Its becoming increasingly evident that the US government doesn't want US citizens to compete globally. While it is most evident in the financial sector (try opening an ordinary bank account in a foreign country) that US citizens are unwanted due to our tyrannical state. It is soon going to be that US citizens are not wanted on most of the internet because they are too big of a liability.
So the question is raised. How much longer till it makes more sense to move outside of the US? Between a lack of freedom of movement, even within the country, to increasingly less freedom of speech and increasingly less economic freedoms it is becoming obvious that US citizenship is no longer really desirable but is slowly becoming a liability.
Bye. Delta is ready when you are. BTW, good luck with "economic freedoms" in Europe.. as if anyone in Britain or the EU has fewer regulations than the US. Maybe Asia is more your speed. They've got the tiger economies, but then again, they're almost completely export-dependent on the US and Europe.
I love how slashdot chose to classify this megaupload story as "censorship". How about putting this in the piracy section?
The definition of censorship is so warped around here. There are troubling aspects to this case, but the blatant bias and advocacy is not needed.
"Censorship" around here is often defined as "My guy can't continue to say or do whatever the hell he likes", very often in cases where it has nothing to do with speech in the constitutional sense at all. If someone can't raise funding for an anti-RIAA documentary, then that's censorship. If an activist can't legally be allowed to hack onto someone's website and change the homepage, that's censorship. In short, if "my side can't get away with it", that's censorship.
But only if NZ actually extradites them. Please also note the DMCA is valid for the US only., the rest of the world (rightfully) wipe their asses with this piece of legal sh**.
New Zealand has extradition treaties with the United States. So does most of the "rest of the world".
I guess the war has now begun. Taking down the department of justice is a clear start of all hostility. I am not sure I agree with them. But they have stuff in their pants!
And when they're in prison, they're going to have stuff in the other side.
Why isn't Slashdot participating? Didn't they care about an open internet at one point??
Maybe they're smart enough to realize that the "blackout" won't accomplish a damn thing? Other than pissing off their own users?
You know what one of the biggest Google searches is right now? "Wikipedia alternative". That means that Wikipedia's competitors now have the kind of audience that they couldn't even pay for if they wanted to. Know what happens if Coke stops selling soda in protest? People look for the nearest Pepsi.
Let's hope this will loosen the grip of the major publishing companies. Paying $150 for a textbook (at least in the US) because you HAVE to get the newest revision to correct a few spelling mistakes is bullshit!
While I had no love for the whole textbook scam back in college either, nor am I all that comfortable with Apple (or anyone else) "destroying" print textbooks.
While the use of contaminated materials is something to be concerned about, let's not forget how much radiation this actually is. It's roughly the equivalent of one chest CT scan per year.
Plus concrete itself is very effective in containing radiation. If broken up and mixed with fresh concrete, it could be diluted to complete safety.
. They have their own soul as much as my feces (mostly dead blood cells and bacteria) do.
Who has argued that stem cells have souls? What's been argued is that embryo's are human (albeit at the earliest stage), and that getting into the habit of producing human life in a lab to be harvested for its resources (in this case, stem cells) on a mass scale open's a Brave New World kind of Pandora's box. If you're going to argue, at least begin from a real premise.
Second, all the big advances have come not from fetal embryo harvests, but from adult stem cells that have been repurposed in the lab. Feel free to correct me with a link should you have one, but I'm not aware of a single breakthrough in any of the fetal trials. Our own adult cells seem to be the best way to get the results we're looking for. And none of the people objecting to the fetal cell research object to adult stem cell research. So harvest your blood, bone, and skin tissue to your heart's delight. Not a single Catholic or Evangelical will object. And you're much more likely to actually get a working result.
WHY is her family homeless? You're telling me that New York State... one of the bluest in the country, with high taxes and lots of money going to social services... doesn't have public housing and rent assistance? This seems to be an ongoing situation with her family, not something just happened suddenly. We're not getting the whole story here.
The GREAT britain, now a BITCH to u.s. corporations. you think this is an uncalled for and aggressive post ? because the keywords were capitalized ?............ does that change the street-speak summary of this situation ?
Britain hasn't been great for a long time now. And lest you think I'm gloating over them, I'm not. I'm mourning them, and I realize we're headed in the same direction.
