It doesn't count for *any* syndication. Even in-country when they're repeated on "Dave" the music gets changed (most noticable in the 'construction' montages where the A-Team theme is conspicuous by its absence)
I wouldn't know since I don't get Dave.
My point is that if you pirate the whole stuff because their sales strategy is retarded then it's their own goddamn fault.
Also, how did Top Gear become a global(except in France) phenomenon? That's pure and simple piracy.
I live in Germany and I wasn't aware of it. If something like this isn't heavily publisized then the old habits prevail.
They should have taken out ads on Pirate Bay and gone to the popular media if they had wanted a proper test case.
The Internet has no oceans. Yet they still think that dividing the world into regions is still viable. The other heavily pirated
TV show that I am aware of is the British Top Gear. They can not release the full show on DVD even though they'd love to.
they can't do it because they use a lot of music. The executive producer of that show said that it is nearly impossible to negotiate
deals with the music industry for a global release on DVD. They'd have to talk with so many rights holders they wouldn't know where to begin.
Another annoying habit that stems from this region thinking is what they did in Germany. They sold(and still sell) DVDs with the German
audio track only. Sometimes if they sell them with the English audio track they have German subtitles that can't be swithced off(VLC ignores this madness). All for publishing reasons.
So the Breaking Bad experiment failed due to lack of publicity(making front page on/. is not publicity). And the publishers tried to sell overcoming regional releases as something new while we have been blissfully ignoring it for years.
Step 1: Kim Dotcom starts Mega Crypto, which is promptly adopted by the world's political dissidents and leakers.
Step 2: All pending government litigation against Mega suspiciously disappears and his assets are unfrozen.
The guy's accustomed to his ill-gotten gains -- even setting aside the rampant piracy of Megaupload, he's a convicted fraudster and embezzler, and has bribed public officials for protection before.
I suspect that if offered the choice between losing his $20 million house, his 12 cars, his yacht, and becoming a partner of the US government, it wouldn't take him much to crack.
He also made a name for himself in Germany for selling out phreakers to the feds when he got cornered. The man is an unstrustworthy megalomaniac.
Checking for new mail via IMAP every 30 minutes or so(I check every 5 minutes on my business account so I can react immediately for extra brownie points) is sufficient and doesn't drain battery too much.
Who in his right mind would do Webmail on a phone/tablet? Also what does the used application protocol have to do with security? Wether you send unencrypted IMAP/SMPT or unencrypted HTTP doesn't make any difference. Also if your email is on some harddrive anywhere and it is unencrypted or somebody you can't trust has a key to it then it is quite public.
And what is the name for all of the businesses who just merrily went along with government requests?
Corporations. They make fascism much easier to implement. An out of control judiciary provides the nudges necessary to force most businesses to adopt a corporate form.
They so often use wishy-washy tools to convict people it beggars belief. WTF is mail/wire fraud? WTF is obstruction of justice? The Book doesn't clearly tell. And if they find you talked to somebody about this then they'll slap conspiracy on top of it. The general strategy seems to be to slap charge upon charge upon charge onto those cases in the hope that something might stick. And this is usually when juries will pronounce somebody guilty of a couple of the dozens of charges and send somebody into the slammer for things that are hard to understand. It also doesn't help that judges tend to be former DAs. Or that DAs use plea bargains to bully somebody to bear witness against their main mark.
Also don't the Feds still pay corporate whistleblowers a percentage of the fines? A couple of years back I read of a guy who got 40 Megabucks for this.
As a private person I'd be much more afraid of the DOJ than some faceless corp.
Please cite the Constitution. What specific quote says the media is the fourth estate?
Even if the Constitution said that, the media has absolutely no power and no authority to make arrests. What good is telling the media if the media cannot arrest anyone?
I haven't got a clue what you are on about. Who said something about arresting somebody?
Media is there to keep the other 3 estates honest and the public informed. That's their job. And that's what I said. And because they fill in that role they are colloquially called the fourth estate.
This War On Sex is becoming ludicrous.
Presumably soldiers stationed in crisis areas are adults. Assuming soldiers still are mammals there's bound to be sex. And the need for casual sex will always be there. You shouldn't need to fill in a form(in triplicate) requisitioning a one-night-stand.
There is no need for regulation. The usual rules apply.
I had thought that was a huge problem when I got my old 32GB Nexus 7. I'm used to my 64GB Transformer Prime which I have fitted with a 64GB MicroSD and a 128GB SD Card. It isn't such a huge problem but I can live with that limitation on a device I mainly use when commuting. I wouldn't be able to live with it on my regular tablet.
