I actually like having 2 superpowers both with enough nukes to make the world glow like a nite-lite.
Knowing that certain actions, like a country using atomics, WILL lead to mutual assured destruction. And that prevents a lot of "bad stuff".. And also cutting off commerce and trade also scares these likes shitless.
Fortunately 6000 nuclear warheads is not, by a long shot, enough to destroy even a little country. It's enough to cause lots and lots of suffering, but it's not enough to keep them down.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki both got 1 10 megaton warhead, and recovered to full economic capacity in a matter of months. Had Japan wanted to, the US would not have been actually able to PREVENT them from waging war in the pacific using nuclear force, even given full use of the US's then one bomb/month capacity.
Add to that the knowledge that a 100 megaton nuclear warhead has only double the effectiveness of a 10 megaton warhead (due to the damage, in the "optimal" case occuring along a circle, whose length increases relative to the square of the distance. A nuclear bomb in a trunk (ie. on the ground) loses effectiveness with the third power of the distance due to "technical reasons" (imagine the difference of a blast in the sky and on the ground. In the sky a bit under 50% of the blast wave hits the target, on the ground, however, only a small circular section will hit the target. The rest will disappear into the sky and into the ground. A diagram explains this very well, but I don't really have one).
Add to that the knowledge that the currently most powerful nuclear weapon is about 150 megatons, and there are only a few dozen in existence.
The US would have needed several hundred 10 megaton bombs to destroy Hiroshima. It would have had to keep firing on Hiroshima for days, causing constant nuclear blasts.
So the "nuclear might" of the US is capable of -> cause month-lasting economic setbacks in 6000 cities world-wide (not enough to hit every important city), and kill about 10 million people -> destroy between 6 and 18 major cities (but not major metropolitans like Randstad (Amsterdam), or New York), killing about 2 million (due to having to hit the same spot twice or thrice, the casualty count would be much lower. Obviously nukes need to be set off in serial, not in parallel, and everyone outside of the blast radius of the two or three bombs would get ample and extremely convincing warnings of what's to come. Combine that with the large capacity transportation systems of these cities and many people get out in time) -> destroy max 2 major metropolitan cities, causing about a million casualties.
Due to the fact that they're built up of much more resilient materials, destroying economic or military centers, like harbors or airstrips would be prohibitively difficult using nuclear weapons.
The power of nuclear weapons is massively exxagerated in popular culture. They are not, at all, the world destroyers people often claim they are. They are, almost exclusively, psychological weapons. They cause a relatively large pinpoint strike, and are almost impossible to defend against.
Atomic weapons' main "power" is that they are capable of killing nearly anyone. You don't need to know all that well where they are, you don't need to fight through the enemy's defenses to kill the leader. Out of the blue, with minimal information, you can kill anyone. Even a theocratic nut like the ones ruling saudi arabia or iran, or a dictator.
And that's, obviously, the real reason dictators and socialists all around want the weapons destroyed : it took the US 2 years (!) to find Saddam Hussein with massive conventional superiority, and only because Saddam stood alone (had he had allies, he would have been beyond the reach of the US). Dictators, islamic or socialist are easy to kill with nuclear weapons, and even a "superpower" needs years to do the same with conventional weapons.
Without nukes, dictators, islamic thugs and massacrers are basically safe from military intervention by the US, or any other party.
The answer is, unfortunately, depended on installed base technologies.
The ancient, prototype nuclear plant (the ones installed all over the western world in the 1950's and 1960's) DO require the very same enrichment cycle that nuclear weapons require.
The new types of reactors. Pebble bed, light water, what have you, don't require any kind of enrichment cycle (but would, in the US and all over Europe and Russia, require replacing most, if not all, existing facilities). Dropping the enrichment cycle would also rob us of the production of medical isotopes, which would become prohibitively expensive to produce. It would also end research into new "very high atomic number" isotopes, and will rob us of any knowledge of the higher stable islands in the periodic table.
The problem with this knowledge is that is makes it VERY hard to explain what Iran is doing with enrichment facilities and light water reactors, which have other advantages such as increased efficiency and, above all, price. You see, Iran doesn't need enrichment for power, and yet they ARE enriching... Since they're not doing it for power (and they sure as hell are not spending 40% of the country's budget on producing medical isotopes they don't know how to use)... there can be only a single conclusion.
However I will leave it to people for whom reality is more important than fantasy to decide what exactly said conclusion is. Especially considering that Iranian engineers participated in North Korea's missile test. The missile test that occured moments before Obama announced he would kill the one defence America's got that's proven to work : the ability to retaliate in kind.
