Capitalism > Socialism > Fascism > Communism (ranged by freedom)
(I mean here socialism as practiced in most european countries between 1950-2000, if you mean the EU's overwhelming philosophy, then perhaps yes, you're right that it's closer to communism than fascism) In many ways the Socialist Europeans are much more free than the average American. Since education is often free to the individual (and you even get a small stipend by the government to go to school) people get to study for the career they really want, rather than being burdened by massive student loans. The state gets paid back through the higher taxes from the greater income, and the individual gets to pursue the career they really want rather than the one that they can afford to pay for (in terms of education).
In terms of medical care the Europeans are also much freer, since they get free medical care. Therefore Europeans are not screwed by getting sick when they can't afford health insurance, have had prior diseases like cancer, or their insurance company decides to screw them somehow.
The much-touted "freedom" of America is more for large corporations and the few people that can write a check for their college tuition. In fact, this article is about large corporations getting their own police force. Do you think this means greater or lesser freedom for the average individual? (Hint: you may soon have federal police knocking on your door for sharing the wrong file) We still haven't even gotten to drug use (legalized in Holland) or sex and nudity (much freer laws in Europe). Sure, they pay alot in taxes, but when you count the cost of health care and education, the tax burden comes out similarly. Americans just get to pay for hugely expensive ($500 billion+) annual defense budgets or hugely expensive ($750 billion+) unnecessary wars or the hugely expensive "War on Drugs" rather than things they actually can use in daily life.
You dipshits don't actually think a copy of a passport is worth anything do you?
At one of the western embassy's, yes. To a local cop, nope. That's not true.
I had a French cop stop me on the streeet ask me for ID (there was some kind of local fraudster that was panhandling, and the cop saw that person talking to me) The French cop said he wanted to see my passport (all I had was my driver's license). When I told him I had left my passport in the hotel room, he wanted to know why I did not make a copy of it and take it with me. He said that it was important that I do this. So yes, copies of passports are important to local cops. Sure, they can be easily altered, but they provide a starting point to prove your nationality and identity.
If wind power was such a good payback, why are they PAYING 400 million Kroner to keep them running?
Solar and wind are a LONG way from being as economically viable as coal, natural gas, or nuclear. And solar and wind are HEAVILY subsidized compared to coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The DOE table above should have made that abundantly clear... Price does not always tell the full story. The main goal of the Danish has been to get to energy independence. For them, the 400 million kroner is worth it. The Arab oil embargo of the '70s did serious damage to their economy, and so their goal was more on focusing how to be self-sufficient in energy more than just focusing on profit alone.
They decided against nuclear energy when the Chernobyl accident happened, which does make sense when you realize that nuclear power plants are uninsurable (an actual accident would easily bankrupt any insurance company you care to choose, making the premiums far too high to be profitable. I am sure that the price of insurance was not put in your calculations of nuclear energy subsidies -- America's nuclear power plants are uninsurable by private companies -- they are insured through the Price-Anderson act
I notice you don't have oil on your list of "cheap" relatively unsubsidized energy sources. You would have if we had this discussion even a year ago. Denmark actually produces more oil than it imports, mainly as a result of their determination to be energy-efficient, and that protects them at a time when oil prices are going through the roof and negatively affecting American business in an already weak economy.
The CIA factbook does not list coal as a Danish resource so if they based their energy program on that, they would be SOL if there were any problems with that.
That leaves natural gas, but when you look at the fact that the wind power industry brings in over 3.5 billion euros every year to the country and is a byproduct of their focus on wind energy, you see that they are much better off than if they focused on natural-gas, which is non-renewable and would not have made them an industry leader.
So how "ignorant" is that? Wind power actually makes sense and is very profitable. Sure, non-renewable resources like oil can sometimes be more profitable on a short-term basis, but you can see how well that is working out every time you fill up at the pump.
Right now, and for the last 20 years, wind and solar have been huge money-losers, and only exists BECAUSE of the massive subsidies. If we subsidized wind or solar at a level to get useful output levels, we'd spend literally trillions more per year. Nice try, troll. Countries like Denmark have had tremendous success with alternative energy sources such as wind power. Currently about 20% of the energy used in Denmark comes from wind power, and there is about a $5 billion market in exporting turbines. Currently over a third of the wind turbines used worldwide are built by Danish manufacturers such as Vestas.
On windy days, Denmark actually generates "too much" power from wind (about 40%) so they are working on an electric car system to act as a "sink" to dump the excess energy. (currently the hydroelectric generating facilities in Norway and Sweden are used to smooth out the changes in energy production from wind)
The wind power project has been such a success that Denmark is currently planning to double its offshore wind farms, after studies showed that it would not harm the environment. The current goal is to increase wind power to 30% of total output by 2025.
