I was in Baghdad and in Kabul and Uzbekistan over the past few years (post invasion for both), and there *are* people that want nothing more than our destruction and subjugation.
So what? You gonna kill anyone who wants to kill you. They gonna kill anyone who they think wants to kill them. You're both gonna go at each other with tanks and guns and die inefficiently over time. Nobody will win, but you'll all manage to increase your likelihood of dying young nicely. The more you fight back, the higher the death rate. You're driving the statistics upward with every gunshot. Kill a terrorist, make two. Kill a terrorist-hating American, make two. It's a simple calculation that some people seem unable to get.
Someone has told you you can win. They're wrong. It's not any "different" this time, it's not any more "moral" this time, it's not any more "winnable" this time, it just goes on until old generations die out and new generations choose new enemies.
No need to tell me to read about the Middle East, my thesis was about the role of women in Palestinian terrorism and their socialization into ranks. I have done the fieldwork and I am very familiar. You might do better to listen to the blogs. Many of them are on the ground, as opposed to the mainstream media, who are in the hotels.
All your mentality does is create statistically significant forms of death from forms of death that began as statistically insignificant and could have been largely eliminated altogether with better policy administration and strategic and economic concessions. Yes, I know that conservatives hate concessions; the goal is to rule the world, naturally, and once you have gained a patch of ground, heaven forbid you should cede it to anyone else.
Some of this is a biblical mentality, some of it is a consumerist mentality, some of it is just postcolonial "protect the noble savage."
And stuff your false pity for the deaths in NY. "Statistically Insignificant" is for jackasses liek you. Suppose a terrorist were to sniper shoot you in the head. Thats "Statistically insignificant" but very important to you and anyoen that values life and freedom.
This is where you lose me. Someone shoots me in the head, the last thing I'm going to want to do is destroy all of society in the interest of getting revenge or trying to create a perfectly safe police state that won't manage to stop death anyway. If that's what I wanted, *I'd* be the jackass. I'm just one guy. It's not worth it. Is it worth destroying all of American society over three thousand American deaths? How many Americans die each year as the result of gun crimes? Poor health care? Are we prepared to dismantle a nation over those as well? Is that what the victims would want?
That's precisely what is going on here. Many, many more people are being made to suffer, and not just Americans. Entire ways of life are in danger of ending simply because a statistically insignificant number of people and their families are unable to cope with the fact that life is dangerous, murderers have always been around, helmets are required, and you may die young. Sure, get the murderers. But don't become so focused on that task that you are willing to destroy everyone and everything else in the process.
So you manage to wipe out all of "international terrorism" (which is laughable--terrorism is nothing less than a euphemism for "opposition to the status quo," it's a methodology and a location, not a person or people), and you manage to do it at the expense of all freedom, all multiculturalism, all understanding.
You create the perfect, homogenized dictatorship of safety. Guess what? Some people are still gonna die. Some people are still gonna die young. And more people will still die young by falling off their ladders than ever would have died thanks to some brown, foriegn boogeyman that terrifies the white post-colonialists.
Current American policy is racism, it's isolationism, its overreaction, its self-destructive policy, its a concession to Old Testament proto-messianism, but what it is not is any kind of assurance of safety, now or later, no matter how "successful" anyone is at it.
You'd be surprised (as I was when I first got to eBay) at the degree to which organized crime, especially in Russia and Romania, work to snag eBay users.
The problem isn't limited to eBay (they go wherever the money is), but it's something I don't think many Slashdotters realize--that there are full-time staffs out there whose only job it is to conduct fraudulent transactions, to formulate spoofs that will get people, to look for potential victims...
It makes them a lot of money. There are so many people out there who fall for the eBay spoofs... and whose high-feedback accounts are immediately taken over by mobsters selling nonexistent $5,000 plasma TVs for $1,200 Buy It Now... which are ended by clueless buyers convinced that by buying on eBay via Western Union money transfer they can actually save $3,800... and who never see their money again. Multiply by 10,000 times a day and you're talking a profit of $12,000,000 every time the sun comes up, give or take.
It's big business and it's primarily being run out of Russia and Romania, with American zombie computers from Windows-based porn and warez users being the middle men sending the bulk of the spoofs, which are as a result untraceable (as though American authorities would have any jurisdiction in Russia/Romania anyway).
Sadly, you're entirely correct. Those that are above the law increasingly accumulate (by leveraging their position) greater power to remain above the law. Capital knows no boundaries and its owners know no laws and ultimately, despite their machinations at any given moment, no "national" affiliation or allegiance. The rest are merely subjects and labor.
People should be reading Marx, not Slashdot, especially given what's going on right now in the Bush administration.
No, there is not. There is an utterly statistically insignificant threat created in the first place only by American votes and American foreign policy, a mistake that conservatives seem to want to compound endlessly until they can build it into a substantive threat.
Well congratulations, given the current stories on NSA spying and the potential for a nuclear war with Iran, I'd say you may have managed to create the substantive threat that you want.
But don't for a moment make the stupid mistake of thinking that it's "terrorism" which is, and will remain, both nebulous and statistically insignificant.
I'm sorry your relatives were stuck by lightning. But contrary to what the American culture of the denial of mortality may tell you, that does not make anti-lighning a good cause to throw your weight behind, in particular when the lightning is your fault in the first place.
You miss the point. The Kuwaiti annexation was precipitated by Bush I. Without there would be no sanctions, no UN programs, no current Iraq war.
The Lancet and other preeminent, *peer-reviewed* medical journals who have published on the subject thanks to the first-hand work of international medical personnel peg the Iraqi civilian death count at 100k or more, and 'Iraqiyun, one of the multiple Iraqi NGOs that actually have to tag the bodies, provide social support, and notify the relatives put it at 128k plus. They are there, on the ground.
