Apple has repeatedly said/claimed that they don't pay for product placement
You've got to be kidding me: Apple reigns supreme in product placement: "Apple is tops at product placement, appearing in 10 of the 33 movies that hit No. 1 at the box office in the U.S. last year"
One of the interesting aspects of movie product placement, is that virtually all the time, movie producers actively avoid having any logos in the scene (or product mentions), unless it's been paid for. In general, if you see a logo in a movie - it was paid for (there are very few exceptions to this) - for every logo, somewhere there was a meeting discussing the use of the logo in the movie and money changing hands for it. Modern movie and TV producers do not simply give free advertising to companies - that's a wasted revenue opportunity.
Here's an example of the sort of thing of thing I'm talking about: New Target for Treating Wide Range of Cancers: Promising Binding Site On Mutant P53 Protein. This is a major breakthrough on the path toward finding treatments for a wide range of cancers. The team is led by what appears to be one of these so-called free-riding immigrants, an Austrian. If you read the names on this publication list you'd be forgiven for thinking this was in a foreign country. Meet some of the team members who are f'ing curing cancer - a sizable percentage of them are "foreigners", and many are probably immigrants who are supposedly being "given" an education at the "expense" of the US. I bet the jerks who are so eager to kick all "foreigners" out of America would gladly accept that cancer cure when it comes round, when they get cancer from sitting on their lazy asses eating junkfood. I really think we benefit from this... this example is just one, but you can look at just about any leading-edge research to find the same pattern.
I am amazed by the percentage of medical doctors in the USA who immigrated from third world countries and now earn their livings soaking middle class Americans
You do realize that if those doctors went back to their countries of origin, that doctors fees would actually fucking rise? Ever heard of "supply and demand"?
There is another indirect benefit of attracting the best and brightest. If you ever follow scientific and medical research, you'll notice a distinct trend, that even for research coming out of US universities, there'll invariably be a disproportionate number of foreign names on the published research (largely Asian, but also a number of other regions stand out). The benefits to the US are immense, as all that leads to things like new cures for diseases, new medications, which are often then manufactured and exported, contributing to US GDP.
Actually, pick any scientific area doing really important work (be it medical, optical or quantum computing) and one can almost guarantee that some of the key names in the field will be foreign names. Hell, even Einstein was a 'foreign immigrant' in the US.
The US has created a fertile environment for 'bright minds' trying to solve key problems. I think that's a good thing. The rapid industrialization of emerging economies, combined with increasing authoritarianism, combined with the College Tuition bubble, is all making the US less attractive.
When foreigners aren't trying to get into your country any more, that's when you should really worry.
Really, I know a lot of people for whom the TSA is a definite reason to avoid visiting. Maybe it also depends if you're single or not, as if you're married with children then TSA means subjecting your own wife and children to molestation at the hands of strangers. No sane man would voluntarily do that.
Some were even hostile...just try getting a date with one of "their" women
Sounds like someone's just bitter at getting rejected by a woman of different ethnicity. Get over it, they don't all just fall over their feet for white males.
The government is not your negotiating partner. It is your tool, your slave
Of course it should be. But still somehow here we are today - the reality we find ourselves in doesn't match this.
What compromise can you suggest here?
Restore liberty, restore the Bill of Rights, kick out the corruption and rot, re-align government so that it works toward the end of moral justice and the protection of natural rights.. I think those are about the baseline conditions, and I guess government can either do this the easy way or the hard way. To be honest, I don't know, I am just trying to find some optimism here.
To be clear, I meant the pragmatic compromise solution if one's goal is de-escalation, not the ethically ideal and just solution.. as any 'ultimatum' that the government 'must' back down (and get in its proper position as servant of the people with only those powers delegated) may just be considered cause for further escalation (as the interesting part of this sort of thing is that it can be partly a self-fulfilling prophecy, which means it might be neither necessary nor optimal to avoid peaceful solutions). Not everyone in government is corrupt, I think all most ordinary people want is for the rotten apples to be thrown out, and this part one can draw a line under ie. make that non-negotiable.
At least, IMO:/.. FTR, I don't want conflict, I'd rather see peace and justice and progress, and everyone working together toward great and interesting things... all this military claptrap is a f-cking waste of money -- I mean we have money to throw away on drills like this where helicopters pretend to shoot at our own citizens but we don't have money to fund organizations like NASA to potentially do really great things that actually take humanity forward (say, a Mars mission or the first drone missions to the nearest stars), or to cure diseases like cancer or provide proper healthcare? That is really messed up.
Conflict is expensive, and often slows down progress.
I think what we are seeing now may be something like standard game-theoretical escalation (between 'government' and 'citizenry').
