Yeah, pretty stunning stuff, found the stats in the London Times (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/).
The pundits and the newsreaders of the media can't all be ignorant of the situation. They can't possibly have forgotten the heroin epidemics of the Vietnam war era or the cocaine and crack waves that accompanied our involvements in Panama and Nicaragua.
But none are even mentioning it. I don't know if it's fear or complicity.
If there is a problem with our intelligence, it just might be in part because we're blowing dough, manpower, and time on our futile "Drug War" efforts.
you don't know the half of it. Last year Afghanistan produced over 3000 tons of raw opiium. We paid the Taliban millions to stop growing it. 2001 crop estimated at 200 tons, but the UN says that the Taliban only banned opium cultivation in order to make their vast stockpiles of the stuff more valuable. Lats year it was $25/kilo, now it's $200/kilo.
Now we are told that, in order to get intelligence on Afghanistan, we are going to have to get "dirty." That means paying drug dealers.
AP reports:
But economic pressure could be brought to bear in many ways. Two House Republican aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said nations involved in the growing, processing and smuggling of opium and heroin could be encouraged through threatened sanctions to help the United States attack a major source of terrorist financing.
"The illegal drug trade is one of the golden gooses of this thing," one aide said.
Now look at the same AP report, re-filed a few hours later...gee, no opium mentioned.
Guess it wasn't newsworthy enough to make the later editions...
Anyway, don't be surprised at a flood of heroin in the ghetto, coming soon, courtesy our intelligence agencies, with the Taliban enjoying their share of the profit.
Like Katz, most Americans are going to trust the military and the politicians to "take care of us" and hand them carte blanche to do so. They will.
I have no sacred cows. I realize I am going to lose some rights, and for a proper cause.
But I worry.
Katz talks about our rights being subject to "checks and balances." Where are the checks and balances for the key-keepers in all of this?
There is no doubt that a systenm of accountability *could* be devised. There is equally little doubt that no such thing will be proposed because it will be perceived as "cumbersome." But shouldn't such power be hampered in certain ways? It's not as if there's no baby in the bathwater.
A lot of things are going by the board these days. It's pretty clear that, for intelligence purposes, we will be partnering with the drug kingpins of that part of the world. And there is going to be a lot of air traffic, unmonitored military traffic and aid traffic, to the same area. Anyone with points of reference to the real world knows that this means a heroin epidemic here in the US. We are ready to repeat history that we did not learn from.
The above may seem off-topic, but it's part of the same scheme. We are turning over our future to the politicians and the military and saying, "take care of us."
Katz's point is well-taken, but like much of his writing it is single-focused to the point of solipsism, dwelling solely on philosophy without the reference to real-world issues that should not get "lost in the sauce."
1. Stop the export of drugs from Pakistan and Afghanistan
If you are going to do a lot of air-drops and air mobile operations, you will not stop drug trafficking -- you will expand it exponentially.
When we were caught up in Vietnam, heroin was the drug epidemic du jour. When we fought the Sandinistas, the US was flooded with coke.
How coincidental!
increasing military and aid air traffic to a specific part of the globe will inevitably provide opportunities for drug traffickers that weren't there before.
Re:Do you think Bush is up to the job?
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 1
i think you over-estimate our commander in chief's approval rating
Agreed...in particular, his attempts to provide "Presidential" rhetoric have been pathetic. TIME's covershot of him waving a dime-store flag atop a rubble-heap is a sad, sad image, for all the wrong reasons.
Who is not ridiculing his choices of cowboy and superhero metaphors at such a sober moment of history?
I can only hope that he is writing his own speeches -- a duty perhaps assigned to him to keep him out of the war room.
Not all that interesting unless you're from an area where blight is a problem....
With current fossil fuel policies, and the numerous oil-producing nations that are likely to soon be alight, hardy varieties may soon be of interest to everybody on the planet.
The words that come to mind are "slippery slope." I am a lifelong non-driver. When I was a young adult, I was able to live my life unencumbered by *any* form of ID, and became quite accustomed to doing so. Nowadays I must carry my passport (the govt-issued one, not MS's).
Once 80% of the population have Passport, how many voters would object to a government requirement that you have Passport (or its equivalent) to do your taxes? Or to do any monetary exchange?
I want to...Goto Slashdot and see other people reading/posting
That is a mud/moo, exactly what you say you don't want....And quite a chilling one, at that.
From what I hear, Hollywood has "seen the light" with Linux...
Hollywood will run Linux, but still wants consumers to run Windows. Rights management, y'know?
There is a long legal precedence that buying a retail business includes buying their customer records. Otherwise, things like warranty service, returns policies, maintenance of tax records, would be impossible.
