The miscreants are not as small of a minority as you think. Hell, laws against public drunkenness precede the founding of the USA.
but once everything is against the law we are all lawbreakers.
This won't be a problem until enforcement catches up with the law. Once that happens, public backlash tends to get laws rolled back. Red light cameras are a great example of over enforcement leading to massive pushback.
I think it's important to note that the audiophile's "4TB 67,000-song music library" is what we now call "one hard drive that costs $200"
Over ten years ago, I remember RAIDing up 4 x 75 GB hard drives and thinking "holy shit I have a lot of space" A DVD-R could back up a significant chunk of your hard drive. Now... a lossless library (at home) is within everyone's reach.
In the US we have a pretty good history of not hanging outgoing politicians for controversial political decisions they made while in office. ... I contend that your proposed alternative is significantly uglier than the current situation.
I contend that you're wrong to conflate war crimes and treason with "controversial political decisions." Almost everything that was done to US prisoners, the USA has seen prosecuted as a war crime in earlier wars.
Western democracies have prosecuted a variety of people for war crimes, but it doesn't take a flaming Republican to notice that there were a variety of very important qualitative differences between the likes of Adolf Hitler's gang and GWBush's...
Please explain to us the qualitative differences between full-Hitler and the CIA black sites + Guantanamo. Because really, I suspect you're arguing about quantity not quality.
The reality of the Civil War was a *lot* more complicated. Slavery was only the third or fourth most important issue until Lincoln turned it into the moral justification for the war. Which was a brilliant PR move on his part, since even a century later we're believing in it.
The difficulty with your version of history is that it is directly contradicted by documents and statements made before and during the Civil War. Here are Declarations of Secession from the four States that decided to explain their reasons
I could give you an almost endless list of primary sources to dig through, but if those declarations aren't convincing, I don't know what else would do it. Anyone who says that slavery was not central to the issues of the Civil War is engaging in historical revisionism.
If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
Ignore whatever you learned growing up and go straight to the sources.
Releasing the documents without also releasing a lot of priviledged information would paint at least one person with a very broad brush, and with a very unflattering color. This could very likely jeapordize their careers and good names, and thus has defamation suit written all over it.
Did we read the same article?
""It was a specific document, citing specific companies, and making very specific suggestions to me [Commerce Secretary Burdette]."
However, [Commerce Secretary Burdette] declined to release the report to the newspaper, saying it was an "internal memorandum" that could be withheld under state law. ... Burdette acknowledged that the exemption doesn't require him to withhold the ICF memo. In other words, he could release the document, even though he believes state law allows him to keep it confidential.
Translation: one or more contractors pissed away money and the Commerce Secretary & Governor don't want anyone called out for their mismanagement of broadband funds. /In the USA, truth is always a defense against defamation
I recall reading that telcos in Africa hired guards to protect the cell towers (and their fuel) from getting ripped off. When this didn't stop the problems, they created a program where the guards could sell minutes as a side business, which gave them an incentive to keep the service up so they could keep making money.
The Chinese bought A123, with the US Government's approval. Fisker is the last man standing, but they're at the whim of their now-chinese-owned battery supplier, who has been trying to invalidate their previous contract.
All your examples had negative narratives pushed by conservative media. Unfortunately, those narratives never actually had much relation to reality.
But the inspector general's new report says almost all the $6.6 billion was properly handed over to Iraq and its Central Bank. "[Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction] was able to account for the unexpended [Development Fund for Iraq] funds remaining in DFI accounts when the CPA (Coalitional Provisional Authority) dissolved in June 2004," the new report says. "Sufficient evidence exists showing that almost all of the remaining $6.6 billion remaining was transferred to actual and legal CBI (Central Bank of Iraq) control."
That's the beautiful two party system for you. Two fucked choices both backed by banks and hollywierd.
Fucking hell. The banks are certainly not endorsing the limits the Obama Administration keeps trying to place on them. It's almost like there wasn't a global recession kicked off by endemic banking fraud, quickly followed by Republicans who've done their damndest to stifle regulatory solutions to keep it all from happening again.
There are plenty of big bright lines composed of objective factors which leave little or no room for interpretation. Anyone still pushing "both parties are bad" needs to pull their head out of their asshole.
And he's also hesitant to say they'd never use a drone to take a US citizen out on US soil....and....
You must have missed the follow up.
Dear Senator Paul:
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional qustion: "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer to that question is no.
Is it not completely possible that one intelligent man, $300 laptop, and an internet connection be just as "deadly" as any country's electronic warfare unit?
Sure. But one man doesn't scale up as well as a building full of them. Hence the electronic warfare units.
