Tian'men Square. Right. Seems to me, there were two groups... the Union Agitators, who wanted more for themselves, with less freedoms, and the Radical Intellectuals, who wanted to overthrow the government on general principles, and because they weren't being rewarded sufficiently by the state.
Seems to me, both groups were being instigated by foreign interests, and supported by foreign interests, and that those foreigners were more interested in breaking the state controls of the Chinese economy so they could pillage the country than they were in anyones freedom.
The whole thing was reminiscent of the robber barons who raped the former Soviet Union of all its wealth and left its people for dead, while we cheered and watched our stock prices rise. Now that Putin is putting a stop to it, all the Western media is all bubbling with how he's an enemy of freedom and holding up people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky as martyrs for freedom.
That was the fate that was in store for China.
The people of China were fortunate that Tian'men Square happened, frankly. It was a small price to pay compared to what we would have done to their country if their government hadn't put a stop to things.
The Chinese are evil as people. Their government keeps the worst vestiges of a discredited system, though. Look at it this way: how many people want to immigrate there vs the USA or Europe to find "freedom."
None, I wouldn't imagine.
Don't the people who live in communist countries say they like the security, knowing that they don't have to stress out competing for the basics of life? I think that was pretty significant.
I seem to recall a lot about the fact that those who are administering communist societies have a responsibility to their society too. Seems the way it works is, if someone wants to step down, they can, but if they betray their trust, they are executed in a coup.
Course, we don't even dignify these ideas with lip service around here. Screwing the people who trusted you is where the paycheck comes from in our culture.
Get your head out of your ass. This culture is bankrupt. The horse has been gone so long that the shit left here doesn't even stink anymore. That's what the bloody article is trying to point out.
Not like here, where I can go blab state secrets around as much as I want with impunity and nothing bad will happen to me. I'm nice and safe here, and can do any little thing my heart desires.
Thanks for clearing that all up. I'm so glad I don't live in China. They're nothing but a bunch of savages down there. With space ships. Like Ming the Merciless.
Right. Got it. So when they put someone in a prison in China after he breaks the law, that's like shooting a burglar in self defense, but when the US puts someone in prison in Guantanamo Bay after they don't break the law, that's like being a serial killer who shoots people because he's hallucinating that they're evil?
No... that can't be right... sorry, I'm still confused...
WTC was attacked because these were very large building, which would make the attack more spectacular -- and Mohammed Atta is known to have hated toll buildings. WTC was not picked on for its economic importance, and it was well known to be staffed purely by civilian personnel. So, while Pentagon and White House may be debated, this was a purely terrorist target in 2001 and that one time before.
No, it was the control hub of the US economy, not just "some tall buildings". Reminiscent of the scene in Fight Club, where he blows up a bunch of buildings full of credit card companies, destroying the infrastructure that allows the economy to operate. Except this was the real deal. Anyone who worked there and didn't know they were working in a significant military target was a moron.
Ahh. I guess that makes it all different then. Bloody monsters, those Chinese are, eh? Man, we should send em all to a Triple-Guantanamo. That would learn em.
I just think that people inside google probably knew this was there.
You don't build a system to index the worlds information, then get people to sign up to your free mail service with provisions that you get to index it, then set up a project to index all the books in the world, etc unless you are a snoop. And all of this was sitting on google servers.
Yes, I know China is not a terrorist organisation, but it's close enough for the US government to use it as an excuse when convenient
Could have fooled me -- they TERRORIZE their own citizens. Step out of line and you might end up in a laogai (corrective labor camp), in prison, or even with a bullet to the head. If you think the War on Terror is bad, look at China.
You mean, they have community service, and jails, and executions?
It wasn't a whistle blower. Some idiot used his Gmail password and Gmail email address to sign up for an account on a bittorrent tracker site that recognized his IP address as one of the ones associated with Media-Defender. So he basically gave his email and password to the enemy trying to sneak around in their services.
If all this was done with Gmail, and Gmail is all indexed using Googles technology, does that mean that Google has had both knowledge and evidence of this the whole time, and did nothing?
We're not doing this because it's a good energy investment, because it's not. It's a piss poor energy investment.
