Anyone entrusting their computing needs to a Microsoft operating system deserves what they get. Fortunately, real modern operating systems are cheaply and abundantly available.
A knee-jerk over-reaction to perceived "political correctness" is itself somewhat worrying. Thing to worry about: school library removes books discussing human sexuality and reproductive health. Thing not to worry about: a child is potentially denied the chance to see "donkey dick fucking your ass" spelled out un-redacted on a news site. I don't think it's unreasonable for a website to respect the squeamishness of potential readers (even if they are irrational for caring about word usage), so long as this does not prevent open, honest discussion of "taboo" topics when on-topic. There is a large gray area between repressive censorship and "polite" word use; I don't buy the slippery-slope argument that self-censoring 'f**k' is tantamount to suppressing free speech any more than I buy the argument that a child who sees the word 'fuck' will be sexually traumatized.
The foam ball is still a less intrusive baton modification than other suggestions proposed here, such as using a game controller accelerometer. Something the size of a pea would probably be about enough, anyway. Some conductors already use batons with higher-visibility markers on the end; you'd certainly have to find a choirmaster willing to adapt to this change. A choirmaster who already accepts a blind singer who sometimes has trouble keeping up is quite likely to be reasonably accommodating --- outside of a few particularly pretentious world-class performing ensembles, I doubt many choirmasters would be such egotistical pricks that they'd refuse half a gram of extra baton weight to help a disabled singer.
The blind singer doesn't have the option to "look at the choirmaster and recognize that he is going to express the sign even before he actually does"; any solution proposed here is going to have that problem, since there's pretty much no way to convey the full bandwidth of a visual scene to a blind person.
Latency in processing is indeed a problem. However, I think you are over-estimating the system latency if you think things will add up to half a second using any decent modern computer. A small amount of latency can even be mostly compensated by extrapolating the measured baton motion out (based on the first two derivatives) to its likely present position. In addition, the sighted singers have their own visual latency to deal with: human response times to audible stimuli are ~30ms faster than visual stimuli, so you can tolerate a video frame or two of latency without falling behind your sighted peers for response to abrupt, non-periodic indications (e.g. abrupt starts or cutoffs).
How you capture the motion --- visible light image tracking or accelerometers --- doesn't particularly matter, since it's trivial to convert position-v-time data to acceleration-v-time data. A concern I have about using many readily available off-the-shelf accelerometer devices (e.g. a game controller) is the form factor; a conductor will be pretty picky about what he/she is willing to wave around for a multi-hour performance; a Wii controller would get awfully tiring compared to a proper light and agile baton. An advantage to video motion capture is requiring minimal modification to the conductor's preferred baton: a small and light colored foam ball speared on the baton tip is going to be an easier sell than a Wiimote or some home-made hacked accelerometer lump held on with duct tape, which most conductors would be extremely unhappy with.
See my own reply to my comment above, suggesting using stereo sound to "visualize" the continuous baton position. Once you've got the motion capture data, you can convert it to whatever output form you need to convey an adequate amount of information. Nonetheless, I suspect that even knowing just the endpoints would be mostly sufficient --- conductors don't generally rapidly/erratically vary the tempo from beat to beat (even the sighted singers couldn't accurately follow that), so you'll have time to feel the pace changing; for entrances, the conductor typically gives everyone a few beats in advance (so they know what tempo to expect) instead of launching in at the first sung beat. The only tricky part is interpreting held notes and cutoffs (the few cases where a conductor does indicate a one-off, out-of-beat timing), where the full motion information (converted from the motion capture to an audible or tactile signal) would be useful.
Even if motion tracking is "excessive," it's probably easier to implement in readily-available hardware: use a camera already on a laptop/phone, rather than needing to wire up the conductor with a custom accelerometer mount. And ripping a rumble motor from a gamepad (and creating the software/hardware interface to control it) is a heck of a lot more work than just piping sound out to headphones. As I describe in another post above, the motion tracking (in a simple and controlled environment) is pretty trivial to implement; I'm not asking for full 3-D capture of the whole conductor's body, just a colored spot (selected to be different from any wallpaper behind) moving up and down.