There is a positive note to make though : despite all the hype, any realistic quantity of nukes is not capable of taking out America's military. That would take something near a million nukes, and would require enveloping America, and several other nations, for weeks in nuclear blasts, something impossible to do with less than several hundred thousand nukes.
Therefore despite their reputation, any nukes Iran or North Korea might fire, in the belief that America would be prevented from retaliating, would not really prevent that. America would, obviously, be left with only one choice : have American soldiers conquer a few of their cities and commit massacres the "old fashioned" way. It would cost untold numbers of casualties, but there would be no other options.
You see, despite all the idiocy surrounding nukes, they were intended to lessen bloodshed and force enemies to use other external politics than war.
They worked. On at least three enemies (Japan, USSR and Korea). Destroying nukes will not improve the world, it will bring back the civil wars and constant open conflicts like WWI and WWII. They will bring back the need for national armies to massacre civilians, just like they did before the 1950's.
Of course, considerations like that are too much reality for anyone who's ever believed an Al Gore (or Obama) speech.
Really ? Notice what North Korea was doing just as Obama announced this idiocy ?
Launching an intercontinental ballistic missile you say ? In the direction of either Japan or the US you say... What mean, clearly untrue things you say.
Of course it wasn't. Let's assume that a coreserver employee said "hey, I've got this bitchin bandwidth at my office, I'll host this movie here and become famous!" (How the employee got a hold of the film is an exercise to the reader). Someone at the MPAA discovers an FTP site on Server X. Why is the FBI collecting servers Y,Z, and the rest of the alphabet?
Because the employee was from coreserver itself, but hosted the movie on one of the customer's servers. But due to some ip configuration trickery they can't be sure which server.
Or even if they know the ip, that will tell you, at best, behind which router the server is connected. If you want to prevent said employee from destroying evidence, you'll have to shut down all those servers by surprise and take all of them out of reach of said employee.
"Customer" server, in a managed services company, is a relative term. In my experience most employees from managed services companies have access to at least a large part of customer servers. Sometimes, they're even the only ones with access to "customer" servers. In those firms "customer" server means the customer pays for them.
Furthermore, this is a capitalist democracy, if those servers were taken without good reason (as decided by a judge), the owners will be compensated fairly. The same thing happens if the police impound your car and you prove that it was not wrongly parked. You get your car back, and $2000-3000 to cover the expenses incurred due to your car getting impounded.
If the case is that a coreserver employee was guilty, any damage recoups will have to come from coreservers of course. That the FBI impounded their servers because one of them comitted a (large, costly) crime means they are themselves responsible for the damage incurred by the impounding.
In any case, the customers get a legal damage claim due to this action. Either against the FBI, or against coreservers. And yes, it sucks losing a server. But a judge (ie. not you) will decide if it was justified.
I'm thinking, they did this, knowing the risk, so they're pretty damn sure they'll get the ceo or cto or some such of coreservers convicted. This also means they probably did not have too many other options, and thought the risk of evidence getting destroyed extreme.
Or perhaps the company... you know... actually did commit a crime. The leaking of wolverine was not an accident. Some guy actually walked in, comitted massive fraud and abused many people's trust, and you'll have to admit the chance is pretty damn huge this was done with malice. And now proof is needed that this guy not only abused many people's trust, but also actually did what the FBI alleged.
What if it was done to prevent destruction of evidence, and was actually the right thing to do ?
If anyone from Coreserver actually gets convicted in this case, I'm sure you'll change your opinion. Right ?
(I'm not really so stupid as to actually consider the thought that you might realise the FBI actually does stop criminals, and saves lives and property... You're just trying to attack someone you suspect, obviously without a shred of proof or even thought, in narcissistic grandiosity, of being "out to get you". That thought is so much more comfortable than the truth, that noone cares at all).
Both of these problems will kill people. Which is what makes evolution work.
So isn't this a good thing ? It improves humanity in the "natural" way. Natural is, like, always good man !
(and for a serious reply : the entirety of Holland has an average height of MINUS 2 meters, so there will be exactly 0 things happening, you also pass by on the fact that all of the following 3 problems will become critical long before any noticeable sea level rise occurs : oil (and energy) shortage, water shortage, food shortage due to overpopulation. Global warming is not a crisis. It's not, by a long shot, the first thing that will kill anyone. Overpopulation is already killing millions today (but not quite enough to prevent further population rise). And this is also assuming that none of the destructive ideologies like islam, dictatorships, socialism,... make a comeback. All of them, of course, seem to be working on a comeback. If we are to live in peace, they need to be stopped).
Actually mostly people argue that he's right to descredit small government policies these days. Which is mind-bogglingly stupid.