Since the (corruption-driven) economic crisis, an increase in resistance-like protests have put those in power on edge. Perceiving increased resistance from a portion of the population, those in power are purposely scaling up their defenses against potential resistance (increased surveillance and attempts at gun control, bills like HR 347 and executive orders that grant extraordinary powers, usurpation of due process and indefinite detention etc.).
The game-theoretical result of this is that at the grassroots level, a small but steadily increasing proportion of the citizenry starts to (basically rightfully) sense that the government is escalating against the citizenry. This fuels further calls for resistance, calls for revolution from some quarters, the massively increased gun sales and stockpiling we've seen, and so on.
The game-theoretical result of that in turn is a government saying "oh shit, the people look increasingly likely to revolt", and the result of that is this kind of escalation - a raw display of brute power intended to demonstrate that we'd better all keep in line, "or else" - it's a kind of veiled threat, a kind of shock and awe tactic. "Behave citizens, or next time there'll be real bullets".
We're currently on a game-theory escalation path to increasing fascism and oppression and possibly a prolonged low-grade guerilla-style 'civil war' (though it will never be called a civil war, it will be called 'terrorism').
The proper solution is that both people and government need to try work with each other as partners toward a common goal, both 'sides' need to calm down and negotiate with mutual interest in the concerns (and rights) of the 'other side'.
In reality the government is now so corrupt and overtaken by corporatist interests (e.g. banks who are now supposedly too powerful even to prosecute for serious crimes, and a 'fox guarding the henhouse' situation at the treasury and Fed) that it might not be possible for true cooperation.
The Christian bible also promotes all sorts of viciousness, but thankfully most Christians have the common sense to selectively ignore these parts... but if we take a stand against Islam based on its literal teachings then we must do so for the Bible too, in which case we'd have a problem (e.g. consider this quote from Deut 20: "When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby").
What we should take a stand against is only the elements that violate the rights of others, and ban those. So it would be wrong and simplistic to 'ban Sharia' but it would be appropriate to ban particular behaviors that might fall under it, e.g. forcing women to be covered if they don't want to, or whatever. It would be wrong to ban the Bible but appropriate to ban forced labor or taking women as 'plunder'.
We don't ban religions, we ban certain types of behavior that violate the natural rights of others. If some members of a religion don't like that, it's up to them to reconcile their religion with human rights.
Just a reminder, anyone who feels Carmen Ortiz overreached here, please consider signing this petition ("A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path").
Faced with adversity, he took the coward's way out
With all due respect, you're a sick fuck, and represent everything that's wrong with America these days. Most of the rest of us are actually sick of sociopaths like you, and of the damage people like you do, and it won't be long until everyone rises up against the sociopaths.
I say modify the H1B visa program to be an official citizenship-seeking visa. Require H1B visa holders also apply for a green-card starting as soon as they are on US soil and make that application the visa holder's responsibility and take the employer completely out of the loop
They're supposed to treat them well, but trust me - there's a world of difference between a boss that can fire you and one that can put your ass on a plane back to Asia.
But isn't the real solution here that your wife should have been allowed to look for other jobs? The lower wages (which by the way are a violation of immigration law if true) are because the employer has complete control over the employee until they get a green card (which takes many years)... if she could look for other jobs, her wages go up, and thus also average wages for that type of job go up (because Americans would not be competing with slave labor).
Your view is not a generally libertarian one, actually, it's interesting that it's completely at odds with how most libertarians think. A libertarian view would consider that a true free market (in the global sense) is one in which labor is allowed to move freely, and that the controls that forcefully prevent laborers in other countries from moving to and working to the US in the first place are a form of massive interference of the free market.
Unfortunately, I have come to agree with that, for the simple reason that no amount of wishful thinking seems to change the fact that it's true.
You probably haven't done this in a while. New torrents don't generally show up publicly for the first hour or so, are deleted by admins if the admins deem them garbage and your account gets banned.
I tried this, and I must be honest, for the time investment required, I don't get the 'kicks'... I spent about half a day looking at loads of publicly open cameras, and all I saw amounted to this:
- Mostly a bunch of business/office cameras. Yawn, if I want to look at some desks inside a boring office building I can do that when I'm at work. If I want to look at the reception area of random business I can walk out into the real world and enter businesses just like those.
- The odd control room of I don't know what exactly.
- Some baby cribs - ew, I'm not a creep and don't want to look at random babies
- The odd lounge or kitchen, mostly empty, now and again with some random boring people in it doing boring things like watching TV. If I want to see people doing stuff at their homes, I can just go visit friends.