If it wasn't for the large install base of vehicles in the US that are being driven by this fuel and couldn't otherwise be used for anything without refitting, it wouldn't be happening.
We're not doing this because it benefits our country, because none of that oil is doing anything for our nation. It's all going to the US.
We could be investing in building renewable energy sources. The prairies would be a great location for the wind-tunnel-greenhouse-generators that they were testing in northern Europe and are now rolling out in Australia. That would feed our grid indefinitely. Same thing with oceanic current power technology.
We could entirely devalue the energy sector in Canada if we were smart about what infrastructure we built, and start looking at other ways to improve the quality of life here with the relieved manpower.
It doesn't matter why it happened. You can't sell livestock off the continent like you can with butchered frozen meat. There was a culture here for years based around how we NEEDED trade with the US for all our meat, so why bother setting up infrastructure here?
Truth is, that culture made select people individually rich while shipping off most of the wealth to the US.
Now that culture is permanently broken. We don't sell the resource of "live cows" across the border wholesale now, we slaughter them ourselves, eat cheap meat, and sell frozen steak internationally. We will never need to go back.
"Yes, your honour, we know that our product uses John Smiths 'Infinite Energy' technology, but we'd like to point out that our product is not just an infinite energy source, but is also a camera, an mp3 player and a toaster. The 'Infinite Energy' technology is only a small part of the product."
"We would also like to point out that John Smiths product, the 'Bottomless Battery', consists mostly of technology that we have patented ourselves. For example, it has 5 buttons, and a number of terminals, and a large number of LEDs."
Don't get too comfortable with this state of affairs.
What will happen when we stop digging sand for oil to pipe to the US?
What will happen to the value of all those homes in Alberta when this highly inefficient short term industry dries up? Because there are a ton of young people out there who have two mortgages on those highly overvalued homes, expecting that they are going to have some long term worth. Will anyone want to buy them and live in them later? Probably not.
Every barrel of oil we sell the US from those sands represents a vast amount of human effort by Canadians that doesn't do anything to further the interests of our country, and actually leaves us a polluted mess of land that we'll later have to clean up.
Dude, the US is the most powerful country in the world.
They're the most powerful country in the world because of economic structures.
The fact that these economic structures are making them more powerful than their neighbours is an indicator that they are getting more out of them than anyone else.
Or, to put it another way, no matter how nice they all look on paper, the end result is that money flows away from this country, towards the US.
Other countries don't need the US. They get taken for a ride by the US.
People used to talk about how much the Canadian beef industry "needed" the US for our economy. Then the borders got shut a few years ago, and now instead of selling live cattle for cheaper than they're worth, we have a local industry slaughtering and butchering meat, we can sell frozen steak internationally, and the price of beef for your average Canadian went through the floor, despite our country now being richer than before.
Other countries need the US in the same way they need vampire.
Win2K certainly did replace a lot of Win98 installs. It was the first NT-based OS that was passable on the desktop. I know I used it rather than deal with all the DOS based crap of the Win9X editions, as did many of my friends and family.
So did I, eventually. That doesn't change the fact that there were a hell of a lot more people who still used Win98SE until they bought a machine with WinXP, because there were a lot of applications that ran better without all the overhead the WinNT codebase brought.
You know what never happened last time? The public didn't apply enough pressure to force tier one distributors to drop their preinstalls back to a previous version of windows. But they did this time.
In a market that is characterized by the chasing of the latest and greatest thing, which is at any rate how I would describe it, that's a pretty big deal.
Win2K didn't achieve its market penetration by replacing either WinME or Win98SE. It achieved its market penetration by replacing WinNT4. It wasn't until WinXP hit the scene that Win98 installs really started to drop. Until that time, people in the home user space were still using Win98SE.
Which is to say, I agree with you, and I think your post underestimates the willingness of the general user to ignore what Microsoft does. Most people didn't wait on ME because of 2K. They ignored both ME and 2K and only started leaving it when XP came along, and they had no idea it was coming along when they said no to ME and 2K.
If the author gets no special treatment, what happens to the offices that are overseeing that special treatment? What happens to the officials who work at those offices?
They get canned, that's what happens. And they're going to act against that.