You can get accused on rather serious forums of being extreme-right because you attack the UN. Whether you attack it in the context of (A)GW, or otherwise. Or just the massive government expansion Obama is starting. No not the way you'd think, that people would compare Obama to Hitler due to the implementation of a welfare state against his own better judgement, but you get compared to Hitler for NOT advocating implementing a totally unsustainable welfare state. You see, not implementing said (more totalitarian) government is apparently racist (which is mostly causing the word racist to lose it's meaning imho. I used to turn away from a politician due to the news services criticizing them as racist. Now that both Mrs. Clinton and McCain have been so criticized, I'm starting to think getting called racist by the MSM is a good indicator. It certainly is in European politicians. I can understand Dewinter getting called racist, but Theo Van Gogh was not, at all, racist. Sadly all this is making it exceedingly hard to recognize extremist politicians without spending a lot of time on them. Then again, perhaps the blurring of the line between relative extreme candidates and center candidates is what got Obama elected. As we've seen, he's certainly no centrist).
Your argument boils down to "by your standards, Bush was far to the left of his predecessors", which is a statement I would agree with wholeheartedly.
I do think there are at least some excuses (like... 9/11 for example) in his case.
He also had lots of sunset provisions on his more leftist policies. I do believe Bush saw most of the pro-government policies as temporary fixes.
Bush, however, does not define the right side of the political spectrum. At all. The definition remains unchanged, no matter how much American presidents screw up. And yes, if America's not careful today, it will be less rightist (and less free, certainly the EU already is less free than China) than China is fast becoming.
Strange how there is never any problem calling this guy "right", but when the obvious thing, that a socialist demagogue might have been, you know, a leftie (oh the horror !), then "right and left are pointless labels".
They aren't. They are also not independant of the totalitarian - free debate. Under a rightist dictatorship, like the one China seems to be turning into, people are a LOT more free than in it's leftist equivalent, since a basic component of rightist ideology is allowing freedom in a specific sphere of society. Leftist ideology, on the other hand, literally does not spare the methods of tying one's shoelaces from state influence.
Hitler destroyed unions ? This would impress me except... why... so did Soviet Russia. They still existed by the way, just only under control of the state (they were eventually disbanded and replaced by the supreme soviet, if memory serves me right), again in both systems. Note that the reverse is also true, Soviet Russia ALSO started a holocaust, against Jews and cripples.
The soviet union ALSO supported big business profiteering when it suited their intrest. Ever checked out the history of oil drilling in Siberia ?
You're right the welfare state is not communism. In fact the people who first pushed the welfare state to it's limits were very anti-communist.
Of course, being as well-informed as you are, I am sure you know who that was. Let's play a game, which fan of Jewish music attacked Poland in the previous century ? He was accused of being "right wing", but any glance at his politics will tell you exactly which side of the political spectrum he belongs, as will the name of his party.
Hitler was for old values, personal responsability and letting the market sort out everything ?
I must be misinformed, have very very bad history books and knowledge then. They say he tried to eradicate religion, destroyed personal responsability and let the state interfere in everyone's lives and forced every company's management to do thing his way... which included not firing anyone, well except those evil jews.
Yes Hitler was "to the right" of Stalin. He was also far to the left of Castro.
BTW: I'm no fool. There are evil right-leaning dictators in this world. There are even quite a few of them. Hitler, however, was not one of them. The national socialists were, you guessed it, socialists. And let's face it, liberal politics meshes a whole lot less well with totalitarianism than lefty utopias.
But of course, Hitler was racist. As we all know, no-one on the left is racist (this cartoon "graced" the covers of half the lefty newpapers of America).
And of course, describing any difference at all between ideologies is so very, very wrong. After all, lefty blogs say the pope teaches his children the same things. Oh wait Jew-hatred ! Her parents must be right-wing fascists... In New York that must mean they vote... democrat ? Overwhelmingly democrat ? Surely you're wrong. Jew haters don't vote to the left...
I am not turning this into a religious issue at all... Have you read the article ? Look at the voting record.
Muslims turned this in a religious issue long (long) before I said anything about it.
Again... read the article.
Any culture that does not have a secular state obviously does not know freedom. If that culture, in addition to that, sanctions criticism with massive violence (cartoon riots, 9/11, rushdie,...) then that's an oppressive religion.
Perhaps I should say this again : read the article.
Wow, using reality against a lefty, who is secretly sympathetic to banning free speech. I suppose you even think it's going to work.
Ever noticed how "postmodern" lefties and academics deny even reason and maths itself, when it suits their purposes ? Do you seriously expect them to care about reality ?
"We can't KNOW reality, man !"
(which is their mind translating the thought "I'm right and don't care about your problems" into acceptable words).
