"That has got to be the worst job in the world! Do something with your life.......Contribute to society somehow!.......Make a difference......."
Judge not, lest ye be judged, Asshole.
Do something with her life? Like what? Write code? Supervise people who write code? Manage people who supevise people who write code? When does the society contribution kick in for that li'l career death-spiral?
You've got no idea what that woman does with her life, for her kids, her community, her extended family, her church/temple/happy-magick-circle. You're actually defining someone by the means through which they pay their motgage? And all this in a post to that most glorious chrome-sheened temple to mid-90's self-absorbed gadget fetishists, SlashDot!! Wow. I mean, Wow.
Helloooooo!! 1954 is calling! When you get back from your tour of duty with a Red Cross Tsunami relief team, it would like it's biases back, please.
Even NPR, that one-time bastion of somewhat impartial reporting, has started sliding toward sensationalism.
Actually, NPR was a bastion of left-think, until very recently when the right-thinkers kicked up a ruckus that public funds were fueling a partisan news outlet. That, and the fact that the Big Money from corporate sponsorships tends to frown on Left/Green perspectives.
Now, NPR seems to go out of its way to present bi-partisan views, except it often does so across multiple days' telecasts, a situation guaranteed to enrage the partisan occasional listener on either side. Of course, long-time lefty NPR listeners moan their network's`shift to the center, and it's tough to blame them.
With multiple strong, clearly partisan media outlets available now for both sides, it's unclear whether or not a venue which painstakingly ventures to be non-partisan can survive.
Journalism is dying. Clinton's elimination of the Fairness Doctrine opened the gates up to the New Media barbarian hordes, Blair/NYT and Rather/CBS poisoned the Emperors' wine, and now the Mob has seen through the bread and circuses, picked up javelins, and become bloggers.
Once, journalists presented the news, as delivered to them from strange and ancient teletype-oracles only they had access to. Now, everybody has their own AP/UPI feed, and more sources than Cronkite ever dreamed of. Once, everybody who became a professional journalist did so not because he wanted to present world events in a fair and balanced manner, but because he wanted to influence world events, crusade for a cause, and be a celebrity. Then, journalists had to pretend they had interestes other than their own in mind. Soon, they can cease pretending completely.
Within Ten Years (Mark My Words): Every major news outlet ceases delivering "the news" in primetime as they currently do, and instead they are all attempting to imitate the success of Bill O'Reilly on Fox, creating celebrity pundits who themselves are their own cottage industries. Right-wing pundits, left-wing pundits, gay-pundits, green-pundits, libertarian-pundits, techno-pundits, luddite-pundits, kid-pundits, septuagenarian-pundits, Baptist-pundits and Wiccan-Pundits -- celebrity wannabes nurturing book deals, all.
Re:Bah. I'm Still Waiting...
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Do you feel silly for paying thousands of dollars for what other people get for free? How about when you take into account that most of your money is gong to the worst kind of rich people who want nothing more than to LIMIT what you (or anyone else) can do with your music?
Hi. You're an idiot.
That out of the way, lemme tell you some good news: in a few short years, when society deems you mature enough to stray from the primly manicured paths and quadrangles of Academe, you will wake up one morning and realize "Damn! There are people in the world born before 1987 who are not my teachers! Wow!!" Once that epiphany hits, whole new vistas of inquiry will be opened to you, like: "I wonder what kind of music these older people listen to?" and "How did they obtain this music before the Internet?" and, perhaps most salient, "Why does every single one of them view me as a self-centered callow punk with a lot to learn?"
You've an exciting life ahead of you, Bucko, full of fascinating surprises! If you are truly favored by the gods, then maybe you'll find yourself trying to make a living from some artistic pursuit, during which time you can daily contemplate the irony of the prejudice and stupidity which prompted your "rich people" remark today.
...for an iPod with capacity sufficient to hold all my (100% legally obtained, bought-and-paid-for, thanks for asking) music. At 128k MP3 format, the collection weighs in at just under 80 gig.
Please, Mr. Jobs, don't make me have to choose between my Techno-Industrial-Gothic and my Tibetan Singing Bowls again this week... please!!
