Really? Because I pretty much found the Left conveniently silent when Bush sent our forces to war to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq - two groups that had SPECIFICALLY said they want to harm the life of Americans.
Face it: both the Right AND Left are hypocrites, cheerfully campaigning on whatever issue suits their POLITICAL goals and clothing it in moral righteousness BUT likewise ignoring parallel situations in which that same logic might apply, but doesn't suit their political agenda.
The AF has a long tradition of living in fantasyland when it comes to the mythology of 'single pilot as knight-of-the-air' machismo.
It's been long-since proved that 2 men in the cockpit are far more effective than one, that task-saturation has exceeded the capability of a single brain to comprehend and react to everything going on in modern air/air combat. And yet, the USAF is committed to having single-pilot fighters always.
HOWEVER, I will raise one point: The current budgetary and technophile love-affair with UAVs is compelling. Note that we haven't fought a peer-competitor for SEVENTY years. It's very easy (especially for the USAF/Navy) to get addicted to weapons systems that are effective against cave-dwelling tribesmen with no navy, no subs, no air-support. The army, who still has to winkle these goat herders out of their hovels and caves, probably still has a better appreciation for the fact that ultimately it's a dirty, dangerous business because the infantry's main approach hasn't fundamentally changed since the days of the Assyrians. But we had a faint taste of changed circumstances when we had missions against Serbia - a puny-but-still-2nd-world opponent, who had things like engineers and scientists who understand how ARM missiles work, the limits of EW, and extended intelligence gathering to leverage their limited resources, particularly against a lazy, lackadaisical foe underestimating their opponent. Against a peer-competitor with the full resources of ECM and ECCM, an airforce, and/or a navy, I *suspect* that UAVs will largely be almost worthless unless they're made with scary levels of autonomy and AI. In this context alone, it will remain important to retain significant, human-driven assets that can function even when their comlink with HQ is shut down.
That said, not having autoland on your UAVs is just plain stupid.
Seriously - asking the Left to be open-minded or tolerant is silly.
The Left has a fascist agenda that they want to jam down people's throats, in the EXACT same sense that the Right does, they've just been far better at packaging it.
"No, no, WE are about freedom and human rights. THEY are about repression. See how clear that is?"
Think I'm joking?
Check with your local Leftist activist friend. They are militantly in favor of the rights of homosexuals. Fair enough, it's a good point. Mention that people against the rights of gays are backwards hicks that should be completely ignored and shunned by anyone with a brain, you'll likely get firm agreement...as long as you're talking about (white) Republicans/Evangelicals. If you change the context, and mention that conservative Muslims should likewise be completely shunned from consideration because they are even more homophobic, MURDERING gay men for their choices, suddenly culture and context is an exonerating factor.
Back to the OP, though, OSC needs ot understand that the Streisand Effect is at work here. The media is against him, so any attention called to the subject will generate only negative publicity.
He needs to shut up, and understand that the spirit of McCarthy is live and well here in the US, he's just wearing a "YES WE CAN" t-shirt this year, and drives a Prius.
No, I shit on federal government workers (specifically) because largely, in my experience, they suck.
Washington, DC - as a city - is a perfect example of why federal government is too incompetent to manage a single city. They are certainly too incompetent to manage a country - (looks around at the US in 2013) - do I really need to prove it?
This is why our Founding Fathers intuited that a government governs best that governs LEAST. The federal government shouldn't be managing ANYTHING that could be kicked down to the state level.
On top of that (not sure which is chicken and which is egg here) Public workers chose a path that was largely undemanding, unchallenging, and offered them a nice, safe sinecure in exchange for their robotic dronelike service.
Ever deal with a federal agency? With very few exceptions, they're unimaginably top-heavy, slow, unresponsive, uncaring. I can't think of the last time I dealt with a federal drone and thought "this is great service" or "this is an impressive employee". I walk in and see a collection of people clearly protected in their positions, doing just-barely-competent work, and getting along until they can retire on a fat pension.
Yes, having the 2nd largest employer in the country be a temp service speaks volumes about the alleged recovery and job market.