Please don't bring up "what about the birds?" in regards to wind turbines. Just don't. Sure, some may fly into one and die. Some won't. It's called survival of the fittest Actually, the tall buildings in cities kill a great many more birds than windmills. According to the linked article, the conservative estimate is that 100 million birds are killed each year through collisions with buildings.
Apparently the combination of tall buildings, glass, and bright light is pretty deadly for birds. The bright lights on the tall buildings (like those over 40 stories) can really confuse the birds when they are migrating. The birds are used to using visual cues from the stars and moon to navigate, and according to the article can end up crashing into the building at night since they are attracted by the light, or get confused into circling the building until they are exhausted. Then in the morning, when they try to leave the city, the glass of the building reflects the sky and the birds fly into the glass.
Most of the birds are small songbirds, which are easily swept up by custodial staff, and it happens at many buildings, so it's not so noticeable for pedestrians, but it's a big enough problem that the buildings (according to the article) have started dimming their lights to avoid killing more birds.
So if you want to argue against windmills on the bird issue, then you should be prepared to argue against skyscrapers as well.
Speech-to-text is already pretty advanced -- just call 1-800-GOOG-411 to hear Google's latest attempt -- it's pretty good at understanding what you are saying.
As a matter of fact, the whole point of GOOG 411 is to create large phoneme database to use in speech-to-text translation system to index audio content for searching.
So you could easily have a system where you just store the text of most phone calls, and store the audio of any "persons of interest" if storage space actually became a problem, which is doubtful considering the speed at which storage density has been increasing. Google has plenty of expertise in both storage systems, indexing and retrieving the data, and translating speech to text -- do you think they will really turn down a multibillion dollar contract and an opportunity to "help in the fight against 'terrorism'"?
I don't know if it's such a bad thing to provide China with safe crowd control devices It depends on what you all "safe". These weapons sound like the dream of a totalitarian state. For example, all they have to do for a truly vicious weapon is to turn up the volume on the sound weapon, instantly rendering the victims totally and permanently deaf. Then you have no gory pictures to upset anyone with, and you render the victims pretty much incapable of organizing and protesting for quite a while.
The "pain ray" the US has developed is pretty well suited for a totalitarian government as well. It leaves no marks, so you could also just round up anyone at a protest and subject them to microwave beams that activate the pain nerves in the skin just enough to be able to cause agonizing pain without leaving any marks . You have the double bonus of driving your victims insane from the pain without any ugly wounds to photograph and get people upset.
However, China is not Burma and by and large the population is content with their government. China has a very effective ability to stifle dissent -- Tiananmen square is an excellent example. How are you going to know if anyone is unhappy if everyone is too scared to say anything? When you surf the internet in China they love to have little animated policemen popping up on your screen to remind you that you are being watched. People are scared enough there already of doing the wrong thing -- imagine what would happen if deaf people started showing up as not-so-subtle reminders of what happens to people who complain?
Imagine the scenario of one man in a truck with a sound weapon shutting down a whole protest without any ugly pictures to shock anyone into action, with no effective recourse by the protesters. This kind of thing is the way that your typical 'nightmare dystopian science fiction movie' would become reality. Once the people are unable to complain or protest, how nice would the government have to be?
So they changed it to a manual process, where aides would manually sort emails one by one into individual PST files, which they call a 'journaling' archive system That may be inefficient in a lot of ways, but it's the most efficient way to make sure that all the incriminating emails are deleted. Even if they eventually have to cough up a few PST files to show a judge how hard they are trying, they can be sure it's a "safe" one.
People call the White House incompetent, but when it comes to things like getting rid of evidence and avoiding any actual consequences for their supposed incompetence, they are masters.
The US and the European Union seem to be working hard to keep up.
The EU just passed a resolution making it illegal to publish "terrorist propaganda", even though the actual definitions are quite vague. That vagueness is incredibly broad:
EU officials said the decision to punish propaganda, recruitment and training for terrorism through the internet filled an important gap in European legislation. America hasn't outlawed "terrorist propaganda" websites yet, but they are working hard to create the case that they need to -- they recently passed the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" , in which our government finds that:
" The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
While the United States must continue its vigilant efforts to combat international terrorism, it must also strengthen efforts to combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States." The US government has been so busy pumping the notion that the Internet is recruiting terrorists at home that they have even claimed that terrorists hang out in the online game Second Life where they engage in information warfare .
Since this is the British police we're talking about, better include "I shot him without cause" there
It seems that you are referring to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. The fact that this remained headline news for several months should probably serve as an indicator that it's not something that's exactly common. The only reason that it stayed in the news was that some people in the department were so shocked and disgusted that they risked their jobs and their freedom to leak the images that showed how everything the police were using to justify the killing was a baldface lie . He wasn't wearing bulky clothing as they claimed, and he did not jump the turnstile or run to the train but walked calmly and stopped to get a paper instead.
