"The government will likely borrow more from social security (why not? its doomed anyways) in order to pay off prior lenders as it becomes more and more difficult to find new lenders."
Except that its actually exceptionally easy to find lenders. Currently treasuries are barely above a negative yield and buyers are lining up to get them and paying some of the highest prices ever to do so. If the market is willing to lend the U.S. Government gobs of money at what is essentially interest free right now, why shouldn't the government do so in order to pay off the older high interest debt? Seems both rational and responsible.
Your hysterical rhetoric obscures some other more relevant facts. Regardless of the total $ amount of the debt, as a percentage of GDP U.S. debt was actually MUCH higher in the 40s and 50s and current debts is roughly equivalent to where it was in 1990.
Please, I would hardly take this as any indication that Flash is better then Silverlight.
MLB Advance Media is quite ahead of the curve in terms of sports media in many ways. They have fantastic statistical databases, great content and a solid business model.
Technology however is NOT their strength. Having spend some time in their offices and talking to their people it is clear that they lack strong organizational direction or awareness of best practices or current events in technology. Until last year most of their forms (assuming you could find what you needed) resulted in ugly JSP errors. Their streaming of live games never failed to dissapoint, turn that sucker all the way down on high speed and it was still a slide show.
Internally they haven't a clue how to plan for a robust SOA envirnoment. No consistency across APIs, services at the edge are arranged by maintainers not functionality. On top of all that their hardware are all ancient sun boxes. Need a database? No matter how small or simple the task, throw Oracle at it.
Then there is the last issue, the one that really gets be about MLB Advanced Media. The blackout restrictions on games.
If you subscribe to MLB TV, all games in the media market associated with the zipcode of your credit card are blocked out, regardless of where you are physically viewing the game from. This isn't a shortcut because they lack the ability to determine your location. This is obvious because they also black out all games in the media market in which your connection is located.
I live in NYC. I want MLB TV so that when I am the road I can watch a Mets game. They backout the Mets game despite knowing that I am in Denver and cant get the game on cable or broadcast. I know they know I can't get the game on broadcast or cable, because they GEO LOCATE ME AND BLACKOUT THE ROCKIES TOO!
WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF THIS SERVICE IF YOU CANT USE IT TO WATCH YOUR HOME TEAM WHEN YOU ARE ON THE ROAD? DOES THIS MAKE SENSE TO ANYONE?!?!?!?!!?!
So last year after determining the worthlessness of their service I tried to cancel. Of course they cant even fucking do proper error handling and the damn cancellation form dumps out to some ugly JSP exception, forcing me to spend over an hour on the phone with customer service to try and cancel. After all that I can get them to take me off their mailing lists.
In so far as we are discussing EC2 type cloud computing, there are no greater issues for privacy or piracy then for any other hosted environment. Amazon has no greater ability to peer into your data or restrict your software then would Rackspace or anyone. A secured server is a blackbox with an IP to them.
Its just an ondemand x86 instance. The end user has FULL control over whatever is running on it.
People, take the tin foil hats off and actually investigate what is being discussed here. EC2 is nothing more then an on demand virtual x86 instance that you pay for by the hour. It has the potentially to literally save users thousands of dollars.
Example- Once a week I need to process a very large quantity of data quite quickly. I could build a server cluster but that would cost tens of thousands of dollars. I could go to a data center and lease a number of computers, but again this will be a couple hunderd dollars per server, per month, at the very least. Or once a week I can spin up 20x virtual servers on EC2 for 6hours, process my data and discard them for FORTY CENTS AN HOUR A SERVER. My data is no less secure then in any other hosted environment.
The instance images aren't owned by Amazon. You build them yourself around whatever x86 OS you want. CentOS and Ubuntu being the most commonly used ones I believe.
Outside of a very few edge cases cloud computing is just a bunch of on-demand virtual servers. No different then having virtual or real servers at a data center. The notion that promoting the use of such services has any implications for "data versus algorithms" is absurd.
Actual vegetarians are no less hypocritical then pescetarians from the standpoint of Vegans. So you don't eat the meat, you have still have no problem benefiting from and encouraging their exploitation.
Take solace though knowing that from an omnivores perspective you are all equally idiotic.
Ripping and boiling is the least of it. Have you not had or seen live lobster on Japanese menus? Live shrimp? Live crab?