The first-largest is Wal Mart, which is pretty much the same, and horrible. (2.2 million employees, 1.3 mill in the USA)
Yet curiously omitted from the figures? Total number of US government employees? 2.8 million. Total local/state employees? 19-some million. So ~20 million people in this country get their paycheck from the government....that's what, about 7% of the entire electorate owes their income to the gubbermint? One might argue that due to a clear conflict of interest, they perhaps shouldn't get votes.
Some people would say that's even MORE revealing about the US (so called), not to mention the tendentiousness of the reporting on the story that it's NOT EVEN MENTIONED.
I think "creates" doesn't mean what you think it means.
She 'created' this "scent camera" the way I just "had sex with" Nicole Kidman.
This "story" links to an aggregator, that links to a blog where she talks about "wouldn't this be cool?"
She built a model of one with some tubes, a glass bell jar, and a ceramic pot, and then took a picture of it. Either the/. editors are colossally lazy or stupid that this even got posted.
Next: Snowden reveals that the Sun comes up in the East.
My guess is that American intelligence services, aside from trying to get hold of him, are working overtime to KEEP HIM ALIVE. If he dies for *any* reason (even if it's falling down the stairs or being hit by a meteor), it's going to be blamed by everyone on the US, making that a cheap and easy way to score points.
Zealots, psychotics, and sociopaths that have nothing to live for are willing to "give their lives for what they believe in". The simple willingness to die for a cause bears NO weight on the moral quality of the cause, nor on the worthiness of the person.
History is littered with nutballs who are willing to give their lives for 'a cause'. Unfortunately, they usually convince others to join them, and invariably some non-nutballs die too.
I know it's all charmingly enthusiastic and romantic to be zealous about a cause but personally I commend American apathy. As we've recently been witness to (repeatedly) the world is FULL of people who are so partisan they are willing to DIE for their local interpretation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Is that commendable?
We rightly mock the Byzantines for the Nika riots (in which tens of thousands of people were slain in street violence over the span of a week, largely over which color team they supported). We stand aghast at today's news about a Brazilian referee stabbing a player because he wouldn't leave the pitch (and then the crowd QUARTERED him and left his head on a stake in the center of the pitch). They certainly "cared" a lot about something, so much so that they were willing as a consensual group to murder a man. Shall we canonize them for their dedication to their beliefs?
America has been accurately characterized as the 'lifeboat from history'. America is where a Jew and an Arab can live next to each other in peace, not brainwashed from birth to destroy each other because of some argument between scruffy goat-herders hundreds of years ago. America is where a Catholic girl can marry a Muslim guy simply because they love each other, and not be bred into fervent hatred because of the faiths of their families. The ESSENCE of this is - dare I say it - an apathy to the fervently-held beliefs and concepts that their parents and homelands were willing to die and kill for.
Partisans of both extremes like to mock what they call the 'apathetic' center, mainly because we won't (whether the reason is intellectual or mere laziness) join their crazy-train of vituperation, spitting at the "other guys" simply because they're "not us".
Well, I'm sorry - I refuse to buy your motivational screed that I "must" care about this or that. I refuse to give a shit about whatever happens to get you all riled up, simply because you're agitated. I'll cheerfully go about my life, earn a living, and celebrate my "apathy" because that's one of the things that make this country great.
Or maybe don't enable them to be any bit more comfortable as homeless people?
Yes, there are some people that life has purely shat upon. If you can cull them out and help them, great, but the fact is that MOST homeless people are there because they made shitty life choices.
While the impulse to help them is genuinely kind, if you make 'being homeless' any less onerous, what are you going to get? MORE HOMELESS.
The point of a luggage tag is severalfold. 1) to tell baggage-handlers where the bag goes quickly and clearly. Current tags are actually a synthetic paper/film product and are incredibly durable. Will the electronic tag be immune to immersion and the sort of (incredibly) rough handling baggage suffers? What about power surges or lightning strikes? Would it be hilarious if a power surge on the plane meant that all the bags arrive at the destination with no codes at all? 2) to identify the bag and owner at the claim end. This is my bigger concern. If the bag is easily re-programmed with a smartphone, how is this secured? Even if it has some sort of paltry code-mechanism (which none of the text I saw describes), smartphones have some pretty hefty processors and could probably brute-force whatever coding is in place. This means that someone could rather easily claim whatever baggage is sitting in the claim area for a while.
IMO this is a solution in search of a problem. Current tags are durable, cheap, and tamper-resistant.