Half the cameras were in differnt time zones, so half the time it's just dark somewhere anyway.
Of course part of me hoped to find that all-elusive titty, but then I thought about it from a statistical perspective (we can apply something akin to the Fermi Paradox), I would have had to waste a lot more time still to find appropriate cameras, then spend time waiting for those people to be home, then spend a lot of time watching them until the moment I happened to catch nudity. I realized it could take days/weeks, and suddenly it (1) all felt incredibly creepy and (2) all felt like an incredible waste of time, I can see titty pics and movies anytime all over the Internet.
It also occurred to me the baby cribs could be honeypot setups, and they're logging potential 'pedophile IP addresses' or something.
By the end of it I just wanted my half a day back.
it provides no "protection" beyond what you'd get from any other stateful firewall.
Yes, because no stateful firewalls have had any vulnerabilities in them ever.
I agree with all your other points, and think it's high time for NAT to just die already, for a whole host of reasons - but let's be honest, one thing it does do is indeed add one small layer of extra security... "NAT plus stateful firewall" cannot be less secure than "same stateful firewall on its own".
Many companies don't secure their networks well. Although oddly, accessing them could (legally) be regarded as an intrusion nonetheless - just a thought on the legalities here, if you or I had (similarly to Google) searched for and published a list of accidentally openly accessible printers and dumped it on something like Pastebin, I suspect we'd probably be prosecuted by someone like Carmen Ortiz and convicted on some trumped up felony hacking charge with a possible 30 year sentence. Apparently Google gets a free pass to do what for peons like us would probably be considered a felony.
Also: Not being classy, isn't illegal. Pointing out that someone "isn't real classy" is usually something you do when you lack anything much more solid to point a finger about.
I'm not sure you understand how the legal system is supposed to work. If everyone went to prison every time they expressed the intent to do something illegal, we'd all be in jail... one of the principles of our justice system is that we don't prosecute for crimes you "might commit in the future" (there's a famous movie based on that idea called Minority Report). If they had any evidence that this phishing actually occurred, they would have prosecuted on it. What they did prosecute on was still bullshit - seriously, basically editing the URL.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has repeatedly said/claimed that they don't pay for product placement
You've got to be kidding me: Apple reigns supreme in product placement: "Apple is tops at product placement, appearing in 10 of the 33 movies that hit No. 1 at the box office in the U.S. last year"
One of the interesting aspects of movie product placement, is that virtually all the time, movie producers actively avoid having any logos in the scene (or product mentions), unless it's been paid for. In general, if you see a logo in a movie - it was paid for (there are very few exceptions to this) - for every logo, somewhere there was a meeting discussing the use of the logo in the movie and money changing hands for it. Modern movie and TV producers do not simply give free advertising to companies - that's a wasted revenue opportunity.
Here's an example of the sort of thing of thing I'm talking about: New Target for Treating Wide Range of Cancers: Promising Binding Site On Mutant P53 Protein. This is a major breakthrough on the path toward finding treatments for a wide range of cancers. The team is led by what appears to be one of these so-called free-riding immigrants, an Austrian. If you read the names on this publication list you'd be forgiven for thinking this was in a foreign country. Meet some of the team members who are f'ing curing cancer - a sizable percentage of them are "foreigners", and many are probably immigrants who are supposedly being "given" an education at the "expense" of the US. I bet the jerks who are so eager to kick all "foreigners" out of America would gladly accept that cancer cure when it comes round, when they get cancer from sitting on their lazy asses eating junkfood. I really think we benefit from this ... this example is just one, but you can look at just about any leading-edge research to find the same pattern.
I am amazed by the percentage of medical doctors in the USA who immigrated from third world countries and now earn their livings soaking middle class Americans
You do realize that if those doctors went back to their countries of origin, that doctors fees would actually fucking rise? Ever heard of "supply and demand"?
There is another indirect benefit of attracting the best and brightest. If you ever follow scientific and medical research, you'll notice a distinct trend, that even for research coming out of US universities, there'll invariably be a disproportionate number of foreign names on the published research (largely Asian, but also a number of other regions stand out). The benefits to the US are immense, as all that leads to things like new cures for diseases, new medications, which are often then manufactured and exported, contributing to US GDP.
Actually, pick any scientific area doing really important work (be it medical, optical or quantum computing) and one can almost guarantee that some of the key names in the field will be foreign names. Hell, even Einstein was a 'foreign immigrant' in the US.
The US has created a fertile environment for 'bright minds' trying to solve key problems. I think that's a good thing. The rapid industrialization of emerging economies, combined with increasing authoritarianism, combined with the College Tuition bubble, is all making the US less attractive.
