A few questions then; why did we have to invade Japan? Why did it need to surrender? It was blockaded, it couldn't mount any significant attack that wouldn't have met russian and american forces, so why were the only choices invasion or nuclear attack? At what level do military casualties become hefty enough to warrant the murder of unarmed civilians that chose not to fight? Why not nuke a naval base? Why not shell targets from the shore, focus on anti-aircraft capabilities, and end with non-stop carpet bombings of military targets? Why not send every american soldier home, away from the obviously defeated Japan, and let the threat of taking on the world alone have it's effect? Why no 'warning shot' over the water to see if letting Japan see the effects of a weapon that was, at that time, mistakenly thought to be the end of the world, would inspire and end to aggression, and possibly a surrender? Surely it's not possible that our immediate reaction was mass murder, because the people and the government wanted revenge, or because the government wanted to flex it's muscles for the world...
This makes me sick. The notion of using nuclear strikes is tantamount to expressing a blatant desire to murder innocent people. I know of no precision nuke that wouldn't kill or irradiate nearby civilians. I don't care how angry people are; the US does not stand for murder. There was no justification for it in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, and there is definitely no justification for it now. If you can tell me that killing hundreds of thousands of civilians to save the American lives that would be lost in an assault (as was the excuse given after WW2), then you're telling me that America stands for nothing that it was meant to stand for. We can't claim that our armed forces exist to fight and die in the name of freedom and basic human rights, when we're willing to forcefully trade civilian lives for those of our armed forces.
Well, they could just abolish human rights and unions, then use slave labor to make unsafe products that kill people and the environment. Sorta like they've done already, at least, before silly things like seatbelts and truthful advertising for cigarettes came about. And I'm sure they could never buy laws that require ownership of a product; unless you count various forms of insurance that are allowed to profit from death. Insurance that is supposedly in place to serve as a safety net; only when you actually need the money you've been funneling into it, you're forced to pay a percentage of it, and pay more annually, afterwards.
If it weren't for the fact that corporate donations buy elections for their favorite candidates, I could probably run for office tomorrow and change all that. It is/was a democratic government. I wonder if it were replaced by corporations.....would I be able to run for CEO? If by some miracle I could, that would be some democracy. I'd be the first dictator of a free country in the world!
I would love to hear about a company in the same industry, that dwarves AOLTW. I think you must be comparing something like Exxon to AOLTW, and by that logic it should just be ok for a few multinational corporations to entirely control each of their respective industries.
Too bad that, in most cases, companies don't clean themselves up; they convince local government to establish corporate'wealthfare' programs that force the public's tax money to foot the bill for whatever maintenance and equipment is needed to reach standards set by environmental regulations.
I dunno what is going on at the NSA, but I know that the people from the NSA aren't gonna tell you the truth about it. The notion that this could be even remotely truthful is rediculous; an agency charged with intelligence gathering on all foreign soil admits publicly that it's out of shape, underfunded, and vulnerable? Yeah, sure, I believe that. I'd sooner bet my life savings on the theory that somewhere sits a document detailing counterintelligence plans to spread propaganda like this for the simple purposes of winning a bigger budget or deceiving foreign targets.
Legislation as earth-shattering as this will never pass, whether it's agreed with or not. There simply won't be enough support for such a huge shift in technology regulations. What will happen is that pieces of the whole will be tagged onto bills with names like "Hacker-prevention act of 2001" or "Save the children act of 2001" and "Computerize underfunded schools act of 2001". That's how it works.
The digital spectrum, estimated to be worth $70 billion, was given away in 1996, to existing broadcasters. Prior to that, the spectrum was public property due to be auctioned off to broadcasters; after all, who but the public as a whole could be justified in having defacto ownership of something so widespread and intangible? Auctions like these created a balance of public interests, and offered opportunities to American businesses. By 'renting' this public property, business could flourish while operating under guidelines that ensured the public's airwaves would serve the public good. A plutocratic minority would love to tell you about how the evil government is censoring their broadcasts, but the truth is that airwaves that are won through these auctions are regulated by a 'public good' that is defined by public commentary to the FCC. These auctions are the ultimate example of free-market in a democracy, because the buck stops at the people.
