The fact that sales went from near zero to comparable with textbook sales in such a hostile environment is exactly my point. Even minimal DRM seems to work. This was observed at multiple universities across the country.
My point was that this situation is atypical. Casual piracy rates would be unusually high because of the factors I mentioned and given the relatively low price point for the software, there is also little incentive for the target audience to spend much time trying to circumvent the DRM. That means that minimal DRM would be unusually effective.
Your anecdote shows that in some cases DRM can be effective, unfortunately, that does not support your central argument that price does not influence piracy rates.
That's an interesting anecdote but contains a fatal flaw. None of the people buying the software actually wanted it, they were students who were (probably) required to have it whether they wanted to purchase it or not. I'm not even sure that the DRM was the significant factor in the increase in sales. After all, the first term you introduced the software, it would be unlikely that the software was included in course plans and in my experience most students were conservative in course purchases, they wouldn't buy something if they did need it.
On the other hand, the students in these course have reasons to know each other thus making piracy of DRM free software very easy. In fact many of them would be living in dormatories meaning they could literally use the same install media to install the software without having to go to any trouble at all.
In essence you have one of the worst case scenarios for piracy. The students are required to have your product, don't value the product, are living in close quarters with people in a similar circumstance, are on minimal or no income, and are among the group of people most likely to pirate software (probably because they have minimal or no income). I suspect any generalizations you pull from that experience are going to be of very dubious quality, partly because you target audience likely considers the "reasonable price" for that software to be $0, and I wouldn't be willing to bet that they're wrong.
I suspect you might be close to right. I think the world of "Art" does not yet have the ability to evaluate a game's artistic merits. Take a step back and look at all what art is. It is paintings, sculpture, movies, photographs, and music. There is a critical difference between each of these formats and games. Art is fixed, games are interactive. So you might be right that games are not art but that's a failing of art, art critics are just not up to the task of understanding games.
Something really needs to be done about Righthaven, and the other parasites of modern society like the RIAA, the BSA, the MPAA, and patent trolls. They are exactly like burglars, they exist only to steal from honest hardworking people to benefit themselves.
I know far too much about the electoral college already.
You, on the other hand, might need to read up on how other Democracies work. In a parliamentary system, the government is created by the elected representatives of the people, they select a prime minister who has powers very similar to your president's. The electoral college is merely a clunky way of selecting the president, the net effect is that your president is still democratically elected, just with a system that is vulnerable to certain problems. Now back in the day, as I understand it, there was a time when states did not allow the people to vote for the president's electors. Back then you could say the United States was not a democracy and be correct, however, those days are over.
Like it or not, the United States is currently a democracy. It's officially a republic, but republics can be democracies.
Obligatory car analogy: Just because a car is officially a "small truck" that doesn't mean it isn't also an SUV.
Friend, you are projecting. I claimed to have heard something on the news, nothing more, nothing less. I showed you it was indeed a news story, make of the story what you will.
However, I feel compelled to note this:
According to Iraqi military spokesman Maj.-Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, Hassim was highly successful in her job: She persuaded more than 80 young women to become suicide bombers, and "confessed to recruiting 28 female suicide bombers who carried out terrorist operations in different areas."
I'm not sure what the motive is supposed to be for the Iraqi military to slander Islam.
Some people will claim the US is indeed a "representative democracy", however that cannot be correct, since the US citizens do not elect their representatives. Instead, the elect the people who will elect their representatives.
I'm not American, but I think you're wrong. As I understand it, Americans directly elect most of their representatives with a few exceptions such as the president who is now "indirectly" elected by the people, and various positions that the government is empowered to appoint people to. At the basics a republic means a government of the people and democracy means government by the people. If that sounds familiar, it's no coincidence. The U.S. is quote clearly a representative democracy and a republic.
I think that's even the source of the names of your political parties. The Democratic Party wanted the country to be more democratic and the Republicans wanted it to be more republican. What's the difference? A republic doesn't require universal suffrage*, while a democracy does.
The fact that a popular party could lose to a different party is really more of a problem with how the American system works (no that it's an a problem exclusive to the U.S.) and should be resolvable by reforming the system. However, that reform seems unlikely to occur unless one of your two parties disintegrates.
* Universal suffrage requires that all people be allowed to participate in voting (this may explain some of the weird things in your history like why women and slaves weren't considered to be "people").