No offense intended, but this isn't a review. Come again after you've actually used it.
Personally, I do not intend to buy the new Nexus 7 at least until it will be possible to build AOSP for it (but I might go out and buy the old one now:-). That said, I have nothing for or against it.
All I'm saying is that your comment did not add information. The comment you'll write in 24 hours likely will, however.
Shachar
The old Nexus 7 is an amazing thing. I had bought the 3G version on a whim and immediately regretted it. I did all my mobile computing on an Asus Transformer Prime, took it everywhere with me and really couldn't justify buying another toy. Long story short: I carry my Nexus 7 around with me all the time and my Transformer stays at home.
I WOULD have bought the Nexus 7 if there wasn't that AOSP bruhaha. We've been warned for months and still we get a Nexus device that isn't supported by AOSP because of proprietary drivers which won't even be released in binary form. And now this happens: http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/07/aosp-maintenance-head-leaves-role-in-wake-of-open-source-issues/
This feels wrong on so many levels.
No matter how thin it is, no matter how fast it is, no matter how well the display can be, it is still a tablet
Well, then don't buy one, and don't bother to let us all know how underwhelmed you are -- we're underwhelmed that you're underwhelmed.
What I am looking for - especially from tech firms such as Google - is something totally new, something that is revolutionary, not evolutionary
But you have NO idea of what that would be, and you're going to sulk until such time as they do? Right.
There's nothing revolutionary anymore in cars, and unfortunately, nor for the smartphones / tablets
And for the most part, this has been true in the industry for a very long time now. The machine on my desktop now is an exceedingly boring direct descendant of the one that sat on my desk 25 years ago -- a screen, keys, and a box full of stuff to make it go.
With a 4 digit ID, you should bloody well know that. Name 5 truly revolutionary pieces of technology in the last 25 years in the realm of computers... anything which came from existing technology in any way doesn't count. Because, after all, that's just evolutionary which seems to make you sad.
Tell you what, you go build something freakin' awesome, and when you get back, we'll all piss and moan about how it's not nearly cool enough.
Your existential malaise is something best savored by yourself.
While everything derives from everything(standing on the shoulders of giants) there are a couple of things that absolutely spring to mind:
-This ePaper thing. I've watched it growing from an idea to the Kindle eco system. It absolutely changed the way I consume the written word.
-Media compression. I have ripped all my CDs which I collected since the late 80ies. I've ripped all my DVDs which I bought since the 2000s. I've rebought a lot of my comic collection in a digital format. That also absolutely changed the way how I consume media.
-eCommerce. Back in the 80ies I was really, really happy if I could get the odd Stephen King or Garfield book in English. Booksellers rarely stocked them and anything I wanted(if I even knew it existed) had to be ordered. Now I have a wide range of things available on short notice. Even the things out of the ordinary.
-the WWW/search engines. When I got my first internet connection back at university Gopher still was a thing. It was arcane and something only for insiders. The sheer amount of infomation I now have at my finger-tips boggles the mind. When I learned to program I had actual books for APIs. Information is not readily available if you have to leaf through 3 volumes at 300 pages+ each. If you watch a movie and you stumble over a historical context that you weren't aware of you can search the net for it and have that information available. Before we had that you would have to try your luck with an encyclopedia which may or may not contain what you were looking for. If you could find it.
-global communication. We are now able to communicate with very little limitations with each other world wide. Before we had that ordinary people who never left their home country hardly got to share ideas or got confronted with other points of views from a different cultural background. We still suffer from the culture shock but I can't stress how much I learned about places without ever having been there.
If you only look for revolutionary stuff from a technical point of view then yeah, you only see the same old. But if you take a look at how technology alters your own behaviour then there has been a lot going on the last couple of years. Take it frome somebody who still remembers bits of the 70ies and the 80ies that life has changed quite a lot and our individual potential has increased drastically. Sadly, people still are kind of stupid. Which propably will not change anytime soon.
So what is the point of scaring people by giving dirty secrets to the media? The media can't stop any of it.
That's why the media is supposed to be the fourth estate. Keep the people informed so they vote with their...votes.
