I was jubilant when I read of how District Court Judge Susan Illston declared those damned National Security Letters unconstitutional. Despite the epic waves of psuedo-cynism, which apparently have overtaken slashdot today, as evidenced here, this is major step in the right direction. While everybody and their brother loves to hate on the government, regardless of the ruling party and their respective policies, the real culprit in the post 9/11 dementia, which held America in it's sway for more than a decade now, has been the "American people", who blindly obliged and acquiesced to every absurdity coming from congress and the executive.
The fact that is has taken so long for a judge to point out the most basic issue of constitutionallity in regards to NSL's is what is really incredible. Our federal judges have been so inept and so asleep-at-the-wheel for such a long time now people are almost shocked to see a judge actually point out what is painfully obvious- federal judges are not beholden to either congress or the executive branch. On one level federal judges are nominally governed by the Justice Department and Attorney General, both of which are functions of the executive branch of government, yet, more importantly, they answer ultimately only to the supreme court. The federal government can only tell a judge that they have no jurisdiction over a given law, if the judge buys into the notion that "father knows best" and is willing to allow the federal government absolute impunity in the name of national defense, ie. secrecy, which in the post 9/11 world has been used to justify almost everything.
This willingness to allow the federal government total impunity in the name of "security", on the basis that our "enemies" might win against us if actually follow our own constituion, where secrecy demands from the feds trumps every other right, is what has damaged our society-not the policies of the government-but that we let them get away with this bullshit, is the tragedy of what really happened post 9/11. If the citizens of this country are so craven in their apparent respect of authority then even a different administration, which perhaps was less likely to play the patriot card used so carelessly and frequently by the predecessor administration, will still be given to use the leeway that the citizens blindly handed over, because we let them get away with this bullshit.
Susan Illiston made the right call. The real proof for just how insanely authoritarian our current administration is will be shown if they attempt to fight this all the way to the supreme court. I doubt they will. I doubt it because they know that NSL's are unjust and indefensible, even if the government has been drunk on the power that NSL's have given them, and lord knows it is difficult for folks to walk away from power however unjustly granted.
It may take another decade for America to completely stand up after having been on our collective knees for so long, but this is an important step in that direction.
The fact is the vast majority of Americans are up to their necks in debt(mortgages, student loans, credit cards etc.). If your wage only ever enables you to maintain that debt, you are effectively an economic slave, perhaps you like the term indebtured servitude, or what we used to call serfs better.
Moreover from a capitalist perspective you are a SLAVE, because you, being in debt, are hostage and easily exploitable, your ability to demand wages is weakened which means the capitalist can extract maximum profit from your labor, and because you are beholden to debtors, you are beholden to those who will pay you a wage.
That summary would be a joke if it was even remotely funny. Talk about missing the plot. Everyone should be proud of the CWA and the IBEW workers who organized one of the most important and successful strikes in recent memory. Let's get the facts straight: On the eve of the strike, Verizon announced it would pay a special $10 billion dividend to shareholders. At the same time, its negotiators were pushing for $1 billion in concessions from workers. The company has made $3 billion already this year, and nearly $20 billion in the last four years.
So Verizon, which has been insanely profitable in recent years, decided to reward it's hardworking employees by attempting to slash their health care benefits, freeze their pensions, denie new hires pensions and health care benefits and by attempting to prevent new hires from organizing in unions. All the while Verizon has been outsourcing more and more positions to firms overseas. Scabs struck 15 picketers during the two week strike. And FOX news, the likely source of this so called "summary", has been demonizing the hard working union members 24/7. While Verizon shareholders are swimming in the dough and Verizon execs laugh all the way to the bank.
I personally will never give Verizon one red cent until they start to do right by their employees. Greedy friggin corporate bastards, the lot of 'em.
Well I guess I may be crazy. Your post reaks of defeatism-as if we were incapable of rising to the challenge. Off the bat here are a couple of potential solutions:
Within the next few years the transition from ipv4 to ipv6 will eventually happen. This provides a unique window of opportunity. Countless millions of devices will need to be replaced because they do not properly support ipv6. If there was a carpe diem attitude about this, it would be a great opportunity to resolve it.
I may be wrong but I believe network devices still are FCC regulated(at least all 3g/4g/wireless etc. are). If so the FCC could issue a new requirement for certification: all network devices must conform to TCP congestion avoidance algorithms, which means minimal buffering so these algorithms can work. Any device manufactured which failed to make to the changes to their hardware would not get their equipment certified.
If we in America fail to do so the EU probably will. Simple regulation can go a long way in correcting such problems.
Yes the problem is daunting and vast, but that is no good reason to not try to resolve it. Yes most "solutions" are hacks-but this particular problem threatens the entire basis of the global digital economy, I think the stakes are too high for people to just paper over the problem.
At the least network driver programmers could change their code to not use all of the available ram buffers. This would help a lot.
Maybe I am an optimist. Maybe I'm a dreamer-but I'm not the only one.....:)
I discovered this series of blog posts about 2 months ago, when he accidentally published one of his blog posts prematurely. I started reading it and followed the links and saw that this was a like a sleuth tale-if I had started reading this with his very first blog on the topic I would have had no idea where he was going with this. Now as to why this contribution by Jim Gettys does the world a great service:
Gettys is not pointing fingers at someone. The problem he is describing is truly vast, and involves lots of different people in different industries(router manufactures, ISP's, kernel driver authors, carrier grade network manufactures, etc.) with, presumably, a myriad of different intentions. The problem has been building over a long time-this didn't start yesterday, and won't be solved in a short time span, without a concerted effort on the part of everyone involved in all of these divergent industries, who often have quite divergent interests.
This approach that Gettys takes allows him to describe a problem which confronts everyone. By taking the high road and not pointing fingers he is able address an issue in such a way that a lot of the people who did contribute to this problem can recognize what they have done and own it, without being labelled, accused or feeling attacked. This should be a lesson to anyone who really wants to redress an issue that effects everyone.
Gettys develops this theme over many, many blog posts. It makes for some of the best internet reading I have experienced in years. Things only gradually become clearer-not merely what the problem is, but also all of the issues involved in it. I can read away in the internet for months at a time and not learn as much as I did by reading this series of posts.
Gettys knows what he is talking about. He developed this theme by talking with lots of experts -engineers at the ISP, people who played a pivotal role in the creation of the www and network specialists. He himself is not a network specialist, but he went out and met with people to discuss his findings and took clues and information from these exchanges to inform him and his quest to find out what was going on.
The series is short on answers. It may prove frustrating to many that he offers so little in the way of solutions to this problem. But this this due to the fact that the problem cannot be resolved by you, the end user. To solve this problem means rearchitecting countless millions of devices and altering hundreds of thousands of lines of code in multiple OS's.
