Sounds intelligent to me. Though I still don't know why those idiots are trying to stop the weapons.
Over-poluation is the single bigest problem the world has, and has ever had. It is so big we call it by multiple names, such as unemployment, homelessnes, poverty, famine, etc. They all come down to the same thing: Two many people for the limited resources the world has.
Two ways to solve the problem: Method 1) Kill people. Advantage: quick, needs no cooperation. Disdavantage: Moral issues
Remove word "terrorist" and replace with "opponents", "Bad Guys", "Evil Men" or similar word. If you attack a civilian you are a terrorist. If you attack a soldier, you are an enemey soldier. Civilians do not have tanks.
QED anyone attempting to kill tanks is not a Terrorist.
(Note if you think a "terrorist" can include peopel that attack soldiers, than according to that definition, every government soldier is a terrorist. We use "terror" to change governments all the time. The reason we are morally superior to them is that we do not attempt to attack civilians, we try to restrict ourselves to other soldiers.)
Sorry but you are blatantly wrong. When you attack SOLDIERS you are a soldier. Or are you claiming that every soldier is a terrorist.
You only become a Terroist when you attack civilans.
So the people from Syria who went to Iraq in the last few months to kill American and Iraqi military forces are not terrorists
But the people that rammed the twin towers were terrorists.
"Someone that uses or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against civilians or civilan property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons."
If you attack a military force you are by definition NOT a terrorist.
Note this can be taken to mean that while the people that rammed the Twin towers were terrorists, the people that rammed the Pentagon were not, assuming you were so callous as to consider the deaths of the civilians on board the aircraft as "collateral damage".
He did claim that what you were describing was not actually occuring, based on the fact that the rate of errors was not lower for new software as compared to old software.
Of course it could be that knowledge was helpful and that new software was more complex.
His report is thorough, but like many such things, he made several key logical errors in his conclusions.
His basic theory is that he believes, given the current rates of discovery, poor patching rates and the large number of bugs that:
1) Due to massive information exchange and slow patching/fixing, post announcement explotitations are not significantly less than explotiation caused by un-announced bugs, so announcing does not help.
2) There are so many bugs out there that finding a bug and announcing it does not produce a singificant reduction in the number of "bugs unknown to white Hats" so it does not increase security significantly.
His major errors are ignoring the following:
1) Exploitation post announcement is almost entirely done against the "lesser" computers, i.e. either machines with un-important data/programs (home pc's) or important machines with incompetent sysadmin. As such the real cost of these explotations is either A) practically null, or b) high, but likely to get the incompetent sysadmin fired, resulting in i) better employment prospects for good sysadmin and ii)an over-all improvment in quality of security for that company. So while the # of explots may be higher for Post-announcement bugs, soceity has a REAL social and economic gain that is very significant.
2)A)The announcement of bugs allows people to judge how well written a program is and therefore make an informed decision to NOT buy inferior producs (say Windows).
B)That perhaps our problem is not that we are announcing the bugs but that we are not doing sufficient bug hunting. He seems to be implying that because bug hunts don't find enough bugs, the solution is not to bug hunt. But anyone with a brain should be able to see that if we are not depleating the unknown bugs fast enough than one possible solution is to tremoundously increase our bug hunting, not to stop the bug disclosures.
There is a lot of the Green Goo around.
Kudzo is an ivy like plant that has conquered Southern USA.
There are muscles that infest certain inland waters in the USA and are blocking water flow.
Not to mention the roaches,mice,rats, etc. that have flourished in the urban environments to unprecedented numbers.
What do you think Life is besides a small machine programmed to reproduce itself?
Organic life has already covered the planet, in green stuff.
I doubt that any man-made gray goo could compete with the Green Goo God made without a LOT of help. By the time we were good enough to make the gray goo beat the God's Green Goo, we would have already made safeguards such as Gray Goo Cops, little nanites whose sole job it is to rome the world looking for rogue nanites and eat them and reproduce more Gray Cops.