This is a great little interview, because it makes no effort to disguise the fact that these laws exist to provide weapons to be used against us all. It disarms any claim that the organization might put forth to be working for the common good, and that's a powerful thing.
I've had an entourage of ACs following me around for months.
They really think I care about this karma system, as though I scour the web doing research so I can get a higher score than them in some database somewhere. Or at least, they really care about the karma system. Or something.
I just come here to read the articles, post my opinions and hopefully get some intelligent feedback to chew on when I'm sick of writing code. Gives me a chance to see where my very abstract views of the world are being miscommunicated, or leaving someones underlying needs unrepresented so I can adjust my views of how the world ought to work.
Why these losers think I should be operating as though I was under some obligation to read every single post to see if anyone else has already said what I'm thinking, I don't know. Most of them don't even read the fucking articles before they post their inane crap, yet they think I should be scouring the thousands of posts making absolutely sure I'm not "stealing karma" from someone engaged in a dialogs on the same topic. Or that I should be mindlessly following their stupid little tangent that sprung from a bad joke, rather than commenting on the article.
It's really annoying. I wish they'd just get a fucking life, or add me to their foes list, automod me -5 in their settings and just go do their own thing.
All you can do is be philosophical about it, I guess. I kind of feel sorry for them... they clearly have no life at all.
Do they have articles? I thought they were just a teaser website. Oh well, they can't be very good, or I would have read one of their articles by now. I wonder if there is anything interesting on the front page of Wired...
We all make compromises trying to be effective in the world.
It is a rare person who can stand up and say "Yes, I made my compromises, and became a little more evil because of it, but good is still good, even when I'm not, and right is still right, even when I'm not strong enough to be."
I have drawn a great deal of strength from what you have produced.
Slashdot Mirror
Tian'men Square. Right. Seems to me, there were two groups... the Union Agitators, who wanted more for themselves, with less freedoms, and the Radical Intellectuals, who wanted to overthrow the government on general principles, and because they weren't being rewarded sufficiently by the state.
Seems to me, both groups were being instigated by foreign interests, and supported by foreign interests, and that those foreigners were more interested in breaking the state controls of the Chinese economy so they could pillage the country than they were in anyones freedom.
The whole thing was reminiscent of the robber barons who raped the former Soviet Union of all its wealth and left its people for dead, while we cheered and watched our stock prices rise. Now that Putin is putting a stop to it, all the Western media is all bubbling with how he's an enemy of freedom and holding up people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky as martyrs for freedom.
That was the fate that was in store for China.
The people of China were fortunate that Tian'men Square happened, frankly. It was a small price to pay compared to what we would have done to their country if their government hadn't put a stop to things.
The Chinese are evil as people. Their government keeps the worst vestiges of a discredited system, though. Look at it this way: how many people want to immigrate there vs the USA or Europe to find "freedom."
None, I wouldn't imagine.
Don't the people who live in communist countries say they like the security, knowing that they don't have to stress out competing for the basics of life? I think that was pretty significant.
I seem to recall a lot about the fact that those who are administering communist societies have a responsibility to their society too. Seems the way it works is, if someone wants to step down, they can, but if they betray their trust, they are executed in a coup.
Course, we don't even dignify these ideas with lip service around here. Screwing the people who trusted you is where the paycheck comes from in our culture.
Get your head out of your ass. This culture is bankrupt. The horse has been gone so long that the shit left here doesn't even stink anymore. That's what the bloody article is trying to point out.
Right. Because they're evil monsters. I get it.
Not like here, where I can go blab state secrets around as much as I want with impunity and nothing bad will happen to me. I'm nice and safe here, and can do any little thing my heart desires.
Thanks for clearing that all up. I'm so glad I don't live in China. They're nothing but a bunch of savages down there. With space ships. Like Ming the Merciless.
Right. Got it. So when they put someone in a prison in China after he breaks the law, that's like shooting a burglar in self defense, but when the US puts someone in prison in Guantanamo Bay after they don't break the law, that's like being a serial killer who shoots people because he's hallucinating that they're evil?
No... that can't be right... sorry, I'm still confused...