Your "facts" are little more than conservative propaganda, as is your notion that the Kuwaiti annexation was entirely Saddam's fault, rather than a calculated miscalculation by the first Bush administration and the defense industry.
Give me a break, it was thanks to Bush One's blessing that Saddam felt that he could invade Kuwait with American support in the first place. Finish the job? Bush I should never have started it. The entire Iraq fiasco from the beginning has been a bow to the military industrial complex and the circle of capital at the top of US economic and military policy.
Stop drinking the Hannitized kool-aid and realize that not only are the numbers already much higher than those the administration give to you, but they will accumulate for many years to come--and that blood is on your hands, the hands of every American, and the hands of US soldiers and administrations.
Read the subject of this thread. It's the truth, only "TRAITORS" should probably be replaced with "CRIMINALS."
The Iraqi body count exceeds 100k, you have been lied to by your government, check the NGO numbers, not the Bush administration numbers. The numbers are much, much higher if you count the years of sanctions.
More to the point, the ends to not justify the means. The damage done by the American administrations to the most highly developed, educated, and secular nation in the middle east will have repercussions for decades, perhaps even centuries to come. Your ilk have successfully destabilized the entire region, increased terrorism tenfold, set back global diplomacy to pre-enlightenment status, and all in order to line their own pockets (though some of you seem to be unable to grasp this fact, despite the lack of WMD, the lack of terrorist ties, the lack of any conceivable other gain, diplomatic or otherwise).
In short, yes, we and the Iraqis were all better off with Saddam. Two wrongs do not make a right, and make no mistake, Bush's wrongs are by far the greater. They should all be on trial for crimes against humanity, but so should the colonialists who fabricated Iraq in the first place, not to mention the ones that unleashed plauges on native Americans as they founded the godforsaken country that would become the US.
People like you have to be stopped. Civil war is coming, since you and people like you will settle for nothing less. Hopefully humanity will win.
You are not dreaming. And the most important thing you can do is to TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY and give them links to these stories (that get buried so quickly) at reputable news sources.
There's still this mentality out there that no matter how much Bush seems to suck, nothing *really wrong* can happen with the US government simply because "this is America," and anyone who says that we're in dire straits is really just a black helicopters tinfoil hat freak.
And all the while, the black helicopters are gathering overhead and the supply of tinfoil to make hats has been silently cut off. Things really are very bad right now (do a little more research into these cases, and into the name Russell Tice, you'll be shocked at what you find) but the public is absolutely unaware of it, and because "big media" won't panic, they refuse to think anyone who does panic is sane.
The best thing any of us can do is go to friends and family who trust our judgment and tell them that things are very, very bad with the US government right now and the 2006 election *may actually be* the last possible turning point, beyond which there is no return.
This genie is not going back in the bottle. We are stuck with these departments and a national information gathering infrastructure that is not only monitoring citizens phones, positions (via cell phone tracking), and habits (via bank/credit account tracking), but that is also strong enough to simply leave 99% of congress in the dark about such operations, and to simply brush off official investigations when the remaining 1% get freaked about what they *do* know.
But what we can do is decide to try to acknowledge and control the genie by selecting the next administration(s) carefully with our votes, rather than conceding to the genie's assurances that genie's don't exist, that nobody that seems to be missing is actually missing, that nobody *really* needs a trial, that torture and secret detention aren't *really* all that bad...
The people who own the media don't have to care about the truth so long as they have the ratings. It is their cash (gained through ratings) that guarantees they will never be subject to any tyrannical regime; they can simply buy their way out of it. They can go to any place on the planet that suits them and live amidst kingly riches.
In fact, protecting their ratings is precisely what they must do, for as long as they can do it, in order to protect this fortune that keeps them above the law, that guarantees their place in international capital, free to go wherever they can buy the lifestyle they want unharassed by officials that are only to happy to have some fraction of their wealthy patronage.
This is why there can never be a useful public information machine in capitalism.
I used to work inside eBay and saw some of the best-crafted phishes around. The phishers used to use our system to get as many official eBay messages as they could, just to be able to clone each of them and have a phish that was "real" in origin so that they could catch people. We gradually had to eliminate email that led back to the site. Some still presents a problem and is being exploited (i.e. the mail forwarding system that buyers/sellers use to communicate is currently being exploited by phishers).
One thing you didn't mention that might even get some slashdotters is that the "@" symbol in a URL is used by most browsers in a way (for authentication) that makes it possible to also spoof domains in a phish link. Try going typing this address (into your URL bar and you'll see what I mean:
http://www.ebay.com@64.236.24.12
Firefox presents a warning in this case because you're being redirected to a site that doesn't require authentication (CNN.com) yet you've provided authentication information. If the destination site (i.e. phish destination) had been crafted to require authentication and accept "www.ebay.com" as valid data, you'd get no warning.
Some of these URLs+site combinations had *very* well-crafted URLs using tricks like this that would almost certainly fool most users who had been told "don't click on a link unless it says it's going to 'ebay.com' in the status bar."
Well, actually, I do mean Wine, but not WineHQ wine. Anyone who wants to run Excel or any other Windows applications on Linux should go straight to http://www.codeweavers.com/ and invest in Crossover Office, which costs very little!
It gives you point-and-click installation (as in insert CD, double-click on "Setup.exe") of Windows applications without having to think about anything. Whatever Windows appls you install end up in a a folder called "Windows Applications" in your K-Menu/GNOME-Menu/etc.
I am a professional writer, editor, and photographer that uses Linux. I have the following Windows applications installed in Fedora Core 5, I use them often, and I know nothing about how to configure Wine:
- Microsoft Office XP Professional (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access) - Adobe Photoshop 7.0 + Adobe Camera RAW - ISL Silkypix 2.0 - PTLens - NeatImage - Apple iTunes
I also have installed, but use less often:
- Internet Explorer 6.0 - Adobe FrameMaker 7.0
These all installed with a simple double-click on Setup.exe after inserting the CD. It's that simple. Combined with Fedora Core, whose recent versions are simple installs that autodetect everything, and Linux is a very easy system to migrate to.