While egghead may not be able to sell the customer records as a standalone asset, selling customer records as part of the sale of the overall business is so firmly established as routine in the world of brick & mortar it would be hard to argue that it is so diffeernt for an online business.
If the towers are only on for a few minutes per hour, and survivors only turn on their phones for a few minutes per hour, then the odds are slim that that survivors and towers will be communicating at all.
Since it is a good idea for the survivors to save phone batteries this way, turning off the towers is a bad idea.
Tonight when I get home from work, instead of downloading wolfenstein I will make anonymous postings to various message boards, and make my best attempt to help people realize what assholes they are by not doing what I think they should do.
Of course, everybody that reads my rude, pigheaded posts will wish I had played Wolfenstein instead, but that won't stop me from making this world a better place.
Alex, I will tell you why I thought this article was significant.
We are nearing the point now where "intellectual property owners" are capable of keeping their IP in their "physical possession," in the form of copyable bytes on a remote server.
In the new licensable-not-purchasable world, MS would like to be the gatekeeper. This story describes a device that sounds like a box-o-fun, but is designed to channel your credit card transactions, and funnel a good percentage of those funds to the gatekeepers.
As an illustration of Microsoft's current strategy and its logical destination, this article is either skillful fiction, or scary fact. Despite the "artist's concept" illo, I suspect this story is entirely true, because it dovetails so well with what is known about MS and its plans.
I do not think this is a good thing. I like owning my CD's and videos and games. I don't want my credit acct to be charged a nickel every time I play a song. I won't enjoy music much under such circumstances.
That is why I think this is newsworthy. Michael says it's a duplicate story, but I don't know what it duplicates, a search for "Home Station" brings up zip.
It was not posted as your submission. It was posted as Michael's submission.
Michael quoted your submission within his post.
As no one claims/. is unbiased when it come to GNU projects, this practice seems fine to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, pretty stunning stuff, found the stats in the London Times (http://www.thetimes.co.uk/).
The pundits and the newsreaders of the media can't all be ignorant of the situation. They can't possibly have forgotten the heroin epidemics of the Vietnam war era or the cocaine and crack waves that accompanied our involvements in Panama and Nicaragua.
But none are even mentioning it. I don't know if it's fear or complicity.
you don't know the half of it. Last year Afghanistan produced over 3000 tons of raw opiium. We paid the Taliban millions to stop growing it. 2001 crop estimated at 200 tons, but the UN says that the Taliban only banned opium cultivation in order to make their vast stockpiles of the stuff more valuable. Lats year it was $25/kilo, now it's $200/kilo.
Now we are told that, in order to get intelligence on Afghanistan, we are going to have to get "dirty." That means paying drug dealers.
AP reports:
But economic pressure could be brought to bear in many ways. Two House Republican aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said nations involved in the growing, processing and smuggling of opium and heroin could be encouraged through threatened sanctions to help the United States attack a major source of terrorist financing.
"The illegal drug trade is one of the golden gooses of this thing," one aide said.
Now look at the same AP report, re-filed a few hours later...gee, no opium mentioned.
Guess it wasn't newsworthy enough to make the later editions...
Anyway, don't be surprised at a flood of heroin in the ghetto, coming soon, courtesy our intelligence agencies, with the Taliban enjoying their share of the profit.
Like Katz, most Americans are going to trust the military and the politicians to "take care of us" and hand them carte blanche to do so. They will.
I have no sacred cows. I realize I am going to lose some rights, and for a proper cause.
But I worry.
Katz talks about our rights being subject to "checks and balances." Where are the checks and balances for the key-keepers in all of this?
There is no doubt that a systenm of accountability *could* be devised. There is equally little doubt that no such thing will be proposed because it will be perceived as "cumbersome." But shouldn't such power be hampered in certain ways? It's not as if there's no baby in the bathwater.
A lot of things are going by the board these days. It's pretty clear that, for intelligence purposes, we will be partnering with the drug kingpins of that part of the world. And there is going to be a lot of air traffic, unmonitored military traffic and aid traffic, to the same area. Anyone with points of reference to the real world knows that this means a heroin epidemic here in the US. We are ready to repeat history that we did not learn from.
The above may seem off-topic, but it's part of the same scheme. We are turning over our future to the politicians and the military and saying, "take care of us."
Katz's point is well-taken, but like much of his writing it is single-focused to the point of solipsism, dwelling solely on philosophy without the reference to real-world issues that should not get "lost in the sauce."
Some call it "editing."
Ot would be a good idea that all news carry this disclaimer: "For your own protection, please do not depend on a single source for news."
If you are going to do a lot of air-drops and air mobile operations, you will not stop drug trafficking -- you will expand it exponentially.