Sure you can. In most parliamentary systems, the elected representatives select the government and the prime minister. Technically, any government which can maintain the support of a majority of the representatives during critical votes can rule, regardless of the percentage of the popular vote that backs it.
The current voting systems used in many countries including the United States are fairly poor at representing the will of the populace anyway. The U.S. has the two-party lock-in system where voting for a third party risks letting the main party you like least get elected. Add on to that the gerrymandering problem, and divisions of popular vote. In theory, a little more than 25% of the popular vote is all that is needed to rule. In practice that situation is practically impossible, but it goes like this: Pack a little less than half of the congressional districts with 100% voters opposed to you, and pack the remaining districts with 51% voters who support you.
In first-past-the-post systems with more viable parties you run into the problems of strategic voting and vote splitting. Where the winning parties only needs (100/x)+1 % of the popular vote to sweep the election in theory. It's why Canada has a conservative party in charge even though the party isn't well liked by between 60-70% of the populace. There are 5 major parties (even if the Greens have 10% support and no elected representatives).
Hey, you're free to believe that the allegations are bullshit, but you asked me for citations and I gave you five. I don't think terrorists are representative of Islam, but I do know that the culture of Middle Eastern Islamic states lends itself readily to certain types of exploitation. You're free to pretend that ruthless people won't exploit that for the benefit of their cause.
I may not have had all the details correct, but as I said, it was something I heard on the radio. To be more accurate (now that I've bothered to look deeper into it) a grandmother in Iraq was part of plan to single out women, have them raped, and then she'd "console" them by talking them into blowing themselves up, rather than letting themselves be murdered by their families for the dishonor of being raped. There are reports of a similar plan being used against boys in Afghanistan where they are raped by men and then giving the option of blowing themselves up and getting into heaven, or being executed for having "participated" in gay sex and going to hell.
It gets a worse than that. I remember hearing on the news a while ago that some Islamic militants have started kidnapping young Muslim women, gang raping them, and then using the shame of being raped to manipulate them into becoming suicide bombers. If they refuse to kill themselves in the name Islam then they get raped again and the process repeats until they agree to wear a bomb or die. That's pretty damn evil.
To be fair, Martin was struck by a very bad case of writers block because of the way he wrote A Feast for Crows. He was trying to cut down on the number of characters in the book so he left a bunch of important characters out, but was left with the problem of writing the second book with events that characters in the first one had already experienced. Hopefully he won't have the same issue with the final two books. So there's hope that they'll both get published this decade.
Assuming, for the sake of argument that Manning actually did it (which has not been proven, but seems likely).
The important question you should ask yourself is what is "traitor" and what is a "patriot"? By definition, treason is acting against the best interests of your nation, thus whether Manning is a traitor or patriot depends entirely on whether he was justified in releasing the documents. If he exposed important wrong doing on the part of the government then he acted in the best interests of his nation and can not be a traitor.
There are quite a few articles like this that allege that the cables about the Tunisian government combined with the self-immolation of the grocer to ignite the revolution. Please note that the Tunisian government thought that the cables were important enough that they blocked access to Wikileaks and other sites that were carrying news about the leaked cables, and reportedly imprisoned some people over their dissemination.
From the article:
No one is suggesting WikiLeaks and its editor Julian Assange can take full credit for toppling the corrupt Tunisian regime. But the whistleblower's contribution to Ben Ali's downfall might at least give the US Justice Department, determined to prosecute Assange as a spy, pause for thought.
You clearly do not understand what "ulterior motives" means. As I mentioned in a previous post:
ulterior motive: An alternative or extrinsic reason for doing something, especially when concealed or when differing from the stated or apparent reason.
Working for a living is not an ulterior motive, it is the apparent reason most people work. Investing for retirement (or to earn money) is not an ulterior motive, again it is the apparent reason most people invest. I have not in any way hidden the fact that I would like people to recognize that "ulterior motives are bad", thus by definition it isn't an ulterior motive.
I don't see any point in continuing this discussion if you don't understand what you're writing about. If you actually have something intelligent to contribute, please try again.