What are the odds that Hong Kong servers are pretty nearly directly connected to Chinese government servers?
I think what the US is doing is reprehensible (if not entirely predictable by anyone with a brain), but please spare me the suggestion that any OTHER country isn't doing the exact same thing if it's within their power.
To wit: Watergate wasn't about what NIXON was doing, it was what they were ALL doing (well, unless you're both nakedly tendentious or almost criminally naive).
My parents seem to already follow their level 1 protocol: PRINT EVERYTHING.
On an even more amusing note, it's good to note that their Terminal Event Protocol has 'ensuring donations' as one of their primary functions, on a level with 'ensuring the permanent preservation of human knowledge' and 'providing a common base of reference for communicating with extraterrestrial species': "...The datastream will include a specially designed primer, or set of simple scientific principles and data that would be common to all extraterrestrial intelligences, providing a common base of reference to enable those receiving the signal to commence the mammoth task of decoding the encyclopedia. The message will be accompanied by a short video message by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and images required for the re-creation of fundraiser banners..."
Imagine the surprise when the first message aliens get from Earth is "Please take a moment to view this short message from Jimmy Wales..."
Sure, but then you should ALSO look at the bigger picture: how's American industry doing today? We've shifted to an almost-completely service economy with very little heavy industry, and I blame that largely on the unions (who'd been most successful organizing within heavy industry because of atrocious work conditions).
Face it, there's no simple binary position here, and in fact there are no "good guys": on the one hand, you have rapacious, irresponsible companies who press 'tight financial management' to ridiculous extremes and end up truly exploiting workers. OTOH, you have unions that start generally well, by collectively representing workers to improve conditions and force management to treat them responsibly, but whose leadership grows indolent and corrupt like any monopoly organization and essentially like an incompetent parasite eventually kills the company/industry on which it depends.
Really? Have you tried to play online with a Nintendo DSLite lately?
Oh sorry, you mean NO NETWORK AVAILABLE still supports the crappy WEP standard? Thus these devices are basically non-functional unless you a) deploy a WAP *just* for this device, or b) turn off your wireless security and change your security to "basically none" because you want to use your handheld.
I'm still driving my car I got the same year. Automakers adoption of the cutting edge standard at that time - ala the DS Lite - would mean it's nearly useless now.
"We wanted it passed theoretically, so we voted for it; but we didn't really have a fucking clue about how it would actually be implemented and are only actually reading the bill now, and so need more time to study/figure out how to apply this catastrophic mess to the real world.
I mean, it's cool, but can we all just post links to our friends' art sites? I mean, she's basically a junk artist - not being dismissive, mind you, as some of it is cool; I'm just questioning the topicality and relevance to/.
I think it's amusing to read the nerdrage at the obvious fallacy in the OP's point (ie his logical reasoning that "we have this technology, people use it for bad things, therefore we should get rid of the technology"), yet don't notice their own hypocrisy using that same logical train of thought when it comes to guns.
We have guns. People use them for bad things. Ergo we should ban guns.
Seriously, how insulated from the world does one have to be to not understand the utility of a weapon? (Setting aside the Homer-Simpson-demonstrated utility of a gun for retrieving a stuck basketball or cat.) Or is it sheer denial that (some) people will be violent entirely independently of their access to a weapon?
I find it amusing that - with an apparent straight face - Mr Krepon makes comments like "In his first term, Mr. Clinton midwifed the denuclearization of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, thereby strengthening the Nonproliferation Treaty and jump-starting the implementation of two Strategic Arms Reduction treaties negotiated by his predecessor, George H.W. Bush."
No trace of acknowledgment there of why this was possible?
For those born in the 21st century or for the dis-ingenues of the arms-control religion: these states were de-nuclearizeable solely because they were fragmented states leftover from the shattering of the Soviet Union, one of the most malignant states of the 20th century.
In the 1980s the world's nuclear armament was estimated in the 50,000-warhead range. (30k for the Soviet Union, whose warheads were inaccurate and unreliable, therefore generally larger; 20k for the US)
And you know what? We survived.
The fundamental paradigm of the arms-control zealots (that fewer weapons = less war) has always been as broken as the Grotian fundamentalists trying to legislate away war. Neither recognizes that conflict is endemic to the human condition. It's not the tools, it's the people that use them.
