Re-read some of your 'arguments' please. Your logic is like a seive. With a dent and an opinionated lean in one side.
If you don't want it online, don't put it online. Google has very little info on me, as I can verify via a quick search or three. If you're responsible with your information, you have no worries.
This seems to sum up your position, which, if I may paraphrase, boils down to, "To avoid predators, one should be careful." I should point out that this argument does not take away from the fact that Google is using predatory tactics which have the potential to do harm. This was the whole point of the argument and as such, your 'debunking', (what little of it there actually was), doesn't do anything to gainsay the main thesis.
What do you expect me to search for? "Trade Center Hoax?" Nothing comes up but some really whacked out theories that can be torn to shreds in seconds.
Oh, come on. NOBODY is that stupid. And I bet you didn't even do that search. Use some imagination, friend. And sorry, but it WILL take some work to sort through the mountains of information, because yes, some of it is bunk.
I see, you can't be bothered to tell me any evidence to back up extraordinary claims. What's that saying about extraordinary evidence? I see none, ordinary or not, and your refusal to even give a single shred of a starting point is a good indicator you're trolling.
Nonsense. This is just another of the bits of social programming used to keep people asleep. What's wrong with good, old fashioned, 'evidence'? What exactly is 'extraordinary evidence' anyway?
I could provide you with many links, many bits of refined thinking. You think a 'willfully paranoid' like me hasn't done a ton of thinking and reading? Psh. But guess what? I am not the one suffering from ignorance here. And read this part carefully: Those who have knowledge do not owe you anything. I do not care what you go away believing. It would certainly be nice if you woke up, but if you want to defend your ignorance as though it were some sort of valued prize, then fine. I lose nothing in this, and you gain nothing. It's not a contest. If you honestly want to know, then I'll provide you with some links. But you want to play king of the mountain. The hell with that. I have better things to spend my energy on.
Indeed, this is another piece of social programming, designed to keep you sitting on your duff, doing nothing to educate yourself, waiting for the Authority Figures on Television to give you nicely packaged answers. Lazy! -And entirely ineffectual, since the Authority Figures on Television have a vested interest in keeping you really, really dumb.
This kind of thinking has been encouraged by the decades of television legal drama, where the juries (you), are sequestered from the public, sit in boxes (couches), and are only allowed to look at the little stage show presentation of argument and debate with zero access to the world of information beyond.
Guess what? It is UP TO YOU to learn. YOU must look at the greater world, and not whine when people don't provide you with 'extraordinary evidence' which they spent time and energy collecting and thinking about. With your attitudes, you don't deserve to know what is really going on.
But you'll probably just go away thinking, "Ah. He is scared to show his information for fear that my superior debating wit will flatten him."
Whatever. Go back to sleep. Enjoy the coming draft. The sooner you get blown up by an Iraqi, (Syrian, Iranian, Saudi) RPG, the happier you'll be. Can't get any more asleep than 'dead'.
Just because we don't celebrate it here, doesn't mean it's not significant to the English.
Yes. I know. It's an annual celebration in England.
I was referring to the fact that Bush timed his visit so that he could profit from the event in such a way. Guy Fawkes would never get press coverage in America otherwise.
Was it perhaps because Bush was visiting England on the anniversary of the event?
This was just another bullshit promotional activity for the Bush reich, and as per usual, everybody is swallowing it whole. "Ooooh. Terrorists are scaaaaaaary! I don't want my rights and freedoms anymore."
I think my favorite part is that Fawkes was caught through century-old law enforcement practices (which did not include RFIDing every man, woman and child in the country), while the FBI of three years ago were very deliberately prevented by higher-ups from stopping 9-11 in the regular course of their jobs. (Couldn't have the know-nothing, bottom-teir officers getting in the way of the biggest power-grab in recent history, now could we?)
Conrad Black isn't just a pawn of big business, he IS big business. (Not to mention that the National Post is one of the downright dumbest rags I've ever read. It's on par with the freekin' Toronto Sun with it's half-nude girl on the inside front cover.)