Failure to redress this problem means that every effort to decrease latency by upping available bandwidth or upgrading network infrastructure will fail to deliver. If packets are not dropped fast, due to excessive buffering, the negotiation process fails, which invariably means congestion, which means latency-only something that addresses this issue has any chance of actually effecting change. Saying that this problem is just an issue already solved by QOS show that you don't understand the problem.
One of the first thoughts I had reading this was: if the techs on wallstreet read this article they will inevitably exploit this issue to win precious milliseconds on the stock exchange-ring a bell?
Any ISP could exploit this issue to offer a relative market advantage. Sadly when resolving an issue is in everybody's interest, market players will exploit the issue for their own relative gain. Getting everyone to actually tackle this is going to a gargantuan task.
Typical entitlement mentality. You seem to think because you have more relative wealth than someone else that you should be entitled to greater political enfranchisement. This thinking coupled with the supreme court decision which equated money with political speech and the other decision that equated corporations with individuals is the legal precedent for Citizens United.
In a democratic society all citizens have the same degree of political enfranchisement. It is the equality of the voices of the citizenry which makes a democracy democratic. In any political system where some are privileged or entitled
to have more political enfranchisement than others, that political system is undemocratic.
Unfortunately America has had to struggle to become democratic since it's inception-it did not start out democratic, and it still has a long way to go to achieve it. All the while Americans have been fed this line of bs about being democratic,when in fact America has ever only aspired to democratic ideals, so most Americans assume our society *is* democratic.
Yet simple reflection on the history of America reveals that with each expansion of enfranchisement(former slaves, women, abolition of jim crowe laws) there has been movement afoot to diminish the efficacy of said enfranchisement by privileging certain classes and giving them a sense of entitlement-entitlement to greater political power, at the expense of others. Corporations are merely the newest class of "citizens" to be entitled to more political power than ordinary people.
If there is ever to be any real progress towards realizing real democracy in America, the financing of political campaigns must be taken out of private sphere. All monies of political campaigns should be drawn from a public trust paid into by citizens and available to any and all candidates that can prove a degree of viable public support(5% of the population in the form of petitions to be listed on the ballot box). And to further ensure that each persons vote counts, an instant runoff voting system would go a long way to fully realizing the democratic ideals this nation was founded on.
Congratulations your level of insight has just illuminated the real solution to this issue: NOT!
The guns that fuel Mexico's bloody drug war come from the United States of America, where we are apparently just a little too dumb for sensible gun control.
And the money to pay for them comes from drug sales.
People who pay for dope should realize that they are funding a network of gangs and cartels that murders far more people than the more familiar flavor of terrorist does. Ideally we would decriminalize the drugs and thereby yank the support out from under these people. But that ain't going to happen, so if you happen to use recreational drugs, please do your fellow man a favor and stop.
It is only not going to happen as long as we have stupid knee-jerk reactions to complex social issues.
You brilliant insight is that this entire problem is simply individual behavior -ie. a personal problem.
Exactly how many of your brain cells got turned on between your ears to reach this oh-so illuminating solution?
Typical, brain-dead, conservative answer to every complex social issue-it's your personal fault and if only you would take responsibility the problem would magically go away.
Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.
Millions of people incarcerated.
For profit prison industry.
For profit prison labor.
Merchants of death, capitalizing on this(gun sellers).
10,000's of employers subjecting their employees to drug-testing, when no employer should ever have that right.
Countless billions wasted, and countless numbers of police who have lost their lives fighting an asinine drug war which has had 0 positive effect since it started.
As long as people keep coming up with radical reductionist answers to complex problems- as long as every societal issue boils down to a personal problem-yep nothing is going to change.
This is my thought too. I think it's a good thing to have a venue where evidence of wrongdoing can be leaked. For example, I didn't have an issue when they leaked the video of the Baghdad strike that killed the Reuters journalist and other unarmed civilians. The military was trying to cover it up, and the video showed evidence of possible wrongdoing. But they shouldn't leak something just because they can. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for the military to keep much of their information classified.
And there are perfectly legitimate reasons for exposing such classified information to the general public. WE, the Citizens, have a right to know what is going on. The military has a right to attempt to control and classify information they hold as being valuable. I do not fault the military for attempting to prevent the dissemination of such material. This is how the military works- NEED TO KNOW basis. But when the media fundamentally fails to uncover and accurately report on what OUR military is doing(whether by virtue of being co-opted by the military(embedding reporters) or by outlandish censorship privileges granted to the military buy OUR executive branch, and when wars have been going on for nearly a decade, with no real end in sight, and when the war itself has become so routine and mundane that the vast majority of Americans live their lives as if there was no war going on because they have become so perfectly isolated from it and anaesthetized to reporting of it that for all practical purposes it does not exist for them-there exists a perfectly legitimate right, and moreover a moral imperative to shatter the status quo and disrupt the anaesthetized conscience of the masses and challenge the unchallenged legitimacy of actions by our military, which are funded with our tax dollars and which are claiming the lives of our sons and daughters and killing and maiming tens of thousands of war victims.
The day will never come that there is any transparency in the doings of OUR military. The military only functions in so far as it controls information. Sure the exposure of such information effects the functioning of the military- to expect the military to react in any way other than how they have responded to these leaks, is at best pathetic naievete, at worst simple disingenuousness. But the sovereign, WE THE PEOPLE, is the ultimate arbitor over what information should be withheld from us and what information we should have access to. The government is only a PROXY for WE THE PEOPLE. And each time we citizens forget and/or neglect this fact we find ourselves with atrocities committed by our government and by our military IN OUR NAME. No governmental or military necessity will ever ultimately trump the sovereigns right to know, AS LONG AS WE FIGHT FOR IT, only when we acquiesce to authority, AUTHORITY GIVEN BY US, are we held to be treasonous or illegitimate in our rightful pursuit of knowledge pertaining to what our government and military does, IN OUR OWN NAME.
Flo you make some very good reasoned arguments. (btw. thanks for not ripping me to shreds-you undoubtedly have more experience in this area than I do). But I still run into a fundamental problem. I do not believe that Google is doing what they are doing out of some kind of benevolence or good natured kindness. They undoubtedly have a strategy behind their actions which I can only speculate about. But I still can't quite reconcile what you are saying about Googles actions. How can one (at once, tertium non datur) provide indemnification for users(commercial entities in this case) who would make use of Googles patents on vp8, without in so doing creating yet another protection racket(ie. even if it is good intentioned, which I would not assume, they would be giving someone promises/pledges of legal indemnification, which validates/proves the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, from which the patent-trolls(eg. Larry Horn) profits? I understand your reasoning that *users* are not being protected by Google from patent litigation, that Google is only protecting itself, first and foremost. But if they were to take this protection of users on themselves, how would they then differ from eg. MPEG-LA(ie. they would be saying in effect, if you use our software under our license we will protect you....which sounds an awful lot like what the patent trolls are saying(and this isn't just an issue of "words" this is the rhetorical constructs which define the entire medium of FUD which led us into the patent insanity in the first place)).
