Don't be, he's the closest thing the Republicans have left to a statesman. I don't agree with a fair number of his positions, but I believe he's a decent man. I can't say the same for the majority of folks in the Republican Party these days. In fact, they scare the hell out of me. Look at the number of states the Republicans are trying to force "Jim Crow" laws in. This is a sad and ugly attempt at hijacking the Presidency. The party has degenerated into a nasty, viscous, hit-man for corporate interest and religious orthodoxies. Its had nearly all traces of sanity sucked out of it. If this is a stereotype, then I would be thrilled to hear of a single member of the Republican Party saying something in the last 2 years that wasn't sucking up to the banking (replace with corporation du jour) industry or felating someone's religious leader someplace else. Do you have even the vaguest idea how bad you have to suck, to make me consider voting Obama a second term? Excuse me, my head is spinning and my stomach hurts.
Forget about Paul, he's not going to be President or even Vice President. Ryan scares the bejebus out of me. I'm not particularly happy with abortion as a means of birth control, but I'm a firm believer that the person already here trumps the one who may or may not be coming. Ryan has made it perfectly clear given the chance, he will outlaw all abortion. That includes abortions, related to rape, incest and necessary to save the Mother's life. He wants to pass a law that says a human being exists the instant a sperm meets an egg, and that the new single celled person has all the constitutional rights afforded a citizen of the United States. That means when your doctor collects a couple dozen eggs, and fertilizes them en vitro, those are all people, and must be brought to term or the parents and the doctor are committing murder. These are not sane people. If you've read the Ryan Plan, it can pretty much be reduced to, eliminate Federal Government, give all the money to corporations, and we live happily ever after. Oh, you need to figure out what to do with an entire generation of dying old people, and a few generations of dying poor people but who cares, they're just old and poor people.
I'm having the hardest time reconciling people who claim to be christian and then turn around and quote Scrooge like the words were born in their own mouths. "If they're dying they should get on with it and reduce the surplus population..." This is why we need regulation. Corporations have one purpose, to make wealth, and they will gladly do it over your bleaching bones if they have to. It is the only way we have left to forge a society predicated on the needs and wants of human beings.
I'm sorry but the facts simply don't bare you out. There are "natural monopolies" that is why we have utility companies. Given an open market, the largest players will eventually coalesce into a single all powerful service provider, and because they own the entire net, they will be in a position to call any cost to their service they like. That's why we originally broke up Ma Bell? Remember? Have you noticed the little Bells all getting back together again? Have you noticed the number of mergers between service providers?
The system you speak of no longer exists. It may have at one time, but it hasn't been around any time in the last 50 years. Corporations have the power. They join to concentrate power. They continue to change the environment to discourage small to medium sized business, and funnel all the society's wealth into their coffers. You want to flatten the playing field, then by all means, deregulate. But not until.
I'm sorry but I completely fail to see how ensuring that the network being made available to everyone equally is a threat to anybodies freedom. In fact I would equate this to water, or gas, or any other basic utility. The vital need for high quality, high speed network access grows by the minute, and allowing the service providers to turn it into a limited resource for the wealthy and powerful only, would eventually ensure a society where the have nots (you and me) would be at the mercy of the haves (as though we aren't already.)
As for being the means by which a SOPA like take over of the network to abridge the rights/privacy of "Users" vs "Providers", seems more than far fetched. These are completely unrelated issues. Time and time again, business has demonstrated, that being composed of precisely the same kind of human beings as you might find anywhere else, they are prone to all those human foibles; greed, dishonesty, hunger for power, duplicity, hypocrisy and narcissism. Given the powers of the corporation, their ability to do real harm being virtually unlimited, and we've seen time and time again, they in fact do precisely that, it is vital that we restrict the amount of harm they can do.