Okay, so technically, it's not so much a boardgame as it is a religion and a Way of Life, but is there any geekier reason to throw dice and push things about a tabletop?
And when the people in charge of the Big Lone Superpower are murderous right-wing religious lunatics with a massive military, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (and a history of actually using them), and effectively unchecked political power over the rest of the world, then please tell me, who are we supposed to root for?
You don't root for anybody; you vote them out of office. Something you can't do in a medieval theocracy. Thing is, American policy and politics is fluid, it's been adapting to modern times as it has to if its leaders want their parties to stay in power. It's a self-correcting system. You simply can't compare its leaders to those whose politics remain effectively unchanged since the Ottoman Empire and before.
America may be building an empire, but at least it's a new one.
Look, I wouldn't worry, Ace: When we elect ineffective presidents who wear their religion on their sleeve, as we did in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, they're not around for a second term...
Would attacking other countries such as Iran be an easier choice to make without the threat of American casualties to sway the public?
Man, I hope so. Otherwise, what good is it? Seriously.
Nobody wants to see more people die in war, but even fewer want to see a lone superpower with even less hesitancy to enforce its agenda around the world.
We all got agendas, Bunky. I have one. America and Iran have one. You clearly have one. And although I don't have the poll numbers in front of me, I believe the number of people who want to see the agenda of a country sitting atop a substantive percentage of the world's oil supply, draped in medieval-level religious fanaticism, and armed with newly-minted atomic weapons achieve ascendancy over that of a nation whose principal exports are fast food, Hollywood movies, Internet cafes, arrogance, swagger, and democracy is rather small.
It's been over a hundred years that America could be viewed as the underdog, and pop culture teaches us never to root for the Big Lone Superpower, but when the little guys are murderous right-wing religious lunatics, aintcha glad that pop culture's got nothing on plain ol' common sense?
Try sending a truant officer or a policeman after a wayward 16 year old, even as the 16 year old's parent. You'll find you can't do it.
Well, that's bad. Stupid and counter-intuitive, even. If this RFID thing works to counter dumbass laws like this, I'm all for it. How could you not be?
The trackees are kids, underage minors, whose care is being entrusted by their parents to the State, for however many hours a week. Presumably, the decision to use RFID tracking technology for kids will be made by a local school board, and school boards are paid and elected by the tax-payers of any given district, who are also the parents of the trackees.
Keep it on the local level, and let the local folks decide. If one school district tries it, and it works, great, others might pick it up. If it fails, others will know to stay away from it, or look at other solutions.
As far as asking the trackees how they feel about it, well, most trackees I know feel they're too cool for school in general. They don't get a vote here, for obvious reasons. It's the parents' call how their school board uses tax money and the newest technology, not the sixteen year olds'. Has it ever been otherwise?
Susie, you can play piano and edit the Astronomy section!
Johnny, you can dance, do impressions, and handle the graphics!!
Little Dilbert, you can write songs, paint the set, and make sure that all articles having anything remotely to do with software development in general and open source in particular are represented far beyond their real-world significance!!
Milo, you collect the tickets and edit all the art-and-literature stuff.
"Once upon a time, when the WWW was whipping across the business landscape like a cold wind from the North, nobody in business had a clue how to wrangle it. Was it an IT thing? A Marketing thing? A New Business thing? It was a Time of Chaos, and still-moist script-jockies were christened "Web Masters" and given the imprimatur, "Um, do your thing. And here's a six figure salary, cuz we haven't a clue what 'your thing' is. Oh, and make it look 'cool,' cuz we heard it's supposed to look 'cool.'"
And they did their thing.
And it looked dreadful.
Happily, business recovered, bean counters and Marketing Directors finally found something upon which they could agree, and color-blind code-jockeys were partnered with art-types so the WWW could outgrow its purple-orange acne-encrusted adolescence and mature into pseudo-suave 'white-is-the-new-black' twenty-something hipsterism."
Bottom line: I'd rather teach an artist how to code (and have done so), then let a coder try to "do art." But if you want it to look remotely professional, you prolly need at least two heads involved.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you...