The cops pinned him to the seat and pumped 7 hollow-point bullets into his brain, until he was unrecognizable, according to a senior police official. It's almost like he knew something that they didn't want him to talk about. If they really thought he was a "terrorist", they would have interrogated / waterboarded him to find out what he knew, not just execute him at close range. If they really thought he had a bomb, they wouldn't have gotten into the same train car with him, let alone get on top of him.
The fact that the police almost got away with their lies and cover-up should show that it's probably a lot more common than you think. They just got a little too arrogant this time, and disgusted even their own people. Bond had a 'license to kill' -- and it looks like these cops thought they did too. If the police don't release the true details, how would you know which killings are justified and which ones are executions?
"A decade ago we couldn't even conceive of... YouTube," Google Inc.'s video-sharing service, said Greg Butz, Comcast's vice president for marketing and product development. Of course they were dreaming of video-on-demand a decade ago,they were talking about it at least as far back as '96.
What they could not conceive of was the fact that would be getting free video that you didn't have to pay Comcast for.
So what they do now is throttle your connection back out of spite. If I have any kind of sustained download, I end up at sub-dialup speeds on my supposedly 6 mps Comcast cablemodem. It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve.
NATO is not the US. Ah, the old "you forgot Poland" strategy. (That was Bush counting Poland's contribution of 184 soldiers to the invasion of Iraq to help prove that it was a "coalition" of nations that attacked Iraq.)
If your statement had any truth to it whatsoever, then the US could pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan today and just let "NATO" take over.
One reason the rich get a lot of these tax breaks, is that they assume higher risks, and do more entrepreneurial things. "Higher Risks" -- You mean like the massive $200 billion+ in bailouts the big bankers are getting these days from the Federal Reserve? Surely you can't talk about higher risk with a straight face when average joes are losing their homes yet the big money men are getting our tax money (in one way or another) handed to them on a silver platter when they screw up. These days it seems bigger the screw-up, the bigger the payout / "bailout" from the Fed. That kind of "socialism for the rich" does not entail much risk at all for those who are rich enough to play that game.
If you have problems with specific tax-writeoffs, lobby your government representatives to change things. We have a "pay to play" legislative system. If you can "donate" big bucks to a politician, you get to write the legislation. Or you can hire well-connected lobbyists to get your legislation passed, or you can pay for fancy "fact-finding" trips for your Congressman (to exotic destinations where he can consider all the reasons why he should pass your legislation). How else do you think the rich got lower tax rates in the first place? If you don't have that kind of money to play with, good luck competing against those who do.
I'm by no means a McCain lover, but one thing I really respect is that he seems to walk the walk with regards to spending. He has taken zero dollars in 'earmarks' and I think I believe what he says when he talks about vetoing earmark laden bills. So you think Mr. "Bomb Iran" is going to be fiscally responsible? The Iraq / Afghanistan wars are currently breaking the back of the American economy, and McCain thinks that staying in Iraq for a 100 years is a good thing, and that we need to get a war started on a new front.
The current wars (occupations) are already going to be costing the US upwards of $2 Trillion when all is said and done, and McCain wants to increase the number of fronts we will be fighting on, and you think he somehow will reign in spending?
Heck, his current campaign is already over the legal spending limits of a law he helped write . If he can't control his own campaign spending, how do well do you think he will handle the finances of an entire country?
This is a non-story, and the only reason it's being pushed time and again is as a kludge to try to attack Bush. I'll admit there are a hell of a lot of reasons to attack Bush (the bribery and scams over illegal immigration/amnesty alone!), but this one isn't it. This is either a troll or you're willfully ignorant, but I'll bite.
The reason that this is a huge issue is that the destruction of presidential records is illegal. The Presidential Records Act mandates that all records from the President and Vice President are owned by the public, and that the President is not allowed to destroy any records without specific authorization from the Archivist of the United States stating that the records do not have any historical, informational, or evidentiary value.
There is a great desire on the part of many Americans to impeach Bush for his part in prosecuting the disastrous $2 Trillion+ debacle, the Iraq War, which is currently sinking our economy. Nixon wss easy to impeach because he left a lot of evidence in the form of tapes for his prosecution, but Bush and Cheney are not making that mistake -- they have both had very "convenient" situations where their records regarding among other things the Iraq War planning that have been "accidentally" destroyed.
