Strings are more powerful then guns if the strings decide who gets shot. And I've said it before, will say it again. I'll take my chances with the gov't, because at least I HAVE a chance. Corporations stated goal is profit, not matter what the cost. The gov't at least has the potential to be "By the people, for the people". A corporation will never be anything but what it is: A replacement for the apparatus of the Divine Right of Kings.
The "Divine Right of Kings" IS, a form of government. Corporations have no power in a free market, only the consumers do. They have no powers of coercion, they require government for that. Government retains a monopoly on violence - all over violence is unlawful. A government "By the people" does nothing to protect the rights of its people, unless it is constrained from doing so - that's the purpose of the US Constitution - to constrain the powers of the government to its primary purpose: protecting the individual rights of its people.
Except, as you pointed out, the corporations have bought the government. Then, it devolves down to 'all personages are equal, but some ore more equal than others', since corporations are personages by law...
I was turned down for a job as a 911 dispatcher in northwest Arizona because I didn't believe the SWAT team should have been called out to arrest some poor bastard sitting in front of his tv smoking a bowl. Of course, since the sheriff got a cut, nobody did shit about the 3 meth labs on my street, in an unincorporated section of Mohave County.
Shooting at police or their property puts you in deep shit with and without gun rights.
Sometimes, you just have to be prepared for the consequences of your actions. Well armed (and trained) is well prepared.
Welcome to Waco. Please bear in mind that police induced lead poisoning is not covered under your HMO. However, you or your heirs are still responsible for making your monthly HMO payment. Have a nice day, and please stop bleeding on our carpets.
Sure fix it for everyone when my reply still stands after "sgt" decided to delete it. This isnt political. Its something that is already LAW under a large number of immigration acts passed threw congress. You have to LEGALLY be in allowed to migrate into the US from anywhere we have borders. It considered an open border too. So why are these people continuously trying to JUMP IT?? Duh suhsuuhuduh geee lemme think.... lemme take a second and get back to you....uhhhh....
These people dont seem to get the picture, SO, the DHS is making it more clear for them. Its wreckless, irresponsible, and criminal on behalf of illegals. Point blank.
Except this is currently deployed in Conroy, TX, a long way away from the border. About what, 400 miles or so?
It will be only a short time before drug lords and other baddies start getting anti aircraft missiles to take out the UAV's.
Do we really want the police encouraging the criminals to upgrade weaponry?
Why does everybody insist on doing things the hard way? How hard is it for the average Slashdotter to build an EMP gun? Scramble the UAV's electronics and down it comes.
He said violent criminals. Most of the people in prison in the USA are non-violent people who are guilty of taking different narcotics from the ruling classes.
Pretty much, yeah. Keep in mind that the largest available pool of cheap/slave labor are convicts, and you'll understand why 'rehabilitation' went the way of the dodo. Why rehabilitate somebody when you can marginalise them, and when they return to crime because they cannot find a job, even, excuse the expression, at gunpoint, they'll return to the prison system labor force within a year or so. Keep also in mind that more and more prisons are becoming privately owned, which means the 'guard force' is being paid minimum wage to be there, and in some states, Arizona, for instance, a prisoner's 'earnings' are attached for 'room board and upkeep', and those private prisons become real money-makers once you get a few companies 'behind the wall'.
I just got the lovely thought of milipolice/civilian drones dogfighting above the cities. Wanna bet that sites like diydrones.com become illegal to view in the US the first time a citizen's drone shoots down a militarily-armed police drone?
So where's the line? If someone drives recklessly should they be blow to smithereens? Driving slightly over the limit? Speeding?
If putting the lives of others at risks justifies summary execution the world will get a whole lot emptier real soon.
Merrely getting behind the wheel of a car puts both yourself and the general public at risk of injury. Does this mean we declare open season on anything that moves on I-90?