That conclusion is incorrect. Those who may want to assert their rights against WebM simply won't use it in their own products, at least not until the situation has been definitively resolved. Those who want to use it in their own products, conversely, wouldn't assert patents against it anyway. You talk about broad industry support but then you should look at the list of MPEG LA contributors and compare it to the list of WebM adopters. You should then also consider the quantity and relevance of the patents contributed by those parties who haven't adopted WebM and therefore still have every possibility to assert those rights.
You are undoubtedly correct in terms of considering the quantity and relevance of the contributed patents. But in a period of perhaps 12 weeks, since Google purchased On2, they have amassed a broad industry support, which although is not as numerous as MPEG-LA, is not only impressive, given how short a time period this has been worked towards, but significant due to the relative importance of the companies listed as supporting webm to the industry as a whole(ie. these are not small-fry, insiginificant players). Undoubtedly those not joining up may indeed have patents, or a patent interest/involvement in the MPEG-LA. It is always right to recognize the significance of actions not taken, support not offered, expressions not expressed(ie. just because nothing is being said does not mean that "nothing" is at work.)
I can tell you based on my experience in discussing patent policy with politicians that it's the very opposite when lawmakers are approached about whether software should or should not be patentable (as it happened here in Europe a few years back). In that situation, those who advocate software patents claim that there really isn't any example of serious negative impact of those patents etc., not even on open source (of which they know that it does matter to a number of politicians).
I don't think this is necessarily contradictory. Sure it makes sense they would argue: "ahh don't worry about these patent issues, they are no big deal, they won't have any bad effects etc." but they only have the luxury of arguing so because they have already created this atmosphere of insane FUD regarding "intellectual property rights", ie. they create FUD context and then within that context they present patents as the solution the situation they have created and from which they profit.
Listen you can't speak out of both sides of your mouth at once. You cannot claim to be against software patents and vilify some group for failing to provide patent indemnification in the same breath. Providing patent indemnification is nothing other than racketeering, those purporting to do so are rackets(ie. MPEG-LA). I applaud the work of those who fight against software patents. But when you argue that Google should be providing patent indemnification you are actively undermining any strategy to rid the world of software patents. Shy of getting the laws regarding software patents changed(ie prohibiting them in the first place), the kind of patent provisions provided in Googles new license for webm *is* the most effective way of fighting software patents. Because of the shitty patent system in place whole industries have arisen which produce nothing other than Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
In fact, it is hard to speak about patents *at all* without engaging in the same FUD-because FUD is the medium of the existence of patent speculator industry(of which Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG-LA, is a known patent-troll par-excellence). One aspect of the fight against software patents is the desire to protect the *users* from being sued into oblivion by patent holding entities(either patent-trolls or companies engaging in patent-trolling). Yet claiming that *users* should be indemnified *is* the raison-d'etre of patent racketeering industry. So if you argue that Google is failing to protect *users* you are, in stating such, proving, providing, and furthering the self-justification that such patent rackets(MPEG-LA) use themselves. And in so doing your words of caution and concern are nothing more than additional weapons in the arsenals of thepatent rackets ideological propaganda. The laws concerning patents(what is patentable, the terms of patents etc.) will only change once the patent situation in general has been sufficiently defused so as to limit the actual perceived value of patents. By insisting that *uers* should be indemnified one is ratcheting up the perceived patent threat, artificially inflating the value of said patents, which directly works against the goal of eliminating software patents. As long as everyone is terrified of potential patent suits those who support software patents already have their case(ie. why we supposedly need software patents) made for them by the very perceived fear. We must break this cycle. Googles new license goes an awful long way towards defusing the actual FUD atmosphere.
Stating that Google is exposing the community to patent litigation is literally the exact opposite of what is really happening. By getting extremely broad industry support for webm within hours of launching webm and coupling this support with patent provisions in the license which state that any filing of patent litigation against webm(vp8) will result in termination of the usage rights envisioned by license, they have dramatically reduced the likelihood of any kind of patent litigation. The effect of this is unequivocally, a *defusing* of the already existing FUD-bases patent insanity. As of this writing those who promote software patents will have more difficulty justifying why we need such patents and the patent rackets are struggling to find some kind of rhetorical self-justification with which they can continue to sell their poisonous FUD.
Flo I really do respect you work. But you are wrong on this one. And not only are you wrong, but you are dangerously close to speaking out of both sides of your mouth. Choose which side you are on. If you raise FUD be aware of what master you are serving.
Errinere doch, wie Munchauesen sich beim eigene Schopf aus dem Sumpf gezogen hat.
Well as frequently is the case, our communication via this medium leads us to utterly misunderstand one another.
Of course there is an inherit danger in singling out any person and placing them on a throne as a singular individualist, reifying the collective human spirit from whence we all draw our inspirations. I am sure that many of those you refer to as nutters have this unvarying belief in the superiority of the individual and hence have libertarian/psuedo-neo con/republican leanings. That my friend is not me. Was I cocky and arrogant at the age of 19? surely, most individuals of that age are. But my response was not mere arrogance. What I didn't know then, I know now and in hindsight this renders things more clearly.
Tesla is held in particularly low esteem by certain members of the academic scientific world. Primarily due to the fact that Tesla was not, in the first instance a scientist. Had he systematically documented and produced verifiable, reproducible mathematical equations, which would have afforded his work the hallmark of scientific empirical research, ie. scientific objectivity, he undoubtedly would be counted as a great scientist by scientists today. Tesla, alas, was of a different persuasion. He had a profoundly intuitive grasp of the phenomena with which he was working. As often is the case there tends to be a rather high degree of contention between the intuitive side and the side which would wish to analyse and ultimately render that which was grasped intuitively as something to be explained away in mathematical equations. It is truly not common for individuals to be gifted in both of these skills, concurrently, for he/she/ who would explore the properties of world, drawn by intuition, is rarely the same person who can produce mathematical equations which strip the world of it's wondrous properties, which gave rise to the intuitive imagination. These aspects are not, per se, in absolute fundamental contradiction, but rarely go hand in hand. I would hold that had Tesla been of the strict objective scientific inclination, which he undoubtedly held himself to be, he would not given much credence to his wild imagination and profound curiosity, which enabled him to grasp things so far ahead of his time.