There is a systematic, systemic breakdown in standards of quality and business accountability. 40 years ago, there were government health inspectors, making certain that food was produced and distributed in a safe, healthy and fastidious manner. Today, cows stand in their own feces for weeks eating corn instead of grass to fatten them up quickly (more profit for the agro-business.) They have to stuff the cows with antibiotics, because the unsanitary conditions would be lethal otherwise, only now through the indiscriminate use of antibiotics you've created super-bugs. The meat is then sent to grocers who are self regulated and its an honest to gawd wonder we aren't all dropping like flies from e coli. There've been a number of incidents (some even shown on television documentaries) of markets that sold chicken, when the chicken begins to go bad, they wash it in a bleach solutions to extend its shelf life, sometime two or more times, and then when the chicken is definitely well past its sale date, they cook it and sell it for fried chicken of use it in soups and salad. These are practices that would have been considered unsanctionable in the 70s, but little by little, these industries have pushed to allow almost anything they want to be considered acceptable practice today. That's just the meat section, if you knew most of the things going on in grocery stores today, you'd have to give up eating altogether.
The only way one could possibly deregulate completely and expect a society that wasn't a draconian disaster, would be to follow deregulation with;
1. A complete separation of corporation and state.
2. The abolition of the modern corporation, replaced instead with a corporation with strict limits on size, life span and ability to garner wealth and power.
3. A surgical removal of all special rights and powers, ensuring that people were treated preferentially to all corporation by law.
4. A return to simple basic laws of accountability, a company augers in, it dies, a CEO steals from society, he goes to jail.
5. A complete overhaul of the IP laws, particularly the unlimited extension of copyright, trademark and patent.
6. Fair mediation, not controlled and operated by the corporations.
The purpose of the last item is to protect corporations from frivolous lawsuits, but remove their ability to ignore their responsibility to society. Most current mediation, is simply a rubber stamp for corporations to get away with murder.
Bodies of laws exist to ensure that human beings, being the primates we are, refrain from resorting to smashing one another's skulls like baboons when we disagree as we attempt to garner wealth and power. Regulations exist to protect one party from another. These protections are perfectly valid if the second party is capable of inflicting undue and unfair damage to the first party. A fair society, provides for the greatest level of freedom, while preventing the unfair or inappropriate use of force on others. This is precisely the situation here, and the regulation is profoundly warranted.
Urban Legend my pink hinny! Here is the most recent story, but this isn't even a rare event. It happens in Japan with some regularity. It has to so with the mechanical function of the male squid's spermatophore. Eat enough raw squid, end up with a mouth full of unwanted guests... and I repeat... EEeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!.
They patented something that already existed in the same way that Europeans claimed North America for various European nations when 120,000,000 people already lived here. Europeans apparently haven't got that whole prior art thing down yet.
Tsk, tsk, tsk, I just patented quarks, barions, leptons and bosons. I'll be only to happy to take that water money of your hands and OH! stop emitting photons! and keep off the grass... damn kids!
This is a hollow argument and ignores 3 decades of deregulation on banking, which allowed banks to mix trading in banking in the same place of business, allowed impossibly complex derivatives to be applied unilaterally to make regulation virtually impossible, allowed the creation and deployment of credit default swaps, allowed banks to push for the creation of ever more risky loans, cut them up, and sell them as AAA rated investments, and ultimately allowed rampant gambling (up to and including the recent fiasco at Lehman Brothers) with other people's money without a single party involved spending so much as an afternoon in central booking.
If the government is guilty of the crime you describe, it is precisely because a lobbyist from the banking industry pushed said rules through to further the progress of the banking systems desire to make money, even in the face of predictable disaster.
So the government is bad. So is the banking industry. Perhaps we need to do away with the central bank, it was in fact one of America's richest periods, when we divorced ourselves from foreign (read English) banking interests. Perhaps its time to do this again.
Why do you think the government is pounding on ISPs on one side and the corporations are pounding on the other. They want to lock us all into exactly the same kind of straight jacket on the internet as we currently have on cell phones. Phones started out that way because Ma Bell had the government by the short hairs and now the phone providers have built those laws into a tall fortress. Something capable of crushing the privacy and civil rights of their users. The internet is the last glimmer of a free environment, and real freedom is a threat to all tyrants both corporate and political. Assange is only dangerous, and therefore contemptible because he exposes those who would conspire to own us all. All in all its just another brick in Wall...
Add GPS or triangulation, occasional self incriminating statements and call logs and I'm pretty sure they could build a case against anybody they wanted to. My deepest concern is that I'll be one of 6 dozen people whose cell timing and location fit some high profile crime find myself under extreme scrutiny by people I neither trust nor believe are interested in justice half as much as they are in feathering their prosecutorial careers in preparation for running for high office. Our sad mouth breathing public is more interested in a prosecutor who executes everyone "Hard on Crime" than one who actually get's the right guy. Sorta tells you about the sorry state of our culture.