Organic based reproducers beat metals based ones before, and they will do it again if the silly puny little machines try to take over.
The reason is simple: Our governments are already strong enough to run well.
One of the MAJOR factors in a "free government" is the fact that you need RESTRICTSIONS on what the government does, not more power to the government.
Yes, the government can do all the things you mentioned. The truth is they don't need the RFID to do di ti. Want to stop cars from being stolen? Let people put explosive car alarms in them. Set them off, the car explodes.
What you thought that was over-kill? Too many bad consequenses for the little good?
Same thing for RFID. Too much bad consequences for the little good. Stolen cars, and traffic violations are minor problems. But putting the RFID in place lets the government know too much about my life. They do not need to know that I went to a hotel on May 19th that had a Sado-masochism convention, and on April 10th I went to a univesity that was having a lecture about legalizing Marijuana. (Note, If you care about whethter those were false examples you are living proof that the Government can not handle that knowledge).
This kind of information is easily abused. In the 1950's in the USA, that kind of information was used by Congressmen to have people fired and Black-listed - thereby preventing them from working.
That was not in a communistic country, not in a facisist country, the U.S.A.
Part of the problem is the simple fact that certain groups have decided to "blur" the definitions in order to obtain greater outrage.
There are several different studies about rape. One of the most common one has a "1 in 4" number. In this study they asked a group of women several questions about their history, but used a "generous" definition of rape, where basically if you regret it afterwards, it was called rape, even if at the time you did not in anyway say no or make any effort to escape/end the rape.
An interesting counter study was done where the same set of questions were asked of both men and women, with their gender not revelealed untill after the questions were graded. Like th first study it found that 1 in 4 women were raped. It also found that 1 in 10 men were raped by women.
For now, lets make NO judgmenet on whether the men really were raped. But you should think long and hard about the consequences of using that definition of rape. If you use it, then considering the low number of women arrested for rape, we have a serious problem with female rapists that the cops are making NO effort to catch. This is a far more serious problem than the failure of the cops to catch the men, because they are not even making an effort and the women KNOW it.
In my opinion there are 5 types of rape. 1) Violent rape where real force is used to ensure the rape is consumated 2) Non-violent, drug free rape where the victim is afraid that force will be used if she(or he) resists. 3) Forced Drug rape where a drug is specifically given to the victim without her(or his) knowledge in order to allow rape to occure and 4) unforced Drug rape where the victim willing takes drugs and ends up unable to suffecully protest the sex. 5) Sex with an under-age partner.
Contrary to popular opinion, it should be clear that women are adults, and as such ARE held responsible for their own actions. As such merely saying that you decided afterwards that sex was wrong should not be considered rape, anymore than if you call it car theft if after sellling a car you decide you want it back. For it to be rape, the rape victim MUST either communicate clearly to the "rapist" that they were unwilling or it should have been clear to a competent person that they were uncapable of communicating.
But part of all this also requires the women to say "YES I WANT SEX", which most of them do want, but are so afraid to admit. Without that, then polite "No thank you" will not work because so many women are saying that when they really mean "yes Please".
P.S. Yes, Whores have the right not to be raped. That includes women that let men pay for dinner but never pay for the man's dinner until after they have had sex. What else would you call them? They use their attractiveness to get expensive dinners and think "He asked me so I don't have to pay even though I want to go out and I never have to ask men because I am a women". You wonder why men rape women? It's because they are angry at constantly being treated like crap. Yes good men take it like a man, and only an evil men would act on this anger.
Now for the BONUS question.
Which am I?
Man or Women
and more imporantly am I:
Straight, Homosexual, or Bi-sexual?
Ten points if you guess right, -50 if you react with the normal prejudice and say I must be a Straight Man to think this way.
1) Price
2) Viruses that target it
3) Bugs that they delay fixing
4) Anger at their arrogance and refusal to support a company that mistreats their customers
5) Less Hangs on Apple/Linux
Their is a better way to do it. Don't have them waive their rights.
