You can easily tell which ones are the Union Members and which ones are not. You can draw the line right down the middle and separate those who know what they're doing and which ones do not. Competent = non-union. Easy as that.
Funny, where I work it's the reverse. Competent = union. Incompetent = hired and fired every 6 months, non-union all the way. Really Fucking Incredibly Incompetent = Indian outsource or H1-B Indian On Visa.
Looking at the Chinese is like looking at the Scientologists. This could also be applied to the Iranians, or to many other dictatorial regimes composed of blowhards, up to and including the modern US Republicans/TeePartiers.
Whenever they start accusing someone else of something, assume either (a) they're doing it themselves or (b) they're doing something far worse and trying to draw attention away from it.
You may also safely assume (c), if they're not doing it themselves they wish they were.
- Since the "tough on crime" system began, criminals are incarcerated for longer. They are denied conjugal visits more often. They generally procreate less. - Previous studies have shown that due both to social and genetic reasons, the progeny of criminals generally become criminals themselves. Drug gangs, mafia,opium, weapons traffic, assassination, motion picture distribution...
- Therefore, possible causal link: incarceration of large numbers of criminals has caused them not to procreate, thus decreasing the number of juveniles likely to become criminals.
But could a malicious person write another, malicious ant which manipulates the existing ant colony for his own goals?
Sure they could.
What, you didn't think that was what existing botnet viruses do? They co-opt the millions of computers left unpatched and unsecured by clueless users everywhere for their own purposes.
What's being described by the "ants" concept is nothing more than the age-old "can we make a beneficial computer virus" crap that constantly gets spread around. The answer is no, because if it gets in through a vulnerability, that vulnerability necessarily exists and any form of communication it does back to home necessarily becomes a new vulnerability.
The trouble is when a "non-governmental entity" grows so large that it becomes a de facto "governmental" body, or filter on what people receive.
Left-wingers and right-wingers like to complain they are being "censored out" from various forms of media. Right-wingers started Faux News specifically because they believed they were not being given a fair shake by the likes of NBC, CBS, etc - and they weren't completely incorrect, though as Stephen Colbert loves to say, "reality has a liberal bias." Left-wingers complain about their lack of representation in talk radio formats, a fair charge given that the owners of most talk-radio formats (including the Clear Channel pseudomonopolists) are crazed right-wingers and "Tea Party" kool-aid drinkers.
If "the government" doesn't censor, but a small number of entities who control the communication channels DO censor heavily, we still have a problem.
Interestingly, the heyday of the RIAA, the point at which they were making the most money, was the period when Napster was also in its heyday. New artists were coming out all the time, getting a ton of exposure through Napster that they'd never get over the radio.
MafiAA revenue declines match well with four factors, none of which have anything to do with "piracy": #1 - The rise in other forms of entertainment. Video games, in the past decade, have ballooned. In a system where people only have a finite amount of recreational funding, people are less likely to buy music CDs. Youtube videos, Hulu... people have a ton of access to other time-wasters. About the only thing CDs are good for is car listening.
#2 - The re-rise of the single over services like iTunes. Why buy an entire album when you can just buy the 1-2 songs that are any good off of it and leave the rest of the crap songs behind?
#3 - Economic decline in general. Face it, when 15-20% of your target market is unemployed, you should EXPECT revenues to decline.
#4 - Lack of investment in new acts and production of new material. Instead of anything innovative, or anything GOOD, we get overproduced, cookie-cutter garbage 99% of the time these days. Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and don't forget the newest gay disney boyband "BBMak." Britney Spears sounds like Mcdonna sounds like Lady Gaga sounds like Who The Fuck Cares I'm Done. Rap, "Hip-hop", and the bastardized "R&B" that has ceased to mean "Rhythm and Blues" and instead now means "Retarded and Black"? Yeah. I don't care if you talksing like William Shatner about shooting cops or fucking hoes, I really don't, because your "music" is pure crap.
No, but the IFPI/RIAA/MAFIAA "either you sign the contract with us or we'll have you blacklisted from most live venues and you won't be eating by next week" negotiation model is pretty damn close.
