Like you, I'm pessimistic. Well, that's not correct. Fatalistic is more the word. I think the DNC response to the white paper on the secret drone memos cinched it. I've been waiting years for the DNC to address that like it addressed secret memos in the GWB era -- instead, all we got is the same lame ass excuses the GOP used to to protect Bush from the DNC. We're well on our way to an authoritarian government, and Americans by and large, crave it. More prisons, more cops, more surveillance. The only road I see is through to what comes after, which is hopefully better but probably worse.
I'm pretty certain you would love this debate Glenn Greenwald had with GWB's drug czar. If you want to see the drug war eviscerated in the most plain and eloquent terms possible, this is it:
$24? Are you nuts? In the Federal Courts, you can expect only the harshest outcome unless you are fabulously wealthy and connected. I know Jamie wasn't the perfect defendant here (didn't she lie about hard drives or something?), so it is easy to kind of say she deserves it, or to at least feel no sympathy, but it is unsympathetic defendants that make bad or unjust law. It is sort of shocking that the same administration which has absolutely sat on its hands (*) about $gazilions of Wall Street fraud, encouraged the Supreme Court to reject the case. Justice for some, and especially good justice when you can purchase laws you want, or in the case of Wall Street, inverse justice (rewards for crime, cabinet positions). The little guy can just have his or her life utterly destroyed. That's the Feds.
(*) William K Black is worth reading on the issue because he headed up the litigation team that put 1000 banksters in jail in the S&L crisis -- a crisis 1/40th the size of the meltdown.
But, the fact that things are stacked in the house's favor and that the house keeps it that way is dubious ethically speaking.
I disagree with this. The casino has to pay for space, pay for equipment, pay for materials, pay for utilities (lighting/heating/cooling/water/sewer/garbage), pay for staff, provide profit to investors, etc. If the games were perfectly 50/50, it is an absolute certainty that the house would lose money. In that situation, it would be the players taking advantage of the house.
Secondly, name a business that isn't some kind of investor scam, where investors are absolutely certain to lose money (and yes, there are stupid ideas that get funded, but that's different from a scam because still, people (unwisely) expect that a profit can be made). A casino that is absolutely guaranteed to lose money, obviously would give a lousy return on investment, and would never be built because there would be no investors.
[re house edge:] Most players are not in any position to understand that to any appreciable degree.
I disagree with this too. The fact that the house has an edge is so widely understood, it has made it into colloquial phrases such as "you can't beat the house" or "the house always wins."
Of course, there are other ways to run a casino and I could imagine one with 50/50 games, but you're parking spot would probably cost $100/hr, a coke would cost $10, etc. etc. And who knows, people might flock to that. But having a house edge on games is really similar to a restaurant charging $1.50 for a cup of coffee that costs $0.10 in materials (coffee grounds) to make -- because you aren't just paying for the coffee in a restaurant: you're paying for a place to drink it in, someone to make it, someone to serve it, someone to wash the cup, someone to wipe down the table, the table, the cup, the dishwasher, etc. etc..
Seriously, fuck you. If there is anything the Obama administration has proven, is that Democrats ONLY hate the GWB neo con agenda when the GOP does it. When a Democrat is even more hardcore than GWB.... Fucking crickets. America would better off by far if every GOP and DNC POS simultaneously had massive strokes. It could be called the stroke of luck in future history books.
I've been using OS X for quite awhile (10.3 I think) laptop wise, and linux on my desktop forever. But I've developed the same sense of not really wanting to go from Snow Leopard to Lion or get new Apple hardware even. I've recently been running Fedora 17 on my Desktop and I have to say, I've come to like Gnome 3 quite a bit. I was at first totally skeptical about it, but not as skeptical as Unity, and after a relatively short period of time, came to prefer it over Gnome 2.
And setting it up was as plug-n-play as you can get with any major distro that doesn't come with codecs. At least, that was the only issue I faced -- not like years ago where it seemed that any new install required manual intervention in the X configuration files to get the correct screen resolution. I recently added a second monitor and literally, all I did was plug it into the computer, and plug it into power. Everything worked immediately without me doing a darn thing. My desktop doesn't have wifi though, so it isn't a complete test.