Every member of my parents' household have been converted to Linux+MS Office for their everyday needs (this is both of my parents and all of my siblings), as has a friend who's in management at Intel, a friend who's in nonprofit management, and two friends who are graduate students.
Why did they switch? They're tired of having to reinstall Windows periodically thanks to spyware/hardware upgrades/whatever, tired of having to pay for every little bit of functionality they want (Wanna rip an MP3? shell out $$$. Wanna extrat this kind of archive? Shell out $$$. Wanna copy all your files from your old hard drive to your new hard drive? Shell out $$$.)
The point being: it's easy to run Excel on Linux. If you can afford Excel, Crossover is so cheap as to almost be free, and it's the easiest piece of software you'll ever use. It's been this way for the better part of five years now with Linux+Crossover. To say otherwise is to be disingenuous.
Yesssss! The I-didn't-mean-to-drag thing drives me nuts. In fact, general UI slowness is the thing that keeps me from using Firefox instead of Konqueror a lot of the time.
I know that my processor is "only" 1.3 GHz, but I swear there was a time when a gigahertz-plus CPU was enough to operate a GUI smoothly. But maybe I'm remembering incorrectly...
"Wow, I'm glad I live in the USA and not whatever US you live in."
Welcome to the difference between the red states and the blue states, the red districts and the blue districts. In the red districts, people are sure that all is well and that the biggest problems facing them are taxes and bin Laden. They don't see what goes on in the bluest of the blue areas. They've never even been to those places. Why? Too dangerous. Who in their right mind would go to such bad neighborhoods? Anyone who does deserves what they get! (I won't even begin to start on the racist undertones of this perspective.)
And what of these bluest of the blue areas where the red district people won't go? Aren't they just lazy people? Lazy people who can't be bothered to go out and get rich? Maybe even because those neighborhoods have a "culture" of laziness and wanting a handout? (hmm, there are those racist undertones again...)
Here's some reality for you, Jack: Those neighborhoods are miserable. Just fscking miserable, and the people in them are hopeless. You want to see sorrow? You want to see real sadness and depression? Don't look at ground zero. Look at some of the darker, more forgotten areas in the burrhoughs where suffering festers for decades, across generations, and to the chance to die in a foreign country is seen as some kind of salvation. Do you honestly believe that the US military is full of CEOs and professional sports players who shed a tear one day singing the national anthem and decided to salute the flag? Did you really buy that crap propaganda? If so, you must be living in middle class white bread Nebraska with a Toyota in your driveway and two TVs in your house.
Do I sound bothered and offended by your post? I AM.
Hunger? There's more than hunger going on in the United States. Those neighborhoods you don't believe exist and wouldn't go to even if they did, I'll tell you what, they are dangerous. Every major US city has neighborhoods where hope has run out and there is no practical way for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and improve their lives. If there is no money in a neighborhood anywhere, there is no way for people in the neighborhood to pay one another. There is no business or industry to employ people, or from which people can buy goods or services. There is no economy to speak of in these neighborhoods, and thus no way to improve your lot by participating industriously in it. The only hope is that money will come in from outside the neighborhood in the form of investment -- money to start local businesses that can employ people and sell to people in the area. Only in this great "private enterprise" system that our red state bretheren love so much, private enterprise wants nothing to do with investment in blue districts. You have tens of thousands of people in high-density housing begging someone to come in and invest and create some jobs, and a bunch of Mercedes-driving tycoons from across town who will never visit the 'hood and wouldn't touch any property in it with a ten food pole. Why?
Because a) there's no money there to begin with, so there are no paying customers to support the business, b) there's no chance in hell that well-to-do customers are going to come in from the outside to these areas to shop, c) it'll probably get robbed blind anyway because people are so desperate that they fight like dogs over whatever does come in. And don't blame them for it, you'd try to feed your children, too.
In short, the free market has no interest in urban decay. Gentrification happens here and there thanks to the mechanics of social "cool," but it touches only a minute portion of the poverty and misery while making things worse by fooling rich white suburbanites into thinking that "bad neighborhood" really just means "historic shopping district" and "povery and crime" really just mean "edgy urban renewal chic."
Where are social services? Missing. Overwhelmed. Caught in budget shortfalls and loca
You have not countered what I have said at all. Let me make it very simple for you:
Very few non-com "volunteers" in the military would choose it if they were able to live acceptably outside of it. You say: "I defy you to find a situation where they had fewer opportunities [in the military] than they did in civilian life."Congratulations, you have made exactly the same point I was making. They are in effect conscripts via socioeconomic leverage.
You say that you call bullshit, then you repeat exactly what I said. The military is full of "volunteers" who were marginalized by the upper classes of civilian society, classes happy to maintain a steady stream of grunts to "die for their country," among other unsavory tasks.
Um, I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I'm fairly sure the neocons are not just going to "leave office." Now don't get me wrong, they're not going to hold up the congress with a pistol and say "THIS IS A COUP! EVERYONE IN THE BASEMENT! NOW!"
That would be far too adolescent for words.
No, either they'll push back the presidential term limit and Bush will "win" a third time somehow (most likely under yet *more* suspicious circumstances, just like the last two elections), or there will be "other circumstances" to contend with:
- A terrorist attack that "postpones" the elections - A threat level so high that elections must be "postponed" - A threat level so high that everyone stays home and somehow the supreme court declares that the election results are "invalid" because too few people voted, leading to a "postponement" of the election - A strange and unexplained 95% landslide victory despite Bush's low approval ratings, after which the wacky conservatives once again get on radio and say (rather ironically) "see, the liberal media got it wrong, their polls are rigged" - A resignation of the Speaker of the House with him choosing a high-profile neocon to follow him, followed by "terrorist assassinations" of Bush and Cheney with said neocon suddenly ascending to office and declaring martial law to protect the public
There are any number of scenarios. But you conservatives are out to lunch on this one. You're looking so silly and naive it's bizarre. Lies take us to war. Secret prisons and secret camps. Tortures. Disappearances. Lack of trials. Lack of transparency. Domestic Spying and the Largest Database Ever Built. Corruption investigations of almost every conservative in federal office, with investigations being stymied using Nixonite techniques. The most overextended national currency we've seen since pre-World-War-II.
