You're not a whistle-blower if you are the head of a resistance movement (or whatever) and sell out - you are a traitor.
Or maybe both. What if the "resistance movement" happens to be doing war crimes or terror attacks against civilians, and you decide you just don't like it anymore?
Turns out that seems to happen surprisingly often in the real world. The IRA, the PLO, Taliban, Hamas... all of these are "resistance movemements" from one perspective and "terror gangs" from another. The enemy of my enemy is likely to be just as much of a bastard, because nice guys don't win wars, and civil wars aren't nice to begin with. So where exactly should the moral high ground of "treason" vs "whistleblowing" lie? It's not always clear-cut at all.
If I were a member of Anonymous, I think I'd become sickened by their random-drive-by-vandalism-for-lulz tactics after a while, with or without the FBI holding my children hostage. But maybe that's just me.
DHS, conspiracy theories aside, is likely conducting their own investigation into DuQu
No need for that unless they snuffed the original developer before securing the relevant docs.~
Hey, everyone makes mistakes. That drone was supposed to have been loaded with tranquilizer darts, not Hellfires. Boy, there were some red faces in the office when we found out what happened.
I can't help but think of how patricians mostly just had surreal, detached, useless conversations in their country villas when the Vandals sacked Rome.
Arguably, from a more global viewpoint, those same patricians and their forebears had all along been having the same surreal, detached, useless conversations in those same country villas while the Roman legions were sacking the rest of Europe. The reality of what it was like to have your goods stolen and your kids enslaved by a bunch of armed goons only came home to them when suddenly it was them on the wrong side of the military machine.
How dare they! A bunch of barbarians sullying our beautiful Rome! The nerve of them! The very nerve!
Well, how dared Julius Caesar go and beat up Gaul and Egypt? Wasn't like he actually had the right. Just happened to be a talented smash-and-grab artist, like the rest of the Roman generals of his era. Bu it's different when it's those people! doing the smashing and the grabbing, isn't it?
you vote for your local smart guy that you trust and let HIM decide on the candidate.
What happens if the smartest guy in the room is also the one you trust least, because he's the one who's used his smarts to run scams on everyone else?
If you're a rabbit, should you best vote for the smart wolf or the dumb sheep to best represent your interests?
If the economist is suggesting that rich rulers sell everything they have and give it to the poor, and that the nation hold all goods in common, it's probably either Jesus or Karl Marx. If he talks a lot about maximising the alpha spread of your highly leveraged HFT server, it's either Adam Smith or Geordi LaForge.
FDR, Ike, and Reagan all had IQ's at or below the average for men of their education levels, all had successful presidencies. U.S. Grant was thought to be one of the dimmer bulbs in the office, but despite huge corruption scandals, had one of the most successful tenures in the office. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was famously bright, and despite good marks for personal character, was seen as weak and ineffective.
The key words here being "seen as".
The success or failure of a presidency isn't (or in a rational world, wouldn't be) judged by how popular they were, but by whether they made objectively correct decisions.
Jimmy Carter correctly analysed the coming oil crunch and launched an energy independence initiative, while Reagan cancelled Carter's gains, put America back on the path to today's dependence on foreign oil, while deregulating finance and pouring millions into wasteful and hugely dangerous military adventures. And yet Carter is still seen as the mistaken one?
How and why does America make such a vast misjudgement of their presidents?
Could it just *possibly* be that both men, of at least reasonable intellect, when faced with the full disclosure of what the US intelligence community knows,
... turned white, staggered back, threw up in a potted planet in the corner of the Oval Office, and pitched to the floor where they were promptly replaced by robots while the originals lived out their days in a white padded room in Guantanamo Bay murmuring about "tentacles"?
If the electoral college did indeed function as a sort of specialized Senate whose purpose was to weigh the candidates and choose the President, you would see a very different kind of political structure in Washington.
One in which a few rich and well-connected insiders controlled all the political power instead of just most of it, and the people were even more disenfranchised? I can certainly see how that would be an improvement. Would you like to come to my private island to discuss this further over a little brunch? My chef's doing fricassee of bald eagle this week. I think it's the last breeding pair on the continent. I expect they will be delicious.
Precious snowflakes just ripe to be lead by the pied piper for that single vote that leads to a dictatorship.