I was never one for the live lobster, but the live shrimp is delicious. Bite it off just below the head and eat. Then pass the head back to the sushi chef for broiling. Then you suck the brains out with a lite mustard sauce or sweet sauce. Yum.
Music isn't what is being discussed. Copyrights and distribution of copyrighted material is the core issue. Music and musicians ARE incidental.
Weather or not P2P networks should be liable for copyright infringment by end users; Weather or not P2P is criminal distribution of copyrighted material; weather or not the abuse of the commons and the legal system by those who claim to represent copyright owners has very little to do with music or musicians.
These are legal and philosophical issues that certainly will impact musicians, but which musicians simply by being musicians have little knowledge of.
I'm sorry but Lars Ulrich is a musician. He isn't a lawyer, a philosopher, an intellectual or a technologist. He is not informed enough or intelligent enough to have any place in this debate.
Besides, there is no debate on MP3s anymore. We won. Amazon sells MP3s without DRM and the RIAA is loosing funding and slowly giving up the lawsuits. Game over. There are other battles fight, battles in which Lars will be even less relevant.
DRM doesn't necessarily have anything to do with copyright. Just because their purpose's are different doesn't mean they are incompatible. Distributors should be free to ask customers to agree to more restrictive licensing then they would otherwise get, and customers are free to tell them to fuck off.
While this "forced" update sounds dodgy, I have no problem with Netflix's use of DRM myself. Now if Netflix weren't a rental service, but were rather selling me the content, then I would not use them.
I don't know if this is a fabrication or just the product of a deranged mind, but it's variance with reality is disturbing. MA drivers are uniformly, regardless of region, the most dangerous, inconsiderate, vile, rude drivers in America. One will never see with such regularity drivers speeding in excess, tailgating and cutting others off.
MA has hands down the highest concentration of jackass drivers in America.
Of course if she was suffering from depression as a result of the miscarriage (quite likely) and this was the cause in the drop-off of her work, then it would qualify as a disability.
In which case I bet this lawyer will remained engaged with her former employer in the legal arena.
While the story is interesting your editorializing is much less so. There are a number of very news organizations that have been very successful with a payment/subscription model. Two great examples: The Wall Street Journal and ESPN. In fact there was an op-ed in today's WSJ about this very subject. When companies have a news product that is unique in the marketplace, then the payment model is quite successful.
Examples given- WSJ Bloomberg Lexus-Nexus ESPN
While it is true that some news providers might not actually offer anything sufficiently distinct or special to make a charge model successful, some definitely do. This assertion "Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse." is borne out by neither reality nor common sense. If your content/service is unique and in demand, you can charge. The AP's content may very well be too generic to get people on board the pay to view model, then again their aggregation services may be sufficiently unique that content providers that rely on the AP may be willing to pay.
Your knee-jerk reaction is as interesting and insightful as those on the other side that insisted a free model could never work.
"now I'm not saying I'd want to play 3D games on their chips, but guess what: despite what you see on Slashdot, very few users want to play these games"
Dude, World of Warcraft alone has 12 million subscribers. Its the highest grossing media ever. Do you think Sony and Microsoft have spent billions on gaming because its a niche market?
2007 Hollywood box office revenue was 9.6 Billion Total revenue in 08 including dvds, tv rights, foreign and domestic was around $50billion. 2008 Video game sales in the U.S. alone were 11.7 Billion.
Video games are a MASSIVE industry these days and will in short order be the largest segment of the entertainment industry. Plenty of people are buying computers for their graphics, and many more will be soon.
People who dismiss the importance of video games, and in turn graphics chips are willfully ignorant.
Dude, I didn't say that the fucking holocaust was a Christian war. I said that there were a lot of French collaborators during the German occupation, and Catholic collaborators at the Vatican who were motivated by ancient religious hatred and helped the Nazis murder machine for that reason.
Killing millions of Jews, Native Americans, anybody else is all true, but it doesn't mean that it's OK for Muslims to do the same
I agree. They are all assholes. Its like arguing over who is worse though, Chrales Manson or the Son of Sam. Ultimately I want them both off the streets.
"Does the word 'Buddhism' sound familiar to you?"
Quite familiar. Every hear of the LTTE in Sri Lanka?