If privacy is history anyway, and Congress has turned radical, why not at least get something good out of that all instead of just watching all the money go to the already wealthy through bailouts?
Umm... I think you misunderstand the current purpose of the US Government. It has been redesigned to spy on and should they object, oppress, the masses in order for those with the right connections to profit and avoid any accountability, financial or criminal. THAT is the entire purpose of the Federal Government in a nutshell, and to thwart it will cost you your life, your freedom, or your property.
He's more than Bush 2.0. He took what was radical under GWB, and made it the "New Normal." Before Obama, there was hope that the abuses of the previous administration could be rolled back. That is no longer possible because those abuses are now firmly ensconced in those issues that form the bipartisan consensus. As a result, expect to hear virtually nothing about them from most of the cheerleader/stenographer "press" corps. It's sickening the way Democrats as whole have just clammed up during the Obama administration, and proof that their rhetoric during the GWB administration was nothing but hot air designed to fraudulently attract liberal voters so that they, like the GOP, could go agro-neo-con on America. There is no way back now -- only through to what comes next.
Re:OMG the Last Pope EVAR!!!!!!!1
on
New Pope Selected
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· Score: 4, Funny
not really. If you are running an unsecured node it's comparable to walking around naked in front of your open bay window. People might happen to see you naked as they walk by, but really it's your own fault.
Maybe for you. For most people who use the internet, this analogy doesn't hold up at all. It is more like they're walking around naked behind solid opaque walls, but unbeknownst to them, someone outside their house has the ability to magically make the walls invisible to himself and other similarly skilled magicians, but the naked person inside the house would still see the walls as solid.
And before you start saying stuff like "idiots shouldn't use the internet if they don't understand it" -- look around you and ask yourself whether you have anything more than a vague understanding of how the various services you use work, and by that I mean a complete technical picture covering exactly how those services are provided and the potential ways a nefarious individual could harm you by taking advantage of your lack of knowledge. Things, like water, electricity, sewer, mail, garbage collection, etc. etc. Are there ways to violate your privacy via the sewer system? Your health via the water system? I could imagine ways, but really, I wouldn't know because I have merely a general understanding of these things totally lacking in specific details. Doesn't make me stupid. Just makes me a human who can't know everything about everything.
Again, not my point. I'm concerned with hypocrisy because it shines a light on the evils we need to correct in our own house. Hypocrisy is a tool helpful in illuminating those problems, but is definitely not a tool to excuse them.
Kiriakou is the sole CIA officer to face jail time for any action involving the federal government's torture program. Ironically, Kiriakou, the whistleblower on the program, will go to prison, while the agents who implemented it will not.
This is confusing because it feels like sarcasm, yet in the larger context of your comment, it seems like not-sarcasm. Obviously, every country should be criticized for its faults, recognizing the difference between the governed and those who govern. Even in first world democracies, it is _not_ easy to say that the government represents the people's wishes. It is easy to say that the government represents what a majority see as the least worst options for public office, which is not a distinction without a difference.
1. "It's not like ______ didn't do it before/isn't doing it too."
Taking care to be aware of one's own sins, is the first step in helping others improve themselves without at the same time, sounding like a completely self-ignorant twit. Further, such self-awareness can be very valid as a basis for an argument about why certain actions are unwise, and thus may form part of a non-fallacious argument.
2. "Why is this news, we expect this from China."
Apathy never gets anything changed for the better, but often allows change for the worse. Views like this should be challenged, not least of all because without expectations that an entity can do better, there is a great likelihood it won't. I'm not sure how this is a fallacy of any kind, because a fallacy requires some argument. This is a "give up" attitude, and attitudes aren't arguments, thus can't be fallacies.
3. "So what, it's their country. We have no right to judge."
While we may have no right to intervene, there is no reason we cannot judge China's wrongs, just as others, and ourselves, should feel free to judge and point out our wrongs. Without feedback on how you're screwing up, the process of improvement is prolonged. This I could see as a fallacy because it is used as argument against even comment, when really, it should apply only to intervention.
