Nagasaki was a major port city with military shipyards in Japan. They shipped a lot of naval supplies out of it during the war as well as building and repairing the Japanese Navy, so yes, it was a legitimate military target. Hiroshima was the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, as well as hosting the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army and the Army-Marine Headquarters, as well as the HQ of the local prefecture reserve army. It was also a major port city, so yeah, it was a legitimate military target. They didn't nuke Tokyo because it was the national capital, and they wanted somebody left in the government who could negociate the surrender, though Tokyo was on the list 'just in case'.
Doncha just love people who think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just filled to overflowing with gentle vegan treehuggers before the nukes were dropped?
You are aware that people with very similar beliefs held positions of power throughout George W. Bush's administration, right? How do you think that appeared to citizens of other nations?
Wrong Bush, actually. They started sneaking in under Ford, but only really took off under Reagan & Bush I. They hated Clinton with a passion because he wasn't hardline NeoCon (more of an old-school conservative, which is why he ended up getting so much support from right-wing voters, they could be comfortable with him where they couldn't with the NeoCons). And with Cheney in as VP, they had it made, Geedub could be their meat puppet while they got down to the serious business of making Amercia a NeoCon stronghold.
Reagan's first term, IIRC. Particularly, the 'guru' of the NeoCons, Leo Strauss, Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares for starters. 'The Power of Nightmares' should be available on any torrent site you choose to use, and I highly recommend you watch it sometime. They talk about all the usual suspects, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Rumsfeld, et. al., the political disciples of Strauss and why it's important to flood America with myths to keep us from becoming 'selfish liberals' with 'no patriotism'. Said disciples started coming to power during Reagan, including the infamous 'Team B' project where the CIA was politicized to provide propaganda for American consumption to whip up the American people to 'fight the Godless Commies'. The Team B reports have become declassified, and make for some seriously disturbing reading.
This is an inane discussion! Who outside/. thinks that Iran will even go to war, let alone launch nukes, against North Korea? They're more likely to do it against Saudi Arabia. And of course, Israel.
The 'Iran vs North Korea' was a 'what-if' scenario, about as likely as me being elected Pope (rather hard, I'm not Roman Catholic). What's a lot more likely is, the US will go to war against Syria and Iran to 'stabilize the region'.
WMDs? So what? Most of what's classified as a 'WMD' isn't really a WMD unless you take the 'D' as 'Death'. The whole point of chemical and biological weaponry is to kill off 'the enemy' without fucking up his real estate and infrastructure. Minimal property destruction. You wanna whack 'em out, then send in teams to clean up the mess and get the infrastructure back into production again with your own people.
Attack and conquer Iran because of the threat of possible nuclear weapons manufacturing? The 'threat' is, they know how to build them. So does any first-year particle physics major. It's not that difficult to design a quick-and-dirty nuke. It's a few orders of magnitude to design an efficient nuke, but if all you want is a Hiroshima-style bang, no problem. It's just two pieces of enriched fissionable uranium slapped together to go supercritical. Easy peasy. A Nagasaki-style nuke, or an H-bomb, takes a lot more work, a lot more intensive calculations, but doable on just about any laptop computer with the right software. Say, a decent spreadsheet and access to an explosives handbook. There's some engineering tricks you'll have to come up with, like making sure the entire explosion happens within a couple hundred femtoseconds, but it's been done. Proof of concept? Nagasaki and all the atomic testing since. The hardest part is coming up with the plutonium, which is why the Cub Scouts aren't a nuclear power.
Kids get injured at foster care, or abused at foster care, or even molested at foster care? Too bad. No apology, no recourse,
Utter bullshit. Do you think foster carers are given some sort of immunity from prosecution? You have no idea what you're talking about.
The agency is unprosecutable, not the caregivers. The 'caregivers' are just civilians, they can be sued, you can't touch the agency involved.
Problem is, trying to see your kids outside of supervised visitation is a crime and can lead to the kids being permenantly taken away as well as some jail time/fines/the usual 'punishment'. This includes showing up at your kids' school to ask them why they have now casts on both legs & how it happened. The agencies don't want you to know the names of the 'caregivers', or any info about them, on the off chance that you'll 'kidnap' your own kids and take off. Getting ahold of that info after the kids have been returned is difficult and expensive. You'll need a lawyer, many many many subpoenas. They won't give you that information until the kids are returned. The agency will fight you every step of the way to cover its own ass.
Sexual acts with adult woman are not morally reprehensible acts (according to society), like it is with children. That's the difference.
