Lacking a mandate from the relevant institutions of international law; in the absence of a credible threat to national security; based entirely on circumstantial evidence, cherry-picked intel and plain fabrication; against the wishes of a large fraction of voters...
But yes, confederate flags sound crazy, I agree. In fact, if I were writing a fishy column I would have discarded that bit as being too obviously fabricated.
But then I don't expect a lot of sanity or even rationality from people who suffer from the kind of ideas these guys have. The local far right and left fringes of the spectrum share this habit of exchanging symbols with remote, but like minded, groups it seems.
Except that GP was not talking about copying the US' computer-based espionage operations, but the US' various illegal wars.
You know, there is a bit of a mess unfolding in Ukraine. There are pro-russian and pro-european factions and the russians are obviously supporting the former -- with a completely illegal show of force.
Less well known is that the pro-european factions supported by the West are largely far-right nationalists. Neonazis, pretty much. See, e.g. this piece by Max Blumenthal.
I'll take a look, just as soon as I'm not supposed to be working. If you like this kind of demolishing you might find Naomi's Klein piece here worthwhile. (I have been bashed before for linking to the Nation, but nevermind).
All right, maybe I didn't phrase that very well. My impression is that Buddhism, on the whole, is a less violent philosophy than other religions. I am never sure if Buddhism counts as a religion because it has no god (or, if you prefer, everyone is potentially godlike.
Oh and offtopic, but Heartland in your.sig? Sarcasm?
What makes you say the film is historically accurate? What would you say is the primary intent of the movie -- informing the public? If either were true, why did the makers had to deceive the actors -- who were working with a different script than what ended up in the movie apparently -- and overdub significant portions of their lines?
As to the pedophile prophet meme... It seems to me this is projecting today's standards onto ancient history, and you're doing so selectively. I am pretty sure that at the time it was completely normal in Christendom too to consider females adults after they first menstruate.
Finally, I don't think Islam is significantly more -- or less -- violent than basically any other organized religion I can think of save Buddhism. And recent history in the Middle East is much less due to Islam then it is due to their cursed oil and *Western* meddling because of that. Read some of the declassified reports in which the US called the ME a "great prize".
So, for example, Iran -- whom we are supposed to be so very affraid of -- has not fought offensive wars for centuries. They have been, however, been forced to defend themselves from Iraqi aggression (backed by US/UK) and been deprived of their democratically elected moderate government on two occasions, again mostly instigated by US/UK agents. The fundamentalists in Tehran (despicable though I find them) are a direct result of Western actions.
I haven't watched it, and even if I had I wouldn't be able to comment on its historical accuracy. But given how long ago the subject lived it strikes me as unlikely that any current movie could claim such accuracy, even if they made a point of trying -- which IoM didn't, from what I've heard.
Also I think you are confusing the cases of a Dutch columnist who was murdered and a Danish cartoonist who was threatened, so historical accuracy doesn't appear to be your forte either (no offense).
Yeah that would be something. Rock and roll and physics are certainly not mutually exclusive. So for example Feynman sure pounded a mean bongo. And Brian Cox actually was a professional musician.
Halliburton loophole was created to hide 8 chemicals from publication.
Samples taken show that there are outlawed chemicals.
Google "Halliburton Loophole" you troll shill Ahole.
Huh, so if the purpose is fracking then, by definition, whatever you squirt down into the earth is not a pollutant. That's pretty rich. I have also heard another cop-out, which may or may not be accurate, that companies can claim "trade secrets" to avoid the EPA even just knowing what they squirt down, let alone rule on whether or not it constitutes pollution.
There's plenty of hazardous expeditions that Muslims have gone on without having a Fatwa issued against it - scaling Mount Everest, visiting the South/North pole, etc.
And the ISS, if I remember correctly. There were some issues in determining the direction in which to pray, but those were resolved. Wonder how that would work for Martian Muslims, though.