Patents and copyrights as originally written up (7 years) wasn't bad, it gave the inventor/author time to recoup their investment and profit from their creations. Extending patents and copyright forever is welfare. Why should my great grandkids get a free ride on my work? Why can't they write something/invent something for themselves?
If everyone had listened to the economists talking about the future mortgage crisis, the crisis would have been averted. And those economists would have been called frauds for predicting something that didn't happen.
And here I've been thinking that, after what, 5, 600 years or so they've been studying the problem, that some of the economists started closing in, and a couple were damned near dead on. The problem I see with economics is, a few people at the top of the food chain with enough cash behind them to really fuck things up, took a look at the projections, saw they were heading for a shareholder disaster and 'did something' about it to save their 4 martini lunches. Once you know the system, figuring out a way to game the system is next on the agenda. Get enough people gaming the system and we get economic disasters.
Yeah, the 'horsepower' of these 8 bit chips leaves something to be desired, but they still do have real-world applications. Robotics, for instance, as a secondary processor for something like the controller for a gripper/hand, programmed on the fly by more powerful processors further up the 'chain'.
Would you want to live in a world where China was the only global super power?
We like to view China as an up-and-comer, but they're really a been-there-done-that situation. It's a 3000 year old country. They have a lot of strife and violence in their history for sure. That said, when it comes down to it, they've demonstrated the ability to have size and resources and power without letting it get to their head. Relative to their size and might, they've not demonstrated Britain's colonization drive, or the US's preference for invading random countries from time to time just to stay in shape.
Yeah, they had the size in the past, but never really had the power. Remember, back then, their tech was used mostly in supporting all those people they had even back then. China's been one of the most populated areas throughout known history. Feeding all those people with Dark Ages technology wasnt easy.
Riiiight, it don't have a thing to do with all that oil, and the shitload of minerals found under Afghanistan, perish the thought! Nope just helping brown people because inside every brown person is an American just waiting to get out....it seems like I've heard that before somewhere.
No oil under Afghanistan that I know of, but the Russians tried taking it over so they could build a pipeline from the Siberian oil fields to the Indian Ocean, chopping off a couple thousand miles of pipeline needed if they were going to rout it to Archangel. And on top of it, they'd get to load their tankers in calmer waters than the subArtic Pacific...
The process so far of going into space, solving the hard problem of going up there and stay, had left us so far a bunch of great technologies that are very important in our current way of life. In the future, if we keep trying and solve the very hard problem of i.e. having self-sustainable space stations or terraforming other planets, we should develop things that surely will be very helpful to improve this planet, and we will have an option if shit happens down here.
Learning to sustain life outside of this biosphere indefinitely will teach us a lot about how this biosphere works. The technological 'fallout' of this learning process will have Earth-side applications. Didn't a lot of technology developed to explore space have tons of Earth-side applications other than Velcro and Teflon-coated frying pans? And weren't those technologies and applications far reaching, even beyond the original problem of 'How do we get somebody to the Moon and back alive?'
5. When a species becomes capable of exploiting its home solar system, its home biome has nearly been destroyed and resources are nearly running out, creating an almost constant war for resources as competition increases over real or imagined resource scarcities. This leads to the species' decline from a space-faring species to a planet-bound species and possibly to extinction.
How do you process the metals? How do you smelt it? How do you get the processing equipment onto the moon?
Scrape up the regolith with teloperated bulldozers. We need not send a man to the moon for this, there's only about a 3.5 second time lag, so if the bulldozer is sufficiently slow speed, it can be run from the ground. Yes, that time lag is going to be a minor problem, but with advances in technology and computer software, it should be liveable in the near future, say, 5 years.
You smelt it with mirrors. Plenty of free sunlight on the moon's surface, no air to conduct the heat away. And the low gravity will allow you to build BIG mirrors. The long lunar day will make moving the mirror to track the Sun an easier problem to solve than an Earth-based solar array would be.