One of the things lawyers try to do all the tiem is to get more then they need, so judges laugh and throw out the entire thing.
Look at the death example. No judge will let you kill someone because they signed a contract. But put in a penalty of $1000 and the judge will let you enforce that.
Try the following:
"I agree to pay any and all reasonable and customary legal expenses if I sue you, even should I win the case."
They can still sue for medical costs. But the judge is VERY likely to say that hey, you personally agreed to pay for their legal costs, and force them to pay for that.
Original is subpoened. Upon arrival in whatever media form it is, it is copied. The original tape/hard drive/whatever that was received is locked away. All work is done on the stored copy.
Most of the helpfull stuff is written pre-decision to commit crime and forgotten about when the crime is committed.
Possible Example from the Kobe case: (Assumption: Kobe is a sweet, innocent man, his accuser is a lier - yes I know the chances of this being true are minimal, but assume for the sake of argument that it is true)
Day after the sex she might have sent a text message to her friend stating:
"Wow, Kobe was such a wonderfull lover. I hope he calls me."
Two weeks later she might have thought "That Son of a )$#*( I'll get him! I'll accuse him of rape." But was too smart to have written it down. But that doesn't change the fact that she wrote the FIRST text message, which proves her a lier.
This is my job. I work for a major law firm loading data into a searchable database.
ASCII files like emails/text messages are loaded directly.
Other documents, such as Word docs, faxs, etc. are OCR'ed (accuracy is not very good).
Next they run compelx searches for word combinations.
And low level lawyers/paralegals then read either everything, or sometiems just the search results, flagging things as Relevant/not-relevant.
The amount of data is HUGE. A certain level of Privacy is created by the hugeness of the data. The effect is similar to looking at an apartment building across the street, without optical aid. Someone might be naked with the shades open, but the amount of stuff you have to look at is is so much and your ability to retrieve fine detail is so little that you see nothing. Like it takes the binoculars/telescope to see the naked person, it takes a HUGE amount of cash to pay for man hours/computer time to wade through all the junk text to find the relevant details.
Now, if you know to start off looking at only a single person's stuff, from x date to y date, then you can find some interesting bits...
Don't just love when people that made millions on Silicon Tech because no one else had started the businesses decide that they no more about biotech and nano-tech then the rest of us and should "warn us" about it?
Almost as much as hearing Physicists warn us about how AIDS is going to mutate, become airborne and kill us all.
Or hearing a Medical Doctor tell me about the threat that Comet's have towards the entire planet.
The man is TOTALLY unquallifed to discuss these issues. He has enough money. If he REALLY thinks these are important issues, he can afford to get a PhD related to them, or at least fund an institute so someone with a PhD can spout his warnings.
Hearing him talk about them is just stupid.
1) You continue to over-generalize. Most of the world if question more specifically says it is the BUSH government they hate, not the USA government in general. They liked Clinton and are not fools. More importantly, this is STILL not more than 50% of the world. I repeat, most people are apathetic. They do not care at all about the US, anymore than you care about Uganda.
2) Last I checked, Michael Moore still got his movie made. Yes some people that disagree with you will call you unamerican. DUH!! Just like you call people names when you don't believe the same as them. That does not change the fact that we DO admit we are not perfect, that the press report when our soldiers torture people, that congress does NOT deny it, but at least makes a 1/2 hearted attempt to investigate it. In China it would be supressed. Same in Russian, same in most of the world. You want to call it "finger pointing", fine. Call my most valued right a silly name and claim it is worthless. But the rest of the world does NOT always allow that finger-pointing.
3) Children may do as they see, but they grow up listening to what you say and it DOES affect their beliefs. Yes the process is slow. Yes it takes a lon time. but YES it works. One generation believes that slavery is wrong, but does it anyway. Next generation still does it, but lets people argue against it. Next does it but have some people try to end it. Next actually fights a war that ends it even if most people supported the war for different reasons, but prejudice still exists and is considered normal. Next generation realizes that prejudice is wrong but still does it. Next generation starts talking about changing it but does nothing, next generation tries to change it and gets nothing done. Next generation actually makes minor changes. Next generation ALL know that prejudice is wrong and major changes get done. We still have prejudice left, but it has been marginizalized.