The downside of using "specific pitch tones" is confusing the heck out of the subconscious of someone trying to sing at some other particular pitch (to match the voices around them). Something broad-spectrum and atonal (a click, hiss, tick, or thump) can relay timing and position information, without interfering with (competing for attention in the brain) tonal perception.
What part of this is hard? Cheap webcam? Bright-colored foam ball? Earpiece? Software to coordinate these? Though image recognition in general, uncontrolled conditions is extremely hard ("here are snapshots of random traffic; identify the location of all signs, pedestrians, vehicles, and obstacles"), specialized tasks under controlled conditions ("there is one saturated red dot in the picture, between 30 and 50 pixels wide; find it.") are trivial to implement. If I was asking for software that could take any random photo of a choir and figure out where the conductor and baton were, that would be "flying car" hard; but, by reducing to a much simpler and well-controlled problem ("find the known-color, known-size spot"), the task is trivial (select all pixels within appropriate color range; apply dilation and expansion morphological operators to select the right size range; return the centroid of remaining pixels --- easy-peasy).
alternate "visualization" method: have a constant stream of clicks through headphones (open-sided so as not to impede following the singing), varying the audio phase to move the stereo "image" side to side as the baton goes up and down; this should make it easy to follow the whole motion of the baton, not just the extrema, using the most cheap and available off-the-shelf hardware.
Motion tracking video of the baton (cheap webcam view from the side, colored foam ball on the baton end, track up/down motion with some very simple image processing); convert to a usable signal (e.g. audible clicks through an earpiece when the baton reaches maximum/minimum positions and turns around).
Yep, I remember seeing that on KDE under Mandrake Linux in the late '90s. You could even adjust the level of "fuzziness," varying from readouts to the nearest minute through "mid-afternoon," "tuesday," "spring," or "20th century".
Please share your potentially benign, child-friendly reading within the "margin of ambiguity" of the redacted text: "Do you like my donkey d**k f*****ng your a**? Take it TAKE THE F*****NG D**K. I am f*****ng you like a dog. YEAHHH!" that might make you worry the phrase was taken out of context. It's one thing to worry about redacted quotes like "Politician X said: 'I will never stop fighting... to kill... all our children.'"; it's another to fall so far into paranoia that you fear the above phrase might be unfairly misrepresented.
What's the point of complaining about the redacting? In the context you can still clearly tell what the words being used are --- unless you're that one guy who can't, who now has an intriguing motivation to learn a few more vocabulary words today.
I don't care so much "who started it"* in the playground fight, that doesn't justify the stronger bully walking away with the weaker kid's lunch money, and declaring him his bitch for life. Nor does groups of Palestinians being militarily evicted by other countries justify their plight (being a persecuted loser doesn't make you worthy of said fate either; one might think that more Israelis might have more introspection on that point, given significant facts in their past history).
*) Not that it changes whether or not Israel is justified in taking land by force, but, from the Wikipedia article on the 1967 Six Days war:
The war began on June 5 with Israel launching surprise bombing raids against Egyptian air-fields after a period of high tension that included an Israeli raid into the Jordanian-controlled West Bank,[12][13] Israeli initiated aerial clashes over Syrian territory,[14] Syrian artillery attacks against Israeli settlements in the vicinity of the border followed by Israeli response against Syrian positions in the Golan Heights and encroachments of increasing intensity and frequency (initiated by Israel) into the demilitarized zones along the Syrian border[15] and culminating in Egypt blocking the Straits of Tiran.[16] and ordering of the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force.
so this was certainly *not* a case of a one-sided offense against Israel's defense; there is no measure by which Israel is not at least a co-aggressor, if not the primary culprit for the war.
