People cry that "the bankers" (or "banksters" in your case) should go to jail but yet never seem to be able to cite specifics.
S&P clearly committed fraud in giving its AAA credit ratings to instruments that clearly did not deserve them. People have been talking about this since 2008 - how could you have missed it as the most specific and provable cause of the financial crisis?
There was also substantial fraud in the CDO market that was very well publicized.
There were material misrepresentations and collusion in the Bear Stearns hit, watch the Frontline program on it, and... wait, were you being facetious?
How do you implement socialism without an enforcing political system? There are three known means of regulating a population: government, religion, and markets. Those can operate independently or in combination.
Totalitarianism is a political system
That's a feature of a political system.
Combine the two, and you get totalitarian socialism, which is communism
No, communism is a bunch of people living on an farm sharing everything. The totalitarian socialists in the USSR called themselves communists, to try to fool [whomever].
I said it on 9/12/2011 and I'll say it again: the most effective countermeasure against airplane hijackings is to teach Kung Fu in high school gym class.
That's not the TSA's purported goal. The 'point' of TSA screening is to protect against infrastructure attacks by an airplane. We cannot protect against blowing up an airplane - there are too many easy ways to do it.
I know, I'm pretending like the TSA is legitimate, and not simply a means of behavioral conditioning.
Assuming they would put the airport on lockdown and start searching everyone
ah, but are you willing to extend this pattern to every airport? The attack becomes obvious, if not. The US did this kind of lockdown after three successful hijackings, but that's a post-hoc response.
This is why the TSA is provably a complete waste of time, money, and liberty: since individual screenings fail at a rate of about 65%, a distributed attack would be expected to succeed, and thus have occurred, if terrorists wanted to blow up US airplanes.
Since it does not happen, we either have to assume one of two things: 1) terrorists are afraid of being sent to prison, but not of killing themselves. Neocons at this point yell, ignorantly, "72 virgins!", completely ignoring the political motivation behind terrorism. -or- 2) there are not terrorists who want to use this tactic anymore.
The most reasonable explanation is that terrorists did not want to blow up an airplane but rather use them as missiles, on 9/11. This vulnerability was solved by ordinary non-specialist Americans at 10:06AM on 9/11/11 over Shanksville PA.
I am typing this on a 30" 2560x1600 panel right now. No panning needed.
Well, that's entirely a function of viewing distance, so YMMV applies to everybody. At my preferred distance, my 24" 16:10 monitor is about 2" too wide for my foveal field of view. Give me a 22" IPS or perhaps OLED at 200dpi, and my wallet will fall open. I found when switching from CRT to LED/LCD I could no longer see the scan lines, so sitting closer wound up being better. Plus no electron beam aimed at my brain, for whatever that might be worth.
Actually, I'd prefer goggles with that kind of angular resolution, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
It's more personally hypocritical than even you have made it out to be.
Is it hypocritical? I think it's clear that she believes the masters are to be armed and their subjects are not to be, so that the masters may more easily exert control. Her behavior and words are entirely consistent with that approach.
I went looking for the older reviews on Amazon, and while they were generally positive, it looks like this 'experiment' lasted a month and a half or so. If it were a year or more, that would seem like an experiment. A month and a half seems like a publicity stunt. The reviews there seem to indicate that everybody knew it was a pseudonym and suspected the author had significant publisher backing, so it's hard to even call it a fair experiment in the first place.
yeah, that machine was horrible - it had design flaws from the factory; they couldn't get it to pass safety tests on cornering so they cambered the wheels inwards meaning it shredded tires in 15K miles or less. The brakes were also constantly warping from this - in the shop nearly a dozen times for brakes under warranty.
If anybody were buying a used one, they'd google it, find the Edumunds thread, and never go near it.
I have a '96 GM truck that is still going strong, so I thought a GM car would be fine. LESSON LEARNED! I returned my business to the Japanese.
The story is... that the current government is, in theory, authorized by the People, under certain conditions. One of those conditions is specified in the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The current group of people calling themselves that government (is it really?) has written some stuff down called the USAPATRIOT ACT which says that this condition is no longer relevant. "So, then," the logician asks, "what authorizes that government?" Mao says it's the willingness to aggressively shoot people in the head, which decent people decline to do.