You get the bulldozers to the moon the old fashioned way, by rocket. Thing is, you don't want to do an Apollo-style mission, you want to put a lunar ferry in Earth orbit and boost cargo & fuel up to it, and reuse the ferry over and over again. One-shot ground to moon and back missions aren't cost effective.
One of the original concepts that NASA looked at when greenlit by Kennedy was building a station in orbit, building a lunar ferry at the station, and making 'runs' to the moon. The problem was, it wouldn'tve made the first manned landing by 1970, so NASA went with the 'quick and dirty' method - Apollo. Had they built a station first and sortied from it, we could have already had colonies on the Moon as well as being well into the building phase of a manned Mars mission already.
Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
Sure they can. At some impressive energy cost (remember the gravity well, it sucks pretty hard). It would be much easier to make floating / submerged habitats than ones in outer space.
Until you come up with essentially unlimited, cheap energy, space is not going to be the place for the huddled masses yearning to be free.
Only if you demand every gram of every habitat come from the Earth. There are plenty of materials just laying around on the surface of the Moon. Smelting them via mirrors during the long Lunar day should be easy, as well as building an escape velocity catapult to launch the materials into space.
Downside of course is if it's done by NASA, they won't let a gram of material off the face of the Moon, and no government in their right mind would allow a catapult on the Moon that has the potential to drop bigassed rocks & metal chunks weighing over 100 tons on Earth.
You can already see more and more common folks starting to make noise. What we need is that extra push to get the common man to say, "OK, enough is enough" and actually stand up.
The western governments are out of control in general and they need to be taken back. News like this just brings the day closer....I hope.
Not gonna happen that way. The only way I can see to clean things up ain't gonna happen either: do away with all campaign contributions and replace them with Federal/state funds you qualify for by applying for the office you're running for. Show a petition for, say, 20,000 verifiable signatures for president of the US and you qualify for Federal campaign funding to run for president. Pay for it the way we do now, only, instead of a check mark on your W-4, the government earmarks 2 bucks taken from what you're stuck paying anyways instead of the optional 1 for the fund. And no sharing your funding with other candidates, AND the IRS audits your campaign yearly, so keep those reciepts!
Oh, and once you're in, it'd be illegal to take funding from a lobbyist. Might as well kill 2 birds while we're at it. See why this will never work without a violent revolution? Too bad the government is busy trying to take away everybody's guns...
If people aren't paying for their products AND they're not consuming it, only then will we see the end to these lawsuits and see some real change.
Two words for that - 'bailout legislation'. You honestly think the media companies don't pay enough bribes^Rcampaign contributions to make sure the public doesn't cough up every last dime possible by making sure copyright never dies? Remember what happened when GM went crying to Washington that not enough people were buying their cars and too many were defaulting on those GMAC loans? Remember when the banks went crying to Washington about all those Fannie Mae loans and bad South American debt burned them so bad they couldn't make their dividend checks OR their top tier bonus checks? You really think the so-called national health care here in the States is about keeping the US healthy and not more of the same for the healthcare insurance companies? What makes you sure RIAA et al won't go bitching for a 'bailout'? They paid their campaign contributions, it's their right to get a bail out.
The "right" thing to do as per the old internet standard is to publish it as a 0 day hack and then let the company fix it themselves.
1. It's the companies systems and they are responsible not you
2. Hacking is illegal
3. This is what happens when you try to reason with sheep who just don't get it
If this was a 0 day currently, it would have probably been patched already and no legal action threat would occur.
Also, at least in the states there are no circumstances a private entity can look at any of my information, it can contact law enforcement, and they can seize the computer, but otherwise SOL and that's the way it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Strings are more powerful then guns if the strings decide who gets shot. And I've said it before, will say it again. I'll take my chances with the gov't, because at least I HAVE a chance. Corporations stated goal is profit, not matter what the cost. The gov't at least has the potential to be "By the people, for the people". A corporation will never be anything but what it is: A replacement for the apparatus of the Divine Right of Kings.