Indeed. I'd go further and say that all this fog of war is just a scorched earth campaign by the fat of the land to oil the outstretched palms which grease the squeaky wheels at the thin end of the bleeding edge of the tail of the white elephant in the room which nobody mentions that wags the running dog which didn't bark in the night on the cart before the dark Trojan horse at the top of the slippery slope of the cliff above the ambulance.
Though that might be overstating the case a bit. But I don't think so.
Be careful when talking about absolutes in government. For that is the way of the Sith
As opposed to the righteous and honourable Jedi, who'll point-blank lie to your face about how your father died and then when your Dad tells you the truth and you call Uncle Ben on it he gives you a weasel speech about how his made-up bit of truthiness was actually true "from a certain point of view", and by the way your girlfriend's actually your sister (but kissing her wasn't really icky if you think about it the right way)...
Of course, they came from a society that saw no contradiction in having "democratically elected" monachies, so...
What she failed to realize was that one of Aristotle's students was Alexander the Great, whose deficiencies led to the collapse of the Greek empire when Alexander died.
Exactly. What a lot of people fail to realise about history is that it doesn't move in a straight line - there are cyclic patterns of boom and collapse. We just tend to average them out, looking back from a safe distance, and think that because we're here today, the periodic prophets of doom in the past were all silly pessimists. But they weren't, necessarily. Many of those collapses were truly horrendous, and although life did pick itself up and survive, we'd do well not to repeat them. And that does mean paying attention to what the critics of the preceding boom cycles were saying about their cultures.
I'm not convinced that we've even yet processed the evident failings of our current society - things like banking and ecological collapse which have been written on the wall for decades - let alone the new failure modes we're busy introducing with technological and sociological experimentation.
You should say: Consistantly finding theories to be false, never knowing things to be true.
But if we can never prove a scientific theory to be true, how do we go about proving for sure the theory that we've proven another theory to be false...?
Bertrand Russell makes Karl Popper cry! (while Kurt Goedel sits in the corner smirking)
From various YouTube DMCA stories, it seems like YouTube just hides the video content and renders an error message when you try to view it. If the takedown is reversed, they re-instate the video at its original URL
Hmm. Isn't that behaviour (hiding rather than deleting DMCA-challenged content) exactly what Kim Dotcom did and is now facing criminal charges for? How can it be legal when Youtube does it, but not when Kim did?
Course the trial hasn't happened yet so the Dotcom case could still backfire.
That's funny... I always hear progressives saying they also support our troops. Are you telling me I'm wrong, and only "conservative dickweeds" do?
You're probably wrong, yes, though I'm afraid you might be right in this case. I'd hope that progressives would always be courageous enough to refuse to support their troops when those troops are doing something bad. Yet American progressives seem terrified of "disrespecting the troops".
Troops aren't fuzzy stuffed toys. Troops are weapons. Their job is to break forcibly into other people's countries and mess up their lives and property. To say you "support" your favoured weapon is like saying "I support my gun. My gun is very important to me! I give my gun lots of love and respect! Don't you love my gun too? I suspect you of being insufficiently supportive of my gun! My poor gun, nobody understands how much it loves me!"
That's... um, a weird thing to be sensitive about, quite frankly. Shouldn't you be more concerned with the person you're currently pointing your gun at, and the pile of corpses who have already been introduced to it?
And this isn't limited to stories that touch on national issues; it happens at every level of media.
Yes, and this voluntary censorship of stories "not in the national interest" goes back at least to the early Cold War years, that golden age of common purpose against a common enemy which a previous poster longed for. It wasn't really a secret - Mockingbird was one of the forms in which it surfaced, British Security Coordination was another, and I'm sure there were others. If you've looked at the old Superman stories, it's interesting how quickly Supes turned on a dime from fighting corrupt defense contractors trying to drag the USA into a European war in 1938, to actively promoting that same war in the 40s. One can see why George Orwell became so cynical about Eurasia/Eastasia when so many "we have always been at war with Russia^WGermany^WRussia" alignment flips in the US-UK axis happened within ten years.
Completely voluntary self-censorship of multiple publishers due to mass patriotic fervour is one explanation. Coordinated propaganda action by intelligence agencies is another. The truth is probably somewhere between the two.
its a good question and one that we have been struggling with since the dawn of human civilization. how do we know we are all not imaginary, or in a dream, or someone elses dream, or a computer like the Matrix?/quote>
If the simulation is sufficiently detailed and keeps running long enough, does it matter?