Anybody who takes this kind of research without any comparative thought, or any digging into the allegiances of its authors, publishers and promoters, is being foolhardy. --Many people do not realize that having a well-researched and ground-breaking paper is only half the battle; you need to promote it or it will simply vanish into mist. And who, typically, has all the money for promotion. . ?
The point of Kyoto was to reduce industrial air pollution. To say that reducing industrial air pollution is a bad idea because, "We don't have reliable proof that air pollution causes environmental damage," is either fraudulent or outright insane. --I'm not sure if there is a difference.
(A quick All-The-Web search turned it up several times over on various campus pages. It's real.)
As much as a twit like Strauss deserves it, please refrain from crap-flooding his address. People like him tend to not be able to deal well with criticism in the first place, which means it is more than likely that he'll just ignore all his incoming email once he realizes that the internet is a two-way street. To blast a fool like him, you need to be subtle. Like emailing him the address to the slashdot article for instance. ..
Those denial balloons are sure hard to penetrate, but curiosity always kills the cat!
Mountains of evidence? I'd like to meet you in person, just so that I can call you a liar to your face. I haven't seen a pebble of evidence, even a boulder, let alone a mountain. Please point me to this missing mountain.
Are you serious. . !? It'd be that big elephant shaped thing in the middle of your living room. Even a half-hearted internet search would give you a year's worth of extensive reading material. Clue in, my man!
the fact that almost nothing would be gained by the government for doing it.
Oh. I see. You're being willfully blind. Nevermind then. Carry on. I'm sure Haliburton and Carlyle will sing you back to sleep.
1. Google's immortal cookie: Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don't already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.
2. Google records everything they can: For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."
3. Google retains all data indefinitely: Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.
4. Google won't say why they need this data: Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.
5. Google hires spooks: Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.
6. Google's toolbar is spyware: With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that's only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a massive security risk.
7. Google's cache copy is illegal: Judging from Ninth Circuit precedent on the application of U.S. copyright laws to the Internet, Google's cache copy appears to be illegal. The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site. Surfers like the cache, but webmasters don't. Many webmasters have deleted questionable material from their sites, only to discover later that the problem pages live merrily on in Google's cache. The cache copy should be "opt-in" for webmasters, not "opt-out."
8. Google is not your friend: Young, stupid script kiddies and many bloggers still think Google is "way kool," so by now Google enjoys a 75 percent monopoly for all external referrals to most websites. No webmaster can avoid seeking Google's approval these days, assuming he wants to increase traffic to his site. If he tries to take advantage of some of the known weaknesses in Google's semi-secret algorithms, he may find himself penalized by Google, and his traffic disappears. There are no detailed, published standards issued by Google, and there is no appeal process for penalized sites. Google is completely unaccountable. Most of the time they don't even answer email from webmasters.
9. Google is a privacy time bomb: With 200 million searches per day, most from outside the U.S., Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washing
I would wager that people are even MORE suceptible today than they were 65 years ago. Education standards have dropped. With convenience food making people slow, fat and stupid, with television, videogames, anti-depressants. . , the list goes on and on; many people are dumb as dirt today.
You are correct in your mention of terrorist threats.
When we consider 9-11, we see that there is a mountain of credible evidence, a mountain of very legitimate yet unanswered questions, and a government with an obvious track record of lying, all of which points to 9-11 being, at best, something other than what was advertised, and at worst, a deliberate fabrication designed to create specific social responses. And yet most people still believe without any question that 9-11 was what Bush tells them it was, and they believe this through exactly the same systems War of the Worlds used. --The only difference being that with 9-11 there were no disclaimers, and they actually blew some stuff up for effect.
Heck, certain think-tanks spent a lot of time studying the data collected from the War of the Worlds radio play fall-out specifically to study how better to advertise products and sell government spin to the public.
I seem to recall that those weapons were found and destroyed after the first Gulf War, and that inspectors were unable to find any new WMDs before the dawn of the second.
But I suppose some people just love their fictional radio broadcasts too much to bother looking at the 'complicated' truth.
im talking about putting on a show (using a style like Well's) to get the public into thinking a war is going on, in some cases right down the street
Of course it's possible.