If the American people were to have more evidence about White House activities, there would be many more people joining Scooter Libby in jail, and we would find out more about things like "ex" gay prostitute Jeff Gannon's entries and exits at the White House .
his sound exactly like what was being said about "30 Days", "An Inconvenient Truth", and "Bowling for Columbine". So, is "Who killed the Electric car" any better? I don't generally watch those movies -- I haven't seen the ones that you mentioned. I only saw the "Who killed the Electric Car?" movie because it was on cable, and even then I didn't see all of it. What I did see was very interesting and pretty eye-opening.
It makes sense that the oil industry would try to stop the electric car, because Americans are attracted to the idea of helping the environment and lowering their car repair costs (commuting an hour each way in stop-and-go traffic puts a hurting on most cars).
if the electric car idea were allowed to take off the oil companies would have lost lose $$billions and the electric car industry would have been at a mature point right now, rather than the current situation of oil companies having us all by the short hairs while as the price of oil skyrockets, and us discussing 100-year-old electric car designs.
Not trying to avoid all that would be a pretty stupid move -- and I don't think they are stupid.
I can't speak for the whole movie since I didn't see all of it, but the part I saw was really fascinating. They had interviews with this guy who developed a better car battery, and was really surprised when the car-makers bought his patent and then sat on it (surprise!). It had interviews with owners of the electric cars who just loved them, and mechanics who loved to work on them because they finally were not covered in grease at the end of the day. They had interviews with people who got calls from Senators warning that if the electric car idea was not stopped then the Senator would "declare war on them". They had the video of people holding vigils outside the lots holding the electric car and promising the companies millions (the prices of all the cars added up, combined with the money that people were prepared to spend to get the cars) if they people could only buy the companies. And they had video of the companies crushing the cars rather than selling them. All in all, it was pretty damning and showed that some very powerful people did not want this to happen. The actual people who got to lease the cars (they were never for sale) loved them, but when the lease was up they had to give the cars back and they were pretty heartbroken that they were not given the option to buy the cars.
Conspiracies are interesting but in the end the Prius sort of proved that while there is a chunk of the relatively affluent who will buy electric cars the consumer gestalt as a whole was never waiting with baited breath only to have their hopes dashed by Big Oil or any other conspiracy faves. That just proves you didn't watch the movie, and are just spouting off the top of your head.
The point of the movie is that the electric cars were never for sale, and even though the middle-income consumers who leased the cars thought they were fantastic, nobody was ever allowed to buy one . This was true even though the people who leased the cars absolutely loved them.
After the federal government sued the state of California to stop the mandating of zero emission vehicles, the cars were repossesed by the manufacturers and sent off to the crushers, even though the people who leased them were desperate to buy the cars and were holding vigils outside the lots where the cars were held, trying to get the manufacturers to sell the cars to them.
The cars were quiet, very well made, reliable, and very easy to fix (electric motors are very simple to work on) with no timing chains, dirty oil-covered parts, etc.
Since the average commute is only 20 miles, the 60-mile range of these cars was more than enough to go to work and back and get some groceries. The dealerships did not like to sell the cars because these cars did not need a lot of expensive maintenance (since they were mechanically so much simpler).
The movie showed that the auto companies were willing not to sell the cars and just throw them away, giving up millions in revenue, just so they could say that no one bought one. And so commenters like you can claim that very few people wanted one in the first place. Watch the movie, you'll be surprised.
Unless you are already tracking a suspect, data trawling is ineffective. The bigger the database, the less effective it is as more and more false positives occur and have to be investigated. This wastes huge amounts of time and resources and starves real investigations that could well turn up real suspects. It depends on what you are trying to do with the data.
If the methods being applied look very much like Orwell's 1984, then one obvious conclusion are that the motives of the authorities are very similar to the motives of "the Party" in 1984: political control.
Take for example the current downfall of NY democratic governer Eliot Spitzer just as he was fighting the gifting of massive amounts of public funds to the big financiers. By tracking financial records and listening to phone calls, the authorities were able to uncover a "crime" that many would consider harmless (having sex) and assert political control by making him resign. This frees them to continue their original agenda unimpeded and take down a rival in the process.
So once all the records of travel (license plates, rail, air, onmipresent cameras) are monitored by the authorities, then you can look at the movement patterns of politically active people and use indirect methods of control without ever revealing the true purpose, and without having to assign full-time agents to follow each person and record their activities. You could track large numbers of people without ever leaving the central office and just place a convenient call to a policeman to pick up the person for whatever crimes you uncover along the way, or arrange an "accident" if you want to be more thorough.
there's an ever-present shortage of skilled IT workers to fill the industry's demand
The key there is SKILLED. Most of the skilled IT people are already at work for a company or for themselves. What you have left in the pool is a bunch of low level first year grads who haven't seen the environments that these companies offer. That still doesn't create a reason to import thousands of IT people from India, who didn't have the experience either. Sure they had IT degrees, but the positions that created the experience were over here in the US, so all they would offer would be the same first year grads. This would bet at a substantially cheaper price though, with a bonus of the threat of green card revocation hanging over their heads.