That's the theory. ATM the US media is in dire straits. Either they give the consumers what they want. Which seems to be news about people, bite-sized snappy headlines and barely justifiable opinions. Background information seems to take the back seat. Which is why bloggers and Twitter are such a big threat since journalism now has such a low quality standard that anybody can do it. And the other side of the "informed public" medal is the public. Voters tend to judge their officials by their words, not by their deeds. Take Obama for instance. While campaigning for his first term he said some very nice things. But now he is just another lawyer who made it big in politics. Guantanamo Bay still is synonymous with a travesty of justice. Extra-judicial killings via drones has become worse. He started a war on whistleblowers(but not on corporate whistleblowers, the DOJ still hands out a nice percentage of the takings to them). Federal law still is an overcriminalized vague mess and it is becoming worse. Foreign relations are still damaged. And they are not damaged because they were caught. They are damaged for what they did. He faced a major rebellion in the house over the NSA spying affair and yet he has the gall to make light of it on some late night TV talk show. That performance propably earned him a couple of brownie points with the public but not by doing something about the sad state the US currently is in.
Obama is a major disappointment. Everybody had assumed he knew better than that. For goodness sake, he has a strong background in constitutional law. And yet right under his nose all of the above happened. If W feigned ignorance on all that everybody would concur. Obama does not have that luxury.
Regarding Syria. It's Sunni vs. Shea. We don't really mind if the Sunni/Shea war starts up again. Why do you think we really went into Iraq? We won't have to invade Iran, Iran will invade Iraq. We will give Iraq just enough weapons to maintain the stalemate. Like we did in the 80s and Switzerland did in the 100years war.
Of course they can't say that out loud or it would make all the effort worthless.
Oh, it is far more complicated than that. It is not only religious, it also has Ba'ath, tribal and clan affiliations. And there are those who would love to have a western style democracy. There is very little good/bad down there. Lotsa grey and who turns out to be what is very hard to predict. Which is the reason why it is a very bad idea to send weapons because who would you give them to?
Same goes for Egypt. Who do you want to support? The former government who had no clue about the democratic proces, showed very little interest in that but still was democratically elected? Or the military who currently seems to be pulling the strings from backstage?
There are times when you can do very little by diplomacy. Especially with an unrelyable and unstable negotiation partner. There are times when you can do very little militarily. Once you've crushed their forces then what?
As frustrating it may be sometimes all you can do is damage control and give humanitarian aid to those who need it. These are the realities when dealing with failed and failing states in a worlds that doesn't lend itsself to distinctions like good and bad. In all honesty, all Kerry can hope to achieve is to get NATO/UN/a coalition to establish no-fly zones, maintain refugee camps, help coordinate the distribution of refugees(in case of Syria Turkey would very much appreciate any help since the border is swamped with Syrian refugees) and all the other non-glorious pesky BS.
Seriously, proper foreign policy is complex and can't be represented in mere headlines and news tickers beneath a Fox-style talking head news show.
Politicians should sign their platform as a contract and be held criminally liable when they deviate from non-ambiguous promises as soon as they actually are elected.
It's very easy to argue against something when you only read half of it.
...given how hard it is to legally prove something as perjury I would not be too astonished if such a scheme would be introduced. And applied electively to politicians who currently are in opposition.
Another vague law on a federal level is just what the US needs.
Wait, that also implies that Bush didn't singlehandedly start two wars, throw "terrorists" into gitmo to be held indefinitely, and crash the economy. Are you sure that your logic is correct there?
Nope. He didn't. He had an awful lot of help inside and outside of the US. The POTUS is not a dictator. He has however the choice of his advisors and I'm fairly certain his immediate circle won't go ahead with something as elaborate as the preparation of the Irak war(which was a masterful execution of legal, diplomatic and PR trickery...with no meaningful plan whatsoever what should happen after Saddam got ousted). He can do very little directly. But he can influence a lot. Which simply takes longer and may fail.
Even tho the POTUS has a lot of power because he is head of the executive branch and head of state(most countries keep those separate) he has very little legislative power. In fact he is unable to accomplish a lot of worthwhile things without substantial cooperation by both houses.
So your assessment is propably quite right. I always wondered why anybody would go to great pains to get that job. It doesn't seem to be worth it.
There have been plausible allegations concerning industrial espionage and Echolon back in the 90ies. This is hardly new. It's still despicable and one would wonder how one would ally with somebody who does this to you. The usual excuse for these things is that everybody does it. But that does not make it ok.
Whenever you hear a politician running on a "moral" platform remember that by "moral" they mean who and how you fuck. Nothing else.
You can do whatever you want within your borders, and choose the rules you want to live by. But don't take your stupid decisions out on everyone else. And for the love of god, EU & UN, stand up to this bully.
While it is true what you wrote a lot of these things were done by proxy. Supposedly to keep their hands clean and stay on the right side of the law(whichever side that may be).The result is that a lot of other countries are complicit.
Most of the Western World has cooperated with the US in their spying. Because ter'rists OHMIGOD!
A lot of the torturing was done by third party countries that were not so squeamish with CIA officials(or propably inofficials, heh) reaped the results.