This may all be for the best, ultimately, though. Carlin's hyperbole has a sound basis. Most people today don't feel that they have to fight for their liberty - they think there's a system in place to protect it. As these things become more common, they may finally realize that it's all a rouse to fleece them of their property, while denying their modern hybrid serf/helot/slave status. Unfortunately, it's going to have to get much uglier before they come to that realization. It'll happen eventually and it won't be pretty. But hopefully, society takes the next step at that point and evolves a better replacement system.
That's a good point - can the iPad's 300% price premium be justified over a Chinese Jelly Bean tablet by some criteria?
How long do tablets usually last in a school environment? I know that the ruggedized netbooks fall out at a 20-30% rate from handling problems (or just hardware failure) per year in a typical school - I'm guessing that the nature of the tablet won't make their damage rate any better, and probably worse.
Tablets do need a smaller cart, though, so there are cost savings there, but that's relevant to laptop vs. tablet, not Apple vs. RandomAssembler (perhaps Foxconn vs. Foxconn in some cases, interestingly enough).
Current iOS does not require an iTunes master, so that disadvantage has been solved. I guess if a school is already using Google Apps for Ed. they have that advantage already, but does anybody make a good mass deployment app for Android at this point?
That's odd - on mine it's mostly second and third level connections from my area, but, from TFA:
nor do I have any recollection of saying yes, but thatâ(TM)s just the way it goes in todayâ(TM)s wacky world of social networking.
No it's not. That's the way lazy people do social networking. I certainly don't approve connections from people I haven't met - Linkedin in has built-in support for finding people through your network - trying to artificially pad it out isn't going to be of any real help. The Linkedin people must be reading, shaking their head, and wondering if the guy's ever heard of GIGO.
Though, to the author's NSA point - yeah, the invention of Big Data is cause to re-visit the SCOTUS decision on metadata - it does not have the same meaning today that it did in the 70's.
Never wait for the government to do something. Just release the data and see if anyone has the balls to convict them of something. I bet not.
It is a better idea, if they really want something to change. Begging for permission almost never creates change in the social order. If anybody has an hour and a half, watch this lecture about the 'Renegade History of the US' and how the beggars weren't the ones who changed things.
That said, I'm doubtful they'll do more because it's never been the corporations who improve liberty.
But in criminal matters, it's not uncommon that the corporate veil is pierced and the individual decisionmakers are prosecuted personally.
Would that be like the fraud that brought about the financial services crisis or more like the trillions of dollars of drug money laundered by the big banks?
Yeah, this is stuff everybody knows. BES is for Exchange, which runs on Windows, which is insecure (better now, but was simply horrible when BES was first popular), plus NSA has an encryption key for signed stuff, or you can use RIM's proxies which opens your otherwise secure (IMAPS/SMTP+TLS) e-mail up to snooping at the Blackberry servers.
But, yeah, I agree, everybody has known this for years, which is what my first comment here said. TFA is surprised by this.
There weren't really any policies that Carter set out that were bad.
He screwed up the ability of the nuclear industry to move to safer, clean technologies, effectively trapping the US into 1950's light water reactors. We should be using all that 'waste' as fuel by now, in safe, meltdown-proof reactors, generating all the carbon-free power the world needs instead of arguing which mountain or aquifer we're going to create a 300,000 year problem in.
Though to be fair, Clinton/Kerry/Gore/O'Leary put the nails in that coffin and Obama is keeping his foot on it. GHWB did move that ball forward, but GWB did nothing at all.
He's no longer in the public eye, and I can't even think of the last time that Carter may have been politically relevant.
As far as I can tell, he spends his resources doing mostly non-political stuff - building homes for poor people with Habitat for Humanity and such. That's a more mature stance than trying to do good with a political system that's based on violence.
