to regain any possibility of accountability on the part of our government Bush, and most of the members of his administrations need to be tried, convicted, and executed for treason
With all the "debates" this past year, there are two conspicuous questions I would have emjoyed being raised:
(1) Candidate X, what in the first month of taking office will you do to roll back the executive branch's power grab of the last 8 years and restore civil liberties?
(2) As President, what will be your response if top officials of the Bush administration are arrested and imprisoned for war crimes when visiting a foreign country, say a European ally?
It's not that I would expect anything more than bluster from the Republicans and squirming from the Democrats but maybe they would at least understand that some people are concerned about more than flag pins.
How many protests were there in the US last year? Then compare population/population density.
The US is about 1/4th the population of China. If there were 20,000+ "mass demonstrations" last year then the main stream media is doing a much better job of suppressing the news than even I give them credit for. I suspect if it was even a tenth of that Cheney would have declared martial law a long time ago.
I am not sure why this post has generated such contention. The Chinese released the figures. The Chinese bought the sound equipment. It isn't that much of stretch to think they are going to use it when they feel they need to do so. And like so many of these technologies (e.g. taser guns), the justifications for their use tend to expand rapidly.
It's the Chinese government's own figures. They have been widely reported. Here are a couple of links and I am sure Google can provide many more. (That tresriogrande troll might want to check a few before shooting his mouth off next time.)
"Mass incidents" is the term the Chinese government uses to describe demonstrations, riots, and group petitioning. In January 2006, the Ministry of Public Security announced that there were 87,000 such incidents in 2005, a 6.6 percent increase over the previous year. Protests over corruption, taxes, and environmental degradation caused by China's breakneck economic development contributed to the rise. But some of the most highly charged disputes have occurred over government seizure of farmland for construction of the factories, power plants, shopping malls, roads, and apartment complexes that are fueling China's boom.
the vast majority of Chinese are very happy with their government at the moment
On the other hand, it was recently reported that there were over 85,000 protests in China last year, some of them violent. That is a staggering number. I suspect these sound machines will see a lot of action.
You mean people that spend all their life being managed and controlled want the internet to be managed and controlled?
This is one manifestation of a larger question: how realistic is it to assume that a society that is quickly growing richer wants to rock the boat that has raised their living conditions? It always seemed naive to assume that a richer China would necessarily demand more freedoms. When you consider the effort and sacrifices required to overcome the odds in securing a middle class lifestyle in China today it seems preposterous to assume that these very same people are somehow going to form the vanguard demanding change. Most of these people aren't going to give up their comfortable high rises or prized automobiles for anything or anyone. This may change in time but that time is a long ways away.
That's funny, because I've seen people protest right outside the White House, and right outside Congress all the time. They're never fenced in or any such nonsense.
Well, it certainly is comforting to have an experienced observer like you on the scene to give everyone the skinny about what's really going on in the country. However for people who prefer to have their reportage from people who don't have their heads in the sand they need only do the most basic Google searches. Here are a few of many, many examples and they don't even include all the abuses by local and state agencies, particularly those that need to justify their lucrative homeland security funding.
Please provide an example where you are not capable of speaking out against the government.
Go to any public appearance of George Bush holding a protest sign. You can hold the sign - 4 blocks away in a fenced pen, surrounded by armed police, filmed by said police, and then put on a list to be passed around to other agencies.
In turn, I will cite how you in fact just did speak out against your government freely.
I was initially intrigued by reccomendation algorithms.
Me too. Last time this topic rolled around I took a brief look at the Netflix competition and was disappointed. The star rating system was limited but more importantly there was a remarkable lack of data. Many of the teams that edged out some improvement did so by importing lots of data from other sources - with lots of holes in that process - and trying to discern patterns from that.
On the whole the exercise seems to be a variation of a couple of decades ago when so many people bought a pc because they planned to be the next stock market wiz by throwing a neural net at basic NYSE daily data. With fancy algorithms and math constructs being all the rage these days (dare I say a bit of a fad?) it behooves us to remember that they are far from the whole story. It helps to have some useful data with which to make connections. No matter how fancy the algorithm you aren't going to harvest rice in a desert.
The role of these bodies is not to try and manipulate my judgement in their favour.