First PCMark 7 benchmarks show a performance increase of around 10 percent on the A10-4600M (5750M: 2175 points, 4600M: 1965 points). Thus, the A10-5750M would place roughly at the level of a Core i3-2330M (Sandy Bridge).
Notebook Check is pretty awesome. If anyone knows of a better/equal website for laptop hardware, I'd like to know
Every time the US or EU attempts to censor something, it makes Slashdot's front page. Are you really so naive as to think they're so much more sophisticated than China that we can't detect the worst things they're doing?
I'll leave the source of this next quote as an exercise to the reader
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
What the NY Times narrative leaves out is that the lead journalist on the story had a book coming out, and the NY Times wanted to break the story before the book did.
I'm sure there are plenty of stories that have never seen the light of day, because media organizations like the NY Times agree with the government not to publish.
The government would have gotten wind of it, after they likely reported it to the government [...]
I can't be bothered to find the article(s), but if you dig through the reporting on wikileaks, more than one newspaper said that they shared the archive with the government in order to get their opinion on what should and should not be published due to national security concerns.
You'll also find the government talked about analyzing the wikileaks cache in order to do risk assessment and mitigation.
The relationship between the press and the government is cosier than the press would like to admit. As at least one other person has pointed out, at the government's request, the media sat on the warrantless wiretapping scandal for over a year.
Once the American stockpile shrinks too much, the Japanese will start to get worried and want to build their own.
The people who live, eat, and breathe non-proliferation seem to think that 1,000 deployed warheads is just fine to protect the Japanese and all our other allies. The current treaty calls for 1,500 ~ 1,675 warheads What's your number?
Wag the dog.. Business sets the rules.. Government enforces them...
Two words: regulatory capture
The relatively new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is independant of Congress and has been churning out meaningful regulations. Compare and contrast with mining or nuclear regulators, who are not independant of Congress and are heavily influenced by the companies they regulate.
Independant regulators (that do not have to worry about getting defunded every year) could do wonders to fix our fucked up system of rules. I mean, we appoint independant prosecutors to impeach Clinton, but we can't get independant prosecutors to go after multi-trillion bank fraud?
[...] and any economist will tell you its the used car market that seriously hurts our fossil fuel numbers, currently the USA averages 14MPG and that is because of all the poor folks in used cars on the road.
Where do you get your numbers from? I found a NY Times article that said this: "The average on-road fuel economy of all vehicles in 1923 was 14 m.p.g., the report said, compared with 17.4 m.p.g. as recently as 2008."
Now, the only reason for low fuel economy averages are large trucks/SUVs. They drag the averages down for everyone, though the new 6-cylinder models have lessened that effect.
Anyways, if this story is indeed about a site that has ended up with 50% of its users running ad blockers then there is a pretty good chance that the particular advertising they were doing was particularly annoying (possibly lots of malware delivered too.)
Why didn't you say up front that you had not read the fine article?
Keep in mind that China's most recent numbers are after they shut down large numbers of really dirty coal plants and took cars off the road. In Beijing, there's a lottery for car buyers and even after you get your car, you won't be able to drive it 1 day a week.
China is pushing ahead much much faster than anyone else when it comes to nuclear and alternate energy.
If I buy a used book, pages may be torn, it might have writing inside "this is for Dave, thanks for being Dave", or it might have coffee stains.
The stuff I find inside used books is half the fun! Plus, far too many authors are dead and their contracts included no mention of digital rights. There's going to be a huge number of out-of-print books that never make it into a digital format.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a huge fan of banning something for everyone because a minority of miscreants are incapable of using it responsibly.
Pollution laws? Money laundering laws? Driving laws? Building codes? Product liability laws? Noise ordinances?
The miscreants are not as small of a minority as you think.
Hell, laws against public drunkenness precede the founding of the USA.
but once everything is against the law we are all lawbreakers.
This won't be a problem until enforcement catches up with the law.
Once that happens, public backlash tends to get laws rolled back.
Red light cameras are a great example of over enforcement leading to massive pushback.
I think it's important to note that the audiophile's "4TB 67,000-song music library" is what we now call "one hard drive that costs $200"
Over ten years ago, I remember RAIDing up 4 x 75 GB hard drives and thinking "holy shit I have a lot of space"
A DVD-R could back up a significant chunk of your hard drive.
Now... a lossless library (at home) is within everyone's reach.
Maybe we should punish them buy sending them some free/discounted stuff. I'm sure that will teach them a lesson they won't soon forget.
That does nothing to help our domestic market and would probably involve government subsidies (aka spending) just to hurt China.
This is all in the context of a Chinese national who was arrested at the airport,
on his way to China, with NASA materials he wasn't supposed to have.