Like all dogmas, once you take things too seriously, they start to go downhill.
Especially if it's too heavy and you're on the skids when the wheels come off near a slippery slope, and there's no ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
Of course, and that's why the 'good ole days' are in quotes. There was a greater belief in those things post-war and a lot less of the cynicism of the current era.
Not that blind faith and naivete is necessarily a good thing, but they do make for a stronger nation, for better or for worse.
'Stronger' should be in quotes too. There was more faith in government and other institutions in the 1950s, yes - but the institutions in which that faith was placed were not in fact worthy of that faith. Building a nation on a lie did not actually make it stronger; the foundations were shaky even as the shiny chrome cladding on the outside of the building looked great.
This is the period in which the Korean war raged and the seeds of Vietnam began, ICBMs were built and deployed with the full intention of being used, and soldiers and mental patients were exposed to radiation without informed consent. These were not actions which created a strong nation. The Baby Boomers and GenXers learning about these betrayals of trust and growing cynical didn't cause the problem - the "greatest generation" dug their own grave.
In capitalist terms, that means that there was a massive mis-allocation of resources starting in the 1940-50s due to the market being given false information (generally toward war materiel and the secrecy that went along with the atomic establishment), and now that the accounting records are starting to be opened we're learning the full extent of our debts and our credit rating is crashing. But our high credit was a mispricing all along, and this is the necessary correction.
I have watched a LOT of scifi over my life time and only once have I ever actually seen sound depicted in space. (Bonus points if anybody knows who the big offender was.)
Attack of the Clones, the "concussion bombs" in the the asteroid belt?
Most space combat will be like modern air combat or sub warfare - You spend a lot of time and effort to see them before they see you.
That bit is difficult since space is, as the name suggests, mostly empty. There's only so many times you can hide behind planets unless you're fighting in low orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not a whistle-blower if you are the head of a resistance movement (or whatever) and sell out - you are a traitor.
Or maybe both. What if the "resistance movement" happens to be doing war crimes or terror attacks against civilians, and you decide you just don't like it anymore?
Turns out that seems to happen surprisingly often in the real world. The IRA, the PLO, Taliban, Hamas... all of these are "resistance movemements" from one perspective and "terror gangs" from another. The enemy of my enemy is likely to be just as much of a bastard, because nice guys don't win wars, and civil wars aren't nice to begin with. So where exactly should the moral high ground of "treason" vs "whistleblowing" lie? It's not always clear-cut at all.
If I were a member of Anonymous, I think I'd become sickened by their random-drive-by-vandalism-for-lulz tactics after a while, with or without the FBI holding my children hostage. But maybe that's just me.
DHS, conspiracy theories aside, is likely conducting their own investigation into DuQu
No need for that unless they snuffed the original developer before securing the relevant docs.~
Hey, everyone makes mistakes. That drone was supposed to have been loaded with tranquilizer darts, not Hellfires. Boy, there were some red faces in the office when we found out what happened.
I can't help but think of how patricians mostly just had surreal, detached, useless conversations in their country villas when the Vandals sacked Rome.
Arguably, from a more global viewpoint, those same patricians and their forebears had all along been having the same surreal, detached, useless conversations in those same country villas while the Roman legions were sacking the rest of Europe. The reality of what it was like to have your goods stolen and your kids enslaved by a bunch of armed goons only came home to them when suddenly it was them on the wrong side of the military machine.
How dare they! A bunch of barbarians sullying our beautiful Rome! The nerve of them! The very nerve!
Well, how dared Julius Caesar go and beat up Gaul and Egypt? Wasn't like he actually had the right. Just happened to be a talented smash-and-grab artist, like the rest of the Roman generals of his era. Bu it's different when it's those people! doing the smashing and the grabbing, isn't it?
you vote for your local smart guy that you trust and let HIM decide on the candidate.
What happens if the smartest guy in the room is also the one you trust least, because he's the one who's used his smarts to run scams on everyone else?
If you're a rabbit, should you best vote for the smart wolf or the dumb sheep to best represent your interests?
or the second coming of Jesus in economist form.
If the economist is suggesting that rich rulers sell everything they have and give it to the poor, and that the nation hold all goods in common, it's probably either Jesus or Karl Marx. If he talks a lot about maximising the alpha spread of your highly leveraged HFT server, it's either Adam Smith or Geordi LaForge.