Of course various branches of Budhism have sprung. In Japan various zen philosophy and samurai go hand in hand. Many Zen philosophers wrote in fervent support of Japan's wars of aggression.
Many of the martial arts of the east were created by Budhist monks.
There's thousands of cases when Christians killed just because some artist/writer/anybody offended their feelings in the last couple of years, right?
There are fewer examples of Christian violence the Islamic violence, but I would argue that this is because Christians are less influential in the west then Muslims are in the middle east. That said there are plenty examples of extremists killings gays, minorities, medical professionals involved in abortion to pretty much prove the point.
Remember that the definition of a Jew in the Third Reich, for the purpose of persecution, was not "one who practices Judaism" - it was "one who is more than 1/8th Jewish by ancestry".
I wasn't talking about the German Nazis. I was talking about the Catholic and French collaborators who may have used Nazi legal criteria but still acting out of ancient hatred founded in religion.
Religion is cetainly not a sole factor dividing Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs (and all of them are typically offended by such claims, except for some pan-Yugoslavists, who mostly tend to be Serbs).
I didn't say it was a sole factor. It was a major factor though. You can't have a bunch of Christians running around killing Muslims and then say that religion was really secondary. Even making the distinction between religion and ethnic divides is a bit extreme when ethnicity was largely predicated on the differences in religion.
That's where we disagree. Judging by what I see, it seems that Christianity has been on the steady decline as far as violence is concerned for the last several centuries.
I would say that Christian violence remains proportional to Christian influence. The fact is that most people don't really believe anymore in the west, so there is a lot less violence on those lines. It is still pretty rampant.
In all of the cases you mention, religion was not a major component.
Really? The holocaust did not have religion as a major component? The collaborators, and there were an awful lot of them, were certainly motivated by religion.
The claim that Bosnia was an ethnic conflict with out a major religious component seems disingenuous when the division between the two ethnicity was religion.
Have you read much of the primary sources or quotes of leaders during the cold war? They routinely invoked god and atheism of communism in order to instill fear and motivate the population. The pink scare in the early 1900s was mostly built around the fact that communists were godless or jews.
In his farewell address speaking on America's destiny (ie the conquering of NA) he said:
"May He who holds in His hands the destinies of nations, make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enable you, with pure hearts and hands and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time, the great charge He has committed to your keeping. "
The whole premise of U.S. entitlement to Indian land was that GOD had chosen America. This not empty rhetoric. How else can you convince the masses of people that murder and theft is ok? It truly takes divine intervention to overcome the innate decency of humanity.
However your argument that because religion is not the sole cause of my examples somehow discounts their validity seems absurd. Nothing significant in the politics of humanity has a single cause as it's explanation. Even in your own examples can't meet that standard. Certainly Islam is not the sole cause of those laws- the need for the regime to seem pious, the ability to silence critics, etc are additional reasons for these laws.
The Iraq war- invocation of crusade imagery by Bush, constant rhetoric about gods work by Bush and the Evangelicals. The religious component was inescapable and significant.
I am not saying that Islam is not violent. I totally agree with you that it is violent and oppressive. I am just asserting that Christianity is by nature no better. Religion is violent. The degree to which various religions engage in violence may wax and wane over time (likely corresponding to their influence) but in the end it doesn't matter.
As long as religion is a significant force in Western life, we will be periodically plagued by religious nut job violence.
You can't keep religion out of this. Sure the leadership was motivated by a desire for power and greed, but they couldn't have pulled it off without the consent of the people and the people were quite often motivated by "Christ's love".
Religion is often used as a tool by the cynical to motivate the people to commit despicable crimes. However organized religion combined with the suppression of skeptics by a system predicated on the insanity that is faith make this possible.
If people weren't encouraged by religion to subdue skepticism and accept the absurd on faith, maybe they would be less willing tools of the powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
"The government will likely borrow more from social security (why not? its doomed anyways) in order to pay off prior lenders as it becomes more and more difficult to find new lenders."
Except that its actually exceptionally easy to find lenders. Currently treasuries are barely above a negative yield and buyers are lining up to get them and paying some of the highest prices ever to do so. If the market is willing to lend the U.S. Government gobs of money at what is essentially interest free right now, why shouldn't the government do so in order to pay off the older high interest debt? Seems both rational and responsible.