The "Divine Right of Kings" IS, a form of government. Corporations have no power in a free market, only the consumers do. They have no powers of coercion, they require government for that. Government retains a monopoly on violence - all over violence is unlawful. A government "By the people" does nothing to protect the rights of its people, unless it is constrained from doing so - that's the purpose of the US Constitution - to constrain the powers of the government to its primary purpose: protecting the individual rights of its people.
Except, as you pointed out, the corporations have bought the government. Then, it devolves down to 'all personages are equal, but some ore more equal than others', since corporations are personages by law...
I was turned down for a job as a 911 dispatcher in northwest Arizona because I didn't believe the SWAT team should have been called out to arrest some poor bastard sitting in front of his tv smoking a bowl. Of course, since the sheriff got a cut, nobody did shit about the 3 meth labs on my street, in an unincorporated section of Mohave County.
It will be amusing to see how law encroachment handles "Smoking" issues.
Yeah, they been telling me most of my life that smoking would kill me. I'm reasonably sure this is not what they meant, though. Who knew?
Shooting at police or their property puts you in deep shit with and without gun rights.
Sometimes, you just have to be prepared for the consequences of your actions. Well armed (and trained) is well prepared.
Welcome to Waco. Please bear in mind that police induced lead poisoning is not covered under your HMO. However, you or your heirs are still responsible for making your monthly HMO payment. Have a nice day, and please stop bleeding on our carpets.
Sure fix it for everyone when my reply still stands after "sgt" decided to delete it. This isnt political. Its something that is already LAW under a large number of immigration acts passed threw congress. You have to LEGALLY be in allowed to migrate into the US from anywhere we have borders. It considered an open border too. So why are these people continuously trying to JUMP IT?? Duh suhsuuhuduh geee lemme think.... lemme take a second and get back to you....uhhhh....
These people dont seem to get the picture, SO, the DHS is making it more clear for them. Its wreckless, irresponsible, and criminal on behalf of illegals. Point blank.
Except this is currently deployed in Conroy, TX, a long way away from the border. About what, 400 miles or so?
It will be only a short time before drug lords and other baddies start getting anti aircraft missiles to take out the UAV's.
Do we really want the police encouraging the criminals to upgrade weaponry?
Why does everybody insist on doing things the hard way? How hard is it for the average Slashdotter to build an EMP gun? Scramble the UAV's electronics and down it comes.
Dibs on the servos!
He said violent criminals. Most of the people in prison in the USA are non-violent people who are guilty of taking different narcotics from the ruling classes.
Pretty much, yeah. Keep in mind that the largest available pool of cheap/slave labor are convicts, and you'll understand why 'rehabilitation' went the way of the dodo. Why rehabilitate somebody when you can marginalise them, and when they return to crime because they cannot find a job, even, excuse the expression, at gunpoint, they'll return to the prison system labor force within a year or so. Keep also in mind that more and more prisons are becoming privately owned, which means the 'guard force' is being paid minimum wage to be there, and in some states, Arizona, for instance, a prisoner's 'earnings' are attached for 'room board and upkeep', and those private prisons become real money-makers once you get a few companies 'behind the wall'.
Fair is fair; you can build one yourself:
http://diydrones.com/
I just got the lovely thought of milipolice/civilian drones dogfighting above the cities. Wanna bet that sites like diydrones.com become illegal to view in the US the first time a citizen's drone shoots down a militarily-armed police drone?
So where's the line? If someone drives recklessly should they be blow to smithereens? Driving slightly over the limit? Speeding?
If putting the lives of others at risks justifies summary execution the world will get a whole lot emptier real soon.
Merrely getting behind the wheel of a car puts both yourself and the general public at risk of injury. Does this mean we declare open season on anything that moves on I-90?
But was he using legally aquired ROMs or pirated ROMs to produce that code?
Contrary to popular belief, blonde is not a handicap. Thank you for playing.