No he's saying that with public opinion machines like FOX News, a huge number of people at least in the U.S. will think we just bagged us a terrorist instead of a humanitarian. About 65% of the country has been properly conditioned to behave in a Pavlovian manner to the infotainment they receive on a daily basis.
Try this instead. Have a high publicity event for children, bring in 2 dozen French Clowns. Pick one clown for height and physicality match to Assange. Have another Assange body double smuggled into the embassy. Have Body doubles made up exactly as the same clown. Surreptitiously have clowns trade places in such a way that some people can see the exchange. Take Assange body double #1 and use him to perform previously mentioned decoy while clowns are driving off back to France. All the while Assange is made up as an old crippled fat woman in a wheel chair watching the performance with the children, and quietly driven off after the show. The police being suspicious as hell chase the first decoy. A couple bright Bobbies think this is too easy and follow the clowns. Assange drives to Liverpool where he boards a freighter bound for Venezuela as a black crewman. All is right with the world and Assange lives to blog another day.
In fact making an example of him that can be seen from mars without aid of telescope. The very next thing the US Government wants leaked to the world at large is a video of Assange, bent over about 30 tons of C4, while a laser guided missile with video camera output records what would be the world's first televised high explosive enema. There is the quote by Gwen Goodnight "If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning." It would appear Assange is trying to accomplish both at the same time.
This is an attempt to:
A. Increase the value of the shares of Apple owned by government security officials.
B. Trick would-be gangstas into using an eminently crackable device on which to do their business.
C. Give crackers a false sense of security by making them think the Gubbermint is even more inept than it really is.
D. All of the above.
Always... follow the money... the truth will not be far behind.
Actually, you have to occasionally point and say "Everyone... this is what stupid looks like... back to your business." Because if you don't, other stupid people will begin to quote him, you'll start seeing it on FOX News, and before you know it, the Tea Party is demanding Obama's birth certificate. Just point and say "Everyone... this is what stupid looks like... back to your business." Nip it in the bud... as a public service mind you.
You have seen the Rodney King tapes??? Or read about Abner Louima the poor Haitian bugger who was mistakenly arrested in Brooklyn, where at the hands of the police he was beaten, clubbed, kicked in the tender vittles, sodomized with the business end of a toilet plunger and then had the plunger shoved through his teeth (tearing out most of the teeth in the front of his mouth.) The officer who committed the atrocity strutted around the precinct bragging "I took a man down tonight!" I dunno, I'm guessing most officers of the law are straight forward guys just trying to do their incredibly challenging job the best they can. A few, think you can fly a car off a four story building and survive the landing, or drive through heavy traffic at over a hundred MPH without leaving a trail of innocent victims and lawsuits. We need to make better use of police shrinks. Certain guys need to be kept on desk duty.
No, the butterfly would only needs to evolve lungs, because spiracle are a very inefficient means to move oxygen. Of course even lungs set an upper limit to the size of a butterfly... figure to get really big, it would have to migrate to the ocean. A butterfly whale... now that would be a site-seeing tour!!!
Apparently you've been avoiding the headlines. The nuclear reactors in the U.S. were designed for a 40 years life expectancy, however, no new generation of reactors sprung up to replace them. So the industry asked the government to let them go to 60, then 80 years. Recently is was discovered that a particular reactor's containment vessel had huge cavities in its wall that would soon have released the content of the vessel exposing people to a life threatening flood of radioactive coolant and exposing the core to the air where it would have promptly gone China Syndrome.
Thankfully they found the problem and are now fixing it, but our nations deranged belief in using things until they break, like bridges, and highways, and reactors, is not just thrifty. Its psychotic. Our parents, grandparents and great grandparents invested in us, by laying down an infrastructure that made our quality of life possible. Now, we leave our children.... nothing but a smoking hole in the ground. And when rightfully they ask "Where's ours?", we'll answer honestly as we sit back on our swollen asses picking our teeth "Huh, oh, was that yours? Sorry, it was so good we just couldn't stop."