Of course, sometimes people who are portrayed in the media as irrational lunatics are just that. As I understand, Obama's campaign released a scanned copy of his birth certificate in June 2008. Bush's eligibility should have been more questionable since there was documented evidence that he should have been dishonorably discharged for dereliction of duty. Hell, even McCain wasn't born in the United States (but he's a natural-born citizen because both his parents were).
Actually I think you may have it reversed. I think Obama's tepid defense of those policies was politics over principles. I think Obama may have abandoned those policies as it's now clear that he gains nothing from defending them. You do have to remember that Obama is a centrist politician who believes in bridging people's differences and bringing about consensus. He's not doing very well at that because he fails to recognize that the Republicans have the opposite goal. They intend to get elected by creating divisions and exploiting them.
In the absence of "superstitions" and/or faith or whatever you're ranting about, *there is no evil*.
Nonsense, there are plenty of moral codes that don't involve deities. Of course, an Athiest would tell you none of the codes actually involve deities. However, the concept of good and evil depending on the existence of a deity is one that doesn't work well. If a deity is the definition of good, that leads to an inconsistent relativist moral code. As long as something is good because the deity commands and evil because the deity forbids it, then you end up with the possiblity of the same action being either good or evil depending on who did it and when. This is a common problem among religious conservatives who often seem to decide that an action is either good or evil depending on who is the recipient. For example: Killing Muslims = good, killing Christians = evil or vice-versa. In theory, having a moral code dictated by a deity ends up being the same as having no moral code (because any action can be justified). In practice, most people substitute their own moral code for the will of the deity and conclude that anything that contradicts that code actually wasn't ordered by their deity. In Christianity these people are often called Cafeteria Christians because they pick and choose which parts of the religion to follow.
The whole concept of good and evil is based on the belief in something. Please at least try to be internally consistent when spouting about who does and does not deserve your respect. *rolls eyes*
On the other hand, people who don't base their moral code directly on religion (including most western "religious" people), tend to have more consistent moral beliefs. They believe that certain actions are moral or immoral regardless of whom is the recipient. Excepting, of course, those people who explicitly believe in moral relativity.
That's actually not true. Actual events have fallen in at the high end of the predictions made by climate models 20 years ago, because little action has been taken in all that time to reduce the effects of global warming. You might like to read the intermediate version of that page which goes into more detail about model accuracy.
If you would like to learn more about the Medieval Warm Period, I suggest you read up on it.
Actually, the other planets are not warming, the sun is at recent minimum output (for the last 13 years, during which we have experienced unprecedented temperatures).
Just a further note on the cooling vs warming thing, some scientists figured out that the earth should be cooling and that an ice age was coming in the next 10,000 years in the 1970s. Some reporters got excited and declared an ice age was imminent after all, tomorrow is in the next 10,000 years, right? But the evidence rapidly became clear that the earth was not cooling like it was supposed to be. That's why you don't hear about global cooling anymore, the scientists behind those papers recognized that the evidence didn't support their predictions, mostly because they didn't account for anthropogenic releases of greenhouse gasses.
Maybe getting the mission done "with as few deaths as possible is the morally right thing to do", maybe "refusing to follow orders" is morally right thing to do (such as the military refusing to fire on defenseless civilians), maybe "doing the best with what we have" is the morally right thing to do.
Whatever the situation, manipulating your superiors and attempting to subvert their ability to make rational choices is a very bad long term strategy. There's a significant chance the mission will be hurt by their actions, and it certainly may have a long term negative impact on the military. This is also going to provide ammunition to the people arguing for deeper cuts to the military. In the end this comes down to the old axiom that the ends don't justify the means. When you use evil means to accomplish good ends, you taint the ends. Sometimes you taint the ends so badly that nothing good is left.
As other have pointed out, having the military decide to use psy-ops against the democratically elected representatives of the people is only a few short steps away from a military coup. Once the military chain of command decides it knows better than it's civilian masters, it's only a matter of time before they decide they should be the masters.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that sales went from near zero to comparable with textbook sales in such a hostile environment is exactly my point. Even minimal DRM seems to work. This was observed at multiple universities across the country.
My point was that this situation is atypical. Casual piracy rates would be unusually high because of the factors I mentioned and given the relatively low price point for the software, there is also little incentive for the target audience to spend much time trying to circumvent the DRM. That means that minimal DRM would be unusually effective.
Your anecdote shows that in some cases DRM can be effective, unfortunately, that does not support your central argument that price does not influence piracy rates.