This isn't some random act of political pressure.
The reality is that NASA is trying to get its house in order.
In the US we have a pretty good history of not hanging outgoing politicians for controversial political decisions they made while in office.
...
I contend that your proposed alternative is significantly uglier than the current situation.
I contend that you're wrong to conflate war crimes and treason with "controversial political decisions."
Almost everything that was done to US prisoners, the USA has seen prosecuted as a war crime in earlier wars.
Western democracies have prosecuted a variety of people for war crimes, but it doesn't take a flaming Republican to notice that there were a variety of very important qualitative differences between the likes of Adolf Hitler's gang and GWBush's...
Please explain to us the qualitative differences between full-Hitler and the CIA black sites + Guantanamo.
Because really, I suspect you're arguing about quantity not quality.
I remember seeing standalone 3D displays at SIGGRAPH over 10 years ago.
The reality of the Civil War was a *lot* more complicated. Slavery was only the third or fourth most important issue until Lincoln turned it into the moral justification for the war. Which was a brilliant PR move on his part, since even a century later we're believing in it.
The difficulty with your version of history is that it is directly contradicted by documents and statements made before and during the Civil War.
Here are Declarations of Secession from the four States that decided to explain their reasons
I could give you an almost endless list of primary sources to dig through,
but if those declarations aren't convincing, I don't know what else would do it.
Anyone who says that slavery was not central to the issues of the Civil War is engaging in historical revisionism.
And, Lincoln didn't really want to end slavery in the South, his plan was to prevent any new States from having slaves, thus allowing slavery in the South to die out in its own time.
If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save Slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
Ignore whatever you learned growing up and go straight to the sources.
Releasing the documents without also releasing a lot of priviledged information would paint at least one person with a very broad brush, and with a very unflattering color. This could very likely jeapordize their careers and good names, and thus has defamation suit written all over it.
Did we read the same article?
""It was a specific document, citing specific companies, and making very specific suggestions to me [Commerce Secretary Burdette]."
However, [Commerce Secretary Burdette] declined to release the report to the newspaper, saying it was an "internal memorandum" that could be withheld under state law.
...
Burdette acknowledged that the exemption doesn't require him to withhold the ICF memo. In other words, he could release the document, even though he believes state law allows him to keep it confidential.
Translation: one or more contractors pissed away money and the Commerce Secretary & Governor don't want anyone called out for their mismanagement of broadband funds.
/In the USA, truth is always a defense against defamation
I recall reading that telcos in Africa hired guards to protect the cell towers (and their fuel) from getting ripped off.
When this didn't stop the problems, they created a program where the guards could sell minutes as a side business,
which gave them an incentive to keep the service up so they could keep making money.
You will remember great hits like Solendra, A123, and Fisker.
Last year, the US Department of Commerce slapped tariffs on Chinese solar panels after the WTO agreed that the Chinese were dumping (too late for Solyndra).
And Solyndra is suing 3 Chinese solar companies under the Sherman anti-trust act for driving the company out of business
The Chinese bought A123, with the US Government's approval.
Fisker is the last man standing, but they're at the whim of their now-chinese-owned battery supplier, who has been trying to invalidate their previous contract.
All your examples had negative narratives pushed by conservative media.
Unfortunately, those narratives never actually had much relation to reality.
'It's a tough question that's not unlike asking what's the best planet to live on not named Earth or the best thing to breathe not named air,'
Nitrox
Heliox
Argox
Hydrox
Hydreliox
Trimix/Heliair
Neox
You can also breathe pure oxygen for a while before oxygen toxicity kicks in and starts ruining various organs.
/sorry if I forgot a mixed gas
You must have missed the follow up
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/26/once-thought-lost-and-now-found-6-billion/
But the inspector general's new report says almost all the $6.6 billion was properly handed over to Iraq and its Central Bank. "[Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction] was able to account for the unexpended [Development Fund for Iraq] funds remaining in DFI accounts when the CPA (Coalitional Provisional Authority) dissolved in June 2004," the new report says. "Sufficient evidence exists showing that almost all of the remaining $6.6 billion remaining was transferred to actual and legal CBI (Central Bank of Iraq) control."
There was also a great story about how a random guy ended up being solely responsible for handling every pallet of cash destined for the Central Bank of Iraq.
It's actually a bit disturbing that the US didn't set up any procedures and this one guy was more or less on his own, handling billions of dollars with zero oversight.
That's the beautiful two party system for you. Two fucked choices both backed by banks and hollywierd.
Fucking hell.
The banks are certainly not endorsing the limits the Obama Administration keeps trying to place on them.