I thought I was the only one sitting here scratching my head and murmuring "WTF?!?" every time wikipedia was cited as if it was some kind of legit reference on par with Britannica. I'm guessing that on that parallel Bizarro world where blogs are regarded as journalism, the wikipedia can be viewed as a reference, but, man, I'm sure glad I don't live there...
The sooner we can get the Reality TV craze off the air the better.
I have DirecTV and a DVR. Hundreds of channels, all time-shifted. Watch what I want when I want. History, Discovery, Sci-Fi, Bravo, Trio, A&E, TechTV, Cartoon, Boomerang, VH1 A, B, C, & D, seventeen PBS nets, and Alison Mack in Smallville new once a week and seven more old in syndication. All the producers of Reality TV shows would have to band together, dress up like Carmen Miranda, and set off an M-80 in my living room before I was even aware of what channel they were on, let alone feel constrained to watch any of their stuff. Don't you have the same selections I do, or is Mark Burnett holding your dog hostage?
(Now, Reality TV sucks big time because the producers don't pay proper Guild fees to the writers (in part because they don't want to formally acknowledge the shows _have_ writers, in part because they're cheap SOB's...), but that's a whole 'nother thread....)
The U.S. did not enter Iraq with the intent of liberating the Iraqi people; that was a happy by-product. We entered Iraq with the intention of de-stabilizing the region, getting a toe-hold in the Mid-East. With Iraq secured, strikes into Iran and Syria become much more feasible. (I'm sure Sun Tzu and Clausewitz could appreciate that.)
The ultimate focus is to keep space-age weapons from getting into the hands of medieval theocracies and the West-hating fanatics bred there. And since the global economy is still rather unfortunately reliant upon petroleum resources, keeping these safe from people who don nitro-glycerine boxer shorts and detonate themselves in crowded bus-stops with little more trepidation than you or I have over re-formatting our hard-drives seems not only prudent, but damn obvious.
And you can be sure that this will be picked up by the Arab world and will look bad on the US and Western Europe.
And if there's one thing we here in the U.S. really, really hate, it's to look bad in the Arab world.
I can just hear the outcry as it trumpets across our waving waves of grain, echoing from our mountains, skimming across from sea to shining sea: "Google is censoring Abu Graib pics! How will we ever recover our prestige?!"
People like you are exactly the reason why I claim to be Canadian when I travel outside the country. Not because I'm unpatriotic, but because people like you have made it dangerous to be an American
Oh, man, you mean you don't like me?
Now I'm going to be sad all day long, you big bully!
Actually there have been some great German movies.
You're absolutely right, and I'm a big fan, particularly of Fritz Lang's work. But it's not like draws upon that vast vault of Great Teutonic Cinema is exactly burning up the P2P nets and torrents world-wide, is it?
thanks for pointing out my hypocricy Happy to help.
though, thats a sure-fire defeat for the argument that america is a consumerist-whore society that is eating the earth. Dude, that's not an "argument," that's long-winded grafitti. For every mean, nasty American export you decry, whether it is Starbuck's, McDonald's, or those Hollywood movies you obviously crave, there is some cute l'il non-American country importing them for their cute l'il non-American consumer to consume. Change begins at home, son.
As for me, I'll keep buying those Japanese cartoons, British music, German cars, and Italian shoes, without begrudging the people or governments of those fine countries their creative and manufacturing skills.
Hey, I followed that link you provided, and boy, I must say, you really got me beat!! I mean, hey, I just provided a link to a globally-accredited newspaper's story about the growing threat of neo-fascism in Europe. But you, Bunky, you just Owned me! You prop up your argument with a link to a crazed screed by a lunatic jihadist whose parent organization recruits for fundamentalist Islam! Way to win a debate, bro!
Our puritanical heritige. It's the same well from which we draw our religious tolerance. I'll take it.
We were the last country to give up slavery. Wrong.
We committed genocide against the native americans. We fought against many Native American nations, aided and abetted by many other Native American nations, some of whom "we" betrayed, some of whom betrayed "us." If you think of the hundreds of tribes that populated the N.A. continent before white settlers came as some kind of happy hippie commune of mystic warrior-poets bound together in love and mutual respect, you've been too-long Disney-fied.
