The terrorists can and will do absolutely everything to hurt and destroy the dirty white kuffars, including expending their own lives, and we respond by doing what we do best -- innovating and working hard. Eventually, even their mindless hatred and disregard for their own lives will be utterly crushed by our economic and technological strength, and like the original Zealots before the Romans 2000 years ago, they'll be but a pathetic historical footnote.
Even so, this is an application of the old "broken windows" fallacy. Terrorism isn't good for our economy, even as it fosters innovation (look at Israel's startup culture). It costs valuable money and resources to defend ourselves against these animals.
A classic case of false equivalency. You're claiming that all points of view are equally valid and are equally legitimate. This is false.
The US in particular seems to have a big problem with political extremism, particularly on the whacky fringes of the Right. The notion that somehow all "points of view" are legitimate is quite a convenient way for extremists, lunatics and sociopaths to claim that their dangerous ideas deserve the same legitimacy as mainstream politics.
It's also a mainstay of lazy journalists, who would rather just give equal time to complete idiots, rather than do their jobs properly, and filter out political extremist garbage.
No, the fact that Big Content are pushing their incredibly destructive and antisocial agenda in such secrecy speaks for itself. Society is more than a free market, and the sensible majority rightly see Big Content's massive and shameless ACTA power grab as the thin end of the wedge.
And I certainly don't believe that gaming or capturing the government for selfish gain in this fashion should be in any way considered legitimate.
And since the system itself is currently completely incapable of controlling these abuses, I do think that it is our right, hell, our DUTY, to bring pressure to bear on the sociopathic individuals driving this process -- at least until the proper legal checks and balances are in place.
I'll wager that the lobbying industry working for Big Content are filled with the same dishonest, shady and corrupt characters that shilled for Big Tobacco decades ago when they tried to deny links between smoking and lung cancer for purely selfish business reasons; or the corrupt rightwing shills who effectively conned the US government in waging wars and terrorism against Latin American countries to "protect US interests" (e.g. United Fruit). The same morally bankrupt individuals who staff lobbying companies and populate rightwing think tanks that are blitzing the world with climate denialism.
Perhaps it's time for society to start asking who these people are, who they're working for and what they're getting paid. A public open database of paid lobbyists and shills might be useful. Perhaps these weasels might be less keen on trashing our liberties for profit if they know that light is being shone on their corrupt activities.
Chances are, there will be only several dozen key individuals, who if pressured enough, and "encouraged" to find a more legitimate and honest lines of work, would make a big difference in fighting the onward march of vested interests in eroding our rights for profit.
The Russians have a huge chip on their shoulder because they lost the Cold War. They're always making grandiose-sounding announcements, but they very rarely follow through.
They recently made a huge announcement about sending cosmonauts to Mars, but they're flat out funding their existing programs, like Angara. They've only recently had a flight test of the Angara common booster core; and only on a "South Korean" rocket.
I'll believe it when I see it -- and by that, I mean bent metal, not press releases with delusions of grandeur.
When you regurgitate silly right-wing talking points SCREAM AND YELL and STAMP YOUR FEET LIKE THIS, set up straw men and knock them down, it makes you look like the paragon of sensible, common sense, level headed conservatism.
Really!
By the way, all health authorities, public and private, have to ration. I've got no idea where people got the idea that one should pay for an average health plan (whether private or single payer), and then expect to have millions spent on cutting edge, experimental, and extremely expensive medicine when they get sick.
Believing that paying for a bargain-basement health plan in the US and believing that you'll get Herceptin when you get breast cancer, is extremely naive.
Oh, and by the way: even in the SOCIALIST COMMUNIST NAZI government run health systems, if you don't like the basic plan, you're free to go private. Of course, they'll ration too. I've never heard of a country with a single-payer or government run health system not let people go private and pay for gold-plated health cover.
Of course, if were weren't listening to fat, drug-addled idiots on AM radio or FOX News, and actually spent time in the real world, you'd already know this, wouldn't you?
You get nothing for nothing in this world, dumbarse.
I think it's commendable that folks still challenge received wisdom, and are actually attempting to answer difficult questions, as opposed to merely sweeping them under the carpet.
However at the same time, we need to be super, super careful that we don't encourage the fringe extremist nutters in the antivax movement, who are sure to seize upon doubts of the efficacy of the swine flu vaccine as PROOF that all vaccination is bad, and that we should protect our kids by going to flu and chickenpox parties because it's "natural".