Social patterns information was collected and studied after Well's radio play fallout. I've seen papers written by university and advertising think-tanks citing such data on the subject of how to effectively fool a population into specific behavior patterns.
People are actually more susceptible today than they were 65 years ago. People have far less capacity today for critical thought, and moreover, they have been convinced that the opposite is true.
One can indeed point to 9-11 which included cool explosions, (special effects), to work its nasty magic. Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, most people still completely believe that 9-11 was not a deliberate fabrication, and they believe this based on nothing more than the network news casts they watch.
Another way of looking at it is to observe how advertising works; it is demonstrated on a daily basis that one can create powerful behavioral responses based on entirely manufactured stimuli.
This scam has been pulled off with many incrementing steps. .,
"Thank you for your $10,000, but now we need another $8,000 because of this new snag."
Worry of offending and thus losing the investment/s already made, lures people into upping the ante many times, probably while their stomach juices become increasingly more acidic and they tell themselves ever larger lies so as to be reassured that they are not being ripped off.
In some cases, people have finally been invited/persuaded to fly into Nigeria to settle the matter, (or wherever the scam is based), and have there been kidnapped and held for ransom.
There are dangerous, organized and well-funded people behind this scam. I hear they didn't just arrest some asshole in Australia, but an international ring of assholes. May they burn together in flaming tar for a thousand years.
Somebody here already noted. . . "You can't scam an honest person." --Unfortunately, this is not true. I know people who would from their kindness want to loan money with no hope or desire for reward in order to help somebody out.
Greed is certainly a big, big lure, but Vigilance and Knowledge are also required to ensure safety. I have a rule of thumb: "Never help a greedy person. Never help those who won't help themselves." --Rendering help to a selfish person means there is no chance of the favor being returned to you or anybody else, thus any energy spent in this way is simply sucked out of circulation. Pointless. "Pay It Forward" works wonderfully, but only if people actively avoid assholes and vampires.
This scam has been pulled off with many incrementing steps,
"Thank you for your $4,000, but now we need another $10,000 because of this new snag."
Worry of offending and thus losing the investment already made, lures people into upping the ante many times.
In some cases, people have finally been invited/persuaded to fly into Nigeria to settle the matter, (or wherever the scam is based), and have there been kidnapped and held for ransom.
There are dangerous, organized people behind this scam, and I seriously doubt that one guy being arrested in Australia is the solution. It sounds as though your pot-smoking friend got off easy, probably because he paid so much up front. He didn't end up dead in Nigeria.
all who wear the official hacker logo could be quickly and easily recognized as the weak-willed, wanna-be, babe-in-the-woods, "I-crave-acceptence" children that they are. And it should bloody well be tatooed to their foreheads.
This story IS a joke, right? It's April out there, right?
If you don't know why this idea is a top runner for the most ridiculous proposal EVER, then you would do the world a favor by falling on your sword. Logos are the pinacle of everything a true Hacker exists to defy.
There is a balance, you see. ..
When Chaos reins, the Hero is called upon to bring order. But when it is Order which threatens life, as it does today, it is the Thief, Hermit and the Vagabond we turn to for salvation, or we will surly perish.
I agree with you! So can I be part of your club? All the members could be given a unique number and bar code, each different, each an expression of our individuality!
Possibly. Possibly. I certainly hope you're right, but we have yet to see how the bulk of Americans react.
The trick is that there is a difference between secrets and conspiracies. A conspiracy of this type comes about when a group agrees to do something to the public without public consent. A few people often do become aware, but if they are generally ignored by the vast public, then larger consent has not been altered, and the conspiracy is still a success.
In Diebold's case, I think there is still a very good chance that the American public will simply refuse to inform themselves or do anything about the issue of bad voting machines.
I think this will be a really interesting test, since I agree, it seems that the flame of awareness is in fact reaching critical mass on this subject. But I am an optimist.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst. We're not even close to being out of the woods yet!
I'll admit that *small* conspiracies do exist, but large ones do not. Try as they may, few rational people believe that the holocost took place
Okay. Two things here.
