There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s.
Uhm-hm. I came across this text from Thom Hartmann which you may find interesting. The closing pieces about federally empowered corporations are especially interesting, and may ring a bell with the Slashdot crowd.
When Democracy Failed: The warnings of history
18 Mar 2003 The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms
The only time I wasted more time on than MULE was Seven Cities Of Gold. I was not astonished, but not really too surprised, to learn that Dan was behind that, too.
Mostly DivXed movies (as a side note, media happens to be legal to download where I live). Hard drive space fills up fast, though, so it's not going on month after month.:-)
I don't have a regular DSL or cable, but a 10-megabit fiber. Still a consumer deal to the ISP, though.
I usually leech on the order of fifteen to twenty gigs a DAY. These guys have not done their homework on how the customer uses the product...
...either that, or they are trying to present a politically correct image of how the product will be used, in case they will go the way of the other dot-bombs. In any case, they have shown to be pulling numbers out of thin air. My guess is that the executives' secretaries print their e-mail for them.
I pay about $20 per month for having a 10-megabit jack in my wall enabled, that's about par for fibered cities in Sweden. DSL in general is a notch more expensive and a lot lower on the bandwidth ladder, it's about $25 per month for something like 2048/512 ADSL.
I guess it has to do with cost of equipment and return on investment in densely populated areas (I live in a high-riser, so suburban villas may be different and more of a DSL place).
Now THAT is funny. I make a reference to smoking a well-written April 1st RFC, hoping for a couple of "+1 Funny", and instead I get five points of "Interesting".
No one seems to have cracked a proper commercial solution
Oh. I guess my 10 megabits a second from the local power company is just a hoax, then. Strange, it seems to work just fine...
In Sollentuna, Sweden, the local energy company is supplying broadband to apartments and even to ordinary houses. Yes, you read me right: these guys are drawing fiber to single-family houses at affordable cost, then lighting them up with 100 Mbits a second.
OTOH, there's nothing said about how they carry the TCP/IP. In my imagination, it's been fiber bundled with power lines. That's probably more economical than trying to piggyback..
It's not TCP/IP over power lines that's interesting, it's electricity over TCP/IP (RFC 3251). That is a much newer and hotter idea, and much more interesting to smoke in the long run.
No, I don't curse the fact that a disaster didn't occur, though I gave a maximum-7-day power and water outage a 10% probability of occurring and prepared accordingly for that new year's (got a kerosene burner, fuel to heat one room for one week, and spare water to last me for one week).
OTOH, perhaps I _should_ be cursing that it never happened. The "passed on to future generations" implies that my genes would be wildly dominant, which isn't very exciting in itself, but to achieve that result, lots of women would need to have sex with me:-D
The fact that my friend had to borrow the stuff when an outage hit _him_ sort of validated my preparations, anyway *laugh*
I use decoy computers. I have a fairly large media collection, and even though downloading movies and music is legal where I live, I am somewhat paranoid. (Btw, I am also prepared for large-scale power and water outages, something my friends used to make fun of me about until one of them had to borrow my stuff when an outage hit his part of town...just to set the tone for my odd mental condition.)
So anyway, I use decoys. I have old decommissioned miditowers sitting under my monitors at my desk, constructed from broken parts. I have even physically removed the platters from their hard drives, but otherwise the would-be-computers appear operational (fans humming, cables connected in the back, etc).
The real computers are hidden away in a closet and not immediately apparent. Cables do not reveal their location as these run inside the drywall.
No, I don't think I will ever have use for my decoys. I certainly hope I won't. But then again, I don't think I will ever have use for my fire extinguisher, kerosene-fuel emergency heater, or motorcycle crash helmet, either.
I see this statement so often that I feel a need to make this point:
Who defines what is correct language and what is not correct language? (Usually, English teachers like to think it's more or less them personally. Not so.)