Colour me shocked.
On top of the usual delays they find it hard to guarantee that their IT system is completely free of any security flaws whatsoever. If they manage to scientifically show the system is reasonably secure then I will hope to read the book and the acceptance speech for the Turing Prize. I will not however read the requirement documents. These will be absolute shambles and as thick as a couple of phonebooks.
Best of luck to our fellow geeks in the trenches of this ruddy mess. I've been there before and feel your pain. Here's a life lesson: try not to be a single cog in a 1000+ person project if you want to preserve your passion or indeed you will to live.
They ought to hand out something like Purple Hearts for projects like these.
1. Vote "None of the Above" if possible in all elections until candidates that agree with your political position run.
2. Vote any third party candidate possible. If enough of the vote is third party, a third party that represents us will appear.
3. Do not vote for any candidate other than these.
Eight years later we will start getting better candidates and the parties will start to crumble. The two parties are our problem, they have staked out nonsensical platforms by playing the opposite game. We spend trillions of dollars a year for this useless crap. Spying, prisoning, drug war, fill in the fscking blank.
If you identify as a Republican or a Democrat you are the reason this stuff keeps happening.
andy
The problem with voting in the last few years is that it was all about people and not about ideas.
The horrible transparency of the administration's agenda is staggering: fuck civil liberties; to hell with consumer rights; let's make civil infractions criminal offenses; let's use jackboot tactics to go after marijuana users; let's viciously and vindictively persecute those who try to expose government and corporate indiscretions by siccing our most petty, pea-brained people on them; let's lie, cheat, steal, bully, badger, and spy on everyone who could possibly be a threat. Essentially, the absolute primacy of government and corporate interests over individual rights. The only ones shittier are the Republicans, but not by much.
I honestly thought Obama would be different. Fuck me, right?!
Let's selectively prosecute whenever we feel like it. Let's bully everybody into plea-bargains to avoid 999 years of jail. Let's keep secret courts that decide what goes and what doesn't. Let's look after our campaign contributors.
Fuck all of us. Obama has a civil liberties and constitutional law background. He really does know better but he still goes ahead. Contrary to W he can't plausibly feign ignorance.
Fuck all of us. Both parties in congress are the same and only differ by the wool they pull over our eyes.
Try as you may you will always be in violation of some law or provision.
Maybe, but the real question should always come down to whether a jury will convict you.
You mention the UK, that make me think you are actually a UK citizen like me (sorry if I am wrong). In our case we are pretty lucky in terms of still having some semblance of a legal aid system that allows us to actually go to court if we think we broke the law but they jury would agree with our reasons for doing so and getting the state to pay for our defence. The problem with copyright law though is that most of the population eligible for jury duty (that includes me) actually supports it. Without copyright law you would be able to take other peoples digital works and then sell them as your own, that is simply not right.
There are a million problems with copyright law as it stands but throwing it all in the bin and having nothing in its place would be no better apart from for people who just want free access to everything and have no money to pay for it. The only time I think we can get rid of copyright law completely is when we also do away with the concept of money.
See, this is where I think you are wrong. For copyright to exist you only need a law that defines the concept and limits its duration and point out that companies can transfer licenses. The rest is best left to civil law. Criminal law is for clear-cut crimes. You leave the grey areas to civil law. And copyright is at the moment not only grey but also very very muddy.
Copyright was introduced to have a framework how a creator can benefit from his works and to control its distribution. Afterwards it was supposed to be transferred into the public domain because that's what defines culture. Cultural heritage was always produced by somebody. Now they turn this into a rent-seeking scheme and by my definition of culture which belongs to everybody we now have corporate ownership of everything that was produced during the last 50 years. Or to put it bluntly: our culture hasn't progressed any during the last 50 years. Now we pile criminal law on top of that.
In my book furthering of our culture is much more important in the long term than the revenue of BMG/Universal/Sony/whoever in the next financial quarter. This overstatement of the copyright holder's rights have resulted in quite a lot works that simply have been lost either by destruction or by not being released anymore. If such a long copyright(which is a granted priviledge, an exception of the default which is public domain) is to be upheld then there should be strings attached. Like the copyright holder demonstrating that he is preserving the work for the time when it enters the public domain.
I repeat: copyright is a priviledge and should be treated as such.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't count for *any* syndication. Even in-country when they're repeated on "Dave" the music gets changed (most noticable in the 'construction' montages where the A-Team theme is conspicuous by its absence)
I wouldn't know since I don't get Dave.
My point is that if you pirate the whole stuff because their sales strategy is retarded then it's their own goddamn fault.
