An incoming freshman will be paying $46,000 a year for tuition,fees, room & board for the next four years (the cost is locked in for four years at a time so people don't complain about annual tuition hikes). Do you think they're going to notice the effect anymore than GW's $50 "voluntary library gift?" (which you can opt out of, nbot into).
Actually, the whole thing goes something like this (using Mansfield, who is probably one of the best--if not the best--translations):
"Nonetheless, he should be slow to believe and to move, nor should he make himself feared, and he should proceed in a temperate mode with prudence and humanity so that too much confidence does not make him incautious and to much diffidence does not render him intolerable.
From this a dispute arises whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The response is that one would want to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to put them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two. For one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders, and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood, property, lives and children, as I said above, when the need for them is far away; but, when it is close to you, they revolt."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince (Mansfield, 2nd ed.), p.66.
Machiavelli then spent another chapter discussing why in being feared the prince must avoid being hated, because fear is a powerful tool, but hatred is a guarantee of future usurpation.
Nope. They can appeal en banc, or to the Supreme Court. Neither attempt guarantees anything since the Supreme Court can hear pretty much whatever it wants, and only hears about 80 cases per year out of the thousands of rulings which are even remotely subject to review by the Court. And en banc, well, that would require a petition successfully indicating that the majority is so wrong that they need to have 7 more (in the 9th Cir.) and the original 3 hear it again. Good luck.
Statistically, once it's decided it's all but final. There is not such a wide disparity of legal thought on the subject for the Court to merit a grant of cert.
That reminds me of a Far Side comic. A scientist has two massively complex equations on the board, and to unite them he writes in the middle of the board "and then a miracle happens." The schools have all of these grnad theories about technology, and grand ideas about brilliant deep-thinking students, and to get between A and B they just close their eyes and wish for technology to produce a miracle.
I think you're confused. The mockery of the due process of law is promulgated by Bush/Ashcroft. Detainees face secret witnesses, evidence, no right to trial by jury. If you have something concrete (not paranoid fantasies) where the ICC was abusive, please post a link. (Also, trial by jury is not a requirement for due process, and may be detrimental when jurors can be retaliated against. Plus from where would you recruit jurors? Think about it before spouting nonsense.)
What the Hell? Due Process is what extended the Federal right to trial by jury to the states in all criminal cases where the punishment could be more than 1 year in prison.
The ICC is a joke because it has no rela power--only the power that member-states will volunteer to it, just like the UN in general. It's useless except when a dictator is overthrown. Look at Victor Bout--one of the largest arms dealers on Earth, just lounging away in Moscow because no one would dare arrest him. What's the ICC going to do? Ask a third-party country to violate Russia's sovereignty to arrest him? What a model of criminal jurisprudence: where enforcement can be interpreted as an act of war.
Wow. Once again, the propensity for someone saying something without actually knowing what they're talking about rears its ugly head.
First of all, it was in Dunblane, Scotland.
It happened on March 13, 1996.
He shot 29 people while firing 105 bullets. Sixteen kids and a teacher died.
Great Britain has had gun control laws since 1820.
The legislation that passed after Dunblane only extended that ban to include.22 to the list which had already covered virtually every other gun in existence.
But more importantly,
This has nothing to do with whether a company should actively suppress socio-political wesbites it doesn't like, used predominantly by users who are either too lazy to parent or too mistrustful to have kids, or too stupid to know how the filter even works.
This is great for teachers who care, but what happens when, in the case of a local HS, the dropout rate is about 50% and the attrition rate from freshman orientation to graduation is 75-80%, and no one--not the teachers, not the students, not the public at-large, gives a flying fuck? What happens when no one cares, and F's are handed out to 1/3 of Gym students (Gym for Christ's sakes!) simply because the coaches don't give a rat's ass, but will mark them down for not dressing out--possibly because it's in the poorest part of the goddamn city.
***** I think if there's one thing consumers are good at, it's attempting to get their money's-worth *****
It actually did take a a Nobel prize winner to prove that this is utter bullshit. People act irrationally in the free market because their perception of worth when factoring in all manner of irrational, often times senseless, justifications often trumps clear logic that is assumed in every Economics class taught since Adam Smith.