Agreed, but realistically the horse ran out of the barn quite a long time ago and this issue with bloggers is just natural incrementalism.
Military agencies plants stories overseas all the time and due to the way news propagates it doesn't take long for them to come back here and be reported as facts.
"Fact finding" junkets are run continually for reporters, pols, clergy, etc., but the military makes sure only one side's facts are exposed.
The military allows "embedded" reporters but it a rare individual who doesn't bond with the soldiers who are protecting him and that tends to seriously skew their reporting.
Plants in the press corps are a time honored tactic. It's no surprise that when a President want to get his message out early in a press conference he knows exactly who to call on.
The sad thing is that the end result of this is to make democracy less efficient. It throws up such a smoke screen that most people just give up on trying to find the truth and just shut down. Ultimately they disengage entirely and it is not all that surprising that 50% of people don't even bother to vote.
I don't disagree with you. Certainly the US has the capacity to censor as much as they want but thus far the main culprit has been self-censorship of various forms.
Most Americans never reach beyond news.yahoo.com or time.com. Clicking on a link that takes them to The Register may be as far afield as they are likely to get. As distilled as these news sources already are, they are getting worse as the economics of the news business forces newspapers and press agencies to layoff and close more and more foreign bureaus.
There are many foreign sites (with English versions) that provide excellent coverage of the world that, even if you don't always agree with them, at least provide alternative viewpoints. Of course, who knows what bells ring in Ft. Meade when you visit them.
It's hypocritical for representatives of the US government to lambaste other countries for WTO "violations", when the US Government turns a blind eye to infringement happening in their own country.
Yet Comcast seems intent on making people WANT to regulate them. Its like they are deliberately behaving stupid?
I was thinking the same thing. It's almost as if they are unaware of what has been going on in the world of late. With the sub-prime market completely off the rails, major investment banks failing, etc., is this really the time to be spitting in the face of government? My sense is that you couldn't pick a worse time to be arguing against regulations and trotting out variations of the "free markets will take care of themselves" shibboleths.
one shouldn't attribute to malice that which would probably be better attributed to ignorance
I think most people have a really hard time accepting the notion that some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, with the best legal resources available to them 24/7, are ignorant of laws directly related to their industry for 25 years.
Bush / Cheney... Medical Privacy Act. Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this law is that it opens patients' private medical records for scrutiny by ALL insurance companies
That's not irony, that's a strategy employed throughout their tenure - title any legislation as the exact opposite of what it does. See Clear Skies Act and Patriot Act among many others.
Saying something is "intellectually vapid" does not a rebuttal make.
I agree. Somewhere in the middle of slogging through all that hate and venom I resigned myself to the notion that any real rebuttal would be pointless anyway. SirSlud did a much better job.
Why don't we ever see comments like yours in the cuba "sneakernet" article...yada yada...
Geez I dunno, maybe because I don't live in Cuba, North Korea, Egypt? Maybe because I have no expectations of civil liberties in those countries? Maybe because none of those governments have been telling me my entire life that I live in a nation of laws, have constitutional rights and so forth? Maybe because I spend so much time worrying about my own country and douche bags like you fucking up that I don't have sufficient energy to work myself into a lather about countries I have absolutely no control over?
One wonders... actually I don't. You just only pick on guys that are guaranteed never to say anything back or hurt you. You are a coward, "making a stand" without risk.
I don't know what "One" wonders but I wonder what the hell you are talking about. Oh, maybe I do. You aren't responding to me at all, are you? You're just reacting to the hate track that never stops playing in your head, bravely fighting whatever fraudulent demon Hannity or Rush stuffed into your tiny brain this afternoon.
What you're doing is not brave, it's not revolutionary, and it's not even moral at all. It's cowardice.
Again, this doesn't make sense. It's just phrases thrown together. Repeat them loud and often enough and they sometime elicit emotion reactions but that doesn't make them any less intellectually vapid.
Catching" bad guys is what they think they're doing and no adjustment will be made from within.
Makes you wonder how they are doing catching "bad" guys when they can barely monitor themselves. Time to face up to it, we are living in a Kafkaesque nation.
