Let's not kid ourselves. They weren't after him for downloading articles. They were after him because of his work on demandprogress.org, rootstrikers and other political activism. As with the dubious accusations (not charges) against Assange, the charges over Schwartz' alleged crimes were trumped up to stop him from doing what he obviously considered important work: political activism challenging the status quo.
We also have the most of it. Though tanks and rifles are practically irrelevant. We live on a water planet. Therefore its the Navy this is of the most concern, and we have eight Nimitz class aircraft carriers complete with, I assume, long range fighters, not to mention drones, with presumably medium to long range missiles in addition to their support fleets.
One of those floating fortresses can easily subdue most countries entire military without the use of ground forces. Though there are really only a handful of countries that could mount significant resistance.
You are correct, but make no mistake, the reason the US will do whatever they feel like is because they have the world's most formidable military by a large margin. Which basically makes it the world's largest terrorist organization. What else do you call it when you have the biggest stick on the planet and the mere threat of it is enough to make other countries do as you please? It is textbook terrorism.
And you know that it is a totalitarian regime when millions of its citizens are out of work, homeless, starving, lacking medical care, etc, yet reducing the budget doublethink-named "Department of Defense" (complete with eight, going on 11 Nimitz class "floating fortresses") is never even considered. Hell, they would rather cut social reinvestment programs like fucking healthcare first!
The whole "but they cannot be a totalitarian regime because the government is controlled by two competing political parties" simply doesn't hold either. Both parties are largely funded by the same plutocracy. They cooperate on everything that benefits the plutocracy (tax cuts for the rich, bank bailout etc, taking on more national debt), and stall on everything that benefits the proletariat (healthcare reform, socialized medicine etc). Hell, the presidential debates have been jointly run by the two supposedly opposed parties for decades - which explains why you did not see the Green Party or Libertarian parties even represented at the 2012 Presidential debates, in fact, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate was arrested and detained without due process by the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service for the political crime of trying to attend the debates for the political office she legally running for!
Do I even need to mention the NSA's Total Information program? The open mockery of the 4th Amendment that is the Transportation Security Administration? Or the Department of Homeland Security whose very existence ought to be redundant given that we already have an oversized military, a national guard, and a police force?
This country is so fucked, and the collapse is coming. It simply is not sustainable as is.
The choice between Democrat and Republican is not freedom, but a box to contain you.
Both support these measures.
Both support more spending on the War Department (I refuse to call it by its doublethink name.)
Both oppose ending marijuana prohibition.
Both endorsed and passed the NDAA.
Both support the TSA's existence.
So which one will you choose? It is no different than our ridiculous telecom oligopoly. Sure you can choose, between three equivalently shitty, abusive options.
Choosing between provided options is not freedom, it's multiple choice where no answer is freedom.
She is guilty of disobeying authority and nothing else.
The TSA exists solely to condition the American people to a police state. This is it in action.
We have known since its inception it is but security theater, not security. So it must exist for some other purpose. Here we see that purpose revealed. Obey authority no matter that it is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment, and you will be made a criminal if you refuse (unless you are rich, famous or powerful).
No, they don't have guns. They're untrained, unskilled mall rentacops who have to be watched, else they'll steal things from their "customers".
Seriously. They've been told to refer to the people whose rights they violate as "customers" in an attempt to frame the situation in a way that distracts from the flagrant violations of the Bill of Rights they perform thousands of times per day.
The question is, why is your faith so weak that you are so offended that I don't believe in god.
Because the religion is constructed in such a way that its believers are programmed to attack or convert non-believers.
It is a classic survival mechanism used by things we all agree are "alive" all the time:
1) Produce more of yourself (believers/hosts for the faith). Usually children indoctrinated by their parents. Also converting those without believing/infected parents.
2) Kill off the competition. (non-believers)
In this way a religion is more a living thing than an ideology, and people are merely hosts.
The sheer (solar) energy abundance alone would seem to almost make anything possible...I'm no expert, but Wikipedia says it gets 4-10x as much energy and with a near 700K surface temperature the place should be just swimming in energy...right? Obviously the colony would have to be underground (where there is also a lot of geothermal energy.
What that much free power available, couldn't we do just about anything we had the raw materials for? Drop a few mineral rich asteroids on the planet and you've got those...
We have the ion drives to move asteroids (slowly) already...
Good point. However, It's not the idiots crashing into my car anyone should be most worried about. It's the idiots crashing the economy and getting bailed out for it.