Moreover, there is marketing--a field which admits that it serves no purpose other than to convince people that they must buy something that they logically don't need or want. The **AA's are the epitome of marketing's success in convincing people that they should be consumers of crap that common sense and logic would dictate should never be bought.
You don't have to be a party to be on the wrong side of a subpoena. Damn near anyone could get one, and the artists definitely count, and the definition of "witness" can be... stretched. (If for no other reason than to discuss the terms of their transfer of rights to the label, etc.) If they were sued enough times under multiple individuals' lawsuits, they could find themselves in deposition Hell forever.
>>> AND UK/USA. It is illegal under both our laws for the security services to spy on civilians. So we spy on yours, you spy on ours, data exchanged, all nice and legal.
Actually, UKUSA and similar agreements have explicitly prohibited such exchanges of information between the U.S. and the British Commonwealth in a manner that would circumvent privacy rights through espionage. Please try again.
>>> The article is basically arguing that the Federal judges are setting bars that are too high, that juries should be the ones who decides whether or not the scientific claims are valid.
Federal courts have always had a higher bar than other courts, but what amazes me is the outrage over the idea that judges (and, actually, Magistrates in federal court) have the authority to determine whether evidence is admissable. That is such nonsense, especially since it's been done forever, and they even have a nice set of guidelines--the Federal Rules of Evidence--to work with for just that purpose. The whole point is to ensure that there is a soundness to evidence based on a legal determination that that evidence is relevant and sufficiently reliable under the law to the the issues and defenses the parties will raise (Fed courts have narrowed the scope of evidence beyond most state courts).
Well, the Apple Music Store does also sell the entire CD for less than $10, so what's the problem? Trent Reznor has said the same thing, and since I listne to NIN and not Radiohead I can say that I know that he writes his music with the whole CD in mind. So in the case of NIN I'd be happy to buy an entire original Halo online, but on the other hand I may or may not want to buy the Closer CD with a dozen renditions of the same song when I only like 2 or 3 tracks. People mention "the customer is always right." Well, maybe I think all of the tracks (or enough that it would be cheaper to buy the whole CD) on a Britney CD are great (this is only a hypothetical), but I only want three songs off of Linkin Park's Meteora (to refer to one of the groups bitching) because I think that totality be damned, the rest of the tracks sucks (this is only a hypothetical). Thta should be my decision based on my preferences, dammit, and not theirs based on some sort of pretentious bullshit.
I was in a very different situation where the ethernet connection is not in place (because the damn IT people at the University are nitwits), but the tables in the Law School classrooms all have enough sockets for everyone to run their laptop/whatnot. Personally, I favor handwriting because, as mentioned, transcribing them tends to favor the really important points in my notes, and helps order things because, let's face it, professors don't always carry on the most linear of lectures (Well, one did...) and it's amazing what crap is in the notes that isn't really needed after all. Besides, with me I'm going to have to integrate all sorts of other materials (i.e., case briefs) into the big outline for my finals and make an attack outline just to get at the outline (and, I kid you not, perhaps an index for the outline if it's really long), and transcription is going to have to be done anyway. Just taking the notes as they are from the lectures is a sucker's game.
This is ridiculous. Why an individual soldier would need that much information in the middle of combat is beyond me, and probably all of these gee-whiz wonks who've never even served. Case in point, when it came down to Infantry fighting in Iraq all of the personal technology, the GPS and whatnot meant nothing when the troops were concerned with keeping themselves from getting killed. When it comes to actual combat situations, anything that isn't going to immediately serve as a weapon is worthless. Look at the prep the soldiers in Black Hawk Down went through (At least, the book. I refuse to see the movie). They grabbed as much ammo as possible and left everything that wasn't a weapon behind because it was DEAD WEIGHT!
The utility of this technology is for a unit leader, with an obvious hierarchy of technological burden/C4I access and control. Officers at the platoon level and up would benefit greatly from this technology so that they could keep track of all of their units and support elements. Likewise, a lesser amount of access and interface for squad leaders to keep track of individual soldiers in an urban or similar combat zone. There's no need for anyone below E-5 to need to know the status of the damn UCAVs because they don't, and shouldn't, have the authority to command them anyway.