If we don't fight (and that means killing when necessary) for free speech, we'll lose it, even in the US itself.
irrational extremists really care about the UN Human Rights Council.
You state this as a joke, but obviously extremists like the idea of a government body without territorial limits... at all.
Like Ahmadinejad "we have no gays in Iran" (he probably thought he had massacred the last of them), he cares a great deal. Like all lefties care a great deal, like Hugo Chavez and others.
After all if extremists only cared about their own little household, how do you suppose 9/11 happened ? Even WWII was the result of an extremist attacking. Just about every war involving the west was. Extremists are interested in capturing the UN and expanding it's power. The capturing part has mostly succeeded. Too bad they're such incompetent losers.
The UN is fast becoming a threat to world peace, just like the leauge of nations did in 1920-1930.
Global government, of any kind, is a disaster waiting to happen.
Actually why can't you ? Islam doesn't allow criticism of it's states. Hinduism doesn't allow criticism of it's states. The mikado (Japanese "religion") can't be criticized. Hell even the Turkish "secular religion" (which can be summarized as all hail ataturk, who was a bastard, but a lot less of a bastard than the islamic head of state) doesn't allow for criticism.
Most, if not all, other religions are at the very least largely repressive. Some, like islam, are very, very repressive, even within western states.
Unless I'm making a huge error here somewhere, Christianity seems pretty unique in allowing for the amount of freedom we have. ALL reasonably free countries are Christian, then there is a single Jewish state, and a single ex-islamic state (the state is explicitly non-islamic even if it's got a small muslim majority)
So it seems to me Christians would be very justified indeed criticizing other faiths for being repressive.
What about the EU and it's hate speech laws that prevent criticism on (amongst many other things) it's immigration laws ?
That's at least a partially unfree collection of (non-sovereign) states.
By the standards put up here, only the US would be allowed in the UN, in addition to a few of it's closest allies.
Of course that'd be the right thing to do, no doubt of it. But as they say, "no good deed goes unpunished", and kicking any non-free state out would be a good deed, but it'd be massively punished.
If a citizen of a country can stand in what amounts to the town square and criticize his/her government without fear of reprisal, it's a freedom-based society.
This would exclude all members of all religions that do not accept separation between religion and state ("church and state", is an ironic term, since churches are just about the ONLY religious institution that's actually separate from states).
So you'd basically exclude all : -> Jews (no way Israel could be allowed) -> Muslims -> Hindus -> Japanese (the "Ruler of heaven", the mikado, is head of state) -> Communist (still the largest group of atheists on the planet)
It would become a Christians-only club. Or nearly so.
Actually I wonder how this captcha holds up against basic neural net analysis. How much do they offer these days for captcha crackers ? It looks like it's basically a silhouette, I expect this will do a lot worse (due to less combinations) than "normal" scrambled letters captchas.
The price has really been going down on captcha crackers. Every idiot and his mother are making them these days. Lots of indians losing jobs...
The sad thing is, my own captcha crackers are much better at solving captchas than my own mother. And there are days when my program outperforms me as well (might have something to do with alcohol, YMMV).
But writing a computer program solving captchas has become so simple it's not even funny anymore. Just collect a few of them, preferably a few hundred, with solutions, then create a simple 2 or 3 layer neural net with every pixel as input and some way of encoding the answer as output (e.g. a-z0-9, each letter it's own neuron), and train away.
On my newest laptop even doing the training in python is not taking the weeks it used to take. Laptop. Not university supercomputer. Laptop. The huge amounts of memory that come so cheap nowadays really help.
*sigh*. The day that humans will have more trouble "proving" their humanity than computers is marching closer at an amazing speed...
This is not the point, and even your statement implicitly accepts that he thought the bible too important to ignore, which would indicate a very non-secular mind. Certainly by today's standards suggesting changing society by changing the bible would get you called very nasty things...
The point is that the destruction of history is (and was) rarely an accident. It was a deliberate policy that many people engage in even today.
Why not ? Everything that's divided into a limited number of classes is considered digital. That means every last word of every last language is digital information.
And you can have DRM easily on anything. You could put DRM on a spray-painted wall. On smoke signals. Anything at all (including, of course, analog information).
Slashdot Mirror
I actually like having 2 superpowers both with enough nukes to make the world glow like a nite-lite.
Knowing that certain actions, like a country using atomics, WILL lead to mutual assured destruction. And that prevents a lot of "bad stuff".. And also cutting off commerce and trade also scares these likes shitless.