The really sad part, is that for the most part, the average Joe, really wants to leave his kid something, he's just been so bled dry and lied to by those rapacious bastards that he's just trying to hang on to what little he has left (including his dignity.) By the way, there may be a loud and fiery debate about precisely who the rapacious are, I don't make a distinction between the corpos, and the government and the wealthy entitled. The distinctions would only be superficial and for the most part philosophical in nature. In practice its all the same folks. We are well on the way to our very own nuclear thrill ride, but we won't even be able to claim disaster. It will be a horror of our own making built purely out of greed, avarice, and blind idiocy.
You can't simply go around making blanket statements (well you can, but people will slap you statements down so hard, they'll leave impressions in the asphalt), especially when you quote information that is either grossly dated, fundamentally meaningless or simply lacks vision, and an understanding of what a diverse energy system can, indeed must look like.
Our nation runs on a grid. There are long distance lines everywhere. This already exists, and therefore does not preclude the existence of large green energy sources. Those very same nuclear resources exist at the end of long power lines. The real answer for power transmission is high performance underground transmission with near room temperature superconductors. Huge strides are being made that could make such transmission a viable reality in our lifetimes (provided there is a nation with sufficient wealth and vision to build such a continental resource.)
All human endeavors have unforeseen environmental consequences. The questions you need to ask, are what is the over-arching impact to the environment, how much do mitigations cost and are there meaningful counter measures available to protect the environment? For wind, there all kinds of work being done to protect wildlife, and might I add that when comparing the threat to large western raptors by wind turbines, vs the threat to western forests decimated by wild fire and the impact that would have on the entire local ecosystem, I think a pretty strong argument in favor of the wind power can be made. As for solar, no energy technology in the world is advancing faster than solar, there isn't a day that passes that efficiency breakthroughs aren't being trumped by cost breakthroughs, and technologies that promise to coat entire cities with transparent thin film solar collectors which will not only produce gigawatts of power, but convert heat into electricity, reducing air conditioning costs, and conserving heat waste in the winter. Next year all experts expect solar production to pass the $0.50 per watt mark making it completely viable in the face of rising oil costs. The real excitement is around growing technologies to store power and allow power created at one time and in one location to be made available anywhere else at any time. Green has never been more exciting and more viable.
Agreed, damns are expensive both economically and environmentally. The huge earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands in China several years ago, is almost certainly the result of huge damn project and the result of billions of tons of water pressing on a lubricating active faults. That doesn't mean that there aren't places where damns and the sweet water they collect don't make perfect sense, and provide overall greater value than cost, you just have to be keeping a sane tally of all the cost. As for changing the spin of the earth, that' pretty thin. Several massive earthquakes have over the last ten years impacted global rotation rates tremendously more than all the reservoirs currently in operation. That's simply a non-issue. The same goes for tidal damning and wave energy. There are places where this is feasible. You must however weigh the energy gain against potential impact to wildlife and aquaculture and food sources, as well as possible impacts to ocean currents and cycles necessary to maintain a healthy global ecology. Seeing as the fishing industry is based on that global ecology, screwing up an estuary on the East Coast of the U.S. could mean that West African's go hungry. We have ways now to evaluate the impacts of our decisions. We need to be concerned about how our actions impact others.
You never even mentioned low pressure OTEC generating fresh water, electricity and mineral rich deep water for local aquaculture on floating cities around the equators all over the world. Or biofuels created from algae being grown in exotic solar reactors producing more energy that we can use in the southwestern deserts of the U.S. Brazil has based its entire economy on ethanol production from sugar cane fields
Sounds to me like the difference between artists and accountants. I want an artist engineering my code. A brilliant, eclectic genius whose intellect and talent create wildly interesting and powerful solutions. I want an accountant exhaustively testing and beating that solution up to make certain that it's everything its speced to be and that it will in fact accomplish the task promised. I see plenty of room for all types in the house, You just need to give each type the kind of task that sings to his talent and intellect.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be, he's the closest thing the Republicans have left to a statesman. I don't agree with a fair number of his positions, but I believe he's a decent man. I can't say the same for the majority of folks in the Republican Party these days. In fact, they scare the hell out of me. Look at the number of states the Republicans are trying to force "Jim Crow" laws in. This is a sad and ugly attempt at hijacking the Presidency. The party has degenerated into a nasty, viscous, hit-man for corporate interest and religious orthodoxies. Its had nearly all traces of sanity sucked out of it. If this is a stereotype, then I would be thrilled to hear of a single member of the Republican Party saying something in the last 2 years that wasn't sucking up to the banking (replace with corporation du jour) industry or felating someone's religious leader someplace else. Do you have even the vaguest idea how bad you have to suck, to make me consider voting Obama a second term? Excuse me, my head is spinning and my stomach hurts.