Your hysterical rhetoric obscures some other more relevant facts. Regardless of the total $ amount of the debt, as a percentage of GDP U.S. debt was actually MUCH higher in the 40s and 50s and current debts is roughly equivalent to where it was in 1990.
Please, I would hardly take this as any indication that Flash is better then Silverlight.
MLB Advance Media is quite ahead of the curve in terms of sports media in many ways. They have fantastic statistical databases, great content and a solid business model.
Technology however is NOT their strength. Having spend some time in their offices and talking to their people it is clear that they lack strong organizational direction or awareness of best practices or current events in technology. Until last year most of their forms (assuming you could find what you needed) resulted in ugly JSP errors. Their streaming of live games never failed to dissapoint, turn that sucker all the way down on high speed and it was still a slide show.
Internally they haven't a clue how to plan for a robust SOA envirnoment. No consistency across APIs, services at the edge are arranged by maintainers not functionality. On top of all that their hardware are all ancient sun boxes. Need a database? No matter how small or simple the task, throw Oracle at it.
Then there is the last issue, the one that really gets be about MLB Advanced Media. The blackout restrictions on games.
If you subscribe to MLB TV, all games in the media market associated with the zipcode of your credit card are blocked out, regardless of where you are physically viewing the game from. This isn't a shortcut because they lack the ability to determine your location. This is obvious because they also black out all games in the media market in which your connection is located.
I live in NYC. I want MLB TV so that when I am the road I can watch a Mets game. They backout the Mets game despite knowing that I am in Denver and cant get the game on cable or broadcast. I know they know I can't get the game on broadcast or cable, because they GEO LOCATE ME AND BLACKOUT THE ROCKIES TOO!
WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF THIS SERVICE IF YOU CANT USE IT TO WATCH YOUR HOME TEAM WHEN YOU ARE ON THE ROAD? DOES THIS MAKE SENSE TO ANYONE?!?!?!?!!?!
So last year after determining the worthlessness of their service I tried to cancel. Of course they cant even fucking do proper error handling and the damn cancellation form dumps out to some ugly JSP exception, forcing me to spend over an hour on the phone with customer service to try and cancel. After all that I can get them to take me off their mailing lists.
GOD DO THEY SUCK!
In so far as we are discussing EC2 type cloud computing, there are no greater issues for privacy or piracy then for any other hosted environment. Amazon has no greater ability to peer into your data or restrict your software then would Rackspace or anyone. A secured server is a blackbox with an IP to them.
Its just an ondemand x86 instance. The end user has FULL control over whatever is running on it.
People, take the tin foil hats off and actually investigate what is being discussed here. EC2 is nothing more then an on demand virtual x86 instance that you pay for by the hour. It has the potentially to literally save users thousands of dollars.
Example- Once a week I need to process a very large quantity of data quite quickly. I could build a server cluster but that would cost tens of thousands of dollars. I could go to a data center and lease a number of computers, but again this will be a couple hunderd dollars per server, per month, at the very least. Or once a week I can spin up 20x virtual servers on EC2 for 6hours, process my data and discard them for FORTY CENTS AN HOUR A SERVER. My data is no less secure then in any other hosted environment.
The instance images aren't owned by Amazon. You build them yourself around whatever x86 OS you want. CentOS and Ubuntu being the most commonly used ones I believe.
Outside of a very few edge cases cloud computing is just a bunch of on-demand virtual servers. No different then having virtual or real servers at a data center. The notion that promoting the use of such services has any implications for "data versus algorithms" is absurd.
Actual vegetarians are no less hypocritical then pescetarians from the standpoint of Vegans. So you don't eat the meat, you have still have no problem benefiting from and encouraging their exploitation.
Take solace though knowing that from an omnivores perspective you are all equally idiotic.
Ripping and boiling is the least of it. Have you not had or seen live lobster on Japanese menus? Live shrimp? Live crab?
I was never one for the live lobster, but the live shrimp is delicious. Bite it off just below the head and eat. Then pass the head back to the sushi chef for broiling. Then you suck the brains out with a lite mustard sauce or sweet sauce. Yum.
Nonsense. Most of us who got Wii quickly grew tired of it (Literally dozens of friends) and have gone back to adult consoles.
I have a PS3 and I love it.