Language is defined by the people who use it. If I insert a previously unused word into an English-language sentence, and my intended meaning reaches the listeners of that sentence, then I have made a new word that works in English. No official approval is necessary. There is no three-letter agency that rubberstamps new words. You will find that a lot of words are invented on-the-fly by people who are extremely skilled in written English, the classical writers among them.
The major dictionaries have understood their role as documentative, not normative. However, partly as a result of school indoctrination, we like to think there is such a thing as "correct" or "incorrect" language. There isn't. The only applicable terms of correctness or inditto is that we have the possibility of choosing our nuance of language, and be perceived differently depending on how we express ourselves. This is nothing new -- even the old Romans had their language among elites, which happened to be Greek.
My [enormously offtopic] point is this: If a usage is commonly accepted, then there is no such thing as "incorrect".
So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price.
Language police nitpicking:
it's - short for it is its - possessive pronoun meaning belonging to it
In this case, the correct writing of the above sentence would be "...but not enough for its price".
...eh. Wait, did I just nitpick Slashdot editors' grammar? I guess I should go do something more productive, like stand on one leg for as long as possible.:-)
It's truly ironic that the United States has such an international reputation as being the leader in freedom of speech, but when it comes to intellectual property, it's actually one of the most restrictive regimes in terms of what people can do with their intellectual property.
This is, unfortunately, blatant nonsense. Americans like to think the US has an international reputation of being "land of the free". However, the international reputation is almost the opposite -- few non-Americans regard America as particularly free. It was maybe true in the 1800s, but not today.
To pick just one item, an international journalist organization ranked countries for relative freedom of press; the US came in... where? First or second, you'd expect; not so. Rank twenty-six. Practically all of the western hemisphere had better freedom of press.
American is only the land of the free in the eyes of Americans themselves, so spare me references to "international reputation".
In fact it's such a huge driver I'm surprised they don't sponsor video codec development and P2P infrastructure outright openly. I recently bought 400 new gigs to grow my media archive slightly; from what my friends and I talk about, I am not the only one who works like this.
So we're talking volume, volume, volume. Not speed. Not reliability. Not even interface technology. Volume. Higher numbers.
Am I just blind or has somebody seen a downright sponsorship? It would certainly pay them back...
The corporation exists to make money. That is its sole purpose in life. Any path that makes more money therefore becomes the correct one.
Laws can influence what is the correct path by providing economic incentives. All such laws can do is to tip the scales a bit further in one direction or the other. It is important to understand that just because something is law, does not make it right in the eyes of the corporation.
An very simple example would be the executive on his/her way in a hurry to the airport for a business-critical (firm-survival-critical) client meeting. The correct thing to do is to take the car to the airport, drive it up on the sidewalk by the airport entrance, and abandon it there to rush to the flight. Illegal, yes, but the economic benefit of getting the sale far outweighs the economic disadvantage (cost) of the parking violation and getting the towed-away car out of the compound.
In other circumstances, economic penalties (like for dumping toxins) provide an incentive that actually does tip the scale. It's a matter of the strength of the penalty.
Corporations exist to make money. The correct course of action for a corporation is the one that generates the most money. Law is just one factor among many here, and it does not have any veto rights or other special standing among the economic factors that apply to a decision.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s.
Uhm-hm. I came across this text from Thom Hartmann which you may find interesting. The closing pieces about federally empowered corporations are especially interesting, and may ring a bell with the Slashdot crowd.
When Democracy Failed: The warnings of history
18 Mar 2003
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms
I don't have a Nokia, so, no... Hell, I didn't even know there was a World of M.U.L.E...?
The only time I wasted more time on than MULE was Seven Cities Of Gold. I was not astonished, but not really too surprised, to learn that Dan was behind that, too.
I really don't think I need to say more than that.
To my disappointment though, nobody has recognized it in public spaces... I sort of had half-expected that.
Mostly DivXed movies (as a side note, media happens to be legal to download where I live). Hard drive space fills up fast, though, so it's not going on month after month. :-)
I don't have a regular DSL or cable, but a 10-megabit fiber. Still a consumer deal to the ISP, though.