That's an interesting anecdote but contains a fatal flaw. None of the people buying the software actually wanted it, they were students who were (probably) required to have it whether they wanted to purchase it or not. I'm not even sure that the DRM was the significant factor in the increase in sales. After all, the first term you introduced the software, it would be unlikely that the software was included in course plans and in my experience most students were conservative in course purchases, they wouldn't buy something if they did need it.
On the other hand, the students in these course have reasons to know each other thus making piracy of DRM free software very easy. In fact many of them would be living in dormatories meaning they could literally use the same install media to install the software without having to go to any trouble at all.
In essence you have one of the worst case scenarios for piracy. The students are required to have your product, don't value the product, are living in close quarters with people in a similar circumstance, are on minimal or no income, and are among the group of people most likely to pirate software (probably because they have minimal or no income). I suspect any generalizations you pull from that experience are going to be of very dubious quality, partly because you target audience likely considers the "reasonable price" for that software to be $0, and I wouldn't be willing to bet that they're wrong.
I suspect you might be close to right. I think the world of "Art" does not yet have the ability to evaluate a game's artistic merits. Take a step back and look at all what art is. It is paintings, sculpture, movies, photographs, and music. There is a critical difference between each of these formats and games. Art is fixed, games are interactive. So you might be right that games are not art but that's a failing of art, art critics are just not up to the task of understanding games.
Something really needs to be done about Righthaven, and the other parasites of modern society like the RIAA, the BSA, the MPAA, and patent trolls. They are exactly like burglars, they exist only to steal from honest hardworking people to benefit themselves.
I know far too much about the electoral college already.
You, on the other hand, might need to read up on how other Democracies work. In a parliamentary system, the government is created by the elected representatives of the people, they select a prime minister who has powers very similar to your president's. The electoral college is merely a clunky way of selecting the president, the net effect is that your president is still democratically elected, just with a system that is vulnerable to certain problems. Now back in the day, as I understand it, there was a time when states did not allow the people to vote for the president's electors. Back then you could say the United States was not a democracy and be correct, however, those days are over.
Like it or not, the United States is currently a democracy. It's officially a republic, but republics can be democracies.
Obligatory car analogy: Just because a car is officially a "small truck" that doesn't mean it isn't also an SUV.
Friend, you are projecting. I claimed to have heard something on the news, nothing more, nothing less. I showed you it was indeed a news story, make of the story what you will.
However, I feel compelled to note this:
According to Iraqi military spokesman Maj.-Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, Hassim was highly successful in her job: She persuaded more than 80 young women to become suicide bombers, and "confessed to recruiting 28 female suicide bombers who carried out terrorist operations in different areas."
I'm not sure what the motive is supposed to be for the Iraqi military to slander Islam.
Some people will claim the US is indeed a "representative democracy", however that cannot be correct, since the US citizens do not elect their representatives. Instead, the elect the people who will elect their representatives.
I'm not American, but I think you're wrong. As I understand it, Americans directly elect most of their representatives with a few exceptions such as the president who is now "indirectly" elected by the people, and various positions that the government is empowered to appoint people to. At the basics a republic means a government of the people and democracy means government by the people. If that sounds familiar, it's no coincidence. The U.S. is quote clearly a representative democracy and a republic.
I think that's even the source of the names of your political parties. The Democratic Party wanted the country to be more democratic and the Republicans wanted it to be more republican. What's the difference? A republic doesn't require universal suffrage*, while a democracy does.
The fact that a popular party could lose to a different party is really more of a problem with how the American system works (no that it's an a problem exclusive to the U.S.) and should be resolvable by reforming the system. However, that reform seems unlikely to occur unless one of your two parties disintegrates.
* Universal suffrage requires that all people be allowed to participate in voting (this may explain some of the weird things in your history like why women and slaves weren't considered to be "people").
Sure you can. In most parliamentary systems, the elected representatives select the government and the prime minister. Technically, any government which can maintain the support of a majority of the representatives during critical votes can rule, regardless of the percentage of the popular vote that backs it.
The current voting systems used in many countries including the United States are fairly poor at representing the will of the populace anyway. The U.S. has the two-party lock-in system where voting for a third party risks letting the main party you like least get elected. Add on to that the gerrymandering problem, and divisions of popular vote. In theory, a little more than 25% of the popular vote is all that is needed to rule. In practice that situation is practically impossible, but it goes like this: Pack a little less than half of the congressional districts with 100% voters opposed to you, and pack the remaining districts with 51% voters who support you.