FDR, Ike, and Reagan all had IQ's at or below the average for men of their education levels, all had successful presidencies. U.S. Grant was thought to be one of the dimmer bulbs in the office, but despite huge corruption scandals, had one of the most successful tenures in the office. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was famously bright, and despite good marks for personal character, was seen as weak and ineffective.
The key words here being "seen as".
The success or failure of a presidency isn't (or in a rational world, wouldn't be) judged by how popular they were, but by whether they made objectively correct decisions.
Jimmy Carter correctly analysed the coming oil crunch and launched an energy independence initiative, while Reagan cancelled Carter's gains, put America back on the path to today's dependence on foreign oil, while deregulating finance and pouring millions into wasteful and hugely dangerous military adventures. And yet Carter is still seen as the mistaken one?
How and why does America make such a vast misjudgement of their presidents?
Could it just *possibly* be that both men, of at least reasonable intellect, when faced with the full disclosure of what the US intelligence community knows,
... turned white, staggered back, threw up in a potted planet in the corner of the Oval Office, and pitched to the floor where they were promptly replaced by robots while the originals lived out their days in a white padded room in Guantanamo Bay murmuring about "tentacles"?
If the electoral college did indeed function as a sort of specialized Senate whose purpose was to weigh the candidates and choose the President, you would see a very different kind of political structure in Washington.
One in which a few rich and well-connected insiders controlled all the political power instead of just most of it, and the people were even more disenfranchised? I can certainly see how that would be an improvement. Would you like to come to my private island to discuss this further over a little brunch? My chef's doing fricassee of bald eagle this week. I think it's the last breeding pair on the continent. I expect they will be delicious.
Precious snowflakes just ripe to be lead by the pied piper for that single vote that leads to a dictatorship.
Indeed. I'd go further and say that all this fog of war is just a scorched earth campaign by the fat of the land to oil the outstretched palms which grease the squeaky wheels at the thin end of the bleeding edge of the tail of the white elephant in the room which nobody mentions that wags the running dog which didn't bark in the night on the cart before the dark Trojan horse at the top of the slippery slope of the cliff above the ambulance.
Though that might be overstating the case a bit. But I don't think so.
Be careful when talking about absolutes in government. For that is the way of the Sith
As opposed to the righteous and honourable Jedi, who'll point-blank lie to your face about how your father died and then when your Dad tells you the truth and you call Uncle Ben on it he gives you a weasel speech about how his made-up bit of truthiness was actually true "from a certain point of view", and by the way your girlfriend's actually your sister (but kissing her wasn't really icky if you think about it the right way)...
Of course, they came from a society that saw no contradiction in having "democratically elected" monachies, so...
What she failed to realize was that one of Aristotle's students was Alexander the Great, whose deficiencies led to the collapse of the Greek empire when Alexander died.
Exactly. What a lot of people fail to realise about history is that it doesn't move in a straight line - there are cyclic patterns of boom and collapse. We just tend to average them out, looking back from a safe distance, and think that because we're here today, the periodic prophets of doom in the past were all silly pessimists. But they weren't, necessarily. Many of those collapses were truly horrendous, and although life did pick itself up and survive, we'd do well not to repeat them. And that does mean paying attention to what the critics of the preceding boom cycles were saying about their cultures.
I'm not convinced that we've even yet processed the evident failings of our current society - things like banking and ecological collapse which have been written on the wall for decades - let alone the new failure modes we're busy introducing with technological and sociological experimentation.
You would prefer another target, a massive scalar target? I grow tired of asking this, so it will be the last time. Where is the Higgs Boson?
125 GeV. It's at 125 GeV.
There, Lord Vader. She can be reasonable. Continue with the ATLAS/CMS collaboration; you can fire when ready.
You should say: Consistantly finding theories to be false, never knowing things to be true.
But if we can never prove a scientific theory to be true, how do we go about proving for sure the theory that we've proven another theory to be false...?
Bertrand Russell makes Karl Popper cry! (while Kurt Goedel sits in the corner smirking)
From various YouTube DMCA stories, it seems like YouTube just hides the video content and renders an error message when you try to view it. If the takedown is reversed, they re-instate the video at its original URL
Hmm. Isn't that behaviour (hiding rather than deleting DMCA-challenged content) exactly what Kim Dotcom did and is now facing criminal charges for? How can it be legal when Youtube does it, but not when Kim did?