Well, the issue of asylum is just something the member states have not allowed the EU final authority over. That said, you're right that they might have issued a non binding directive in this case, but in majority voted against. Which is regrettable, I think, but possibly was the right thing to do (even if for all the wrong reasons). Individual member states are much easier to bully into submission, and don't think for a minute that some of the people out to get Snowden would think twice about that.
Well, one of the numerous problems with this whole situation is we can't rely on anything the govt, or the companies involved, have to say. Are these companies really against this, or do they just see the need to pretend to publicly? And even if they really are against it, would that change for sufficient compensation?
Either way, privatization is not going to make the underlying problems (such as much of the program being unconstitutional) go away.
I don't think neither "alarmist" nor "denier" are very helpful. Let's ask the climate scientists, in stead. Once again:
In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused primarily by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.[2][3][4] No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view,[5] though a few organizations hold non-committal positions.[6] Disputes over the key scientific facts of global warming are now more prevalent in the popular media than in the scientific literature, where such issues are treated as resolved, and more in the United States than globally[7][8].
We do not have "corruption commission" in the States, therefore we do not have any solid figure of how much corruption is costing the American taxpayers.
I hear you guys call this "campaign contribution". Maybe that will help you find some figures -- I am told they are rather outlandish.
Also, the Peter Principle. Basically it says that as long you prove yourself competent in your current position, you will have a shot at promotion -- so therefore a lot of people get promoted at least once too often, and wind up out of their depth.
Fair enough. Still, this story hardly warrants the comparison with book burning, certainly not with people burning, IMHO. Also, just curious, which movie were you thinking of?
Look, I agree that this is a pretty bad transgression on the part of British government, but let's keep a bit of perspective.
If anything it is slightly comical that these people think they can destroy digital information with drills and grinders and so on. Obviously they really don't, GHCQ do not have a reputation of being digitards.
So this is a message, the presence of cameras confirms it. On the one hand to the assorted press, watch your step. On the other hand to their US counterparts, sorry about this chaps we've got your back.
Which is a dick move, to be sure, but not quite the holocaust yet.
Is this the end of the leaks then? No smoking gun?
No, just a bunch of smoking HDs. But seriously, a "smoking gun" is what you need in a case where the evidence is thus far not conclusive. In this case, however, I don't know of anything Snowden released which has been denied by officials and much of it has been confirmed or corroborated by others.
I think we can consider it pretty much inevitable. In fact I'm amazed they haven't already started installing them. Hell, maybe they have. It is such a wonderful tool I'd be shocked if they could possibly resist the temptation. Imagine never needing to chase a car ever again? Always knowing where someone is and where they've been? It almost has to happen.
The problem with this, as with any tool that authorities don't want us to know about, is that they can't easily deploy it en masse without blowing the cover.
It's a bit like the problem the allies had in WWII. They had broken, sort of, several Axis ciphers (notably Enigma) but did not want that to be obvious, for fear that their adversaries would lose confidence and switch over to another cipher. That meant they had to do what we would now call parallel construction, and where this was not feasible they might have had to remain inactive and suffer losses. It may or may not be historically accurate, but some believe that plans for the bombing of Coventry were known beforehand by UK intelligence, who allowed it to happen instead of attempting an evacuation or even concentrating defenses.
I'm just going to go ahead and assume that all/. regulars have read Neal Stephenson's excellent Cryptonomicon, featuring this kind of conundrum in baroque detail.
Anyway, I think the comparison with places like China and Russia is less than helpful. In stead, let's compare with the US of, say, three decades ago -- when there were still two superpowers and the US had to at least pretend to be the good guys, to maintain support of its allies and at least some good will on the part of the non-aligned bloc.
Clearly the poster you replied to is a bit, um, out of his element here, but to say that serious a/v work is not possible on apple hardware is patently and demonstrably false. Name one major vendor that doesn't ship for mac?
Obviously that will require external audio and midi interfaces, but that much is true of any laptop.
Ardour has a dependency on GTK, as per this, so Gnome would seem the more natural fit. I use mint/mate myself, but as others have pointed out you might want to consider a special purpose a/v distro. Several exist, based off of most popular general purpose distros. See this.