That's not a compliment... its a Darwinian selection factor...
Forget about Paul, he's not going to be President or even Vice President. Ryan scares the bejebus out of me. I'm not particularly happy with abortion as a means of birth control, but I'm a firm believer that the person already here trumps the one who may or may not be coming. Ryan has made it perfectly clear given the chance, he will outlaw all abortion. That includes abortions, related to rape, incest and necessary to save the Mother's life. He wants to pass a law that says a human being exists the instant a sperm meets an egg, and that the new single celled person has all the constitutional rights afforded a citizen of the United States. That means when your doctor collects a couple dozen eggs, and fertilizes them en vitro, those are all people, and must be brought to term or the parents and the doctor are committing murder. These are not sane people. If you've read the Ryan Plan, it can pretty much be reduced to, eliminate Federal Government, give all the money to corporations, and we live happily ever after. Oh, you need to figure out what to do with an entire generation of dying old people, and a few generations of dying poor people but who cares, they're just old and poor people.
I'm having the hardest time reconciling people who claim to be christian and then turn around and quote Scrooge like the words were born in their own mouths. "If they're dying they should get on with it and reduce the surplus population..." This is why we need regulation. Corporations have one purpose, to make wealth, and they will gladly do it over your bleaching bones if they have to. It is the only way we have left to forge a society predicated on the needs and wants of human beings.
I'm sorry but the facts simply don't bare you out. There are "natural monopolies" that is why we have utility companies. Given an open market, the largest players will eventually coalesce into a single all powerful service provider, and because they own the entire net, they will be in a position to call any cost to their service they like. That's why we originally broke up Ma Bell? Remember? Have you noticed the little Bells all getting back together again? Have you noticed the number of mergers between service providers?
The system you speak of no longer exists. It may have at one time, but it hasn't been around any time in the last 50 years. Corporations have the power. They join to concentrate power. They continue to change the environment to discourage small to medium sized business, and funnel all the society's wealth into their coffers. You want to flatten the playing field, then by all means, deregulate. But not until.
I'm sorry but I completely fail to see how ensuring that the network being made available to everyone equally is a threat to anybodies freedom. In fact I would equate this to water, or gas, or any other basic utility. The vital need for high quality, high speed network access grows by the minute, and allowing the service providers to turn it into a limited resource for the wealthy and powerful only, would eventually ensure a society where the have nots (you and me) would be at the mercy of the haves (as though we aren't already.)
As for being the means by which a SOPA like take over of the network to abridge the rights/privacy of "Users" vs "Providers", seems more than far fetched. These are completely unrelated issues. Time and time again, business has demonstrated, that being composed of precisely the same kind of human beings as you might find anywhere else, they are prone to all those human foibles; greed, dishonesty, hunger for power, duplicity, hypocrisy and narcissism. Given the powers of the corporation, their ability to do real harm being virtually unlimited, and we've seen time and time again, they in fact do precisely that, it is vital that we restrict the amount of harm they can do.
There is a systematic, systemic breakdown in standards of quality and business accountability. 40 years ago, there were government health inspectors, making certain that food was produced and distributed in a safe, healthy and fastidious manner. Today, cows stand in their own feces for weeks eating corn instead of grass to fatten them up quickly (more profit for the agro-business.) They have to stuff the cows with antibiotics, because the unsanitary conditions would be lethal otherwise, only now through the indiscriminate use of antibiotics you've created super-bugs. The meat is then sent to grocers who are self regulated and its an honest to gawd wonder we aren't all dropping like flies from e coli. There've been a number of incidents (some even shown on television documentaries) of markets that sold chicken, when the chicken begins to go bad, they wash it in a bleach solutions to extend its shelf life, sometime two or more times, and then when the chicken is definitely well past its sale date, they cook it and sell it for fried chicken of use it in soups and salad. These are practices that would have been considered unsanctionable in the 70s, but little by little, these industries have pushed to allow almost anything they want to be considered acceptable practice today. That's just the meat section, if you knew most of the things going on in grocery stores today, you'd have to give up eating altogether.