1. If Diebold is small, then what do you think counts as big?
2. Try asking the average person, "How many non-Jews died in the Holocaust?" A great deal of time, money and resource has been funneled into shaping the general belief that only Jews were killed by the millions, when this is by no means the truth.
Thus, it's not so much about denial as it is spin to serve agendas.
I don't like the word 'Conspiracy' because it too has been the target of spin and social programming. When the word 'Conspiracy' comes up in casual conversation with regular muggles, people shudder inwardly and have automatic negative emotional reactions. This is the earmark of standard mind-programming as installed by the media.
This being the case, I prefer to use the word, 'Corruption'. This word has not been linked to automatic fear, repulsion and reactions of denial. Only a truly susceptible person would try to claim that Corruption does not exist.
Or is it a vigilante Right-wing 'justice' sort of head-space which makes you spout so endlessly this apologist crap? (Hard-core K5 asshole, for those who care.)
I sometimes think that guys like you are wind-up toys which the bad guys release into the world to do their damage.
Listen: If Diebold is claiming copyright infringement, it bloody-well means that the documents are legitimate. --Though, when they have enough of the links to the evidence shut down, I'm sure they will start denying everything, just to make you happy.
If Diebold is claiming copyright infringement, they are admitting that the memos are real!
I heard a story once about WWII. --It went like this; when the German death camps were discovered by the Allied forces, one high ranking General, rounded up as many people in his command as possible and marched them through the scene, telling them, "Look at this and do not forget it. People are going to try to deny that this has happened."
You watch. Two years from now, when all the links and documents have been rounded up, there will be people swearing up and down that this Diebold thing is just another loony conspiracy. Just wait. The PR spin will put a rationalized face on it and raise lots of reasonable doubt, etc.
Newsflash: Conspiracies bloody well exist. Those who swear they do not are chumps who think that watching television documentary 'science' shows makes them smart. And amazingly, many of them can also tell you who Joseph Goebbels was as well! (Cuz they learned about it from a television documentary.)
Nonetheless, SCO getting its way would mean several huge nails in the coffins of both Linux and GPL. Conspiracy or not, this would benefit the Masters Of The Universe in utterly enormous ways during a time when these things really, really matter.
This is why I would be interested to know more about the driving personas behind SCO and their associations. --As simple to understand as SCO appears to be. Even if the name players are just your standard, greed-motivated lawyers, then their position in the business world makes them a prime target for use by other parties who do have specific agendas. 50 million dollars appearing from thin air is fairly clear evidence of this, I think. ($25 million of which isn't public record.)
I don't much care for the word, 'Conspiracy'. I prefer to use the word 'Corruption' because people haven't been programmed into believing that it doesn't exist.
If one smells fishy smells, it usually means there is a rotting fish somewhere.
Anyway, thank you for responding with a real post. It is appreciated.
If you have a difference of opinion, please state it rather than call me names. This is a discussion board, after all, and I don't think my post was being deliberately chip-on-the-shoulder-ish.
I really would like to know the connections of the people running SCO, and I think my observations are entirely valid.
Slashdot Mirror
My appologies. (Savor it. I don't screw up like this normally.)
-FL
My appologies.
-FL
Debunking? Try crap-flooding.
Re-read some of your 'arguments' please. Your logic is like a seive. With a dent and an opinionated lean in one side.
If you don't want it online, don't put it online. Google has very little info on me, as I can verify via a quick search or three. If you're responsible with your information, you have no worries.
This seems to sum up your position, which, if I may paraphrase, boils down to, "To avoid predators, one should be careful." I should point out that this argument does not take away from the fact that Google is using predatory tactics which have the potential to do harm. This was the whole point of the argument and as such, your 'debunking', (what little of it there actually was), doesn't do anything to gainsay the main thesis.
But thanks for playing.
-FL
Oh, come on. NOBODY is that stupid. And I bet you didn't even do that search. Use some imagination, friend. And sorry, but it WILL take some work to sort through the mountains of information, because yes, some of it is bunk.