Rewarding NK's misbehavior sucks; I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The problem is, no one has yet gotten agreement on a working solution that doesn't involve Seoul being reduced to rubble in the final temper-tantrum of the NK leadership (and mass chaos in the now headless country completely unprepared to take over the reigns of a very precarious civil society from authoritarian dictatorship). A lot of "solutions" have risks that may seem "not so bad" to us in the USA, but are unacceptable both to South Korea and China (who will suffer from the fallout of a messy collapse in NK).
Isreal didn't steal any land they won it fair and square in war.
You really think anything is "won fair and square in war" --- that "I've got bigger weapons and am better at killing your folks than you are mine" justifies "therefore, all your stuff belongs to us"? To you and anyone who shares your "might makes right" philosophy: fuck you. Attitudes like yours make it clear that "homocidal maniacs" aren't exclusive to the "other side."
Even the tiniest tin-pot dictatorships can have noisy propaganda machines (or do you think info from North Korea's state media is truthful?); even larger corporations can flood the media with propaganda. And the Israeli government's propaganda is given free amplification by the US, which makes it by far the most pervasive voice in shaping perceptions about everything that goes on in Israel's section of the world.
All right, so Vietnam "doesn't count" because we didn't win --- even though, if we had, we'd still have already destroyed nearly all their dams and irrigation systems, and doused the whole country in carcinogenic defoliants, so I can't see the outcome being a lot more rosy after that point.
But, just so you don't think Bush's bungling in Iraq is an isolated incident of failed US "helpfulness," why don't you read up on the history of a few more countries where we've "helped out," including Cambodia, East Timor, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, and Pakistan. Remember that the successful re-building in Europe/Japan took place with some American money, but under the guidance of the relatively socialist policies of the regions; empire building guided more by US-centric capitalist ideology (e.g. Thomas Friedman's Chicago School acolytes advising Pinochet) doesn't work out so well.
I'm absolutely certain that the US wants to throw money at the boogeyman of cyberwar --- however, they've already got a propaganda line. Look at all the fear-mongering in the media about Chinese hacking; this is the credible enemy of which we are supposed to be terrified. As for deterring a real anonymous attack against vulnerable infrastructure by posing as anonymous --- this seems overly risky, based on the way anonymous functions. Indeed, anyone can pose as anonymous, by announcing upcoming attack plans through the internet forums where anonymous hangs out. If the CIA/Mossad tried to rally a failed attack in this way, there would be far too much risk of inciting the "real" anonymous to show up in typical independent, uncoordinated style and "help" the attack to find the real vulnerable targets.
North Korea has been waving their gun around for a long time. Even though you may not care about this from an American perspective, NK has for decades been fully capable of launching devastating attacks on major South Korean population centers (which don't require intercontinental long range missiles). Outside the perspective of "only American lives matter," NK's longer range weapons don't fundamentally change the diplomatic situation: they are still, as they have always been, capable of going out with an unacceptable suicidal bang, simply continuing the same decades-long tense standoff (in order to continue, on their side, receiving aid money/supplies as appeasement). NK's current round of bluster is really nothing new; and, while there is no certainty in dealing with madmen, there is also no positive reason to expect that NK's actual policies (of waving a gun with their finger on the trigger, but stopping short of anything beyond warning shots) have changed.
And to really underestimate the power of getting some nutritious food and knowing that some of your family is no longer spending the rest of their miserable lives in one of NK's versions of a Stalinist death/labor camp.
History over the past half century shows that America isn't real good at this part. In all the countries we've worked to "liberate," from Vietnam to Iraq, we generally do so at immense cost to civilian architecture: what little they already had of agriculture, clean water, electricity, sanitation gets reduced to rubble; disease and starvation kill far more than our direct bombings. I doubt North Koreans will come to love us for food and freedom, because we've shown zero capability of actually improving food and freedom through war. If history is any guide at all, there will just be millions pushed over the line from severe malnutrition to starvation, and whatever goons we install as the new government will become notorious for sadistic crackdowns against dissent (keeping the same old death camps running, just with a new slew of occupants).
If this were true, then why would the Israeli propaganda machine be downplaying the effectiveness of the attacks? Instead, you'd expect them to be wailing about the terrible carnage about to be unleashed on society by Anonymous, unless their "cyber-warrior" budgets are immediately increased and a slew of new controls imposed on the internet --- not saying that already existing infrastructure is already 100% effective at preventing real damage.