But with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it was Trent Lott who prohibited the auctions, and forced the FCC to give licenses away. The act also prohibited consideration of anyone but the renewal applicant for the license, assuring that only the owners of the ill-gotten licenses would be keeping them, and I quote:
`(4) COMPETITOR CONSIDERATION PROHIBITED- In making the
determinations specified in paragraph (1) or (2), the
Commission shall not consider whether the public interest,
convenience, and necessity might be served by the grant of a
license to a person other than the renewal applicant.'.
You do the math.
Deciding whether to side with the FCC or with Corporate America in this matter is easy. I live in a democracy; if I don't like the government I can run for office and change it. I don't like Carnivore, Echelon, the DMCA, and I would like to play a significant role in having the NSA and the CIA dissolved and opened to the scrutiny of the world. Why does it work this way when 90% of the country, left and right, libertarian and conservative, doesn't like it? Why can't I change the way this government works? It's because no one takes office without large corporate donors behind them, and no one campaigns without the millions of dollars needed to get themselves on corporate airwaves. The public would never know your name, and that would gaurantee you a sideline seat for the election debates that, by the way, happen to be corporate-sponsored as well. It's one big joke.
God no. I hope that the song in that QT movie stays away from the series. If not, then just give the whole crew hairstyles from the latest gap commercial and throw them into a coffee shop to make politically correct observations on pop-culture.
If I could get it to work, my PGP-freeware for windows would have a user interface. Unfortunately I'm a stoopids, and when I try to use the thingamajig to secure my network what'sit card I can't connect to my email server thingy. In other words this entire post is a cheap trick to get technical assistance.
I believe plenty of individuals would give out of the goodness of their hearts, but I know for a fact that a corporation operates like a machine. There is no mastermind, and decisions get made because groups of financial advisors analyze it's profitability on paper. So my point is the same, that the money is buying something.
Personally I wouldn't judge which colleges are underfunded by comparing them to other, possibly overfunded, colleges. "Corporations invested $34,193,280 with NC State", and "NC State received $6,881,136 from foundations". Or by comparing them to a college like Georgia Tech, which gets a large chunk of it's funding by being 'employed' under the government for it's research.
Hell, the Clemson site says that donors gave $37 million in 2000-2001. I live 3 miles from a college in Charlotte that looks like a prison, and is basically the poverty-puddle that all minorities of low-income areas are funnled into. I have a hard time feeling sorry for Clemson. I'd be interested to know where the donations came from, as well. They never seem to be charitable, so if it's handled like most situations I wouldn't be surprised if there's an on-campus McDonald's. Or if the college is paid to advertise local businesses, and give deals to students who'll be shuttled over to the preferred stores.
I have to say that my knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be to blame the state, it would be to find out whether or not Clemson wants to be a for-profit business or a school. Politics is politics, and it's never convenient for politicians to cut funding for education, because no matter how you spin it that is going to look very, very bad. I would think it more likely that Clemson was enjoying swimming around in cash, and when it was denied cash it didn't need, someone decided to raise tuition so that students and their parents would get ticked off at the state; forcing politicians to renew the cash flow. In other words, criminal extortion. I just don't see what a politician could possibly hope to gain by making it so that they appear to be attacking education.
You'd think the press would know better. I live in charlotte, so I guess I better start writing someone. Soon I imagine parents will be telling their kids to stay away from the perverts who use the porn-machine at the library.
I don't know much about IA, but you can see that Sony/Bertelsman intentions are more obvious, since both donate to the House/Senate, Democrat/Republican Dinner Committees.
If you're a service that wants to go 'legit' by asking me to help line these people's pockets, so that they can afford more of this and that, you can blow it out your ass.
I wonder if trade laws come into play at all. I know a little about trade restrictions, but I don't even know if laws exist that would require US borders to allow trade; as in software from Russia that is about as illegal as a paper clip (having legal and illegal uses).
It might be interesting to note that I can buy a wife from Russia, but not a piece of software.
I would've partly agreed with you a few days ago, because if there's even a significant chance that he could be convicted, I would prefer to see him take a plea and get back to Russia. But I'm no lawyer, and I assume you're not either. I don't support the actions against him, for that reason, and for the same reasons fcd pointed out; that, by our nature, Americans don't support the rule (as in reign) of law. I can't pretend to know better than the EFF lawyers what path to take. Anyway, wouldn't those scales of justice things that sit in courtrooms mean something here?