That which does not lend itself as empirically founded, mathematically proveable, with ample statistical evidence and which is not embodied in theoretical constructs, which themselves are not founded in otherwise sound logical principles and clearly delineable categories of identification is of no immediate use to scientists. Ontologically spoken, that which is not experimentally reproduceable simply "isn't" in the eyes of a good scientist. Nothing there, nothing to be seen, move along now. Of course these attributes of modern science were still being fought out during Tesla's time. It was a time when Inventors waged battle with scientist for the attention of the public. These days we have Scientists, Engineers and Nutters. Invention is an epiphenomal by-product of scientific progress and engineering ingenuity, nowadays. Nutters go on about perpetual motion devices and are held to be laughable lunatics.
What fascinates me so much about people like Tesla is that the body of what constitutes scientific knowledge simply did not exist back then. Today we take for granted that we understand all these things, for there is no end to available list of theories which purportedly account for everything. Yet fundamentally we are still as ignorant today as we were at the time of Tesla about most of things he worked with. Our engineering practices have enabled us treat that which we do not understand as mere technical hurdles to be worked around. Truth is, after all, something which Scientists and Engineers no longer concern themselves with, and Engineers are only interested in making things "work", which often boils down to mere question of immediate economic viability, but enhances our understanding of the world not one iota.
In the same year as I had that encounter with that prof
Lol,nothing like taking shelter in the coat tails of "everyone else". How rich. I made a comment about how I made a personal life decision based on an encounter I had with a man who was a respected authority in a department at the university. From this you assume that 1) I held myself to be smarter than all of the profs at the university and 2) that I am a nutter, probably a socialist nutter too, because I respect the work of someone whose work proved commercially non-viable during his lifetime. You have to be kidding me. I can't believe I am responding to such tosh.
I guess I will just bow to your authority. Thanks, had forgotten that us nutters have nothing to say.lmao...please, give me more, this is so good I am gonna be laughing for days....
After having read about Tesla's demoing of remote controlled(wireless) submarine which used digital logic for navigation at he 1896 World Fair in Chicago(IIRC), I went to the head of the Physics department at the University of Louisville(circa '89), to ask him what he thought about Tesla's contributions. The man looked at me with a straight face and declared that Tesla was a raving lunatic who had contributed nothing. That day I dropped out of my Electrical Engineering major. I figured that if the supposedly brightest minds in our department were a) so utterly ignorant b) so obnoxiously arrogant and c) whose imaginative capacities were dwarfed by common ants, that I had nothing to learn from them. Haven't looked back once in all the years.
It would not be utterly misguided to view the history of electrical engineering in the last 100 years as the attempt to document and render reproducible that which Tesla intuitively grasped and understood.
I didn't bother mentioning to the man that if it wasn't for that raving lunatic who had contributed nothing that he would a) be working in a room powered by candlelight or b) that we would have DC power generators on every city block providing electricity.....At the rate we are going we will still need another 100 years to catch up to where Tesla was 100 years ago....He managed to pull these things off *without* a body of knowledge composed by millions of people working together, around the world, for the last 100 years-without modern theories, without modern equipment, without decent funding, etc.
And our geniuses of today nitpick and dismiss what Tesla did, because we are oh so much smarter nowadays, give me a friggin break...
They can afford to. With great power comes great responsibility.
As a footnote this is why, although I abhor Apples control fetish and find their latest coding restrictions for their products utterly insane, I applaud Jobs saying F U to Adobe: thanks to Apple, their is a web which works without Flash, thank the gods.....In one case, Google is preventing H264 from becoming so dominant that the web becomes unusable without H264, by embracing a less popular codec and helping to make it standard, *while* taking advantage of H264's popularity by including it in their browser. In the other case Apple is saying NO to Flash, to help win back a web sans Flash, because Adobe has tried and virtually succeeded in making itself into the gatekeeper for all multimedia-rich content. Don't worry about Unity3d and Mono, Apple is solely targetting Adobe with this move. Now if only Apple would also back theora.....
Are you telling me that right-clicking on the networkmanager icon in the panel, selecting edit connections, selecting your network connection, hitting Edit and then and switching to the IPV4 Settings tab, changing Method from DHCP to Manual and the pressing Add and entering your ip Address, Netmask and Gateway and filling in DNS servers doesn't work? like it has for the past 2 years?
Alan Goldhammer, deputy vice president for regulatory affairs at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the new study neglected to mention that industry and government had already taken steps to make clinical trial information more transparent. "This is all based on data from before 2004, and since then we've put to rest the myth that companies have anything to hide," he said.
Funny that when one focuses on issues of social justice and invidividual and community empowerment one gets labeled a "closet anarchist".
Somehow I rather much prefer to be labeled such than to be a pawn of the nuclear industry and to be part of their propaganda campaign.
Saying that nuclear power is cleaner than coal is not saying much at all, really. Posing nuclear power as the only realistic alternative is simply disingenous- nuclear power is not alternative in any meaningful sense of the word. By implying that there is no other option you are doing nothing to justify this choice. This is exactly what big power wants us to think.
Yeah, I know, it is awfully unamerican of me to be opposed to the concentration of wealth and power.
You state up front that the fanboys I speak of are the engineers designing the nuclear tech. Is it not in their financial interest to push for broader use of nuclear power? Although I do not begrudge them in the slightest on their need to earn a living, supporting themselves and perhaps a family, you wouldn't deny that they're being paid for this work perhaps renders their opinions somewhat less "objective", would you ?
I would certainly hope that they know more about the technical aspects nuclear power technology than I do- they are, after all, being paid for this knowledge and expertise. If they dind't know more than me then the nuclear industry which is either directly or indirectly paying their wages is simply throwing money out the window.
You focus on someone named Bussard and his efforts to draw up funding for researching a line of nuclear tech which might have eventualy led to a decentralized form of nuclear tech which might have empowered individuals and communities instead of the behemoth nuclear industry. Ironicaly what you are describing here vindicates the point I was making even if you and I take a different stance to nuclear technology.
Neither the government nor nuclear industry are interested in funding developments of such projects. Such projects, which empower the individual and the communities, are anti-thetical to the financial interest of big power and to the legislative desires of the government.
Big Power(tm) is all about seducing private investors and attaining government contracts. The government is only interested in gigantic scale projects which can be approved and realized within a given legislative period and which promise something which can be sold to their electors-ie. "creates jobs", "investment in our community" etc. The bigger the project the more legislation and more regulation, and most of all taxes.
We may have far more in common than you might think-regardless of our respective stances towards nuclear tech.
Just don't pay too much attention to what these shills are saying. I consider articles concerning energy on slashdot as a kind of opportunity to practice anger management. The pro-nuclear fanboys that so utterly dominate slashdot have been so thoroughly brainwashed by that industry that they are only capable of equivocating and spreading falsehoods.
