not a rant, it's pure chicago school economics. the "value" of intellectual property is not market driven, but a result of government interference in the markets in the form of "copyright" and "intellectual property." so trying to settle on the value of software by looking for its market price is flawed because as it stands today, that "market price" is actually a monopoly rent sanctioned by an interventionist government. if you wanted to get to the true market price, you'd do better to find out what pirated versions of windows are going for in silk alley in beijing, which is the cost of burning a cd plus whatever surplus they can get people to pay for. under classical economics, however, in a free market the price of a good or service will get competed to the point where price=marginal cost, or where profit=price-marginal cost=0.
yeah, but the marginal cost of production of IP is zero, so in a true free market without government interference the market price should and would be competed to the point where profit is zero, or a price of zero. that's why invoking "market economics" to justify the price or cost or loss of intellectual "property" is disingenuous and goofy.
Isn't this the deal they were calling Quaoar or some other goofy name? Changing it to 'Xena' now is hardly keeping us abreast of the situation.
i blame the rise in drug use and lawlessness on the teletubbies. have you ever SEEN the baby-faced sun? if that's not a drug-inspired and -inspiring image, i don't know what is.
as an aside, claiming that GTA:SA encourages drug use is silly. everyone knows GTA:SA encourages wreckless driving, beating hookers, assassination, and theft.
Another very impassioned post, and I say right on! But it's still an argument for how we're powerless to do anything. Dunno if you'll see this reply since this is an older topic, but no one in power is ever going to give up their power just to make you happy. You have to take power from them. And speaking as someone who's done it, the hardest part about taking power away from them is convincing yourself you can. Once you've done that, it's as easy as stealing candy from a baby to take them down. A lot of work, to be sure, but not intellectually difficult. And a lot of times it's not even all that much work.
So stop Thinking about being active; just Be active. Start locally, if you like. Mayor of your town's a jerk? Get up some friends and neighbors and start a letter-writing campaign. Put out a press release to the local paper--they're always hungry for stories and will likely pick yours up. Start a local political blog and get your friends and neighbors to join.
There are a ton of things you can do by yourself or with just a couple people that can be very effective. If you want someone to bounce ideas off of, drop me an email at dakong27@yahoo.com.
Is to learn to play an instrument and make your own music. As a non-musician I always assumed that learning to play and read notes was a task on par with quantum mechanics, and that it required thousands of hours of lessons and matriculation to Juilliard. It took a lifetime of wanting to learn and 6 years of raging against the RIAA to finally pick up a guitar. And I've discovered that it's really, really easy to learn, and in less than a week of noodling around for an hour here or there you can pick up enough chords to play a large swath of rock 'n' roll. It's also quite fun.
And as you play your happy little tunes you also get a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that you've become the RIAA's ultimate nightmare, an artistically and culturally liberated producer of music who will never again have need of their crap.
What I find fascinating is that in America these days people think that being an employee means you're a serf or slave, with your own identity/rights/privacy/humanity suspended during working hours, as though you suddenly cease to have a family or civic/religious obligations. In actual fact, if people are unable to perform at least minimal maintenance of those outside obligations during the day, then society and business break down even quicker than not. Because if you can't tell the delivery man to leave the package with the building superintendant, then you have to take a whole day off to receive a package and the business loses your work for the whole day instead of the 10 minutes you need to place the call.
There are so many. If cities would build decent public transportation that went radially as well as from suburbs to city centers, so many good things would happen. First, every household would have an extra couple hundred dollars a month that they're not spending on car payments, car insurance, gasoline, repairs, parking, tolls, and maintenance. Second, instead of playing chicken and road rage on the way to and from work every day, commuters could read a book or the paper or whatever, and generally arrive far less stressed out. And maybe they'd get a little exercise in walking to and from the station, with all the good things that that confers. With fewer people driving, there'd be less wear-and-tear on the roads, which means there would be fewer levies and taxes to repair them. Fewer people driving means fewer people dying in auto accidents. With fewer people driving, there would be a drop in demand for oil. That does a lot of good things, like bringing down the cost of plane tickets and consumer goods that have petroleum-based components (plastic, anyone?). And oh yeah, take the heat out of the oil market and suddenly all the money that Saudi Arabia and others flow to terrorists goes away. And oh yeah, fewer people driving also helps the environment.
we can do something about it. Voting is not bullshit, and neither is taking action. That's the first and best way that the powers-that-be defeat you, by convincing you that you are powerless to fight them. In reality, we hold all the cards and only have to do a very little to upset their applecart. But first, this "the whole system's rigged and there's nothing we can do about it" whine has to be thrown right out. If you're smart, and I'm assuming you are, and motivated, which I gather from your post you are, then you have everything you need to change the country. Get online and do a little reading about citizen activism. Join the millions of us who already have and are actively working to bring these bastards down.
And in addition to that, I humbly submit that we should form a class action suit to sue the Department of Justice and the United States for violating our constitutional rights, since the current crop of congressmen don't seem terribly interested in upholding the Constitution. If we can get members of the Slashdot community to sign on, that's already a sizeable body. And I say we sue for damages of $10,000K each. That would quickly bankrupt the entire anti-American Republican movement.
To those who are pooh-poohing this story, there have been congressional white papers that document China's widespread efforts to acquire technology and intelligence. The one I read in 1998 detailed how they're using non-intelligence service channels (ie. industrial espionage, etc) to collect that information. But why is that surprising? The CIA's done similar things in the past, so thinking that China, which is expressly expansionist, would not use every means they can think of to strengthen their hand in the looming showdown over Taiwan, is pretty naive.
d f
Check out page 39 in this: http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/20030730chinaex.p
I read the EW review yesterday, and it sounds awesome. I never go to musicals or opera hardly, but I'd go see this. Unfortunately, it's not going to come to New York for at least 18 months.