3)You pity ny Naivete??? I hear you talk and all I hear is pesimistic jaded cynicism. I am not naive at all. You sound like one of those christian fundamaentlists that talk all about the Devil without admitting God might be nice. If the world was 1/2 as corrupt/evil/bad as you think it was, then it would all look like a blasted, war ravaged wasteland. It isn't that bad. Good still lives, hope still thrives, and innocent boys and girls still grow up to be innocent people.
4) I pity your total ignorance. Look at a world with NO cops. Think about it. Do you REALLY think it would be better? Of course not. An unaccountable cop IS better than an accountable cop, in part because no matter WHAT you think, there is ALWAYS a small amount of accountability. The cop can be fired, can be hunted down by everyone else. Yes the chances of that happening are slight, but that doesn't matter, because the cop KNOWS it might happen and has some fear of it. As such he tempers what he does.
5) The adage about absolute power is a foolish belief that anyone with a brain can easily realize is wrong. Forget about the fact that Absolute power is a non-existant thing, so the idea can not be tested. Ask yourself: do you really think a homeless bum (with no power at all) is less likely to steal a steak dinner than a Corporate CEO? No of course not. Power does not corrupt. Instead it is obvious Power Reveals Corruption that Was Already ThereBut some people are so blind and stupid that think there favored guy must never have started out corrupt, it must have been the power that made him that way. BULLSHIT. He was always corrupt, you were just too naive to see it before.
5) 15 smaller evils is a HUNDRED time better than 1 big one. If you don't understand that you have a lot to learn. At least you should be able to realize that if you piss of your particular warlord you can go to one of the other 14 and live there. There are a LOT of Afgahni people that are VERY happy we kicked out the Taliban.
6) You are almost right about training our enemis. But the problem with you, and so many
Not very convincing.
1) Despite what paranoid Americans think and angry non-Americans think, most of the world does NOT hate the USA. Most of the world has no opinion on the USA, just as we americans have no opinion about Javanese. Of those people that have an opininion of the USA, most rank the average American Citizen as being more likeable than an average citizen of most other countries. The "Hate Americans" groups however DO get more press than most other "Hate x country groups". Why, because the US has a singular military might and we have demonstrated that we do not bomb the crap out of countries just because they allow hate mongery against us.
2) The US is a good country not because of what we do or have done but because of what our goals are. We strive to be a better place while other countries claim their life is perfect how could you ask for anything more. This greater willingness to admit we have problems both allows us to progess faster than other countries AND gives us a lot of bad press that less intelligent people believe. Yes it is not the be all and end all, but we want it to be so. Yes we have illusions. By teaching our kids this we hope they will be BETTER than us because they will know how we want them to act instead of copying our evilness. I PITY THOSE THAT DO NOT STRIVE FOR A BETTER WORLD, those that do not teach their children to do as they say, not as they did, those that do not teach their children that yes, we can achieve this celestial goals.
3) The world may not need an unaccountable global policeman, but it sure as @#)! needs a policeman. An unaccountable global one is far better than none at all.
4) America was wrong to do a lot of things. The current war is an example of it. But the Taliban should have been taken down a LONG time ago. Notice how we don't hear about suicide bombers in Afganistan.
We get upset when hugely profitable companies steal stuff do other illegal stuff at the expense of worthy, under-paid programmers to make a profit on it.
We do not get upset when individuals ignore a corrupt law that tramples over fair-use rules in order to catch criminals that make NO monetary profit who are stealing from some of the most corrupt companies around.
