I'd say Exxon Mobil might be motivated to fund people to tell a few porkies.
After all, if I was making over $40 billion a year and big fat margins, I could consider that throwing a few million here and there to pay some PR people to lie about climate change is a good investment. And being a fossil company, I wouldn't care, since I would already be an expert at liability-dumping in any case, so I would sleep perfectly soundly, knowing that the massive negative externalities my business is generating (and that I'm not paying for) won't be my problem until long after I'm dead.
Oh, I'm sorry that non-Muslims might be unhappy about being cut down by terrorists in their thousands, simply because you consider them dirty white kuffars.
So typical of Muslims. We must be destroyed and subjugated, and if we resist, we fuel your bullshit sense of victimhood.
"We are victims because you are rich dirty white kuffars and you exist. Therefore it is our right to kill you, terrorise you, bomb you, and illegally colonise your countries".
I heard about the "copyright police" at university, where a bunch of petty small-dicked wankers have nothing better to do, then to get paid by scumbag publishers to hang around photocopiers to make sure nobody's copying too much.
Clearly, some fat cat assholes at Elsevier and friends are afraid of losing their obscene 45% profit margins.
But intrusive surveillance to monitor in case somebody might link to somebody copyrighted, is bizarre and utterly extreme. It's a bit like burning down the entire forest, just because there might be a snake somewhere. But then, with corporatist extremists seemingly on the march everywhere, and seemingly completely untouchable these days, little surprises me.
Oh, SingularityHub is the great big circle jerk set up by Ray 'Nerd Rapture' Kurzweil for these sad basement dwellers to jack off in public about turning into Gods by sticking our brains in jars or something.
Those cranks, loonies and weirdoes lost credibility long ago. I stopped reading as soon as I saw the URL bar.
Why am I surprised that some rich Wall St prick thinks like all other spoilt Wall St pricks, and thinks that they are exempt from the rules that everyone else is subjected to, and try and get one over everyone else so he can get even more obscenely rich than he is.
I hope that prick Philip Falcone gets bankrupted for his hubris, and learns some morals and a little humility.
Save your money. Online dating is for poorly socialized basement dwellers.
Want to meet somebody nice? Try going out into the real world, and outside your comfort zone. Travel. Study something new. Change jobs. Move to another country. Then you'll meet lots of people; some may be date material, some will become lifelong friends, and a few will be special enough to share your life with. And that person, odds-on, will look nothing like what you imagined your partner to look like in your mind's eye.
Me? On a whim, I quit my job, moved to the other side of the world with nothing but the clothes on my back and my savings, and decided to start afresh. Six years later, I'm happily settled down with my lovely and very sweet, Spanish fiancee, only a few short years after I thought I'd be single forever.
It's what pickup nerds call "inner game". Work on growing as a person and being a balanced individual, and eventually everything else will fall into place.
Get out there, be bold, and have the courage to do something new and different. Don't waste your time on seedy websites.
It'll be the Chinese. Their get-rich-quick mentality, and the evil Chinese Communist Party's habit of indoctrinating everyone with a bullshit sense of self-righteous grievance that everything is Whitey's fault, gives then license to lie, cheat and steal. Chinese have a "shame" culture (unlike our Western "guilt" culture). There's no shame in lying, cheating, dealing drugs, adulterating food and medicine, stealing, etc in their culture -- only the shame of getting caught.
Too bad we can't give them a well deserved hiding, despite their extreme lack of preparedness (they're so set up to attack, their defences are hopeless), we can't do a thing about it. We could've developed a cyber-army worthy of Mordor, except the utter morons in the US Government destroyed the US hacker scene in the 1991 Operation Sundevil busts.
The solution would be very easy: do what the Chinese and Russians do: get a tacit understanding from the US government, that no American who hacks the US government or a US business will go to jail, and then let the hackers go to town. We should've done this 20 years ago.
The EU has always been a neoliberal political project designed to benefit big business. Single huge parket, mobililty of labour, single currency, decisions taken by unelected bureaucrats... it's all designed to enrich well-connected big businessmen.
But the problem with all this, is that they have to make a show of democratic legitimacy through what has been an utterly irrelevant European Parliament. But it seems that real people have other ideas... the youth these days are pan-European, with Erasmus scholarships and whatnot, people study, travel, holiday, fall in love and start families across a borderless Europe. So political legitimacy of a united Europe has become more important, and we're seeing a gradual strengthening of pan-European civil society, helped in part by the internet, and cheap flights. The demand of ordinary people for a fair say in how their continent is run is irresistable.
