Ah, but the difference is, Google doesn't 'prune' its 'non-pirating' links away, as the MAFIAA claims the deportee did. They're claiming his site was strictly for piracy-related activities, not a general search engine.
Well then, getting your name on the watch list is a good thing. Heck, if they have more than a half of population on the watch list, then what do they do, employ the other half to watch those, who are on the list?
Getting as many people on the watchlist creates the fine-grained control the government appears to want. Seems that the powers-that-wanna-be took lessions from Lavrentiy Beria.
Comrade Beria was 'Uncle Joe' Stalin's hatchetman in the NKVD, precourser to the KGB. He came up through the Party ranks in the original 'Cheka' by reputedly setting up his superiors in some kind of scandal, usually coming up with evidence of sexual scandals, either real or manufactured. When his boss resigned in disgrace, Comrade Beria was standing there ready to go to work in his new job, usually purging possibly disloyal 'coworkers' in the process.
When 'Uncle Joe' died, Beria was the frontrunner to become the 'big boss' of the Soviet Union, until Nikita Khrushchev, Gregori Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov (of 'Molotov Cocktail' fame) had him arrested on over 150 counts of rape, sodomy, child molestation, and abuse of office. In the 'investigation' that followed, he was tried for high treason and reputedly executed in December 1953, although apocryphal evidence claims he was actually shot and killed during his arrest in July '53.
Whether Beria did what they say he did is immaterial. The lession we garner from the events is, it just don't matter what you do, at the end of the day, if the powers-that-wanna-be want you bad enough, they'll find a way.
Must be nice to have massive bandwidth at your fingertips. Here, with Time-Warner, I'm lucky to get 100kb/s downloads. I shudder to think of trying to stream 1080p here.
You non-US citizens need to realise that Americans as people have been cut out of the loop since Kennedy. We have about as much force available to us as a gnat's fart would influence the course of a hurricane. And it's getting worse every day.
We know you don't hate us (mostly), but can you do us a favor? Airdrop us AK-47s. Many many AK-47s. And not the cheap semiautomatic versions either. Ammo would be nice as well, and if you have any man-portable anti-tank missile launchers, that would be wonderful as well. You see, once upon a time, we had the right to keep and bear arms consistent with the military. Now, all we're allowed are nonfunctional cap guns, and they're coming for those next.
Let's see. 140 million jobs in the US, from part time flipping burgers & delivering phone books, to CEO of $MEGACORP, and about 280 million people possible for the job market. I'm thinking, once you're locked out of the job market, you might as well be living in the Third World.
And why didn't the Soviets have tractors? You say that they were 25-30 years behind American ag technology, but no mention of why.
After WW2, they were busy rebuilding. They didn't get much from the Marshall Plan, most of that money went to West Germany, Italy and France.
And then the Cold War started, and what little of their GNP was available for infrastructure rebuilding started to get tied up in defense spending, particularly when you consider a lot of 'defense' spending was gifts to 12 of the 13 republics of the Soviet Union. Where places like Bulgaria and the Ukraine had diesel locomotives for their trains, most of Russia itself used steam. They just didn't have the capital to put into their infrastructure that the West did.
The Soviets used 'slave labor' only because they didn't have the machinery to farm like they do in Kansas. Take away the tractors, and the only way a Kansas agribiz would survive is by using said 'slave labor'.
Here in the US(S)A, said leaders of this Pirate Party would be shuffled off to 'free speech zones' where they'd be ignored until arrested for criminal copyright infringement. The results of their show trials would be seen on FOX, and they'd be sent off to some federal prison for a long enough sentence that they'd be forgotten if they ever managed to get a parole. Likely, they wouldn't get paroled because of the 'fact' that they'd just repeat their hideous crimes when released to society.
Better question: What incentive do they have to try to create something new if all the old stuff is so locked up in copyright that it's impossible to come up with something original that can't be determined by a court of law to be derivative of a copyrighted work?
Except that in the ever-moving goal to improve profits, companies will begin to move away for paying for copyright. They will stop using "Happy Birthday". They will innovate. Would it be easier if certain things were in the public domain? yes. However, the idea of taxing (let's be real, that's what this is is) everything we see/hear/use/think means we will just stop engaging those things.