Your government is being taken over by the Nazi party and you're so busy hating the big city liberals (umm... "Jews" anyone?!) that you're convinced that anyone else who hates them, too, must be on your side.
The comparisons to Weimar are not merely insightful, they're accurate and terrifying.
The people in the US military are hardly volunteers. They're forced via leverage into combat through the realities of class difference.
You're born poor. You get a substandard education because all of the educational dollars and community infrastructure are re-routed to wealthy districts since that's where both the lobbyists and the lawmakers are from since they have the resources to affect policy and ability and access to means to vote while the poor can't even afford to take a day off of work to do so.
Because of this substandard education, you have few prospects in an economy in which labor is moving offshore to line the pockets of the very wealthy through the exploitation of cheap labor. To make things worse, there is NO WORK WHATSOEVER because there is no working economy in your part of town, and you can't afford to commute out of it to the other side of town where the rich people do have a working economy in order to land a job (nevermind the fact that they wouldn't hire you anyway--wrong side of the tracks and all).
But it's a problem to have no prospects, since you live in the inner city and there is no social safety net. There is nowhere for you to grow your own food or improvise shelter, but there is also no social infrastructure to feed you and clothe you, much less provide you and/or your children with basic medical care. You . will . die . prematurely, and so will your children.
BUT... The same Uncle Sam who won't guarantee you BASIC healthcare or fund the security force and investment necessary to help your community to feed itself or jumpstart its economy... comes along and says that if you are willing to carry a gun, he will feed both you *and* your children and provide you medical care and a retirement. Otherwise, you and they will suffer and die young. He promises you that it's safe, you won't die, the numbers are in your favor, our military is ultra-strong and ultra-well-equipped, it's like playing a video game, there's absolutely no risk, plus you'll get to travel and work with computers and get a better education and on-the-job-training and you'll finally have respect instead of being seen as a worthless piece of poor trash, and more to the point your . children . will . eat . and . be . healthy.
What choice do you have? After asking your recruiter again and being promised that it's utterly risk-free, and looking around your dive on the south side and out the window at your graffiti-covered neighborhood with boarded up windows everywhere and drug dealers on every corner, and thinking once more about how you never were able to finish high school because the school was so dangerous you were afraid to go and they didn't actually have any *textbooks* for lack of funding anyway, and you'll never amount to anything and your family has a history of heart disease and cancer and you want to be there for your children... you sign on the dotted line.
And then they send you to Iraq and you die.
And Uncle Sam and his gronies even wealthier thanks to you, a poor person, having been forced into labor at gunpoint to force Iraqis into US service at gunpoint.
And some shmuck posts to Slashdot about how you were happy to do it because you were brave and volunteer-minded.
Hardly deeply meaningful to the average user in the context of general purpose computing. They're new computing vocabulary words whose meanings in this context have been constructed entirely by product design and marketing.
We could rename it from PC-BSD to "Straw Hat OS" or "Purple Badger OS" or "Zeitgeist OS" and it would be the same. It doesn't say any more about the software's function to the average user than "PC-BSD."
You mean start making up nonsense words that only have meaning if there's a giant marketing department behind them, like "Pentium" or "Zeta" or "Ubuntu?"
Okay, how about we rename it from PC-BSD to any of the following:
Did that first. It made things worse--after the repair it BSOD'ed on boot every time. I looked through Google for a while for a solution but I decided it would be faster to just reinstall from scratch than get ahold of a Linux-based rescue CD, burn it, and start poking around trying to replace/edit files one by one.
MkLinux has been around for years. I once ran it on a PowerMac 6100 until the monolithic kernel was ported to the architecture with driver support for the hardware in the machine.
Granted, the hardware was older, but the performance hit was massive compared to the monolithic kernel that followed. I'd hate to think of losing that many cycles regardless of the speed of my CPU.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but really, when was the last time you saw Windows bluescreen?
I got called LAST NIGHT to help with a BSOD in Windows XP for a family member that would happen 20-30% of the within a few minutes of booting. I just had them copy their "My Documents" folder to a DVD and then reinstall. Problem seems to have been solved...
I agree, but if you happen to drive a Ferrari and if you are debt free and got a few million bucks stored, then why not settle for the best if you can afford it?
Maybe because $1,000 can do a lot of good for the world feeding/clothing/curing people, four hefty-draw video cards contributes more to global warming and includes a lot more toxic waste than one card, and you can get 90% of the gaming experience by dropping $150 on a GF6800.
Basically, because if you do run four cards like this just because you have the money and wanna "settle for the best," you're basically a bad person.
In the area where I live there has been a more serious "phone phish" going on. You receive a call from someone and claiming to be a police officer. They say that they're very sorry to have to inform you that your mother/father/son/daughter/sister/bother has been involved in a serious crash and is being flown by emergency helicopter to regional hospital X. So that the hospital is able to treat them the moment it touches down, the officer is trying to complete necessary admittance and insurance paperwork in advance, and what they need from you is your insurance policy number *and* the full name, address, phone, credit card number, and social security number of someone who can be billed in the event that the insurance policy is unwilling to cover the necessary treatment.
From what I understand, these scammers have been doing pretty well, unfortunately, and as far as I know there are few leads. The public hasn't been told why... maybe they're using convenience store phones and/or pay phones.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in Baghdad and in Kabul and Uzbekistan over the past few years (post invasion for both), and there *are* people that want nothing more than our destruction and subjugation.