The problem is, when you've established that you're a profitable to trolls, they're much more likely to gang up to backstab you. I suspect the following wouldn't be entirely atypical:
Troll 1) We have patent! Give us meellion dollar, or we sue! You) O.K.; here's $1M, but you've got to protect us against the next troll. Troll 2) We have patent! Give us meelion dollars, or we sue! Troll 1) Our board of directors take meellion dollar bonus for hard work! Now we bankrupt! Our directors find new job with Troll 2! Troll 1+2) Give us two meellion dollar! Or double sue! You)... aww, shit.
Since the troll companies are generally just empty shell corporations for investor psychopaths, they have no reason to stick around to fight each other (knowing that, by the time they ever won a case, the payout cash would have long ago vanished into some other Cayman Islands fund). A company with a solid revenue stream from actually making and selling products, that's proven itself a juicy target for Troll 1, is just asking to be bilked twice (by the same leeches under a different corporate name).
The purpose of the second amendment, at the time it was introduced, was to make southern states happy that they could keep their "slave patrols" (state militias to gun down runaway slaves and squelch slave insurrections). And since that time, guns have done very little to promote or protect liberty in this country. With the exception of the Civil War (which gun-lovin' southern politicians tend to think was a bad thing), the side with guns has always been on the wrong side of struggles for worker's rights (generally, the privately-employed Pinkerton goon squads were the ones with guns shooting down labor rebellions), women's rights (you think suffragettes won thanks to superior firepower?), civil rights (whenever black folks stockpiled guns, they ended up murdered by the FBI), gay rights, immigrant rights, free speech issues, etc. What cases have you seen of guns actually *helping* with first-amendment rights issues (or any other civil liberties issues)? What protections and advances in rights came because "we the people" had guns, instead of thanks to non-gun (and often deliberately non-violent) mass movements?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone entrusting their computing needs to a Microsoft operating system deserves what they get. Fortunately, real modern operating systems are cheaply and abundantly available.
A knee-jerk over-reaction to perceived "political correctness" is itself somewhat worrying.
Thing to worry about: school library removes books discussing human sexuality and reproductive health.
Thing not to worry about: a child is potentially denied the chance to see "donkey dick fucking your ass" spelled out un-redacted on a news site.
I don't think it's unreasonable for a website to respect the squeamishness of potential readers (even if they are irrational for caring about word usage), so long as this does not prevent open, honest discussion of "taboo" topics when on-topic. There is a large gray area between repressive censorship and "polite" word use; I don't buy the slippery-slope argument that self-censoring 'f**k' is tantamount to suppressing free speech any more than I buy the argument that a child who sees the word 'fuck' will be sexually traumatized.
The foam ball is still a less intrusive baton modification than other suggestions proposed here, such as using a game controller accelerometer. Something the size of a pea would probably be about enough, anyway. Some conductors already use batons with higher-visibility markers on the end; you'd certainly have to find a choirmaster willing to adapt to this change. A choirmaster who already accepts a blind singer who sometimes has trouble keeping up is quite likely to be reasonably accommodating --- outside of a few particularly pretentious world-class performing ensembles, I doubt many choirmasters would be such egotistical pricks that they'd refuse half a gram of extra baton weight to help a disabled singer.
The blind singer doesn't have the option to "look at the choirmaster and recognize that he is going to express the sign even before he actually does"; any solution proposed here is going to have that problem, since there's pretty much no way to convey the full bandwidth of a visual scene to a blind person.
Latency in processing is indeed a problem. However, I think you are over-estimating the system latency if you think things will add up to half a second using any decent modern computer. A small amount of latency can even be mostly compensated by extrapolating the measured baton motion out (based on the first two derivatives) to its likely present position. In addition, the sighted singers have their own visual latency to deal with: human response times to audible stimuli are ~30ms faster than visual stimuli, so you can tolerate a video frame or two of latency without falling behind your sighted peers for response to abrupt, non-periodic indications (e.g. abrupt starts or cutoffs).