And I would need convincing that this isn't some kind of stunt by Group Health or other elements of the private health industry to wriggle out of paying for flu shots. Gotta love profit-focused private "health" care, and its useful idiot defenders on the Right.
I suppose it won't work if you try sketching the Dalai Lama?
I've heard of academic projects on filtering out porn (Australian military didn't want people surfing smut on the clock). I'd imagine that filtering out pics of the Dalai Lama would be harder...
The big problem with Anglo-Celtic society, is that we always love to yammer on about our rights and inalienable right to individual freedom, but never our responsibilities to each other.
Libertoons who try to defend the indefensible in the name of "freedom" and "individual liberty" annoy the hell out of me. They're every bit as bad as Marxists, religious crazies and animal rights extremists.
They have some serious cojones to be messing with dangerous organised criminals. Good on 'em and I hope they keep fighting the good fight -- and not come unstuck. They are stepping on the toes of some seriously ugly, violent people.
You are failing to make the distinction between a state founded as an ethnic and national project, as many European and East Asian countries are, as opposed to countries that are not, e.g. Australia, United States, Canada.
While I am by no means a UKIP/BNP voter, I think that in any given country, the concerns of the ethnic majority, about having their way of life disrupted, and their culture diluted by people from poor countries who don't respect their hosts, is justified.
East Asia, by and large, are doing a very good job at avoiding cultural suicide, by severely restricting mass immigration from poor countries, or countries with lesser-developed cultures. Europe, OTOH, has failed, and with the ghettoization of its inner cities, has only recently woken up to that fact.
What would be nice, is if somebody in the US could propose amending the Constitution to prevent private business from making profits by gaming Congress and regulators, and force them to make money by innovating and working hard instead.
Make laws to make regulatory capture by private business (especially those with failing business models) difficult or impossible, and make any law produced from private business' attempts to scam favourable laws, unconstitutional.
IANAL, but if such a thing could be done, then it would set a nice precedent to stop IP cartels and extortion outfits (RIAA, et al) from running amok elsewhere in the world too.
In my student days, a bunch of friends and I rented a couple of crappy student houses. They were next to each other, and only one house had cable internet access.
We solved the problem by digging a trench running from under one house to under the other. We dropped in PVC piping with a set of elbow joints, ran some cat 5 network cable through, and -- voila -- cheap(er) broadband for two houseloads of starving IT students.
Since the houses themselves were fit only for scrap timber, nobody really cared. And we saved a fortune in broadband bills.
It's ridiculous that a supposedly rational, enlightened society would permit the existence of these kinds of these blatently political star chambers.
Sadly, there is a certain part of American society, particularly on the pro-business, conservative side of politics, which is yet to move beyond the Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials. This is an example of that kind of medieval, irrational mindset.
What's so galling for me, is the existence of people, particularly on the political Right, who think they can change reality for their own benefit, by wishing for it hard enough.
This kind of violent, wilful irrationality will be the death of America.
Ostensibly a failure for the South Koreans, since some kind of failure of staging caused the satellite to be inserted into the incorrect orbit. And in all likelihood, the perigee ended up being too low, causing the payload to be inserted into the ocean...
The first stage is basically Russian hardware (Khrunichev), and is basically a flight test of the Angara common booster core with an advanced Russian LOX-kerosene RD-191 engine. Since the failure occurred *AFTER* staging, the failure most likely occurred in South Korean hardware.
So if I were the South Koreans, I'd be fairly pissed right now. Although this is only a first attempt; anything space-related is bloody hard, and you've got to expect failures on brand new, untested hardware.
On the other hand, if I were one of the Russian engineers responsible for the first stage, I'd be pretty pleased with the successful Angara flight test.
(Although I'm not sure if I was the only one who saw the launch video, and saw the first stage pitch suddenly before clearing the tower and then pitch in the opposite direction. Didn't look good...)
Guess that somebody actually considering an off-the-shelf industrial robot newsworthy speaks volumes about the state of Australian society.
Australia suffers from a severe problem, where anything perceived as too 'clever' is distrusted and sneered at. Governments don't support industrial development (and indeed, the neoliberals and environmentalists try to actively sabotage it). If it isn't sport, and if it doesn't involve farming it or digging it out of the ground, it doesn't rate.
Much of the problem is knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, and another part of it is the credulity of the political class; they actually believe in neoliberalism, and think that Australia can only do farming and extractive industry.
This is the reason why Australians are so well-known as travellers; of a population of 21 million, about a million are abroad at any one time. Much of it is because neoliberals have turned Australia into a classic branch-office economy, and there are more opportunities overseas.