I usually leech on the order of fifteen to twenty gigs a DAY. These guys have not done their homework on how the customer uses the product...
...either that, or they are trying to present a politically correct image of how the product will be used, in case they will go the way of the other dot-bombs. In any case, they have shown to be pulling numbers out of thin air. My guess is that the executives' secretaries print their e-mail for them.
I pay about $20 per month for having a 10-megabit jack in my wall enabled, that's about par for fibered cities in Sweden. DSL in general is a notch more expensive and a lot lower on the bandwidth ladder, it's about $25 per month for something like 2048/512 ADSL.
I guess it has to do with cost of equipment and return on investment in densely populated areas (I live in a high-riser, so suburban villas may be different and more of a DSL place).
I bought 40 pairs of identical black socks. Black socks go with anything and there's never an odd one.
There's usually "10 pairs for $10" deals at trade shows and the like, that's where I got mine.
That's "Prostethnic Vogon Jeltz" to you, scum. :-)
Anybody more than me remember the ultimate hacking cartridge for the C64? "Final Cartridge III"?
:-)
I love names like that
The New Church (Nieuwe Kerk) in Amsterdam springs to mind. It was completed around 1350...
Now THAT is funny. I make a reference to smoking a well-written April 1st RFC, hoping for a couple of "+1 Funny", and instead I get five points of "Interesting".
:-)
I wonder what RFCs the moderators are smoking.
No one seems to have cracked a proper commercial solution
Oh. I guess my 10 megabits a second from the local power company is just a hoax, then. Strange, it seems to work just fine...
In Sollentuna, Sweden, the local energy company is supplying broadband to apartments and even to ordinary houses. Yes, you read me right: these guys are drawing fiber to single-family houses at affordable cost, then lighting them up with 100 Mbits a second.
OTOH, there's nothing said about how they carry the TCP/IP. In my imagination, it's been fiber bundled with power lines. That's probably more economical than trying to piggyback..
It's not TCP/IP over power lines that's interesting, it's electricity over TCP/IP (RFC 3251). That is a much newer and hotter idea, and much more interesting to smoke in the long run.
Let's see now:
Microsoft gives its browser away for free vs. Netscape who sells it, MS wins - Slashdot cries foul.
Microsoft sells its software vs. OSS who gives it away for free, OSS wins - Slashdot says "competition works".
Hello? Anybody home?
There is a whole essay on the topic. Funny as hell a read, and good in-your-face material for co-workers, too.
How To Write Unmaintainable Code
No, I don't curse the fact that a disaster didn't occur, though I gave a maximum-7-day power and water outage a 10% probability of occurring and prepared accordingly for that new year's (got a kerosene burner, fuel to heat one room for one week, and spare water to last me for one week).
:-D
OTOH, perhaps I _should_ be cursing that it never happened. The "passed on to future generations" implies that my genes would be wildly dominant, which isn't very exciting in itself, but to achieve that result, lots of women would need to have sex with me
The fact that my friend had to borrow the stuff when an outage hit _him_ sort of validated my preparations, anyway *laugh*
I use decoy computers. I have a fairly large media collection, and even though downloading movies and music is legal where I live, I am somewhat paranoid. (Btw, I am also prepared for large-scale power and water outages, something my friends used to make fun of me about until one of them had to borrow my stuff when an outage hit his part of town...just to set the tone for my odd mental condition.)
So anyway, I use decoys. I have old decommissioned miditowers sitting under my monitors at my desk, constructed from broken parts. I have even physically removed the platters from their hard drives, but otherwise the would-be-computers appear operational (fans humming, cables connected in the back, etc).
The real computers are hidden away in a closet and not immediately apparent. Cables do not reveal their location as these run inside the drywall.