Sharpton and Lee could never be elected if they were not in gerrymandered districts designed to ghettoize a political party into as few districts as possible. Racist assholes like Culberson, Poe, and McCaul stem from the same sort of gerrymandering, they are just from the other side and are in "safe" districts designed by their own party.
NONE of them should be elected, ever. The devil's bargain is that the Democrats allow for the creation of the supersafe-districts in states they don't control, because the Republicans accept the same crap in the districts THEY don't control.
And the voters get fucked, because there are so few noncompetitive districts as to make no difference.
If you are a regular, hard working, private sector, tax paying Californian, you are literally locked out of the system. It's just the public employees and the politicians giving each other hand jobs over and over again, only turning to the rest of us for ever more taxes when they need to finance their next round of corrupt horseshit.
Funny.
If you are a regular, hard working, public OR private sector, tax paying citizen in the rest of the nation, you are literally locked out of the system.
It's the "elected representatives" giving handjobs and corporate welfare kickbacks to their robber baron overlords who then ship jobs overseas, raid your pension, and crash the economy evaporating your life's savings and the "personal retirement account" the republicunts insisted was the way to "replace" social security, forcing you to work pretty much as a slave till you die. And you think you have a voice? Sorry. 1% of the population controls more than 50% of the wealth, if you ever try to stand up and voice opposition to them, the Kochs and the rest of the robber barons will have their media puppets refuse to cover the story and launch a series of coverup ads through their money-laundering front groups like the Teabaggers.
I never understood how people universally recognize why a duopoly in the marketplace, when it's all about money alone, is a bad thing; yet they universally fail to understand why a duopoly with a stranglehold on politics, when it's about both money and power, is also a bad thing. In both scenarios the customers and the voters lose.
Simple: for 80-90% of the "elected representatives", those who aren't quickly replaced or in non-safe districts, they are the aristocracy. They are the ones in control. Why would they support a system that is highly likely to remove them from power?
If they can't simply do a popular vote, then at least use a fixed boundary like county lines.
County lines don't work. Counties have different populations, some incredibly different (one county with a metropolis may be 5x the population of a neighboring mostly rural county). Constitutionally, districts must be as evenly populated as possible for Congressional representation.
What would make some level of sense is eliminating the anachronistic Senate, which used to be elected indirectly but has basically turned into a secondary squabbling house after the change to "direct election" of those assholes, and replacing it with a parliamentary percentage-representative system (say, each political party gets 1 Senator for each 1% of the vote they earn). The added bonus is that it would give an incentive for smaller parties to exist and participate again....which is precisely why the dumbicrats and republicunts won't go for it, since it would loosen their corrupt grips on power.
The point is not that disenfranchised inner-city voters (or rural voters, or suburban voters, or anyone else) do not have a voice.
It's that their voice is muted because 90% of them live in a "safe district" of one sort or another, and the only "competition" is in the primaries where you get to choose between Adolf Eichmann or Herman Goering to "represent" you in the general election and auto-win based on party affiliation.
If "your party" was running the state at last redistricting, chances are that you live in a district that is 55-60% "your party." They are "just safe enough" to ensure constant wins in a 2-party system.
If "your party" was not running the state at last redistricting, you're either one of the disenfranchised 45% in one of those districts and, essentially, voting doesn't matter for you anyways (you could get someone "marginally less bad" who still is a rubber stamp for their asshole party heads by cross-party voting in the primaries, but a candidate from your party has virtually no shot in the general). Or you're in a "super-safe" district where they took the remaining voters who share your general affiliation and concerns and stuffed them all into a gerrymandered ghetto that's 90% "you" and you really don't even get that much choice in the primaries because the district "belongs" to someone who's been in it for 30-40 years and couldn't give a crap whether their party is winning or losing as long as their "safe district" stays that way and they can still live off of bribes and the congressional salary while not doing a goddamn thing to help the people of their district.
It's not going to change until the decisions are taken out of the hands of the state politicians. Seriously. And it's the main reason that the US, with its "great democracy", can barely manage an anemic 30% participation rate in a Presidential election year, while off-year voting in most other actual democracies and republics is consistently 90% or better.