Fortunately 6000 nuclear warheads is not, by a long shot, enough to destroy even a little country. It's enough to cause lots and lots of suffering, but it's not enough to keep them down.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki both got 1 10 megaton warhead, and recovered to full economic capacity in a matter of months. Had Japan wanted to, the US would not have been actually able to PREVENT them from waging war in the pacific using nuclear force, even given full use of the US's then one bomb/month capacity.
Add to that the knowledge that a 100 megaton nuclear warhead has only double the effectiveness of a 10 megaton warhead (due to the damage, in the "optimal" case occuring along a circle, whose length increases relative to the square of the distance. A nuclear bomb in a trunk (ie. on the ground) loses effectiveness with the third power of the distance due to "technical reasons" (imagine the difference of a blast in the sky and on the ground. In the sky a bit under 50% of the blast wave hits the target, on the ground, however, only a small circular section will hit the target. The rest will disappear into the sky and into the ground. A diagram explains this very well, but I don't really have one).
Add to that the knowledge that the currently most powerful nuclear weapon is about 150 megatons, and there are only a few dozen in existence.
The US would have needed several hundred 10 megaton bombs to destroy Hiroshima. It would have had to keep firing on Hiroshima for days, causing constant nuclear blasts.
So the "nuclear might" of the US is capable of
-> cause month-lasting economic setbacks in 6000 cities world-wide (not enough to hit every important city), and kill about 10 million people
-> destroy between 6 and 18 major cities (but not major metropolitans like Randstad (Amsterdam), or New York), killing about 2 million (due to having to hit the same spot twice or thrice, the casualty count would be much lower. Obviously nukes need to be set off in serial, not in parallel, and everyone outside of the blast radius of the two or three bombs would get ample and extremely convincing warnings of what's to come. Combine that with the large capacity transportation systems of these cities and many people get out in time)
-> destroy max 2 major metropolitan cities, causing about a million casualties.
Due to the fact that they're built up of much more resilient materials, destroying economic or military centers, like harbors or airstrips would be prohibitively difficult using nuclear weapons.
The power of nuclear weapons is massively exxagerated in popular culture. They are not, at all, the world destroyers people often claim they are. They are, almost exclusively, psychological weapons. They cause a relatively large pinpoint strike, and are almost impossible to defend against.
Atomic weapons' main "power" is that they are capable of killing nearly anyone. You don't need to know all that well where they are, you don't need to fight through the enemy's defenses to kill the leader. Out of the blue, with minimal information, you can kill anyone. Even a theocratic nut like the ones ruling saudi arabia or iran, or a dictator.
And that's, obviously, the real reason dictators and socialists all around want the weapons destroyed : it took the US 2 years (!) to find Saddam Hussein with massive conventional superiority, and only because Saddam stood alone (had he had allies, he would have been beyond the reach of the US). Dictators, islamic or socialist are easy to kill with nuclear weapons, and even a "superpower" needs years to do the same with conventional weapons.
Without nukes, dictators, islamic thugs and massacrers are basically safe from military intervention by the US, or any other party.
The answer is, unfortunately, depended on installed base technologies.
The ancient, prototype nuclear plant (the ones installed all over the western world in the 1950's and 1960's) DO require the very same enrichment cycle that nuclear weapons require.
The new types of reactors. Pebble bed, light water, what have you, don't require any kind of enrichment cycle (but would, in the US and all over Europe and Russia, require replacing most, if not all, existing facilities). Dropping the enrichment cycle would also rob us of the production of medical isotopes, which would become prohibitively expensive to produce. It would also end research into new "very high atomic number" isotopes, and will rob us of any knowledge of the higher stable islands in the periodic table.
The problem with this knowledge is that is makes it VERY hard to explain what Iran is doing with enrichment facilities and light water reactors, which have other advantages such as increased efficiency and, above all, price. You see, Iran doesn't need enrichment for power, and yet they ARE enriching ... Since they're not doing it for power (and they sure as hell are not spending 40% of the country's budget on producing medical isotopes they don't know how to use) ... there can be only a single conclusion.
However I will leave it to people for whom reality is more important than fantasy to decide what exactly said conclusion is. Especially considering that Iranian engineers participated in North Korea's missile test. The missile test that occured moments before Obama announced he would kill the one defence America's got that's proven to work : the ability to retaliate in kind.
There is a positive note to make though : despite all the hype, any realistic quantity of nukes is not capable of taking out America's military. That would take something near a million nukes, and would require enveloping America, and several other nations, for weeks in nuclear blasts, something impossible to do with less than several hundred thousand nukes.
Therefore despite their reputation, any nukes Iran or North Korea might fire, in the belief that America would be prevented from retaliating, would not really prevent that. America would, obviously, be left with only one choice : have American soldiers conquer a few of their cities and commit massacres the "old fashioned" way. It would cost untold numbers of casualties, but there would be no other options.