Naturally, the crooks, rent-seekers and kleptocrats want "their" Europe back, and are trying to hide their scheming and plotting away from public scrutiny. Look at how the criminals overthrew the democratically-elected governments in Greece and Italy, and replaced them with "their" people as unelected dictators (bankers from Goldman Sachs, the same criminals who engineered the global financial crisis, no less).
The business class are the worst hypocrites imaginable -- they LOVE democracy, when it opens up free markets for their goods and services and drives down the cost of labour, but turn on open society like rabid pigs when it doesn't serve their interests.
It's not surprising in the least that they would seek to bypass democratic oversight of their latest blatent power grab.
Agreed, you'd have to have a bit of a Messiah complex with a tenuous grip on reality to say the least, to be doing what that tosser is doing. At least he's going to go out in a blaze of glory.
Yes, I still think that Assange is a dangerous, mentally ill douchebag, but OTOH, there is no denying the public benefit of seeing some of these cables (as embarrasing and damaging as that may be to the US' legitimate interests).
I don't donate a cent to WikiLeaks, but they deserve at least a little credit.
Why the MAFIAA's dealings with the US Government isn't considered corruption is utterly beyond me.
It isn't 'corrupt' in the eyes of the law, but to ordinary people, it certainly smacks of corruption.
We can't expect it to be criminalised any time soon either, because the legislators who would be responsible for this have a massive conflict of interest.
There no doubting that despite the excellent work pharmaceutical companies do, that they're really not viable (and increasingly less so with time) as private going concerns - ESPECIALLY if they have to resort to such shady and dishonest tactics to maintain their margins. Private big pharma is a classic case of market failure -- where they'd rather invest in anti-cholesterol drugs and dick pill for rich, fat, ageing Boomers, than creating medicines to save lives in Third World countries -- simply because it's more profitable.
I say tell the shareholders -- and their political backers on the Nazi punk Right to go and fuck themselves -- and nationalize all pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment makers in the national interest.
I'm sure that nobody except right-wing profiteers and class warriors would shed even a single tear for them.
Now I understand COMPLETELY, the decision by the then-white-minority government in South Africa, to relinquish their nuclear weapons and put their nuclear programme under international safeguards.
And this does not make Jacob ('Bring Me My Machine Gun') Zuma and his cronies look too good.
Nobody, except the sickest, craziest Zionists and right-wing Republicans -- is that stupid. Like the Burmese junta, the mad mullahs of Tehran are a hydra-headed beast; cutting off a few heads won't destroy the beast. With this lot, change clearly has to come from within.
Or should I say, their system needs a few decades to rot from within; their ideological rigidity and zeal will ensure that they won't be able to adapt to circumstances, and they'll eventually be blown away by the winds of change before they even know what hit them.
So what, if these monkeys get nukes? If they ever dare to use them, they'll be obliterated, and they know it. Even animals have survival instincts. Why not just LET them waste the money and resources building useless weapons. A dollar spent building a centrifuge, is a dollar not spent on far more threatening conventional arms, or terror operations.
All we have to do is sit back, play the long game, and wait.
It would be quite interesting to see a list of employees of said company. I think some public shaming of the individuals involved might focus some minds wonderfully, from the boardroom downwards.
... probably thought they were awfully clever for a while.
Nice to see the good guys get up once in a while. Here's hoping that government policy makes it easy for these guys to get started and start producing economically and profitably. The less that hostile and aggressive foreign powers have over us, the better.
he's absolutely bang-on the money. I've tried using Android devices after several years using iDevices, and they are a human-factors disaster -- every single one of them. Like the Motorola Xoom. The first thirty seconds is "this loops slick", and the rest thirty seconds (before throwing the thing through the nearest sheet of plate glass), is "How TF do I use this Goddamned thing!?!?". Usability on Android is an afterthought.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's fairly obvious that they're just right-wing jackasses-for-hire, who'll lie for the highest bidder.
There is no idealism here at all. Just a desire to make a buck and watch the world burn. The epitome of the very worst side of human nature.
I'd say Exxon Mobil might be motivated to fund people to tell a few porkies.
