If a democratic government doesn't like what you are looking at online, they take it down. If a totalitarian government doesn't like what you are looking at online, they take YOU down.
The UN can be, like Obama, both corrupt and ineffective, and diabolically genius at the same time.... Conservative thinking requires no logical connection between its premises.
The same could be said for liberal thinking. Remember how George W. Bush was supposedly stupider than a chimpanzee, yet somehow able to steal an election, trick the Democrats into authorizing two trumped-up wars, mastermind 9/11, and perhaps even use global warming to engineer Hurricane Katrina?
Because it's much better to be murdered over the contents of an obscure document than a well-publicized one.
There are certainly situations where avoiding the Streisand effect is important. If you want to minimize the awareness the general public has about how to jailbreak a phone or bypass some DRM, not drawing attention to the issue helps. In this case, it's probably pretty safe to assume that the Taliban have already heard of the documents. Sure, if people keep talking about them, Joe Six Pack is more likely to hear about them too, but that's not nearly as likely to endanger lives as the initial release of the documents did.
George W. Bush appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he goes out and finds a better qualified candidate.
Barrack Obama appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he laughs in their faces and pushes her through confirmation anyway.
Just when you think you have idiot-proofed something, Nature will design a better idiot just to spite you.
Currently, the worst drivers tend to remove themselves from the gene pool, or at least have the possibility of death place some sort of upper bound on how moronically one can drive. Just imagine the type of idiot nature will be able to design once Volvo removes these constraints.
But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
How is that "very far right"? At the time it began, the Iraq war had widespread favor across the political spectrum, with most of the Senate Democrats voting in favor of it, including the oh-so-very-far-right Hilary Clinton. Belief in WMD was similarly pervasive, since the intelligence community was saying they were there, and no evidence had come out yet to suggest this analysis was incorrect.
If I buy something from a merchant California, you want me to pay sales taxes to California. So, suddenly I'm a taxpayer of California, but what services is the state government providing me? Roads, police, fire department, schools? Seems like it would be difficult to provide those things for people who live far outside the state, but if California is providing me with squat, the social contract rationale for why they are entitled to my money kind of falls apart. Do I at least get to vote in California elections, or is your plan also a call for more taxation without representation?
Maybe some people like the idea that the world will come to a fiery cataclysmic end in 2012 because it beats the alternative: a second term of the Obama administration.
Or, to paraphrase: "I'm trying to define 'decade' as eight years here, and you go and point out that over an actual decade my argument doesn't stand up. Have you considered applying for a job with Fox News?"
Nice inadvertent compliment for Fox News though, that they present facts which get in the way of nice-sounding but unsupported arguments. I hear Obama's been getting annoyed with them over that lately.
In some US jurisdictions, being convicted of three felony offenses raises the penalty to life imprisonment, as by this point supporters argue that the criminal has repeatedly not rehabilitated and just keeps on committing more crimes. Music executives apparently want something analogous for punishing intellectual property "criminals". A noteworthy difference between the situations, however, is that in the criminal justice case, the penalty kicks in after three felony convictions in a court of law, whereas most versions of the Internet banishment proposal only require multiple accusations.
It is possible Apple wanted to get ahead of the curve and file this patent so that if any company is silly enough to engage in Big Brother advertising, then Apple will get a royalty.
That's an interesting definition of professionalism, that it requires throwing ethics and morality out the window and blindly carrying out instructions, even if what you are being asked to do seems horribly wrong.
But it does answer the question as to why there are people out there who are willing to build chemical weapons, DRM rootkits, spyware, big brother surveillance systems, or what have you instead of refusing to be a part of it. They're just adhering to a higher standard of professionalism than superstitious losers who let their scruples get in the way.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said that if you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss stares back at you. Now staring at the TV can have the same effect.
that idea got pretty hammered in a recent administration, which felt it was the job of government to make sure campagne contributors can maintain their monopolies.
A recent administration... Obama and the auto industry? Bush and oil? Clinton signing the DMCA and Mickey Mouse copyright extension act? Could you narrow it down a bit?
While we're doing weird analogies, if I stole the brake fluid out of your car, causing you to have a wreck, would you go after me for the cost of the destroyed car and your medical expenses, or say "I see you left five bucks in the glove box, which covers the cost of the fluid, so we're cool."?