Moreover, I really wonder if these people actually expect soldiers to basically compromise their line of sight in the middle of combat. Even if they do, those HUDS are never going to be used in the middle of a firefight because there isn't anything remotely useful for a soldier to utilize that can't be done with an order over the radio from someone who DOES have sufficient overwatch capability and necessity to do so. When the U.S. Army or Marine Corps sets up sniper/countersniper positions relatively afar from enemy forces, what difference does it make that each soldier have a map or any other nonsense? They need to be able to shoot and have unit coordination, which is better accomplished by limiting this much technology and information to platoon headquarters units and above, and possibly much less information to squad leaders.
Which brings me to my next point: INFOSEC.
God forbid a soldier or Marine gets killed while wearing all of the crap necessary to operate this farce of a wannabe battlesuit. How do they presume to them eliminate the potential for hostile agents to access and compromise U.S. forces by using all of this information against them when they are in the middle of combat and can't quickly strip the dead soldier (which I'm sure their recently-close friends would enjoy in the middle of combat) and destroy (to prevent immediate threat of compromise) all of this equipment.
All of this equipment has its place, mainly with vehicles (the first place this type of technology was introduced and where it is most advanced) for a reason. It's mainly utility and scope of combat, as well as the amount of data relevant to those forces as opposed to Infantry. Infantry doesn't need this. The officer corps would benefit from it, but the individual soldier or Marine would find it useless, distracting, and quite simply and unnecessary burden. This could easily add 10-20lbs. to their ensemble, and for units in Airborne, Special Operations, and even most Infantry that is heaping crap on top of gear that already weighs almost as much as they do (i.e., the 100+lbs. of gear Airborne soldiers carry in airborne insertions). As we saw in Afghanistan during Operation: Anaconda, depending on the locale the gear was already too much for them to carry, especially as they are moving out in the middle of a firefight, with soldiers actually falling over backwards and struggling to get into helicopters because the weight of the gear and exhaustion (due to fatigue and the thin air at the altitudes of the combat zones in Afghanistan) just got the best of them. So these geniuses want to ADD MORE WEIGHT? Good luck.
I started reading The Prince, by Machiavelli, again after I found myself on the receiving end of some of his ideas not once, but TWICE in one g-d damn week!
So, I figured I might as well go back and do a trifecta:
The Prince
Discourses on Livy
Art of War
I figured I'd also try and do Clausewitz's On War; Cicero, Everitt's biography of the Roman; and since I was reading Machiavelli, I figure I might as well read Leo Strauss' book about him.
Oops. Ignore the "I agree part. All I agree with is that the review was inconsistent and grasping at straws.
Religion's designed for control. Duh. Rather than cite someone who I never heard of, what about Plato and the "Noble Lie" from Republic? It applies quite well to ideology and theology in general, and has a hell of a lot more philosophical background behind it at this point.
I agree. For the sake of logic, or at the least, internal consistency he should have stuck with the Mayan cycles (of which, he got the date the Sixth World begins wrong AFAIK). If you want to keep in theology, try Islam.
Rather than refer to the Five books of Moses (which are just the first five books of the Bible and Torah), what about the idea that in Islam five prophets preceded Mohammed? There are six prophets: Adam, Moses, Abraham, David, Jesus, and Mohammed being the sixth; all extraordinary men who were to guide men on Earth, but men nonetheless, preceeding the arrival of a final actor who actually is the Messiah (The acolyte? Neo & Trinity's child? Maybe. If nothing else they could squeeze a few more paragraphs out of their review).
This reminds me of when I worked in a library, and I was gathering journals to send to be bound. I was getting some cinema journals ready when I noticed that for several issues they were discussing serious philosphical issues in the context of Terminator 2, which had come out a few years before the journals were published. These were the same journals I bypassed when I wrote a paper regarding "dark future" sci-fi and the allegory they presented from a philosophy/political science perspective; a paper which spent a great deal discussing The Matrix because it was the pop-philosophy film du jour. Whatever is significant at the time in popular culture will always be analyzed for all manner of meaning. I have since not only disowned the paper and its predecessor analysis of Blade Runner as an allegory for, at the time, the major trends in social and political development (i.e., conservative revolution, sprawl, technofilia, etc.) as being utter crap based on "pop" references that were, in someone else's words, 7th grade philosophy. After reading Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and later finding myself critcizing his brand of postmodernism and similar strains of nihilism, I only thought it was appropriate to read that Baudrillard thought The Matrix completely missed the ball on his own work (such as the aforementioned book).