I'm not really sure what you want to see in a discussion of this type of news. A bunch soviet russia jokes? Beowulf clusters? A few links to goatse or tubgirl? A wide-ranging, on-topic discussion is actually healthy, not something to be sneered at.
I agree with you that China should clean up its act. But what bugged me was the parent poster's seeming attitude that China was different somehow. I should have quoted the comment more fully:
The issue is the Chinese government (national level) is not based upon any principles of openness. They hide anything and everything that might threaten their place in power. The only time it comes out is when trying to keep it secret would hurt even more (i.e when a coverup is exposed).
I would have no issue with the comment if it read "The issue with government in general" -- or "The issue is the Chinese government (national level), like that of most, is not based..."
It strikes me as hypocritical to suggest that China has some distinctive secrecy evil that one's own government steadfastly avoids (specifically, that secrecy is usually about protection from embarrassment, liability, or corruption/special industry favors). It's like a crack head denigrating a heroin addict as a dope fiend. Maybe I read too much into it, but that was my impression.
They hide anything and everything that might threaten their place in power.
And this is distinctive from America how? In America, the State Secrets Doctrine has its roots in a wrongful death suit by the widows of some RCA engineers who were working for the US Air Force when they died in a plane crash in 1948. During discovery, the widows sought the accident report. The Air Force said that it contained information vital to national security and would not turn it over. Eventually, the case got to the Supreme Court, and without actually looking at the document, ruled that it could be kept secret. 40 some years later, it was declassified. It contained nothing in it beyond what was publicly known about the project, but it also revealed that the Air Force had negligently failed to install manufacturer recommended heat shields in the engines, among other issues with the plane, and that the engines caught fire leading to the crash.
So you tell me, is our State Secrets doctrine, the one that Obama has used to prevent people from suing for unlawful detention, unlawful torture, unlawful wiretapping, and unlawful execution, based in anything but an attempt to avoid embarrassment and liability? How is it that we are morally superior to the Chinese government on this issue?
True -- I forgot the process of elimination. But I think that only serves to prove the point of how much easier things are in the post public-internet world. It surely took you more than a five second google search to tease out the answers.
LSL3 was one of the first games I bought, then I went back and played 1 & 2. The questions to ensure you were old enough to play were amusing, but also indicative of how a searchable internet has changed everything. In the early 90s, you actually had to know the answers, know someone who knew the answers, or visit a library. Now it's three words in a google search (lsl3 questions age):
I used to play simcity a long time ago, and by that I mean a very early or the earliest version. Then I found Civilization and never played simcity again, but that's beside the point. It seems to me that the simcity game was pretty hardcore on the antipiracy stuff even in the early days. If I recall correctly, to load the game you had to type in something from a printed table that came with the game disk, but it was printed in black text on dark burgundy colored paper. This prevented photocopying, but it also made it hard to read in anything but bright light. The other effect was that if you couldn't find the paper and couldn't get a copy, you couldn't play your game. For all you whipersnappers, locating a readable duplicate in the pre-public-internet days wasn't like googling up something today.
So exactly how is this administration going to define "emergency" and "combat?" We already have a hint from the leaked memo that "imminent" (*) does get its ordinary dictionary definition. If the same is true of the other terms, Holder's reassurance amounts to nothing but empty words to make the discussion go away.
From the memo: "The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,"
There is a world of difference between shooting a clocktower shooter out his perch, and shooting a person suspected of planning to be a clocktower shooter but actually engaged in having dinner or something. In the first case, lethal force is justified. In the second, arrest is justified and lethal force completely unconstitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
Like you, I'm pessimistic. Well, that's not correct. Fatalistic is more the word. I think the DNC response to the white paper on the secret drone memos cinched it. I've been waiting years for the DNC to address that like it addressed secret memos in the GWB era -- instead, all we got is the same lame ass excuses the GOP used to to protect Bush from the DNC. We're well on our way to an authoritarian government, and Americans by and large, crave it. More prisons, more cops, more surveillance. The only road I see is through to what comes after, which is hopefully better but probably worse.