Problem is, even consentual sex acts between consenting adults can be illegal in some jurisdictions. There are still a ton of 'blue laws' on the books outlawing anything other than sex for procreation by married heterosexual couples. In those jurisdictions, if I get caught spanking my above-age-of-consent girlfriend, I can be arrested tried and convicted of 'sexual battery' and spend a few years as 'guest of the state', and get to sign up for that lovely sex offender registry database, all because it's an election year & some assistant DA wants to push his boss out of the way and climb the political ladder.
Social Services isn't bound by 'innocent until proven guilty'. Their mandate is, 'Protect the child at all costs', even if those costs emotionally scar the child worse than any unfounded allegations. You & your other half get ticketted for a joint? Pull the kids til Social Services determines the parents aren't stark raving crack addicts running a meth lab in the basement and take part in a 12 Step program for awhile to keep them off drugs. Get seen spanking your kid? Pull the kids til the parents get cleared of child abuse charges and go to anger management counselling.
Kids get injured at foster care, or abused at foster care, or even molested at foster care? Too bad. No apology, no recourse, and Social Services is still waiting for the parents to clear themselves of the allegations. They're 'thinking of the children' so anything they do is a-ok.
Definitely Cordwainer Smith. 'Alpha Ralpha Boulevard' was one of the first short stories I ever read. It and 'The Ballad of Lost C'Mell' still tear me up.
Likewise, H. Beam Piper, anything he ever wrote is good.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Henry Kuttner yet. 'Mutant' was a great short story collection. Get it. Read it.
You get to have the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you know they won't break down your door for 'video piracy'. At least, not for their files. Anybody else's, you're fair game.
Also, you'll be free from the 'need' for DVD ripping software, bittorrent software, and anything else that can be construed as a tool for video piracy. Probably, including your desktop and laptop computers. You DO have a smart phone, don't you???
They want you to keep your 'media file' on their cloud. You get to pay for the bandwidth to stream it to your chosen machine (and ONLY that chosen machine, you'll need another file to put it on the other machine). And somewhere down the line, they'll charge you a 'small fee' to access your data in their cloud. Hell, if RIAA et al could figure out a way to determine what songs or movies you were thinking of, they'd try to figure out a way to charge you for each time you thought of them.
More likely, what they mean is, a file that's a rootkit/player for your machine that manages their rights to a file in the cloud somewhere that can disappear at any time they get froggy and decide to leap. The differences between what they want and what I do with my own DVDs is simple: the media is stored offsite in the cloud, the media is DRMed for 'their protection', the media can disappear at their whim, and their way is legal, whereas the file I rip from my DVD is on my machine, unDRMed, ain't goin anywhere unless I have a disc crash or decide to wipe it myself, and is totally illegal by their rules.
Of course the head of Lulzsec has to be American. FOX News tells me only an American could lead such a group. Only an American would have the intelligence to lead third-world Brits & Irish on a rampage that damages corporations and banks. Third Worlders are idiots, that's why we keep invading them and overthrowing their governments in favor of democratic systems that favor corporations. It's the American way, and we're exporting it bigtime. Unless the particular piece of ground has nothing the corporations want. Then you can starve in your mud huts. We'll send enough Peace Corps volunteers to keep the liberals happy while we loot the rest of the planet.
If my ISP logs a few hundred gigs of encrypted data flowing into my house, they're gonna know I'm transfering something. In today's 'jail 'em til they can prove their innosense beyond a reasonable doubt' society, that's more than probable cause. I've seen a lot of interesting ideas to anonymise file transfers, but you still have to send that data somewhere. The bottleneck is always gonna be at the endpoints. Figure a way to make 1 IP address look like 5 dozen and still have reliable delivery of the packets, and you just may have something there.
Bandwidth isn't free, servers aren't free. Time isn't free. Someone's got to pay the bills. I'm sorry wanting to eat got in the way of your spoiled child dIatri e.
I pay my monthly access charge. My ISP claims to 'guarantee' me a certain level of service. The contract says download & upload speeds 'up to a certain limit for x dollars. ISPs always oversell their bandwitdth, it's the only way they can make a profit without government subsidies. The problems come in when you try to use the bandwidth they're selling you.
I can think of two reasons off the top of my head.
1. There just weren't many people around. When you only have a couple million people on the planet and 99.999% of them are busy trying to grow something to eat, it doesn't leave much free time to come up with new ways of doing things.