60 kWh car is $62,400. $72,400 for an 85 kWh and $87,400 with upgraded features
Have you seen what a Lexus LS Hybrid costs? It's easy to walk out of an Acura dealer with a mass produced gasoline vehicle for $60K. Tesla is right in there at a reasonable price (US wages relative to the international market are a separate issue). Consider some places in the US you can buy a tiny ranch for $600K and average annual salaries are $130K or so, and a $60K car isn't outside of the realm of typical.
I thought I was living a pretty average lifestyle but I spent $6,600 on my current car
Nah, you're pretty far to the low side there. 75% of car sales are used, at about $9K on average. 25% of car sales are new, with the latest average at $31K. That puts the overall average at $14.5K, which puts you at, what, the 20th percentile or so?
That's nice marketing material, but if Blackberry is logging into systems with disparate hashing or encrypting schemes, they are handling the cleartext of the comms at some point, and that's where the taps are. There's mathematically no other way to do it.
When Blackberries were used in the London bombings, they went to the Blackberry server and got the comms. India was in the news last year because they got one installed there for the same reason. It would be shocking if the NSA wasn't getting a feed out of Canada as well based on NATO cooperation agreements.
We know from the Stratfor hack that intelligence information is shared with cooperative industrial partners, and that includes investment banks that underwrite competitors to the people whose secrets need protection. When a new biotech drug has an addressable market of $4B annually, how much do you think it will take in bribes to get that information shared?
Note also that you make the assumption that because I recommend against Blackberry that I've always recommended a competitor. That's not necessarily a valid assumption. Not trusting a particular third party does not mean automatically trusting other third parties. That said, today there do exist open source solutions for mobile computing that provide the necessary level of security.
Third-party certifications are a great idea. Forced monopolies on anything lead to misery and suffering. Conflating the two leads to people dying of actually curable diseases.
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People cry that "the bankers" (or "banksters" in your case) should go to jail but yet never seem to be able to cite specifics.
S&P clearly committed fraud in giving its AAA credit ratings to instruments that clearly did not deserve them. People have been talking about this since 2008 - how could you have missed it as the most specific and provable cause of the financial crisis?
There was also substantial fraud in the CDO market that was very well publicized.
There were material misrepresentations and collusion in the Bear Stearns hit, watch the Frontline program on it, and ... wait, were you being facetious?
Socialism is an economic system
How do you implement socialism without an enforcing political system? There are three known means of regulating a population: government, religion, and markets. Those can operate independently or in combination.
Totalitarianism is a political system
That's a feature of a political system.
Combine the two, and you get totalitarian socialism, which is communism
No, communism is a bunch of people living on an farm sharing everything. The totalitarian socialists in the USSR called themselves communists, to try to fool [whomever].
I said it on 9/12/2011 and I'll say it again: the most effective countermeasure against airplane hijackings is to teach Kung Fu in high school gym class.
It's supposed to be the airplane safe.
That's not the TSA's purported goal. The 'point' of TSA screening is to protect against infrastructure attacks by an airplane. We cannot protect against blowing up an airplane - there are too many easy ways to do it.
I know, I'm pretending like the TSA is legitimate, and not simply a means of behavioral conditioning.
Assuming they would put the airport on lockdown and start searching everyone
ah, but are you willing to extend this pattern to every airport? The attack becomes obvious, if not. The US did this kind of lockdown after three successful hijackings, but that's a post-hoc response.
This is why the TSA is provably a complete waste of time, money, and liberty: since individual screenings fail at a rate of about 65%, a distributed attack would be expected to succeed, and thus have occurred, if terrorists wanted to blow up US airplanes.
Since it does not happen, we either have to assume one of two things:
1) terrorists are afraid of being sent to prison, but not of killing themselves. Neocons at this point yell, ignorantly, "72 virgins!", completely ignoring the political motivation behind terrorism.
-or-
2) there are not terrorists who want to use this tactic anymore.
The most reasonable explanation is that terrorists did not want to blow up an airplane but rather use them as missiles, on 9/11. This vulnerability was solved by ordinary non-specialist Americans at 10:06AM on 9/11/11 over Shanksville PA.
That's baloney.
I am typing this on a 30" 2560x1600 panel right now. No panning needed.
