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User: jamstar7

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  1. Re:Gee, all I am doing is kicking this honets nest on Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War · · Score: 2

    Why do I get this feeling that a Gulf of Tonkin incident is being manufactured?

  2. Re:Owwww on Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War · · Score: 1

    Of course it's been studied. The results and recommendations should be out around 2020 by the earliest.

  3. Re:Gee, maybe U.S. shouldn't try to steal oil on Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War · · Score: 1

    Nobody knew for sure at the time there was oil there.


    Besides, there were no brown people there to bomb, and the former Soviets haddn't had their big nuclear weapons garage sale yet, which is why we didn't do the big 'Invade for regime change' on the area.

  4. Re:Gee, maybe U.S. shouldn't try to steal oil on Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War · · Score: 1

    The Pipeline was constructed with the promise that Alaskan oil wouldn't be diverted to Japan. So, the partners in the project ended up getting bought out by British Petroleum, which wasn't a signatory to that agreement, and a good portion of the oil was then shipped off to Japan.

  5. Re:Gee, maybe U.S. shouldn't try to steal oil on Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War · · Score: 1

    Iraq invaded Kuwait for the oil and the access to the Gulf. After fighting the Iranians, their economy was a mess. Sanctions didn't help them a bit. Neither did the Israeli bombing of a light water power reactor the Israelis claimed was going to be used for a breeder reactor. As for the oil smuggling that went on in Iraq until the invasion, most of the money went for bribes to keep the Ba'ath Party in power.

    Ya know, they never did find 'WMDs' in Iraq, and they never will. If the Iraqis had had any left over from the US-supplied weapons, they'dve used them on the US in '03. They had nothing to lose, the US had repeatedly claimed they were invading to force a regime change. And I for one find it interesting that those aluminum tubes reputedly scheduled for use in a seperator for enriching plutonium to weapons grade were pronounced perfect for the fusilages of the latest generation of SCUD missiles by US rocket scientists, said SCUDs which, if fired from just inside the western border of Iraq, could, with a minimal tailwind, drop their warheads inside the borders of Israel.

    Makes you think, eh?

  6. Re:Gee, maybe U.S. shouldn't try to steal oil on Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War · · Score: 1

    We are not overpopulated. The Earth could easily support seven billion people for many thousands of years. The problem of limited resources is purely social and political.

    Actually, we are overpopulated, once you take away all our technology. Most of the tech involved to feed 7 billion people requires cheap energy and chemicals for fertilizer. Most of those chemicals come from petroleum and other fossil fuels, the cheap energy also from fossil fuels. I've heard varying figures for the 'carrying capacity' of humans on Earth without technology that range from half a million to half a billion, depending on who's doing the figuring and how much tech they claim needs to 'go away'.

  7. Re:Nuremburg Defense on Warrantless Wiretapping Decisions Issued By Ninth Circuit Court · · Score: 1

    The second amendment was to ensure that military power (by way of military grade weaponry) was distributed and in the hands of the people so that at the end of the day the government had to fear their collective anger. This was to be the recourse of the people if the government started subverting that first one.

    Great idea there. Now, you know what it means, and I know what it means, and anybody who's paid attention in Civics class knows what it means, but try scamming up some military-grade weapons for civilian consumption, and you'll have the BATF-men all over you. The big print (US Constitution) giveth, the fine print (various Federal regulations of the ATF) taketh away.

  8. Re:Rational decisions are relative to wants on Doctorow: the Coming War On General-Purpose Computing · · Score: 2, Informative

    Way back in the way back, I had a computer upon which I had a development system and a web browser. It had a 16 MHz SPARC processor and 24 MB of RAM, a luxury back then. When the average cellphone of today is more powerful than the most powerful computers of then, this argument is beyond ridiculous.

    The difference is, you could write your own software to run on that SPARC, you weren't at the mercy of whatever was in the 'SPARC App Store'. You weren't made to jump through many many burning hoops to get the toolchain to build new SPARC apps. You could distribute those new apps any way you wanted, you weren't dependent on the 'guardians of the gate' at the 'SPARC App Store'. You could get a wild hair up your ass, sit down, code and compile your new app however you wanted it.

    Try that with your iphone.

    Back in the Stone Age, you busted your ass off for a couple weeks to get your card stack made and compiled. Then you went to the machine operators, the 'High Priests' of computing and prayed for some time on the mainframe to run your stack. And if you were lucky, they'd run it sometime in the following three weeks. The charge was up to $100/minute for processor time, and that was in real money, equivilent to about $1000/minute today. If you were a college kid running your program on college mainframe, they'd charge it to your department. If you didn't have a class or belong to a department that needed computer support, you had ZERO access to the mainframe.

    And now Big Media wants to turn the clock back to 1960 as far as computing goes. Are we having fun yet?

  9. Re:Freedoms on Warrantless Wiretapping Decisions Issued By Ninth Circuit Court · · Score: 2

    How in HELL are the citizens to blame when they've been cut out of the loop for decades?

  10. Re:Nuremburg Defense on Warrantless Wiretapping Decisions Issued By Ninth Circuit Court · · Score: 1

    So sorry, that was the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. Like any government document, the Constitution has no provisions for being set aside by the public in the public good. The American Civil War proved that, when the Southern states seceeded, the Northern states forced them back into the fold.

  11. Re:Who would have stopped this? on TSA Got Everything It Wanted For Christmas · · Score: 1

    He is not known for his willingness to cooperate, or his ability to lead and to raise support for his efforts. If you look at his record, he has sponsored literally hundreds of bills for which he has been unable to muster even a handful of cosponsors. That's a worrisome lack of leadership, and makes me think he sponsors legislation just to be able to say "I sponsored legislation to do X," but where he really didn't have the intent to follow through on it.