Although I am very reluctant to make such accusations, being that this comes awfully close to actual conspiracy, a thought which I almost always argue against, sheer ignorance cannot account for the level of equivocation which one sees being put forth on these forums. Most of these people were not even born when America had a large anti-nuclear movement. They do not remember the issues which people fought about and against which people protested. If you are old enough to remember these things, coming to slashdot you feel like you have wandered into the twilight zone, kind of like being in a parallel universe where the past the we know simply never occurred.
But what can we really expect? We have had 15 years of paid shills being used to manipulate the public opinion-including "scientists" bought and paid for by the large economic interests which see and cast the environmental movement as the heir apparent of the "commies".
What is so truly sad is that almost nobody in America can even remember that environmentalist movement was not merely lamenting the negative ecological impacts of our energy policies but perhaps more importanty attacking the tremendous centralization(monopolization) of capital and power which is synonomous with big energy.
This social justice aspect of the environmental movement which at its roots is defying the profound concentration of wealth and power and working towards environmental solutions which empower the individual and communities has been almost completely swept under the rug. None of these pro-nuclear fanboys even begin to address the larger socio-economic problems which have always played a crucial role in the environmentalist movement.
The patent intellectual dishonesty which equates the environmental lobby with big energy, is the same as that which equates coal plants "radioactivity" with that of nuclear power plants, that which talks about "clean coal" and nuclear power being "green"-doublespeak, in classice orwellian tradition.
If you listen too closely to these shills you begin to believe that nuclear power is infinite clean energy and that it produces only negligable byproducts which pose no threat at all. You begin to believe that the environmental movement and those who have engaged themselves in the fight against big energy are all bought and paid for by some vast conspiracy of evironmental lobbiests who have endless amounts of money to spend fighting the poor misunderstood behemoths of the energy industry.
And of course you also start to think that everyone who questions the wisdom of such energy policies are all just ignorant uneducated people who have no idea what they are talking about.
Open your nose, follow the money and soon enough you can see where this shit is coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad to hear AMD was selling 8088's before Intel developed them.
Please, pretty please let me see your 8088 based machine from 1975.
Damn am I getting that old!
I was jubilant when I read of how District Court Judge Susan Illston declared those damned National Security Letters unconstitutional. Despite the epic waves of psuedo-cynism, which apparently have overtaken slashdot today, as evidenced here, this is major step in the right direction. While everybody and their brother loves to hate on the government, regardless of the ruling party and their respective policies, the real culprit in the post 9/11 dementia, which held America in it's sway for more than a decade now, has been the "American people", who blindly obliged and acquiesced to every absurdity coming from congress and the executive.
The fact that is has taken so long for a judge to point out the most basic issue of constitutionallity in regards to NSL's is what is really incredible. Our federal judges have been so inept and so asleep-at-the-wheel for such a long time now people are almost shocked to see a judge actually point out what is painfully obvious- federal judges are not beholden to either congress or the executive branch. On one level federal judges are nominally governed by the Justice Department and Attorney General, both of which are functions of the executive branch of government, yet, more importantly, they answer ultimately only to the supreme court. The federal government can only tell a judge that they have no jurisdiction over a given law, if the judge buys into the notion that "father knows best" and is willing to allow the federal government absolute impunity in the name of national defense, ie. secrecy, which in the post 9/11 world has been used to justify almost everything.
This willingness to allow the federal government total impunity in the name of "security", on the basis that our "enemies" might win against us if actually follow our own constituion, where secrecy demands from the feds trumps every other right, is what has damaged our society-not the policies of the government-but that we let them get away with this bullshit, is the tragedy of what really happened post 9/11. If the citizens of this country are so craven in their apparent respect of authority then even a different administration, which perhaps was less likely to play the patriot card used so carelessly and frequently by the predecessor administration, will still be given to use the leeway that the citizens blindly handed over, because we let them get away with this bullshit.
Susan Illiston made the right call. The real proof for just how insanely authoritarian our current administration is will be shown if they attempt to fight this all the way to the supreme court. I doubt they will. I doubt it because they know that NSL's are unjust and indefensible, even if the government has been drunk on the power that NSL's have given them, and lord knows it is difficult for folks to walk away from power however unjustly granted.
It may take another decade for America to completely stand up after having been on our collective knees for so long, but this is an important step in that direction.
The fact is the vast majority of Americans are up to their necks in debt(mortgages, student loans, credit cards etc.). If your wage only ever enables you to maintain that debt, you are effectively an economic slave, perhaps you like the term indebtured servitude, or what we used to call serfs better.
Moreover from a capitalist perspective you are a SLAVE , because you, being in debt, are hostage and easily exploitable, your ability to demand wages is weakened which means the capitalist can extract maximum profit from your labor, and because you are beholden to debtors, you are beholden to those who will pay you a wage.
Ayn come on now your aren't supposed to be posting from the dead!
That summary would be a joke if it was even remotely funny. Talk about missing the plot. Everyone should be proud of the CWA and the IBEW workers who organized one of the most important and successful strikes in recent memory. Let's get the facts straight: On the eve of the strike, Verizon announced it would pay a special $10 billion dividend to shareholders. At the same time, its negotiators were pushing for $1 billion in concessions from workers. The company has made $3 billion already this year, and nearly $20 billion in the last four years.
So Verizon, which has been insanely profitable in recent years, decided to reward it's hardworking employees by attempting to slash their health care benefits, freeze their pensions, denie new hires pensions and health care benefits and by attempting to prevent new hires from organizing in unions. All the while Verizon has been outsourcing more and more positions to firms overseas. Scabs struck 15 picketers during the two week strike. And FOX news, the likely source of this so called "summary", has been demonizing the hard working union members 24/7. While Verizon shareholders are swimming in the dough and Verizon execs laugh all the way to the bank.
I personally will never give Verizon one red cent until they start to do right by their employees. Greedy friggin corporate bastards, the lot of 'em.
Well I guess I may be crazy. Your post reaks of defeatism-as if we were incapable of rising to the challenge. Off the bat here are a couple of potential solutions:
Maybe I am an optimist. Maybe I'm a dreamer-but I'm not the only one..... :)
I discovered this series of blog posts about 2 months ago, when he accidentally published one of his blog posts prematurely. I started reading it and followed the links and saw that this was a like a sleuth tale-if I had started reading this with his very first blog on the topic I would have had no idea where he was going with this. Now as to why this contribution by Jim Gettys does the world a great service:
Hats of to Jim Gettys. Thanks for your service.