I have to wonder just how clever these small-time fraudsters and crooks actually are.
Most of them are young men with little life experience, big egos and something to prove. Thus the puerile bragging and bravado coming out of the little scumbags in the media. If they're not script kiddies, they're not that much better; they're just greedy, arrogant, loud-mouthed little thieves, and the police will nail them as low-hanging fruit.
The Feds on the other hand, are people you DON'T want to needlessly antagonise. It'll be interesting to see if our little piece-of-shit fraudster friends are actually as smart as they think they are.
... at the vast resources the record and movie companies are pouring into their litigation jihad against TPB. Good lawyers don't exactly grow on trees.
Clearly, they see piracy -- as a political movement -- as an existential threat to their business, and are prepared to do absolutely anything to kill it.
Reckon that the record companies would engage in outright criminality to fight their enemies? Given their penchant for suing defenceless, computer-illiterate single mums and kids, there's definitely a whiff of Big Tobacco or United Fruit there...
Vote parent up. There's a pattern emerging here. It's what a lot of corporate types call an "inability to execute".
Could be that all these grandiose-but-ultimately-fruitless hare brained schemes are actually a symptom of a more serious underlying malady: a very low self-esteem in the Russian political establishment. This manifests itself in bullying countries in their near abroad, and 19th-century style political posturing when that they REALLY need to do, is knuckle down and do the unglamourous grunt work of building the foundations of future prosperity. Like properly guaranteeing the rule of law for everybody, and not just selectively enforcing the law when it suits the "power vertical"; real political pluralism, independent judiciary, and a thorough and wide ranging crackdown on corruption.
Big Content are just abusing the legal system as a weapon. They don't care if they win or lose, because it costs a lot of money to defend against a lawsuit in most countries.
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That's completely fine in my book.
The terrorists can and will do absolutely everything to hurt and destroy the dirty white kuffars, including expending their own lives, and we respond by doing what we do best -- innovating and working hard. Eventually, even their mindless hatred and disregard for their own lives will be utterly crushed by our economic and technological strength, and like the original Zealots before the Romans 2000 years ago, they'll be but a pathetic historical footnote.
Even so, this is an application of the old "broken windows" fallacy. Terrorism isn't good for our economy, even as it fosters innovation (look at Israel's startup culture). It costs valuable money and resources to defend ourselves against these animals.
A classic case of false equivalency. You're claiming that all points of view are equally valid and are equally legitimate. This is false.
The US in particular seems to have a big problem with political extremism, particularly on the whacky fringes of the Right. The notion that somehow all "points of view" are legitimate is quite a convenient way for extremists, lunatics and sociopaths to claim that their dangerous ideas deserve the same legitimacy as mainstream politics.
It's also a mainstay of lazy journalists, who would rather just give equal time to complete idiots, rather than do their jobs properly, and filter out political extremist garbage.
No, the fact that Big Content are pushing their incredibly destructive and antisocial agenda in such secrecy speaks for itself. Society is more than a free market, and the sensible majority rightly see Big Content's massive and shameless ACTA power grab as the thin end of the wedge.
And I certainly don't believe that gaming or capturing the government for selfish gain in this fashion should be in any way considered legitimate.
And since the system itself is currently completely incapable of controlling these abuses, I do think that it is our right, hell, our DUTY, to bring pressure to bear on the sociopathic individuals driving this process -- at least until the proper legal checks and balances are in place.
What are /you/ so afraid of?
I'll wager that the lobbying industry working for Big Content are filled with the same dishonest, shady and corrupt characters that shilled for Big Tobacco decades ago when they tried to deny links between smoking and lung cancer for purely selfish business reasons; or the corrupt rightwing shills who effectively conned the US government in waging wars and terrorism against Latin American countries to "protect US interests" (e.g. United Fruit). The same morally bankrupt individuals who staff lobbying companies and populate rightwing think tanks that are blitzing the world with climate denialism.
Perhaps it's time for society to start asking who these people are, who they're working for and what they're getting paid. A public open database of paid lobbyists and shills might be useful. Perhaps these weasels might be less keen on trashing our liberties for profit if they know that light is being shone on their corrupt activities.
Chances are, there will be only several dozen key individuals, who if pressured enough, and "encouraged" to find a more legitimate and honest lines of work, would make a big difference in fighting the onward march of vested interests in eroding our rights for profit.