When we were caught up in Vietnam, heroin was the drug epidemic du jour. When we fought the Sandinistas, the US was flooded with coke.
How coincidental!
increasing military and aid air traffic to a specific part of the globe will inevitably provide opportunities for drug traffickers that weren't there before.
Agreed...in particular, his attempts to provide "Presidential" rhetoric have been pathetic. TIME's covershot of him waving a dime-store flag atop a rubble-heap is a sad, sad image, for all the wrong reasons.
Who is not ridiculing his choices of cowboy and superhero metaphors at such a sober moment of history?
I can only hope that he is writing his own speeches -- a duty perhaps assigned to him to keep him out of the war room.
With current fossil fuel policies, and the numerous oil-producing nations that are likely to soon be alight, hardy varieties may soon be of interest to everybody on the planet.
Starbucks is here. Note the "Passport" login at the top right of the page.
The words that come to mind are "slippery slope." I am a lifelong non-driver. When I was a young adult, I was able to live my life unencumbered by *any* form of ID, and became quite accustomed to doing so. Nowadays I must carry my passport (the govt-issued one, not MS's).
Once 80% of the population have Passport, how many voters would object to a government requirement that you have Passport (or its equivalent) to do your taxes? Or to do any monetary exchange?
Vote with your dollars on that? I don't think so.
I want to...Goto Slashdot and see other people reading/posting
That is a mud/moo, exactly what you say you don't want....And quite a chilling one, at that.
Out of place? You mean you don't consider no women and lots of *NIX the components of a perfect world?
From what I hear, Hollywood has "seen the light" with Linux...
Hollywood will run Linux, but still wants consumers to run Windows. Rights management, y'know?
Hey, and the WTC would still be standing. That, and a time machine, might get you somewhere. Too bad, no time machine.
This article has no business being on Slashdot and is just more anti-Microsoft zealotry.
It's at least interesting that The Nation ran this with no apparent understanding of the amount of questionable rhetoric it contains.
There is a long legal precedence that buying a retail business includes buying their customer records. Otherwise, things like warranty service, returns policies, maintenance of tax records, would be impossible.
While egghead may not be able to sell the customer records as a standalone asset, selling customer records as part of the sale of the overall business is so firmly established as routine in the world of brick & mortar it would be hard to argue that it is so diffeernt for an online business.
Which reports are you referring to? There's a story at CNET saying that 50-plus wireless signals have come from the rubble since day 0.
m l
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7191650.ht
Air.
They can't live without air.
If the towers are only on for a few minutes per hour, and survivors only turn on their phones for a few minutes per hour, then the odds are slim that that survivors and towers will be communicating at all.
Since it is a good idea for the survivors to save phone batteries this way, turning off the towers is a bad idea.
Thank you for that link.
Ansary's little essay rings with more truth than can be found in a ton of the knee-jerk verbiage flowing out of the media.
Okay, you've persuaded me.
Tonight when I get home from work, instead of downloading wolfenstein I will make anonymous postings to various message boards, and make my best attempt to help people realize what assholes they are by not doing what I think they should do.
Of course, everybody that reads my rude, pigheaded posts will wish I had played Wolfenstein instead, but that won't stop me from making this world a better place.
Sorry, Michael - never mind about the duplication; Troed's link educated me...I wish search worked better.
Alex, I will tell you why I thought this article was significant.
We are nearing the point now where "intellectual property owners" are capable of keeping their IP in their "physical possession," in the form of copyable bytes on a remote server.
In the new licensable-not-purchasable world, MS would like to be the gatekeeper. This story describes a device that sounds like a box-o-fun, but is designed to channel your credit card transactions, and funnel a good percentage of those funds to the gatekeepers.
As an illustration of Microsoft's current strategy and its logical destination, this article is either skillful fiction, or scary fact. Despite the "artist's concept" illo, I suspect this story is entirely true, because it dovetails so well with what is known about MS and its plans.
I do not think this is a good thing. I like owning my CD's and videos and games. I don't want my credit acct to be charged a nickel every time I play a song. I won't enjoy music much under such circumstances.
That is why I think this is newsworthy. Michael says it's a duplicate story, but I don't know what it duplicates, a search for "Home Station" brings up zip.
Michael, what does this story duplicate?
And, since I posted this Saturday afternoon, what's this about early am Sunday?
Don't be messing with my karma!
It was not posted as your submission. It was posted as Michael's submission. /. is unbiased when it come to GNU projects, this practice seems fine to me.
Michael quoted your submission within his post.
As no one claims
We should talk. I currently am working on the first IP-addressable mailing envelopes. Can't roll it out till IPv6 arrives, though.