Also, how did Top Gear become a global(except in France) phenomenon? That's pure and simple piracy.
C'mon, they didn't want a "proper test case". They wanted a "see, pirates pirate anyway, even if we reach out to them".
My point exactly. The whole thing was a dishonest publicity stunt.
I live in Germany and I wasn't aware of it. If something like this isn't heavily publisized then the old habits prevail. They should have taken out ads on Pirate Bay and gone to the popular media if they had wanted a proper test case.
/. is not publicity). And the publishers tried to sell overcoming regional releases as something new while we have been blissfully ignoring it for years.
The Internet has no oceans. Yet they still think that dividing the world into regions is still viable. The other heavily pirated TV show that I am aware of is the British Top Gear. They can not release the full show on DVD even though they'd love to. they can't do it because they use a lot of music. The executive producer of that show said that it is nearly impossible to negotiate deals with the music industry for a global release on DVD. They'd have to talk with so many rights holders they wouldn't know where to begin.
Another annoying habit that stems from this region thinking is what they did in Germany. They sold(and still sell) DVDs with the German audio track only. Sometimes if they sell them with the English audio track they have German subtitles that can't be swithced off(VLC ignores this madness). All for publishing reasons.
So the Breaking Bad experiment failed due to lack of publicity(making front page on
Step 1: Kim Dotcom starts Mega Crypto, which is promptly adopted by the world's political dissidents and leakers.
Step 2: All pending government litigation against Mega suspiciously disappears and his assets are unfrozen.
The guy's accustomed to his ill-gotten gains -- even setting aside the rampant piracy of Megaupload, he's a convicted fraudster and embezzler, and has bribed public officials for protection before.
I suspect that if offered the choice between losing his $20 million house, his 12 cars, his yacht, and becoming a partner of the US government, it wouldn't take him much to crack.
He also made a name for himself in Germany for selling out phreakers to the feds when he got cornered. The man is an unstrustworthy megalomaniac.
Checking for new mail via IMAP every 30 minutes or so(I check every 5 minutes on my business account so I can react immediately for extra brownie points) is sufficient and doesn't drain battery too much.
Who in his right mind would do Webmail on a phone/tablet? Also what does the used application protocol have to do with security? Wether you send unencrypted IMAP/SMPT or unencrypted HTTP doesn't make any difference. Also if your email is on some harddrive anywhere and it is unencrypted or somebody you can't trust has a key to it then it is quite public.
And what is the name for all of the businesses who just merrily went along with government requests?
Corporations. They make fascism much easier to implement. An out of control judiciary provides the nudges necessary to force most businesses to adopt a corporate form.
They so often use wishy-washy tools to convict people it beggars belief. WTF is mail/wire fraud? WTF is obstruction of justice? The Book doesn't clearly tell. And if they find you talked to somebody about this then they'll slap conspiracy on top of it. The general strategy seems to be to slap charge upon charge upon charge onto those cases in the hope that something might stick. And this is usually when juries will pronounce somebody guilty of a couple of the dozens of charges and send somebody into the slammer for things that are hard to understand. It also doesn't help that judges tend to be former DAs. Or that DAs use plea bargains to bully somebody to bear witness against their main mark.
Also don't the Feds still pay corporate whistleblowers a percentage of the fines? A couple of years back I read of a guy who got 40 Megabucks for this.
As a private person I'd be much more afraid of the DOJ than some faceless corp.
Please cite the Constitution. What specific quote says the media is the fourth estate?
Even if the Constitution said that, the media has absolutely no power and no authority to make arrests. What good is telling the media if the media cannot arrest anyone?
I haven't got a clue what you are on about. Who said something about arresting somebody?
Media is there to keep the other 3 estates honest and the public informed. That's their job. And that's what I said. And because they fill in that role they are colloquially called the fourth estate.
This War On Sex is becoming ludicrous.
Presumably soldiers stationed in crisis areas are adults. Assuming soldiers still are mammals there's bound to be sex. And the need for casual sex will always be there. You shouldn't need to fill in a form(in triplicate) requisitioning a one-night-stand.
There is no need for regulation. The usual rules apply.
Also no flash slot.
I had thought that was a huge problem when I got my old 32GB Nexus 7. I'm used to my 64GB Transformer Prime which I have fitted with a 64GB MicroSD and a 128GB SD Card. It isn't such a huge problem but I can live with that limitation on a device I mainly use when commuting. I wouldn't be able to live with it on my regular tablet.
I have the original, and even brand new the battery life sucked
...and charging over USB takes forever. But it is quite fast when using the original docking station.
No offense intended, but this isn't a review. Come again after you've actually used it.