Point being, if someone suffers other damages as a direct result of a theft, it's pretty understandable that they would want compensation for those damages too, not just the property that was stolen.
It sounds like the article is talking about character advancement mechanics being based on skills (you use a sword, your guy gets better with a sword) instead of levels (you character suddenly gets better at everything). The editor writeup, however, is a commentary on player skill.
A proposed amendment to the Cap and Trade Tax sought to provide a safety valve in case it goes horribly awry and trashes the economy. It stipulated that if gasoline reached $5 a gallon or unemployment hit 15%, the tax would go away. Sponsors of the bill basically argued that destroying the economy was not a bug but a feature, and rejected this.
If you think the current recession is bad, it's going to get a lot worse if this tax becomes law.
Satellite in geostable orbit. Receiving station on equator. Receiving station emits guiding signal to satellite, causing satellite to beam power to earth. If the guiding signal is missing, the satellite stops beaming power and starts using that power to adjust it's position. That's how I'd do it.
That's nice and all, but how about this: If the beam goes off-target, the satellite cranks the output up to full power, obliterating whatever it happens to be pointed at. This will create a bright column of light visible to cameras at the receiving station. Based on which direction this shaft of annihilation is from the station, the ground station transmits instructions to the satellite of which way to adjust the beam, walking it back onto the target and creating a massive swath of destruction in the process.
Well, I hope my government is this vocal and helpful in getting everyone coordinated to switch to IPv6 and HTML5.
Do you really want the government to have the authority to tell people what network protocols they can and can't use? You might think they would use such power to spur adoption of IPv6 and HTML5, but I suspect they would be more inclined to ban BitTorrent, TOR, and FreeNet than IPv4 and HTML4.
During Bush's administration, I would have taken that as sarcasm. But after Obama's gutting the space budget, honoring Bush's scientific enlightenment is starting to sound like a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
If a democratic government doesn't like what you are looking at online, they take it down.
If a totalitarian government doesn't like what you are looking at online, they take YOU down.
Thanks for taking the time to post that you didn't care. It means a lot to me.
We don't care about that either.
The UN can be, like Obama, both corrupt and ineffective, and diabolically genius at the same time. ... Conservative thinking requires no logical connection between its premises.
The same could be said for liberal thinking. Remember how George W. Bush was supposedly stupider than a chimpanzee, yet somehow able to steal an election, trick the Democrats into authorizing two trumped-up wars, mastermind 9/11, and perhaps even use global warming to engineer Hurricane Katrina?
Because it's much better to be murdered over the contents of an obscure document than a well-publicized one.
There are certainly situations where avoiding the Streisand effect is important. If you want to minimize the awareness the general public has about how to jailbreak a phone or bypass some DRM, not drawing attention to the issue helps. In this case, it's probably pretty safe to assume that the Taliban have already heard of the documents. Sure, if people keep talking about them, Joe Six Pack is more likely to hear about them too, but that's not nearly as likely to endanger lives as the initial release of the documents did.
George W. Bush appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he goes out and finds a better qualified candidate.
Barrack Obama appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he laughs in their faces and pushes her through confirmation anyway.
Well, he did say he was going to "change" things.
Just when you think you have idiot-proofed something, Nature will design a better idiot just to spite you.
Currently, the worst drivers tend to remove themselves from the gene pool, or at least have the possibility of death place some sort of upper bound on how moronically one can drive. Just imagine the type of idiot nature will be able to design once Volvo removes these constraints.
But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
How is that "very far right"? At the time it began, the Iraq war had widespread favor across the political spectrum, with most of the Senate Democrats voting in favor of it, including the oh-so-very-far-right Hilary Clinton. Belief in WMD was similarly pervasive, since the intelligence community was saying they were there, and no evidence had come out yet to suggest this analysis was incorrect.
If I buy something from a merchant California, you want me to pay sales taxes to California. So, suddenly I'm a taxpayer of California, but what services is the state government providing me? Roads, police, fire department, schools? Seems like it would be difficult to provide those things for people who live far outside the state, but if California is providing me with squat, the social contract rationale for why they are entitled to my money kind of falls apart. Do I at least get to vote in California elections, or is your plan also a call for more taxation without representation?
Maybe some people like the idea that the world will come to a fiery cataclysmic end in 2012 because it beats the alternative: a second term of the Obama administration.