I'm pretty certain you would love this debate Glenn Greenwald had with GWB's drug czar. If you want to see the drug war eviscerated in the most plain and eloquent terms possible, this is it:
http://vimeo.com/32110912
The Q&A session is definitely worth watching too as GG in no uncertain terms, but with great skill, points out that his opponent is just flat evil.
$24? Are you nuts? In the Federal Courts, you can expect only the harshest outcome unless you are fabulously wealthy and connected. I know Jamie wasn't the perfect defendant here (didn't she lie about hard drives or something?), so it is easy to kind of say she deserves it, or to at least feel no sympathy, but it is unsympathetic defendants that make bad or unjust law. It is sort of shocking that the same administration which has absolutely sat on its hands (*) about $gazilions of Wall Street fraud, encouraged the Supreme Court to reject the case. Justice for some, and especially good justice when you can purchase laws you want, or in the case of Wall Street, inverse justice (rewards for crime, cabinet positions). The little guy can just have his or her life utterly destroyed. That's the Feds.
(*) William K Black is worth reading on the issue because he headed up the litigation team that put 1000 banksters in jail in the S&L crisis -- a crisis 1/40th the size of the meltdown.
I disagree with this. The casino has to pay for space, pay for equipment, pay for materials, pay for utilities (lighting/heating/cooling/water/sewer/garbage), pay for staff, provide profit to investors, etc. If the games were perfectly 50/50, it is an absolute certainty that the house would lose money. In that situation, it would be the players taking advantage of the house.
Secondly, name a business that isn't some kind of investor scam, where investors are absolutely certain to lose money (and yes, there are stupid ideas that get funded, but that's different from a scam because still, people (unwisely) expect that a profit can be made). A casino that is absolutely guaranteed to lose money, obviously would give a lousy return on investment, and would never be built because there would be no investors.
I disagree with this too. The fact that the house has an edge is so widely understood, it has made it into colloquial phrases such as "you can't beat the house" or "the house always wins."
Of course, there are other ways to run a casino and I could imagine one with 50/50 games, but you're parking spot would probably cost $100/hr, a coke would cost $10, etc. etc. And who knows, people might flock to that. But having a house edge on games is really similar to a restaurant charging $1.50 for a cup of coffee that costs $0.10 in materials (coffee grounds) to make -- because you aren't just paying for the coffee in a restaurant: you're paying for a place to drink it in, someone to make it, someone to serve it, someone to wash the cup, someone to wipe down the table, the table, the cup, the dishwasher, etc. etc..
Seriously, fuck you. If there is anything the Obama administration has proven, is that Democrats ONLY hate the GWB neo con agenda when the GOP does it. When a Democrat is even more hardcore than GWB .... Fucking crickets. America would better off by far if every GOP and DNC POS simultaneously had massive strokes. It could be called the stroke of luck in future history books.
One hour of brown noise every day? That's some enema!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brown%20noise
I've been using OS X for quite awhile (10.3 I think) laptop wise, and linux on my desktop forever. But I've developed the same sense of not really wanting to go from Snow Leopard to Lion or get new Apple hardware even. I've recently been running Fedora 17 on my Desktop and I have to say, I've come to like Gnome 3 quite a bit. I was at first totally skeptical about it, but not as skeptical as Unity, and after a relatively short period of time, came to prefer it over Gnome 2.
And setting it up was as plug-n-play as you can get with any major distro that doesn't come with codecs. At least, that was the only issue I faced -- not like years ago where it seemed that any new install required manual intervention in the X configuration files to get the correct screen resolution. I recently added a second monitor and literally, all I did was plug it into the computer, and plug it into power. Everything worked immediately without me doing a darn thing. My desktop doesn't have wifi though, so it isn't a complete test.