How you capture the motion --- visible light image tracking or accelerometers --- doesn't particularly matter, since it's trivial to convert position-v-time data to acceleration-v-time data. A concern I have about using many readily available off-the-shelf accelerometer devices (e.g. a game controller) is the form factor; a conductor will be pretty picky about what he/she is willing to wave around for a multi-hour performance; a Wii controller would get awfully tiring compared to a proper light and agile baton. An advantage to video motion capture is requiring minimal modification to the conductor's preferred baton: a small and light colored foam ball speared on the baton tip is going to be an easier sell than a Wiimote or some home-made hacked accelerometer lump held on with duct tape, which most conductors would be extremely unhappy with.
See my own reply to my comment above, suggesting using stereo sound to "visualize" the continuous baton position. Once you've got the motion capture data, you can convert it to whatever output form you need to convey an adequate amount of information. Nonetheless, I suspect that even knowing just the endpoints would be mostly sufficient --- conductors don't generally rapidly/erratically vary the tempo from beat to beat (even the sighted singers couldn't accurately follow that), so you'll have time to feel the pace changing; for entrances, the conductor typically gives everyone a few beats in advance (so they know what tempo to expect) instead of launching in at the first sung beat. The only tricky part is interpreting held notes and cutoffs (the few cases where a conductor does indicate a one-off, out-of-beat timing), where the full motion information (converted from the motion capture to an audible or tactile signal) would be useful.
Even if motion tracking is "excessive," it's probably easier to implement in readily-available hardware: use a camera already on a laptop/phone, rather than needing to wire up the conductor with a custom accelerometer mount. And ripping a rumble motor from a gamepad (and creating the software/hardware interface to control it) is a heck of a lot more work than just piping sound out to headphones. As I describe in another post above, the motion tracking (in a simple and controlled environment) is pretty trivial to implement; I'm not asking for full 3-D capture of the whole conductor's body, just a colored spot (selected to be different from any wallpaper behind) moving up and down.
The downside of using "specific pitch tones" is confusing the heck out of the subconscious of someone trying to sing at some other particular pitch (to match the voices around them). Something broad-spectrum and atonal (a click, hiss, tick, or thump) can relay timing and position information, without interfering with (competing for attention in the brain) tonal perception.
What part of this is hard? Cheap webcam? Bright-colored foam ball? Earpiece? Software to coordinate these?
Though image recognition in general, uncontrolled conditions is extremely hard ("here are snapshots of random traffic; identify the location of all signs, pedestrians, vehicles, and obstacles"), specialized tasks under controlled conditions ("there is one saturated red dot in the picture, between 30 and 50 pixels wide; find it.") are trivial to implement. If I was asking for software that could take any random photo of a choir and figure out where the conductor and baton were, that would be "flying car" hard; but, by reducing to a much simpler and well-controlled problem ("find the known-color, known-size spot"), the task is trivial (select all pixels within appropriate color range; apply dilation and expansion morphological operators to select the right size range; return the centroid of remaining pixels --- easy-peasy).
alternate "visualization" method: have a constant stream of clicks through headphones (open-sided so as not to impede following the singing), varying the audio phase to move the stereo "image" side to side as the baton goes up and down; this should make it easy to follow the whole motion of the baton, not just the extrema, using the most cheap and available off-the-shelf hardware.
Motion tracking video of the baton (cheap webcam view from the side, colored foam ball on the baton end, track up/down motion with some very simple image processing); convert to a usable signal (e.g. audible clicks through an earpiece when the baton reaches maximum/minimum positions and turns around).
Yep, I remember seeing that on KDE under Mandrake Linux in the late '90s. You could even adjust the level of "fuzziness," varying from readouts to the nearest minute through "mid-afternoon," "tuesday," "spring," or "20th century".
Please share your potentially benign, child-friendly reading within the "margin of ambiguity" of the redacted text: ... to kill ... all our children.'"; it's another to fall so far into paranoia that you fear the above phrase might be unfairly misrepresented.