I see, you can't be bothered to tell me any evidence to back up extraordinary claims. What's that saying about extraordinary evidence? I see none, ordinary or not, and your refusal to even give a single shred of a starting point is a good indicator you're trolling.
Nonsense. This is just another of the bits of social programming used to keep people asleep. What's wrong with good, old fashioned, 'evidence'? What exactly is 'extraordinary evidence' anyway?
I could provide you with many links, many bits of refined thinking. You think a 'willfully paranoid' like me hasn't done a ton of thinking and reading? Psh. But guess what? I am not the one suffering from ignorance here. And read this part carefully: Those who have knowledge do not owe you anything. I do not care what you go away believing. It would certainly be nice if you woke up, but if you want to defend your ignorance as though it were some sort of valued prize, then fine. I lose nothing in this, and you gain nothing. It's not a contest. If you honestly want to know, then I'll provide you with some links. But you want to play king of the mountain. The hell with that. I have better things to spend my energy on.
Indeed, this is another piece of social programming, designed to keep you sitting on your duff, doing nothing to educate yourself, waiting for the Authority Figures on Television to give you nicely packaged answers. Lazy! -And entirely ineffectual, since the Authority Figures on Television have a vested interest in keeping you really, really dumb.
This kind of thinking has been encouraged by the decades of television legal drama, where the juries (you), are sequestered from the public, sit in boxes (couches), and are only allowed to look at the little stage show presentation of argument and debate with zero access to the world of information beyond.
Guess what? It is UP TO YOU to learn. YOU must look at the greater world, and not whine when people don't provide you with 'extraordinary evidence' which they spent time and energy collecting and thinking about. With your attitudes, you don't deserve to know what is really going on.
But you'll probably just go away thinking, "Ah. He is scared to show his information for fear that my superior debating wit will flatten him."
Whatever. Go back to sleep. Enjoy the coming draft. The sooner you get blown up by an Iraqi, (Syrian, Iranian, Saudi) RPG, the happier you'll be. Can't get any more asleep than 'dead'.
Knowledge protects. Ignorance endangers.
-FL
Yes. I know. It's an annual celebration in England.
I was referring to the fact that Bush timed his visit so that he could profit from the event in such a way. Guy Fawkes would never get press coverage in America otherwise.
-FL
This was just another bullshit promotional activity for the Bush reich, and as per usual, everybody is swallowing it whole. "Ooooh. Terrorists are scaaaaaaary! I don't want my rights and freedoms anymore."
I think my favorite part is that Fawkes was caught through century-old law enforcement practices (which did not include RFIDing every man, woman and child in the country), while the FBI of three years ago were very deliberately prevented by higher-ups from stopping 9-11 in the regular course of their jobs. (Couldn't have the know-nothing, bottom-teir officers getting in the way of the biggest power-grab in recent history, now could we?)
-FL
Conrad Black isn't just a pawn of big business, he IS big business. (Not to mention that the National Post is one of the downright dumbest rags I've ever read. It's on par with the freekin' Toronto Sun with it's half-nude girl on the inside front cover.)
Anybody who takes this kind of research without any comparative thought, or any digging into the allegiances of its authors, publishers and promoters, is being foolhardy. --Many people do not realize that having a well-researched and ground-breaking paper is only half the battle; you need to promote it or it will simply vanish into mist. And who, typically, has all the money for promotion. . ?
The point of Kyoto was to reduce industrial air pollution. To say that reducing industrial air pollution is a bad idea because, "We don't have reliable proof that air pollution causes environmental damage," is either fraudulent or outright insane. --I'm not sure if there is a difference.
-FL
(A quick All-The-Web search turned it up several times over on various campus pages. It's real.)
As much as a twit like Strauss deserves it, please refrain from crap-flooding his address. People like him tend to not be able to deal well with criticism in the first place, which means it is more than likely that he'll just ignore all his incoming email once he realizes that the internet is a two-way street. To blast a fool like him, you need to be subtle. Like emailing him the address to the slashdot article for instance. .
Those denial balloons are sure hard to penetrate, but curiosity always kills the cat!
Cheers!