I know that to get Ardour running smoothly I had to jump through some hoops to set up Jack properly (Jack Audio Connection Kit) and chances are that a specialized distro makes that kind of thing a bit easier.
Sure it isn't Logic, but I found Ardour to be a pretty awesome DAW. I'm an amateur, mind you, and lucky enough to have had a hands-on workshop with the author to get me started (during the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, couple of years back). Anyway, I'm using it with an RME audio interface and a MIDI control surface, and am pretty happy with that setup. Latency has never been an issue for me, but YMMV obviously.
That says something about what you guys expect from government, methinks.
Very little indeed, which is why we're actually doing better than you guys.
Better in what way, exactly? As a blanket statement this seems meaningless to me...
If Americans were "reflexively" against taxes, they wouldn't be collecting so many of them and the top marginal income tax rates would come down. Right now, they're higher than in Germany and the Netherlands (where you seem to be from), but Europeans don't figure that out because they don't even understand how the tax systems work.
Well, suppose I think it might be more complicated than what you're saying, which seems to amount to "Europeans are too stupid to understand US or even their own tax systems". Top bracket income in the Netherlands is at 52%, the number I just found for the US is 39%.
Of course with all the various accounting tricks and outright evasion, available on both sides of the Atlantic, nobody in that top bracket actually pays anything near these respective amounts. I seem to remember Warren Buffet making a point of saying he paid less taxes, proportionally, than his secretary, post-loopholes.
Conversely I think this goes some way to explaining why a lot of Europeans don't actually mind taxes
I think a better explanation is that the average European voter is even less informed than the average American voter.
Based on what? I'm certainly not about to argue that the average European is intrisically better informed than his US counterpart, but I don't see any evidence for the reverse either.
Slashdot Mirror
Please define "illegal wars".
Lacking a mandate from the relevant institutions of international law; in the absence of a credible threat to national security; based entirely on circumstantial evidence, cherry-picked intel and plain fabrication; against the wishes of a large fraction of voters...
Take your pick.
Sounds fishy. It SOUNDS like an American columnist came up with it out of his own head and forgot that Ukraine doesn't have southern democrats.
Svoboda and right sector are hardly being coy about it.
But yes, confederate flags sound crazy, I agree. In fact, if I were writing a fishy column I would have discarded that bit as being too obviously fabricated.
But then I don't expect a lot of sanity or even rationality from people who suffer from the kind of ideas these guys have. The local far right and left fringes of the spectrum share this habit of exchanging symbols with remote, but like minded, groups it seems.
Except that GP was not talking about copying the US' computer-based espionage operations, but the US' various illegal wars.
You know, there is a bit of a mess unfolding in Ukraine. There are pro-russian and pro-european factions and the russians are obviously supporting the former -- with a completely illegal show of force.
Less well known is that the pro-european factions supported by the West are largely far-right nationalists. Neonazis, pretty much. See, e.g. this piece by Max Blumenthal.
Thanks for confirming, I figured as much :-)
I'll take a look, just as soon as I'm not supposed to be working. If you like this kind of demolishing you might find Naomi's Klein piece here worthwhile. (I have been bashed before for linking to the Nation, but nevermind).
All right, maybe I didn't phrase that very well. My impression is that Buddhism, on the whole, is a less violent philosophy than other religions. I am never sure if Buddhism counts as a religion because it has no god (or, if you prefer, everyone is potentially godlike.
Oh and offtopic, but Heartland in your .sig? Sarcasm?
What makes you say the film is historically accurate? What would you say is the primary intent of the movie -- informing the public? If either were true, why did the makers had to deceive the actors -- who were working with a different script than what ended up in the movie apparently -- and overdub significant portions of their lines?
As to the pedophile prophet meme... It seems to me this is projecting today's standards onto ancient history, and you're doing so selectively. I am pretty sure that at the time it was completely normal in Christendom too to consider females adults after they first menstruate.