Personally, I do not intend to buy the new Nexus 7 at least until it will be possible to build AOSP for it (but I might go out and buy the old one now :-). That said, I have nothing for or against it.
All I'm saying is that your comment did not add information. The comment you'll write in 24 hours likely will, however.
Shachar
The old Nexus 7 is an amazing thing. I had bought the 3G version on a whim and immediately regretted it. I did all my mobile computing on an Asus Transformer Prime, took it everywhere with me and really couldn't justify buying another toy. Long story short: I carry my Nexus 7 around with me all the time and my Transformer stays at home.
I WOULD have bought the Nexus 7 if there wasn't that AOSP bruhaha. We've been warned for months and still we get a Nexus device that isn't supported by AOSP because of proprietary drivers which won't even be released in binary form. And now this happens: http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/07/aosp-maintenance-head-leaves-role-in-wake-of-open-source-issues/
This feels wrong on so many levels.
Well, then don't buy one, and don't bother to let us all know how underwhelmed you are -- we're underwhelmed that you're underwhelmed.
But you have NO idea of what that would be, and you're going to sulk until such time as they do? Right.
And for the most part, this has been true in the industry for a very long time now. The machine on my desktop now is an exceedingly boring direct descendant of the one that sat on my desk 25 years ago -- a screen, keys, and a box full of stuff to make it go.
With a 4 digit ID, you should bloody well know that. Name 5 truly revolutionary pieces of technology in the last 25 years in the realm of computers ... anything which came from existing technology in any way doesn't count. Because, after all, that's just evolutionary which seems to make you sad.
Tell you what, you go build something freakin' awesome, and when you get back, we'll all piss and moan about how it's not nearly cool enough.
Your existential malaise is something best savored by yourself.
While everything derives from everything(standing on the shoulders of giants) there are a couple of things that absolutely spring to mind:
-This ePaper thing. I've watched it growing from an idea to the Kindle eco system. It absolutely changed the way I consume the written word.
-Media compression. I have ripped all my CDs which I collected since the late 80ies. I've ripped all my DVDs which I bought since the 2000s. I've rebought a lot of my comic collection in a digital format. That also absolutely changed the way how I consume media.
-eCommerce. Back in the 80ies I was really, really happy if I could get the odd Stephen King or Garfield book in English. Booksellers rarely stocked them and anything I wanted(if I even knew it existed) had to be ordered. Now I have a wide range of things available on short notice. Even the things out of the ordinary.
-the WWW/search engines. When I got my first internet connection back at university Gopher still was a thing. It was arcane and something only for insiders. The sheer amount of infomation I now have at my finger-tips boggles the mind. When I learned to program I had actual books for APIs. Information is not readily available if you have to leaf through 3 volumes at 300 pages+ each. If you watch a movie and you stumble over a historical context that you weren't aware of you can search the net for it and have that information available. Before we had that you would have to try your luck with an encyclopedia which may or may not contain what you were looking for. If you could find it.
-global communication. We are now able to communicate with very little limitations with each other world wide. Before we had that ordinary people who never left their home country hardly got to share ideas or got confronted with other points of views from a different cultural background. We still suffer from the culture shock but I can't stress how much I learned about places without ever having been there.
If you only look for revolutionary stuff from a technical point of view then yeah, you only see the same old. But if you take a look at how technology alters your own behaviour then there has been a lot going on the last couple of years. Take it frome somebody who still remembers bits of the 70ies and the 80ies that life has changed quite a lot and our individual potential has increased drastically. Sadly, people still are kind of stupid. Which propably will not change anytime soon.
So what is the point of scaring people by giving dirty secrets to the media? The media can't stop any of it.
That's why the media is supposed to be the fourth estate. Keep the people informed so they vote with their...votes.
That's the theory. ATM the US media is in dire straits. Either they give the consumers what they want. Which seems to be news about people, bite-sized snappy headlines and barely justifiable opinions. Background information seems to take the back seat. Which is why bloggers and Twitter are such a big threat since journalism now has such a low quality standard that anybody can do it. And the other side of the "informed public" medal is the public. Voters tend to judge their officials by their words, not by their deeds. Take Obama for instance. While campaigning for his first term he said some very nice things. But now he is just another lawyer who made it big in politics. Guantanamo Bay still is synonymous with a travesty of justice. Extra-judicial killings via drones has become worse. He started a war on whistleblowers(but not on corporate whistleblowers, the DOJ still hands out a nice percentage of the takings to them). Federal law still is an overcriminalized vague mess and it is becoming worse. Foreign relations are still damaged. And they are not damaged because they were caught. They are damaged for what they did. He faced a major rebellion in the house over the NSA spying affair and yet he has the gall to make light of it on some late night TV talk show. That performance propably earned him a couple of brownie points with the public but not by doing something about the sad state the US currently is in.