When foreigners aren't trying to get into your country any more, that's when you should really worry.
They consider the TSA part of the experience
Really, I know a lot of people for whom the TSA is a definite reason to avoid visiting. Maybe it also depends if you're single or not, as if you're married with children then TSA means subjecting your own wife and children to molestation at the hands of strangers. No sane man would voluntarily do that.
Some were even hostile...just try getting a date with one of "their" women
Sounds like someone's just bitter at getting rejected by a woman of different ethnicity. Get over it, they don't all just fall over their feet for white males.
The government is not your negotiating partner. It is your tool, your slave
Of course it should be. But still somehow here we are today - the reality we find ourselves in doesn't match this.
What compromise can you suggest here?
Restore liberty, restore the Bill of Rights, kick out the corruption and rot, re-align government so that it works toward the end of moral justice and the protection of natural rights .. I think those are about the baseline conditions, and I guess government can either do this the easy way or the hard way. To be honest, I don't know, I am just trying to find some optimism here.
To be clear, I meant the pragmatic compromise solution if one's goal is de-escalation, not the ethically ideal and just solution .. as any 'ultimatum' that the government 'must' back down (and get in its proper position as servant of the people with only those powers delegated) may just be considered cause for further escalation (as the interesting part of this sort of thing is that it can be partly a self-fulfilling prophecy, which means it might be neither necessary nor optimal to avoid peaceful solutions). Not everyone in government is corrupt, I think all most ordinary people want is for the rotten apples to be thrown out, and this part one can draw a line under ie. make that non-negotiable.
At least, IMO :/ .. FTR, I don't want conflict, I'd rather see peace and justice and progress, and everyone working together toward great and interesting things ... all this military claptrap is a f-cking waste of money -- I mean we have money to throw away on drills like this where helicopters pretend to shoot at our own citizens but we don't have money to fund organizations like NASA to potentially do really great things that actually take humanity forward (say, a Mars mission or the first drone missions to the nearest stars), or to cure diseases like cancer or provide proper healthcare? That is really messed up.
Conflict is expensive, and often slows down progress.
I think what we are seeing now may be something like standard game-theoretical escalation (between 'government' and 'citizenry').
Since the (corruption-driven) economic crisis, an increase in resistance-like protests have put those in power on edge. Perceiving increased resistance from a portion of the population, those in power are purposely scaling up their defenses against potential resistance (increased surveillance and attempts at gun control, bills like HR 347 and executive orders that grant extraordinary powers, usurpation of due process and indefinite detention etc.).
The game-theoretical result of this is that at the grassroots level, a small but steadily increasing proportion of the citizenry starts to (basically rightfully) sense that the government is escalating against the citizenry. This fuels further calls for resistance, calls for revolution from some quarters, the massively increased gun sales and stockpiling we've seen, and so on.
The game-theoretical result of that in turn is a government saying "oh shit, the people look increasingly likely to revolt", and the result of that is this kind of escalation - a raw display of brute power intended to demonstrate that we'd better all keep in line, "or else" - it's a kind of veiled threat, a kind of shock and awe tactic. "Behave citizens, or next time there'll be real bullets".
We're currently on a game-theory escalation path to increasing fascism and oppression and possibly a prolonged low-grade guerilla-style 'civil war' (though it will never be called a civil war, it will be called 'terrorism').
The proper solution is that both people and government need to try work with each other as partners toward a common goal, both 'sides' need to calm down and negotiate with mutual interest in the concerns (and rights) of the 'other side'.
In reality the government is now so corrupt and overtaken by corporatist interests (e.g. banks who are now supposedly too powerful even to prosecute for serious crimes, and a 'fox guarding the henhouse' situation at the treasury and Fed) that it might not be possible for true cooperation.
The Christian bible also promotes all sorts of viciousness, but thankfully most Christians have the common sense to selectively ignore these parts ... but if we take a stand against Islam based on its literal teachings then we must do so for the Bible too, in which case we'd have a problem (e.g. consider this quote from Deut 20: "When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby").
What we should take a stand against is only the elements that violate the rights of others, and ban those. So it would be wrong and simplistic to 'ban Sharia' but it would be appropriate to ban particular behaviors that might fall under it, e.g. forcing women to be covered if they don't want to, or whatever. It would be wrong to ban the Bible but appropriate to ban forced labor or taking women as 'plunder'.
We don't ban religions, we ban certain types of behavior that violate the natural rights of others. If some members of a religion don't like that, it's up to them to reconcile their religion with human rights.
No.
Just a reminder, anyone who feels Carmen Ortiz overreached here, please consider signing this petition ("A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path").