You see, despite all the idiocy surrounding nukes, they were intended to lessen bloodshed and force enemies to use other external politics than war.
They worked. On at least three enemies (Japan, USSR and Korea). Destroying nukes will not improve the world, it will bring back the civil wars and constant open conflicts like WWI and WWII. They will bring back the need for national armies to massacre civilians, just like they did before the 1950's.
Of course, considerations like that are too much reality for anyone who's ever believed an Al Gore (or Obama) speech.
Really ? Notice what North Korea was doing just as Obama announced this idiocy ?
Launching an intercontinental ballistic missile you say ? In the direction of either Japan or the US you say ... What mean, clearly untrue things you say.
Of course it wasn't. Let's assume that a coreserver employee said "hey, I've got this bitchin bandwidth at my office, I'll host this movie here and become famous!" (How the employee got a hold of the film is an exercise to the reader). Someone at the MPAA discovers an FTP site on Server X. Why is the FBI collecting servers Y,Z, and the rest of the alphabet?
Because the employee was from coreserver itself, but hosted the movie on one of the customer's servers. But due to some ip configuration trickery they can't be sure which server.
Or even if they know the ip, that will tell you, at best, behind which router the server is connected. If you want to prevent said employee from destroying evidence, you'll have to shut down all those servers by surprise and take all of them out of reach of said employee.
"Customer" server, in a managed services company, is a relative term. In my experience most employees from managed services companies have access to at least a large part of customer servers. Sometimes, they're even the only ones with access to "customer" servers. In those firms "customer" server means the customer pays for them.
Furthermore, this is a capitalist democracy, if those servers were taken without good reason (as decided by a judge), the owners will be compensated fairly. The same thing happens if the police impound your car and you prove that it was not wrongly parked. You get your car back, and $2000-3000 to cover the expenses incurred due to your car getting impounded.
If the case is that a coreserver employee was guilty, any damage recoups will have to come from coreservers of course. That the FBI impounded their servers because one of them comitted a (large, costly) crime means they are themselves responsible for the damage incurred by the impounding.
In any case, the customers get a legal damage claim due to this action. Either against the FBI, or against coreservers. And yes, it sucks losing a server. But a judge (ie. not you) will decide if it was justified.
I'm thinking, they did this, knowing the risk, so they're pretty damn sure they'll get the ceo or cto or some such of coreservers convicted. This also means they probably did not have too many other options, and thought the risk of evidence getting destroyed extreme.
Or perhaps the company ... you know ... actually did commit a crime. The leaking of wolverine was not an accident. Some guy actually walked in, comitted massive fraud and abused many people's trust, and you'll have to admit the chance is pretty damn huge this was done with malice. And now proof is needed that this guy not only abused many people's trust, but also actually did what the FBI alleged.
What if it was done to prevent destruction of evidence, and was actually the right thing to do ?
If anyone from Coreserver actually gets convicted in this case, I'm sure you'll change your opinion. Right ?
(I'm not really so stupid as to actually consider the thought that you might realise the FBI actually does stop criminals, and saves lives and property ... You're just trying to attack someone you suspect, obviously without a shred of proof or even thought, in narcissistic grandiosity, of being "out to get you". That thought is so much more comfortable than the truth, that noone cares at all).
Both of these problems will kill people. Which is what makes evolution work.
So isn't this a good thing ? It improves humanity in the "natural" way. Natural is, like, always good man !
(and for a serious reply : the entirety of Holland has an average height of MINUS 2 meters, so there will be exactly 0 things happening, you also pass by on the fact that all of the following 3 problems will become critical long before any noticeable sea level rise occurs : oil (and energy) shortage, water shortage, food shortage due to overpopulation. Global warming is not a crisis. It's not, by a long shot, the first thing that will kill anyone. Overpopulation is already killing millions today (but not quite enough to prevent further population rise). And this is also assuming that none of the destructive ideologies like islam, dictatorships, socialism, ... make a comeback. All of them, of course, seem to be working on a comeback. If we are to live in peace, they need to be stopped).
As I said ...
I guess Obama reads slashdot
It seems like Obama just can't wait to join as many anti-freedom organisations as he can.
Actually mostly people argue that he's right to descredit small government policies these days. Which is mind-bogglingly stupid.