Importing thousands of workers from India would definitely expand the labor pool here and dramatically drive down the costs of hiring IT workers, which would be a very attractive goal.
that's not how it works. Rarely does some evil poltiical overlord try and make some BS law as a false front to do something shady. That's just in the movies. You mean you think that "bad guys" never seek political power? The founders of our country would have said that this was an incredibly naive viewpoint, since the "evil political overlords" were exactly the kind of people they expected to take power, make "BS laws" and do "something shady". Which is why they wrote the Constitution expressly to try to prevent that from happening.
You really think that even though "evil political overlords" can and did take power in Germany, Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Rwanda, etc. etc, and delight in every kind of abuse possible in those places, that somehow those same "evil overlord" types are prevented from doing this in America?
What's really amazing is that the current rulers of the U.S. have publicly admitted torturing their victims and holding them without trial. They have also publicly admitted to mounting a massive campaign of unrestricted domestic surveillance, and entering into illegal partnerships with corporations to do it. Yet somehow you still think it "can't happen here" and even get modded "insightful" for it.
That attitude of "it can never happen here" is precisely why it is happening here.
Neurons fire when a certain threshhold of other neurons are firing around them, does that mean they can "count"? It's an electrochemical reaction, not intelligence. All humans have going for them is electrochemical reactions in neurons as well (in terms of intelligence). If your statement was at all correct (which it isn't) you would be "disproving" intelligence in humans as well.
Research on fish intelligence is showing some interesting results -- here is an impressive video of fish swimming in unison in response to hand signals . Science is busily proving that fish are smarter than most people realize.
If you believe in the theory of evolution, which most Slashdotters hopefully do, this will only make sense -- learning, reasoning, emotions, and other forms of mental activity had to evolve through different life forms before reaching their highest expression in humans. If you didn't believe that, then you would have to believe that all of the human mental gifts just somehow spontaneously "appeared" out of nowhere. (or were granted through "creation" for example).
Behave like a black hat, get the same treatment.
on
An Epidemic of Snooping
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I did his at school. When I urged people to encrypt their communication, several said they had nothing to hide. So I started Wireshark and proceeded to read some of their more interesting instant messages to them and everyone who was interested.
Kind of bothered some of them, but instead of learning crypto basics, they yelled at me. I do not understand this behaviour, can Slashdot explain ? It's the difference between explaining to someone that their bedroom window is easily viewable at night, and being the person actually looking in that bedroom window at night, pounding on it when they are naked.
You have a well-meaning intention, but you are causing the exact harm you wished them to avoid. And they are doing to you what they would have done to anyone else who would have read their "interesting" messages to "everyone who was interested". You're not helping them at all. If you had instead asked their permission ahead of time to do what you were planning to do, read the messages only to them, and shown them how easy it was to read the messages with Wireshark, they would probably have been a lot nicer, and would not have yelled at you since you told them ahead of time what you would be doing and they gave you permission, and you didn't "harm" them or their reputation.
Even if they still couldn't be bothered to run encryption, they would now be doing an accurate risk assessment, and might keep more incriminating details out of their messages.
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(ranged by freedom)
(I mean here socialism as practiced in most european countries between 1950-2000, if you mean the EU's overwhelming philosophy, then perhaps yes, you're right that it's closer to communism than fascism) In many ways the Socialist Europeans are much more free than the average American. Since education is often free to the individual (and you even get a small stipend by the government to go to school) people get to study for the career they really want, rather than being burdened by massive student loans. The state gets paid back through the higher taxes from the greater income, and the individual gets to pursue the career they really want rather than the one that they can afford to pay for (in terms of education).
In terms of medical care the Europeans are also much freer, since they get free medical care. Therefore Europeans are not screwed by getting sick when they can't afford health insurance, have had prior diseases like cancer, or their insurance company decides to screw them somehow.
The much-touted "freedom" of America is more for large corporations and the few people that can write a check for their college tuition. In fact, this article is about large corporations getting their own police force. Do you think this means greater or lesser freedom for the average individual? (Hint: you may soon have federal police knocking on your door for sharing the wrong file) We still haven't even gotten to drug use (legalized in Holland) or sex and nudity (much freer laws in Europe). Sure, they pay alot in taxes, but when you count the cost of health care and education, the tax burden comes out similarly. Americans just get to pay for hugely expensive ($500 billion+) annual defense budgets or hugely expensive ($750 billion+) unnecessary wars or the hugely expensive "War on Drugs" rather than things they actually can use in daily life.