Obama is a major disappointment. Everybody had assumed he knew better than that. For goodness sake, he has a strong background in constitutional law. And yet right under his nose all of the above happened. If W feigned ignorance on all that everybody would concur. Obama does not have that luxury.
Regarding Syria. It's Sunni vs. Shea. We don't really mind if the Sunni/Shea war starts up again. Why do you think we really went into Iraq? We won't have to invade Iran, Iran will invade Iraq. We will give Iraq just enough weapons to maintain the stalemate. Like we did in the 80s and Switzerland did in the 100years war.
Of course they can't say that out loud or it would make all the effort worthless.
Oh, it is far more complicated than that. It is not only religious, it also has Ba'ath, tribal and clan affiliations. And there are those who would love to have a western style democracy. There is very little good/bad down there. Lotsa grey and who turns out to be what is very hard to predict. Which is the reason why it is a very bad idea to send weapons because who would you give them to?
Same goes for Egypt. Who do you want to support? The former government who had no clue about the democratic proces, showed very little interest in that but still was democratically elected? Or the military who currently seems to be pulling the strings from backstage?
There are times when you can do very little by diplomacy. Especially with an unrelyable and unstable negotiation partner. There are times when you can do very little militarily. Once you've crushed their forces then what?
As frustrating it may be sometimes all you can do is damage control and give humanitarian aid to those who need it. These are the realities when dealing with failed and failing states in a worlds that doesn't lend itsself to distinctions like good and bad. In all honesty, all Kerry can hope to achieve is to get NATO/UN/a coalition to establish no-fly zones, maintain refugee camps, help coordinate the distribution of refugees(in case of Syria Turkey would very much appreciate any help since the border is swamped with Syrian refugees) and all the other non-glorious pesky BS.
Seriously, proper foreign policy is complex and can't be represented in mere headlines and news tickers beneath a Fox-style talking head news show.
Politicians should sign their platform as a contract and be held criminally liable when they deviate from non-ambiguous promises as soon as they actually are elected.
It's very easy to argue against something when you only read half of it.
...given how hard it is to legally prove something as perjury I would not be too astonished if such a scheme would be introduced. And applied electively to politicians who currently are in opposition.
Another vague law on a federal level is just what the US needs.
Wait, that also implies that Bush didn't singlehandedly start two wars, throw "terrorists" into gitmo to be held indefinitely, and crash the economy. Are you sure that your logic is correct there?
Nope. He didn't. He had an awful lot of help inside and outside of the US. The POTUS is not a dictator. He has however the choice of his advisors and I'm fairly certain his immediate circle won't go ahead with something as elaborate as the preparation of the Irak war(which was a masterful execution of legal, diplomatic and PR trickery...with no meaningful plan whatsoever what should happen after Saddam got ousted). He can do very little directly. But he can influence a lot. Which simply takes longer and may fail.
Even tho the POTUS has a lot of power because he is head of the executive branch and head of state(most countries keep those separate) he has very little legislative power. In fact he is unable to accomplish a lot of worthwhile things without substantial cooperation by both houses.
So your assessment is propably quite right. I always wondered why anybody would go to great pains to get that job. It doesn't seem to be worth it.
Isn't that what a summit is for, to resolve issues? The summit is cancelled because there are too many issues?
Nope. Negotiations are done well in advance. these summits are only for shake-hands and grinning into cameras and presenting the results.
Think about it: How much face time do you think they have at those summits? How much detail can be discussed? Not too much, I'd wager.
Also putting "civil liberties" and whatnot on the agenda is a surefire way to ensure there is no progress whatsoever.
I kinda like my society. I don't really care about yours, whatever country that is....
And I wonder why there are no tourists coming from the US of A. Lotsa Canadians, tho. Never thought there were that many of them...
There have been plausible allegations concerning industrial espionage and Echolon back in the 90ies. This is hardly new. It's still despicable and one would wonder how one would ally with somebody who does this to you. The usual excuse for these things is that everybody does it. But that does not make it ok.
Whenever you hear a politician running on a "moral" platform remember that by "moral" they mean who and how you fuck. Nothing else.
You can do whatever you want within your borders, and choose the rules you want to live by. But don't take your stupid decisions out on everyone else. And for the love of god, EU & UN, stand up to this bully.
While it is true what you wrote a lot of these things were done by proxy. Supposedly to keep their hands clean and stay on the right side of the law(whichever side that may be).The result is that a lot of other countries are complicit.