In first-past-the-post systems with more viable parties you run into the problems of strategic voting and vote splitting. Where the winning parties only needs (100/x)+1 % of the popular vote to sweep the election in theory. It's why Canada has a conservative party in charge even though the party isn't well liked by between 60-70% of the populace. There are 5 major parties (even if the Greens have 10% support and no elected representatives).
Hey, you're free to believe that the allegations are bullshit, but you asked me for citations and I gave you five. I don't think terrorists are representative of Islam, but I do know that the culture of Middle Eastern Islamic states lends itself readily to certain types of exploitation. You're free to pretend that ruthless people won't exploit that for the benefit of their cause.
How about doing some research?
I may not have had all the details correct, but as I said, it was something I heard on the radio. To be more accurate (now that I've bothered to look deeper into it) a grandmother in Iraq was part of plan to single out women, have them raped, and then she'd "console" them by talking them into blowing themselves up, rather than letting themselves be murdered by their families for the dishonor of being raped. There are reports of a similar plan being used against boys in Afghanistan where they are raped by men and then giving the option of blowing themselves up and getting into heaven, or being executed for having "participated" in gay sex and going to hell.
It gets a worse than that. I remember hearing on the news a while ago that some Islamic militants have started kidnapping young Muslim women, gang raping them, and then using the shame of being raped to manipulate them into becoming suicide bombers. If they refuse to kill themselves in the name Islam then they get raped again and the process repeats until they agree to wear a bomb or die. That's pretty damn evil.
To be fair, Martin was struck by a very bad case of writers block because of the way he wrote A Feast for Crows. He was trying to cut down on the number of characters in the book so he left a bunch of important characters out, but was left with the problem of writing the second book with events that characters in the first one had already experienced. Hopefully he won't have the same issue with the final two books. So there's hope that they'll both get published this decade.
Assuming, for the sake of argument that Manning actually did it (which has not been proven, but seems likely).
The important question you should ask yourself is what is "traitor" and what is a "patriot"? By definition, treason is acting against the best interests of your nation, thus whether Manning is a traitor or patriot depends entirely on whether he was justified in releasing the documents. If he exposed important wrong doing on the part of the government then he acted in the best interests of his nation and can not be a traitor.
There are quite a few articles like this that allege that the cables about the Tunisian government combined with the self-immolation of the grocer to ignite the revolution. Please note that the Tunisian government thought that the cables were important enough that they blocked access to Wikileaks and other sites that were carrying news about the leaked cables, and reportedly imprisoned some people over their dissemination.
From the article:
No one is suggesting WikiLeaks and its editor Julian Assange can take full credit for toppling the corrupt Tunisian regime. But the whistleblower's contribution to Ben Ali's downfall might at least give the US Justice Department, determined to prosecute Assange as a spy, pause for thought.
Well you could be talking about Brain in a Vat, A Bunch of Rocks or The Allegory of the Cave among many other similar thought experiments.
You clearly do not understand what "ulterior motives" means. As I mentioned in a previous post:
ulterior motive: An alternative or extrinsic reason for doing something, especially when concealed or when differing from the stated or apparent reason.
Working for a living is not an ulterior motive, it is the apparent reason most people work.
Investing for retirement (or to earn money) is not an ulterior motive, again it is the apparent reason most people invest.
I have not in any way hidden the fact that I would like people to recognize that "ulterior motives are bad", thus by definition it isn't an ulterior motive.
I don't see any point in continuing this discussion if you don't understand what you're writing about. If you actually have something intelligent to contribute, please try again.
Of course, sometimes people who are portrayed in the media as irrational lunatics are just that. As I understand, Obama's campaign released a scanned copy of his birth certificate in June 2008. Bush's eligibility should have been more questionable since there was documented evidence that he should have been dishonorably discharged for dereliction of duty. Hell, even McCain wasn't born in the United States (but he's a natural-born citizen because both his parents were).
Snopes
Politifact
You might be forgiven for asking those questions in 2008, but now, you're just a desperate lunatic clinging to your own delusions.
Maybe so, but that's still better than what the Republicans would do.