Typical entitlement mentality. You seem to think because you have more relative wealth than someone else that you should be entitled to greater political enfranchisement. This thinking coupled with the supreme court decision which equated money with political speech and the other decision that equated corporations with individuals is the legal precedent for Citizens United.
In a democratic society all citizens have the same degree of political enfranchisement. It is the equality of the voices of the citizenry which makes a democracy democratic. In any political system where some are privileged or entitled to have more political enfranchisement than others, that political system is undemocratic.
Unfortunately America has had to struggle to become democratic since it's inception-it did not start out democratic, and it still has a long way to go to achieve it. All the while Americans have been fed this line of bs about being democratic,when in fact America has ever only aspired to democratic ideals, so most Americans assume our society *is* democratic.
Yet simple reflection on the history of America reveals that with each expansion of enfranchisement(former slaves, women, abolition of jim crowe laws) there has been movement afoot to diminish the efficacy of said enfranchisement by privileging certain classes and giving them a sense of entitlement-entitlement to greater political power, at the expense of others. Corporations are merely the newest class of "citizens" to be entitled to more political power than ordinary people.
If there is ever to be any real progress towards realizing real democracy in America, the financing of political campaigns must be taken out of private sphere. All monies of political campaigns should be drawn from a public trust paid into by citizens and available to any and all candidates that can prove a degree of viable public support(5% of the population in the form of petitions to be listed on the ballot box). And to further ensure that each persons vote counts, an instant runoff voting system would go a long way to fully realizing the democratic ideals this nation was founded on.
Congratulations your level of insight has just illuminated the real solution to this issue: NOT!
The guns that fuel Mexico's bloody drug war come from the United States of America, where we are apparently just a little too dumb for sensible gun control.
And the money to pay for them comes from drug sales.
People who pay for dope should realize that they are funding a network of gangs and cartels that murders far more people than the more familiar flavor of terrorist does. Ideally we would decriminalize the drugs and thereby yank the support out from under these people. But that ain't going to happen, so if you happen to use recreational drugs, please do your fellow man a favor and stop.
It is only not going to happen as long as we have stupid knee-jerk reactions to complex social issues.
You brilliant insight is that this entire problem is simply individual behavior -ie. a personal problem.
Exactly how many of your brain cells got turned on between your ears to reach this oh-so illuminating solution?
Typical, brain-dead, conservative answer to every complex social issue-it's your personal fault and if only you would take responsibility the problem would magically go away.
Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.
Millions of people incarcerated.
For profit prison industry.
For profit prison labor.
Merchants of death, capitalizing on this(gun sellers).
10,000's of employers subjecting their employees to drug-testing, when no employer should ever have that right.
Countless billions wasted, and countless numbers of police who have lost their lives fighting an asinine drug war which has had 0 positive effect since it started.
As long as people keep coming up with radical reductionist answers to complex problems- as long as every societal issue boils down to a personal problem-yep nothing is going to change.
God, your ilk makes me sick.
This is my thought too. I think it's a good thing to have a venue where evidence of wrongdoing can be leaked. For example, I didn't have an issue when they leaked the video of the Baghdad strike that killed the Reuters journalist and other unarmed civilians. The military was trying to cover it up, and the video showed evidence of possible wrongdoing. But they shouldn't leak something just because they can. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for the military to keep much of their information classified.
And there are perfectly legitimate reasons for exposing such classified information to the general public. WE, the Citizens, have a right to know what is going on. The military has a right to attempt to control and classify information they hold as being valuable. I do not fault the military for attempting to prevent the dissemination of such material. This is how the military works- NEED TO KNOW basis. But when the media fundamentally fails to uncover and accurately report on what OUR military is doing(whether by virtue of being co-opted by the military(embedding reporters) or by outlandish censorship privileges granted to the military buy OUR executive branch, and when wars have been going on for nearly a decade, with no real end in sight, and when the war itself has become so routine and mundane that the vast majority of Americans live their lives as if there was no war going on because they have become so perfectly isolated from it and anaesthetized to reporting of it that for all practical purposes it does not exist for them-there exists a perfectly legitimate right, and moreover a moral imperative to shatter the status quo and disrupt the anaesthetized conscience of the masses and challenge the unchallenged legitimacy of actions by our military, which are funded with our tax dollars and which are claiming the lives of our sons and daughters and killing and maiming tens of thousands of war victims.
The day will never come that there is any transparency in the doings of OUR military. The military only functions in so far as it controls information. Sure the exposure of such information effects the functioning of the military- to expect the military to react in any way other than how they have responded to these leaks, is at best pathetic naievete, at worst simple disingenuousness. But the sovereign, WE THE PEOPLE, is the ultimate arbitor over what information should be withheld from us and what information we should have access to. The government is only a PROXY for WE THE PEOPLE. And each time we citizens forget and/or neglect this fact we find ourselves with atrocities committed by our government and by our military IN OUR NAME. No governmental or military necessity will ever ultimately trump the sovereigns right to know, AS LONG AS WE FIGHT FOR IT, only when we acquiesce to authority, AUTHORITY GIVEN BY US, are we held to be treasonous or illegitimate in our rightful pursuit of knowledge pertaining to what our government and military does, IN OUR OWN NAME.
Flo you make some very good reasoned arguments. (btw. thanks for not ripping me to shreds-you undoubtedly have more experience in this area than I do). But I still run into a fundamental problem. I do not believe that Google is doing what they are doing out of some kind of benevolence or good natured kindness. They undoubtedly have a strategy behind their actions which I can only speculate about. But I still can't quite reconcile what you are saying about Googles actions. How can one (at once, tertium non datur) provide indemnification for users(commercial entities in this case) who would make use of Googles patents on vp8, without in so doing creating yet another protection racket(ie. even if it is good intentioned, which I would not assume, they would be giving someone promises/pledges of legal indemnification, which validates/proves the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, from which the patent-trolls(eg. Larry Horn) profits? I understand your reasoning that *users* are not being protected by Google from patent litigation, that Google is only protecting itself, first and foremost. But if they were to take this protection of users on themselves, how would they then differ from eg. MPEG-LA(ie. they would be saying in effect, if you use our software under our license we will protect you....which sounds an awful lot like what the patent trolls are saying(and this isn't just an issue of "words" this is the rhetorical constructs which define the entire medium of FUD which led us into the patent insanity in the first place)).
That conclusion is incorrect. Those who may want to assert their rights against WebM simply won't use it in their own products, at least not until the situation has been definitively resolved. Those who want to use it in their own products, conversely, wouldn't assert patents against it anyway. You talk about broad industry support but then you should look at the list of MPEG LA contributors and compare it to the list of WebM adopters. You should then also consider the quantity and relevance of the patents contributed by those parties who haven't adopted WebM and therefore still have every possibility to assert those rights.