Patents and copyrights as originally written up (7 years) wasn't bad, it gave the inventor/author time to recoup their investment and profit from their creations. Extending patents and copyright forever is welfare. Why should my great grandkids get a free ride on my work? Why can't they write something/invent something for themselves?
If everyone had listened to the economists talking about the future mortgage crisis, the crisis would have been averted. And those economists would have been called frauds for predicting something that didn't happen.
And here I've been thinking that, after what, 5, 600 years or so they've been studying the problem, that some of the economists started closing in, and a couple were damned near dead on. The problem I see with economics is, a few people at the top of the food chain with enough cash behind them to really fuck things up, took a look at the projections, saw they were heading for a shareholder disaster and 'did something' about it to save their 4 martini lunches. Once you know the system, figuring out a way to game the system is next on the agenda. Get enough people gaming the system and we get economic disasters.
Yeah, the 'horsepower' of these 8 bit chips leaves something to be desired, but they still do have real-world applications. Robotics, for instance, as a secondary processor for something like the controller for a gripper/hand, programmed on the fly by more powerful processors further up the 'chain'.
Would you want to live in a world where China was the only global super power?
We like to view China as an up-and-comer, but they're really a been-there-done-that situation. It's a 3000 year old country. They have a lot of strife and violence in their history for sure. That said, when it comes down to it, they've demonstrated the ability to have size and resources and power without letting it get to their head. Relative to their size and might, they've not demonstrated Britain's colonization drive, or the US's preference for invading random countries from time to time just to stay in shape.
Yeah, they had the size in the past, but never really had the power. Remember, back then, their tech was used mostly in supporting all those people they had even back then. China's been one of the most populated areas throughout known history. Feeding all those people with Dark Ages technology wasnt easy.
Riiiight, it don't have a thing to do with all that oil, and the shitload of minerals found under Afghanistan, perish the thought! Nope just helping brown people because inside every brown person is an American just waiting to get out....it seems like I've heard that before somewhere.
No oil under Afghanistan that I know of, but the Russians tried taking it over so they could build a pipeline from the Siberian oil fields to the Indian Ocean, chopping off a couple thousand miles of pipeline needed if they were going to rout it to Archangel. And on top of it, they'd get to load their tankers in calmer waters than the subArtic Pacific...
The process so far of going into space, solving the hard problem of going up there and stay, had left us so far a bunch of great technologies that are very important in our current way of life. In the future, if we keep trying and solve the very hard problem of i.e. having self-sustainable space stations or terraforming other planets, we should develop things that surely will be very helpful to improve this planet, and we will have an option if shit happens down here.
Learning to sustain life outside of this biosphere indefinitely will teach us a lot about how this biosphere works. The technological 'fallout' of this learning process will have Earth-side applications. Didn't a lot of technology developed to explore space have tons of Earth-side applications other than Velcro and Teflon-coated frying pans? And weren't those technologies and applications far reaching, even beyond the original problem of 'How do we get somebody to the Moon and back alive?'
5. When a species becomes capable of exploiting its home solar system, its home biome has nearly been destroyed and resources are nearly running out, creating an almost constant war for resources as competition increases over real or imagined resource scarcities. This leads to the species' decline from a space-faring species to a planet-bound species and possibly to extinction.
How do you process the metals? How do you smelt it? How do you get the processing equipment onto the moon?
Scrape up the regolith with teloperated bulldozers. We need not send a man to the moon for this, there's only about a 3.5 second time lag, so if the bulldozer is sufficiently slow speed, it can be run from the ground. Yes, that time lag is going to be a minor problem, but with advances in technology and computer software, it should be liveable in the near future, say, 5 years.
You smelt it with mirrors. Plenty of free sunlight on the moon's surface, no air to conduct the heat away. And the low gravity will allow you to build BIG mirrors. The long lunar day will make moving the mirror to track the Sun an easier problem to solve than an Earth-based solar array would be.