That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard
WTC was attacked because these were very large building, which would make the attack more spectacular -- and Mohammed Atta is known to have hated toll buildings. WTC was not picked on for its economic importance, and it was well known to be staffed purely by civilian personnel. So, while Pentagon and White House may be debated, this was a purely terrorist target in 2001 and that one time before.
No, it was the control hub of the US economy, not just "some tall buildings". Reminiscent of the scene in Fight Club, where he blows up a bunch of buildings full of credit card companies, destroying the infrastructure that allows the economy to operate. Except this was the real deal. Anyone who worked there and didn't know they were working in a significant military target was a moron.
Ahh. I guess that makes it all different then. Bloody monsters, those Chinese are, eh? Man, we should send em all to a Triple-Guantanamo. That would learn em.
I didn't suggest anything that they ought to do.
I just think that people inside google probably knew this was there.
You don't build a system to index the worlds information, then get people to sign up to your free mail service with provisions that you get to index it, then set up a project to index all the books in the world, etc unless you are a snoop. And all of this was sitting on google servers.
No, Google cannot be expected to keep track of millions of accounts.
Isn't that what they're paid for?
Yes, I know China is not a terrorist organisation, but it's close enough for the US government to use it as an excuse when convenient Could have fooled me -- they TERRORIZE their own citizens. Step out of line and you might end up in a laogai (corrective labor camp), in prison, or even with a bullet to the head. If you think the War on Terror is bad, look at China.
You mean, they have community service, and jails, and executions?
Around here, there is only one principle: You're not allowed to have principles. They're provincial, prejudicial and bad for business.
It wasn't a whistle blower. Some idiot used his Gmail password and Gmail email address to sign up for an account on a bittorrent tracker site that recognized his IP address as one of the ones associated with Media-Defender. So he basically gave his email and password to the enemy trying to sneak around in their services.
If all this was done with Gmail, and Gmail is all indexed using Googles technology, does that mean that Google has had both knowledge and evidence of this the whole time, and did nothing?
We're not doing this because it's a good energy investment, because it's not. It's a piss poor energy investment.
If it wasn't for the large install base of vehicles in the US that are being driven by this fuel and couldn't otherwise be used for anything without refitting, it wouldn't be happening.
We're not doing this because it benefits our country, because none of that oil is doing anything for our nation. It's all going to the US.
We could be investing in building renewable energy sources. The prairies would be a great location for the wind-tunnel-greenhouse-generators that they were testing in northern Europe and are now rolling out in Australia. That would feed our grid indefinitely. Same thing with oceanic current power technology.
We could entirely devalue the energy sector in Canada if we were smart about what infrastructure we built, and start looking at other ways to improve the quality of life here with the relieved manpower.
We are being fucked up the ass.
It doesn't matter why it happened. You can't sell livestock off the continent like you can with butchered frozen meat. There was a culture here for years based around how we NEEDED trade with the US for all our meat, so why bother setting up infrastructure here?
Truth is, that culture made select people individually rich while shipping off most of the wealth to the US.
Now that culture is permanently broken. We don't sell the resource of "live cows" across the border wholesale now, we slaughter them ourselves, eat cheap meat, and sell frozen steak internationally. We will never need to go back.
This needs to happen to all our industries.
You can see the point, though.
"Yes, your honour, we know that our product uses John Smiths 'Infinite Energy' technology, but we'd like to point out that our product is not just an infinite energy source, but is also a camera, an mp3 player and a toaster. The 'Infinite Energy' technology is only a small part of the product."
"We would also like to point out that John Smiths product, the 'Bottomless Battery', consists mostly of technology that we have patented ourselves. For example, it has 5 buttons, and a number of terminals, and a large number of LEDs."
Don't get too comfortable with this state of affairs.
What will happen when we stop digging sand for oil to pipe to the US?
What will happen to the value of all those homes in Alberta when this highly inefficient short term industry dries up? Because there are a ton of young people out there who have two mortgages on those highly overvalued homes, expecting that they are going to have some long term worth. Will anyone want to buy them and live in them later? Probably not.
Every barrel of oil we sell the US from those sands represents a vast amount of human effort by Canadians that doesn't do anything to further the interests of our country, and actually leaves us a polluted mess of land that we'll later have to clean up.