Kinda hard to 'innovate' when for all intents and purposes, ideas themselves are trademarked and copyrighted. You get to the point where you cannot innovate without violating copyrights or trademarks. How do you prove you weren't influenced by something copyrighted and held in copyright a hundred years ago (Hi, Mickey!!)?
(T)He entire notion of maximizing profit AND locking it in permanently for corporations is a self-destructive situation, it is not tenable. These laws will eat themselves. It will get awful before it gets better, perhaps, but just like centralized planning (communism) doesn't work well for efficient economic models, stranglehold of all ideas is, similarly, a loss no matter what.
Perpetual lock-in of copyright means only the owners of said copyright(s) can make derivitive works from that copyright. Without other sources to work from, the only viable career path is lawyer, attacking and defending said copyrights in court.
And it's not the 'centralised planning' that's the killer, it's when the planners are decoupled from any feedback that the problem arises. Become insulated enough from the process, you're looking for trouble. The Soviets learned that the hard way. America is learning it now.
1. Capitalism did not end communism. Communism collapsed under its own weight, because central planning is inherently unstable as a means of organizing society's productive capacity.
Funny you should say that, as corporations under Capitalism do central planning each and every day. Without a plan, they go belly up.
The problem with 'central planning' comes when there's no negative feedback loop to the 'device', letting the upper levels know when there are problems that need to be addressed.
It still kills me sometimes when I hear how 'evil' a Soviet collective farm was, but how 'great and wonderful' a Kansas agribiz farm is. When you get down to it, there's only 3 major technical differences between the two:
1, The language spoken 2. The technology involved (Soviet agricultural technology was about 25-30 years behind American agricultural technologies) 3. The climate. (Most of the Soviet Union's arable land was equivilent to Norther Canada. Look at a climatological map sometime. That climate needs a higher input of technology to produce comparable yields, which the Soviets didn't have).
Considering that most americans think that they could only pick between Kang or Kodos, is not amazing that things are this way.
That's because only Kang and Kodos are offered up this year by the Party.
Trust me, if I thought writing in Cthulhu would change anything, I'd exercise my writing hand and make sure I had a fresh pen when I went to the polls.
The good thing about the primaries is you get to vote for the lesser of a couple of evils. Whereas later you basically only get to choose between two lesser evils.
The 'lesser of (X) evils' is still evil. Time to clear the slate of the evils, unfortunately, without a shitpile of cash at your disposal, your chances of doing just that are nonexistant.
So was Iraq. They even had elections and everything. Course, the only party on the ticket was the Ba'ath Party, just like the Soviet Union had elections as well, with only the Communist Party on the ballot. It even reminds me of the US, where we have two wings of the Party on the ballots here, the Kleptocrats and the Decepticons.
It was the leaders of Iraq who murdered millions of their own people throughout the 80s and 90s.
No 'self-respecting' Persian would ever consider a Kurd as being a member of 'their people'. It's like telling a Japanese that the Koreans living in Japan are Japanese as well. It just don't happen.
Bush Sr promised the Kurds in Iraq that he'd support them after the Coalition got through pushing the Iraqi army back to Bagdad in exchange for their help in doing just that, and conveniently forgot that promise as soon as it was convenient. Saddam of course found out about it and went batshit, turning 'Chemical Ali' loose on them as a national security measure.
I'm not sure of that 2 billion figure. I do know that the Renaisance happened when people were able to grow enough food to free up other people to become educated and/or ask pointed questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. That fueled the cycle to create the Industrial Revolution, industrialising food production in the First World enough to free even more people from the farm to develop even more technology. Take away enough technology to force enough people back to farming for a living and technology and its development will come to a complete stall.
An American air craft carrier has a price tag of about $9 billion, per figures tossed about in this thread. 9 billion worth of those 100K speedboats is 90,000 speedboats. I doubt any aircraft carrier would survive being attacked by those 90,000 speedboats.
More likely, they'd launch 'only' a couple thousand at a time. Say, around 50 million worth. Sure, a carrier group has sophisticated multiple targetting capability, but shooting up 5000 incoming boats and their previously launched missiles? 10,000 targets would put a serious strain on their defensive fire. Likely, they'd miss a few. When the carrier takes enough hits, it'll sink. 50 million to whack a 9 BILLION carrier? Cheap!
Great idea. The problem is, any country, or even group of people, can be considered a potential enemy. This grouping includes the citizenry of the United States, by the way.