Most of the Western World has cooperated with the US in their spying. Because ter'rists OHMIGOD!
A lot of the torturing was done by third party countries that were not so squeamish with CIA officials(or propably inofficials, heh) reaped the results.
We are pretty much all fucked.
Colour me shocked.
On top of the usual delays they find it hard to guarantee that their IT system is completely free of any security flaws whatsoever. If they manage to scientifically show the system is reasonably secure then I will hope to read the book and the acceptance speech for the Turing Prize. I will not however read the requirement documents. These will be absolute shambles and as thick as a couple of phonebooks.
Best of luck to our fellow geeks in the trenches of this ruddy mess. I've been there before and feel your pain. Here's a life lesson: try not to be a single cog in a 1000+ person project if you want to preserve your passion or indeed you will to live.
They ought to hand out something like Purple Hearts for projects like these.
Americans like me just have to:
1. Vote "None of the Above" if possible in all elections until candidates that agree with your political position run.
2. Vote any third party candidate possible. If enough of the vote is third party, a third party that represents us will appear.
3. Do not vote for any candidate other than these.
Eight years later we will start getting better candidates and the parties will start to crumble. The two parties are our problem, they have staked out nonsensical platforms by playing the opposite game. We spend trillions of dollars a year for this useless crap. Spying, prisoning, drug war, fill in the fscking blank.
If you identify as a Republican or a Democrat you are the reason this stuff keeps happening.
andy
The problem with voting in the last few years is that it was all about people and not about ideas.
The horrible transparency of the administration's agenda is staggering: fuck civil liberties; to hell with consumer rights; let's make civil infractions criminal offenses; let's use jackboot tactics to go after marijuana users; let's viciously and vindictively persecute those who try to expose government and corporate indiscretions by siccing our most petty, pea-brained people on them; let's lie, cheat, steal, bully, badger, and spy on everyone who could possibly be a threat. Essentially, the absolute primacy of government and corporate interests over individual rights. The only ones shittier are the Republicans, but not by much.
I honestly thought Obama would be different. Fuck me, right?!
Let's selectively prosecute whenever we feel like it. Let's bully everybody into plea-bargains to avoid 999 years of jail. Let's keep secret courts that decide what goes and what doesn't. Let's look after our campaign contributors.
Fuck all of us. Obama has a civil liberties and constitutional law background. He really does know better but he still goes ahead. Contrary to W he can't plausibly feign ignorance.
Fuck all of us. Both parties in congress are the same and only differ by the wool they pull over our eyes.
Try as you may you will always be in violation of some law or provision.
Maybe, but the real question should always come down to whether a jury will convict you.
You mention the UK, that make me think you are actually a UK citizen like me (sorry if I am wrong). In our case we are pretty lucky in terms of still having some semblance of a legal aid system that allows us to actually go to court if we think we broke the law but they jury would agree with our reasons for doing so and getting the state to pay for our defence. The problem with copyright law though is that most of the population eligible for jury duty (that includes me) actually supports it. Without copyright law you would be able to take other peoples digital works and then sell them as your own, that is simply not right.
There are a million problems with copyright law as it stands but throwing it all in the bin and having nothing in its place would be no better apart from for people who just want free access to everything and have no money to pay for it. The only time I think we can get rid of copyright law completely is when we also do away with the concept of money.
See, this is where I think you are wrong. For copyright to exist you only need a law that defines the concept and limits its duration and point out that companies can transfer licenses. The rest is best left to civil law. Criminal law is for clear-cut crimes. You leave the grey areas to civil law. And copyright is at the moment not only grey but also very very muddy.
Copyright was introduced to have a framework how a creator can benefit from his works and to control its distribution. Afterwards it was supposed to be transferred into the public domain because that's what defines culture. Cultural heritage was always produced by somebody. Now they turn this into a rent-seeking scheme and by my definition of culture which belongs to everybody we now have corporate ownership of everything that was produced during the last 50 years. Or to put it bluntly: our culture hasn't progressed any during the last 50 years. Now we pile criminal law on top of that.
In my book furthering of our culture is much more important in the long term than the revenue of BMG/Universal/Sony/whoever in the next financial quarter. This overstatement of the copyright holder's rights have resulted in quite a lot works that simply have been lost either by destruction or by not being released anymore. If such a long copyright(which is a granted priviledge, an exception of the default which is public domain) is to be upheld then there should be strings attached. Like the copyright holder demonstrating that he is preserving the work for the time when it enters the public domain.
I repeat: copyright is a priviledge and should be treated as such.