Music isn't what is being discussed. Copyrights and distribution of copyrighted material is the core issue. Music and musicians ARE incidental.
Weather or not P2P networks should be liable for copyright infringment by end users; Weather or not P2P is criminal distribution of copyrighted material; weather or not the abuse of the commons and the legal system by those who claim to represent copyright owners has very little to do with music or musicians.
These are legal and philosophical issues that certainly will impact musicians, but which musicians simply by being musicians have little knowledge of.
I'm sorry but Lars Ulrich is a musician. He isn't a lawyer, a philosopher, an intellectual or a technologist. He is not informed enough or intelligent enough to have any place in this debate.
Besides, there is no debate on MP3s anymore. We won. Amazon sells MP3s without DRM and the RIAA is loosing funding and slowly giving up the lawsuits. Game over. There are other battles fight, battles in which Lars will be even less relevant.
DRM doesn't necessarily have anything to do with copyright. Just because their purpose's are different doesn't mean they are incompatible. Distributors should be free to ask customers to agree to more restrictive licensing then they would otherwise get, and customers are free to tell them to fuck off.
While this "forced" update sounds dodgy, I have no problem with Netflix's use of DRM myself. Now if Netflix weren't a rental service, but were rather selling me the content, then I would not use them.
Why is being any more "family un-friendly" then being straight?
Gay or straight, I would rather not have my kids watch you have sex. However other then that, what does it matter?
I don't know if this is a fabrication or just the product of a deranged mind, but it's variance with reality is disturbing. MA drivers are uniformly, regardless of region, the most dangerous, inconsiderate, vile, rude drivers in America. One will never see with such regularity drivers speeding in excess, tailgating and cutting others off.
MA has hands down the highest concentration of jackass drivers in America.
Of course if she was suffering from depression as a result of the miscarriage (quite likely) and this was the cause in the drop-off of her work, then it would qualify as a disability.
In which case I bet this lawyer will remained engaged with her former employer in the legal arena.
While the story is interesting your editorializing is much less so. There are a number of very news organizations that have been very successful with a payment/subscription model. Two great examples: The Wall Street Journal and ESPN. In fact there was an op-ed in today's WSJ about this very subject. When companies have a news product that is unique in the marketplace, then the payment model is quite successful.
Examples given-
WSJ
Bloomberg
Lexus-Nexus
ESPN
While it is true that some news providers might not actually offer anything sufficiently distinct or special to make a charge model successful, some definitely do. This assertion "Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse." is borne out by neither reality nor common sense. If your content/service is unique and in demand, you can charge. The AP's content may very well be too generic to get people on board the pay to view model, then again their aggregation services may be sufficiently unique that content providers that rely on the AP may be willing to pay.
Your knee-jerk reaction is as interesting and insightful as those on the other side that insisted a free model could never work.
"now I'm not saying I'd want to play 3D games on their chips, but guess what: despite what you see on Slashdot, very few users want to play these games"
Dude, World of Warcraft alone has 12 million subscribers. Its the highest grossing media ever. Do you think Sony and Microsoft have spent billions on gaming because its a niche market?
2007 Hollywood box office revenue was 9.6 Billion Total revenue in 08 including dvds, tv rights, foreign and domestic was around $50billion.
2008 Video game sales in the U.S. alone were 11.7 Billion.
Video games are a MASSIVE industry these days and will in short order be the largest segment of the entertainment industry. Plenty of people are buying computers for their graphics, and many more will be soon.
People who dismiss the importance of video games, and in turn graphics chips are willfully ignorant.
They are missing the most egregious offenders. Clearly anyone under the age of 16 caught masturbating should be arrested for child molestation.
Nonsense. NYC cops now carry collapsible metal batons that are capable of the same sort of damage.
They can invoice whomever they want, that doesn't mean anyone is going to pay them. They can file the notice as the law provides or shut the hell up.
Yep. The DPRK fascinates me.
Either way it doesn't matter. This was a federal court, not state.
Dude, I didn't say that the fucking holocaust was a Christian war. I said that there were a lot of French collaborators during the German occupation, and Catholic collaborators at the Vatican who were motivated by ancient religious hatred and helped the Nazis murder machine for that reason.
"Oh, really?.. In the 90s... 250 thou... Unless you provide any serious source you're a bigoted moron."