-FL
Are you serious. . !? It'd be that big elephant shaped thing in the middle of your living room. Even a half-hearted internet search would give you a year's worth of extensive reading material. Clue in, my man!
the fact that almost nothing would be gained by the government for doing it.
Oh. I see. You're being willfully blind. Nevermind then. Carry on. I'm sure Haliburton and Carlyle will sing you back to sleep.
-FL
I would wager that people are even MORE suceptible today than they were 65 years ago. Education standards have dropped. With convenience food making people slow, fat and stupid, with television, videogames, anti-depressants. . , the list goes on and on; many people are dumb as dirt today.
You are correct in your mention of terrorist threats.
When we consider 9-11, we see that there is a mountain of credible evidence, a mountain of very legitimate yet unanswered questions, and a government with an obvious track record of lying, all of which points to 9-11 being, at best, something other than what was advertised, and at worst, a deliberate fabrication designed to create specific social responses. And yet most people still believe without any question that 9-11 was what Bush tells them it was, and they believe this through exactly the same systems War of the Worlds used. --The only difference being that with 9-11 there were no disclaimers, and they actually blew some stuff up for effect.
Heck, certain think-tanks spent a lot of time studying the data collected from the War of the Worlds radio play fall-out specifically to study how better to advertise products and sell government spin to the public.
-FL
I seem to recall that those weapons were found and destroyed after the first Gulf War, and that inspectors were unable to find any new WMDs before the dawn of the second.
But I suppose some people just love their fictional radio broadcasts too much to bother looking at the 'complicated' truth.
-FL
Of course it's possible.
Social patterns information was collected and studied after Well's radio play fallout. I've seen papers written by university and advertising think-tanks citing such data on the subject of how to effectively fool a population into specific behavior patterns.
People are actually more susceptible today than they were 65 years ago. People have far less capacity today for critical thought, and moreover, they have been convinced that the opposite is true.
One can indeed point to 9-11 which included cool explosions, (special effects), to work its nasty magic. Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, most people still completely believe that 9-11 was not a deliberate fabrication, and they believe this based on nothing more than the network news casts they watch.
Another way of looking at it is to observe how advertising works; it is demonstrated on a daily basis that one can create powerful behavioral responses based on entirely manufactured stimuli.
-FL
"It was? By who?"
-FL
"Thank you for your $10,000, but now we need another $8,000 because of this new snag."
Worry of offending and thus losing the investment/s already made, lures people into upping the ante many times, probably while their stomach juices become increasingly more acidic and they tell themselves ever larger lies so as to be reassured that they are not being ripped off.
In some cases, people have finally been invited/persuaded to fly into Nigeria to settle the matter, (or wherever the scam is based), and have there been kidnapped and held for ransom.
There are dangerous, organized and well-funded people behind this scam. I hear they didn't just arrest some asshole in Australia, but an international ring of assholes. May they burn together in flaming tar for a thousand years.
Somebody here already noted. . . "You can't scam an honest person." --Unfortunately, this is not true. I know people who would from their kindness want to loan money with no hope or desire for reward in order to help somebody out.
Greed is certainly a big, big lure, but Vigilance and Knowledge are also required to ensure safety. I have a rule of thumb: "Never help a greedy person. Never help those who won't help themselves." --Rendering help to a selfish person means there is no chance of the favor being returned to you or anybody else, thus any energy spent in this way is simply sucked out of circulation. Pointless. "Pay It Forward" works wonderfully, but only if people actively avoid assholes and vampires.
-FL
"Thank you for your $4,000, but now we need another $10,000 because of this new snag."
Worry of offending and thus losing the investment already made, lures people into upping the ante many times.
In some cases, people have finally been invited/persuaded to fly into Nigeria to settle the matter, (or wherever the scam is based), and have there been kidnapped and held for ransom.
There are dangerous, organized people behind this scam, and I seriously doubt that one guy being arrested in Australia is the solution. It sounds as though your pot-smoking friend got off easy, probably because he paid so much up front. He didn't end up dead in Nigeria.
-FL
You Frickin' Loser.
-FL
This story IS a joke, right? It's April out there, right?