No, I don't think I will ever have use for my decoys. I certainly hope I won't. But then again, I don't think I will ever have use for my fire extinguisher, kerosene-fuel emergency heater, or motorcycle crash helmet, either.
commonly accepted (but incorrect)
I see this statement so often that I feel a need to make this point:
Who defines what is correct language and what is not correct language? (Usually, English teachers like to think it's more or less them personally. Not so.)
Language is defined by the people who use it. If I insert a previously unused word into an English-language sentence, and my intended meaning reaches the listeners of that sentence, then I have made a new word that works in English. No official approval is necessary. There is no three-letter agency that rubberstamps new words. You will find that a lot of words are invented on-the-fly by people who are extremely skilled in written English, the classical writers among them.
The major dictionaries have understood their role as documentative, not normative. However, partly as a result of school indoctrination, we like to think there is such a thing as "correct" or "incorrect" language. There isn't. The only applicable terms of correctness or inditto is that we have the possibility of choosing our nuance of language, and be perceived differently depending on how we express ourselves. This is nothing new -- even the old Romans had their language among elites, which happened to be Greek.
My [enormously offtopic] point is this: If a usage is commonly accepted, then there is no such thing as "incorrect".
So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price.
...eh. Wait, did I just nitpick Slashdot editors' grammar? I guess I should go do something more productive, like stand on one leg for as long as possible. :-)
Language police nitpicking:
it's - short for it is
its - possessive pronoun meaning belonging to it
In this case, the correct writing of the above sentence would be "...but not enough for its price".
It's truly ironic that the United States has such an international reputation as being the leader in freedom of speech, but when it comes to intellectual property, it's actually one of the most restrictive regimes in terms of what people can do with their intellectual property.
This is, unfortunately, blatant nonsense. Americans like to think the US has an international reputation of being "land of the free". However, the international reputation is almost the opposite -- few non-Americans regard America as particularly free. It was maybe true in the 1800s, but not today.
To pick just one item, an international journalist organization ranked countries for relative freedom of press; the US came in... where? First or second, you'd expect; not so. Rank twenty-six. Practically all of the western hemisphere had better freedom of press.
American is only the land of the free in the eyes of Americans themselves, so spare me references to "international reputation".
The clone was, by necessity, born at a different time than its original.
Finally some evidence for what people have suspected for ages: it is not genes that determine who and what we become, it is astrology.
...is DivX.
In fact it's such a huge driver I'm surprised they don't sponsor video codec development and P2P infrastructure outright openly. I recently bought 400 new gigs to grow my media archive slightly; from what my friends and I talk about, I am not the only one who works like this.
So we're talking volume, volume, volume. Not speed. Not reliability. Not even interface technology. Volume. Higher numbers.
Am I just blind or has somebody seen a downright sponsorship? It would certainly pay them back...
Who in his right mind would like to have his brain fondled by a MS product?
Right. The normal case appears to be that people allow MS products to interact violently with their rectum, not their brains.
Then again, this could be symptomatic of something about that brain, couldn't it?
Or, for that matter, Hugh G. Rection...
The corporation exists to make money. That is its sole purpose in life. Any path that makes more money therefore becomes the correct one.
Laws can influence what is the correct path by providing economic incentives. All such laws can do is to tip the scales a bit further in one direction or the other. It is important to understand that just because something is law, does not make it right in the eyes of the corporation.
An very simple example would be the executive on his/her way in a hurry to the airport for a business-critical (firm-survival-critical) client meeting. The correct thing to do is to take the car to the airport, drive it up on the sidewalk by the airport entrance, and abandon it there to rush to the flight. Illegal, yes, but the economic benefit of getting the sale far outweighs the economic disadvantage (cost) of the parking violation and getting the towed-away car out of the compound.
In other circumstances, economic penalties (like for dumping toxins) provide an incentive that actually does tip the scale. It's a matter of the strength of the penalty.
Corporations exist to make money. The correct course of action for a corporation is the one that generates the most money. Law is just one factor among many here, and it does not have any veto rights or other special standing among the economic factors that apply to a decision.