The RIAA does not represent artists. It represents recording companies, producers etc. Have you SEEN their contracts? They continue to have clauses that state "The company shall only pay the artist based on 90% of sales, to account for an estimated 10% breakage." Yes, LP's had about 10% breakage. CD's have a breakage rate of less than 1% but the scum-bags still rip off the artists. And this is only ONE of severl ridiculous clausses of the standard contract.
The truth is that if P2P stopped entirely, I doubt the artists would get 10% more in sales. If the RIAA and their companies vanished today and the artists went to CD-BABY and similar services, the artists would end up making more money.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, please note this virus is relatively benign, just spreadign itself and some grafiti.
Eventually they had to realize that there is NEVER a good reason to support less secure voting methods.
Over-poluation is the single bigest problem the world has, and has ever had. It is so big we call it by multiple names, such as unemployment, homelessnes, poverty, famine, etc. They all come down to the same thing: Two many people for the limited resources the world has.
Two ways to solve the problem: Method 1) Kill people. Advantage: quick, needs no cooperation. Disdavantage: Moral issues
Method 2)Reduce Birth Rate: Advantage: Moral issues. Disadvantage: Slow, requires massive cooperation.
Killing people is the intelligent thing to do. Morally objectionable, but intelligent. We Kill because we are smartest S.O.B.s on the planet.
QED anyone attempting to kill tanks is not a Terrorist.
(Note if you think a "terrorist" can include peopel that attack soldiers, than according to that definition, every government soldier is a terrorist. We use "terror" to change governments all the time. The reason we are morally superior to them is that we do not attempt to attack civilians, we try to restrict ourselves to other soldiers.)
You only become a Terroist when you attack civilans. So the people from Syria who went to Iraq in the last few months to kill American and Iraqi military forces are not terrorists
But the people that rammed the twin towers were terrorists.
The official definition of a terrorist is:
"Someone that uses or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against civilians or civilan property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons."
If you attack a military force you are by definition NOT a terrorist.
Note this can be taken to mean that while the people that rammed the Twin towers were terrorists, the people that rammed the Pentagon were not, assuming you were so callous as to consider the deaths of the civilians on board the aircraft as "collateral damage".
Of course it could be that knowledge was helpful and that new software was more complex.
His basic theory is that he believes, given the current rates of discovery, poor patching rates and the large number of bugs that:
1) Due to massive information exchange and slow patching/fixing, post announcement explotitations are not significantly less than explotiation caused by un-announced bugs, so announcing does not help.
2) There are so many bugs out there that finding a bug and announcing it does not produce a singificant reduction in the number of "bugs unknown to white Hats" so it does not increase security significantly.
His major errors are ignoring the following: 1) Exploitation post announcement is almost entirely done against the "lesser" computers, i.e. either machines with un-important data/programs (home pc's) or important machines with incompetent sysadmin. As such the real cost of these explotations is either A) practically null, or b) high, but likely to get the incompetent sysadmin fired, resulting in i) better employment prospects for good sysadmin and ii)an over-all improvment in quality of security for that company. So while the # of explots may be higher for Post-announcement bugs, soceity has a REAL social and economic gain that is very significant.
2)A)The announcement of bugs allows people to judge how well written a program is and therefore make an informed decision to NOT buy inferior producs (say Windows).
B)That perhaps our problem is not that we are announcing the bugs but that we are not doing sufficient bug hunting. He seems to be implying that because bug hunts don't find enough bugs, the solution is not to bug hunt. But anyone with a brain should be able to see that if we are not depleating the unknown bugs fast enough than one possible solution is to tremoundously increase our bug hunting, not to stop the bug disclosures.
There is a lot of the Green Goo around. Kudzo is an ivy like plant that has conquered Southern USA. There are muscles that infest certain inland waters in the USA and are blocking water flow. Not to mention the roaches,mice,rats, etc. that have flourished in the urban environments to unprecedented numbers.
I for one welcome our Gorilla masters.
I've been told it was on the front page several weeks ago (I must have been out of town then.)
Organic life has already covered the planet, in green stuff.