If you don't know why this idea is a top runner for the most ridiculous proposal EVER, then you would do the world a favor by falling on your sword. Logos are the pinacle of everything a true Hacker exists to defy.
There is a balance, you see. .
When Chaos reins, the Hero is called upon to bring order. But when it is Order which threatens life, as it does today, it is the Thief, Hermit and the Vagabond we turn to for salvation, or we will surly perish.
Heros don't use open source.
-FL
We could pin them on our team jackets, n' stuff!
I MUST BELONG!!!!
-FL
Possibly. Possibly. I certainly hope you're right, but we have yet to see how the bulk of Americans react.
The trick is that there is a difference between secrets and conspiracies. A conspiracy of this type comes about when a group agrees to do something to the public without public consent. A few people often do become aware, but if they are generally ignored by the vast public, then larger consent has not been altered, and the conspiracy is still a success.
In Diebold's case, I think there is still a very good chance that the American public will simply refuse to inform themselves or do anything about the issue of bad voting machines.
I think this will be a really interesting test, since I agree, it seems that the flame of awareness is in fact reaching critical mass on this subject. But I am an optimist.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst. We're not even close to being out of the woods yet!
-FL
Okay. Two things here.
1. If Diebold is small, then what do you think counts as big?
2. Try asking the average person, "How many non-Jews died in the Holocaust?" A great deal of time, money and resource has been funneled into shaping the general belief that only Jews were killed by the millions, when this is by no means the truth.
Thus, it's not so much about denial as it is spin to serve agendas.
I don't like the word 'Conspiracy' because it too has been the target of spin and social programming. When the word 'Conspiracy' comes up in casual conversation with regular muggles, people shudder inwardly and have automatic negative emotional reactions. This is the earmark of standard mind-programming as installed by the media.
This being the case, I prefer to use the word, 'Corruption'. This word has not been linked to automatic fear, repulsion and reactions of denial. Only a truly susceptible person would try to claim that Corruption does not exist.
-FL
Or is it a vigilante Right-wing 'justice' sort of head-space which makes you spout so endlessly this apologist crap? (Hard-core K5 asshole, for those who care.)
I sometimes think that guys like you are wind-up toys which the bad guys release into the world to do their damage.
Listen: If Diebold is claiming copyright infringement, it bloody-well means that the documents are legitimate. --Though, when they have enough of the links to the evidence shut down, I'm sure they will start denying everything, just to make you happy.
-FL
I heard a story once about WWII. --It went like this; when the German death camps were discovered by the Allied forces, one high ranking General, rounded up as many people in his command as possible and marched them through the scene, telling them, "Look at this and do not forget it. People are going to try to deny that this has happened."
You watch. Two years from now, when all the links and documents have been rounded up, there will be people swearing up and down that this Diebold thing is just another loony conspiracy. Just wait. The PR spin will put a rationalized face on it and raise lots of reasonable doubt, etc.
Newsflash: Conspiracies bloody well exist. Those who swear they do not are chumps who think that watching television documentary 'science' shows makes them smart. And amazingly, many of them can also tell you who Joseph Goebbels was as well! (Cuz they learned about it from a television documentary.)
-FL
Nonetheless, SCO getting its way would mean several huge nails in the coffins of both Linux and GPL. Conspiracy or not, this would benefit the Masters Of The Universe in utterly enormous ways during a time when these things really, really matter.
This is why I would be interested to know more about the driving personas behind SCO and their associations. --As simple to understand as SCO appears to be. Even if the name players are just your standard, greed-motivated lawyers, then their position in the business world makes them a prime target for use by other parties who do have specific agendas. 50 million dollars appearing from thin air is fairly clear evidence of this, I think. ($25 million of which isn't public record.)
I don't much care for the word, 'Conspiracy'. I prefer to use the word 'Corruption' because people haven't been programmed into believing that it doesn't exist.
If one smells fishy smells, it usually means there is a rotting fish somewhere.
Anyway, thank you for responding with a real post. It is appreciated.
-FL
I really would like to know the connections of the people running SCO, and I think my observations are entirely valid.
-FL