For the political parties involved, they want to draw the district boundaries such that they end up with a majority of citizens who will vote for their party in each district.
The actual goal is to make as many districts that are roughly 55-60% "theirs", just enough to ensure consistent wins, and then pack the remaining voters that are "not theirs" into as few districts as possible that contain 90% or above "not theirs" districts.
It's this sort of mentality that allows for the creation of gerrymandered districts that are 99% black or latino or similar, and the creation of "supersafe" districts that allow people like Al Sharpton or Sheila Jackson Lee to keep getting elected. The tradeoff is, for every one Sheila you get from a 90%-safe district, you have to put up with 3-5 racist assholes like Ted Poe or John Culberson or Michael McCaul that the other side puts into their 55%-safe districts.
Back the last time redistricting was done, the redistricting game came out. It showed how eliminating gerrymandering, by forcing decisions to be made without including "percentage of voters of X party", would improve the political process.
Instead, what we're going to see now in most states is what we saw last time. If one party controls a state, they will try to make as many districts as possible that are 55% "theirs" while stuffing the remaining voters that are "not theirs" into as few districts as possible that are 90% or more the opposite party.
Result? Complete lack of representation for most people, courtesy of gerrymandered districts where the only "difference" is whether you get Herman Goering or Adolf Eichmann winning the nomination out of the primaries.
Are there always going to be "safe districts" in areas where one party is in control? Probably. Would there be nearly as many if the job of districting had been long ago taken out of the hands of politicians? Of course not!
Not just that - the Swiss defense system also consists of the ability to use the mountains against an attacker. Set off rockslides, destroy passes and roadways, bury any armed force unfortunate enough to be downhill.
Mountaintop positions that make for incredible sniping posts and "we can hit you but good luck hitting us" mortar and cannon positions. Mountains themselves that make for treacherous flying for aircraft even for bombing runs, let alone foolhardy for any invading force to try to land forces.
And then there's the political situation. The Swiss were nominally germanic to start with, but they didn't have the direct ties that Austria did (remember, Hitler himself was Austrian-born) to the Nazi regime. The Nazis were, thereby, relatively content to let them sit and exist and be "neutral." They were essentially surrounded on all sides anyways, and the Nazi regime assumed that eventually, following the conquest of the rest of Europe, the Swiss would either decide to fold in or else become enough of an economic arm that it'd make little difference.
Especially in the days when a simple Remote Help session to take screen control and approve/deny the program is all that's needed.
If you're going to have end-users running with install rights, you're going to have orders of magnitude more infections. Partly because they are going to reflexively "click yes" on every single thing they see, partly because you're going to have a defined population of users who are the kind of morons who install every "ooh look it's free" widget from Bonzi Buddy to Weatherbug and all the tagalongs and security holes that come in along with them.
I've had back problems from time to time, mostly related to overstressed muscles. I've gone to a chiropractor for it, had therapeutic massage and spinal adjustments done, and it did a lot of good. Eliminated for weeks at a time a problem that a normal doctor would have hit with muscle relaxants and painkillers.
BUT, the first thing my chiropractor did was take X-rays, both to see the underlying problem and guide the course of treatment. And he was willing to point out that NO serious spinal injury, nothing anywhere near the level of possibly damaging the spinal cord, should be hit with chiropractic treatment. For those, they have this thing called "Traction." He's actually sent patients over to a real hospital when they showed up asking for chiropractic treatment and his X-rays showed they had a major, serious, surgery-level problem.
The problem with chiropractic medicine is that for every good chiropractor out there who treats it as medicine, you have three lying assholes who go on and on about "energy" and "life flow" and all the other sort of new-agey bunk that gives the field a bad name.
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You can easily tell which ones are the Union Members and which ones are not. You can draw the line right down
the middle and separate those who know what they're doing and which ones do not. Competent = non-union. Easy
as that.
Funny, where I work it's the reverse. Competent = union. Incompetent = hired and fired every 6 months, non-union all the way. Really Fucking Incredibly Incompetent = Indian outsource or H1-B Indian On Visa.