2. Early patent trolls. "Dude, your 'wheel' infringes on our 'log roller' patent. DIE!!"
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Um, TSA is a branch of Homeland Security. They don't need arrest powers, they just pass the request up the line and whoever is disappeared.
Nagasaki was a major port city with military shipyards in Japan. They shipped a lot of naval supplies out of it during the war as well as building and repairing the Japanese Navy, so yes, it was a legitimate military target. Hiroshima was the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, as well as hosting the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army and the Army-Marine Headquarters, as well as the HQ of the local prefecture reserve army. It was also a major port city, so yeah, it was a legitimate military target. They didn't nuke Tokyo because it was the national capital, and they wanted somebody left in the government who could negociate the surrender, though Tokyo was on the list 'just in case'.
Doncha just love people who think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just filled to overflowing with gentle vegan treehuggers before the nukes were dropped?
Wrong Bush, actually. They started sneaking in under Ford, but only really took off under Reagan & Bush I. They hated Clinton with a passion because he wasn't hardline NeoCon (more of an old-school conservative, which is why he ended up getting so much support from right-wing voters, they could be comfortable with him where they couldn't with the NeoCons). And with Cheney in as VP, they had it made, Geedub could be their meat puppet while they got down to the serious business of making Amercia a NeoCon stronghold.
Reagan's first term, IIRC. Particularly, the 'guru' of the NeoCons, Leo Strauss, Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares for starters. 'The Power of Nightmares' should be available on any torrent site you choose to use, and I highly recommend you watch it sometime. They talk about all the usual suspects, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kristol, Rumsfeld, et. al., the political disciples of Strauss and why it's important to flood America with myths to keep us from becoming 'selfish liberals' with 'no patriotism'. Said disciples started coming to power during Reagan, including the infamous 'Team B' project where the CIA was politicized to provide propaganda for American consumption to whip up the American people to 'fight the Godless Commies'. The Team B reports have become declassified, and make for some seriously disturbing reading.
The 'Iran vs North Korea' was a 'what-if' scenario, about as likely as me being elected Pope (rather hard, I'm not Roman Catholic). What's a lot more likely is, the US will go to war against Syria and Iran to 'stabilize the region'.
WMDs? So what? Most of what's classified as a 'WMD' isn't really a WMD unless you take the 'D' as 'Death'. The whole point of chemical and biological weaponry is to kill off 'the enemy' without fucking up his real estate and infrastructure. Minimal property destruction. You wanna whack 'em out, then send in teams to clean up the mess and get the infrastructure back into production again with your own people.
Attack and conquer Iran because of the threat of possible nuclear weapons manufacturing? The 'threat' is, they know how to build them. So does any first-year particle physics major. It's not that difficult to design a quick-and-dirty nuke. It's a few orders of magnitude to design an efficient nuke, but if all you want is a Hiroshima-style bang, no problem. It's just two pieces of enriched fissionable uranium slapped together to go supercritical. Easy peasy. A Nagasaki-style nuke, or an H-bomb, takes a lot more work, a lot more intensive calculations, but doable on just about any laptop computer with the right software. Say, a decent spreadsheet and access to an explosives handbook. There's some engineering tricks you'll have to come up with, like making sure the entire explosion happens within a couple hundred femtoseconds, but it's been done. Proof of concept? Nagasaki and all the atomic testing since. The hardest part is coming up with the plutonium, which is why the Cub Scouts aren't a nuclear power.
The agency is unprosecutable, not the caregivers. The 'caregivers' are just civilians, they can be sued, you can't touch the agency involved.
Problem is, trying to see your kids outside of supervised visitation is a crime and can lead to the kids being permenantly taken away as well as some jail time/fines/the usual 'punishment'. This includes showing up at your kids' school to ask them why they have now casts on both legs & how it happened. The agencies don't want you to know the names of the 'caregivers', or any info about them, on the off chance that you'll 'kidnap' your own kids and take off. Getting ahold of that info after the kids have been returned is difficult and expensive. You'll need a lawyer, many many many subpoenas. They won't give you that information until the kids are returned. The agency will fight you every step of the way to cover its own ass.
Problem is, even consentual sex acts between consenting adults can be illegal in some jurisdictions. There are still a ton of 'blue laws' on the books outlawing anything other than sex for procreation by married heterosexual couples. In those jurisdictions, if I get caught spanking my above-age-of-consent girlfriend, I can be arrested tried and convicted of 'sexual battery' and spend a few years as 'guest of the state', and get to sign up for that lovely sex offender registry database, all because it's an election year & some assistant DA wants to push his boss out of the way and climb the political ladder.
