Why is that always the only response you see when someone points out these kind of covert operations perpetrated by the USA they immediately associate the person with being a communist?
Although the CIA certainly was involved in both cases, it's not correct to say the US caused either of these coups. They did not cause the government to fall, it was already falling in both cases, all the CIA did was to make sure it fell in the direction they wanted.
You have it all wrong. First of all, go read about IRAN CONTRA, that will tell you that they did indeed, along with the brits, engineer that coup from A to Z. It's not a zany conspiracy theory, it's a well documented fact. Secondly, you list the result of black ops (sabotaging production etc) as things the CIA isn't responsible for, which is just plain blind.
There isn't any proof that the CIA was involved in Chile, no smoking gun besides their exact modus operandi, but Iran was declassified, it's written down, you just have to go read it.
I suppose the only problems would be the fuel (wood and other biofuel consumption would suddenly take a hike), training (operating the still), and maintenance (cleaning the crud out).
Materials, portability, scalability, possibility of being used by small children, safety of use, etc.
They're looking for something they can airdrop on refugees.
Actually, I think it's slightly more general than just religious people looking for their big payoff. People in general dislike having their views challenged. Why?
It's because the process of acquiring knowledge means that future contradicting info will be judged wrong accordingly. Same goes for, say, self-esteem: If a kid grows up being told they are bad, they'll usually believe it for the rest of their lives.
I happen to know a few people who are really.. well, they love Jesus more than most. They seem to attack science, not to learn anything, but to merely shoot down their "adversary".
I really wish those people could understand this quote (last 2 lines of the article): "People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth."
Hi, let me do some armchair neurolinguistics for you: "belief" is warm and fuzzy; Science want to cast the warm-fuzzy thing away: SCIENCE BAD!
Because it is very important to them to believe every word their faith holds true, otherwise they won't get their big payoff: Eternal life with all those you love and everything you desire. Science can't offer that, so they stick to the better offer.
The whole thing seemed like 8 unrelated first chapters of novels set in a vaguely similar time, all of which didn't know anything about the other chapters.
Yikes, I can't advise you to read the Confusion then, because that's the criticism I would find perfectly reasonable about it. What can I say, I read the Baroque Cycle (am now picturing a fancy bike) twice, and I wanted more by the time I got to the end. So, keep them for when you'll have a lot of time to kill (long trip, hospital, etc), that way its wordiness will serve your needs:)
They published over 75,000 documents about the Afghan war, to which presumably only a very small inner circle had prior access. Did they have time to review every one of those documents, with the same skill and care of a military intelligence analyst? Did they have access to all other relevant non-public information, to make sure nothing sensitive could be deduced from what they were leaking by someone bad who already had some but not all of the picture?
No, but they asked the pentagon, who has the resources, and the pentagon's position was: Fuck you, give it all back, release none of it. I get it, they don't want their dirty laundry aired out in public. The pentagon then lied about being contacted before hand and went on to make accusations about irresponsibility. No one expected any less. And the sexual scandal is also par for the course.
Don't forget that the pentagon said that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire, and that Jessica Lynch fought with her sidearm to the last bullet, and that Phan Th Kim Phúc was burned in a cooking accident by a careless parent. Lies. Lies and more lies, so that they can keep killing, and maiming, and skimming off the top of those billion dollar contracts. I don't think that those murderous liars are the good guys, nor that the people exposing their actions are the bad guys. They lie to start wars, lie to keep the wars going, and it needs to stop.
Wikileaks redacted fifteen thousand pages to avoid harming innocent people, asked the pentagon to help make sure there were none left before it went live, the pentagon denied being asked and implied that they did nothing to redact any names. You now tell me you believe they did nothing and redacted no names. Implying is a great tool for propaganda.
I gave up on him at the point in "Quicksilver" when he rambled on at length about Parisian horse trading markets.
You mean the super important plot point about the trade of very unique-looking Arabian horses for a certain extraordinary slave girl by a French nobleman? You gave up at that point? Your loss.
I learned my lesson soon after Asimov's death: Beware new books bearing the name of a dead author. I got 60 pages in something before I realized this crap couldn't possibly have been written by Isaac, and realized I'd been reading some hack riding a dead man's coat tails.
Please cite the crimes being hidden that have been revealed by this raw dump of intelligence data? I think I must have missed those news stories about how wikileaks blew the lid off the war crimes being committed, despite my careful attention to multiple news services.
It is up to a court to decide if a crime has been committed, but there appears to be prima facie evidence of war crimes. There's undeniable evidence of cover ups of civilian casualties by reporting them as combatants. Remember the camera man and reporter who were clearly insurgents with rocket launchers that got massacred along with bystanders and good Samaritans? Stuff like that, and lots of it, isn't being reported by your "multiple news services" because they are owned and operated by the people who go through the revolving door of the military industrial congress complex. i.e. you've been fed propaganda and you swallowed it whole.