Actually I think you may have it reversed. I think Obama's tepid defense of those policies was politics over principles. I think Obama may have abandoned those policies as it's now clear that he gains nothing from defending them. You do have to remember that Obama is a centrist politician who believes in bridging people's differences and bringing about consensus. He's not doing very well at that because he fails to recognize that the Republicans have the opposite goal. They intend to get elected by creating divisions and exploiting them.
In the absence of "superstitions" and/or faith or whatever you're ranting about, *there is no evil*.
Nonsense, there are plenty of moral codes that don't involve deities. Of course, an Athiest would tell you none of the codes actually involve deities. However, the concept of good and evil depending on the existence of a deity is one that doesn't work well. If a deity is the definition of good, that leads to an inconsistent relativist moral code. As long as something is good because the deity commands and evil because the deity forbids it, then you end up with the possiblity of the same action being either good or evil depending on who did it and when. This is a common problem among religious conservatives who often seem to decide that an action is either good or evil depending on who is the recipient. For example: Killing Muslims = good, killing Christians = evil or vice-versa. In theory, having a moral code dictated by a deity ends up being the same as having no moral code (because any action can be justified). In practice, most people substitute their own moral code for the will of the deity and conclude that anything that contradicts that code actually wasn't ordered by their deity. In Christianity these people are often called Cafeteria Christians because they pick and choose which parts of the religion to follow.
The whole concept of good and evil is based on the belief in something. Please at least try to be internally consistent when spouting about who does and does not deserve your respect. *rolls eyes*
On the other hand, people who don't base their moral code directly on religion (including most western "religious" people), tend to have more consistent moral beliefs. They believe that certain actions are moral or immoral regardless of whom is the recipient. Excepting, of course, those people who explicitly believe in moral relativity.
In any care you might like to learn more about Deontology, Consequentialism and Teleological ethics.
That's actually not true. Actual events have fallen in at the high end of the predictions made by climate models 20 years ago, because little action has been taken in all that time to reduce the effects of global warming. You might like to read the intermediate version of that page which goes into more detail about model accuracy.
If you would like to learn more about the Medieval Warm Period, I suggest you read up on it.
Actually, the other planets are not warming, the sun is at recent minimum output (for the last 13 years, during which we have experienced unprecedented temperatures).
Wow, you're really working the "we don't know" angle hard, do you ever stop to consider that maybe it's you who doesn't know, and the experts might know what they're talking about?
97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.
Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.
Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives.
The vast majority of climate papers in the 1970s predicted warming, not cooling.
Just a further note on the cooling vs warming thing, some scientists figured out that the earth should be cooling and that an ice age was coming in the next 10,000 years in the 1970s. Some reporters got excited and declared an ice age was imminent after all, tomorrow is in the next 10,000 years, right? But the evidence rapidly became clear that the earth was not cooling like it was supposed to be. That's why you don't hear about global cooling anymore, the scientists behind those papers recognized that the evidence didn't support their predictions, mostly because they didn't account for anthropogenic releases of greenhouse gasses.
Whack-a-mole:
Globally averaged temperature now is higher than global temperature in medieval times.
Humans emit 100 times more CO2 than volcanoes.
Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing.
Mars and Venus are not warming, and anyway the sun has recently been cooling slightly.
I'm afraid much of the rest of your post is incomprehensible, but those links should provide enough reading material for your education.
Maybe getting the mission done "with as few deaths as possible is the morally right thing to do", maybe "refusing to follow orders" is morally right thing to do (such as the military refusing to fire on defenseless civilians), maybe "doing the best with what we have" is the morally right thing to do.
Whatever the situation, manipulating your superiors and attempting to subvert their ability to make rational choices is a very bad long term strategy. There's a significant chance the mission will be hurt by their actions, and it certainly may have a long term negative impact on the military. This is also going to provide ammunition to the people arguing for deeper cuts to the military. In the end this comes down to the old axiom that the ends don't justify the means. When you use evil means to accomplish good ends, you taint the ends. Sometimes you taint the ends so badly that nothing good is left.
As other have pointed out, having the military decide to use psy-ops against the democratically elected representatives of the people is only a few short steps away from a military coup. Once the military chain of command decides it knows better than it's civilian masters, it's only a matter of time before they decide they should be the masters.