So it looks like we'll have to invade the entire damned planet to make the world safe for American democracy^Wbusiness...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but the difference is, Google doesn't 'prune' its 'non-pirating' links away, as the MAFIAA claims the deportee did. They're claiming his site was strictly for piracy-related activities, not a general search engine.
Getting as many people on the watchlist creates the fine-grained control the government appears to want. Seems that the powers-that-wanna-be took lessions from Lavrentiy Beria.
Comrade Beria was 'Uncle Joe' Stalin's hatchetman in the NKVD, precourser to the KGB. He came up through the Party ranks in the original 'Cheka' by reputedly setting up his superiors in some kind of scandal, usually coming up with evidence of sexual scandals, either real or manufactured. When his boss resigned in disgrace, Comrade Beria was standing there ready to go to work in his new job, usually purging possibly disloyal 'coworkers' in the process.
When 'Uncle Joe' died, Beria was the frontrunner to become the 'big boss' of the Soviet Union, until Nikita Khrushchev, Gregori Malenkov, and Vyacheslav Molotov (of 'Molotov Cocktail' fame) had him arrested on over 150 counts of rape, sodomy, child molestation, and abuse of office. In the 'investigation' that followed, he was tried for high treason and reputedly executed in December 1953, although apocryphal evidence claims he was actually shot and killed during his arrest in July '53.
Whether Beria did what they say he did is immaterial. The lession we garner from the events is, it just don't matter what you do, at the end of the day, if the powers-that-wanna-be want you bad enough, they'll find a way.
You know, there ARE other desktops you can use.
Personally, I use Fluxbox. Nice and light on my Atom-powered current desktop, runs mplayer and vlc quite nicely.
sudo apt-get install fluxbox fbpager
Must be nice to have massive bandwidth at your fingertips. Here, with Time-Warner, I'm lucky to get 100kb/s downloads. I shudder to think of trying to stream 1080p here.
Just wait til they make jaywalking into 'terrorism'. We'll see summary executions on the streets.
That'll teach you to walk at the crosswalk!
That 'US warplane' isn't spying, it's doing pizza delivery. Domino's. 30 orbits or less, or your pizza's free...
You non-US citizens need to realise that Americans as people have been cut out of the loop since Kennedy. We have about as much force available to us as a gnat's fart would influence the course of a hurricane. And it's getting worse every day.
We know you don't hate us (mostly), but can you do us a favor? Airdrop us AK-47s. Many many AK-47s. And not the cheap semiautomatic versions either. Ammo would be nice as well, and if you have any man-portable anti-tank missile launchers, that would be wonderful as well. You see, once upon a time, we had the right to keep and bear arms consistent with the military. Now, all we're allowed are nonfunctional cap guns, and they're coming for those next.
Let's see. 140 million jobs in the US, from part time flipping burgers & delivering phone books, to CEO of $MEGACORP, and about 280 million people possible for the job market. I'm thinking, once you're locked out of the job market, you might as well be living in the Third World.
After WW2, they were busy rebuilding. They didn't get much from the Marshall Plan, most of that money went to West Germany, Italy and France.
And then the Cold War started, and what little of their GNP was available for infrastructure rebuilding started to get tied up in defense spending, particularly when you consider a lot of 'defense' spending was gifts to 12 of the 13 republics of the Soviet Union. Where places like Bulgaria and the Ukraine had diesel locomotives for their trains, most of Russia itself used steam. They just didn't have the capital to put into their infrastructure that the West did.
The Soviets used 'slave labor' only because they didn't have the machinery to farm like they do in Kansas. Take away the tractors, and the only way a Kansas agribiz would survive is by using said 'slave labor'.
Here in the US(S)A, said leaders of this Pirate Party would be shuffled off to 'free speech zones' where they'd be ignored until arrested for criminal copyright infringement. The results of their show trials would be seen on FOX, and they'd be sent off to some federal prison for a long enough sentence that they'd be forgotten if they ever managed to get a parole. Likely, they wouldn't get paroled because of the 'fact' that they'd just repeat their hideous crimes when released to society.
Better question: What incentive do they have to try to create something new if all the old stuff is so locked up in copyright that it's impossible to come up with something original that can't be determined by a court of law to be derivative of a copyrighted work?
No, his suggestion is equivalent to masturbating because somebody else copyrighted having sex and you can't afford the license.