Has Wikileaks provided any citations or evidence of all the war crimes that they've asserted the documents they're releasing "may contain evidence of"?
It's not the setting that bugs me, it's the verbosity. The Baroque Cycle was a good read, but about 1500 pages too long.
It wouldn't be baroque if he didn't overdo it:)
The first few hundred pages of Anathem were on his website, I got to the end of that sample and went to buy the hardcover the next day. It's a brick, but it's a good brick. Like he said, he's a fan of Dune, and us Dune fans love our books big and wordy.
If I'm reading a book, it's because I WANT to be alone with the book and my imagination. The only communication I'm interested in is with the author's words.
We don't need, and we don't want, yet another "social platform."
No, loners don't need or want a social platform, but publishers are looking at the shipments of cash being delivered 24/7 to Blizzard, and they want some.
The question is, will this new platform allow the author to add an ending to a novel?
As an author, Stephenson rides the reader hard and puts them away wet, so to speak. It'd be nice if he'd address that first.
Your point is insightful and all, his really work did stop abruptly rather than end properly, but to be fair: he's been getting better, making progress. Heck, Anathem even had a epilogue! I think somehow the thousands and thousands of complaints wore him down.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that always the only response you see when someone points out these kind of covert operations perpetrated by the USA they immediately associate the person with being a communist?
Pavlovian conditioning, I guess...
being poor in America is like being poor in Cuba: life sucks.
Free health care and education > no health care nor education; I think the poor in Cuba are skinnier, but with more teeth.
Boy, some people just buy the propaganda, hook, line, and sinker. The Cuban government has the motivation and the means to lie about those statistics.
The Cuban government has the means to make the CIA website say what they want? Wooooooow...
Although the CIA certainly was involved in both cases, it's not correct to say the US caused either of these coups. They did not cause the government to fall, it was already falling in both cases, all the CIA did was to make sure it fell in the direction they wanted.
You have it all wrong. First of all, go read about IRAN CONTRA, that will tell you that they did indeed, along with the brits, engineer that coup from A to Z. It's not a zany conspiracy theory, it's a well documented fact.
Secondly, you list the result of black ops (sabotaging production etc) as things the CIA isn't responsible for, which is just plain blind.
There isn't any proof that the CIA was involved in Chile, no smoking gun besides their exact modus operandi, but Iran was declassified, it's written down, you just have to go read it.
I suppose the only problems would be the fuel (wood and other biofuel consumption would suddenly take a hike), training (operating the still), and maintenance (cleaning the crud out).
Materials, portability, scalability, possibility of being used by small children, safety of use, etc.
They're looking for something they can airdrop on refugees.
Yes but that solution doesn't remove any contaminants in the water; it only kills microbes.
The bleach will also break apart many kinds of contaminants, it won't remove heavy metals and whatnot, but I think bleach can break poisons.
it's up to him to curb the douchebaggery.
No, it's not. He's being maligned, and that's not up to him.
Actually, I think it's slightly more general than just religious people looking for their big payoff. People in general dislike having their views challenged. Why?
It's because the process of acquiring knowledge means that future contradicting info will be judged wrong accordingly. Same goes for, say, self-esteem: If a kid grows up being told they are bad, they'll usually believe it for the rest of their lives.
I happen to know a few people who are really.. well, they love Jesus more than most. They seem to attack science, not to learn anything, but to merely shoot down their "adversary".
I really wish those people could understand this quote (last 2 lines of the article): "People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth."
Hi, let me do some armchair neurolinguistics for you: "belief" is warm and fuzzy; Science want to cast the warm-fuzzy thing away: SCIENCE BAD!
Because it is very important to them to believe every word their faith holds true, otherwise they won't get their big payoff: Eternal life with all those you love and everything you desire. Science can't offer that, so they stick to the better offer.
The whole thing seemed like 8 unrelated first chapters of novels set in a vaguely similar time, all of which didn't know anything about the other chapters.
Yikes, I can't advise you to read the Confusion then, because that's the criticism I would find perfectly reasonable about it. What can I say, I read the Baroque Cycle (am now picturing a fancy bike) twice, and I wanted more by the time I got to the end. So, keep them for when you'll have a lot of time to kill (long trip, hospital, etc), that way its wordiness will serve your needs :)
They published over 75,000 documents about the Afghan war, to which presumably only a very small inner circle had prior access. Did they have time to review every one of those documents, with the same skill and care of a military intelligence analyst? Did they have access to all other relevant non-public information, to make sure nothing sensitive could be deduced from what they were leaking by someone bad who already had some but not all of the picture?