The important thing is that they weren't pushing a crappy format
Not to beat a dead horse but hasn't your argument changed to it's ok for Sony to use money and marketing might because its products aren't crappy rather than your original argument that Sony products are technically superior but suffer from bad corporate management?
I don't have anything against the quality of Sony products though, like a lot of people, I find some of their corporate practices the last couple of years to be questionable and occasionally borderline criminal. My problem with the Blu-ray victory is that it appears to be in line with that trend. The adoption of an ends-justifies-the-means argument, as you have made here regarding Blu-ray, seems to be exactly what gets Sony in trouble in the first place.
They consistently make high quality tech products. Blu-ray (despite being DRM crippled) will probably be the next CD. I sure hope it is.
I have no dog in the disk format wars but can Blu-ray's success really be chalked up to engineering? There are stories aplenty about how Sony paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the movie studios to get them to switch. This seems more like marketing (or something more nefarious) than technical excellence and doesn't support your argument very well.
it will further infuriate you to include the following paraphrase from Ronald Reagan: "how can you claim to love America, but hate your fellow Americans."
Infuriate? Not at all. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day supporting torture, stomping on your fellow citizen's civil rights, and denying health care to children to remind everyone of those inspiring words.
Amazing that in one line people create a [false] connection with UBL and two US Presidents, but these same lefty conspiracy theorists never mention the reported 100Million deal between the Clintons and the Dubai Royalty.
Not any less amazing than you connecting "lefties" and the triangulating, centrist, sell-out Clintons in a single sentence. Maybe if the Right didn't have a complete strangle hold on the media you could actually find out what the Left thinks instead of having to make shit up. If the above is any indication you wouldn't know a Lefty if he came up and bit you on the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
to regain any possibility of accountability on the part of our government Bush, and most of the members of his administrations need to be tried, convicted, and executed for treason
With all the "debates" this past year, there are two conspicuous questions I would have emjoyed being raised:
(1) Candidate X, what in the first month of taking office will you do to roll back the executive branch's power grab of the last 8 years and restore civil liberties?
(2) As President, what will be your response if top officials of the Bush administration are arrested and imprisoned for war crimes when visiting a foreign country, say a European ally?
It's not that I would expect anything more than bluster from the Republicans and squirming from the Democrats but maybe they would at least understand that some people are concerned about more than flag pins.
I thought shape-shifting malware was the official business attire of geeks everywhere.
How many protests were there in the US last year? Then compare population/population density.
The US is about 1/4th the population of China. If there were 20,000+ "mass demonstrations" last year then the main stream media is doing a much better job of suppressing the news than even I give them credit for. I suspect if it was even a tenth of that Cheney would have declared martial law a long time ago.
I am not sure why this post has generated such contention. The Chinese released the figures. The Chinese bought the sound equipment. It isn't that much of stretch to think they are going to use it when they feel they need to do so. And like so many of these technologies (e.g. taser guns), the justifications for their use tend to expand rapidly.
It's the Chinese government's own figures. They have been widely reported. Here are a couple of links and I am sure Google can provide many more. (That tresriogrande troll might want to check a few before shooting his mouth off next time.)
For instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/international/asia/20china.html
A paragraph from http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2006/DA_spring_06/china/china_06.html
"Mass incidents" is the term the Chinese government uses to describe demonstrations, riots, and group petitioning. In January 2006, the Ministry of Public Security announced that there were 87,000 such incidents in 2005, a 6.6 percent increase over the previous year. Protests over corruption, taxes, and environmental degradation caused by China's breakneck economic development contributed to the rise. But some of the most highly charged disputes have occurred over government seizure of farmland for construction of the factories, power plants, shopping malls, roads, and apartment complexes that are fueling China's boom.the vast majority of Chinese are very happy with their government at the moment
On the other hand, it was recently reported that there were over 85,000 protests in China last year, some of them violent. That is a staggering number. I suspect these sound machines will see a lot of action.
You mean people that spend all their life being managed and controlled want the internet to be managed and controlled?