Feminism: letting women be whatever they want to be...unless it contravenes our image of what they should be, then we require that they conform with our idea of what's "right".
Wait, I was just told yesterday that the US Supreme Court was irredeemably conservative-biased and packed with old-school racists that want to take away the rights of black people to vote? Now the other channel is telling me that the US Supreme Court is *actually* made up of leftist communists that want fags to get married?
I suspect that in this I will be contrary to most of the/. audience, but I don't believe that there IS an inherent "right to be forgotten".
Not at ALL.
In fact, I'd go so far as to point to the anonymizing of people as one of the more pernicious aspects of modern society (both as subject and as direct-object).
What we do, what we say, and the ripples of these actions are fundamentally WHO WE ARE. For better or worse, they are inescapably tied to us.
As much as we'd like to deny some things, or be allowed to (re)define ourselves, our actions speak more clearly to our essential character and personality than anything we can say, or rationalize, or even remember (since our memories are going to be biased in any case). Everyone makes mistakes, fools try to run from them. The facts of our mistakes are likewise part of us.
The idea that people have a "right" to erase this, to say "I am as I am today, not as I was yesterday" isn't subtle and isn't profound: it's denial.
Oh I think I "get it" - the assertion behind the 'right to be forgotten' is one of anonymity. In an era where the power of the individual seems to have vanished in the face of the might of collective entities like governments and corporations, the perception is that one can dodge aside by being anonymous. That too is silly in an era where passive observation is growing more comprehensive and data retention is nearly eternal.
This is usually the sort of argument that's far more credible if it wasn't always made by someone who's basically just a pothead trying to make scoring weed simpler, usually with a sort of vapid 'Woody Harrelson'-stoned sort of look on their face.
Seriously, the points may be entirely credible, but the message is badly corrupted by the typical source.
Slashdot Mirror
So now can we work on the major publishers as well?
Really? Because I pretty much found the Left conveniently silent when Bush sent our forces to war to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq - two groups that had SPECIFICALLY said they want to harm the life of Americans.
Face it: both the Right AND Left are hypocrites, cheerfully campaigning on whatever issue suits their POLITICAL goals and clothing it in moral righteousness BUT likewise ignoring parallel situations in which that same logic might apply, but doesn't suit their political agenda.
The AF has a long tradition of living in fantasyland when it comes to the mythology of 'single pilot as knight-of-the-air' machismo.
It's been long-since proved that 2 men in the cockpit are far more effective than one, that task-saturation has exceeded the capability of a single brain to comprehend and react to everything going on in modern air/air combat. And yet, the USAF is committed to having single-pilot fighters always.
HOWEVER, I will raise one point:
The current budgetary and technophile love-affair with UAVs is compelling. Note that we haven't fought a peer-competitor for SEVENTY years. It's very easy (especially for the USAF/Navy) to get addicted to weapons systems that are effective against cave-dwelling tribesmen with no navy, no subs, no air-support. The army, who still has to winkle these goat herders out of their hovels and caves, probably still has a better appreciation for the fact that ultimately it's a dirty, dangerous business because the infantry's main approach hasn't fundamentally changed since the days of the Assyrians.
But we had a faint taste of changed circumstances when we had missions against Serbia - a puny-but-still-2nd-world opponent, who had things like engineers and scientists who understand how ARM missiles work, the limits of EW, and extended intelligence gathering to leverage their limited resources, particularly against a lazy, lackadaisical foe underestimating their opponent.
Against a peer-competitor with the full resources of ECM and ECCM, an airforce, and/or a navy, I *suspect* that UAVs will largely be almost worthless unless they're made with scary levels of autonomy and AI. In this context alone, it will remain important to retain significant, human-driven assets that can function even when their comlink with HQ is shut down.
That said, not having autoland on your UAVs is just plain stupid.
Seriously - asking the Left to be open-minded or tolerant is silly.
The Left has a fascist agenda that they want to jam down people's throats, in the EXACT same sense that the Right does, they've just been far better at packaging it.
"No, no, WE are about freedom and human rights. THEY are about repression. See how clear that is?"
Think I'm joking?