I remember last year's Free Comic Day. I was walking through Georgetown in D.C. and after, maybe an hour or two of mindless obvliousness, I found myself in front of the Russian Embassy on Mt. Alto a few miles from where I started. When I turned around and went back down Wisconsin Ave. to M St. I stopped at Another Universe comics because I had just remembered it was Free Comic Day and I also wanted to see if they had the newest issue of the Dark Knight Strikes Again or, basically, anything interesting. I ended up standing next to some woman who was talking to some guy about a class she was taking, but I wasn't really paying attention, and eventually I left. However, I walked out and realized that it was Tiffany Taylor, a former Playboy Playmate and a student at University of Maryland (And a damn hot woman), and I didn't even think to say "hi." Ah, Free Comic Day...
> The biggest thing about the news, I think, is the fact that it was a
victory in LA.
Actually, that's not the greatest thing in the world. The case will be
appealed because the legal issue is begging for an appeal. However, it's
going to be appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which is almost assuredly the
most tech-saavy geographical Circuit, it also happens to be the Circuit
most overturned by the Supreme Court. So even if they hear it, uphold it,
uphold it if it goes en banc (That is, before all of the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals judges and not just three randomly selected
judges), if, god-forbid, the Supreme Court grants cert, the chances of it
being upheld by them are probably not that good. I have no doubt
that MPAA/RIAA's lawyers know this. Hell, Jack Valenti's old boss, Ronald
Reagan, appointed three of the Justices and made Rehnquits the Chief
Justice. They have the time and the money to push this as far as they
want, and they probably have a lot more sympathetic ear at the top who
would be perfectly willing to bitch-slap the Ninth for kicks.
BTW, did anyone notice footnote 2? They are entering a default judgment
against Kazaa for the same thing he just absolved Morpheus and Grokster
for. However, as the opinion goes on, the fact that the two are bascially
licensees of Kazaa's has helped absolve the of liability, but if Kazaa had
not defaulted, there would probably be different results becuase he seems
to have little trouble identifying similar patterns of behavior between
Kazaa's software and Napster. Many functions are independent of Grokster,
specifically, but that does not mean that this software is completely
free from liability. Grokster's off the hook for now, but that doesn't
mean Kazaa is, and they provie the software to run Grokster, so Grokster
may cease to exist if they nail Kazaa. Gnutella looks like it is safe, by
contrast, because it can't be controlled, it isn't based upon known
"supernodes" and because access can't be limited easily by going after a
handful of individuals or other entities.
Poindexter isn't technically a convicted felon. While he did commit a felony (lying to Congress, IIRC) his conviction was overturned because he had earlier been granted immunity for his testimony (This makes no sense from a common sense POV).
The person you want to mention is Elliot Abrams, who is a convicted felon, and is currently working in the White House on the National Security Council staff. When a reporter asked Ari Fleischer who else at the White House was a convicted felon, he blew them off, which makes a person wonder... The White House is employing someone who was duplicitous to the Congress and American people, and they won't say if anyone else working for them could be in the same category. Hmm.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I used to work in that library.
An incoming freshman will be paying $46,000 a year for tuition,fees, room & board for the next four years (the cost is locked in for four years at a time so people don't complain about annual tuition hikes). Do you think they're going to notice the effect anymore than GW's $50 "voluntary library gift?" (which you can opt out of, nbot into).
GW Colonial, Class of 2002.
Actually, the whole thing goes something like this (using Mansfield, who is probably one of the best--if not the best--translations):
"Nonetheless, he should be slow to believe and to move, nor should he make himself feared, and he should proceed in a temperate mode with prudence and humanity so that too much confidence does not make him incautious and to much diffidence does not render him intolerable.
From this a dispute arises whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The response is that one would want to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to put them together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two. For one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, pretenders, and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain. While you do them good, they are yours, offering you their blood, property, lives and children, as I said above, when the need for them is far away; but, when it is close to you, they revolt."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince (Mansfield, 2nd ed.), p.66.
Machiavelli then spent another chapter discussing why in being feared the prince must avoid being hated, because fear is a powerful tool, but hatred is a guarantee of future usurpation.