After all, if I was making over $40 billion a year and big fat margins, I could consider that throwing a few million here and there to pay some PR people to lie about climate change is a good investment. And being a fossil company, I wouldn't care, since I would already be an expert at liability-dumping in any case, so I would sleep perfectly soundly, knowing that the massive negative externalities my business is generating (and that I'm not paying for) won't be my problem until long after I'm dead.
Nihilism, FTW.
Oh, I'm sorry that non-Muslims might be unhappy about being cut down by terrorists in their thousands, simply because you consider them dirty white kuffars.
So typical of Muslims. We must be destroyed and subjugated, and if we resist, we fuel your bullshit sense of victimhood.
"We are victims because you are rich dirty white kuffars and you exist. Therefore it is our right to kill you, terrorise you, bomb you, and illegally colonise your countries".
I heard about the "copyright police" at university, where a bunch of petty small-dicked wankers have nothing better to do, then to get paid by scumbag publishers to hang around photocopiers to make sure nobody's copying too much.
Clearly, some fat cat assholes at Elsevier and friends are afraid of losing their obscene 45% profit margins.
But intrusive surveillance to monitor in case somebody might link to somebody copyrighted, is bizarre and utterly extreme. It's a bit like burning down the entire forest, just because there might be a snake somewhere. But then, with corporatist extremists seemingly on the march everywhere, and seemingly completely untouchable these days, little surprises me.
No, idiot. The Ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round.
Oh, SingularityHub is the great big circle jerk set up by Ray 'Nerd Rapture' Kurzweil for these sad basement dwellers to jack off in public about turning into Gods by sticking our brains in jars or something.
Those cranks, loonies and weirdoes lost credibility long ago. I stopped reading as soon as I saw the URL bar.
Speaking strictly for myself, I would never be a major shareholder for Sony.
There's no way I would let such a bunch of useless, amoral assclowns to invest my money.
Why am I surprised that some rich Wall St prick thinks like all other spoilt Wall St pricks, and thinks that they are exempt from the rules that everyone else is subjected to, and try and get one over everyone else so he can get even more obscenely rich than he is.
I hope that prick Philip Falcone gets bankrupted for his hubris, and learns some morals and a little humility.
Save your money. Online dating is for poorly socialized basement dwellers.
Want to meet somebody nice? Try going out into the real world, and outside your comfort zone. Travel. Study something new. Change jobs. Move to another country. Then you'll meet lots of people; some may be date material, some will become lifelong friends, and a few will be special enough to share your life with. And that person, odds-on, will look nothing like what you imagined your partner to look like in your mind's eye.
Me? On a whim, I quit my job, moved to the other side of the world with nothing but the clothes on my back and my savings, and decided to start afresh. Six years later, I'm happily settled down with my lovely and very sweet, Spanish fiancee, only a few short years after I thought I'd be single forever.
It's what pickup nerds call "inner game". Work on growing as a person and being a balanced individual, and eventually everything else will fall into place.
Get out there, be bold, and have the courage to do something new and different. Don't waste your time on seedy websites.
... who REFRAINS from hacking the US government or US businesses, even.
It'll be the Chinese. Their get-rich-quick mentality, and the evil Chinese Communist Party's habit of indoctrinating everyone with a bullshit sense of self-righteous grievance that everything is Whitey's fault, gives then license to lie, cheat and steal. Chinese have a "shame" culture (unlike our Western "guilt" culture). There's no shame in lying, cheating, dealing drugs, adulterating food and medicine, stealing, etc in their culture -- only the shame of getting caught.
Too bad we can't give them a well deserved hiding, despite their extreme lack of preparedness (they're so set up to attack, their defences are hopeless), we can't do a thing about it. We could've developed a cyber-army worthy of Mordor, except the utter morons in the US Government destroyed the US hacker scene in the 1991 Operation Sundevil busts.
The solution would be very easy: do what the Chinese and Russians do: get a tacit understanding from the US government, that no American who hacks the US government or a US business will go to jail, and then let the hackers go to town. We should've done this 20 years ago.
Another dummy spit by some smug, business class wanker with a massive sense of entitlement.
In his overblown imaginations, he's a Galtian superman. In reality, he's just another huckster, who happened to make the big time.
This'll obviously depend on what kind of family you'll have. If they're the wrong kind of people, you could end up making enemies for life.
I think this is quite interesting.
The EU has always been a neoliberal political project designed to benefit big business. Single huge parket, mobililty of labour, single currency, decisions taken by unelected bureaucrats... it's all designed to enrich well-connected big businessmen.