So what? You gonna kill anyone who wants to kill you. They gonna kill anyone who they think wants to kill them. You're both gonna go at each other with tanks and guns and die inefficiently over time. Nobody will win, but you'll all manage to increase your likelihood of dying young nicely. The more you fight back, the higher the death rate. You're driving the statistics upward with every gunshot. Kill a terrorist, make two. Kill a terrorist-hating American, make two. It's a simple calculation that some people seem unable to get.
Someone has told you you can win. They're wrong. It's not any "different" this time, it's not any more "moral" this time, it's not any more "winnable" this time, it just goes on until old generations die out and new generations choose new enemies.
No need to tell me to read about the Middle East, my thesis was about the role of women in Palestinian terrorism and their socialization into ranks. I have done the fieldwork and I am very familiar. You might do better to listen to the blogs. Many of them are on the ground, as opposed to the mainstream media, who are in the hotels.
All your mentality does is create statistically significant forms of death from forms of death that began as statistically insignificant and could have been largely eliminated altogether with better policy administration and strategic and economic concessions. Yes, I know that conservatives hate concessions; the goal is to rule the world, naturally, and once you have gained a patch of ground, heaven forbid you should cede it to anyone else.
Some of this is a biblical mentality, some of it is a consumerist mentality, some of it is just postcolonial "protect the noble savage."
And stuff your false pity for the deaths in NY. "Statistically Insignificant" is for jackasses liek you. Suppose a terrorist were to sniper shoot you in the head. Thats "Statistically insignificant" but very important to you and anyoen that values life and freedom.
This is where you lose me. Someone shoots me in the head, the last thing I'm going to want to do is destroy all of society in the interest of getting revenge or trying to create a perfectly safe police state that won't manage to stop death anyway. If that's what I wanted, *I'd* be the jackass. I'm just one guy. It's not worth it. Is it worth destroying all of American society over three thousand American deaths? How many Americans die each year as the result of gun crimes? Poor health care? Are we prepared to dismantle a nation over those as well? Is that what the victims would want?
That's precisely what is going on here. Many, many more people are being made to suffer, and not just Americans. Entire ways of life are in danger of ending simply because a statistically insignificant number of people and their families are unable to cope with the fact that life is dangerous, murderers have always been around, helmets are required, and you may die young. Sure, get the murderers. But don't become so focused on that task that you are willing to destroy everyone and everything else in the process.
So you manage to wipe out all of "international terrorism" (which is laughable--terrorism is nothing less than a euphemism for "opposition to the status quo," it's a methodology and a location, not a person or people), and you manage to do it at the expense of all freedom, all multiculturalism, all understanding.
You create the perfect, homogenized dictatorship of safety. Guess what? Some people are still gonna die. Some people are still gonna die young. And more people will still die young by falling off their ladders than ever would have died thanks to some brown, foriegn boogeyman that terrifies the white post-colonialists.
Current American policy is racism, it's isolationism, its overreaction, its self-destructive policy, its a concession to Old Testament proto-messianism, but what it is not is any kind of assurance of safety, now or later, no matter how "successful" anyone is at it.
You'd be surprised (as I was when I first got to eBay) at the degree to which organized crime, especially in Russia and Romania, work to snag eBay users.
The problem isn't limited to eBay (they go wherever the money is), but it's something I don't think many Slashdotters realize--that there are full-time staffs out there whose only job it is to conduct fraudulent transactions, to formulate spoofs that will get people, to look for potential victims...
It makes them a lot of money. There are so many people out there who fall for the eBay spoofs... and whose high-feedback accounts are immediately taken over by mobsters selling nonexistent $5,000 plasma TVs for $1,200 Buy It Now... which are ended by clueless buyers convinced that by buying on eBay via Western Union money transfer they can actually save $3,800... and who never see their money again. Multiply by 10,000 times a day and you're talking a profit of $12,000,000 every time the sun comes up, give or take.
It's big business and it's primarily being run out of Russia and Romania, with American zombie computers from Windows-based porn and warez users being the middle men sending the bulk of the spoofs, which are as a result untraceable (as though American authorities would have any jurisdiction in Russia/Romania anyway).
Sadly, you're entirely correct. Those that are above the law increasingly accumulate (by leveraging their position) greater power to remain above the law. Capital knows no boundaries and its owners know no laws and ultimately, despite their machinations at any given moment, no "national" affiliation or allegiance. The rest are merely subjects and labor.
People should be reading Marx, not Slashdot, especially given what's going on right now in the Bush administration.
There is a substantive threat out there.
No, there is not. There is an utterly statistically insignificant threat created in the first place only by American votes and American foreign policy, a mistake that conservatives seem to want to compound endlessly until they can build it into a substantive threat.
Well congratulations, given the current stories on NSA spying and the potential for a nuclear war with Iran, I'd say you may have managed to create the substantive threat that you want.
But don't for a moment make the stupid mistake of thinking that it's "terrorism" which is, and will remain, both nebulous and statistically insignificant.
I'm sorry your relatives were stuck by lightning. But contrary to what the American culture of the denial of mortality may tell you, that does not make anti-lighning a good cause to throw your weight behind, in particular when the lightning is your fault in the first place.
You miss the point. The Kuwaiti annexation was precipitated by Bush I. Without there would be no sanctions, no UN programs, no current Iraq war.
The Lancet and other preeminent, *peer-reviewed* medical journals who have published on the subject thanks to the first-hand work of international medical personnel peg the Iraqi civilian death count at 100k or more, and 'Iraqiyun, one of the multiple Iraqi NGOs that actually have to tag the bodies, provide social support, and notify the relatives put it at 128k plus. They are there, on the ground.
Your "facts" are little more than conservative propaganda, as is your notion that the Kuwaiti annexation was entirely Saddam's fault, rather than a calculated miscalculation by the first Bush administration and the defense industry.