Looking at the Chinese is like looking at the Scientologists. This could also be applied to the Iranians, or to many other dictatorial regimes composed of blowhards, up to and including the modern US Republicans/TeePartiers.
Whenever they start accusing someone else of something, assume either (a) they're doing it themselves or (b) they're doing something far worse and trying to draw attention away from it.
You may also safely assume (c), if they're not doing it themselves they wish they were.
Posited:
- Since the "tough on crime" system began, criminals are incarcerated for longer. They are denied conjugal visits more often. They generally procreate less.
- Previous studies have shown that due both to social and genetic reasons, the progeny of criminals generally become criminals themselves. Drug gangs, mafia,opium, weapons traffic, assassination, motion picture distribution...
- Therefore, possible causal link: incarceration of large numbers of criminals has caused them not to procreate, thus decreasing the number of juveniles likely to become criminals.
Dunno. They might get a contact high from all the crack and cocaine...
While we're putting Bieber down there, has anyone tested it with Vanilla Ice or the Jonas Brothers?
But could a malicious person write another, malicious ant which manipulates the existing ant colony for his own goals?
Sure they could.
What, you didn't think that was what existing botnet viruses do? They co-opt the millions of computers left unpatched and unsecured by clueless users everywhere for their own purposes.
What's being described by the "ants" concept is nothing more than the age-old "can we make a beneficial computer virus" crap that constantly gets spread around. The answer is no, because if it gets in through a vulnerability, that vulnerability necessarily exists and any form of communication it does back to home necessarily becomes a new vulnerability.
The trouble is when a "non-governmental entity" grows so large that it becomes a de facto "governmental" body, or filter on what people receive.
Left-wingers and right-wingers like to complain they are being "censored out" from various forms of media. Right-wingers started Faux News specifically because they believed they were not being given a fair shake by the likes of NBC, CBS, etc - and they weren't completely incorrect, though as Stephen Colbert loves to say, "reality has a liberal bias." Left-wingers complain about their lack of representation in talk radio formats, a fair charge given that the owners of most talk-radio formats (including the Clear Channel pseudomonopolists) are crazed right-wingers and "Tea Party" kool-aid drinkers.
If "the government" doesn't censor, but a small number of entities who control the communication channels DO censor heavily, we still have a problem.
The Pirate Bay just screws them over completely.
O RLY?
Interestingly, the heyday of the RIAA, the point at which they were making the most money, was the period when Napster was also in its heyday. New artists were coming out all the time, getting a ton of exposure through Napster that they'd never get over the radio.
MafiAA revenue declines match well with four factors, none of which have anything to do with "piracy":
#1 - The rise in other forms of entertainment. Video games, in the past decade, have ballooned. In a system where people only have a finite amount of recreational funding, people are less likely to buy music CDs. Youtube videos, Hulu... people have a ton of access to other time-wasters. About the only thing CDs are good for is car listening.
#2 - The re-rise of the single over services like iTunes. Why buy an entire album when you can just buy the 1-2 songs that are any good off of it and leave the rest of the crap songs behind?
#3 - Economic decline in general. Face it, when 15-20% of your target market is unemployed, you should EXPECT revenues to decline.
#4 - Lack of investment in new acts and production of new material. Instead of anything innovative, or anything GOOD, we get overproduced, cookie-cutter garbage 99% of the time these days. Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and don't forget the newest gay disney boyband "BBMak." Britney Spears sounds like Mcdonna sounds like Lady Gaga sounds like Who The Fuck Cares I'm Done. Rap, "Hip-hop", and the bastardized "R&B" that has ceased to mean "Rhythm and Blues" and instead now means "Retarded and Black"? Yeah. I don't care if you talksing like William Shatner about shooting cops or fucking hoes, I really don't, because your "music" is pure crap.
No, but the IFPI/RIAA/MAFIAA "either you sign the contract with us or we'll have you blacklisted from most live venues and you won't be eating by next week" negotiation model is pretty damn close.
I believe that was my point.
Sharpton and Lee could never be elected if they were not in gerrymandered districts designed to ghettoize a political party into as few districts as possible.