Check with your local Leftist activist friend. They are militantly in favor of the rights of homosexuals. Fair enough, it's a good point. Mention that people against the rights of gays are backwards hicks that should be completely ignored and shunned by anyone with a brain, you'll likely get firm agreement...as long as you're talking about (white) Republicans/Evangelicals.
If you change the context, and mention that conservative Muslims should likewise be completely shunned from consideration because they are even more homophobic, MURDERING gay men for their choices, suddenly culture and context is an exonerating factor.
Back to the OP, though, OSC needs ot understand that the Streisand Effect is at work here. The media is against him, so any attention called to the subject will generate only negative publicity.
He needs to shut up, and understand that the spirit of McCarthy is live and well here in the US, he's just wearing a "YES WE CAN" t-shirt this year, and drives a Prius.
No, I shit on federal government workers (specifically) because largely, in my experience, they suck.
Washington, DC - as a city - is a perfect example of why federal government is too incompetent to manage a single city. They are certainly too incompetent to manage a country - (looks around at the US in 2013) - do I really need to prove it?
This is why our Founding Fathers intuited that a government governs best that governs LEAST. The federal government shouldn't be managing ANYTHING that could be kicked down to the state level.
On top of that (not sure which is chicken and which is egg here) Public workers chose a path that was largely undemanding, unchallenging, and offered them a nice, safe sinecure in exchange for their robotic dronelike service.
Ever deal with a federal agency? With very few exceptions, they're unimaginably top-heavy, slow, unresponsive, uncaring. I can't think of the last time I dealt with a federal drone and thought "this is great service" or "this is an impressive employee". I walk in and see a collection of people clearly protected in their positions, doing just-barely-competent work, and getting along until they can retire on a fat pension.
Well, clearly YOU are racist. Too.
Yes, having the 2nd largest employer in the country be a temp service speaks volumes about the alleged recovery and job market.
The first-largest is Wal Mart, which is pretty much the same, and horrible.
(2.2 million employees, 1.3 mill in the USA)
Yet curiously omitted from the figures?
Total number of US government employees? 2.8 million.
Total local/state employees? 19-some million.
So ~20 million people in this country get their paycheck from the government....that's what, about 7% of the entire electorate owes their income to the gubbermint? One might argue that due to a clear conflict of interest, they perhaps shouldn't get votes.
Some people would say that's even MORE revealing about the US (so called), not to mention the tendentiousness of the reporting on the story that it's NOT EVEN MENTIONED.
I think "creates" doesn't mean what you think it means.
She 'created' this "scent camera" the way I just "had sex with" Nicole Kidman.
This "story" links to an aggregator, that links to a blog where she talks about "wouldn't this be cool?"
She built a model of one with some tubes, a glass bell jar, and a ceramic pot, and then took a picture of it. Either the /. editors are colossally lazy or stupid that this even got posted.
Apparently he's run out of useful stuff.
Next: Snowden reveals that the Sun comes up in the East.
My guess is that American intelligence services, aside from trying to get hold of him, are working overtime to KEEP HIM ALIVE. If he dies for *any* reason (even if it's falling down the stairs or being hit by a meteor), it's going to be blamed by everyone on the US, making that a cheap and easy way to score points.
Nonsense.
Zealots, psychotics, and sociopaths that have nothing to live for are willing to "give their lives for what they believe in". The simple willingness to die for a cause bears NO weight on the moral quality of the cause, nor on the worthiness of the person.
History is littered with nutballs who are willing to give their lives for 'a cause'. Unfortunately, they usually convince others to join them, and invariably some non-nutballs die too.
I know it's all charmingly enthusiastic and romantic to be zealous about a cause but personally I commend American apathy. As we've recently been witness to (repeatedly) the world is FULL of people who are so partisan they are willing to DIE for their local interpretation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Is that commendable?
We rightly mock the Byzantines for the Nika riots (in which tens of thousands of people were slain in street violence over the span of a week, largely over which color team they supported). We stand aghast at today's news about a Brazilian referee stabbing a player because he wouldn't leave the pitch (and then the crowd QUARTERED him and left his head on a stake in the center of the pitch). They certainly "cared" a lot about something, so much so that they were willing as a consensual group to murder a man. Shall we canonize them for their dedication to their beliefs?