How is this legal? The action of monitoring people and their 'transgressions' may be done by advertisers and websites all the time, but at the very least they've been required to post a privacy policy, or an opt-out arrangement. Required might be an assumption, maybe they just know better than to cross that line of complete deception and risk legal action.
(This is offtopic, I know. I got to the ranger site from the salon article linked by the 'cute fable')
Slashdot Mirror
A few questions then; why did we have to invade Japan? Why did it need to surrender? It was blockaded, it couldn't mount any significant attack that wouldn't have met russian and american forces, so why were the only choices invasion or nuclear attack? At what level do military casualties become hefty enough to warrant the murder of unarmed civilians that chose not to fight? Why not nuke a naval base? Why not shell targets from the shore, focus on anti-aircraft capabilities, and end with non-stop carpet bombings of military targets? Why not send every american soldier home, away from the obviously defeated Japan, and let the threat of taking on the world alone have it's effect? Why no 'warning shot' over the water to see if letting Japan see the effects of a weapon that was, at that time, mistakenly thought to be the end of the world, would inspire and end to aggression, and possibly a surrender? Surely it's not possible that our immediate reaction was mass murder, because the people and the government wanted revenge, or because the government wanted to flex it's muscles for the world...
This makes me sick. The notion of using nuclear strikes is tantamount to expressing a blatant desire to murder innocent people. I know of no precision nuke that wouldn't kill or irradiate nearby civilians. I don't care how angry people are; the US does not stand for murder. There was no justification for it in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, and there is definitely no justification for it now. If you can tell me that killing hundreds of thousands of civilians to save the American lives that would be lost in an assault (as was the excuse given after WW2), then you're telling me that America stands for nothing that it was meant to stand for. We can't claim that our armed forces exist to fight and die in the name of freedom and basic human rights, when we're willing to forcefully trade civilian lives for those of our armed forces.
Well, they could just abolish human rights and unions, then use slave labor to make unsafe products that kill people and the environment. Sorta like they've done already, at least, before silly things like seatbelts and truthful advertising for cigarettes came about. And I'm sure they could never buy laws that require ownership of a product; unless you count various forms of insurance that are allowed to profit from death. Insurance that is supposedly in place to serve as a safety net; only when you actually need the money you've been funneling into it, you're forced to pay a percentage of it, and pay more annually, afterwards.
If it weren't for the fact that corporate donations buy elections for their favorite candidates, I could probably run for office tomorrow and change all that. It is/was a democratic government. I wonder if it were replaced by corporations.....would I be able to run for CEO? If by some miracle I could, that would be some democracy. I'd be the first dictator of a free country in the world!
/sarcasm
I would love to hear about a company in the same industry, that dwarves AOLTW. I think you must be comparing something like Exxon to AOLTW, and by that logic it should just be ok for a few multinational corporations to entirely control each of their respective industries.
Too bad that, in most cases, companies don't clean themselves up; they convince local government to establish c o r p o r a t e 'wealthfare' programs that force the public's tax money to foot the bill for whatever maintenance and equipment is needed to reach standards set by environmental regulations.
I dunno what is going on at the NSA, but I know that the people from the NSA aren't gonna tell you the truth about it. The notion that this could be even remotely truthful is rediculous; an agency charged with intelligence gathering on all foreign soil admits publicly that it's out of shape, underfunded, and vulnerable? Yeah, sure, I believe that. I'd sooner bet my life savings on the theory that somewhere sits a document detailing counterintelligence plans to spread propaganda like this for the simple purposes of winning a bigger budget or deceiving foreign targets.
Legislation as earth-shattering as this will never pass, whether it's agreed with or not. There simply won't be enough support for such a huge shift in technology regulations. What will happen is that pieces of the whole will be tagged onto bills with names like "Hacker-prevention act of 2001" or "Save the children act of 2001" and "Computerize underfunded schools act of 2001". That's how it works.
I have never seen a more perfect example of jerks with mod-points punishing opinions they disagree with than in this discussion.
Bush made the comment because his legal team filed suit against a comedy website, so, you be the judge.
JFK campaigned on a plan to break up the CIA. He was following through too. But then, well, he got shot.
But with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it was Trent Lott who prohibited the auctions, and forced the FCC to give licenses away. The act also prohibited consideration of anyone but the renewal applicant for the license, assuring that only the owners of the ill-gotten licenses would be keeping them, and I quote:
You do the math.