The only way one could possibly deregulate completely and expect a society that wasn't a draconian disaster, would be to follow deregulation with;
1. A complete separation of corporation and state.
2. The abolition of the modern corporation, replaced instead with a corporation with strict limits on size, life span and ability to garner wealth and power.
3. A surgical removal of all special rights and powers, ensuring that people were treated preferentially to all corporation by law.
4. A return to simple basic laws of accountability, a company augers in, it dies, a CEO steals from society, he goes to jail.
5. A complete overhaul of the IP laws, particularly the unlimited extension of copyright, trademark and patent.
6. Fair mediation, not controlled and operated by the corporations.
The purpose of the last item is to protect corporations from frivolous lawsuits, but remove their ability to ignore their responsibility to society. Most current mediation, is simply a rubber stamp for corporations to get away with murder.
Bodies of laws exist to ensure that human beings, being the primates we are, refrain from resorting to smashing one another's skulls like baboons when we disagree as we attempt to garner wealth and power. Regulations exist to protect one party from another. These protections are perfectly valid if the second party is capable of inflicting undue and unfair damage to the first party. A fair society, provides for the greatest level of freedom, while preventing the unfair or inappropriate use of force on others. This is precisely the situation here, and the regulation is profoundly warranted.
Urban Legend my pink hinny! Here is the most recent story, but this isn't even a rare event. It happens in Japan with some regularity. It has to so with the mechanical function of the male squid's spermatophore. Eat enough raw squid, end up with a mouth full of unwanted guests... and I repeat... EEeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!.
And the particular bag of feces in question is sporting a black robe.
They patented something that already existed in the same way that Europeans claimed North America for various European nations when 120,000,000 people already lived here. Europeans apparently haven't got that whole prior art thing down yet.
Eating raw squid recently resulted in an Asian woman getting pregnant with baby squid in her mouth... Eeeeeewwwww!!!
Tsk, tsk, tsk, I just patented quarks, barions, leptons and bosons. I'll be only to happy to take that water money of your hands and OH! stop emitting photons! and keep off the grass... damn kids!
This is a hollow argument and ignores 3 decades of deregulation on banking, which allowed banks to mix trading in banking in the same place of business, allowed impossibly complex derivatives to be applied unilaterally to make regulation virtually impossible, allowed the creation and deployment of credit default swaps, allowed banks to push for the creation of ever more risky loans, cut them up, and sell them as AAA rated investments, and ultimately allowed rampant gambling (up to and including the recent fiasco at Lehman Brothers) with other people's money without a single party involved spending so much as an afternoon in central booking.
If the government is guilty of the crime you describe, it is precisely because a lobbyist from the banking industry pushed said rules through to further the progress of the banking systems desire to make money, even in the face of predictable disaster.
So the government is bad. So is the banking industry. Perhaps we need to do away with the central bank, it was in fact one of America's richest periods, when we divorced ourselves from foreign (read English) banking interests. Perhaps its time to do this again.
Why do you think the government is pounding on ISPs on one side and the corporations are pounding on the other. They want to lock us all into exactly the same kind of straight jacket on the internet as we currently have on cell phones. Phones started out that way because Ma Bell had the government by the short hairs and now the phone providers have built those laws into a tall fortress. Something capable of crushing the privacy and civil rights of their users. The internet is the last glimmer of a free environment, and real freedom is a threat to all tyrants both corporate and political. Assange is only dangerous, and therefore contemptible because he exposes those who would conspire to own us all. All in all its just another brick in Wall...
Add GPS or triangulation, occasional self incriminating statements and call logs and I'm pretty sure they could build a case against anybody they wanted to. My deepest concern is that I'll be one of 6 dozen people whose cell timing and location fit some high profile crime find myself under extreme scrutiny by people I neither trust nor believe are interested in justice half as much as they are in feathering their prosecutorial careers in preparation for running for high office. Our sad mouth breathing public is more interested in a prosecutor who executes everyone "Hard on Crime" than one who actually get's the right guy. Sorta tells you about the sorry state of our culture.