This is one manifestation of a larger question: how realistic is it to assume that a society that is quickly growing richer wants to rock the boat that has raised their living conditions? It always seemed naive to assume that a richer China would necessarily demand more freedoms. When you consider the effort and sacrifices required to overcome the odds in securing a middle class lifestyle in China today it seems preposterous to assume that these very same people are somehow going to form the vanguard demanding change. Most of these people aren't going to give up their comfortable high rises or prized automobiles for anything or anyone. This may change in time but that time is a long ways away.
That's funny, because I've seen people protest right outside the White House, and right outside Congress all the time. They're never fenced in or any such nonsense.
Well, it certainly is comforting to have an experienced observer like you on the scene to give everyone the skinny about what's really going on in the country. However for people who prefer to have their reportage from people who don't have their heads in the sand they need only do the most basic Google searches. Here are a few of many, many examples and they don't even include all the abuses by local and state agencies, particularly those that need to justify their lucrative homeland security funding.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04/INGPQ40MB81.DTL&type=printable http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/11419res20030923.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/washington/21protests.html
And, oh, oh, Fox News so IT MUST be true!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96474,00.htmlNext time, try again, but without the lies so much.
Don't worry, that appears to be only one of several statements you have made that have come back to bite your ass today.
Please provide an example where you are not capable of speaking out against the government.
Go to any public appearance of George Bush holding a protest sign. You can hold the sign - 4 blocks away in a fenced pen, surrounded by armed police, filmed by said police, and then put on a list to be passed around to other agencies.
In turn, I will cite how you in fact just did speak out against your government freely.
Yeah, explain away.
I was initially intrigued by reccomendation algorithms.
Me too. Last time this topic rolled around I took a brief look at the Netflix competition and was disappointed. The star rating system was limited but more importantly there was a remarkable lack of data. Many of the teams that edged out some improvement did so by importing lots of data from other sources - with lots of holes in that process - and trying to discern patterns from that.
On the whole the exercise seems to be a variation of a couple of decades ago when so many people bought a pc because they planned to be the next stock market wiz by throwing a neural net at basic NYSE daily data. With fancy algorithms and math constructs being all the rage these days (dare I say a bit of a fad?) it behooves us to remember that they are far from the whole story. It helps to have some useful data with which to make connections. No matter how fancy the algorithm you aren't going to harvest rice in a desert.
The role of these bodies is not to try and manipulate my judgement in their favour.
Agreed, but realistically the horse ran out of the barn quite a long time ago and this issue with bloggers is just natural incrementalism.
Military agencies plants stories overseas all the time and due to the way news propagates it doesn't take long for them to come back here and be reported as facts.
"Fact finding" junkets are run continually for reporters, pols, clergy, etc., but the military makes sure only one side's facts are exposed.
The military allows "embedded" reporters but it a rare individual who doesn't bond with the soldiers who are protecting him and that tends to seriously skew their reporting.
Plants in the press corps are a time honored tactic. It's no surprise that when a President want to get his message out early in a press conference he knows exactly who to call on.
The sad thing is that the end result of this is to make democracy less efficient. It throws up such a smoke screen that most people just give up on trying to find the truth and just shut down. Ultimately they disengage entirely and it is not all that surprising that 50% of people don't even bother to vote.
For the US most are blissfully unaware....
I don't disagree with you. Certainly the US has the capacity to censor as much as they want but thus far the main culprit has been self-censorship of various forms.
Most Americans never reach beyond news.yahoo.com or time.com. Clicking on a link that takes them to The Register may be as far afield as they are likely to get. As distilled as these news sources already are, they are getting worse as the economics of the news business forces newspapers and press agencies to layoff and close more and more foreign bureaus.
There are many foreign sites (with English versions) that provide excellent coverage of the world that, even if you don't always agree with them, at least provide alternative viewpoints. Of course, who knows what bells ring in Ft. Meade when you visit them.
It's hypocritical for representatives of the US government to lambaste other countries for WTO "violations", when the US Government turns a blind eye to infringement happening in their own country.
In the words of our Vice President: So?
Since it is government funded, will there be public review of who gets access?
I am guessing your "Real ID" will barely get you through the front gate.
Yet Comcast seems intent on making people WANT to regulate them. Its like they are deliberately behaving stupid?