Those psychopaths that have yet to be held accountable, and they control the finance world. But not the bitcoin world.
Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government
I'm not sure that's a bad thing anymore given what governments around the world are doing to people these days. I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly. Banks and governments can't freeze it at will.
and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value.
This is misleading as all hell. Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. And pretty much every non-electronic currency collapsed in value in 2008. I'm not sure bitcoin did. It's new, but it's totally usable and stable enough.
Having used bitcoin personally for several things, I have nothing bad to say about it except that it's a little bit slow for transfers to happen. Still way faster than a bank and it operates 24/365.
Maybe it was death threats from anti-nuclear Luddites, or, simply exhaustion from the pressure of being a public figure, or annoyance with the continual ignorance of the masses fighting against one of the most promising technologies of the 20th century.
Thank you for saying this. I've been trying to get this point across to people until I'm blue in the face.
Fact: More people die due to coal and oil powered plants than nuclear ones. In fact, it's about 915 times more dangerous than nuclear power, even accounting for their respective percentages of world power. In actuality, it's 161 deaths per TWH for coal, and 0.04 for nuclear. Not to mention the pollutants that don't kill human beings, but hurt
Fact: One day the coal and oil are going to run out.
So what else are we going to use? Nothing touches nuclear power in terms of efficiency, cleanliness, and viability right now, yet this whole Fukishima disaster (note that it was caused by an record-setting earthquake, and a tsunami which exceeded the safety precautions in place. Still, none by radiation which is the only "scary" aspect of nuclear power, really. Power plants can't explode. And we have learned a LOT since Chernobyl. Just look at Fukishima. After all was said & done, it wasn't that bad as far as the power plants reactors' are concerned.
Radiation is fear-mongered to death, demonized by the fossil fuel industry, and better for all of us than it.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is 90% for the benefit of lawyers. Congress is 51% lawyers by volume. This is not a coincidence.
Let's not kid ourselves. They weren't after him for downloading articles. They were after him because of his work on demandprogress.org, rootstrikers and other political activism. As with the dubious accusations (not charges) against Assange, the charges over Schwartz' alleged crimes were trumped up to stop him from doing what he obviously considered important work: political activism challenging the status quo.
Which sounds great until you realize that the cost of living in the SF Bay area is significantly higher than most parts of the US except NYC.
Comparing salaries without accounting for cost of living is extremely misleading.
We also have the most of it. Though tanks and rifles are practically irrelevant. We live on a water planet. Therefore its the Navy this is of the most concern, and we have eight Nimitz class aircraft carriers complete with, I assume, long range fighters, not to mention drones, with presumably medium to long range missiles in addition to their support fleets.
One of those floating fortresses can easily subdue most countries entire military without the use of ground forces. Though there are really only a handful of countries that could mount significant resistance.
The Soviet Union lacked the Internet to circumvent authoritarian propaganda. This is going to happen much, much quicker.
You are correct, but make no mistake, the reason the US will do whatever they feel like is because they have the world's most formidable military by a large margin. Which basically makes it the world's largest terrorist organization. What else do you call it when you have the biggest stick on the planet and the mere threat of it is enough to make other countries do as you please? It is textbook terrorism.
And you know that it is a totalitarian regime when millions of its citizens are out of work, homeless, starving, lacking medical care, etc, yet reducing the budget doublethink-named "Department of Defense" (complete with eight, going on 11 Nimitz class "floating fortresses") is never even considered. Hell, they would rather cut social reinvestment programs like fucking healthcare first!
The whole "but they cannot be a totalitarian regime because the government is controlled by two competing political parties" simply doesn't hold either. Both parties are largely funded by the same plutocracy. They cooperate on everything that benefits the plutocracy (tax cuts for the rich, bank bailout etc, taking on more national debt), and stall on everything that benefits the proletariat (healthcare reform, socialized medicine etc). Hell, the presidential debates have been jointly run by the two supposedly opposed parties for decades - which explains why you did not see the Green Party or Libertarian parties even represented at the 2012 Presidential debates, in fact, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate was arrested and detained without due process by the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service for the political crime of trying to attend the debates for the political office she legally running for!
Do I even need to mention the NSA's Total Information program? The open mockery of the 4th Amendment that is the Transportation Security Administration? Or the Department of Homeland Security whose very existence ought to be redundant given that we already have an oversized military, a national guard, and a police force?
This country is so fucked, and the collapse is coming. It simply is not sustainable as is.
As if?
The choice between Democrat and Republican is not freedom, but a box to contain you.
Both support these measures.