Social Services isn't bound by 'innocent until proven guilty'. Their mandate is, 'Protect the child at all costs', even if those costs emotionally scar the child worse than any unfounded allegations. You & your other half get ticketted for a joint? Pull the kids til Social Services determines the parents aren't stark raving crack addicts running a meth lab in the basement and take part in a 12 Step program for awhile to keep them off drugs. Get seen spanking your kid? Pull the kids til the parents get cleared of child abuse charges and go to anger management counselling.
Kids get injured at foster care, or abused at foster care, or even molested at foster care? Too bad. No apology, no recourse, and Social Services is still waiting for the parents to clear themselves of the allegations. They're 'thinking of the children' so anything they do is a-ok.
Definitely Cordwainer Smith. 'Alpha Ralpha Boulevard' was one of the first short stories I ever read. It and 'The Ballad of Lost C'Mell' still tear me up.
Likewise, H. Beam Piper, anything he ever wrote is good.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Henry Kuttner yet. 'Mutant' was a great short story collection. Get it. Read it.
You get to have the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you know they won't break down your door for 'video piracy'. At least, not for their files. Anybody else's, you're fair game.
Also, you'll be free from the 'need' for DVD ripping software, bittorrent software, and anything else that can be construed as a tool for video piracy. Probably, including your desktop and laptop computers. You DO have a smart phone, don't you???
I remember those. Too bad there wasn't decent ripping software when they came out. Er, um...
*NEVERMIND*
They want you to keep your 'media file' on their cloud. You get to pay for the bandwidth to stream it to your chosen machine (and ONLY that chosen machine, you'll need another file to put it on the other machine). And somewhere down the line, they'll charge you a 'small fee' to access your data in their cloud. Hell, if RIAA et al could figure out a way to determine what songs or movies you were thinking of, they'd try to figure out a way to charge you for each time you thought of them.
More likely, what they mean is, a file that's a rootkit/player for your machine that manages their rights to a file in the cloud somewhere that can disappear at any time they get froggy and decide to leap. The differences between what they want and what I do with my own DVDs is simple: the media is stored offsite in the cloud, the media is DRMed for 'their protection', the media can disappear at their whim, and their way is legal, whereas the file I rip from my DVD is on my machine, unDRMed, ain't goin anywhere unless I have a disc crash or decide to wipe it myself, and is totally illegal by their rules.
Silly ferriner, the world IS our back yard. Go find your own.
According to Facebook, it is. YMMV.
Of course the head of Lulzsec has to be American. FOX News tells me only an American could lead such a group. Only an American would have the intelligence to lead third-world Brits & Irish on a rampage that damages corporations and banks. Third Worlders are idiots, that's why we keep invading them and overthrowing their governments in favor of democratic systems that favor corporations. It's the American way, and we're exporting it bigtime. Unless the particular piece of ground has nothing the corporations want. Then you can starve in your mud huts. We'll send enough Peace Corps volunteers to keep the liberals happy while we loot the rest of the planet.
The management jobs will go to India & China. The grunt-work IT jobs will go to Uzbekistan. Hey, those budding capitalists need work, too.
They're working on that. Give it a couple more elections.
Feet first through the wood chipper work for you?
They were young and needed the money?
OK, off the top of my head, the US Post Office (yeah, it's private now!), the Medicare system, just about any state's medical insurance plan.
So all those old iMacs will crash?
If my ISP logs a few hundred gigs of encrypted data flowing into my house, they're gonna know I'm transfering something. In today's 'jail 'em til they can prove their innosense beyond a reasonable doubt' society, that's more than probable cause. I've seen a lot of interesting ideas to anonymise file transfers, but you still have to send that data somewhere. The bottleneck is always gonna be at the endpoints. Figure a way to make 1 IP address look like 5 dozen and still have reliable delivery of the packets, and you just may have something there.
I pay my monthly access charge. My ISP claims to 'guarantee' me a certain level of service. The contract says download & upload speeds 'up to a certain limit for x dollars. ISPs always oversell their bandwitdth, it's the only way they can make a profit without government subsidies. The problems come in when you try to use the bandwidth they're selling you.
I can think of two reasons off the top of my head.
1. There just weren't many people around. When you only have a couple million people on the planet and 99.999% of them are busy trying to grow something to eat, it doesn't leave much free time to come up with new ways of doing things.
2. Early patent trolls. "Dude, your 'wheel' infringes on our 'log roller' patent. DIE!!"