Umm ... I think you misunderstand the current purpose of the US Government. It has been redesigned to spy on and should they object, oppress, the masses in order for those with the right connections to profit and avoid any accountability, financial or criminal. THAT is the entire purpose of the Federal Government in a nutshell, and to thwart it will cost you your life, your freedom, or your property.
He's more than Bush 2.0. He took what was radical under GWB, and made it the "New Normal." Before Obama, there was hope that the abuses of the previous administration could be rolled back. That is no longer possible because those abuses are now firmly ensconced in those issues that form the bipartisan consensus. As a result, expect to hear virtually nothing about them from most of the cheerleader/stenographer "press" corps. It's sickening the way Democrats as whole have just clammed up during the Obama administration, and proof that their rhetoric during the GWB administration was nothing but hot air designed to fraudulently attract liberal voters so that they, like the GOP, could go agro-neo-con on America. There is no way back now -- only through to what comes next.
warning, NSFW for most workplaces, but an amusing Tim Minchin song about the pope:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTIorwtJbhE
Maybe for you. For most people who use the internet, this analogy doesn't hold up at all. It is more like they're walking around naked behind solid opaque walls, but unbeknownst to them, someone outside their house has the ability to magically make the walls invisible to himself and other similarly skilled magicians, but the naked person inside the house would still see the walls as solid.
And before you start saying stuff like "idiots shouldn't use the internet if they don't understand it" -- look around you and ask yourself whether you have anything more than a vague understanding of how the various services you use work, and by that I mean a complete technical picture covering exactly how those services are provided and the potential ways a nefarious individual could harm you by taking advantage of your lack of knowledge. Things, like water, electricity, sewer, mail, garbage collection, etc. etc. Are there ways to violate your privacy via the sewer system? Your health via the water system? I could imagine ways, but really, I wouldn't know because I have merely a general understanding of these things totally lacking in specific details. Doesn't make me stupid. Just makes me a human who can't know everything about everything.
It's either crappy writing, bad googlefu on my part, or plain old ignorance on my part, but I just don't understand this:
For "tn" I get:
terraNewtons
tons
and a bunch of stuff about Tennessee
But not a lot of stuff directly related to volume.
Again, not my point. I'm concerned with hypocrisy because it shines a light on the evils we need to correct in our own house. Hypocrisy is a tool helpful in illuminating those problems, but is definitely not a tool to excuse them.
http://www.whistleblower.org/blog/44-2013/2554-ciatorture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-reports-to-prison-today
This is confusing because it feels like sarcasm, yet in the larger context of your comment, it seems like not-sarcasm. Obviously, every country should be criticized for its faults, recognizing the difference between the governed and those who govern. Even in first world democracies, it is _not_ easy to say that the government represents the people's wishes. It is easy to say that the government represents what a majority see as the least worst options for public office, which is not a distinction without a difference.
Taking care to be aware of one's own sins, is the first step in helping others improve themselves without at the same time, sounding like a completely self-ignorant twit. Further, such self-awareness can be very valid as a basis for an argument about why certain actions are unwise, and thus may form part of a non-fallacious argument.
Apathy never gets anything changed for the better, but often allows change for the worse. Views like this should be challenged, not least of all because without expectations that an entity can do better, there is a great likelihood it won't. I'm not sure how this is a fallacy of any kind, because a fallacy requires some argument. This is a "give up" attitude, and attitudes aren't arguments, thus can't be fallacies.
While we may have no right to intervene, there is no reason we cannot judge China's wrongs, just as others, and ourselves, should feel free to judge and point out our wrongs. Without feedback on how you're screwing up, the process of improvement is prolonged. This I could see as a fallacy because it is used as argument against even comment, when really, it should apply only to intervention.
I'm not really sure what you want to see in a discussion of this type of news. A bunch soviet russia jokes? Beowulf clusters? A few links to goatse or tubgirl? A wide-ranging, on-topic discussion is actually healthy, not something to be sneered at.
I agree with you that China should clean up its act. But what bugged me was the parent poster's seeming attitude that China was different somehow. I should have quoted the comment more fully:
I would have no issue with the comment if it read "The issue with government in general" -- or "The issue is the Chinese government (national level), like that of most, is not based ..."