Nope. They can appeal en banc, or to the Supreme Court. Neither attempt guarantees anything since the Supreme Court can hear pretty much whatever it wants, and only hears about 80 cases per year out of the thousands of rulings which are even remotely subject to review by the Court. And en banc, well, that would require a petition successfully indicating that the majority is so wrong that they need to have 7 more (in the 9th Cir.) and the original 3 hear it again. Good luck.
Statistically, once it's decided it's all but final. There is not such a wide disparity of legal thought on the subject for the Court to merit a grant of cert.
No, it makes you dumb because of the AutoCorrect feature that isn't always automatically correct.
That reminds me of a Far Side comic. A scientist has two massively complex equations on the board, and to unite them he writes in the middle of the board "and then a miracle happens." The schools have all of these grnad theories about technology, and grand ideas about brilliant deep-thinking students, and to get between A and B they just close their eyes and wish for technology to produce a miracle.
Wow. Once again, the propensity for someone saying something without actually knowing what they're talking about rears its ugly head.
.22 to the list which had already covered virtually every other gun in existence.
First of all, it was in Dunblane, Scotland.
It happened on March 13, 1996.
He shot 29 people while firing 105 bullets. Sixteen kids and a teacher died.
Great Britain has had gun control laws since 1820.
The legislation that passed after Dunblane only extended that ban to include
But more importantly,
This has nothing to do with whether a company should actively suppress socio-political wesbites it doesn't like, used predominantly by users who are either too lazy to parent or too mistrustful to have kids, or too stupid to know how the filter even works.
This is great for teachers who care, but what happens when, in the case of a local HS, the dropout rate is about 50% and the attrition rate from freshman orientation to graduation is 75-80%, and no one--not the teachers, not the students, not the public at-large, gives a flying fuck? What happens when no one cares, and F's are handed out to 1/3 of Gym students (Gym for Christ's sakes!) simply because the coaches don't give a rat's ass, but will mark them down for not dressing out--possibly because it's in the poorest part of the goddamn city.
So, exactly how is the going to help solve that?
What a goddamn waste of money.
It actually did take a a Nobel prize winner to prove that this is utter bullshit. People act irrationally in the free market because their perception of worth when factoring in all manner of irrational, often times senseless, justifications often trumps clear logic that is assumed in every Economics class taught since Adam Smith.
Moreover, there is marketing--a field which admits that it serves no purpose other than to convince people that they must buy something that they logically don't need or want. The **AA's are the epitome of marketing's success in convincing people that they should be consumers of crap that common sense and logic would dictate should never be bought.
You don't have to be a party to be on the wrong side of a subpoena. Damn near anyone could get one, and the artists definitely count, and the definition of "witness" can be ... stretched. (If for no other reason than to discuss the terms of their transfer of rights to the label, etc.) If they were sued enough times under multiple individuals' lawsuits, they could find themselves in deposition Hell forever.
>>> AND UK/USA. It is illegal under both our laws for the security services to spy on civilians. So we spy on yours, you spy on ours, data exchanged, all nice and legal.
Actually, UKUSA and similar agreements have explicitly prohibited such exchanges of information between the U.S. and the British Commonwealth in a manner that would circumvent privacy rights through espionage. Please try again.
>>> The article is basically arguing that the Federal judges are setting bars that are too high, that juries should be the ones who decides whether or not the scientific claims are valid.
Federal courts have always had a higher bar than other courts, but what amazes me is the outrage over the idea that judges (and, actually, Magistrates in federal court) have the authority to determine whether evidence is admissable. That is such nonsense, especially since it's been done forever, and they even have a nice set of guidelines--the Federal Rules of Evidence--to work with for just that purpose. The whole point is to ensure that there is a soundness to evidence based on a legal determination that that evidence is relevant and sufficiently reliable under the law to the the issues and defenses the parties will raise (Fed courts have narrowed the scope of evidence beyond most state courts).
Well, the Apple Music Store does also sell the entire CD for less than $10, so what's the problem? Trent Reznor has said the same thing, and since I listne to NIN and not Radiohead I can say that I know that he writes his music with the whole CD in mind. So in the case of NIN I'd be happy to buy an entire original Halo online, but on the other hand I may or may not want to buy the Closer CD with a dozen renditions of the same song when I only like 2 or 3 tracks. People mention "the customer is always right." Well, maybe I think all of the tracks (or enough that it would be cheaper to buy the whole CD) on a Britney CD are great (this is only a hypothetical), but I only want three songs off of Linkin Park's Meteora (to refer to one of the groups bitching) because I think that totality be damned, the rest of the tracks sucks (this is only a hypothetical). Thta should be my decision based on my preferences, dammit, and not theirs based on some sort of pretentious bullshit.