Okay, Okay.... a dozen Clowns, 6 Mimes, 3 rude Waitors, 2 rude Taxi drivers and a rabid poodle... Happy!
No he's saying that with public opinion machines like FOX News, a huge number of people at least in the U.S. will think we just bagged us a terrorist instead of a humanitarian. About 65% of the country has been properly conditioned to behave in a Pavlovian manner to the infotainment they receive on a daily basis.
Try this instead. Have a high publicity event for children, bring in 2 dozen French Clowns. Pick one clown for height and physicality match to Assange. Have another Assange body double smuggled into the embassy. Have Body doubles made up exactly as the same clown. Surreptitiously have clowns trade places in such a way that some people can see the exchange. Take Assange body double #1 and use him to perform previously mentioned decoy while clowns are driving off back to France. All the while Assange is made up as an old crippled fat woman in a wheel chair watching the performance with the children, and quietly driven off after the show. The police being suspicious as hell chase the first decoy. A couple bright Bobbies think this is too easy and follow the clowns. Assange drives to Liverpool where he boards a freighter bound for Venezuela as a black crewman. All is right with the world and Assange lives to blog another day.
In fact making an example of him that can be seen from mars without aid of telescope. The very next thing the US Government wants leaked to the world at large is a video of Assange, bent over about 30 tons of C4, while a laser guided missile with video camera output records what would be the world's first televised high explosive enema. There is the quote by Gwen Goodnight "If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning." It would appear Assange is trying to accomplish both at the same time.
Only if you accept that my Gawd is bigger than yours! Ppppffftttt
This is an attempt to:
A. Increase the value of the shares of Apple owned by government security officials.
B. Trick would-be gangstas into using an eminently crackable device on which to do their business.
C. Give crackers a false sense of security by making them think the Gubbermint is even more inept than it really is.
D. All of the above.
Always... follow the money... the truth will not be far behind.
Actually, you have to occasionally point and say "Everyone... this is what stupid looks like... back to your business." Because if you don't, other stupid people will begin to quote him, you'll start seeing it on FOX News, and before you know it, the Tea Party is demanding Obama's birth certificate. Just point and say "Everyone... this is what stupid looks like... back to your business." Nip it in the bud... as a public service mind you.
You have seen the Rodney King tapes??? Or read about Abner Louima the poor Haitian bugger who was mistakenly arrested in Brooklyn, where at the hands of the police he was beaten, clubbed, kicked in the tender vittles, sodomized with the business end of a toilet plunger and then had the plunger shoved through his teeth (tearing out most of the teeth in the front of his mouth.) The officer who committed the atrocity strutted around the precinct bragging "I took a man down tonight!" I dunno, I'm guessing most officers of the law are straight forward guys just trying to do their incredibly challenging job the best they can. A few, think you can fly a car off a four story building and survive the landing, or drive through heavy traffic at over a hundred MPH without leaving a trail of innocent victims and lawsuits. We need to make better use of police shrinks. Certain guys need to be kept on desk duty.
No, the butterfly would only needs to evolve lungs, because spiracle are a very inefficient means to move oxygen. Of course even lungs set an upper limit to the size of a butterfly... figure to get really big, it would have to migrate to the ocean. A butterfly whale... now that would be a site-seeing tour!!!
Apparently you've been avoiding the headlines. The nuclear reactors in the U.S. were designed for a 40 years life expectancy, however, no new generation of reactors sprung up to replace them. So the industry asked the government to let them go to 60, then 80 years. Recently is was discovered that a particular reactor's containment vessel had huge cavities in its wall that would soon have released the content of the vessel exposing people to a life threatening flood of radioactive coolant and exposing the core to the air where it would have promptly gone China Syndrome.