Deciding whether to side with the FCC or with Corporate America in this matter is easy. I live in a democracy; if I don't like the government I can run for office and change it. I don't like Carnivore, Echelon, the DMCA, and I would like to play a significant role in having the NSA and the CIA dissolved and opened to the scrutiny of the world. Why does it work this way when 90% of the country, left and right, libertarian and conservative, doesn't like it? Why can't I change the way this government works? It's because no one takes office without large corporate donors behind them, and no one campaigns without the millions of dollars needed to get themselves on corporate airwaves. The public would never know your name, and that would gaurantee you a sideline seat for the election debates that, by the way, happen to be corporate-sponsored as well. It's one big joke.
God no. I hope that the song in that QT movie stays away from the series. If not, then just give the whole crew hairstyles from the latest gap commercial and throw them into a coffee shop to make politically correct observations on pop-culture.
If I could get it to work, my PGP-freeware for windows would have a user interface. Unfortunately I'm a stoopids, and when I try to use the thingamajig to secure my network what'sit card I can't connect to my email server thingy. In other words this entire post is a cheap trick to get technical assistance.
Well, I did move to Charlotte only 1 year ago :)
I believe plenty of individuals would give out of the goodness of their hearts, but I know for a fact that a corporation operates like a machine. There is no mastermind, and decisions get made because groups of financial advisors analyze it's profitability on paper. So my point is the same, that the money is buying something.
No idea how I screwed that up, but the first link should be the same as the second, since both quotes are from the same page.
Personally I wouldn't judge which colleges are underfunded by comparing them to other, possibly overfunded, colleges. "Corporations invested $34,193,280 with NC State", and "NC State received $6,881,136 from foundations". Or by comparing them to a college like Georgia Tech, which gets a large chunk of it's funding by being 'employed' under the government for it's research.
Hell, the Clemson site says that donors gave $37 million in 2000-2001. I live 3 miles from a college in Charlotte that looks like a prison, and is basically the poverty-puddle that all minorities of low-income areas are funnled into. I have a hard time feeling sorry for Clemson. I'd be interested to know where the donations came from, as well. They never seem to be charitable, so if it's handled like most situations I wouldn't be surprised if there's an on-campus McDonald's. Or if the college is paid to advertise local businesses, and give deals to students who'll be shuttled over to the preferred stores.
I have to say that my knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be to blame the state, it would be to find out whether or not Clemson wants to be a for-profit business or a school. Politics is politics, and it's never convenient for politicians to cut funding for education, because no matter how you spin it that is going to look very, very bad. I would think it more likely that Clemson was enjoying swimming around in cash, and when it was denied cash it didn't need, someone decided to raise tuition so that students and their parents would get ticked off at the state; forcing politicians to renew the cash flow. In other words, criminal extortion. I just don't see what a politician could possibly hope to gain by making it so that they appear to be attacking education.
You'd think the press would know better. I live in charlotte, so I guess I better start writing someone. Soon I imagine parents will be telling their kids to stay away from the perverts who use the porn-machine at the library.
I don't know much about IA, but you can see that Sony/Bertelsman intentions are more obvious, since both donate to the House/Senate, Democrat/Republican Dinner Committees.
If you're a service that wants to go 'legit' by asking me to help line these people's pockets, so that they can afford more of this and that, you can blow it out your ass.
I wonder if trade laws come into play at all. I know a little about trade restrictions, but I don't even know if laws exist that would require US borders to allow trade; as in software from Russia that is about as illegal as a paper clip (having legal and illegal uses).
It might be interesting to note that I can buy a wife from Russia, but not a piece of software.
I would've partly agreed with you a few days ago, because if there's even a significant chance that he could be convicted, I would prefer to see him take a plea and get back to Russia. But I'm no lawyer, and I assume you're not either. I don't support the actions against him, for that reason, and for the same reasons fcd pointed out; that, by our nature, Americans don't support the rule (as in reign) of law. I can't pretend to know better than the EFF lawyers what path to take. Anyway, wouldn't those scales of justice things that sit in courtrooms mean something here?
How is this legal? The action of monitoring people and their 'transgressions' may be done by advertisers and websites all the time, but at the very least they've been required to post a privacy policy, or an opt-out arrangement. Required might be an assumption, maybe they just know better than to cross that line of complete deception and risk legal action.
(This is offtopic, I know. I got to the ranger site from the salon article linked by the 'cute fable')