America has been accurately characterized as the 'lifeboat from history'. America is where a Jew and an Arab can live next to each other in peace, not brainwashed from birth to destroy each other because of some argument between scruffy goat-herders hundreds of years ago. America is where a Catholic girl can marry a Muslim guy simply because they love each other, and not be bred into fervent hatred because of the faiths of their families. The ESSENCE of this is - dare I say it - an apathy to the fervently-held beliefs and concepts that their parents and homelands were willing to die and kill for.
Partisans of both extremes like to mock what they call the 'apathetic' center, mainly because we won't (whether the reason is intellectual or mere laziness) join their crazy-train of vituperation, spitting at the "other guys" simply because they're "not us".
Well, I'm sorry - I refuse to buy your motivational screed that I "must" care about this or that. I refuse to give a shit about whatever happens to get you all riled up, simply because you're agitated. I'll cheerfully go about my life, earn a living, and celebrate my "apathy" because that's one of the things that make this country great.
I'd stake my life on it.
Or maybe don't enable them to be any bit more comfortable as homeless people?
Yes, there are some people that life has purely shat upon. If you can cull them out and help them, great, but the fact is that MOST homeless people are there because they made shitty life choices.
While the impulse to help them is genuinely kind, if you make 'being homeless' any less onerous, what are you going to get? MORE HOMELESS.
The point of a luggage tag is severalfold.
1) to tell baggage-handlers where the bag goes quickly and clearly. Current tags are actually a synthetic paper/film product and are incredibly durable. Will the electronic tag be immune to immersion and the sort of (incredibly) rough handling baggage suffers? What about power surges or lightning strikes? Would it be hilarious if a power surge on the plane meant that all the bags arrive at the destination with no codes at all?
2) to identify the bag and owner at the claim end. This is my bigger concern. If the bag is easily re-programmed with a smartphone, how is this secured? Even if it has some sort of paltry code-mechanism (which none of the text I saw describes), smartphones have some pretty hefty processors and could probably brute-force whatever coding is in place. This means that someone could rather easily claim whatever baggage is sitting in the claim area for a while.
IMO this is a solution in search of a problem. Current tags are durable, cheap, and tamper-resistant.
Crocodile tears.
What are the odds that Hong Kong servers are pretty nearly directly connected to Chinese government servers?
I think what the US is doing is reprehensible (if not entirely predictable by anyone with a brain), but please spare me the suggestion that any OTHER country isn't doing the exact same thing if it's within their power.
To wit: Watergate wasn't about what NIXON was doing, it was what they were ALL doing (well, unless you're both nakedly tendentious or almost criminally naive).
My parents seem to already follow their level 1 protocol: PRINT EVERYTHING.
On an even more amusing note, it's good to note that their Terminal Event Protocol has 'ensuring donations' as one of their primary functions, on a level with 'ensuring the permanent preservation of human knowledge' and 'providing a common base of reference for communicating with extraterrestrial species':
"...The datastream will include a specially designed primer, or set of simple scientific principles and data that would be common to all extraterrestrial intelligences, providing a common base of reference to enable those receiving the signal to commence the mammoth task of decoding the encyclopedia. The message will be accompanied by a short video message by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and images required for the re-creation of fundraiser banners..."
Imagine the surprise when the first message aliens get from Earth is "Please take a moment to view this short message from Jimmy Wales..."
Sure, but then you should ALSO look at the bigger picture: how's American industry doing today? We've shifted to an almost-completely service economy with very little heavy industry, and I blame that largely on the unions (who'd been most successful organizing within heavy industry because of atrocious work conditions).
Face it, there's no simple binary position here, and in fact there are no "good guys": on the one hand, you have rapacious, irresponsible companies who press 'tight financial management' to ridiculous extremes and end up truly exploiting workers. OTOH, you have unions that start generally well, by collectively representing workers to improve conditions and force management to treat them responsibly, but whose leadership grows indolent and corrupt like any monopoly organization and essentially like an incompetent parasite eventually kills the company/industry on which it depends.
Really? Have you tried to play online with a Nintendo DSLite lately?
Oh sorry, you mean NO NETWORK AVAILABLE still supports the crappy WEP standard? Thus these devices are basically non-functional unless you
a) deploy a WAP *just* for this device, or
b) turn off your wireless security and change your security to "basically none" because you want to use your handheld.
I'm still driving my car I got the same year.