I had a French cop stop me on the streeet ask me for ID (there was some kind of local fraudster that was panhandling, and the cop saw that person talking to me) The French cop said he wanted to see my passport (all I had was my driver's license). When I told him I had left my passport in the hotel room, he wanted to know why I did not make a copy of it and take it with me. He said that it was important that I do this. So yes, copies of passports are important to local cops. Sure, they can be easily altered, but they provide a starting point to prove your nationality and identity.
"But I swear, I'm making this hot blonde Scandinavian chick for the advancement of science!"
Solar and wind are a LONG way from being as economically viable as coal, natural gas, or nuclear. And solar and wind are HEAVILY subsidized compared to coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The DOE table above should have made that abundantly clear... Price does not always tell the full story. The main goal of the Danish has been to get to energy independence. For them, the 400 million kroner is worth it. The Arab oil embargo of the '70s did serious damage to their economy, and so their goal was more on focusing how to be self-sufficient in energy more than just focusing on profit alone.
They decided against nuclear energy when the Chernobyl accident happened, which does make sense when you realize that nuclear power plants are uninsurable (an actual accident would easily bankrupt any insurance company you care to choose, making the premiums far too high to be profitable. I am sure that the price of insurance was not put in your calculations of nuclear energy subsidies -- America's nuclear power plants are uninsurable by private companies -- they are insured through the Price-Anderson act
I notice you don't have oil on your list of "cheap" relatively unsubsidized energy sources. You would have if we had this discussion even a year ago. Denmark actually produces more oil than it imports, mainly as a result of their determination to be energy-efficient, and that protects them at a time when oil prices are going through the roof and negatively affecting American business in an already weak economy.
The CIA factbook does not list coal as a Danish resource so if they based their energy program on that, they would be SOL if there were any problems with that.
That leaves natural gas, but when you look at the fact that the wind power industry brings in over 3.5 billion euros every year to the country and is a byproduct of their focus on wind energy, you see that they are much better off than if they focused on natural-gas, which is non-renewable and would not have made them an industry leader.
So how "ignorant" is that? Wind power actually makes sense and is very profitable. Sure, non-renewable resources like oil can sometimes be more profitable on a short-term basis, but you can see how well that is working out every time you fill up at the pump.
On windy days, Denmark actually generates "too much" power from wind (about 40%) so they are working on an electric car system to act as a "sink" to dump the excess energy. (currently the hydroelectric generating facilities in Norway and Sweden are used to smooth out the changes in energy production from wind)
The wind power project has been such a success that Denmark is currently planning to double its offshore wind farms, after studies showed that it would not harm the environment. The current goal is to increase wind power to 30% of total output by 2025.
Apparently the combination of tall buildings, glass, and bright light is pretty deadly for birds. The bright lights on the tall buildings (like those over 40 stories) can really confuse the birds when they are migrating. The birds are used to using visual cues from the stars and moon to navigate, and according to the article can end up crashing into the building at night since they are attracted by the light, or get confused into circling the building until they are exhausted. Then in the morning, when they try to leave the city, the glass of the building reflects the sky and the birds fly into the glass.
Most of the birds are small songbirds, which are easily swept up by custodial staff, and it happens at many buildings, so it's not so noticeable for pedestrians, but it's a big enough problem that the buildings (according to the article) have started dimming their lights to avoid killing more birds.
So if you want to argue against windmills on the bird issue, then you should be prepared to argue against skyscrapers as well.
Try "speech-to-text" as your form of compression.
Speech-to-text is already pretty advanced -- just call 1-800-GOOG-411 to hear Google's latest attempt -- it's pretty good at understanding what you are saying.
As a matter of fact, the whole point of GOOG 411 is to create large phoneme database to use in speech-to-text translation system to index audio content for searching.
So you could easily have a system where you just store the text of most phone calls, and store the audio of any "persons of interest" if storage space actually became a problem, which is doubtful considering the speed at which storage density has been increasing. Google has plenty of expertise in both storage systems, indexing and retrieving the data, and translating speech to text -- do you think they will really turn down a multibillion dollar contract and an opportunity to "help in the fight against 'terrorism'"?
The "pain ray" the US has developed is pretty well suited for a totalitarian government as well. It leaves no marks, so you could also just round up anyone at a protest and subject them to microwave beams that activate the pain nerves in the skin just enough to be able to cause agonizing pain without leaving any marks . You have the double bonus of driving your victims insane from the pain without any ugly wounds to photograph and get people upset. However, China is not Burma and by and large the population is content with their government. China has a very effective ability to stifle dissent -- Tiananmen square is an excellent example. How are you going to know if anyone is unhappy if everyone is too scared to say anything? When you surf the internet in China they love to have little animated policemen popping up on your screen to remind you that you are being watched. People are scared enough there already of doing the wrong thing -- imagine what would happen if deaf people started showing up as not-so-subtle reminders of what happens to people who complain?