Well, that's entirely a function of viewing distance, so YMMV applies to everybody. At my preferred distance, my 24" 16:10 monitor is about 2" too wide for my foveal field of view. Give me a 22" IPS or perhaps OLED at 200dpi, and my wallet will fall open. I found when switching from CRT to LED/LCD I could no longer see the scan lines, so sitting closer wound up being better. Plus no electron beam aimed at my brain, for whatever that might be worth.
Actually, I'd prefer goggles with that kind of angular resolution, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
It's more personally hypocritical than even you have made it out to be.
Is it hypocritical? I think it's clear that she believes the masters are to be armed and their subjects are not to be, so that the masters may more easily exert control. Her behavior and words are entirely consistent with that approach.
I went looking for the older reviews on Amazon, and while they were generally positive, it looks like this 'experiment' lasted a month and a half or so. If it were a year or more, that would seem like an experiment. A month and a half seems like a publicity stunt. The reviews there seem to indicate that everybody knew it was a pseudonym and suspected the author had significant publisher backing, so it's hard to even call it a fair experiment in the first place.
haha, be careful!
yeah, that machine was horrible - it had design flaws from the factory; they couldn't get it to pass safety tests on cornering so they cambered the wheels inwards meaning it shredded tires in 15K miles or less. The brakes were also constantly warping from this - in the shop nearly a dozen times for brakes under warranty.
If anybody were buying a used one, they'd google it, find the Edumunds thread, and never go near it.
I have a '96 GM truck that is still going strong, so I thought a GM car would be fine. LESSON LEARNED! I returned my business to the Japanese.
The story is ... that the current government is, in theory, authorized by the People, under certain conditions. One of those conditions is specified in the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution:
The current group of people calling themselves that government (is it really?) has written some stuff down called the USAPATRIOT ACT which says that this condition is no longer relevant. "So, then," the logician asks, "what authorizes that government?" Mao says it's the willingness to aggressively shoot people in the head, which decent people decline to do.
This may all be for the best, ultimately, though. Carlin's hyperbole has a sound basis. Most people today don't feel that they have to fight for their liberty - they think there's a system in place to protect it. As these things become more common, they may finally realize that it's all a rouse to fleece them of their property, while denying their modern hybrid serf/helot/slave status. Unfortunately, it's going to have to get much uglier before they come to that realization. It'll happen eventually and it won't be pretty. But hopefully, society takes the next step at that point and evolves a better replacement system.
Hey, I made the mistake of buying a new Pontiac Minivan when we had a kid. I figure that over three years that PoS cost us $50K.
We sold that for $5K (only a dealer would take it) and I bought an $8K used Subaru instead. 3-year average on maintenance has been about $800.
Unfortunately, many people have more money than sense.
Well at least iPads have a future.
That's a good point - can the iPad's 300% price premium be justified over a Chinese Jelly Bean tablet by some criteria?
How long do tablets usually last in a school environment? I know that the ruggedized netbooks fall out at a 20-30% rate from handling problems (or just hardware failure) per year in a typical school - I'm guessing that the nature of the tablet won't make their damage rate any better, and probably worse.
Tablets do need a smaller cart, though, so there are cost savings there, but that's relevant to laptop vs. tablet, not Apple vs. RandomAssembler (perhaps Foxconn vs. Foxconn in some cases, interestingly enough).
Current iOS does not require an iTunes master, so that disadvantage has been solved. I guess if a school is already using Google Apps for Ed. they have that advantage already, but does anybody make a good mass deployment app for Android at this point?
in contrast to iPads which are premium and expensive.
Sadly, many school districts are spending taxpayers' money on large stacks of iPads too.
Then I'll buy one, I could do with a tablet to run Fedora
Hence, why they took the write-down rather than suffer the indignity.
That's odd - on mine it's mostly second and third level connections from my area, but, from TFA:
No it's not. That's the way lazy people do social networking. I certainly don't approve connections from people I haven't met - Linkedin in has built-in support for finding people through your network - trying to artificially pad it out isn't going to be of any real help. The Linkedin people must be reading, shaking their head, and wondering if the guy's ever heard of GIGO.