Automakers adoption of the cutting edge standard at that time - ala the DS Lite - would mean it's nearly useless now.
^the above is a very long, circuitous way to say:
"We wanted it passed theoretically, so we voted for it; but we didn't really have a fucking clue about how it would actually be implemented and are only actually reading the bill now, and so need more time to study/figure out how to apply this catastrophic mess to the real world.
Signed,
Congress"
-1, really?
I mean, it's cool, but can we all just post links to our friends' art sites? I mean, she's basically a junk artist - not being dismissive, mind you, as some of it is cool; I'm just questioning the topicality and relevance to /.
I think it's amusing to read the nerdrage at the obvious fallacy in the OP's point (ie his logical reasoning that "we have this technology, people use it for bad things, therefore we should get rid of the technology"), yet don't notice their own hypocrisy using that same logical train of thought when it comes to guns.
We have guns.
People use them for bad things.
Ergo we should ban guns.
Seriously, how insulated from the world does one have to be to not understand the utility of a weapon? (Setting aside the Homer-Simpson-demonstrated utility of a gun for retrieving a stuck basketball or cat.) Or is it sheer denial that (some) people will be violent entirely independently of their access to a weapon?
I find it amusing that - with an apparent straight face - Mr Krepon makes comments like "In his first term, Mr. Clinton midwifed the denuclearization of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, thereby strengthening the Nonproliferation Treaty and jump-starting the implementation of two Strategic Arms Reduction treaties negotiated by his predecessor, George H.W. Bush."
No trace of acknowledgment there of why this was possible?
For those born in the 21st century or for the dis-ingenues of the arms-control religion: these states were de-nuclearizeable solely because they were fragmented states leftover from the shattering of the Soviet Union, one of the most malignant states of the 20th century.
In the 1980s the world's nuclear armament was estimated in the 50,000-warhead range. (30k for the Soviet Union, whose warheads were inaccurate and unreliable, therefore generally larger; 20k for the US)
And you know what? We survived.
The fundamental paradigm of the arms-control zealots (that fewer weapons = less war) has always been as broken as the Grotian fundamentalists trying to legislate away war. Neither recognizes that conflict is endemic to the human condition. It's not the tools, it's the people that use them.
Everyone spies on everyone, even their friends, in case friends turn out to be enemies.
Jesus people, this is geopolitics 101 going back to the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
Only in this, the most-informed but apparently most-naive culture in human history, could this possibly be a surprise.
Feminism: letting women be whatever they want to be...unless it contravenes our image of what they should be, then we require that they conform with our idea of what's "right".
I'm sure they're feeling empowered already!
Wait, I was just told yesterday that the US Supreme Court was irredeemably conservative-biased and packed with old-school racists that want to take away the rights of black people to vote?
Now the other channel is telling me that the US Supreme Court is *actually* made up of leftist communists that want fags to get married?
Which IS it?
I suspect that in this I will be contrary to most of the /. audience, but I don't believe that there IS an inherent "right to be forgotten".
Not at ALL.
In fact, I'd go so far as to point to the anonymizing of people as one of the more pernicious aspects of modern society (both as subject and as direct-object).
What we do, what we say, and the ripples of these actions are fundamentally WHO WE ARE. For better or worse, they are inescapably tied to us.
As much as we'd like to deny some things, or be allowed to (re)define ourselves, our actions speak more clearly to our essential character and personality than anything we can say, or rationalize, or even remember (since our memories are going to be biased in any case). Everyone makes mistakes, fools try to run from them. The facts of our mistakes are likewise part of us.
The idea that people have a "right" to erase this, to say "I am as I am today, not as I was yesterday" isn't subtle and isn't profound: it's denial.
Oh I think I "get it" - the assertion behind the 'right to be forgotten' is one of anonymity. In an era where the power of the individual seems to have vanished in the face of the might of collective entities like governments and corporations, the perception is that one can dodge aside by being anonymous. That too is silly in an era where passive observation is growing more comprehensive and data retention is nearly eternal.
This is usually the sort of argument that's far more credible if it wasn't always made by someone who's basically just a pothead trying to make scoring weed simpler, usually with a sort of vapid 'Woody Harrelson'-stoned sort of look on their face.
Seriously, the points may be entirely credible, but the message is badly corrupted by the typical source.