Imagine the scenario of one man in a truck with a sound weapon shutting down a whole protest without any ugly pictures to shock anyone into action, with no effective recourse by the protesters. This kind of thing is the way that your typical 'nightmare dystopian science fiction movie' would become reality. Once the people are unable to complain or protest, how nice would the government have to be?
People call the White House incompetent, but when it comes to things like getting rid of evidence and avoiding any actual consequences for their supposed incompetence, they are masters.
Here's my vacation photos:
a whole lot of mime-encoded binary that might have
a legal-looking jpeg header at the start.
How are they going to filter this exactly? By the time that you start having to think that way, you have already lost.
The EU just passed a resolution making it illegal to publish "terrorist propaganda", even though the actual definitions are quite vague. That vagueness is incredibly broad: EU officials said the decision to punish propaganda, recruitment and training for terrorism through the internet filled an important gap in European legislation. America hasn't outlawed "terrorist propaganda" websites yet, but they are working hard to create the case that they need to -- they recently passed the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" , in which our government finds that: " The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
While the United States must continue its vigilant efforts to combat international terrorism, it must also strengthen efforts to combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States." The US government has been so busy pumping the notion that the Internet is recruiting terrorists at home that they have even claimed that terrorists hang out in the online game Second Life where they engage in information warfare .
The cops pinned him to the seat and pumped 7 hollow-point bullets into his brain, until he was unrecognizable, according to a senior police official. It's almost like he knew something that they didn't want him to talk about. If they really thought he was a "terrorist", they would have interrogated / waterboarded him to find out what he knew, not just execute him at close range. If they really thought he had a bomb, they wouldn't have gotten into the same train car with him, let alone get on top of him.
The fact that the police almost got away with their lies and cover-up should show that it's probably a lot more common than you think. They just got a little too arrogant this time, and disgusted even their own people. Bond had a 'license to kill' -- and it looks like these cops thought they did too. If the police don't release the true details, how would you know which killings are justified and which ones are executions?
What they could not conceive of was the fact that would be getting free video that you didn't have to pay Comcast for.
So what they do now is throttle your connection back out of spite. If I have any kind of sustained download, I end up at sub-dialup speeds on my supposedly 6 mps Comcast cablemodem. It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve.
If your statement had any truth to it whatsoever, then the US could pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan today and just let "NATO" take over.
The current wars (occupations) are already going to be costing the US upwards of $2 Trillion when all is said and done, and McCain wants to increase the number of fronts we will be fighting on, and you think he somehow will reign in spending?
Heck, his current campaign is already over the legal spending limits of a law he helped write . If he can't control his own campaign spending, how do well do you think he will handle the finances of an entire country?
The reason that this is a huge issue is that the destruction of presidential records is illegal. The Presidential Records Act mandates that all records from the President and Vice President are owned by the public, and that the President is not allowed to destroy any records without specific authorization from the Archivist of the United States stating that the records do not have any historical, informational, or evidentiary value.
There is a great desire on the part of many Americans to impeach Bush for his part in prosecuting the disastrous $2 Trillion+ debacle, the Iraq War, which is currently sinking our economy. Nixon wss easy to impeach because he left a lot of evidence in the form of tapes for his prosecution, but Bush and Cheney are not making that mistake -- they have both had very "convenient" situations where their records regarding among other things the Iraq War planning that have been "accidentally" destroyed.
If the American people were to have more evidence about White House activities, there would be many more people joining Scooter Libby in jail, and we would find out more about things like "ex" gay prostitute Jeff Gannon's entries and exits at the White House .
It makes sense that the oil industry would try to stop the electric car, because Americans are attracted to the idea of helping the environment and lowering their car repair costs (commuting an hour each way in stop-and-go traffic puts a hurting on most cars).
if the electric car idea were allowed to take off the oil companies would have lost lose $$billions and the electric car industry would have been at a mature point right now, rather than the current situation of oil companies having us all by the short hairs while as the price of oil skyrockets, and us discussing 100-year-old electric car designs.
Not trying to avoid all that would be a pretty stupid move -- and I don't think they are stupid.
I can't speak for the whole movie since I didn't see all of it, but the part I saw was really fascinating. They had interviews with this guy who developed a better car battery, and was really surprised when the car-makers bought his patent and then sat on it (surprise!). It had interviews with owners of the electric cars who just loved them, and mechanics who loved to work on them because they finally were not covered in grease at the end of the day. They had interviews with people who got calls from Senators warning that if the electric car idea was not stopped then the Senator would "declare war on them". They had the video of people holding vigils outside the lots holding the electric car and promising the companies millions (the prices of all the cars added up, combined with the money that people were prepared to spend to get the cars) if they people could only buy the companies. And they had video of the companies crushing the cars rather than selling them. All in all, it was pretty damning and showed that some very powerful people did not want this to happen. The actual people who got to lease the cars (they were never for sale) loved them, but when the lease was up they had to give the cars back and they were pretty heartbroken that they were not given the option to buy the cars.