Racist assholes like Culberson, Poe, and McCaul stem from the same sort of gerrymandering, they are just from the other side and are in "safe" districts designed by their own party.
NONE of them should be elected, ever. The devil's bargain is that the Democrats allow for the creation of the supersafe-districts in states they don't control, because the Republicans accept the same crap in the districts THEY don't control.
And the voters get fucked, because there are so few noncompetitive districts as to make no difference.
If you are a regular, hard working, private sector, tax paying Californian, you are literally locked out of the system. It's just the public employees and the politicians giving each other hand jobs over and over again, only turning to the rest of us for ever more taxes when they need to finance their next round of corrupt horseshit.
Funny.
If you are a regular, hard working, public OR private sector, tax paying citizen in the rest of the nation, you are literally locked out of the system.
It's the "elected representatives" giving handjobs and corporate welfare kickbacks to their robber baron overlords who then ship jobs overseas, raid your pension, and crash the economy evaporating your life's savings and the "personal retirement account" the republicunts insisted was the way to "replace" social security, forcing you to work pretty much as a slave till you die. And you think you have a voice? Sorry. 1% of the population controls more than 50% of the wealth, if you ever try to stand up and voice opposition to them, the Kochs and the rest of the robber barons will have their media puppets refuse to cover the story and launch a series of coverup ads through their money-laundering front groups like the Teabaggers.
I never understood how people universally recognize why a duopoly in the marketplace, when it's all about money alone, is a bad thing; yet they universally fail to understand why a duopoly with a stranglehold on politics, when it's about both money and power, is also a bad thing. In both scenarios the customers and the voters lose.
Simple: for 80-90% of the "elected representatives", those who aren't quickly replaced or in non-safe districts, they are the aristocracy. They are the ones in control. Why would they support a system that is highly likely to remove them from power?
If they can't simply do a popular vote, then at least use a fixed boundary like county lines.
County lines don't work. Counties have different populations, some incredibly different (one county with a metropolis may be 5x the population of a neighboring mostly rural county). Constitutionally, districts must be as evenly populated as possible for Congressional representation.
What would make some level of sense is eliminating the anachronistic Senate, which used to be elected indirectly but has basically turned into a secondary squabbling house after the change to "direct election" of those assholes, and replacing it with a parliamentary percentage-representative system (say, each political party gets 1 Senator for each 1% of the vote they earn). The added bonus is that it would give an incentive for smaller parties to exist and participate again. ...which is precisely why the dumbicrats and republicunts won't go for it, since it would loosen their corrupt grips on power.
The point is not that disenfranchised inner-city voters (or rural voters, or suburban voters, or anyone else) do not have a voice.
It's that their voice is muted because 90% of them live in a "safe district" of one sort or another, and the only "competition" is in the primaries where you get to choose between Adolf Eichmann or Herman Goering to "represent" you in the general election and auto-win based on party affiliation.
If "your party" was running the state at last redistricting, chances are that you live in a district that is 55-60% "your party." They are "just safe enough" to ensure constant wins in a 2-party system.
If "your party" was not running the state at last redistricting, you're either one of the disenfranchised 45% in one of those districts and, essentially, voting doesn't matter for you anyways (you could get someone "marginally less bad" who still is a rubber stamp for their asshole party heads by cross-party voting in the primaries, but a candidate from your party has virtually no shot in the general). Or you're in a "super-safe" district where they took the remaining voters who share your general affiliation and concerns and stuffed them all into a gerrymandered ghetto that's 90% "you" and you really don't even get that much choice in the primaries because the district "belongs" to someone who's been in it for 30-40 years and couldn't give a crap whether their party is winning or losing as long as their "safe district" stays that way and they can still live off of bribes and the congressional salary while not doing a goddamn thing to help the people of their district.
It's not going to change until the decisions are taken out of the hands of the state politicians. Seriously. And it's the main reason that the US, with its "great democracy", can barely manage an anemic 30% participation rate in a Presidential election year, while off-year voting in most other actual democracies and republics is consistently 90% or better.
You're forgetting a few things:
For the political parties involved, they want to draw the district boundaries such that they end up with a majority of citizens who will vote for their party in each district.