No, but they asked the pentagon, who has the resources, and the pentagon's position was: Fuck you, give it all back, release none of it. I get it, they don't want their dirty laundry aired out in public. The pentagon then lied about being contacted before hand and went on to make accusations about irresponsibility. No one expected any less. And the sexual scandal is also par for the course.
Don't forget that the pentagon said that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire, and that Jessica Lynch fought with her sidearm to the last bullet, and that Phan Th Kim Phúc was burned in a cooking accident by a careless parent. Lies. Lies and more lies, so that they can keep killing, and maiming, and skimming off the top of those billion dollar contracts. I don't think that those murderous liars are the good guys, nor that the people exposing their actions are the bad guys. They lie to start wars, lie to keep the wars going, and it needs to stop.
They were referring to the fact that wikileaks failed to redact the names of the informants
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/20/wikileaks/index.html
Wikileaks redacted fifteen thousand pages to avoid harming innocent people, asked the pentagon to help make sure there were none left before it went live, the pentagon denied being asked and implied that they did nothing to redact any names. You now tell me you believe they did nothing and redacted no names. Implying is a great tool for propaganda.
In a somewhat untraditional partnership, Snoop Dogg and Symantec's Norton want you
A company hiring a celebrity to get its fans to buy their product is nothing new. Neither are slashvertisements.
we may stop calling them novels.
As soon as the novelty wears off...
I gave up on him at the point in "Quicksilver" when he rambled on at length about Parisian horse trading markets.
You mean the super important plot point about the trade of very unique-looking Arabian horses for a certain extraordinary slave girl by a French nobleman? You gave up at that point? Your loss.
Everything his son wrote is awful.
I learned my lesson soon after Asimov's death: Beware new books bearing the name of a dead author.
I got 60 pages in something before I realized this crap couldn't possibly have been written by Isaac, and realized I'd been reading some hack riding a dead man's coat tails.
Please cite the crimes being hidden that have been revealed by this raw dump of intelligence data? I think I must have missed those news stories about how wikileaks blew the lid off the war crimes being committed, despite my careful attention to multiple news services.
http://www.google.com/search?q=wikileaks+war+crime
It is up to a court to decide if a crime has been committed, but there appears to be prima facie evidence of war crimes. There's undeniable evidence of cover ups of civilian casualties by reporting them as combatants. Remember the camera man and reporter who were clearly insurgents with rocket launchers that got massacred along with bystanders and good Samaritans? Stuff like that, and lots of it, isn't being reported by your "multiple news services" because they are owned and operated by the people who go through the revolving door of the military industrial congress complex. i.e. you've been fed propaganda and you swallowed it whole.
Please provide a credible citation stating that no one has been killed due to the leaked information.
Sure, but first you must prove yo me that your mother is not a whore.
Has Wikileaks provided any citations or evidence of all the war crimes that they've asserted the documents they're releasing "may contain evidence of"?
Yes.
For me, his best stuff was actually non-cyberpunk. Zodiac, Interface, The Cobweb, Cryptonomicon...
Zodiac is the one I use to introduce him to people. Not too big, not too weird, but 100% awesome.
It's not the setting that bugs me, it's the verbosity. The Baroque Cycle was a good read, but about 1500 pages too long.
It wouldn't be baroque if he didn't overdo it :)
The first few hundred pages of Anathem were on his website, I got to the end of that sample and went to buy the hardcover the next day. It's a brick, but it's a good brick. Like he said, he's a fan of Dune, and us Dune fans love our books big and wordy.
If I'm reading a book, it's because I WANT to be alone with the book and my imagination. The only communication I'm interested in is with the author's words.
We don't need, and we don't want, yet another "social platform."
No, loners don't need or want a social platform, but publishers are looking at the shipments of cash being delivered 24/7 to Blizzard, and they want some.
Does anyone seriously think the answer to the 'content can be had for free, so people have it for free' problem is ... more content? Really?
The answer is: Dynamic content. Content that doesn't stay the same from one week to the next, that way you can't just .zip it, you won't have it all.
I think it's an interesting idea, we'll see if it works.
Most eBook/eZine/eManga software is severely lacking in ease of use and functionality
By design. The point of these wares is to remove your ability to do things with the material that the publisher doesn't want you to do.
The question is, will this new platform allow the author to add an ending to a novel?
As an author, Stephenson rides the reader hard and puts them away wet, so to speak. It'd be nice if he'd address that first.
Your point is insightful and all, his really work did stop abruptly rather than end properly, but to be fair: he's been getting better, making progress. Heck, Anathem even had a epilogue! I think somehow the thousands and thousands of complaints wore him down.