The Russians have a huge chip on their shoulder because they lost the Cold War. They're always making grandiose-sounding announcements, but they very rarely follow through.
They recently made a huge announcement about sending cosmonauts to Mars, but they're flat out funding their existing programs, like Angara. They've only recently had a flight test of the Angara common booster core; and only on a "South Korean" rocket.
I'll believe it when I see it -- and by that, I mean bent metal, not press releases with delusions of grandeur.
LOL.
When you regurgitate silly right-wing talking points SCREAM AND YELL and STAMP YOUR FEET LIKE THIS, set up straw men and knock them down, it makes you look like the paragon of sensible, common sense, level headed conservatism.
Really!
By the way, all health authorities, public and private, have to ration. I've got no idea where people got the idea that one should pay for an average health plan (whether private or single payer), and then expect to have millions spent on cutting edge, experimental, and extremely expensive medicine when they get sick.
Believing that paying for a bargain-basement health plan in the US and believing that you'll get Herceptin when you get breast cancer, is extremely naive.
Oh, and by the way: even in the SOCIALIST COMMUNIST NAZI government run health systems, if you don't like the basic plan, you're free to go private. Of course, they'll ration too. I've never heard of a country with a single-payer or government run health system not let people go private and pay for gold-plated health cover.
Of course, if were weren't listening to fat, drug-addled idiots on AM radio or FOX News, and actually spent time in the real world, you'd already know this, wouldn't you?
You get nothing for nothing in this world, dumbarse.
I think it's commendable that folks still challenge received wisdom, and are actually attempting to answer difficult questions, as opposed to merely sweeping them under the carpet.
However at the same time, we need to be super, super careful that we don't encourage the fringe extremist nutters in the antivax movement, who are sure to seize upon doubts of the efficacy of the swine flu vaccine as PROOF that all vaccination is bad, and that we should protect our kids by going to flu and chickenpox parties because it's "natural".
And I would need convincing that this isn't some kind of stunt by Group Health or other elements of the private health industry to wriggle out of paying for flu shots. Gotta love profit-focused private "health" care, and its useful idiot defenders on the Right.
I suppose it won't work if you try sketching the Dalai Lama?
I've heard of academic projects on filtering out porn (Australian military didn't want people surfing smut on the clock). I'd imagine that filtering out pics of the Dalai Lama would be harder...
"Bad and Clueless Parenting Linked to Violence"?
The big problem with Anglo-Celtic society, is that we always love to yammer on about our rights and inalienable right to individual freedom, but never our responsibilities to each other.
Libertoons who try to defend the indefensible in the name of "freedom" and "individual liberty" annoy the hell out of me. They're every bit as bad as Marxists, religious crazies and animal rights extremists.
They have some serious cojones to be messing with dangerous organised criminals. Good on 'em and I hope they keep fighting the good fight -- and not come unstuck. They are stepping on the toes of some seriously ugly, violent people.
You are failing to make the distinction between a state founded as an ethnic and national project, as many European and East Asian countries are, as opposed to countries that are not, e.g. Australia, United States, Canada.
While I am by no means a UKIP/BNP voter, I think that in any given country, the concerns of the ethnic majority, about having their way of life disrupted, and their culture diluted by people from poor countries who don't respect their hosts, is justified.
East Asia, by and large, are doing a very good job at avoiding cultural suicide, by severely restricting mass immigration from poor countries, or countries with lesser-developed cultures. Europe, OTOH, has failed, and with the ghettoization of its inner cities, has only recently woken up to that fact.
What would be nice, is if somebody in the US could propose amending the Constitution to prevent private business from making profits by gaming Congress and regulators, and force them to make money by innovating and working hard instead.
Make laws to make regulatory capture by private business (especially those with failing business models) difficult or impossible, and make any law produced from private business' attempts to scam favourable laws, unconstitutional.
IANAL, but if such a thing could be done, then it would set a nice precedent to stop IP cartels and extortion outfits (RIAA, et al) from running amok elsewhere in the world too.
This was before affordable wireless dongles/cards and APs.
Besides, considering that we were all living on ramen and tomato ketchup, there wasn't a lot of money in the budget for anything we couldn't scrounge.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
In my student days, a bunch of friends and I rented a couple of crappy student houses. They were next to each other, and only one house had cable internet access.
We solved the problem by digging a trench running from under one house to under the other. We dropped in PVC piping with a set of elbow joints, ran some cat 5 network cable through, and -- voila -- cheap(er) broadband for two houseloads of starving IT students.