You are undoubtedly correct in terms of considering the quantity and relevance of the contributed patents. But in a period of perhaps 12 weeks, since Google purchased On2, they have amassed a broad industry support, which although is not as numerous as MPEG-LA, is not only impressive, given how short a time period this has been worked towards, but significant due to the relative importance of the companies listed as supporting webm to the industry as a whole(ie. these are not small-fry, insiginificant players). Undoubtedly those not joining up may indeed have patents, or a patent interest/involvement in the MPEG-LA. It is always right to recognize the significance of actions not taken, support not offered, expressions not expressed(ie. just because nothing is being said does not mean that "nothing" is at work.)
I can tell you based on my experience in discussing patent policy with politicians that it's the very opposite when lawmakers are approached about whether software should or should not be patentable (as it happened here in Europe a few years back). In that situation, those who advocate software patents claim that there really isn't any example of serious negative impact of those patents etc., not even on open source (of which they know that it does matter to a number of politicians).
I don't think this is necessarily contradictory. Sure it makes sense they would argue: "ahh don't worry about these patent issues, they are no big deal, they won't have any bad effects etc." but they only have the luxury of arguing so because they have already created this atmosphere of insane FUD regarding "intellectual property rights", ie. they create FUD context and then within that context they present patents as the solution the situation they have created and from which they profit.
M
In fact, it is hard to speak about patents *at all* without engaging in the same FUD-because FUD is the medium of the existence of patent speculator industry(of which Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG-LA, is a known patent-troll par-excellence). One aspect of the fight against software patents is the desire to protect the *users* from being sued into oblivion by patent holding entities(either patent-trolls or companies engaging in patent-trolling). Yet claiming that *users* should be indemnified *is* the raison-d'etre of patent racketeering industry. So if you argue that Google is failing to protect *users* you are, in stating such, proving, providing, and furthering the self-justification that such patent rackets(MPEG-LA) use themselves. And in so doing your words of caution and concern are nothing more than additional weapons in the arsenals of thepatent rackets ideological propaganda. The laws concerning patents(what is patentable, the terms of patents etc.) will only change once the patent situation in general has been sufficiently defused so as to limit the actual perceived value of patents. By insisting that *uers* should be indemnified one is ratcheting up the perceived patent threat, artificially inflating the value of said patents, which directly works against the goal of eliminating software patents. As long as everyone is terrified of potential patent suits those who support software patents already have their case(ie. why we supposedly need software patents) made for them by the very perceived fear. We must break this cycle. Googles new license goes an awful long way towards defusing the actual FUD atmosphere.
Stating that Google is exposing the community to patent litigation is literally the exact opposite of what is really happening. By getting extremely broad industry support for webm within hours of launching webm and coupling this support with patent provisions in the license which state that any filing of patent litigation against webm(vp8) will result in termination of the usage rights envisioned by license, they have dramatically reduced the likelihood of any kind of patent litigation. The effect of this is unequivocally, a *defusing* of the already existing FUD-bases patent insanity. As of this writing those who promote software patents will have more difficulty justifying why we need such patents and the patent rackets are struggling to find some kind of rhetorical self-justification with which they can continue to sell their poisonous FUD.
Flo I really do respect you work. But you are wrong on this one. And not only are you wrong, but you are dangerously close to speaking out of both sides of your mouth. Choose which side you are on. If you raise FUD be aware of what master you are serving.
Errinere doch, wie Munchauesen sich beim eigene Schopf aus dem Sumpf gezogen hat.
Of course there is an inherit danger in singling out any person and placing them on a throne as a singular individualist, reifying the collective human spirit from whence we all draw our inspirations. I am sure that many of those you refer to as nutters have this unvarying belief in the superiority of the individual and hence have libertarian/psuedo-neo con/republican leanings. That my friend is not me. Was I cocky and arrogant at the age of 19? surely, most individuals of that age are. But my response was not mere arrogance. What I didn't know then, I know now and in hindsight this renders things more clearly.
Tesla is held in particularly low esteem by certain members of the academic scientific world. Primarily due to the fact that Tesla was not, in the first instance a scientist. Had he systematically documented and produced verifiable, reproducible mathematical equations, which would have afforded his work the hallmark of scientific empirical research, ie. scientific objectivity, he undoubtedly would be counted as a great scientist by scientists today. Tesla, alas, was of a different persuasion. He had a profoundly intuitive grasp of the phenomena with which he was working. As often is the case there tends to be a rather high degree of contention between the intuitive side and the side which would wish to analyse and ultimately render that which was grasped intuitively as something to be explained away in mathematical equations. It is truly not common for individuals to be gifted in both of these skills, concurrently, for he/she/ who would explore the properties of world, drawn by intuition, is rarely the same person who can produce mathematical equations which strip the world of it's wondrous properties, which gave rise to the intuitive imagination. These aspects are not, per se, in absolute fundamental contradiction, but rarely go hand in hand. I would hold that had Tesla been of the strict objective scientific inclination, which he undoubtedly held himself to be, he would not given much credence to his wild imagination and profound curiosity, which enabled him to grasp things so far ahead of his time.
That which does not lend itself as empirically founded, mathematically proveable, with ample statistical evidence and which is not embodied in theoretical constructs, which themselves are not founded in otherwise sound logical principles and clearly delineable categories of identification is of no immediate use to scientists. Ontologically spoken, that which is not experimentally reproduceable simply "isn't" in the eyes of a good scientist. Nothing there, nothing to be seen, move along now. Of course these attributes of modern science were still being fought out during Tesla's time. It was a time when Inventors waged battle with scientist for the attention of the public. These days we have Scientists, Engineers and Nutters. Invention is an epiphenomal by-product of scientific progress and engineering ingenuity, nowadays. Nutters go on about perpetual motion devices and are held to be laughable lunatics.
What fascinates me so much about people like Tesla is that the body of what constitutes scientific knowledge simply did not exist back then. Today we take for granted that we understand all these things, for there is no end to available list of theories which purportedly account for everything. Yet fundamentally we are still as ignorant today as we were at the time of Tesla about most of things he worked with. Our engineering practices have enabled us treat that which we do not understand as mere technical hurdles to be worked around. Truth is, after all, something which Scientists and Engineers no longer concern themselves with, and Engineers are only interested in making things "work", which often boils down to mere question of immediate economic viability, but enhances our understanding of the world not one iota.
In the same year as I had that encounter with that prof
I guess I will just bow to your authority. Thanks, had forgotten that us nutters have nothing to say.lmao...please, give me more, this is so good I am gonna be laughing for days....
It would not be utterly misguided to view the history of electrical engineering in the last 100 years as the attempt to document and render reproducible that which Tesla intuitively grasped and understood.