Give me a break, it was thanks to Bush One's blessing that Saddam felt that he could invade Kuwait with American support in the first place. Finish the job? Bush I should never have started it. The entire Iraq fiasco from the beginning has been a bow to the military industrial complex and the circle of capital at the top of US economic and military policy.
Stop drinking the Hannitized kool-aid and realize that not only are the numbers already much higher than those the administration give to you, but they will accumulate for many years to come--and that blood is on your hands, the hands of every American, and the hands of US soldiers and administrations.
Read the subject of this thread. It's the truth, only "TRAITORS" should probably be replaced with "CRIMINALS."
The Iraqi body count exceeds 100k, you have been lied to by your government, check the NGO numbers, not the Bush administration numbers. The numbers are much, much higher if you count the years of sanctions.
More to the point, the ends to not justify the means. The damage done by the American administrations to the most highly developed, educated, and secular nation in the middle east will have repercussions for decades, perhaps even centuries to come. Your ilk have successfully destabilized the entire region, increased terrorism tenfold, set back global diplomacy to pre-enlightenment status, and all in order to line their own pockets (though some of you seem to be unable to grasp this fact, despite the lack of WMD, the lack of terrorist ties, the lack of any conceivable other gain, diplomatic or otherwise).
In short, yes, we and the Iraqis were all better off with Saddam. Two wrongs do not make a right, and make no mistake, Bush's wrongs are by far the greater. They should all be on trial for crimes against humanity, but so should the colonialists who fabricated Iraq in the first place, not to mention the ones that unleashed plauges on native Americans as they founded the godforsaken country that would become the US.
People like you have to be stopped. Civil war is coming, since you and people like you will settle for nothing less. Hopefully humanity will win.
Agreed.
You are not dreaming. And the most important thing you can do is to TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY and give them links to these stories (that get buried so quickly) at reputable news sources.
There's still this mentality out there that no matter how much Bush seems to suck, nothing *really wrong* can happen with the US government simply because "this is America," and anyone who says that we're in dire straits is really just a black helicopters tinfoil hat freak.
And all the while, the black helicopters are gathering overhead and the supply of tinfoil to make hats has been silently cut off. Things really are very bad right now (do a little more research into these cases, and into the name Russell Tice, you'll be shocked at what you find) but the public is absolutely unaware of it, and because "big media" won't panic, they refuse to think anyone who does panic is sane.
The best thing any of us can do is go to friends and family who trust our judgment and tell them that things are very, very bad with the US government right now and the 2006 election *may actually be* the last possible turning point, beyond which there is no return.
This genie is not going back in the bottle. We are stuck with these departments and a national information gathering infrastructure that is not only monitoring citizens phones, positions (via cell phone tracking), and habits (via bank/credit account tracking), but that is also strong enough to simply leave 99% of congress in the dark about such operations, and to simply brush off official investigations when the remaining 1% get freaked about what they *do* know.
But what we can do is decide to try to acknowledge and control the genie by selecting the next administration(s) carefully with our votes, rather than conceding to the genie's assurances that genie's don't exist, that nobody that seems to be missing is actually missing, that nobody *really* needs a trial, that torture and secret detention aren't *really* all that bad...
The people who own the media don't have to care about the truth so long as they have the ratings. It is their cash (gained through ratings) that guarantees they will never be subject to any tyrannical regime; they can simply buy their way out of it. They can go to any place on the planet that suits them and live amidst kingly riches.
In fact, protecting their ratings is precisely what they must do, for as long as they can do it, in order to protect this fortune that keeps them above the law, that guarantees their place in international capital, free to go wherever they can buy the lifestyle they want unharassed by officials that are only to happy to have some fraction of their wealthy patronage.
This is why there can never be a useful public information machine in capitalism.
Get out while you can.
One thing you didn't mention that might even get some slashdotters is that the "@" symbol in a URL is used by most browsers in a way (for authentication) that makes it possible to also spoof domains in a phish link. Try going typing this address (into your URL bar and you'll see what I mean:
http://www.ebay.com@64.236.24.12
Firefox presents a warning in this case because you're being redirected to a site that doesn't require authentication (CNN.com) yet you've provided authentication information. If the destination site (i.e. phish destination) had been crafted to require authentication and accept "www.ebay.com" as valid data, you'd get no warning.
Some of these URLs+site combinations had *very* well-crafted URLs using tricks like this that would almost certainly fool most users who had been told "don't click on a link unless it says it's going to 'ebay.com' in the status bar."
Well, actually, I do mean Wine, but not WineHQ wine. Anyone who wants to run Excel or any other Windows applications on Linux should go straight to http://www.codeweavers.com/ and invest in Crossover Office, which costs very little!
It gives you point-and-click installation (as in insert CD, double-click on "Setup.exe") of Windows applications without having to think about anything. Whatever Windows appls you install end up in a a folder called "Windows Applications" in your K-Menu/GNOME-Menu/etc.
I am a professional writer, editor, and photographer that uses Linux. I have the following Windows applications installed in Fedora Core 5, I use them often, and I know nothing about how to configure Wine:
- Microsoft Office XP Professional (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access)
- Adobe Photoshop 7.0 + Adobe Camera RAW
- ISL Silkypix 2.0
- PTLens
- NeatImage
- Apple iTunes
I also have installed, but use less often:
- Internet Explorer 6.0
- Adobe FrameMaker 7.0
These all installed with a simple double-click on Setup.exe after inserting the CD. It's that simple. Combined with Fedora Core, whose recent versions are simple installs that autodetect everything, and Linux is a very easy system to migrate to.
Every member of my parents' household have been converted to Linux+MS Office for their everyday needs (this is both of my parents and all of my siblings), as has a friend who's in management at Intel, a friend who's in nonprofit management, and two friends who are graduate students.