Faced with adversity, he took the coward's way out
With all due respect, you're a sick fuck, and represent everything that's wrong with America these days. Most of the rest of us are actually sick of sociopaths like you, and of the damage people like you do, and it won't be long until everyone rises up against the sociopaths.
I say modify the H1B visa program to be an official citizenship-seeking visa. Require H1B visa holders also apply for a green-card starting as soon as they are on US soil and make that application the visa holder's responsibility and take the employer completely out of the loop
This, this and this.
They're supposed to treat them well, but trust me - there's a world of difference between a boss that can fire you and one that can put your ass on a plane back to Asia.
But isn't the real solution here that your wife should have been allowed to look for other jobs? The lower wages (which by the way are a violation of immigration law if true) are because the employer has complete control over the employee until they get a green card (which takes many years) ... if she could look for other jobs, her wages go up, and thus also average wages for that type of job go up (because Americans would not be competing with slave labor).
Your view is not a generally libertarian one, actually, it's interesting that it's completely at odds with how most libertarians think. A libertarian view would consider that a true free market (in the global sense) is one in which labor is allowed to move freely, and that the controls that forcefully prevent laborers in other countries from moving to and working to the US in the first place are a form of massive interference of the free market.
Unfortunately, I have come to agree with that, for the simple reason that no amount of wishful thinking seems to change the fact that it's true.
You probably haven't done this in a while. New torrents don't generally show up publicly for the first hour or so, are deleted by admins if the admins deem them garbage and your account gets banned.
Have a grudge against somebody? Make their toast extra dark and their coffee extra weak.
Wow, Dr. Evil you are not.
- Mostly a bunch of business/office cameras. Yawn, if I want to look at some desks inside a boring office building I can do that when I'm at work. If I want to look at the reception area of random business I can walk out into the real world and enter businesses just like those.
- The odd control room of I don't know what exactly.
- Some baby cribs - ew, I'm not a creep and don't want to look at random babies
- The odd lounge or kitchen, mostly empty, now and again with some random boring people in it doing boring things like watching TV. If I want to see people doing stuff at their homes, I can just go visit friends.
Half the cameras were in differnt time zones, so half the time it's just dark somewhere anyway.
Of course part of me hoped to find that all-elusive titty, but then I thought about it from a statistical perspective (we can apply something akin to the Fermi Paradox), I would have had to waste a lot more time still to find appropriate cameras, then spend time waiting for those people to be home, then spend a lot of time watching them until the moment I happened to catch nudity. I realized it could take days/weeks, and suddenly it (1) all felt incredibly creepy and (2) all felt like an incredible waste of time, I can see titty pics and movies anytime all over the Internet.
It also occurred to me the baby cribs could be honeypot setups, and they're logging potential 'pedophile IP addresses' or something.
By the end of it I just wanted my half a day back.
it provides no "protection" beyond what you'd get from any other stateful firewall.
Yes, because no stateful firewalls have had any vulnerabilities in them ever.
I agree with all your other points, and think it's high time for NAT to just die already, for a whole host of reasons - but let's be honest, one thing it does do is indeed add one small layer of extra security ... "NAT plus stateful firewall" cannot be less secure than "same stateful firewall on its own".
Uhm .. I don't think that was actually a real case, you know. I agree it's a silly post, but not for the reason you think.
Many companies don't secure their networks well. Although oddly, accessing them could (legally) be regarded as an intrusion nonetheless - just a thought on the legalities here, if you or I had (similarly to Google) searched for and published a list of accidentally openly accessible printers and dumped it on something like Pastebin, I suspect we'd probably be prosecuted by someone like Carmen Ortiz and convicted on some trumped up felony hacking charge with a possible 30 year sentence. Apparently Google gets a free pass to do what for peons like us would probably be considered a felony.
Individually, I believe most Americans are quite sane and normal people
Yet even on this discussion thread there are lots of people arguing to toss the guys in jail and defending the prosecutors. I'm not so sure anymore.
This 'collective system' is nothing more than the sum of its parts - if the system is sick, it's because the people in it are sick.
Sound like some classy fellows there
Also: Not being classy, isn't illegal. Pointing out that someone "isn't real classy" is usually something you do when you lack anything much more solid to point a finger about.
yeah, no criminal intent there.
I'm not sure you understand how the legal system is supposed to work. If everyone went to prison every time they expressed the intent to do something illegal, we'd all be in jail ... one of the principles of our justice system is that we don't prosecute for crimes you "might commit in the future" (there's a famous movie based on that idea called Minority Report). If they had any evidence that this phishing actually occurred, they would have prosecuted on it. What they did prosecute on was still bullshit - seriously, basically editing the URL.