Thankfully they found the problem and are now fixing it, but our nations deranged belief in using things until they break, like bridges, and highways, and reactors, is not just thrifty. Its psychotic. Our parents, grandparents and great grandparents invested in us, by laying down an infrastructure that made our quality of life possible. Now, we leave our children.... nothing but a smoking hole in the ground. And when rightfully they ask "Where's ours?", we'll answer honestly as we sit back on our swollen asses picking our teeth "Huh, oh, was that yours? Sorry, it was so good we just couldn't stop."
The really sad part, is that for the most part, the average Joe, really wants to leave his kid something, he's just been so bled dry and lied to by those rapacious bastards that he's just trying to hang on to what little he has left (including his dignity.) By the way, there may be a loud and fiery debate about precisely who the rapacious are, I don't make a distinction between the corpos, and the government and the wealthy entitled. The distinctions would only be superficial and for the most part philosophical in nature. In practice its all the same folks. We are well on the way to our very own nuclear thrill ride, but we won't even be able to claim disaster. It will be a horror of our own making built purely out of greed, avarice, and blind idiocy.
You can't simply go around making blanket statements (well you can, but people will slap you statements down so hard, they'll leave impressions in the asphalt), especially when you quote information that is either grossly dated, fundamentally meaningless or simply lacks vision, and an understanding of what a diverse energy system can, indeed must look like.
Our nation runs on a grid. There are long distance lines everywhere. This already exists, and therefore does not preclude the existence of large green energy sources. Those very same nuclear resources exist at the end of long power lines. The real answer for power transmission is high performance underground transmission with near room temperature superconductors. Huge strides are being made that could make such transmission a viable reality in our lifetimes (provided there is a nation with sufficient wealth and vision to build such a continental resource.)
All human endeavors have unforeseen environmental consequences. The questions you need to ask, are what is the over-arching impact to the environment, how much do mitigations cost and are there meaningful counter measures available to protect the environment? For wind, there all kinds of work being done to protect wildlife, and might I add that when comparing the threat to large western raptors by wind turbines, vs the threat to western forests decimated by wild fire and the impact that would have on the entire local ecosystem, I think a pretty strong argument in favor of the wind power can be made. As for solar, no energy technology in the world is advancing faster than solar, there isn't a day that passes that efficiency breakthroughs aren't being trumped by cost breakthroughs, and technologies that promise to coat entire cities with transparent thin film solar collectors which will not only produce gigawatts of power, but convert heat into electricity, reducing air conditioning costs, and conserving heat waste in the winter. Next year all experts expect solar production to pass the $0.50 per watt mark making it completely viable in the face of rising oil costs. The real excitement is around growing technologies to store power and allow power created at one time and in one location to be made available anywhere else at any time. Green has never been more exciting and more viable.
Agreed, damns are expensive both economically and environmentally. The huge earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands in China several years ago, is almost certainly the result of huge damn project and the result of billions of tons of water pressing on a lubricating active faults. That doesn't mean that there aren't places where damns and the sweet water they collect don't make perfect sense, and provide overall greater value than cost, you just have to be keeping a sane tally of all the cost. As for changing the spin of the earth, that' pretty thin. Several massive earthquakes have over the last ten years impacted global rotation rates tremendously more than all the reservoirs currently in operation. That's simply a non-issue. The same goes for tidal damning and wave energy. There are places where this is feasible. You must however weigh the energy gain against potential impact to wildlife and aquaculture and food sources, as well as possible impacts to ocean currents and cycles necessary to maintain a healthy global ecology. Seeing as the fishing industry is based on that global ecology, screwing up an estuary on the East Coast of the U.S. could mean that West African's go hungry. We have ways now to evaluate the impacts of our decisions. We need to be concerned about how our actions impact others.
You never even mentioned low pressure OTEC generating fresh water, electricity and mineral rich deep water for local aquaculture on floating cities around the equators all over the world. Or biofuels created from algae being grown in exotic solar reactors producing more energy that we can use in the southwestern deserts of the U.S. Brazil has based its entire economy on ethanol production from sugar cane fields
Sounds to me like the difference between artists and accountants. I want an artist engineering my code. A brilliant, eclectic genius whose intellect and talent create wildly interesting and powerful solutions. I want an accountant exhaustively testing and beating that solution up to make certain that it's everything its speced to be and that it will in fact accomplish the task promised. I see plenty of room for all types in the house, You just need to give each type the kind of task that sings to his talent and intellect.