Why did they switch? They're tired of having to reinstall Windows periodically thanks to spyware/hardware upgrades/whatever, tired of having to pay for every little bit of functionality they want (Wanna rip an MP3? shell out $$$. Wanna extrat this kind of archive? Shell out $$$. Wanna copy all your files from your old hard drive to your new hard drive? Shell out $$$.)
The point being: it's easy to run Excel on Linux. If you can afford Excel, Crossover is so cheap as to almost be free, and it's the easiest piece of software you'll ever use. It's been this way for the better part of five years now with Linux+Crossover. To say otherwise is to be disingenuous.
Yesssss! The I-didn't-mean-to-drag thing drives me nuts. In fact, general UI slowness is the thing that keeps me from using Firefox instead of Konqueror a lot of the time.
I know that my processor is "only" 1.3 GHz, but I swear there was a time when a gigahertz-plus CPU was enough to operate a GUI smoothly. But maybe I'm remembering incorrectly...
"Wow, I'm glad I live in the USA and not whatever US you live in."
Welcome to the difference between the red states and the blue states, the red districts and the blue districts. In the red districts, people are sure that all is well and that the biggest problems facing them are taxes and bin Laden. They don't see what goes on in the bluest of the blue areas. They've never even been to those places. Why? Too dangerous. Who in their right mind would go to such bad neighborhoods? Anyone who does deserves what they get! (I won't even begin to start on the racist undertones of this perspective.)
And what of these bluest of the blue areas where the red district people won't go? Aren't they just lazy people? Lazy people who can't be bothered to go out and get rich? Maybe even because those neighborhoods have a "culture" of laziness and wanting a handout? (hmm, there are those racist undertones again...)
Here's some reality for you, Jack: Those neighborhoods are miserable. Just fscking miserable, and the people in them are hopeless. You want to see sorrow? You want to see real sadness and depression? Don't look at ground zero. Look at some of the darker, more forgotten areas in the burrhoughs where suffering festers for decades, across generations, and to the chance to die in a foreign country is seen as some kind of salvation. Do you honestly believe that the US military is full of CEOs and professional sports players who shed a tear one day singing the national anthem and decided to salute the flag? Did you really buy that crap propaganda? If so, you must be living in middle class white bread Nebraska with a Toyota in your driveway and two TVs in your house.
Do I sound bothered and offended by your post? I AM.
Hunger? There's more than hunger going on in the United States. Those neighborhoods you don't believe exist and wouldn't go to even if they did, I'll tell you what, they are dangerous. Every major US city has neighborhoods where hope has run out and there is no practical way for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and improve their lives. If there is no money in a neighborhood anywhere, there is no way for people in the neighborhood to pay one another. There is no business or industry to employ people, or from which people can buy goods or services. There is no economy to speak of in these neighborhoods, and thus no way to improve your lot by participating industriously in it. The only hope is that money will come in from outside the neighborhood in the form of investment -- money to start local businesses that can employ people and sell to people in the area. Only in this great "private enterprise" system that our red state bretheren love so much, private enterprise wants nothing to do with investment in blue districts. You have tens of thousands of people in high-density housing begging someone to come in and invest and create some jobs, and a bunch of Mercedes-driving tycoons from across town who will never visit the 'hood and wouldn't touch any property in it with a ten food pole. Why?
Because a) there's no money there to begin with, so there are no paying customers to support the business, b) there's no chance in hell that well-to-do customers are going to come in from the outside to these areas to shop, c) it'll probably get robbed blind anyway because people are so desperate that they fight like dogs over whatever does come in. And don't blame them for it, you'd try to feed your children, too.
In short, the free market has no interest in urban decay. Gentrification happens here and there thanks to the mechanics of social "cool," but it touches only a minute portion of the poverty and misery while making things worse by fooling rich white suburbanites into thinking that "bad neighborhood" really just means "historic shopping district" and "povery and crime" really just mean "edgy urban renewal chic."
Where are social services? Missing. Overwhelmed. Caught in budget shortfalls and loca
You have not countered what I have said at all. Let me make it very simple for you:
Very few non-com "volunteers" in the military would choose it if they were able to live acceptably outside of it. You say: "I defy you to find a situation where they had fewer opportunities [in the military] than they did in civilian life." Congratulations, you have made exactly the same point I was making. They are in effect conscripts via socioeconomic leverage.
You say that you call bullshit, then you repeat exactly what I said. The military is full of "volunteers" who were marginalized by the upper classes of civilian society, classes happy to maintain a steady stream of grunts to "die for their country," among other unsavory tasks.
Um, I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I'm fairly sure the neocons are not just going to "leave office." Now don't get me wrong, they're not going to hold up the congress with a pistol and say "THIS IS A COUP! EVERYONE IN THE BASEMENT! NOW!"
That would be far too adolescent for words.
No, either they'll push back the presidential term limit and Bush will "win" a third time somehow (most likely under yet *more* suspicious circumstances, just like the last two elections), or there will be "other circumstances" to contend with:
- A terrorist attack that "postpones" the elections
- A threat level so high that elections must be "postponed"
- A threat level so high that everyone stays home and somehow the supreme court declares that the election results are "invalid" because too few people voted, leading to a "postponement" of the election
- A strange and unexplained 95% landslide victory despite Bush's low approval ratings, after which the wacky conservatives once again get on radio and say (rather ironically) "see, the liberal media got it wrong, their polls are rigged"
- A resignation of the Speaker of the House with him choosing a high-profile neocon to follow him, followed by "terrorist assassinations" of Bush and Cheney with said neocon suddenly ascending to office and declaring martial law to protect the public
There are any number of scenarios. But you conservatives are out to lunch on this one. You're looking so silly and naive it's bizarre. Lies take us to war. Secret prisons and secret camps. Tortures. Disappearances. Lack of trials. Lack of transparency. Domestic Spying and the Largest Database Ever Built. Corruption investigations of almost every conservative in federal office, with investigations being stymied using Nixonite techniques. The most overextended national currency we've seen since pre-World-War-II.