Both support more spending on the War Department (I refuse to call it by its doublethink name.)
Both oppose ending marijuana prohibition.
Both endorsed and passed the NDAA.
Both support the TSA's existence.
So which one will you choose? It is no different than our ridiculous telecom oligopoly. Sure you can choose, between three equivalently shitty, abusive options.
Choosing between provided options is not freedom, it's multiple choice where no answer is freedom.
Hear, hear!
She is guilty of disobeying authority and nothing else.
The TSA exists solely to condition the American people to a police state. This is it in action.
We have known since its inception it is but security theater, not security. So it must exist for some other purpose. Here we see that purpose revealed. Obey authority no matter that it is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment, and you will be made a criminal if you refuse (unless you are rich, famous or powerful).
No, they don't have guns. They're untrained, unskilled mall rentacops who have to be watched, else they'll steal things from their "customers".
Seriously. They've been told to refer to the people whose rights they violate as "customers" in an attempt to frame the situation in a way that distracts from the flagrant violations of the Bill of Rights they perform thousands of times per day.
The question is, why is your faith so weak that you are so offended that I don't believe in god.
Because the religion is constructed in such a way that its believers are programmed to attack or convert non-believers.
It is a classic survival mechanism used by things we all agree are "alive" all the time:
1) Produce more of yourself (believers/hosts for the faith). Usually children indoctrinated by their parents. Also converting those without believing/infected parents.
2) Kill off the competition. (non-believers)
In this way a religion is more a living thing than an ideology, and people are merely hosts.
tl;dr: Religions like this are parasites.
Surely a km or two below the surface would help? Again, I'm not an expert, obviously.
Sufficient for what?
I was just thinking Mercury wouldn't have sufficient energy, it would have abundant energy.
Why not mercury?
The sheer (solar) energy abundance alone would seem to almost make anything possible...I'm no expert, but Wikipedia says it gets 4-10x as much energy and with a near 700K surface temperature the place should be just swimming in energy...right? Obviously the colony would have to be underground (where there is also a lot of geothermal energy.
What that much free power available, couldn't we do just about anything we had the raw materials for? Drop a few mineral rich asteroids on the planet and you've got those...
We have the ion drives to move asteroids (slowly) already...
The choice between (D) and (R) is not freedom. It is a box to contain you.
Lawyers and bankers are both professional liars.
I would only trust them if I owned their data.
How can it be both blind and malicious? The two are mutually exclusive.
guilty of sharing
Did they do it less, or stop asking for permission?
Good point. However, It's not the idiots crashing into my car anyone should be most worried about. It's the idiots crashing the economy and getting bailed out for it.
Those psychopaths that have yet to be held accountable, and they control the finance world. But not the bitcoin world.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing anymore given what governments around the world are doing to people these days. I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly. Banks and governments can't freeze it at will.
This is misleading as all hell. Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. And pretty much every non-electronic currency collapsed in value in 2008. I'm not sure bitcoin did. It's new, but it's totally usable and stable enough.
Having used bitcoin personally for several things, I have nothing bad to say about it except that it's a little bit slow for transfers to happen. Still way faster than a bank and it operates 24/365.
I can't wait for this + the revolution. It's going to be so fun shooting them down.
Maybe it was death threats from anti-nuclear Luddites, or, simply exhaustion from the pressure of being a public figure, or annoyance with the continual ignorance of the masses fighting against one of the most promising technologies of the 20th century.
Thank you for saying this. I've been trying to get this point across to people until I'm blue in the face.
Fact: More people die due to coal and oil powered plants than nuclear ones. In fact, it's about 915 times more dangerous than nuclear power, even accounting for their respective percentages of world power. In actuality, it's 161 deaths per TWH for coal, and 0.04 for nuclear. Not to mention the pollutants that don't kill human beings, but hurt
Fact: One day the coal and oil are going to run out.
So what else are we going to use? Nothing touches nuclear power in terms of efficiency, cleanliness, and viability right now, yet this whole Fukishima disaster (note that it was caused by an record-setting earthquake, and a tsunami which exceeded the safety precautions in place. Still, none by radiation which is the only "scary" aspect of nuclear power, really. Power plants can't explode. And we have learned a LOT since Chernobyl. Just look at Fukishima. After all was said & done, it wasn't that bad as far as the power plants reactors' are concerned.
Radiation is fear-mongered to death, demonized by the fossil fuel industry, and better for all of us than it.
The old rule still applies: Physical access is access.
This is what happens when you pretend information can be owned.