I doubt that any man-made gray goo could compete with the Green Goo God made without a LOT of help. By the time we were good enough to make the gray goo beat the God's Green Goo, we would have already made safeguards such as Gray Goo Cops, little nanites whose sole job it is to rome the world looking for rogue nanites and eat them and reproduce more Gray Cops.
Organic based reproducers beat metals based ones before, and they will do it again if the silly puny little machines try to take over.
One of the MAJOR factors in a "free government" is the fact that you need RESTRICTSIONS on what the government does, not more power to the government.
Yes, the government can do all the things you mentioned. The truth is they don't need the RFID to do di ti. Want to stop cars from being stolen? Let people put explosive car alarms in them. Set them off, the car explodes.
What you thought that was over-kill? Too many bad consequenses for the little good?
Same thing for RFID. Too much bad consequences for the little good. Stolen cars, and traffic violations are minor problems. But putting the RFID in place lets the government know too much about my life. They do not need to know that I went to a hotel on May 19th that had a Sado-masochism convention, and on April 10th I went to a univesity that was having a lecture about legalizing Marijuana. (Note, If you care about whethter those were false examples you are living proof that the Government can not handle that knowledge).
This kind of information is easily abused. In the 1950's in the USA, that kind of information was used by Congressmen to have people fired and Black-listed - thereby preventing them from working.
That was not in a communistic country, not in a facisist country, the U.S.A.
They do that in Barcelona. Read my comment above, or go directly to this story: http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/09/spa in.club/index.html
Which I submitted yesterday, but they rejected. Putting them into people seems FAR more interesting than into licencse plates.
There are several different studies about rape. One of the most common one has a "1 in 4" number. In this study they asked a group of women several questions about their history, but used a "generous" definition of rape, where basically if you regret it afterwards, it was called rape, even if at the time you did not in anyway say no or make any effort to escape/end the rape.
An interesting counter study was done where the same set of questions were asked of both men and women, with their gender not revelealed untill after the questions were graded. Like th first study it found that 1 in 4 women were raped. It also found that 1 in 10 men were raped by women.
For now, lets make NO judgmenet on whether the men really were raped. But you should think long and hard about the consequences of using that definition of rape. If you use it, then considering the low number of women arrested for rape, we have a serious problem with female rapists that the cops are making NO effort to catch. This is a far more serious problem than the failure of the cops to catch the men, because they are not even making an effort and the women KNOW it.
In my opinion there are 5 types of rape. 1) Violent rape where real force is used to ensure the rape is consumated 2) Non-violent, drug free rape where the victim is afraid that force will be used if she(or he) resists. 3) Forced Drug rape where a drug is specifically given to the victim without her(or his) knowledge in order to allow rape to occure and 4) unforced Drug rape where the victim willing takes drugs and ends up unable to suffecully protest the sex. 5) Sex with an under-age partner.
Contrary to popular opinion, it should be clear that women are adults, and as such ARE held responsible for their own actions. As such merely saying that you decided afterwards that sex was wrong should not be considered rape, anymore than if you call it car theft if after sellling a car you decide you want it back. For it to be rape, the rape victim MUST either communicate clearly to the "rapist" that they were unwilling or it should have been clear to a competent person that they were uncapable of communicating.
But part of all this also requires the women to say "YES I WANT SEX", which most of them do want, but are so afraid to admit. Without that, then polite "No thank you" will not work because so many women are saying that when they really mean "yes Please".
P.S. Yes, Whores have the right not to be raped. That includes women that let men pay for dinner but never pay for the man's dinner until after they have had sex. What else would you call them? They use their attractiveness to get expensive dinners and think "He asked me so I don't have to pay even though I want to go out and I never have to ask men because I am a women". You wonder why men rape women? It's because they are angry at constantly being treated like crap. Yes good men take it like a man, and only an evil men would act on this anger.
Now for the BONUS question.
Which am I? Man or Women
and more imporantly am I: Straight, Homosexual, or Bi-sexual?
Ten points if you guess right, -50 if you react with the normal prejudice and say I must be a Straight Man to think this way.