Finally, I don't think Islam is significantly more -- or less -- violent than basically any other organized religion I can think of save Buddhism. And recent history in the Middle East is much less due to Islam then it is due to their cursed oil and *Western* meddling because of that. Read some of the declassified reports in which the US called the ME a "great prize".
So, for example, Iran -- whom we are supposed to be so very affraid of -- has not fought offensive wars for centuries. They have been, however, been forced to defend themselves from Iraqi aggression (backed by US/UK) and been deprived of their democratically elected moderate government on two occasions, again mostly instigated by US/UK agents. The fundamentalists in Tehran (despicable though I find them) are a direct result of Western actions.
I haven't watched it, and even if I had I wouldn't be able to comment on its historical accuracy. But given how long ago the subject lived it strikes me as unlikely that any current movie could claim such accuracy, even if they made a point of trying -- which IoM didn't, from what I've heard.
Also I think you are confusing the cases of a Dutch columnist who was murdered and a Danish cartoonist who was threatened, so historical accuracy doesn't appear to be your forte either (no offense).
Yeah that would be something. Rock and roll and physics are certainly not mutually exclusive. So for example Feynman sure pounded a mean bongo. And Brian Cox actually was a professional musician.
Halliburton loophole was created to hide 8 chemicals from publication.
Samples taken show that there are outlawed chemicals.
Google "Halliburton Loophole" you troll shill Ahole.
Huh, so if the purpose is fracking then, by definition, whatever you squirt down into the earth is not a pollutant. That's pretty rich. I have also heard another cop-out, which may or may not be accurate, that companies can claim "trade secrets" to avoid the EPA even just knowing what they squirt down, let alone rule on whether or not it constitutes pollution.
Sickening.
There's plenty of hazardous expeditions that Muslims have gone on without having a Fatwa issued against it - scaling Mount Everest, visiting the South/North pole, etc.
And the ISS, if I remember correctly. There were some issues in determining the direction in which to pray, but those were resolved. Wonder how that would work for Martian Muslims, though.
Well, the issue of asylum is just something the member states have not allowed the EU final authority over. That said, you're right that they might have issued a non binding directive in this case, but in majority voted against. Which is regrettable, I think, but possibly was the right thing to do (even if for all the wrong reasons). Individual member states are much easier to bully into submission, and don't think for a minute that some of the people out to get Snowden would think twice about that.
Well, one of the numerous problems with this whole situation is we can't rely on anything the govt, or the companies involved, have to say. Are these companies really against this, or do they just see the need to pretend to publicly? And even if they really are against it, would that change for sufficient compensation?
Either way, privatization is not going to make the underlying problems (such as much of the program being unconstitutional) go away.
I don't think neither "alarmist" nor "denier" are very helpful. Let's ask the climate scientists, in stead. Once again:
In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused primarily by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases.[2][3][4] No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view,[5] though a few organizations hold non-committal positions.[6] Disputes over the key scientific facts of global warming are now more prevalent in the popular media than in the scientific literature, where such issues are treated as resolved, and more in the United States than globally[7][8].
We do not have "corruption commission" in the States, therefore we do not have any solid figure of how much corruption is costing the American taxpayers.
I hear you guys call this "campaign contribution". Maybe that will help you find some figures -- I am told they are rather outlandish.
Also, the Peter Principle. Basically it says that as long you prove yourself competent in your current position, you will have a shot at promotion -- so therefore a lot of people get promoted at least once too often, and wind up out of their depth.
Fair enough. Still, this story hardly warrants the comparison with book burning, certainly not with people burning, IMHO. Also, just curious, which movie were you thinking of?
Godwin in 6 minutes, well done.
Look, I agree that this is a pretty bad transgression on the part of British government, but let's keep a bit of perspective.
If anything it is slightly comical that these people think they can destroy digital information with drills and grinders and so on. Obviously they really don't, GHCQ do not have a reputation of being digitards.
So this is a message, the presence of cameras confirms it. On the one hand to the assorted press, watch your step. On the other hand to their US counterparts, sorry about this chaps we've got your back.
Which is a dick move, to be sure, but not quite the holocaust yet.