You can get accused on rather serious forums of being extreme-right because you attack the UN. Whether you attack it in the context of (A)GW, or otherwise. Or just the massive government expansion Obama is starting. No not the way you'd think, that people would compare Obama to Hitler due to the implementation of a welfare state against his own better judgement, but you get compared to Hitler for NOT advocating implementing a totally unsustainable welfare state. You see, not implementing said (more totalitarian) government is apparently racist (which is mostly causing the word racist to lose it's meaning imho. I used to turn away from a politician due to the news services criticizing them as racist. Now that both Mrs. Clinton and McCain have been so criticized, I'm starting to think getting called racist by the MSM is a good indicator. It certainly is in European politicians. I can understand Dewinter getting called racist, but Theo Van Gogh was not, at all, racist. Sadly all this is making it exceedingly hard to recognize extremist politicians without spending a lot of time on them. Then again, perhaps the blurring of the line between relative extreme candidates and center candidates is what got Obama elected. As we've seen, he's certainly no centrist).
That's just my experience.
+1 Dance, monkeys, dance !
Your argument boils down to "by your standards, Bush was far to the left of his predecessors", which is a statement I would agree with wholeheartedly.
I do think there are at least some excuses (like ... 9/11 for example) in his case.
He also had lots of sunset provisions on his more leftist policies. I do believe Bush saw most of the pro-government policies as temporary fixes.
Bush, however, does not define the right side of the political spectrum. At all. The definition remains unchanged, no matter how much American presidents screw up. And yes, if America's not careful today, it will be less rightist (and less free, certainly the EU already is less free than China) than China is fast becoming.
Strange how there is never any problem calling this guy "right", but when the obvious thing, that a socialist demagogue might have been, you know, a leftie (oh the horror !), then "right and left are pointless labels".
They aren't. They are also not independant of the totalitarian - free debate. Under a rightist dictatorship, like the one China seems to be turning into, people are a LOT more free than in it's leftist equivalent, since a basic component of rightist ideology is allowing freedom in a specific sphere of society. Leftist ideology, on the other hand, literally does not spare the methods of tying one's shoelaces from state influence.
Hitler destroyed unions ? This would impress me except ... why ... so did Soviet Russia. They still existed by the way, just only under control of the state (they were eventually disbanded and replaced by the supreme soviet, if memory serves me right), again in both systems. Note that the reverse is also true, Soviet Russia ALSO started a holocaust, against Jews and cripples.
The soviet union ALSO supported big business profiteering when it suited their intrest. Ever checked out the history of oil drilling in Siberia ?
You're right the welfare state is not communism. In fact the people who first pushed the welfare state to it's limits were very anti-communist.
Of course, being as well-informed as you are, I am sure you know who that was. Let's play a game, which fan of Jewish music attacked Poland in the previous century ? He was accused of being "right wing", but any glance at his politics will tell you exactly which side of the political spectrum he belongs, as will the name of his party.
Hitler, the right ? Excuse me ?
Hitler was for old values, personal responsability and letting the market sort out everything ?
I must be misinformed, have very very bad history books and knowledge then. They say he tried to eradicate religion, destroyed personal responsability and let the state interfere in everyone's lives and forced every company's management to do thing his way ... which included not firing anyone, well except those evil jews.
Yes Hitler was "to the right" of Stalin. He was also far to the left of Castro.
BTW: I'm no fool. There are evil right-leaning dictators in this world. There are even quite a few of them. Hitler, however, was not one of them. The national socialists were, you guessed it, socialists. And let's face it, liberal politics meshes a whole lot less well with totalitarianism than lefty utopias.
But of course, Hitler was racist. As we all know, no-one on the left is racist (this cartoon "graced" the covers of half the lefty newpapers of America).
And of course, describing any difference at all between ideologies is so very, very wrong. After all, lefty blogs say the pope teaches his children the same things. Oh wait Jew-hatred ! Her parents must be right-wing fascists ... In New York that must mean they vote ... democrat ? Overwhelmingly democrat ? Surely you're wrong. Jew haters don't vote to the left ...
--
-1000 Uncomfortable truth
Why don't you ask your ideological collaegues of 1920's Russia how much that helped them bring sanity to their country.
Oh wait. They don't answer questions anymore since 1921 ...
I am not turning this into a religious issue at all ... Have you read the article ? Look at the voting record.
Muslims turned this in a religious issue long (long) before I said anything about it.
Again ... read the article.
Any culture that does not have a secular state obviously does not know freedom. If that culture, in addition to that, sanctions criticism with massive violence (cartoon riots, 9/11, rushdie, ...) then that's an oppressive religion.
Perhaps I should say this again : read the article.
Wow, using reality against a lefty, who is secretly sympathetic to banning free speech. I suppose you even think it's going to work.
Ever noticed how "postmodern" lefties and academics deny even reason and maths itself, when it suits their purposes ? Do you seriously expect them to care about reality ?
"We can't KNOW reality, man !"