It's almost like there wasn't a global recession kicked off by endemic banking fraud, quickly followed by Republicans who've done their damndest to stifle regulatory solutions to keep it all from happening again.
Letâ(TM)s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-04-27/opinions/35453898_1_republican-party-party-moves-democratic-party
There are plenty of big bright lines composed of objective factors which leave little or no room for interpretation.
Anyone still pushing "both parties are bad" needs to pull their head out of their asshole.
And he's also hesitant to say they'd never use a drone to take a US citizen out on US soil....and....
You must have missed the follow up.
Dear Senator Paul:
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional qustion: "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer to that question is no.
Sincerely,
Eric Holder
Is it not completely possible that one intelligent man, $300 laptop, and an internet connection be just as "deadly" as any country's electronic warfare unit?
Sure. But one man doesn't scale up as well as a building full of them.
Hence the electronic warfare units.
This was the first benchmark I found.
Keep in mind this new CPU is for mobile usage.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A-Series-A10-5750M-Notebook-Processor.87797.0.html
First PCMark 7 benchmarks show a performance increase of around 10 percent on the A10-4600M (5750M: 2175 points, 4600M: 1965 points).
Thus, the A10-5750M would place roughly at the level of a Core i3-2330M (Sandy Bridge).
Notebook Check is pretty awesome.
If anyone knows of a better/equal website for laptop hardware, I'd like to know
Every time the US or EU attempts to censor something, it makes Slashdot's front page. Are you really so naive as to think they're so much more sophisticated than China that we can't detect the worst things they're doing?
I'll leave the source of this next quote as an exercise to the reader
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
What the NY Times narrative leaves out is that the lead journalist on the story had a book coming out,
and the NY Times wanted to break the story before the book did.
I'm sure there are plenty of stories that have never seen the light of day,
because media organizations like the NY Times agree with the government not to publish.
The government would have gotten wind of it, after they likely reported it to the government [...]
I can't be bothered to find the article(s), but if you dig through the reporting on wikileaks, more than one newspaper said that they shared the archive with the government in order to get their opinion on what should and should not be published due to national security concerns.
You'll also find the government talked about analyzing the wikileaks cache in order to do risk assessment and mitigation.
The relationship between the press and the government is cosier than the press would like to admit.
As at least one other person has pointed out, at the government's request, the media sat on the warrantless wiretapping scandal for over a year.
Once the American stockpile shrinks too much, the Japanese will start to get worried and want to build their own.
The people who live, eat, and breathe non-proliferation seem to think that 1,000 deployed warheads is just fine to protect the Japanese and all our other allies.
The current treaty calls for 1,500 ~ 1,675 warheads
What's your number?
Wag the dog.. Business sets the rules.. Government enforces them...
Two words: regulatory capture
The relatively new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is independant of Congress and has been churning out meaningful regulations.
Compare and contrast with mining or nuclear regulators, who are not independant of Congress and are heavily influenced by the companies they regulate.
Independant regulators (that do not have to worry about getting defunded every year) could do wonders to fix our fucked up system of rules.
I mean, we appoint independant prosecutors to impeach Clinton, but we can't get independant prosecutors to go after multi-trillion bank fraud?
[...] and any economist will tell you its the used car market that seriously hurts our fossil fuel numbers, currently the USA averages 14MPG and that is because of all the poor folks in used cars on the road.
Where do you get your numbers from?
I found a NY Times article that said this:
"The average on-road fuel economy of all vehicles in 1923 was 14 m.p.g., the report said, compared with 17.4 m.p.g. as recently as 2008."
Now, the only reason for low fuel economy averages are large trucks/SUVs.
They drag the averages down for everyone, though the new 6-cylinder models have lessened that effect.
Anyways, if this story is indeed about a site that has ended up with 50% of its users running ad blockers then there is a pretty good chance that the particular advertising they were doing was particularly annoying (possibly lots of malware delivered too.)
Why didn't you say up front that you had not read the fine article?
Keep in mind that China's most recent numbers are after they shut down large numbers of really dirty coal plants and took cars off the road.
In Beijing, there's a lottery for car buyers and even after you get your car, you won't be able to drive it 1 day a week.
China is pushing ahead much much faster than anyone else when it comes to nuclear and alternate energy.
Because 40 years ago, the EPA was created in the wake of a massive offshore oil spill.
The oil industry has been leery ever since.
It's only in the last decade that oil companies have diversified into energy companies.
If I buy a used book, pages may be torn, it might have writing inside "this is for Dave, thanks for being Dave", or it might have coffee stains.
The stuff I find inside used books is half the fun!
Plus, far too many authors are dead and their contracts included no mention of digital rights.
There's going to be a huge number of out-of-print books that never make it into a digital format.