The actual goal is to make as many districts that are roughly 55-60% "theirs", just enough to ensure consistent wins, and then pack the remaining voters that are "not theirs" into as few districts as possible that contain 90% or above "not theirs" districts.
It's this sort of mentality that allows for the creation of gerrymandered districts that are 99% black or latino or similar, and the creation of "supersafe" districts that allow people like Al Sharpton or Sheila Jackson Lee to keep getting elected. The tradeoff is, for every one Sheila you get from a 90%-safe district, you have to put up with 3-5 racist assholes like Ted Poe or John Culberson or Michael McCaul that the other side puts into their 55%-safe districts.
This is really a major problem of the system.
Back the last time redistricting was done, the redistricting game came out. It showed how eliminating gerrymandering, by forcing decisions to be made without including "percentage of voters of X party", would improve the political process.
Instead, what we're going to see now in most states is what we saw last time. If one party controls a state, they will try to make as many districts as possible that are 55% "theirs" while stuffing the remaining voters that are "not theirs" into as few districts as possible that are 90% or more the opposite party.
Result? Complete lack of representation for most people, courtesy of gerrymandered districts where the only "difference" is whether you get Herman Goering or Adolf Eichmann winning the nomination out of the primaries.
Are there always going to be "safe districts" in areas where one party is in control? Probably. Would there be nearly as many if the job of districting had been long ago taken out of the hands of politicians? Of course not!
Either this guy's a complete troll, or completely insane.
Not just that - the Swiss defense system also consists of the ability to use the mountains against an attacker. Set off rockslides, destroy passes and roadways, bury any armed force unfortunate enough to be downhill.
Mountaintop positions that make for incredible sniping posts and "we can hit you but good luck hitting us" mortar and cannon positions. Mountains themselves that make for treacherous flying for aircraft even for bombing runs, let alone foolhardy for any invading force to try to land forces.
And then there's the political situation. The Swiss were nominally germanic to start with, but they didn't have the direct ties that Austria did (remember, Hitler himself was Austrian-born) to the Nazi regime. The Nazis were, thereby, relatively content to let them sit and exist and be "neutral." They were essentially surrounded on all sides anyways, and the Nazi regime assumed that eventually, following the conquest of the rest of Europe, the Swiss would either decide to fold in or else become enough of an economic arm that it'd make little difference.
I'm on a rampage!
No, but why should they be running as superuser just to open their email client?
Nothing, really.
Especially in the days when a simple Remote Help session to take screen control and approve/deny the program is all that's needed.
If you're going to have end-users running with install rights, you're going to have orders of magnitude more infections. Partly because they are going to reflexively "click yes" on every single thing they see, partly because you're going to have a defined population of users who are the kind of morons who install every "ooh look it's free" widget from Bonzi Buddy to Weatherbug and all the tagalongs and security holes that come in along with them.
This is also why end-users shouldn't have install rights. Period.
Wow.
He reminds me of the Scientologists.
Yeah seriously.
I've had back problems from time to time, mostly related to overstressed muscles. I've gone to a chiropractor for it, had therapeutic massage and spinal adjustments done, and it did a lot of good. Eliminated for weeks at a time a problem that a normal doctor would have hit with muscle relaxants and painkillers.
BUT, the first thing my chiropractor did was take X-rays, both to see the underlying problem and guide the course of treatment. And he was willing to point out that NO serious spinal injury, nothing anywhere near the level of possibly damaging the spinal cord, should be hit with chiropractic treatment. For those, they have this thing called "Traction." He's actually sent patients over to a real hospital when they showed up asking for chiropractic treatment and his X-rays showed they had a major, serious, surgery-level problem.
The problem with chiropractic medicine is that for every good chiropractor out there who treats it as medicine, you have three lying assholes who go on and on about "energy" and "life flow" and all the other sort of new-agey bunk that gives the field a bad name.
Huh. Point out that copyright trolls do things like jurisdiction shopping and engage in unethical practices all the time, and you get modded "troll."
I bet that Righthaven has someone playing the modpoint lottery for them.