Boycott. Stop watching, stop buying, stop feeding these asshole media publishers. If you must buy, buy used.
Actually, that's the right approach to take. You don't have the right to copyrighted stuff. What you do have the right to do is to not watch or listen. That's the proper approach. Stop watching the shows, stop listening to the music. Go find stuff that fits your idealism.
Please give a single example of a copyright violation by "The Pirate Bay". Oh wait, you can't. You want to get into the whole argument of "facilitating copyright violation" then you might as well sue network, computer and storage equipment manufacturers, not to mention anyone who ever built and sold a set of speakers.
The very act of providing copyrighted material for download without permission from the copyright holders is prima facie copyright violation in almost all legal systems that have copyright systems in place. This argument that you and some others are making is stupid on its face, and frankly dishonest as well, the equivalent of a looter saying "Oh yeah? Prove that this stuff isn't mine".
They are just doing what the United States is telling them to do.
Honestly, Why are the Citizens of the Netherlands allowing the USA To dictate their own laws? Why are you people not protesting in the streets over this stuff?
You honestly think there would be no copyright laws abroad without American pressure? Really?
And from a country where a man once gave his life for freedom of speech, no less.
They once fought the Nazi's, but now they drop to their knees before the entertainment industry.
What a farce. The Pirate Bay isn't fighting for freedom of speech, nor are the Dutch suppressing it. Copyright violation isn't free speech, no matter how you want to dress it up as such.
Internet access isn't a human right just like access to running water or electricity aren't human right -- it's not absolutely necessary for life, but it's still pretty damn important.
And I think advocates for things such as universal access to the Net would be taken more seriously if they used your reasoning. Argue for the importance of a cause, but realize that if you try to argue that everything you work for is a "right", then people roll their eyes and just tune you out.
And bypassing Congress, like it says in the Constitution, Clause 3, Section 2, Article 2?
And Obama, the Senate Majority Leader during the Congressional sessions in 2007-2008?
Please point out where that gives the President unilateral power to appoint people to office without the consent of the Senate, and while the Senate is still in session?
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
The Constitution gives the Congress the authority decide if they'll let the President appoint minor officials on his own. Congress has not. Further, Congress says these appointments are not to minor offices, but important ones that require Senate confirmation. Obama pulled a Caesar on this one and dared the Congress to do anything about it.
"The same Congress that did recess and had Bush make the recess appointment of Jon Bolton as U.N. Ambassador?"
The US Senate was recessed when the Bolton appointment was made. The current US Senate is still in session according to the rules of the Senate and the law.
Why is this modded down? It's absolutely true. The President doesn't get to decide when the Senate is in session. The Senate does. For all of the bitching about Bush's recess appointments, they were done according to the letter of the law, during a Senate recess, and when it came time to vote for them, the Senate voted against those appointments, and they didn't stay in office. Just as the Constitution and law provide. Obama's appointments yesterday, simply put, are unconstitutional, and will almost surely be struck down in court.
By the way, for the people cheering those appointments, answer a serious question: do you want Republican presidents to have the power to bypass the Senate for appointments?
Yea pretty much this. XP lacks key security features, like ASLR and browser sandboxing, ACL'ed services and so on. Win 7 (and Vista) also have better multicore support, more widely supported and compatible x64 versions, and better SSD support. So I would say to all these "XP ain't broken" comments, that it depends very much on your definition of "broken" because XP seems very broken to me (in this age, though it might have been dandy back in 2002.)
And none of that has stopped infections on Win 7. I just cleaned two Win 7 boxes for a family member yesterday, both with the latest patches and running IE 9. Malware writers simply find a way around whatever speedbumps MS puts into place. MS Security Essentials is a relatively good AV app, and these infections just breezed right past it. If you use Windows, it doesn't matter if you're using XP or 7. You're simply more at risk than using other platforms. In the real world, 7 hasn't been any safer than XP. Better multicore support? Fine. More secure? No, not really.
Betcha that a lot of reactors are still running Windows 2K or NT servers. OS upgrades tend to move very slowly in isolated automation/SCADA systems.
We don't have a reactor, but we did have a legacy app that ran on NT4, and we didn't retire that box until last year. We locked it down from outside access good and tight, and it just ran for years after MS stopped supporting NT. It was a reliable single purpose box, and it rarely needed a reboot. There are all kinds of boxes like that in various businesses and organizations.