We have one of the bloodiest histories of labor relations in the western world. Compared to the UK? Italy? Australia? Please.
Hey, you missed one: America has the lowest per capita of weepy, self-flagellating, achiever-despising socialists in the world as well! Oh, how will we ever survive?!?!
can't say much else. wish someone would send me some good moviez sites or something, that'd make the cold and grey go away for an hour or two.
I'm thinking you kinda invalidate any right you may have thought you had to grouse about American "consumer marketplace economics" when you lazily request Hollywood warez sites be e-mailed to you in your perch in Germany.
Maybe we're just supposed to send you warez sites for those great German movies. Yeah, that's it, that's what you meant...
As far as America's "innate desire for fascism" goes, uhhhh, don't you think might be just projecting a teensy bit? Fascism is on the rise, all right. But we Americans are dorky amateurs at it. You guys remain the world-class professionals at it.
Seriously though, this does raise an important point, however, the real issue is not "is there evidence available", rather it is: "can we get access to the evidence?"
The other problem, of course, is the perception that this new technology might stifle the age-old and traditionally effective policework of the beat cop.
If these snitch-cams became wide-spread, it's highly possible that cops would be less inclined to billy-club the malcontents who deserve a good billy-clubbing. History does not record the forward leaps and bounds civilized society has made, nor the precipices from which it has been pulled, by the judiciously well-placed but otherwise private administration of a veteran law-officer's wooden stick.
Make a case for him to do what? The Exec Branch doesn't create or repeal legislation. As a Senator, he voted for the DMCA, which Clinton signed into law. His campaign is solidly backed and financed by the entertainment industry, as strongly if not more so than Bush is propped up by Big Oil. Why for a heartbeat do you believe "we have an opportunity to make a case?"
...and who do you mean by "we?" You mean there are no geeks who create things and also value the protection the DMCA provides? If a linux-using Star Wars fan favors stronger copyright laws and a conservative interpretation of "Fair Use,", is he drummed out of the club?
Slashdot Mirror
"That has got to be the worst job in the world! Do something with your life.......Contribute to society somehow!.......Make a difference......."
Judge not, lest ye be judged, Asshole.
Do something with her life? Like what? Write code? Supervise people who write code? Manage people who supevise people who write code? When does the society contribution kick in for that li'l career death-spiral?
You've got no idea what that woman does with her life, for her kids, her community, her extended family, her church/temple/happy-magick-circle. You're actually defining someone by the means through which they pay their motgage? And all this in a post to that most glorious chrome-sheened temple to mid-90's self-absorbed gadget fetishists, SlashDot!! Wow. I mean, Wow.
Helloooooo!! 1954 is calling! When you get back from your tour of duty with a Red Cross Tsunami relief team, it would like it's biases back, please.
Even NPR, that one-time bastion of somewhat impartial reporting, has started sliding toward sensationalism.
Actually, NPR was a bastion of left-think, until very recently when the right-thinkers kicked up a ruckus that public funds were fueling a partisan news outlet. That, and the fact that the Big Money from corporate sponsorships tends to frown on Left/Green perspectives.
Now, NPR seems to go out of its way to present bi-partisan views, except it often does so across multiple days' telecasts, a situation guaranteed to enrage the partisan occasional listener on either side. Of course, long-time lefty NPR listeners moan their network's`shift to the center, and it's tough to blame them.
With multiple strong, clearly partisan media outlets available now for both sides, it's unclear whether or not a venue which painstakingly ventures to be non-partisan can survive.
Journalism is dying. Clinton's elimination of the Fairness Doctrine opened the gates up to the New Media barbarian hordes, Blair/NYT and Rather/CBS poisoned the Emperors' wine, and now the Mob has seen through the bread and circuses, picked up javelins, and become bloggers.
Once, journalists presented the news, as delivered to them from strange and ancient teletype-oracles only they had access to. Now, everybody has their own AP/UPI feed, and more sources than Cronkite ever dreamed of. Once, everybody who became a professional journalist did so not because he wanted to present world events in a fair and balanced manner, but because he wanted to influence world events, crusade for a cause, and be a celebrity. Then, journalists had to pretend they had interestes other than their own in mind. Soon, they can cease pretending completely.