1) Price 2) Viruses that target it 3) Bugs that they delay fixing 4) Anger at their arrogance and refusal to support a company that mistreats their customers 5) Less Hangs on Apple/Linux
One of the things lawyers try to do all the tiem is to get more then they need, so judges laugh and throw out the entire thing. Look at the death example. No judge will let you kill someone because they signed a contract. But put in a penalty of $1000 and the judge will let you enforce that.
Try the following:
"I agree to pay any and all reasonable and customary legal expenses if I sue you, even should I win the case."
They can still sue for medical costs. But the judge is VERY likely to say that hey, you personally agreed to pay for their legal costs, and force them to pay for that.
Original is subpoened. Upon arrival in whatever media form it is, it is copied. The original tape/hard drive/whatever that was received is locked away. All work is done on the stored copy.
Possible Example from the Kobe case: (Assumption: Kobe is a sweet, innocent man, his accuser is a lier - yes I know the chances of this being true are minimal, but assume for the sake of argument that it is true) Day after the sex she might have sent a text message to her friend stating: "Wow, Kobe was such a wonderfull lover. I hope he calls me."
Two weeks later she might have thought "That Son of a )$#*( I'll get him! I'll accuse him of rape." But was too smart to have written it down. But that doesn't change the fact that she wrote the FIRST text message, which proves her a lier.
ASCII files like emails/text messages are loaded directly.
Other documents, such as Word docs, faxs, etc. are OCR'ed (accuracy is not very good).
Next they run compelx searches for word combinations.
And low level lawyers/paralegals then read either everything, or sometiems just the search results, flagging things as Relevant/not-relevant.
The amount of data is HUGE. A certain level of Privacy is created by the hugeness of the data. The effect is similar to looking at an apartment building across the street, without optical aid. Someone might be naked with the shades open, but the amount of stuff you have to look at is is so much and your ability to retrieve fine detail is so little that you see nothing. Like it takes the binoculars/telescope to see the naked person, it takes a HUGE amount of cash to pay for man hours/computer time to wade through all the junk text to find the relevant details.
Now, if you know to start off looking at only a single person's stuff, from x date to y date, then you can find some interesting bits...
Almost as much as hearing Physicists warn us about how AIDS is going to mutate, become airborne and kill us all.
Or hearing a Medical Doctor tell me about the threat that Comet's have towards the entire planet.
The man is TOTALLY unquallifed to discuss these issues. He has enough money. If he REALLY thinks these are important issues, he can afford to get a PhD related to them, or at least fund an institute so someone with a PhD can spout his warnings. Hearing him talk about them is just stupid.
2) Last I checked, Michael Moore still got his movie made. Yes some people that disagree with you will call you unamerican. DUH!! Just like you call people names when you don't believe the same as them. That does not change the fact that we DO admit we are not perfect, that the press report when our soldiers torture people, that congress does NOT deny it, but at least makes a 1/2 hearted attempt to investigate it. In China it would be supressed. Same in Russian, same in most of the world. You want to call it "finger pointing", fine. Call my most valued right a silly name and claim it is worthless. But the rest of the world does NOT always allow that finger-pointing. 3) Children may do as they see, but they grow up listening to what you say and it DOES affect their beliefs. Yes the process is slow. Yes it takes a lon time. but YES it works. One generation believes that slavery is wrong, but does it anyway. Next generation still does it, but lets people argue against it. Next does it but have some people try to end it. Next actually fights a war that ends it even if most people supported the war for different reasons, but prejudice still exists and is considered normal. Next generation realizes that prejudice is wrong but still does it. Next generation starts talking about changing it but does nothing, next generation tries to change it and gets nothing done. Next generation actually makes minor changes. Next generation ALL know that prejudice is wrong and major changes get done. We still have prejudice left, but it has been marginizalized. 