I still run Win2K at home. Lightweight, simple, without the clutter of XP. I can probably get XP to work that way, but it'd be more effort than I want to put into a fairly-customized home machine used for surfing the internet.
For security, it's hidden behind a NAT, and there's Tiny Personal Firewall 2 installed on it that's set to pop up on every unrecognized connection type by a new program. At this point in time, I don't even get the pop-ups anymore unless I install something and it phones home (at which time I just accept or deny it depending on what it is).
I haven't done any reinstallation in years, mostly because I keep it lean by installing only the bare essentials (with the occasional update).
The machine is work is dictated by company policy, and will get upgraded with the company policy. But I see no reason to upgrade to XP at home, much less to Windows 7.
There's really no technical reason MS couldn't have kept selling and supporting Win2K. It's not like a Win 9X situation where you had filesystem limitations and shortcomings from its DOS-based core. Win2K is indeed solid yet less resource intensive than XP (and by modern standards, XP is absolutely lightweight). MS just wants people on their latest stuff because it's easier to sell associated "modern" software such as the latest versions of Office and things like Sharepoint. I always thought Win2K was the perfect business desktop, and really, MS hasn't improved on it as far as business needs go. Flashy consumer side stuff, yeah, but not for the Enterprise.
I don't see how one can reasonably be considered a Christian, at least in any sense that has applied since the last of the great heresies was stamped out, if they deny the divinity of Christ. His position varied little from, say, a Jew or a Muslim.
Actually, I would agree with you on that (as did the late Christopher Hitchens, who said that if you didn't have orthodox beliefs about Christ, then you just weren't a Christian). However, there are Christian denominations that don't believe Christ was divine. And then there were those Unitarian (in the original sense, not the watered down modern Unitarian Universal sense) churches that thought Christ was of divine parentage but wasn't God Himself. Jefferson wasn't alone on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Its becoming increasingly evident that the US government doesn't want US citizens to compete globally. While it is most evident in the financial sector (try opening an ordinary bank account in a foreign country) that US citizens are unwanted due to our tyrannical state. It is soon going to be that US citizens are not wanted on most of the internet because they are too big of a liability.
So the question is raised. How much longer till it makes more sense to move outside of the US? Between a lack of freedom of movement, even within the country, to increasingly less freedom of speech and increasingly less economic freedoms it is becoming obvious that US citizenship is no longer really desirable but is slowly becoming a liability.
Bye. Delta is ready when you are. BTW, good luck with "economic freedoms" in Europe.. as if anyone in Britain or the EU has fewer regulations than the US. Maybe Asia is more your speed. They've got the tiger economies, but then again, they're almost completely export-dependent on the US and Europe.
I love how slashdot chose to classify this megaupload story as "censorship". How about putting this in the piracy section?
The definition of censorship is so warped around here. There are troubling aspects to this case, but the blatant bias and advocacy is not needed.
"Censorship" around here is often defined as "My guy can't continue to say or do whatever the hell he likes", very often in cases where it has nothing to do with speech in the constitutional sense at all. If someone can't raise funding for an anti-RIAA documentary, then that's censorship. If an activist can't legally be allowed to hack onto someone's website and change the homepage, that's censorship. In short, if "my side can't get away with it", that's censorship.
But only if NZ actually extradites them. Please also note the DMCA is valid for the US only., the rest of the world (rightfully) wipe their asses with this piece of legal sh**.
New Zealand has extradition treaties with the United States. So does most of the "rest of the world".
We've still got serial ports. There are still motherboards with a parallel port, for goodness sake. VGA ain't going away anytime soon.
I guess the war has now begun. Taking down the department of justice is a clear start of all hostility. I am not sure I agree with them. But they have stuff in their pants!
And when they're in prison, they're going to have stuff in the other side.
Why isn't Slashdot participating? Didn't they care about an open internet at one point??
Maybe they're smart enough to realize that the "blackout" won't accomplish a damn thing? Other than pissing off their own users?
You know what one of the biggest Google searches is right now? "Wikipedia alternative". That means that Wikipedia's competitors now have the kind of audience that they couldn't even pay for if they wanted to. Know what happens if Coke stops selling soda in protest? People look for the nearest Pepsi.
Especially at home. Who's with me?