Within Ten Years (Mark My Words): Every major news outlet ceases delivering "the news" in primetime as they currently do, and instead they are all attempting to imitate the success of Bill O'Reilly on Fox, creating celebrity pundits who themselves are their own cottage industries. Right-wing pundits, left-wing pundits, gay-pundits, green-pundits, libertarian-pundits, techno-pundits, luddite-pundits, kid-pundits, septuagenarian-pundits, Baptist-pundits and Wiccan-Pundits -- celebrity wannabes nurturing book deals, all.
Do you feel silly for paying thousands of dollars for what other people get for free?
How about when you take into account that most of your money is gong to the worst kind of rich people who want nothing more than to LIMIT what you (or anyone else) can do with your music?
Hi. You're an idiot.
That out of the way, lemme tell you some good news: in a few short years, when society deems you mature enough to stray from the primly manicured paths and quadrangles of Academe, you will wake up one morning and realize "Damn! There are people in the world born before 1987 who are not my teachers! Wow!!" Once that epiphany hits, whole new vistas of inquiry will be opened to you, like: "I wonder what kind of music these older people listen to?" and "How did they obtain this music before the Internet?" and, perhaps most salient, "Why does every single one of them view me as a self-centered callow punk with a lot to learn?"
You've an exciting life ahead of you, Bucko, full of fascinating surprises! If you are truly favored by the gods, then maybe you'll find yourself trying to make a living from some artistic pursuit, during which time you can daily contemplate the irony of the prejudice and stupidity which prompted your "rich people" remark today.
...for an iPod with capacity sufficient to hold all my (100% legally obtained, bought-and-paid-for, thanks for asking) music. At 128k MP3 format, the collection weighs in at just under 80 gig.
Please, Mr. Jobs, don't make me have to choose between my Techno-Industrial-Gothic and my Tibetan Singing Bowls again this week... please!!
I suppose North Americans just love inefficiency.
Sure. Cuz when I think "efficiency," the first modern society that pops into my head is "Europe."
Classic Battletech.
Okay, so technically, it's not so much a boardgame as it is a religion and a Way of Life, but is there any geekier reason to throw dice and push things about a tabletop?
And when the people in charge of the Big Lone Superpower are murderous right-wing religious lunatics with a massive military, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (and a history of actually using them), and effectively unchecked political power over the rest of the world, then please tell me, who are we supposed to root for?
You don't root for anybody; you vote them out of office. Something you can't do in a medieval theocracy. Thing is, American policy and politics is fluid, it's been adapting to modern times as it has to if its leaders want their parties to stay in power. It's a self-correcting system. You simply can't compare its leaders to those whose politics remain effectively unchanged since the Ottoman Empire and before.
America may be building an empire, but at least it's a new one.
Look, I wouldn't worry, Ace: When we elect ineffective presidents who wear their religion on their sleeve, as we did in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, they're not around for a second term...
Would attacking other countries such as Iran be an easier choice to make without the threat of American casualties to sway the public?
Man, I hope so. Otherwise, what good is it? Seriously.
Nobody wants to see more people die in war, but even fewer want to see a lone superpower with even less hesitancy to enforce its agenda around the world.
We all got agendas, Bunky. I have one. America and Iran have one. You clearly have one. And although I don't have the poll numbers in front of me, I believe the number of people who want to see the agenda of a country sitting atop a substantive percentage of the world's oil supply, draped in medieval-level religious fanaticism, and armed with newly-minted atomic weapons achieve ascendancy over that of a nation whose principal exports are fast food, Hollywood movies, Internet cafes, arrogance, swagger, and democracy is rather small.
It's been over a hundred years that America could be viewed as the underdog, and pop culture teaches us never to root for the Big Lone Superpower, but when the little guys are murderous right-wing religious lunatics, aintcha glad that pop culture's got nothing on plain ol' common sense?
Try sending a truant officer or a policeman after a wayward 16 year old, even as the 16 year old's parent. You'll find you can't do it.
Well, that's bad. Stupid and counter-intuitive, even. If this RFID thing works to counter dumbass laws like this, I'm all for it. How could you not be?