But the problem with all this, is that they have to make a show of democratic legitimacy through what has been an utterly irrelevant European Parliament. But it seems that real people have other ideas... the youth these days are pan-European, with Erasmus scholarships and whatnot, people study, travel, holiday, fall in love and start families across a borderless Europe. So political legitimacy of a united Europe has become more important, and we're seeing a gradual strengthening of pan-European civil society, helped in part by the internet, and cheap flights. The demand of ordinary people for a fair say in how their continent is run is irresistable.
Naturally, the crooks, rent-seekers and kleptocrats want "their" Europe back, and are trying to hide their scheming and plotting away from public scrutiny. Look at how the criminals overthrew the democratically-elected governments in Greece and Italy, and replaced them with "their" people as unelected dictators (bankers from Goldman Sachs, the same criminals who engineered the global financial crisis, no less).
The business class are the worst hypocrites imaginable -- they LOVE democracy, when it opens up free markets for their goods and services and drives down the cost of labour, but turn on open society like rabid pigs when it doesn't serve their interests.
It's not surprising in the least that they would seek to bypass democratic oversight of their latest blatent power grab.
Non-sequitur much?
Agreed, you'd have to have a bit of a Messiah complex with a tenuous grip on reality to say the least, to be doing what that tosser is doing. At least he's going to go out in a blaze of glory.
Yes, I still think that Assange is a dangerous, mentally ill douchebag, but OTOH, there is no denying the public benefit of seeing some of these cables (as embarrasing and damaging as that may be to the US' legitimate interests).
I don't donate a cent to WikiLeaks, but they deserve at least a little credit.
Why the MAFIAA's dealings with the US Government isn't considered corruption is utterly beyond me.
It isn't 'corrupt' in the eyes of the law, but to ordinary people, it certainly smacks of corruption.
We can't expect it to be criminalised any time soon either, because the legislators who would be responsible for this have a massive conflict of interest.
when they're getting blown literally to pieces with real weapons. Might school them in reality.
There no doubting that despite the excellent work pharmaceutical companies do, that they're really not viable (and increasingly less so with time) as private going concerns - ESPECIALLY if they have to resort to such shady and dishonest tactics to maintain their margins. Private big pharma is a classic case of market failure -- where they'd rather invest in anti-cholesterol drugs and dick pill for rich, fat, ageing Boomers, than creating medicines to save lives in Third World countries -- simply because it's more profitable.
I say tell the shareholders -- and their political backers on the Nazi punk Right to go and fuck themselves -- and nationalize all pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment makers in the national interest.
I'm sure that nobody except right-wing profiteers and class warriors would shed even a single tear for them.
Now I understand COMPLETELY, the decision by the then-white-minority government in South Africa, to relinquish their nuclear weapons and put their nuclear programme under international safeguards.
And this does not make Jacob ('Bring Me My Machine Gun') Zuma and his cronies look too good.
Nobody, except the sickest, craziest Zionists and right-wing Republicans -- is that stupid. Like the Burmese junta, the mad mullahs of Tehran are a hydra-headed beast; cutting off a few heads won't destroy the beast. With this lot, change clearly has to come from within.
Or should I say, their system needs a few decades to rot from within; their ideological rigidity and zeal will ensure that they won't be able to adapt to circumstances, and they'll eventually be blown away by the winds of change before they even know what hit them.
So what, if these monkeys get nukes? If they ever dare to use them, they'll be obliterated, and they know it. Even animals have survival instincts. Why not just LET them waste the money and resources building useless weapons. A dollar spent building a centrifuge, is a dollar not spent on far more threatening conventional arms, or terror operations.
All we have to do is sit back, play the long game, and wait.
It would be quite interesting to see a list of employees of said company. I think some public shaming of the individuals involved might focus some minds wonderfully, from the boardroom downwards.
... probably thought they were awfully clever for a while.
Nice to see the good guys get up once in a while. Here's hoping that government policy makes it easy for these guys to get started and start producing economically and profitably. The less that hostile and aggressive foreign powers have over us, the better.
he's absolutely bang-on the money. I've tried using Android devices after several years using iDevices, and they are a human-factors disaster -- every single one of them. Like the Motorola Xoom. The first thirty seconds is "this loops slick", and the rest thirty seconds (before throwing the thing through the nearest sheet of plate glass), is "How TF do I use this Goddamned thing!?!?". Usability on Android is an afterthought.
Mod me down, fanboys.