Is this the end of the leaks then? No smoking gun?
No, just a bunch of smoking HDs. But seriously, a "smoking gun" is what you need in a case where the evidence is thus far not conclusive. In this case, however, I don't know of anything Snowden released which has been denied by officials and much of it has been confirmed or corroborated by others.
I think we can consider it pretty much inevitable. In fact I'm amazed they haven't already started installing them. Hell, maybe they have. It is such a wonderful tool I'd be shocked if they could possibly resist the temptation. Imagine never needing to chase a car ever again? Always knowing where someone is and where they've been? It almost has to happen.
The problem with this, as with any tool that authorities don't want us to know about, is that they can't easily deploy it en masse without blowing the cover.
It's a bit like the problem the allies had in WWII. They had broken, sort of, several Axis ciphers (notably Enigma) but did not want that to be obvious, for fear that their adversaries would lose confidence and switch over to another cipher. That meant they had to do what we would now call parallel construction, and where this was not feasible they might have had to remain inactive and suffer losses. It may or may not be historically accurate, but some believe that plans for the bombing of Coventry were known beforehand by UK intelligence, who allowed it to happen instead of attempting an evacuation or even concentrating defenses.
I'm just going to go ahead and assume that all /. regulars have read Neal Stephenson's excellent Cryptonomicon, featuring this kind of conundrum in baroque detail.
Does it mean that USA no longer has to pretend to be that "Good Guy" anymore ? That it can start wantonly violating the liberty of anybody it wants ?
Well, that is sort of what it looks like from where I'm standing.
Why the scare quotes around "people's"?
Anyway, I think the comparison with places like China and Russia is less than helpful. In stead, let's compare with the US of, say, three decades ago -- when there were still two superpowers and the US had to at least pretend to be the good guys, to maintain support of its allies and at least some good will on the part of the non-aligned bloc.
Clearly the poster you replied to is a bit, um, out of his element here, but to say that serious a/v work is not possible on apple hardware is patently and demonstrably false. Name one major vendor that doesn't ship for mac?
Obviously that will require external audio and midi interfaces, but that much is true of any laptop.
Ardour has a dependency on GTK, as per this, so Gnome would seem the more natural fit. I use mint/mate myself, but as others have pointed out you might want to consider a special purpose a/v distro. Several exist, based off of most popular general purpose distros. See this.
I know that to get Ardour running smoothly I had to jump through some hoops to set up Jack properly (Jack Audio Connection Kit) and chances are that a specialized distro makes that kind of thing a bit easier.
Sure it isn't Logic, but I found Ardour to be a pretty awesome DAW. I'm an amateur, mind you, and lucky enough to have had a hands-on workshop with the author to get me started (during the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, couple of years back). Anyway, I'm using it with an RME audio interface and a MIDI control surface, and am pretty happy with that setup. Latency has never been an issue for me, but YMMV obviously.
That says something about what you guys expect from government, methinks.
Very little indeed, which is why we're actually doing better than you guys.
Better in what way, exactly? As a blanket statement this seems meaningless to me...
If Americans were "reflexively" against taxes, they wouldn't be collecting so many of them and the top marginal income tax rates would come down. Right now, they're higher than in Germany and the Netherlands (where you seem to be from), but Europeans don't figure that out because they don't even understand how the tax systems work.
Well, suppose I think it might be more complicated than what you're saying, which seems to amount to "Europeans are too stupid to understand US or even their own tax systems". Top bracket income in the Netherlands is at 52%, the number I just found for the US is 39%.
Of course with all the various accounting tricks and outright evasion, available on both sides of the Atlantic, nobody in that top bracket actually pays anything near these respective amounts. I seem to remember Warren Buffet making a point of saying he paid less taxes, proportionally, than his secretary, post-loopholes.
Conversely I think this goes some way to explaining why a lot of Europeans don't actually mind taxes
I think a better explanation is that the average European voter is even less informed than the average American voter.
Based on what? I'm certainly not about to argue that the average European is intrisically better informed than his US counterpart, but I don't see any evidence for the reverse either.