3)You pity ny Naivete??? I hear you talk and all I hear is pesimistic jaded cynicism. I am not naive at all. You sound like one of those christian fundamaentlists that talk all about the Devil without admitting God might be nice. If the world was 1/2 as corrupt/evil/bad as you think it was, then it would all look like a blasted, war ravaged wasteland. It isn't that bad. Good still lives, hope still thrives, and innocent boys and girls still grow up to be innocent people. 4) I pity your total ignorance. Look at a world with NO cops. Think about it. Do you REALLY think it would be better? Of course not. An unaccountable cop IS better than an accountable cop, in part because no matter WHAT you think, there is ALWAYS a small amount of accountability. The cop can be fired, can be hunted down by everyone else. Yes the chances of that happening are slight, but that doesn't matter, because the cop KNOWS it might happen and has some fear of it. As such he tempers what he does. 5) The adage about absolute power is a foolish belief that anyone with a brain can easily realize is wrong. Forget about the fact that Absolute power is a non-existant thing, so the idea can not be tested. Ask yourself: do you really think a homeless bum (with no power at all) is less likely to steal a steak dinner than a Corporate CEO? No of course not. Power does not corrupt. Instead it is obvious Power Reveals Corruption that Was Already ThereBut some people are so blind and stupid that think there favored guy must never have started out corrupt, it must have been the power that made him that way. BULLSHIT. He was always corrupt, you were just too naive to see it before. 5) 15 smaller evils is a HUNDRED time better than 1 big one. If you don't understand that you have a lot to learn. At least you should be able to realize that if you piss of your particular warlord you can go to one of the other 14 and live there. There are a LOT of Afgahni people that are VERY happy we kicked out the Taliban. 6) You are almost right about training our enemis. But the problem with you, and so many
Not very convincing. 1) Despite what paranoid Americans think and angry non-Americans think, most of the world does NOT hate the USA. Most of the world has no opinion on the USA, just as we americans have no opinion about Javanese. Of those people that have an opininion of the USA, most rank the average American Citizen as being more likeable than an average citizen of most other countries. The "Hate Americans" groups however DO get more press than most other "Hate x country groups". Why, because the US has a singular military might and we have demonstrated that we do not bomb the crap out of countries just because they allow hate mongery against us. 2) The US is a good country not because of what we do or have done but because of what our goals are. We strive to be a better place while other countries claim their life is perfect how could you ask for anything more. This greater willingness to admit we have problems both allows us to progess faster than other countries AND gives us a lot of bad press that less intelligent people believe. Yes it is not the be all and end all, but we want it to be so. Yes we have illusions. By teaching our kids this we hope they will be BETTER than us because they will know how we want them to act instead of copying our evilness. I PITY THOSE THAT DO NOT STRIVE FOR A BETTER WORLD, those that do not teach their children to do as they say, not as they did, those that do not teach their children that yes, we can achieve this celestial goals. 3) The world may not need an unaccountable global policeman, but it sure as @#)! needs a policeman. An unaccountable global one is far better than none at all. 4) America was wrong to do a lot of things. The current war is an example of it. But the Taliban should have been taken down a LONG time ago. Notice how we don't hear about suicide bombers in Afganistan.
We get upset when hugely profitable companies steal stuff do other illegal stuff at the expense of worthy, under-paid programmers to make a profit on it.
We do not get upset when individuals ignore a corrupt law that tramples over fair-use rules in order to catch criminals that make NO monetary profit who are stealing from some of the most corrupt companies around.
The RIAA does not represent artists. It represents recording companies, producers etc. Have you SEEN their contracts? They continue to have clauses that state "The company shall only pay the artist based on 90% of sales, to account for an estimated 10% breakage." Yes, LP's had about 10% breakage. CD's have a breakage rate of less than 1% but the scum-bags still rip off the artists. And this is only ONE of severl ridiculous clausses of the standard contract.
The truth is that if P2P stopped entirely, I doubt the artists would get 10% more in sales. If the RIAA and their companies vanished today and the artists went to CD-BABY and similar services, the artists would end up making more money.