It strikes me as hypocritical to suggest that China has some distinctive secrecy evil that one's own government steadfastly avoids (specifically, that secrecy is usually about protection from embarrassment, liability, or corruption/special industry favors). It's like a crack head denigrating a heroin addict as a dope fiend. Maybe I read too much into it, but that was my impression.
And this is distinctive from America how? In America, the State Secrets Doctrine has its roots in a wrongful death suit by the widows of some RCA engineers who were working for the US Air Force when they died in a plane crash in 1948. During discovery, the widows sought the accident report. The Air Force said that it contained information vital to national security and would not turn it over. Eventually, the case got to the Supreme Court, and without actually looking at the document, ruled that it could be kept secret. 40 some years later, it was declassified. It contained nothing in it beyond what was publicly known about the project, but it also revealed that the Air Force had negligently failed to install manufacturer recommended heat shields in the engines, among other issues with the plane, and that the engines caught fire leading to the crash.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/383/origin-story?act=2#play
So you tell me, is our State Secrets doctrine, the one that Obama has used to prevent people from suing for unlawful detention, unlawful torture, unlawful wiretapping, and unlawful execution, based in anything but an attempt to avoid embarrassment and liability? How is it that we are morally superior to the Chinese government on this issue?
Examples:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/us/10torture.html?_r=0
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/10/obama-administration-invokes-state-secrets-privilegeagain/
http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0811/Obama_admin_asserts_state_secrets_privilege_to_dismiss_Muslims_suit.html
http://www.salon.com/2010/09/25/secrecy_7/
True -- I forgot the process of elimination. But I think that only serves to prove the point of how much easier things are in the post public-internet world. It surely took you more than a five second google search to tease out the answers.
LSL3 was one of the first games I bought, then I went back and played 1 & 2. The questions to ensure you were old enough to play were amusing, but also indicative of how a searchable internet has changed everything. In the early 90s, you actually had to know the answers, know someone who knew the answers, or visit a library. Now it's three words in a google search (lsl3 questions age):
http://www.allowe.com/Larry/3questions.htm
And an interesting history of copy discouraging techniques for LSL:
http://www.allowe.com/Larry/cluescheats.htm
Wow -- life before search engines must have been hard. I lived it and can't even remember what it was like.
Anyway, this is the code sheet I was talking about:
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/copyprotection/simcity_large.jpg
I used to play simcity a long time ago, and by that I mean a very early or the earliest version. Then I found Civilization and never played simcity again, but that's beside the point. It seems to me that the simcity game was pretty hardcore on the antipiracy stuff even in the early days. If I recall correctly, to load the game you had to type in something from a printed table that came with the game disk, but it was printed in black text on dark burgundy colored paper. This prevented photocopying, but it also made it hard to read in anything but bright light. The other effect was that if you couldn't find the paper and couldn't get a copy, you couldn't play your game. For all you whipersnappers, locating a readable duplicate in the pre-public-internet days wasn't like googling up something today.
Lame self response, but the line:
"imminent" (*) does get
Should read
"imminent" (*) does NOT get
What is an emergency?
What is combat?
As examples of this administration's loose practices with the dictionary, consider the following:
This administration defines militant to be any boy or man killed by a drone, irrespective of the dead's actual beliefs.
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/
This administration claimed that the Libyan war was not a war to avoid getting Congressional approval.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/us/politics/16powers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
So exactly how is this administration going to define "emergency" and "combat?" We already have a hint from the leaked memo that "imminent" (*) does get its ordinary dictionary definition. If the same is true of the other terms, Holder's reassurance amounts to nothing but empty words to make the discussion go away.
(*) http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite
From the memo: "The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,"
There is a world of difference between shooting a clocktower shooter out his perch, and shooting a person suspected of planning to be a clocktower shooter but actually engaged in having dinner or something. In the first case, lethal force is justified. In the second, arrest is justified and lethal force completely unconstitutional.
why you post as AC? you'd be +5 funny by now if you hadn't.