Pretty much everyone.
Let's hope this will loosen the grip of the major publishing companies. Paying $150 for a textbook (at least in the US) because you HAVE to get the newest revision to correct a few spelling mistakes is bullshit!
gasmonso ReligiousFreaks.com
While I had no love for the whole textbook scam back in college either, nor am I all that comfortable with Apple (or anyone else) "destroying" print textbooks.
We can't just lay this at the feet of King's family. King himself... in his lifetime... jealously guarded his copyrights.
While the use of contaminated materials is something to be concerned about, let's not forget how much radiation this actually is. It's roughly the equivalent of one chest CT scan per year.
Plus concrete itself is very effective in containing radiation. If broken up and mixed with fresh concrete, it could be diluted to complete safety.
. They have their own soul as much as my feces (mostly dead blood cells and bacteria) do.
Who has argued that stem cells have souls? What's been argued is that embryo's are human (albeit at the earliest stage), and that getting into the habit of producing human life in a lab to be harvested for its resources (in this case, stem cells) on a mass scale open's a Brave New World kind of Pandora's box. If you're going to argue, at least begin from a real premise.
Second, all the big advances have come not from fetal embryo harvests, but from adult stem cells that have been repurposed in the lab. Feel free to correct me with a link should you have one, but I'm not aware of a single breakthrough in any of the fetal trials. Our own adult cells seem to be the best way to get the results we're looking for. And none of the people objecting to the fetal cell research object to adult stem cell research. So harvest your blood, bone, and skin tissue to your heart's delight. Not a single Catholic or Evangelical will object. And you're much more likely to actually get a working result.
Just about curiosity... Where I can find statics and documents about NYS budget and social service situation?
I don't know about the rest of social services, but NYS housing budget figures can be found here.
WHY is her family homeless? You're telling me that New York State... one of the bluest in the country, with high taxes and lots of money going to social services... doesn't have public housing and rent assistance? This seems to be an ongoing situation with her family, not something just happened suddenly. We're not getting the whole story here.
The GREAT britain, now a BITCH to u.s. corporations. you think this is an uncalled for and aggressive post ? because the keywords were capitalized ? ............ does that change the street-speak summary of this situation ?
Britain hasn't been great for a long time now. And lest you think I'm gloating over them, I'm not. I'm mourning them, and I realize we're headed in the same direction.
Boycott. Stop watching, stop buying, stop feeding these asshole media publishers. If you must buy, buy used.
Actually, that's the right approach to take. You don't have the right to copyrighted stuff. What you do have the right to do is to not watch or listen. That's the proper approach. Stop watching the shows, stop listening to the music. Go find stuff that fits your idealism.
Copyright violation isn't free speech
Please give a single example of a copyright violation by "The Pirate Bay". Oh wait, you can't. You want to get into the whole argument of "facilitating copyright violation" then you might as well sue network, computer and storage equipment manufacturers, not to mention anyone who ever built and sold a set of speakers.
The very act of providing copyrighted material for download without permission from the copyright holders is prima facie copyright violation in almost all legal systems that have copyright systems in place. This argument that you and some others are making is stupid on its face, and frankly dishonest as well, the equivalent of a looter saying "Oh yeah? Prove that this stuff isn't mine".
They are just doing what the United States is telling them to do.
Honestly, Why are the Citizens of the Netherlands allowing the USA To dictate their own laws? Why are you people not protesting in the streets over this stuff?
You honestly think there would be no copyright laws abroad without American pressure? Really?
And from a country where a man once gave his life for freedom of speech, no less.
They once fought the Nazi's, but now they drop to their knees before the entertainment industry.
What a farce. The Pirate Bay isn't fighting for freedom of speech, nor are the Dutch suppressing it. Copyright violation isn't free speech, no matter how you want to dress it up as such.
Internet access isn't a human right just like access to running water or electricity aren't human right -- it's not absolutely necessary for life, but it's still pretty damn important.
And I think advocates for things such as universal access to the Net would be taken more seriously if they used your reasoning. Argue for the importance of a cause, but realize that if you try to argue that everything you work for is a "right", then people roll their eyes and just tune you out.
And bypassing Congress, like it says in the Constitution, Clause 3, Section 2, Article 2?
And Obama, the Senate Majority Leader during the Congressional sessions in 2007-2008?