(which is their mind translating the thought "I'm right and don't care about your problems" into acceptable words).
If we don't fight (and that means killing when necessary) for free speech, we'll lose it, even in the US itself.
irrational extremists really care about the UN Human Rights Council.
You state this as a joke, but obviously extremists like the idea of a government body without territorial limits ... at all.
Like Ahmadinejad "we have no gays in Iran" (he probably thought he had massacred the last of them), he cares a great deal. Like all lefties care a great deal, like Hugo Chavez and others.
After all if extremists only cared about their own little household, how do you suppose 9/11 happened ? Even WWII was the result of an extremist attacking. Just about every war involving the west was. Extremists are interested in capturing the UN and expanding it's power. The capturing part has mostly succeeded. Too bad they're such incompetent losers.
The UN is fast becoming a threat to world peace, just like the leauge of nations did in 1920-1930.
Global government, of any kind, is a disaster waiting to happen.
Actually why can't you ? Islam doesn't allow criticism of it's states. Hinduism doesn't allow criticism of it's states. The mikado (Japanese "religion") can't be criticized. Hell even the Turkish "secular religion" (which can be summarized as all hail ataturk, who was a bastard, but a lot less of a bastard than the islamic head of state) doesn't allow for criticism.
Most, if not all, other religions are at the very least largely repressive. Some, like islam, are very, very repressive, even within western states.
Unless I'm making a huge error here somewhere, Christianity seems pretty unique in allowing for the amount of freedom we have. ALL reasonably free countries are Christian, then there is a single Jewish state, and a single ex-islamic state (the state is explicitly non-islamic even if it's got a small muslim majority)
So it seems to me Christians would be very justified indeed criticizing other faiths for being repressive.
What about the EU and it's hate speech laws that prevent criticism on (amongst many other things) it's immigration laws ?
That's at least a partially unfree collection of (non-sovereign) states.
By the standards put up here, only the US would be allowed in the UN, in addition to a few of it's closest allies.
Of course that'd be the right thing to do, no doubt of it. But as they say, "no good deed goes unpunished", and kicking any non-free state out would be a good deed, but it'd be massively punished.
If a citizen of a country can stand in what amounts to the town square and criticize his/her government without fear of reprisal, it's a freedom-based society.
This would exclude all members of all religions that do not accept separation between religion and state ("church and state", is an ironic term, since churches are just about the ONLY religious institution that's actually separate from states).
So you'd basically exclude all :
-> Jews (no way Israel could be allowed)
-> Muslims
-> Hindus
-> Japanese (the "Ruler of heaven", the mikado, is head of state)
-> Communist (still the largest group of atheists on the planet)
It would become a Christians-only club. Or nearly so.
Note : I don't disagree with you at all.
It gets worse. Obama wants to bring the US closer, and it laws "more in line" with the UN.
Actually I wonder how this captcha holds up against basic neural net analysis. How much do they offer these days for captcha crackers ? It looks like it's basically a silhouette, I expect this will do a lot worse (due to less combinations) than "normal" scrambled letters captchas.
The price has really been going down on captcha crackers. Every idiot and his mother are making them these days. Lots of indians losing jobs ...
The sad thing is, my own captcha crackers are much better at solving captchas than my own mother. And there are days when my program outperforms me as well (might have something to do with alcohol, YMMV).
But writing a computer program solving captchas has become so simple it's not even funny anymore. Just collect a few of them, preferably a few hundred, with solutions, then create a simple 2 or 3 layer neural net with every pixel as input and some way of encoding the answer as output (e.g. a-z0-9, each letter it's own neuron), and train away.
On my newest laptop even doing the training in python is not taking the weeks it used to take. Laptop. Not university supercomputer. Laptop. The huge amounts of memory that come so cheap nowadays really help.
*sigh*. The day that humans will have more trouble "proving" their humanity than computers is marching closer at an amazing speed ...
Basic captcha cracking tutorial
This is not the point, and even your statement implicitly accepts that he thought the bible too important to ignore, which would indicate a very non-secular mind. Certainly by today's standards suggesting changing society by changing the bible would get you called very nasty things ...
The point is that the destruction of history is (and was) rarely an accident. It was a deliberate policy that many people engage in even today.
Why not ? Everything that's divided into a limited number of classes is considered digital. That means every last word of every last language is digital information.
And you can have DRM easily on anything. You could put DRM on a spray-painted wall. On smoke signals. Anything at all (including, of course, analog information).
One of the big candidates for this flood was the explosion of the Santorini volcano (and island, there is no difference).
It wiped out the minoan civilization (afterwards, a lot of it's remaining buildings were "sold for scraps" by the muslims).