The point of the movie is that the electric cars were never for sale, and even though the middle-income consumers who leased the cars thought they were fantastic, nobody was ever allowed to buy one . This was true even though the people who leased the cars absolutely loved them.
After the federal government sued the state of California to stop the mandating of zero emission vehicles, the cars were repossesed by the manufacturers and sent off to the crushers, even though the people who leased them were desperate to buy the cars and were holding vigils outside the lots where the cars were held, trying to get the manufacturers to sell the cars to them.
The cars were quiet, very well made, reliable, and very easy to fix (electric motors are very simple to work on) with no timing chains, dirty oil-covered parts, etc.
Since the average commute is only 20 miles, the 60-mile range of these cars was more than enough to go to work and back and get some groceries. The dealerships did not like to sell the cars because these cars did not need a lot of expensive maintenance (since they were mechanically so much simpler).
The movie showed that the auto companies were willing not to sell the cars and just throw them away, giving up millions in revenue, just so they could say that no one bought one. And so commenters like you can claim that very few people wanted one in the first place. Watch the movie, you'll be surprised.
If the methods being applied look very much like Orwell's 1984, then one obvious conclusion are that the motives of the authorities are very similar to the motives of "the Party" in 1984: political control.
Take for example the current downfall of NY democratic governer Eliot Spitzer just as he was fighting the gifting of massive amounts of public funds to the big financiers. By tracking financial records and listening to phone calls, the authorities were able to uncover a "crime" that many would consider harmless (having sex) and assert political control by making him resign. This frees them to continue their original agenda unimpeded and take down a rival in the process.
So once all the records of travel (license plates, rail, air, onmipresent cameras) are monitored by the authorities, then you can look at the movement patterns of politically active people and use indirect methods of control without ever revealing the true purpose, and without having to assign full-time agents to follow each person and record their activities. You could track large numbers of people without ever leaving the central office and just place a convenient call to a policeman to pick up the person for whatever crimes you uncover along the way, or arrange an "accident" if you want to be more thorough.
Importing thousands of workers from India would definitely expand the labor pool here and dramatically drive down the costs of hiring IT workers, which would be a very attractive goal.
With that purpose in mind, there were plenty of HR people who specialized in running recruitment campaigns with the express goal of NOT finding any interested or qualified US workers, so that a foreign national could be hired instead.
You really think that even though "evil political overlords" can and did take power in Germany, Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Rwanda, etc. etc, and delight in every kind of abuse possible in those places, that somehow those same "evil overlord" types are prevented from doing this in America?
What's really amazing is that the current rulers of the U.S. have publicly admitted torturing their victims and holding them without trial. They have also publicly admitted to mounting a massive campaign of unrestricted domestic surveillance, and entering into illegal partnerships with corporations to do it. Yet somehow you still think it "can't happen here" and even get modded "insightful" for it.
That attitude of "it can never happen here" is precisely why it is happening here.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but here's the fish video that I was referring to in the previous post.
The trainer gets four goldfish to swim in some very interesting synchronized patterns that he appears to communicate to them through hand signals.
Research on fish intelligence is showing some interesting results -- here is an impressive video of fish swimming in unison in response to hand signals . Science is busily proving that fish are smarter than most people realize.
If you believe in the theory of evolution, which most Slashdotters hopefully do, this will only make sense -- learning, reasoning, emotions, and other forms of mental activity had to evolve through different life forms before reaching their highest expression in humans. If you didn't believe that, then you would have to believe that all of the human mental gifts just somehow spontaneously "appeared" out of nowhere. (or were granted through "creation" for example).
Kind of bothered some of them, but instead of learning crypto basics, they yelled at me. I do not understand this behaviour, can Slashdot explain ? It's the difference between explaining to someone that their bedroom window is easily viewable at night, and being the person actually looking in that bedroom window at night, pounding on it when they are naked.
You have a well-meaning intention, but you are causing the exact harm you wished them to avoid. And they are doing to you what they would have done to anyone else who would have read their "interesting" messages to "everyone who was interested". You're not helping them at all. If you had instead asked their permission ahead of time to do what you were planning to do, read the messages only to them, and shown them how easy it was to read the messages with Wireshark, they would probably have been a lot nicer, and would not have yelled at you since you told them ahead of time what you would be doing and they gave you permission, and you didn't "harm" them or their reputation.
Even if they still couldn't be bothered to run encryption, they would now be doing an accurate risk assessment, and might keep more incriminating details out of their messages.