Or, to paraphrase: "I'm trying to define 'decade' as eight years here, and you go and point out that over an actual decade my argument doesn't stand up. Have you considered applying for a job with Fox News?"
Nice inadvertent compliment for Fox News though, that they present facts which get in the way of nice-sounding but unsupported arguments. I hear Obama's been getting annoyed with them over that lately.
In some US jurisdictions, being convicted of three felony offenses raises the penalty to life imprisonment, as by this point supporters argue that the criminal has repeatedly not rehabilitated and just keeps on committing more crimes. Music executives apparently want something analogous for punishing intellectual property "criminals". A noteworthy difference between the situations, however, is that in the criminal justice case, the penalty kicks in after three felony convictions in a court of law, whereas most versions of the Internet banishment proposal only require multiple accusations.
It is possible Apple wanted to get ahead of the curve and file this patent so that if any company is silly enough to engage in Big Brother advertising, then Apple will get a royalty.
So, best case scenario, Apple is a patent troll?
That's an interesting definition of professionalism, that it requires throwing ethics and morality out the window and blindly carrying out instructions, even if what you are being asked to do seems horribly wrong.
But it does answer the question as to why there are people out there who are willing to build chemical weapons, DRM rootkits, spyware, big brother surveillance systems, or what have you instead of refusing to be a part of it. They're just adhering to a higher standard of professionalism than superstitious losers who let their scruples get in the way.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said that if you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss stares back at you. Now staring at the TV can have the same effect.
that idea got pretty hammered in a recent administration, which felt it was the job of government to make sure campagne contributors can maintain their monopolies.
A recent administration... Obama and the auto industry? Bush and oil? Clinton signing the DMCA and Mickey Mouse copyright extension act? Could you narrow it down a bit?
While we're doing weird analogies, if I stole the brake fluid out of your car, causing you to have a wreck, would you go after me for the cost of the destroyed car and your medical expenses, or say "I see you left five bucks in the glove box, which covers the cost of the fluid, so we're cool."?
Point being, if someone suffers other damages as a direct result of a theft, it's pretty understandable that they would want compensation for those damages too, not just the property that was stolen.
The political FB post should be valid grounds for firing, too. If I gave out company "secrets" or confidential material on FB, I'd get fired. Duh.
I'm not sure how big of a secret Obama being "dumb" is. Some of us had that figured out for a while now.
It sounds like the article is talking about character advancement mechanics being based on skills (you use a sword, your guy gets better with a sword) instead of levels (you character suddenly gets better at everything). The editor writeup, however, is a commentary on player skill.
A proposed amendment to the Cap and Trade Tax sought to provide a safety valve in case it goes horribly awry and trashes the economy. It stipulated that if gasoline reached $5 a gallon or unemployment hit 15%, the tax would go away. Sponsors of the bill basically argued that destroying the economy was not a bug but a feature, and rejected this.
If you think the current recession is bad, it's going to get a lot worse if this tax becomes law.
Frodo is not level 70, and is thus unable to use a flying mount.
Satellite in geostable orbit. Receiving station on equator. Receiving station emits guiding signal to satellite, causing satellite to beam power to earth. If the guiding signal is missing, the satellite stops beaming power and starts using that power to adjust it's position. That's how I'd do it.
That's nice and all, but how about this: If the beam goes off-target, the satellite cranks the output up to full power, obliterating whatever it happens to be pointed at. This will create a bright column of light visible to cameras at the receiving station. Based on which direction this shaft of annihilation is from the station, the ground station transmits instructions to the satellite of which way to adjust the beam, walking it back onto the target and creating a massive swath of destruction in the process.
That's how I'd do it.
Well, I hope my government is this vocal and helpful in getting everyone coordinated to switch to IPv6 and HTML5.
Do you really want the government to have the authority to tell people what network protocols they can and can't use? You might think they would use such power to spur adoption of IPv6 and HTML5, but I suspect they would be more inclined to ban BitTorrent, TOR, and FreeNet than IPv4 and HTML4.
During Bush's administration, I would have taken that as sarcasm. But after Obama's gutting the space budget, honoring Bush's scientific enlightenment is starting to sound like a good idea.
Thankfully you seem to have a new President that has intelligence and morals
Who is this guy and how did he get Obama to vacate the presidency?
Yes, and then they ran it through a machine to make it even more so.