I was in a very different situation where the ethernet connection is not in place (because the damn IT people at the University are nitwits), but the tables in the Law School classrooms all have enough sockets for everyone to run their laptop/whatnot. Personally, I favor handwriting because, as mentioned, transcribing them tends to favor the really important points in my notes, and helps order things because, let's face it, professors don't always carry on the most linear of lectures (Well, one did...) and it's amazing what crap is in the notes that isn't really needed after all. Besides, with me I'm going to have to integrate all sorts of other materials (i.e., case briefs) into the big outline for my finals and make an attack outline just to get at the outline (and, I kid you not, perhaps an index for the outline if it's really long), and transcription is going to have to be done anyway. Just taking the notes as they are from the lectures is a sucker's game.
I was just trying to illustrate the kind of response that items like this would be likely to receive from the soldiers on the ground.
The utility of this technology is for a unit leader, with an obvious hierarchy of technological burden/C4I access and control. Officers at the platoon level and up would benefit greatly from this technology so that they could keep track of all of their units and support elements. Likewise, a lesser amount of access and interface for squad leaders to keep track of individual soldiers in an urban or similar combat zone. There's no need for anyone below E-5 to need to know the status of the damn UCAVs because they don't, and shouldn't, have the authority to command them anyway.
Moreover, I really wonder if these people actually expect soldiers to basically compromise their line of sight in the middle of combat. Even if they do, those HUDS are never going to be used in the middle of a firefight because there isn't anything remotely useful for a soldier to utilize that can't be done with an order over the radio from someone who DOES have sufficient overwatch capability and necessity to do so. When the U.S. Army or Marine Corps sets up sniper/countersniper positions relatively afar from enemy forces, what difference does it make that each soldier have a map or any other nonsense? They need to be able to shoot and have unit coordination, which is better accomplished by limiting this much technology and information to platoon headquarters units and above, and possibly much less information to squad leaders.
Which brings me to my next point: INFOSEC.
God forbid a soldier or Marine gets killed while wearing all of the crap necessary to operate this farce of a wannabe battlesuit. How do they presume to them eliminate the potential for hostile agents to access and compromise U.S. forces by using all of this information against them when they are in the middle of combat and can't quickly strip the dead soldier (which I'm sure their recently-close friends would enjoy in the middle of combat) and destroy (to prevent immediate threat of compromise) all of this equipment.
All of this equipment has its place, mainly with vehicles (the first place this type of technology was introduced and where it is most advanced) for a reason. It's mainly utility and scope of combat, as well as the amount of data relevant to those forces as opposed to Infantry. Infantry doesn't need this. The officer corps would benefit from it, but the individual soldier or Marine would find it useless, distracting, and quite simply and unnecessary burden. This could easily add 10-20lbs. to their ensemble, and for units in Airborne, Special Operations, and even most Infantry that is heaping crap on top of gear that already weighs almost as much as they do (i.e., the 100+lbs. of gear Airborne soldiers carry in airborne insertions). As we saw in Afghanistan during Operation: Anaconda, depending on the locale the gear was already too much for them to carry, especially as they are moving out in the middle of a firefight, with soldiers actually falling over backwards and struggling to get into helicopters because the weight of the gear and exhaustion (due to fatigue and the thin air at the altitudes of the combat zones in Afghanistan) just got the best of them. So these geniuses want to ADD MORE WEIGHT? Good luck.
So, I figured I might as well go back and do a trifecta:
- The Prince
- Discourses on Livy
- Art of War
I figured I'd also try and do Clausewitz's On War; Cicero, Everitt's biography of the Roman; and since I was reading Machiavelli, I figure I might as well read Leo Strauss' book about him.Religion's designed for control. Duh. Rather than cite someone who I never heard of, what about Plato and the "Noble Lie" from Republic? It applies quite well to ideology and theology in general, and has a hell of a lot more philosophical background behind it at this point.