Though, to the author's NSA point - yeah, the invention of Big Data is cause to re-visit the SCOTUS decision on metadata - it does not have the same meaning today that it did in the 70's.
Never wait for the government to do something. Just release the data and see if anyone has the balls to convict them of something. I bet not.
It is a better idea, if they really want something to change. Begging for permission almost never creates change in the social order. If anybody has an hour and a half, watch this lecture about the 'Renegade History of the US' and how the beggars weren't the ones who changed things.
That said, I'm doubtful they'll do more because it's never been the corporations who improve liberty.
But in criminal matters, it's not uncommon that the corporate veil is pierced and the individual decisionmakers are prosecuted personally.
Would that be like the fraud that brought about the financial services crisis or more like the trillions of dollars of drug money laundered by the big banks?
All we can do is sit around and wait for another Enlightenment
booooooring. Who's dancing on the stars tonight? Hand me a Bud.
At this point only Google can say for sure how it is.
Is the Google backup service in Cyanogenmod a binary blob?
Yeah, this is stuff everybody knows. BES is for Exchange, which runs on Windows, which is insecure (better now, but was simply horrible when BES was first popular), plus NSA has an encryption key for signed stuff, or you can use RIM's proxies which opens your otherwise secure (IMAPS/SMTP+TLS) e-mail up to snooping at the Blackberry servers.
But, yeah, I agree, everybody has known this for years, which is what my first comment here said. TFA is surprised by this.
There weren't really any policies that Carter set out that were bad.
He screwed up the ability of the nuclear industry to move to safer, clean technologies, effectively trapping the US into 1950's light water reactors. We should be using all that 'waste' as fuel by now, in safe, meltdown-proof reactors, generating all the carbon-free power the world needs instead of arguing which mountain or aquifer we're going to create a 300,000 year problem in.
Though to be fair, Clinton/Kerry/Gore/O'Leary put the nails in that coffin and Obama is keeping his foot on it. GHWB did move that ball forward, but GWB did nothing at all.
He's no longer in the public eye, and I can't even think of the last time that Carter may have been politically relevant.
As far as I can tell, he spends his resources doing mostly non-political stuff - building homes for poor people with Habitat for Humanity and such. That's a more mature stance than trying to do good with a political system that's based on violence.
60 kWh car is $62,400. $72,400 for an 85 kWh and $87,400 with upgraded features
Have you seen what a Lexus LS Hybrid costs? It's easy to walk out of an Acura dealer with a mass produced gasoline vehicle for $60K. Tesla is right in there at a reasonable price (US wages relative to the international market are a separate issue). Consider some places in the US you can buy a tiny ranch for $600K and average annual salaries are $130K or so, and a $60K car isn't outside of the realm of typical.
I thought I was living a pretty average lifestyle but I spent $6,600 on my current car
Nah, you're pretty far to the low side there. 75% of car sales are used, at about $9K on average. 25% of car sales are new, with the latest average at $31K. That puts the overall average at $14.5K, which puts you at, what, the 20th percentile or so?
That's nice marketing material, but if Blackberry is logging into systems with disparate hashing or encrypting schemes, they are handling the cleartext of the comms at some point, and that's where the taps are. There's mathematically no other way to do it.
When Blackberries were used in the London bombings, they went to the Blackberry server and got the comms. India was in the news last year because they got one installed there for the same reason. It would be shocking if the NSA wasn't getting a feed out of Canada as well based on NATO cooperation agreements.
We know from the Stratfor hack that intelligence information is shared with cooperative industrial partners, and that includes investment banks that underwrite competitors to the people whose secrets need protection. When a new biotech drug has an addressable market of $4B annually, how much do you think it will take in bribes to get that information shared?
Note also that you make the assumption that because I recommend against Blackberry that I've always recommended a competitor. That's not necessarily a valid assumption. Not trusting a particular third party does not mean automatically trusting other third parties. That said, today there do exist open source solutions for mobile computing that provide the necessary level of security.
but entities like that exist for a good reason
Third-party certifications are a great idea. Forced monopolies on anything lead to misery and suffering. Conflating the two leads to people dying of actually curable diseases.