The trackees are kids, underage minors, whose care is being entrusted by their parents to the State, for however many hours a week. Presumably, the decision to use RFID tracking technology for kids will be made by a local school board, and school boards are paid and elected by the tax-payers of any given district, who are also the parents of the trackees.
Keep it on the local level, and let the local folks decide. If one school district tries it, and it works, great, others might pick it up. If it fails, others will know to stay away from it, or look at other solutions.
As far as asking the trackees how they feel about it, well, most trackees I know feel they're too cool for school in general. They don't get a vote here, for obvious reasons. It's the parents' call how their school board uses tax money and the newest technology, not the sixteen year olds'. Has it ever been otherwise?
Hey, Kids!! Let's Put On An Encyclopedia!!!
We can use my Dad's barn, and my Mom's Mac!
Susie, you can play piano and edit the Astronomy section!
Johnny, you can dance, do impressions, and handle the graphics!!
Little Dilbert, you can write songs, paint the set, and make sure that all articles having anything remotely to do with software development in general and open source in particular are represented far beyond their real-world significance!!
Milo, you collect the tickets and edit all the art-and-literature stuff.
Boy, won't we have fun?!
[Doing my best Mako impression:]
"Once upon a time, when the WWW was whipping across the business landscape like a cold wind from the North, nobody in business had a clue how to wrangle it. Was it an IT thing? A Marketing thing? A New Business thing? It was a Time of Chaos, and still-moist script-jockies were christened "Web Masters" and given the imprimatur, "Um, do your thing. And here's a six figure salary, cuz we haven't a clue what 'your thing' is. Oh, and make it look 'cool,' cuz we heard it's supposed to look 'cool.'"
And they did their thing.
And it looked dreadful.
Happily, business recovered, bean counters and Marketing Directors finally found something upon which they could agree, and color-blind code-jockeys were partnered with art-types so the WWW could outgrow its purple-orange acne-encrusted adolescence and mature into pseudo-suave 'white-is-the-new-black' twenty-something hipsterism."
Bottom line: I'd rather teach an artist how to code (and have done so), then let a coder try to "do art." But if you want it to look remotely professional, you prolly need at least two heads involved.
Oh, it's in Wikipedia. It must be true.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you...
I thought I was the only one sitting here scratching my head and murmuring "WTF?!?" every time wikipedia was cited as if it was some kind of legit reference on par with Britannica. I'm guessing that on that parallel Bizarro world where blogs are regarded as journalism, the wikipedia can be viewed as a reference, but, man, I'm sure glad I don't live there...
The sooner we can get the Reality TV craze off the air the better.
I have DirecTV and a DVR. Hundreds of channels, all time-shifted. Watch what I want when I want. History, Discovery, Sci-Fi, Bravo, Trio, A&E, TechTV, Cartoon, Boomerang, VH1 A, B, C, & D, seventeen PBS nets, and Alison Mack in Smallville new once a week and seven more old in syndication. All the producers of Reality TV shows would have to band together, dress up like Carmen Miranda, and set off an M-80 in my living room before I was even aware of what channel they were on, let alone feel constrained to watch any of their stuff. Don't you have the same selections I do, or is Mark Burnett holding your dog hostage?
(Now, Reality TV sucks big time because the producers don't pay proper Guild fees to the writers (in part because they don't want to formally acknowledge the shows _have_ writers, in part because they're cheap SOB's...), but that's a whole 'nother thread....)
The U.S. did not enter Iraq with the intent of liberating the Iraqi people; that was a happy by-product. We entered Iraq with the intention of de-stabilizing the region, getting a toe-hold in the Mid-East. With Iraq secured, strikes into Iran and Syria become much more feasible. (I'm sure Sun Tzu and Clausewitz could appreciate that.)
The ultimate focus is to keep space-age weapons from getting into the hands of medieval theocracies and the West-hating fanatics bred there. And since the global economy is still rather unfortunately reliant upon petroleum resources, keeping these safe from people who don nitro-glycerine boxer shorts and detonate themselves in crowded bus-stops with little more trepidation than you or I have over re-formatting our hard-drives seems not only prudent, but damn obvious.