Please point out where that gives the President unilateral power to appoint people to office without the consent of the Senate, and while the Senate is still in session?
The Constitution gives the Congress the authority decide if they'll let the President appoint minor officials on his own. Congress has not. Further, Congress says these appointments are not to minor offices, but important ones that require Senate confirmation. Obama pulled a Caesar on this one and dared the Congress to do anything about it.
"The same Congress that did recess and had Bush make the recess appointment of Jon Bolton as U.N. Ambassador?"
The US Senate was recessed when the Bolton appointment was made. The current US Senate is still in session according to the rules of the Senate and the law.
Why is this modded down? It's absolutely true. The President doesn't get to decide when the Senate is in session. The Senate does. For all of the bitching about Bush's recess appointments, they were done according to the letter of the law, during a Senate recess, and when it came time to vote for them, the Senate voted against those appointments, and they didn't stay in office. Just as the Constitution and law provide. Obama's appointments yesterday, simply put, are unconstitutional, and will almost surely be struck down in court.
By the way, for the people cheering those appointments, answer a serious question: do you want Republican presidents to have the power to bypass the Senate for appointments?
Yea pretty much this. XP lacks key security features, like ASLR and browser sandboxing, ACL'ed services and so on. Win 7 (and Vista) also have better multicore support, more widely supported and compatible x64 versions, and better SSD support. So I would say to all these "XP ain't broken" comments, that it depends very much on your definition of "broken" because XP seems very broken to me (in this age, though it might have been dandy back in 2002.)
And none of that has stopped infections on Win 7. I just cleaned two Win 7 boxes for a family member yesterday, both with the latest patches and running IE 9. Malware writers simply find a way around whatever speedbumps MS puts into place. MS Security Essentials is a relatively good AV app, and these infections just breezed right past it. If you use Windows, it doesn't matter if you're using XP or 7. You're simply more at risk than using other platforms. In the real world, 7 hasn't been any safer than XP. Better multicore support? Fine. More secure? No, not really.
Betcha that a lot of reactors are still running Windows 2K or NT servers. OS upgrades tend to move very slowly in isolated automation/SCADA systems.
We don't have a reactor, but we did have a legacy app that ran on NT4, and we didn't retire that box until last year. We locked it down from outside access good and tight, and it just ran for years after MS stopped supporting NT. It was a reliable single purpose box, and it rarely needed a reboot. There are all kinds of boxes like that in various businesses and organizations.
I still run Win2K at home. Lightweight, simple, without the clutter of XP. I can probably get XP to work that way, but it'd be more effort than I want to put into a fairly-customized home machine used for surfing the internet.
For security, it's hidden behind a NAT, and there's Tiny Personal Firewall 2 installed on it that's set to pop up on every unrecognized connection type by a new program. At this point in time, I don't even get the pop-ups anymore unless I install something and it phones home (at which time I just accept or deny it depending on what it is).
I haven't done any reinstallation in years, mostly because I keep it lean by installing only the bare essentials (with the occasional update).
The machine is work is dictated by company policy, and will get upgraded with the company policy. But I see no reason to upgrade to XP at home, much less to Windows 7.
There's really no technical reason MS couldn't have kept selling and supporting Win2K. It's not like a Win 9X situation where you had filesystem limitations and shortcomings from its DOS-based core. Win2K is indeed solid yet less resource intensive than XP (and by modern standards, XP is absolutely lightweight). MS just wants people on their latest stuff because it's easier to sell associated "modern" software such as the latest versions of Office and things like Sharepoint. I always thought Win2K was the perfect business desktop, and really, MS hasn't improved on it as far as business needs go. Flashy consumer side stuff, yeah, but not for the Enterprise.
I don't see how one can reasonably be considered a Christian, at least in any sense that has applied since the last of the great heresies was stamped out, if they deny the divinity of Christ. His position varied little from, say, a Jew or a Muslim.
Actually, I would agree with you on that (as did the late Christopher Hitchens, who said that if you didn't have orthodox beliefs about Christ, then you just weren't a Christian). However, there are Christian denominations that don't believe Christ was divine. And then there were those Unitarian (in the original sense, not the watered down modern Unitarian Universal sense) churches that thought Christ was of divine parentage but wasn't God Himself. Jefferson wasn't alone on that.