Course the trial hasn't happened yet so the Dotcom case could still backfire.
All knowledge begins with "Why does X. I don't know, let's find out."
And ends with "Oww why is my arm being eaten by a dinosaur which is also on fire?"
That's funny... I always hear progressives saying they also support our troops. Are you telling me I'm wrong, and only "conservative dickweeds" do?
You're probably wrong, yes, though I'm afraid you might be right in this case. I'd hope that progressives would always be courageous enough to refuse to support their troops when those troops are doing something bad. Yet American progressives seem terrified of "disrespecting the troops".
Troops aren't fuzzy stuffed toys. Troops are weapons. Their job is to break forcibly into other people's countries and mess up their lives and property. To say you "support" your favoured weapon is like saying "I support my gun. My gun is very important to me! I give my gun lots of love and respect! Don't you love my gun too? I suspect you of being insufficiently supportive of my gun! My poor gun, nobody understands how much it loves me!"
That's... um, a weird thing to be sensitive about, quite frankly. Shouldn't you be more concerned with the person you're currently pointing your gun at, and the pile of corpses who have already been introduced to it?
And this isn't limited to stories that touch on national issues; it happens at every level of media.
Yes, and this voluntary censorship of stories "not in the national interest" goes back at least to the early Cold War years, that golden age of common purpose against a common enemy which a previous poster longed for. It wasn't really a secret - Mockingbird was one of the forms in which it surfaced, British Security Coordination was another, and I'm sure there were others. If you've looked at the old Superman stories, it's interesting how quickly Supes turned on a dime from fighting corrupt defense contractors trying to drag the USA into a European war in 1938, to actively promoting that same war in the 40s. One can see why George Orwell became so cynical about Eurasia/Eastasia when so many "we have always been at war with Russia^WGermany^WRussia" alignment flips in the US-UK axis happened within ten years.
Completely voluntary self-censorship of multiple publishers due to mass patriotic fervour is one explanation. Coordinated propaganda action by intelligence agencies is another. The truth is probably somewhere between the two.
its a good question and one that we have been struggling with since the dawn of human civilization. how do we know we are all not imaginary, or in a dream, or someone elses dream, or a computer like the Matrix?/quote>
If the simulation is sufficiently detailed and keeps running long enough, does it matter?
Like all dogmas, once you take things too seriously, they start to go downhill.
Especially if it's too heavy and you're on the skids when the wheels come off near a slippery slope, and there's no ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.
Of course, and that's why the 'good ole days' are in quotes. There was a greater belief in those things post-war and a lot less of the cynicism of the current era.
Not that blind faith and naivete is necessarily a good thing, but they do make for a stronger nation, for better or for worse.
'Stronger' should be in quotes too. There was more faith in government and other institutions in the 1950s, yes - but the institutions in which that faith was placed were not in fact worthy of that faith. Building a nation on a lie did not actually make it stronger; the foundations were shaky even as the shiny chrome cladding on the outside of the building looked great.
This is the period in which the Korean war raged and the seeds of Vietnam began, ICBMs were built and deployed with the full intention of being used, and soldiers and mental patients were exposed to radiation without informed consent. These were not actions which created a strong nation. The Baby Boomers and GenXers learning about these betrayals of trust and growing cynical didn't cause the problem - the "greatest generation" dug their own grave.
In capitalist terms, that means that there was a massive mis-allocation of resources starting in the 1940-50s due to the market being given false information (generally toward war materiel and the secrecy that went along with the atomic establishment), and now that the accounting records are starting to be opened we're learning the full extent of our debts and our credit rating is crashing. But our high credit was a mispricing all along, and this is the necessary correction.
Who's equipment?
Currently a sonic screwdriver and a bowtie.
There's all sorts of reasons someone might not spell well. So who cares?
Noone cares about this alot.
How would noise travel in vacuum?
Very quickly.
I have watched a LOT of scifi over my life time and only once have I ever actually seen sound depicted in space. (Bonus points if anybody knows who the big offender was.)
Attack of the Clones, the "concussion bombs" in the the asteroid belt?
Most space combat will be like modern air combat or sub warfare - You spend a lot of time and effort to see them before they see you.
That bit is difficult since space is, as the name suggests, mostly empty. There's only so many times you can hide behind planets unless you're fighting in low orbit.