"Do you like my donkey d**k f*****ng your a**? Take it TAKE THE F*****NG D**K. I am f*****ng you like a dog. YEAHHH!"
that might make you worry the phrase was taken out of context. It's one thing to worry about redacted quotes like "Politician X said: 'I will never stop fighting
What's the point of complaining about the redacting? In the context you can still clearly tell what the words being used are --- unless you're that one guy who can't, who now has an intriguing motivation to learn a few more vocabulary words today.
I don't care so much "who started it"* in the playground fight, that doesn't justify the stronger bully walking away with the weaker kid's lunch money, and declaring him his bitch for life. Nor does groups of Palestinians being militarily evicted by other countries justify their plight (being a persecuted loser doesn't make you worthy of said fate either; one might think that more Israelis might have more introspection on that point, given significant facts in their past history).
*) Not that it changes whether or not Israel is justified in taking land by force, but, from the Wikipedia article on the 1967 Six Days war:
The war began on June 5 with Israel launching surprise bombing raids against Egyptian air-fields after a period of high tension that included an Israeli raid into the Jordanian-controlled West Bank,[12][13] Israeli initiated aerial clashes over Syrian territory,[14] Syrian artillery attacks against Israeli settlements in the vicinity of the border followed by Israeli response against Syrian positions in the Golan Heights and encroachments of increasing intensity and frequency (initiated by Israel) into the demilitarized zones along the Syrian border[15] and culminating in Egypt blocking the Straits of Tiran.[16] and ordering of the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force.
so this was certainly *not* a case of a one-sided offense against Israel's defense; there is no measure by which Israel is not at least a co-aggressor, if not the primary culprit for the war.
Rewarding NK's misbehavior sucks; I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The problem is, no one has yet gotten agreement on a working solution that doesn't involve Seoul being reduced to rubble in the final temper-tantrum of the NK leadership (and mass chaos in the now headless country completely unprepared to take over the reigns of a very precarious civil society from authoritarian dictatorship). A lot of "solutions" have risks that may seem "not so bad" to us in the USA, but are unacceptable both to South Korea and China (who will suffer from the fallout of a messy collapse in NK).
Isreal didn't steal any land they won it fair and square in war.
You really think anything is "won fair and square in war" --- that "I've got bigger weapons and am better at killing your folks than you are mine" justifies "therefore, all your stuff belongs to us"? To you and anyone who shares your "might makes right" philosophy: fuck you. Attitudes like yours make it clear that "homocidal maniacs" aren't exclusive to the "other side."
Even the tiniest tin-pot dictatorships can have noisy propaganda machines (or do you think info from North Korea's state media is truthful?); even larger corporations can flood the media with propaganda. And the Israeli government's propaganda is given free amplification by the US, which makes it by far the most pervasive voice in shaping perceptions about everything that goes on in Israel's section of the world.
All right, so Vietnam "doesn't count" because we didn't win --- even though, if we had, we'd still have already destroyed nearly all their dams and irrigation systems, and doused the whole country in carcinogenic defoliants, so I can't see the outcome being a lot more rosy after that point.
But, just so you don't think Bush's bungling in Iraq is an isolated incident of failed US "helpfulness," why don't you read up on the history of a few more countries where we've "helped out," including Cambodia, East Timor, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, and Pakistan. Remember that the successful re-building in Europe/Japan took place with some American money, but under the guidance of the relatively socialist policies of the regions; empire building guided more by US-centric capitalist ideology (e.g. Thomas Friedman's Chicago School acolytes advising Pinochet) doesn't work out so well.
I'm absolutely certain that the US wants to throw money at the boogeyman of cyberwar --- however, they've already got a propaganda line. Look at all the fear-mongering in the media about Chinese hacking; this is the credible enemy of which we are supposed to be terrified. As for deterring a real anonymous attack against vulnerable infrastructure by posing as anonymous --- this seems overly risky, based on the way anonymous functions. Indeed, anyone can pose as anonymous, by announcing upcoming attack plans through the internet forums where anonymous hangs out. If the CIA/Mossad tried to rally a failed attack in this way, there would be far too much risk of inciting the "real" anonymous to show up in typical independent, uncoordinated style and "help" the attack to find the real vulnerable targets.