Rather than refer to the Five books of Moses (which are just the first five books of the Bible and Torah), what about the idea that in Islam five prophets preceded Mohammed? There are six prophets: Adam, Moses, Abraham, David, Jesus, and Mohammed being the sixth; all extraordinary men who were to guide men on Earth, but men nonetheless, preceeding the arrival of a final actor who actually is the Messiah (The acolyte? Neo & Trinity's child? Maybe. If nothing else they could squeeze a few more paragraphs out of their review).
This reminds me of when I worked in a library, and I was gathering journals to send to be bound. I was getting some cinema journals ready when I noticed that for several issues they were discussing serious philosphical issues in the context of Terminator 2, which had come out a few years before the journals were published. These were the same journals I bypassed when I wrote a paper regarding "dark future" sci-fi and the allegory they presented from a philosophy/political science perspective; a paper which spent a great deal discussing The Matrix because it was the pop-philosophy film du jour. Whatever is significant at the time in popular culture will always be analyzed for all manner of meaning. I have since not only disowned the paper and its predecessor analysis of Blade Runner as an allegory for, at the time, the major trends in social and political development (i.e., conservative revolution, sprawl, technofilia, etc.) as being utter crap based on "pop" references that were, in someone else's words, 7th grade philosophy. After reading Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and later finding myself critcizing his brand of postmodernism and similar strains of nihilism, I only thought it was appropriate to read that Baudrillard thought The Matrix completely missed the ball on his own work (such as the aforementioned book).
I remember last year's Free Comic Day. I was walking through Georgetown in D.C. and after, maybe an hour or two of mindless obvliousness, I found myself in front of the Russian Embassy on Mt. Alto a few miles from where I started. When I turned around and went back down Wisconsin Ave. to M St. I stopped at Another Universe comics because I had just remembered it was Free Comic Day and I also wanted to see if they had the newest issue of the Dark Knight Strikes Again or, basically, anything interesting. I ended up standing next to some woman who was talking to some guy about a class she was taking, but I wasn't really paying attention, and eventually I left. However, I walked out and realized that it was Tiffany Taylor, a former Playboy Playmate and a student at University of Maryland (And a damn hot woman), and I didn't even think to say "hi." Ah, Free Comic Day...
What the Hell? I thought WIPO was supposed to facilitate IP issues such as global copyrights. What the Hell are they doing in Geneva?
Actually, that's not the greatest thing in the world. The case will be appealed because the legal issue is begging for an appeal. However, it's going to be appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which is almost assuredly the most tech-saavy geographical Circuit, it also happens to be the Circuit most overturned by the Supreme Court. So even if they hear it, uphold it, uphold it if it goes en banc (That is, before all of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges and not just three randomly selected judges), if, god-forbid, the Supreme Court grants cert, the chances of it being upheld by them are probably not that good. I have no doubt that MPAA/RIAA's lawyers know this. Hell, Jack Valenti's old boss, Ronald Reagan, appointed three of the Justices and made Rehnquits the Chief Justice. They have the time and the money to push this as far as they want, and they probably have a lot more sympathetic ear at the top who would be perfectly willing to bitch-slap the Ninth for kicks.
BTW, did anyone notice footnote 2? They are entering a default judgment against Kazaa for the same thing he just absolved Morpheus and Grokster for. However, as the opinion goes on, the fact that the two are bascially licensees of Kazaa's has helped absolve the of liability, but if Kazaa had not defaulted, there would probably be different results becuase he seems to have little trouble identifying similar patterns of behavior between Kazaa's software and Napster. Many functions are independent of Grokster, specifically, but that does not mean that this software is completely free from liability. Grokster's off the hook for now, but that doesn't mean Kazaa is, and they provie the software to run Grokster, so Grokster may cease to exist if they nail Kazaa. Gnutella looks like it is safe, by contrast, because it can't be controlled, it isn't based upon known "supernodes" and because access can't be limited easily by going after a handful of individuals or other entities.
The person you want to mention is Elliot Abrams, who is a convicted felon, and is currently working in the White House on the National Security Council staff. When a reporter asked Ari Fleischer who else at the White House was a convicted felon, he blew them off, which makes a person wonder... The White House is employing someone who was duplicitous to the Congress and American people, and they won't say if anyone else working for them could be in the same category. Hmm.