Kinda hard to 'innovate' when for all intents and purposes, ideas themselves are trademarked and copyrighted. You get to the point where you cannot innovate without violating copyrights or trademarks. How do you prove you weren't influenced by something copyrighted and held in copyright a hundred years ago (Hi, Mickey!!)?
Perpetual lock-in of copyright means only the owners of said copyright(s) can make derivitive works from that copyright. Without other sources to work from, the only viable career path is lawyer, attacking and defending said copyrights in court.
And it's not the 'centralised planning' that's the killer, it's when the planners are decoupled from any feedback that the problem arises. Become insulated enough from the process, you're looking for trouble. The Soviets learned that the hard way. America is learning it now.
Funny you should say that, as corporations under Capitalism do central planning each and every day. Without a plan, they go belly up.
The problem with 'central planning' comes when there's no negative feedback loop to the 'device', letting the upper levels know when there are problems that need to be addressed.
It still kills me sometimes when I hear how 'evil' a Soviet collective farm was, but how 'great and wonderful' a Kansas agribiz farm is. When you get down to it, there's only 3 major technical differences between the two:
1, The language spoken
2. The technology involved (Soviet agricultural technology was about 25-30 years behind American agricultural technologies)
3. The climate. (Most of the Soviet Union's arable land was equivilent to Norther Canada. Look at a climatological map sometime. That climate needs a higher input of technology to produce comparable yields, which the Soviets didn't have).
That's because only Kang and Kodos are offered up this year by the Party.
Trust me, if I thought writing in Cthulhu would change anything, I'd exercise my writing hand and make sure I had a fresh pen when I went to the polls.
The 'lesser of (X) evils' is still evil. Time to clear the slate of the evils, unfortunately, without a shitpile of cash at your disposal, your chances of doing just that are nonexistant.
Please insert credit card into the slot, type in your PIN number, and pay the $9.99 licensing fee for using the lyrics to that song.
Fair use?!?!?!?!?!?!? What are you, some kind of anti-corporate hippie COMMUNIST????
So was Iraq. They even had elections and everything. Course, the only party on the ticket was the Ba'ath Party, just like the Soviet Union had elections as well, with only the Communist Party on the ballot. It even reminds me of the US, where we have two wings of the Party on the ballots here, the Kleptocrats and the Decepticons.
No 'self-respecting' Persian would ever consider a Kurd as being a member of 'their people'. It's like telling a Japanese that the Koreans living in Japan are Japanese as well. It just don't happen.
Bush Sr promised the Kurds in Iraq that he'd support them after the Coalition got through pushing the Iraqi army back to Bagdad in exchange for their help in doing just that, and conveniently forgot that promise as soon as it was convenient. Saddam of course found out about it and went batshit, turning 'Chemical Ali' loose on them as a national security measure.
I'm not sure of that 2 billion figure. I do know that the Renaisance happened when people were able to grow enough food to free up other people to become educated and/or ask pointed questions about Life, the Universe, and Everything. That fueled the cycle to create the Industrial Revolution, industrialising food production in the First World enough to free even more people from the farm to develop even more technology. Take away enough technology to force enough people back to farming for a living and technology and its development will come to a complete stall.
Isn't that a violation of the Geneva Accords????
As long as Arabs are shooting Arabs and Persians, they're not shooting Israelis. That's what makes a destabilised Middle East a win-win for Israel.
And to think Lebanon was once a beautiful country...
An American air craft carrier has a price tag of about $9 billion, per figures tossed about in this thread. 9 billion worth of those 100K speedboats is 90,000 speedboats. I doubt any aircraft carrier would survive being attacked by those 90,000 speedboats.
More likely, they'd launch 'only' a couple thousand at a time. Say, around 50 million worth. Sure, a carrier group has sophisticated multiple targetting capability, but shooting up 5000 incoming boats and their previously launched missiles? 10,000 targets would put a serious strain on their defensive fire. Likely, they'd miss a few. When the carrier takes enough hits, it'll sink. 50 million to whack a 9 BILLION carrier? Cheap!
Great idea. The problem is, any country, or even group of people, can be considered a potential enemy. This grouping includes the citizenry of the United States, by the way.
So it looks like we'll have to invade the entire damned planet to make the world safe for American democracy^Wbusiness...