I didn't bother mentioning to the man that if it wasn't for that raving lunatic who had contributed nothing that he would a) be working in a room powered by candlelight or b) that we would have DC power generators on every city block providing electricity .....At the rate we are going we will still need another 100 years to catch up to where Tesla was 100 years ago....He managed to pull these things off *without* a body of knowledge composed by millions of people working together, around the world, for the last 100 years-without modern theories, without modern equipment, without decent funding, etc.
And our geniuses of today nitpick and dismiss what Tesla did, because we are oh so much smarter nowadays, give me a friggin break...
It's only real feature is the fact it is open source and doesn't require a license.
Yeah buddy, that's the difference which make a difference. Theora is good enough(tm). And it's only getting better.
How much are you getting paid to spew this crap? Either you are astroturfing or you really believe $$$=better, ie. propietary fanboyism.
Dude, Google *IS* the Gatekeeper.
They can afford to. With great power comes great responsibility.
As a footnote this is why, although I abhor Apples control fetish and find their latest coding restrictions for their products utterly insane, I applaud Jobs saying F U to Adobe: thanks to Apple, their is a web which works without Flash, thank the gods.....In one case, Google is preventing H264 from becoming so dominant that the web becomes unusable without H264, by embracing a less popular codec and helping to make it standard, *while* taking advantage of H264's popularity by including it in their browser. In the other case Apple is saying NO to Flash, to help win back a web sans Flash, because Adobe has tried and virtually succeeded in making itself into the gatekeeper for all multimedia-rich content. Don't worry about Unity3d and Mono, Apple is solely targetting Adobe with this move. Now if only Apple would also back theora.....
Merry Minge ?
Are you telling me that right-clicking on the networkmanager icon in the panel, selecting edit connections, selecting your network connection, hitting Edit and then and switching to the IPV4 Settings tab, changing Method from DHCP to Manual and the pressing Add and entering your ip Address, Netmask and Gateway and filling in DNS servers doesn't work? like it has for the past 2 years?
ahh they are going to bring Bonobo back ;)
Alan Goldhammer, deputy vice president for regulatory affairs at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the new study neglected to mention that industry and government had already taken steps to make clinical trial information more transparent. "This is all based on data from before 2004, and since then we've put to rest the myth that companies have anything to hide," he said.
All I can say to that is :
ROFL
LMAO
Hillarious!
Funny that when one focuses on issues of social justice and invidividual and community empowerment one gets labeled a "closet anarchist".
Somehow I rather much prefer to be labeled such than to be a pawn of the nuclear industry and to be part of their propaganda campaign.
Saying that nuclear power is cleaner than coal is not saying much at all, really. Posing nuclear power as the only realistic alternative is simply disingenous- nuclear power is not alternative in any meaningful sense of the word. By implying that there is no other option you are doing nothing to justify this choice. This is exactly what big power wants us to think.
Yeah, I know, it is awfully unamerican of me to be opposed to the concentration of wealth and power.
You state up front that the fanboys I speak of are the engineers designing the nuclear tech. Is it not in their financial interest to push for broader use of nuclear power? Although I do not begrudge them in the slightest on their need to earn a living, supporting themselves and perhaps a family, you wouldn't deny that they're being paid for this work perhaps renders their opinions somewhat less "objective", would you ?
I would certainly hope that they know more about the technical aspects nuclear power technology than I do- they are, after all, being paid for this knowledge and expertise. If they dind't know more than me then the nuclear industry which is either directly or indirectly paying their wages is simply throwing money out the window.
You focus on someone named Bussard and his efforts to draw up funding for researching a line of nuclear tech which might have eventualy led to a decentralized form of nuclear tech which might have empowered individuals and communities instead of the behemoth nuclear industry. Ironicaly what you are describing here vindicates the point I was making even if you and I take a different stance to nuclear technology.
Neither the government nor nuclear industry are interested in funding developments of such projects. Such projects, which empower the individual and the communities, are anti-thetical to the financial interest of big power and to the legislative desires of the government.
Big Power(tm) is all about seducing private investors and attaining government contracts. The government is only interested in gigantic scale projects which can be approved and realized within a given legislative period and which promise something which can be sold to their electors-ie. "creates jobs", "investment in our community" etc. The bigger the project the more legislation and more regulation, and most of all taxes.
We may have far more in common than you might think-regardless of our respective stances towards nuclear tech.
Just don't pay too much attention to what these shills are saying. I consider articles concerning energy on slashdot as a kind of opportunity to practice anger management. The pro-nuclear fanboys that so utterly dominate slashdot have been so thoroughly brainwashed by that industry that they are only capable of equivocating and spreading falsehoods.
Although I am very reluctant to make such accusations, being that this comes awfully close to actual conspiracy, a thought which I almost always argue against, sheer ignorance cannot account for the level of equivocation which one sees being put forth on these forums. Most of these people were not even born when America had a large anti-nuclear movement. They do not remember the issues which people fought about and against which people protested. If you are old enough to remember these things, coming to slashdot you feel like you have wandered into the twilight zone, kind of like being in a parallel universe where the past the we know simply never occurred.
But what can we really expect? We have had 15 years of paid shills being used to manipulate the public opinion-including "scientists" bought and paid for by the large economic interests which see and cast the environmental movement as the heir apparent of the "commies".
What is so truly sad is that almost nobody in America can even remember that environmentalist movement was not merely lamenting the negative ecological impacts of our energy policies but perhaps more importanty attacking the tremendous centralization(monopolization) of capital and power which is synonomous with big energy.
This social justice aspect of the environmental movement which at its roots is defying the profound concentration of wealth and power and working towards environmental solutions which empower the individual and communities has been almost completely swept under the rug. None of these pro-nuclear fanboys even begin to address the larger socio-economic problems which have always played a crucial role in the environmentalist movement.
The patent intellectual dishonesty which equates the environmental lobby with big energy, is the same as that which equates coal plants "radioactivity" with that of nuclear power plants, that which talks about "clean coal" and nuclear power being "green"-doublespeak, in classice orwellian tradition.
If you listen too closely to these shills you begin to believe that nuclear power is infinite clean energy and that it produces only negligable byproducts which pose no threat at all. You begin to believe that the environmental movement and those who have engaged themselves in the fight against big energy are all bought and paid for by some vast conspiracy of evironmental lobbiests who have endless amounts of money to spend fighting the poor misunderstood behemoths of the energy industry.
And of course you also start to think that everyone who questions the wisdom of such energy policies are all just ignorant uneducated people who have no idea what they are talking about.
Open your nose, follow the money and soon enough you can see where this shit is coming from.
But of course- pecunia non olet. Bullshit