I was thinking the same thing. It's almost as if they are unaware of what has been going on in the world of late. With the sub-prime market completely off the rails, major investment banks failing, etc., is this really the time to be spitting in the face of government? My sense is that you couldn't pick a worse time to be arguing against regulations and trotting out variations of the "free markets will take care of themselves" shibboleths.
one shouldn't attribute to malice that which would probably be better attributed to ignorance
I think most people have a really hard time accepting the notion that some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, with the best legal resources available to them 24/7, are ignorant of laws directly related to their industry for 25 years.
Bush / Cheney ... Medical Privacy Act. Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this law is that it opens patients' private medical records for scrutiny by ALL insurance companies
That's not irony, that's a strategy employed throughout their tenure - title any legislation as the exact opposite of what it does. See Clear Skies Act and Patriot Act among many others.
Saying something is "intellectually vapid" does not a rebuttal make.
I agree. Somewhere in the middle of slogging through all that hate and venom I resigned myself to the notion that any real rebuttal would be pointless anyway. SirSlud did a much better job.
Why don't we ever see comments like yours in the cuba "sneakernet" article ...yada yada...
Geez I dunno, maybe because I don't live in Cuba, North Korea, Egypt? Maybe because I have no expectations of civil liberties in those countries? Maybe because none of those governments have been telling me my entire life that I live in a nation of laws, have constitutional rights and so forth? Maybe because I spend so much time worrying about my own country and douche bags like you fucking up that I don't have sufficient energy to work myself into a lather about countries I have absolutely no control over?
One wonders ... actually I don't. You just only pick on guys that are guaranteed never to say anything back or hurt you. You are a coward, "making a stand" without risk.
I don't know what "One" wonders but I wonder what the hell you are talking about. Oh, maybe I do. You aren't responding to me at all, are you? You're just reacting to the hate track that never stops playing in your head, bravely fighting whatever fraudulent demon Hannity or Rush stuffed into your tiny brain this afternoon.
What you're doing is not brave, it's not revolutionary, and it's not even moral at all. It's cowardice.
Again, this doesn't make sense. It's just phrases thrown together. Repeat them loud and often enough and they sometime elicit emotion reactions but that doesn't make them any less intellectually vapid.
Whether or not we're willing to tolerate this, is the question
Sadly its already been asked and answered.
Catching" bad guys is what they think they're doing and no adjustment will be made from within.
Makes you wonder how they are doing catching "bad" guys when they can barely monitor themselves. Time to face up to it, we are living in a Kafkaesque nation.
The important thing is that they weren't pushing a crappy format
Not to beat a dead horse but hasn't your argument changed to it's ok for Sony to use money and marketing might because its products aren't crappy rather than your original argument that Sony products are technically superior but suffer from bad corporate management?
I don't have anything against the quality of Sony products though, like a lot of people, I find some of their corporate practices the last couple of years to be questionable and occasionally borderline criminal. My problem with the Blu-ray victory is that it appears to be in line with that trend. The adoption of an ends-justifies-the-means argument, as you have made here regarding Blu-ray, seems to be exactly what gets Sony in trouble in the first place.
They consistently make high quality tech products. Blu-ray (despite being DRM crippled) will probably be the next CD. I sure hope it is.
I have no dog in the disk format wars but can Blu-ray's success really be chalked up to engineering? There are stories aplenty about how Sony paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the movie studios to get them to switch. This seems more like marketing (or something more nefarious) than technical excellence and doesn't support your argument very well.
it will further infuriate you to include the following paraphrase from Ronald Reagan: "how can you claim to love America, but hate your fellow Americans."
Infuriate? Not at all. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day supporting torture, stomping on your fellow citizen's civil rights, and denying health care to children to remind everyone of those inspiring words.
.Amazing that in one line people create a [false] connection with UBL and two US Presidents, but these same lefty conspiracy theorists never mention the reported 100Million deal between the Clintons and the Dubai Royalty.
Not any less amazing than you connecting "lefties" and the triangulating, centrist, sell-out Clintons in a single sentence. Maybe if the Right didn't have a complete strangle hold on the media you could actually find out what the Left thinks instead of having to make shit up. If the above is any indication you wouldn't know a Lefty if he came up and bit you on the ass.
I believe it was optional in the Shoe Phone. Only available in the Wing Tip model, not loafers.