Since the houses themselves were fit only for scrap timber, nobody really cared. And we saved a fortune in broadband bills.
Typical irrational, truthy conservative shit talk.
"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."
â" Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It's ridiculous that a supposedly rational, enlightened society would permit the existence of these kinds of these blatently political star chambers.
Sadly, there is a certain part of American society, particularly on the pro-business, conservative side of politics, which is yet to move beyond the Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials. This is an example of that kind of medieval, irrational mindset.
What's so galling for me, is the existence of people, particularly on the political Right, who think they can change reality for their own benefit, by wishing for it hard enough.
This kind of violent, wilful irrationality will be the death of America.
Ostensibly a failure for the South Koreans, since some kind of failure of staging caused the satellite to be inserted into the incorrect orbit. And in all likelihood, the perigee ended up being too low, causing the payload to be inserted into the ocean...
The first stage is basically Russian hardware (Khrunichev), and is basically a flight test of the Angara common booster core with an advanced Russian LOX-kerosene RD-191 engine. Since the failure occurred *AFTER* staging, the failure most likely occurred in South Korean hardware.
So if I were the South Koreans, I'd be fairly pissed right now. Although this is only a first attempt; anything space-related is bloody hard, and you've got to expect failures on brand new, untested hardware.
On the other hand, if I were one of the Russian engineers responsible for the first stage, I'd be pretty pleased with the successful Angara flight test.
(Although I'm not sure if I was the only one who saw the launch video, and saw the first stage pitch suddenly before clearing the tower and then pitch in the opposite direction. Didn't look good...)
Guess that somebody actually considering an off-the-shelf industrial robot newsworthy speaks volumes about the state of Australian society.
Australia suffers from a severe problem, where anything perceived as too 'clever' is distrusted and sneered at. Governments don't support industrial development (and indeed, the neoliberals and environmentalists try to actively sabotage it). If it isn't sport, and if it doesn't involve farming it or digging it out of the ground, it doesn't rate.
Much of the problem is knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, and another part of it is the credulity of the political class; they actually believe in neoliberalism, and think that Australia can only do farming and extractive industry.
This is the reason why Australians are so well-known as travellers; of a population of 21 million, about a million are abroad at any one time. Much of it is because neoliberals have turned Australia into a classic branch-office economy, and there are more opportunities overseas.
I have to wonder just how clever these small-time fraudsters and crooks actually are.
Most of them are young men with little life experience, big egos and something to prove. Thus the puerile bragging and bravado coming out of the little scumbags in the media. If they're not script kiddies, they're not that much better; they're just greedy, arrogant, loud-mouthed little thieves, and the police will nail them as low-hanging fruit.
The Feds on the other hand, are people you DON'T want to needlessly antagonise. It'll be interesting to see if our little piece-of-shit fraudster friends are actually as smart as they think they are.
Somebody needs a hug.
BTW, you're probably thinking of John Galt. Nice try anyway.
... at the vast resources the record and movie companies are pouring into their litigation jihad against TPB. Good lawyers don't exactly grow on trees.
Clearly, they see piracy -- as a political movement -- as an existential threat to their business, and are prepared to do absolutely anything to kill it.
Reckon that the record companies would engage in outright criminality to fight their enemies? Given their penchant for suing defenceless, computer-illiterate single mums and kids, there's definitely a whiff of Big Tobacco or United Fruit there...
Vote parent up. There's a pattern emerging here. It's what a lot of corporate types call an "inability to execute".
Could be that all these grandiose-but-ultimately-fruitless hare brained schemes are actually a symptom of a more serious underlying malady: a very low self-esteem in the Russian political establishment. This manifests itself in bullying countries in their near abroad, and 19th-century style political posturing when that they REALLY need to do, is knuckle down and do the unglamourous grunt work of building the foundations of future prosperity. Like properly guaranteeing the rule of law for everybody, and not just selectively enforcing the law when it suits the "power vertical"; real political pluralism, independent judiciary, and a thorough and wide ranging crackdown on corruption.
Easy. Spam, fast-flux dick pill hosting, and DDoS workloads are what are technically known as "embarrassingly parallel" workloads.
Who needs supercomputers when you've got million-node botnets?
Big Content are just abusing the legal system as a weapon. They don't care if they win or lose, because it costs a lot of money to defend against a lawsuit in most countries.
In other contexts, they're known as SLAPP suits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation
More examples of the dinosaurs in Big Content propping up their failed business models through the legal system and coopting lawmakers.