Your government is being taken over by the Nazi party and you're so busy hating the big city liberals (umm... "Jews" anyone?!) that you're convinced that anyone else who hates them, too, must be on your side.
The comparisons to Weimar are not merely insightful, they're accurate and terrifying.
The people in the US military are hardly volunteers. They're forced via leverage into combat through the realities of class difference.
You're born poor. You get a substandard education because all of the educational dollars and community infrastructure are re-routed to wealthy districts since that's where both the lobbyists and the lawmakers are from since they have the resources to affect policy and ability and access to means to vote while the poor can't even afford to take a day off of work to do so.
Because of this substandard education, you have few prospects in an economy in which labor is moving offshore to line the pockets of the very wealthy through the exploitation of cheap labor. To make things worse, there is NO WORK WHATSOEVER because there is no working economy in your part of town, and you can't afford to commute out of it to the other side of town where the rich people do have a working economy in order to land a job (nevermind the fact that they wouldn't hire you anyway--wrong side of the tracks and all).
But it's a problem to have no prospects, since you live in the inner city and there is no social safety net. There is nowhere for you to grow your own food or improvise shelter, but there is also no social infrastructure to feed you and clothe you, much less provide you and/or your children with basic medical care. You . will . die . prematurely, and so will your children.
BUT... The same Uncle Sam who won't guarantee you BASIC healthcare or fund the security force and investment necessary to help your community to feed itself or jumpstart its economy... comes along and says that if you are willing to carry a gun, he will feed both you *and* your children and provide you medical care and a retirement. Otherwise, you and they will suffer and die young. He promises you that it's safe, you won't die, the numbers are in your favor, our military is ultra-strong and ultra-well-equipped, it's like playing a video game, there's absolutely no risk, plus you'll get to travel and work with computers and get a better education and on-the-job-training and you'll finally have respect instead of being seen as a worthless piece of poor trash, and more to the point your . children . will . eat . and . be . healthy.
What choice do you have? After asking your recruiter again and being promised that it's utterly risk-free, and looking around your dive on the south side and out the window at your graffiti-covered neighborhood with boarded up windows everywhere and drug dealers on every corner, and thinking once more about how you never were able to finish high school because the school was so dangerous you were afraid to go and they didn't actually have any *textbooks* for lack of funding anyway, and you'll never amount to anything and your family has a history of heart disease and cancer and you want to be there for your children... you sign on the dotted line.
And then they send you to Iraq and you die.
And Uncle Sam and his gronies even wealthier thanks to you, a poor person, having been forced into labor at gunpoint to force Iraqis into US service at gunpoint.
And some shmuck posts to Slashdot about how you were happy to do it because you were brave and volunteer-minded.
Hardly deeply meaningful to the average user in the context of general purpose computing. They're new computing vocabulary words whose meanings in this context have been constructed entirely by product design and marketing.
We could rename it from PC-BSD to "Straw Hat OS" or "Purple Badger OS" or "Zeitgeist OS" and it would be the same. It doesn't say any more about the software's function to the average user than "PC-BSD."
You mean start making up nonsense words that only have meaning if there's a giant marketing department behind them, like "Pentium" or "Zeta" or "Ubuntu?"
Okay, how about we rename it from PC-BSD to any of the following:
- Bonedai 1.0
- Genufal 1.0
- Marada 1.0
- Notege 1.0
- Imboldos 1.0
- Drimium 1.0
- Turbalus 1.0
At least you can explain that PC-BSD actually is representational in nature: Personal Computer Berkeley Software Distribution.
Better than "Zzemdaxa" or "Mmulema" or "Panaxap" or [insert another nonsense word here, maybe with the words "Desktop 1.0" after it].
One more for good measure, say, Eetharalia Desktop 1.0 Pro.
Did that first. It made things worse--after the repair it BSOD'ed on boot every time. I looked through Google for a while for a solution but I decided it would be faster to just reinstall from scratch than get ahold of a Linux-based rescue CD, burn it, and start poking around trying to replace/edit files one by one.
MkLinux has been around for years. I once ran it on a PowerMac 6100 until the monolithic kernel was ported to the architecture with driver support for the hardware in the machine.
Granted, the hardware was older, but the performance hit was massive compared to the monolithic kernel that followed. I'd hate to think of losing that many cycles regardless of the speed of my CPU.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but really, when was the last time you saw Windows bluescreen?
I got called LAST NIGHT to help with a BSOD in Windows XP for a family member that would happen 20-30% of the within a few minutes of booting. I just had them copy their "My Documents" folder to a DVD and then reinstall. Problem seems to have been solved...
I agree, but if you happen to drive a Ferrari and if you are debt free and got a few million bucks stored, then why not settle for the best if you can afford it?
Maybe because $1,000 can do a lot of good for the world feeding/clothing/curing people, four hefty-draw video cards contributes more to global warming and includes a lot more toxic waste than one card, and you can get 90% of the gaming experience by dropping $150 on a GF6800.
Basically, because if you do run four cards like this just because you have the money and wanna "settle for the best," you're basically a bad person.
In the area where I live there has been a more serious "phone phish" going on. You receive a call from someone and claiming to be a police officer. They say that they're very sorry to have to inform you that your mother/father/son/daughter/sister/bother has been involved in a serious crash and is being flown by emergency helicopter to regional hospital X. So that the hospital is able to treat them the moment it touches down, the officer is trying to complete necessary admittance and insurance paperwork in advance, and what they need from you is your insurance policy number *and* the full name, address, phone, credit card number, and social security number of someone who can be billed in the event that the insurance policy is unwilling to cover the necessary treatment.
From what I understand, these scammers have been doing pretty well, unfortunately, and as far as I know there are few leads. The public hasn't been told why... maybe they're using convenience store phones and/or pay phones.