    Sure looks good on his resume, though. Makes it look like he was doing something when all he was doing was spinning his wheels.

    Ron Paul as president would be more of the same, vetoing everything in sight & making Congress hammer him back into his job again.

  12. Re:Well, on TSA Got Everything It Wanted For Christmas · · Score: 1

    6th time's a charm?

  13. Well... on What's Wrong With the US Defense R&D Budget? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's all about scamming up those DoD contracts. Who cares if they ever deliver a viable weapon system, they can make payroll with feasibility studies all day long. The most hillarious of the 'urban legend' proposals I ever heard of was a couple physicists talking at a party during the Ronny Ray-Gun years, when 'Star Wars' funding was damned near bottomless. Their idea was, develop a tachyon beam weapon, deployed in space, that would shoot down enemy missiles 20 minutes before they were launched.

    Rumor has it, they copped a cool 50 mil for a feasibility study before somebody at the Five-Sided Funny Farm figured it out.

  14. Re:As a vegtarian: on FDA Backtracks On Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Proposal · · Score: 1

    I was gonna say, 'Yeah, it can, they did it for millenia', but then I reread what you said. Feeding 7 billion people isn't easy. Even harder is dealing with warlords who play games with the distribution.

    I've been told we have 5 times as much food on hand at any given time to feed everybody, the problem is in the distribution networks. When they get politicised, problems happen. Just look at central Africa.

  15. Re:Greed on FDA Backtracks On Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Proposal · · Score: 1

    Last time I tried snorting Coke, I damned near drowned.

  16. Re:Ugh on Rackspace: SOPA "Is a Deeply Flawed Piece of Legislation" · · Score: 1

    He made sure Clevelanders had a municipal-owned electric company. Nice idea in theory, but in practice, the entire infrastructure got closed down, and Muni Light has zero power plants. Muni Light now gets 100% of its power from Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, which supplies a large portion of the North Coast.

    In theory, like I say, a good idea. But what happens when the grid has problems? The lack of inhouse generating capacity helps improve air quality in Cleveland at the expense of being hostage to CEI.

    He also knuckled under to George Forbes after fighting getting Cleveland wired for cable for a decade, until City Council, lead by George Forbes, passed an ordinance declaring the low income neighborhoods would be wired for cable first.

  17. Re:The real question.. on Apocalypse Tourism: Where To Celebrate Doomsday? · · Score: 1
    Cool thing is, scam the cash off those idiots, blow it all on a big-assed party, watch the end of the world from your own island lair, PROFIT!!

    Just need to buy that island lair in a non-extradition country.

  18. Re:What Would Happen... on Rackspace: SOPA "Is a Deeply Flawed Piece of Legislation" · · Score: 1

    The Govt will fund a Govt only network (if they need it)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANETBeen done. Some of us have a short sense of history.

    And what they did before, they can do again, especially if it has the Disney(tm) logo on it.

  19. Re:Ugh on Rackspace: SOPA "Is a Deeply Flawed Piece of Legislation" · · Score: 1

    What is wrong with kucinich?

    Other than he's a total loon?

    He did some crazy shit as mayor of Cleveland back in the day.

  20. Re:Ugh on Rackspace: SOPA "Is a Deeply Flawed Piece of Legislation" · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Of course this bill will pass overwhelmingly. It's an attempt to centralise and monopolise a decentralised and antimonopolistic service. Those who bought and paid for this bill won't be satisfied until the only way to get any kind of content off the net is after you pull out your credit card. Forget about content creation, if you're not a big buck studio, you won't have a seat at the table anymore.

    And don't scream too loudly if any of your ideas are ripped off by Big Bizz to make a buck off of. The true citizens of the US (multinational corporations) have certainly gotten their money'sworth this time. Until an individual can amass the cash that a multinational can, their voice does not matter.

  21. Re:Meanwhile... on Warner Bros Sued For Pirating Louis Vuitton Trademark · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just in case anybody doesn't know . . . everything you see in the movies and on TV is fake.

    Including the tits on the 'girl next door'.

  22. Re:Another way to save money on Do You Really Need a Smart Phone? · · Score: 1

    3 year old dumb as a rock Motorola (yeah, they used to make cellphones!!) that needs daily charging (a replacement battery would cost more than the fone!), on Tracfone. A 30 buck card lasts me 4 months or more (I got double minutes with the fone for the life of the fone!). I use it to make phone calls & some light texting. NO cam, NO internet, none of those bells & whistles. Hell, I even use the default ringtone.

  23. Re:lesson learned, don't upload stolen movies on X-Men Origins Pirate Draws a 1-Year Sentence · · Score: 1
    Silly wabbit, EVERYBODY knows the Constitution has zero bearing on any copyright or trademark infringement cases.

    START THE MOVIE!!!!

  24. Re:Ferrari without a paint job on X-Men Origins Pirate Draws a 1-Year Sentence · · Score: 1

    The Trabant.

  25. OK, so, let's look at the numbers... on X-Men Origins Pirate Draws a 1-Year Sentence · · Score: 1
    Per the IMDB page, this turkey cost an estimated $150 million. Openning weekend brought in $85 million & lunch money. Overall theatre sales at the end of run, $373 mil and change.

    This doesn't count DVD sales & royalties scammed from the cable companies to show it on TV. This also doesn't include merchandising.

    Now factor in Hollywood accounting and poormouthing and we now know why the studio loses money on a film that was made for 32 million and brought in half a BILLION