North Korea has been waving their gun around for a long time. Even though you may not care about this from an American perspective, NK has for decades been fully capable of launching devastating attacks on major South Korean population centers (which don't require intercontinental long range missiles). Outside the perspective of "only American lives matter," NK's longer range weapons don't fundamentally change the diplomatic situation: they are still, as they have always been, capable of going out with an unacceptable suicidal bang, simply continuing the same decades-long tense standoff (in order to continue, on their side, receiving aid money/supplies as appeasement). NK's current round of bluster is really nothing new; and, while there is no certainty in dealing with madmen, there is also no positive reason to expect that NK's actual policies (of waving a gun with their finger on the trigger, but stopping short of anything beyond warning shots) have changed.
And to really underestimate the power of getting some nutritious food and knowing that some of your family is no longer spending the rest of their miserable lives in one of NK's versions of a Stalinist death/labor camp.
History over the past half century shows that America isn't real good at this part. In all the countries we've worked to "liberate," from Vietnam to Iraq, we generally do so at immense cost to civilian architecture: what little they already had of agriculture, clean water, electricity, sanitation gets reduced to rubble; disease and starvation kill far more than our direct bombings. I doubt North Koreans will come to love us for food and freedom, because we've shown zero capability of actually improving food and freedom through war. If history is any guide at all, there will just be millions pushed over the line from severe malnutrition to starvation, and whatever goons we install as the new government will become notorious for sadistic crackdowns against dissent (keeping the same old death camps running, just with a new slew of occupants).
If this were true, then why would the Israeli propaganda machine be downplaying the effectiveness of the attacks? Instead, you'd expect them to be wailing about the terrible carnage about to be unleashed on society by Anonymous, unless their "cyber-warrior" budgets are immediately increased and a slew of new controls imposed on the internet --- not saying that already existing infrastructure is already 100% effective at preventing real damage.
The problem is, when you've established that you're a profitable to trolls, they're much more likely to gang up to backstab you. I suspect the following wouldn't be entirely atypical:
Troll 1) We have patent! Give us meellion dollar, or we sue! ... aww, shit.
You) O.K.; here's $1M, but you've got to protect us against the next troll.
Troll 2) We have patent! Give us meelion dollars, or we sue!
Troll 1) Our board of directors take meellion dollar bonus for hard work! Now we bankrupt! Our directors find new job with Troll 2!
Troll 1+2) Give us two meellion dollar! Or double sue!
You)
Since the troll companies are generally just empty shell corporations for investor psychopaths, they have no reason to stick around to fight each other (knowing that, by the time they ever won a case, the payout cash would have long ago vanished into some other Cayman Islands fund). A company with a solid revenue stream from actually making and selling products, that's proven itself a juicy target for Troll 1, is just asking to be bilked twice (by the same leeches under a different corporate name).
The purpose of the second amendment, at the time it was introduced, was to make southern states happy that they could keep their "slave patrols" (state militias to gun down runaway slaves and squelch slave insurrections). And since that time, guns have done very little to promote or protect liberty in this country. With the exception of the Civil War (which gun-lovin' southern politicians tend to think was a bad thing), the side with guns has always been on the wrong side of struggles for worker's rights (generally, the privately-employed Pinkerton goon squads were the ones with guns shooting down labor rebellions), women's rights (you think suffragettes won thanks to superior firepower?), civil rights (whenever black folks stockpiled guns, they ended up murdered by the FBI), gay rights, immigrant rights, free speech issues, etc. What cases have you seen of guns actually *helping* with first-amendment rights issues (or any other civil liberties issues)? What protections and advances in rights came because "we the people" had guns, instead of thanks to non-gun (and often deliberately non-violent) mass movements?