Remember Bosnia? http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/bosnia_genocide.htm
Killing millions of Jews, Native Americans, anybody else is all true, but it doesn't mean that it's OK for Muslims to do the same
I agree. They are all assholes. Its like arguing over who is worse though, Chrales Manson or the Son of Sam. Ultimately I want them both off the streets.
"Does the word 'Buddhism' sound familiar to you?"
Quite familiar. Every hear of the LTTE in Sri Lanka?
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/slrv.htm
Of course various branches of Budhism have sprung. In Japan various zen philosophy and samurai go hand in hand. Many Zen philosophers wrote in fervent support of Japan's wars of aggression.
Many of the martial arts of the east were created by Budhist monks.
There's thousands of cases when Christians killed just because some artist/writer/anybody offended their feelings in the last couple of years, right?
There are fewer examples of Christian violence the Islamic violence, but I would argue that this is because Christians are less influential in the west then Muslims are in the middle east. That said there are plenty examples of extremists killings gays, minorities, medical professionals involved in abortion to pretty much prove the point.
Remember that the definition of a Jew in the Third Reich, for the purpose of persecution, was not "one who practices Judaism" - it was "one who is more than 1/8th Jewish by ancestry".
I wasn't talking about the German Nazis. I was talking about the Catholic and French collaborators who may have used Nazi legal criteria but still acting out of ancient hatred founded in religion.
Religion is cetainly not a sole factor dividing Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs (and all of them are typically offended by such claims, except for some pan-Yugoslavists, who mostly tend to be Serbs).
I didn't say it was a sole factor. It was a major factor though. You can't have a bunch of Christians running around killing Muslims and then say that religion was really secondary. Even making the distinction between religion and ethnic divides is a bit extreme when ethnicity was largely predicated on the differences in religion.
That's where we disagree. Judging by what I see, it seems that Christianity has been on the steady decline as far as violence is concerned for the last several centuries.
I would say that Christian violence remains proportional to Christian influence. The fact is that most people don't really believe anymore in the west, so there is a lot less violence on those lines. It is still pretty rampant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism
In all of the cases you mention, religion was not a major component.
Really? The holocaust did not have religion as a major component? The collaborators, and there were an awful lot of them, were certainly motivated by religion.
The claim that Bosnia was an ethnic conflict with out a major religious component seems disingenuous when the division between the two ethnicity was religion.
Have you read much of the primary sources or quotes of leaders during the cold war? They routinely invoked god and atheism of communism in order to instill fear and motivate the population. The pink scare in the early 1900s was mostly built around the fact that communists were godless or jews.
In his farewell address speaking on America's destiny (ie the conquering of NA) he said:
"May He who holds in His hands the destinies of nations, make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed, and enable you, with pure hearts and hands and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time, the great charge He has committed to your keeping. "
The whole premise of U.S. entitlement to Indian land was that GOD had chosen America. This not empty rhetoric. How else can you convince the masses of people that murder and theft is ok? It truly takes divine intervention to overcome the innate decency of humanity.
However your argument that because religion is not the sole cause of my examples somehow discounts their validity seems absurd. Nothing significant in the politics of humanity has a single cause as it's explanation. Even in your own examples can't meet that standard. Certainly Islam is not the sole cause of those laws- the need for the regime to seem pious, the ability to silence critics, etc are additional reasons for these laws.
The Iraq war- invocation of crusade imagery by Bush, constant rhetoric about gods work by Bush and the Evangelicals. The religious component was inescapable and significant.
I am not saying that Islam is not violent. I totally agree with you that it is violent and oppressive. I am just asserting that Christianity is by nature no better. Religion is violent. The degree to which various religions engage in violence may wax and wane over time (likely corresponding to their influence) but in the end it doesn't matter.
As long as religion is a significant force in Western life, we will be periodically plagued by religious nut job violence.
You can't keep religion out of this. Sure the leadership was motivated by a desire for power and greed, but they couldn't have pulled it off without the consent of the people and the people were quite often motivated by "Christ's love".
Religion is often used as a tool by the cynical to motivate the people to commit despicable crimes. However organized religion combined with the suppression of skeptics by a system predicated on the insanity that is faith make this possible.
If people weren't encouraged by religion to subdue skepticism and accept the absurd on faith, maybe they would be less willing tools of the powerful.