Dude, the US is the most powerful country in the world.
They're the most powerful country in the world because of economic structures.
The fact that these economic structures are making them more powerful than their neighbours is an indicator that they are getting more out of them than anyone else.
Or, to put it another way, no matter how nice they all look on paper, the end result is that money flows away from this country, towards the US.
Other countries don't need the US. They get taken for a ride by the US.
People used to talk about how much the Canadian beef industry "needed" the US for our economy. Then the borders got shut a few years ago, and now instead of selling live cattle for cheaper than they're worth, we have a local industry slaughtering and butchering meat, we can sell frozen steak internationally, and the price of beef for your average Canadian went through the floor, despite our country now being richer than before.
Other countries need the US in the same way they need vampire.
Has anyone actually read these emails?
I tried to download the torrent, but all I got was a bad rip of Fight Club...
Don't do it.
Yes, you... I know you're thinking about it.
Leave the goatse link out.
Win2K certainly did replace a lot of Win98 installs. It was the first NT-based OS that was passable on the desktop. I know I used it rather than deal with all the DOS based crap of the Win9X editions, as did many of my friends and family.
So did I, eventually. That doesn't change the fact that there were a hell of a lot more people who still used Win98SE until they bought a machine with WinXP, because there were a lot of applications that ran better without all the overhead the WinNT codebase brought.
You know what never happened last time? The public didn't apply enough pressure to force tier one distributors to drop their preinstalls back to a previous version of windows. But they did this time.
In a market that is characterized by the chasing of the latest and greatest thing, which is at any rate how I would describe it, that's a pretty big deal.
Win2K didn't achieve its market penetration by replacing either WinME or Win98SE. It achieved its market penetration by replacing WinNT4. It wasn't until WinXP hit the scene that Win98 installs really started to drop. Until that time, people in the home user space were still using Win98SE.
Which is to say, I agree with you, and I think your post underestimates the willingness of the general user to ignore what Microsoft does. Most people didn't wait on ME because of 2K. They ignored both ME and 2K and only started leaving it when XP came along, and they had no idea it was coming along when they said no to ME and 2K.
If the author gets no special treatment, what happens to the offices that are overseeing that special treatment? What happens to the officials who work at those offices?
They get canned, that's what happens. And they're going to act against that.
This is a great little interview, because it makes no effort to disguise the fact that these laws exist to provide weapons to be used against us all. It disarms any claim that the organization might put forth to be working for the common good, and that's a powerful thing.
I've had an entourage of ACs following me around for months.
They really think I care about this karma system, as though I scour the web doing research so I can get a higher score than them in some database somewhere. Or at least, they really care about the karma system. Or something.
I just come here to read the articles, post my opinions and hopefully get some intelligent feedback to chew on when I'm sick of writing code. Gives me a chance to see where my very abstract views of the world are being miscommunicated, or leaving someones underlying needs unrepresented so I can adjust my views of how the world ought to work.
Why these losers think I should be operating as though I was under some obligation to read every single post to see if anyone else has already said what I'm thinking, I don't know. Most of them don't even read the fucking articles before they post their inane crap, yet they think I should be scouring the thousands of posts making absolutely sure I'm not "stealing karma" from someone engaged in a dialogs on the same topic. Or that I should be mindlessly following their stupid little tangent that sprung from a bad joke, rather than commenting on the article.
It's really annoying. I wish they'd just get a fucking life, or add me to their foes list, automod me -5 in their settings and just go do their own thing.
All you can do is be philosophical about it, I guess. I kind of feel sorry for them... they clearly have no life at all.
Do they have articles? I thought they were just a teaser website. Oh well, they can't be very good, or I would have read one of their articles by now. I wonder if there is anything interesting on the front page of Wired...
Thanks for all the inspiring music Trent.
We all make compromises trying to be effective in the world.
It is a rare person who can stand up and say "Yes, I made my compromises, and became a little more evil because of it, but good is still good, even when I'm not, and right is still right, even when I'm not strong enough to be."
I have drawn a great deal of strength from what you have produced.
You think it's off topic because you can't see the connections.
It's not. It's the cause to the effect.