You get the bulldozers to the moon the old fashioned way, by rocket. Thing is, you don't want to do an Apollo-style mission, you want to put a lunar ferry in Earth orbit and boost cargo & fuel up to it, and reuse the ferry over and over again. One-shot ground to moon and back missions aren't cost effective.
One of the original concepts that NASA looked at when greenlit by Kennedy was building a station in orbit, building a lunar ferry at the station, and making 'runs' to the moon. The problem was, it wouldn'tve made the first manned landing by 1970, so NASA went with the 'quick and dirty' method - Apollo. Had they built a station first and sortied from it, we could have already had colonies on the Moon as well as being well into the building phase of a manned Mars mission already.
Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
Sure they can. At some impressive energy cost (remember the gravity well, it sucks pretty hard). It would be much easier to make floating / submerged habitats than ones in outer space.
Until you come up with essentially unlimited, cheap energy, space is not going to be the place for the huddled masses yearning to be free.
Only if you demand every gram of every habitat come from the Earth. There are plenty of materials just laying around on the surface of the Moon. Smelting them via mirrors during the long Lunar day should be easy, as well as building an escape velocity catapult to launch the materials into space.
Downside of course is if it's done by NASA, they won't let a gram of material off the face of the Moon, and no government in their right mind would allow a catapult on the Moon that has the potential to drop bigassed rocks & metal chunks weighing over 100 tons on Earth.
I've always supported the 'two term' theory of politics: 1 term in office, 1 in jail.
You can already see more and more common folks starting to make noise. What we need is that extra push to get the common man to say, "OK, enough is enough" and actually stand up.
The western governments are out of control in general and they need to be taken back. News like this just brings the day closer....I hope.
Not gonna happen that way. The only way I can see to clean things up ain't gonna happen either: do away with all campaign contributions and replace them with Federal/state funds you qualify for by applying for the office you're running for. Show a petition for, say, 20,000 verifiable signatures for president of the US and you qualify for Federal campaign funding to run for president. Pay for it the way we do now, only, instead of a check mark on your W-4, the government earmarks 2 bucks taken from what you're stuck paying anyways instead of the optional 1 for the fund. And no sharing your funding with other candidates, AND the IRS audits your campaign yearly, so keep those reciepts!
Oh, and once you're in, it'd be illegal to take funding from a lobbyist. Might as well kill 2 birds while we're at it. See why this will never work without a violent revolution? Too bad the government is busy trying to take away everybody's guns...
How do I get Aussies to riot.
Replace all their beer with Coors.
We want them to riot not start World War 3!!!
If people aren't paying for their products AND they're not consuming it, only then will we see the end to these lawsuits and see some real change.
Two words for that - 'bailout legislation'. You honestly think the media companies don't pay enough bribes^Rcampaign contributions to make sure the public doesn't cough up every last dime possible by making sure copyright never dies? Remember what happened when GM went crying to Washington that not enough people were buying their cars and too many were defaulting on those GMAC loans? Remember when the banks went crying to Washington about all those Fannie Mae loans and bad South American debt burned them so bad they couldn't make their dividend checks OR their top tier bonus checks? You really think the so-called national health care here in the States is about keeping the US healthy and not more of the same for the healthcare insurance companies? What makes you sure RIAA et al won't go bitching for a 'bailout'? They paid their campaign contributions, it's their right to get a bail out.
The "right" thing to do as per the old internet standard is to publish it as a 0 day hack and then let the company fix it themselves.
1. It's the companies systems and they are responsible not you 2. Hacking is illegal 3. This is what happens when you try to reason with sheep who just don't get it
If this was a 0 day currently, it would have probably been patched already and no legal action threat would occur.
Also, at least in the states there are no circumstances a private entity can look at any of my information, it can contact law enforcement, and they can seize the computer, but otherwise SOL and that's the way it should be.
Just goes to show, no good dead goes unpunished.