And you can be sure that this will be picked up by the Arab world and will look bad on the US and Western Europe.
And if there's one thing we here in the U.S. really, really hate, it's to look bad in the Arab world.
I can just hear the outcry as it trumpets across our waving waves of grain, echoing from our mountains, skimming across from sea to shining sea: "Google is censoring Abu Graib pics! How will we ever recover our prestige?!"
People like you are exactly the reason why I claim to be Canadian when I travel outside the country. Not because I'm unpatriotic, but because people like you have made it dangerous to be an American
Oh, man, you mean you don't like me?
Now I'm going to be sad all day long, you big bully!
Actually there have been some great German movies.
You're absolutely right, and I'm a big fan, particularly of Fritz Lang's work. But it's not like draws upon that vast vault of Great Teutonic Cinema is exactly burning up the P2P nets and torrents world-wide, is it?
thanks for pointing out my hypocricy
Happy to help.
though, thats a sure-fire defeat for the argument that america is a consumerist-whore society that is eating the earth.
Dude, that's not an "argument," that's long-winded grafitti. For every mean, nasty American export you decry, whether it is Starbuck's, McDonald's, or those Hollywood movies you obviously crave, there is some cute l'il non-American country importing them for their cute l'il non-American consumer to consume. Change begins at home, son.
As for me, I'll keep buying those Japanese cartoons, British music, German cars, and Italian shoes, without begrudging the people or governments of those fine countries their creative and manufacturing skills.
Hey, I followed that link you provided, and boy, I must say, you really got me beat!! I mean, hey, I just provided a link to a globally-accredited newspaper's story about the growing threat of neo-fascism in Europe. But you, Bunky, you just Owned me! You prop up your argument with a link to a crazed screed by a lunatic jihadist whose parent organization recruits for fundamentalist Islam! Way to win a debate, bro!
Who are you, an American?
Ya gotta ask?
Our puritanical heritige.
It's the same well from which we draw our religious tolerance. I'll take it.
We were the last country to give up slavery.
Wrong.
We committed genocide against the native americans.
We fought against many Native American nations, aided and abetted by many other Native American nations, some of whom "we" betrayed, some of whom betrayed "us." If you think of the hundreds of tribes that populated the N.A. continent before white settlers came as some kind of happy hippie commune of mystic warrior-poets bound together in love and mutual respect, you've been too-long Disney-fied.
We have one of the bloodiest histories of labor relations in the western world.
Compared to the UK? Italy? Australia? Please.
Hey, you missed one: America has the lowest per capita of weepy, self-flagellating, achiever-despising socialists in the world as well! Oh, how will we ever survive?!?!
Did it ever cross your mind that he might be an American who currently is in Germany?
Sure it did. And I figured he'd tell me so if he wanted to keep the conversation going.
Who are you, his mother?
I'm thinking you kinda invalidate any right you may have thought you had to grouse about American "consumer marketplace economics" when you lazily request Hollywood warez sites be e-mailed to you in your perch in Germany.
Maybe we're just supposed to send you warez sites for those great German movies. Yeah, that's it, that's what you meant...
As far as America's "innate desire for fascism" goes, uhhhh, don't you think might be just projecting a teensy bit? Fascism is on the rise, all right. But we Americans are dorky amateurs at it. You guys remain the world-class professionals at it.
The other problem, of course, is the perception that this new technology might stifle the age-old and traditionally effective policework of the beat cop.
If these snitch-cams became wide-spread, it's highly possible that cops would be less inclined to billy-club the malcontents who deserve a good billy-clubbing. History does not record the forward leaps and bounds civilized society has made, nor the precipices from which it has been pulled, by the judiciously well-placed but otherwise private administration of a veteran law-officer's wooden stick.
And, oh yes! Remember to Vote!
Make a case for him to do what? The Exec Branch doesn't create or repeal legislation. As a Senator, he voted for the DMCA, which Clinton signed into law. His campaign is solidly backed and financed by the entertainment industry, as strongly if not more so than Bush is propped up by Big Oil. Why for a heartbeat do you believe "we have an opportunity to make a case?"