"Opponents of this bill hate capitalism, pure and simple."
Not true. I only hate this bill because its creating an artificial market. The cap and trade system ONLY works if its a global market, this is. This bill is creating a market where American companies have to pay for a commodity while their competitors in China and India do not. It instantly places U.S. companies at an even greater disadvantage than they already are. They already have massive problems due to labor rates, currency manipulations, health insurance costs, OSHA, workmen's comp, payroll taxes, etc., this is just one more straw on the camel's back.
When the EU instituted cap and trade many factories that were CO2 expensive just moved off shore to Africa and China and polluted even more once they left the EU. Cap and trade was often a net loss for the environment. Cap and trade only works if the entire world is under the same market, and they aren't. China has already eclipsed the U.S. in pollution and coal burning and its rate of growth in pollution will more than offset any reduction in the U.S. Cap and trade will just accelerate pollution in China as more U.S. manufacturing migrates there to escape rising energy costs in the U.S. due to this.
My opposition to cap and trade would be instantly solved if this bill included tariffs on imports from countries that don't institute cap and trade. Chances of that are about zero because every big multinational does all their manufacturing in China now and wont let their lobbyists, let Congress slap tarifs on their goods when they come in to the U.S.
"You don't purposefully pollute your environment because it's doomed anyway."
Fine. Assuming you live in the U.S. just don't come crying to me when you are living in a country which is completely bankrupt, where there are NO jobs, and where if you don't get foreign aid shipments from China you starve. Oh and by the way climate change will continue unabated while you are broke and starving. I am 100% behimd cap and trade. as long as you slap tarrifs on imports from China and India until they adopt it too. Simple solution, problem solved.
The U.S. is heading for third world status because we simply can't continue to drive all our jobs offshore, whether they be manufacturing or IT, import everything we consume through Walmart and run one and two trillion dollar current account deficits every year. Only reason we've gotten away with it this long is the dollar is still the world's reserve currency. If it weren't for that we would be borrowing money from the IMF to stay afloat like every other bankrupt country in the world. Due to our economic fiasco of the last year its unlikely the dollar will stay the reserve currency much longer. If the rest of the world dumps the dollar, or dollar hyperinflation sets in, you will be living in a bankrupt country.
If you can't put food on the table your priority on environmentalism will change fast, trust me. I tend to lean somewhat to pro environmentalism but my dad was born in the depression and knows what its like to starve. He hates environmentalists because to him most of them are spoiled rotten, don't work for a living and are living off the wealth their ancestors generated for them. None of them have ever had to live through really hard times. Environmentalists kill jobs and companies to save the environment with total disregard of the economic consequences. They can get away with it only because they are living off the vast wealth their ancestors created for them during the U.S. industrial boom when it polluted with abandon. That wealth is disappearing fast. When its gone all the environmentalists are in for a rude awakening when their bank accounts are empty, they have no jobs or a way to make money, and no food on the table. I hope they can survive in a barter economy. If you are an environmentalist living in a city... good luck.
We live in a globally competitive world, like it or not. The U.S. has, across a range of economic issues, committed unilateral economic disarmament, this is just another instance. We threw our markets wide open to free trade, but look the other way while China, India, Japan and Korea erect massive barriers to U.S. companies and imports. The Chinese manipulate their currency to insure we aren't competitive. When we took all the trade barriers down it became nearly impossible for U.S. workers to compete against Chinese workers making $100 a month, with no health insurance, no workmans'comp, in factories with no OSHA or EPA. Cap and trade is just the next step in economic capitulation to China and India.
Environmental protection is important, China pays a steep price for its life threatening pollution. A lot of the pollution in the U.S. in the 20th century was pure stupidity in the long run but greedy people trying to make a buck will do it, now its just the Chinese doing it instead of us.
About all I'm saying is the U.S. needs to refrain from further destroying its economy to try save the world, while China and India destroy it anyway and break us economically while they do it.
The only good solution here is to sink money in to a Manhattan project to develop a clean, cheap and abundant energy source like fusion. Our current approaches to green energy, relying on impractical initiatives like Ethanol, wind, solar and electric cars, and tax everything else to make them competitive just really isn't very smart. I hope cap and trade forces development of practical clean energy sources, but its not a given due to the stupidity of this country and especially our government sometimes. Somehow our g
Not sure what makes you think I am... I'm just trying to convey to you that newspapers and journalism are doomed thanks to Craigslist, Google and Ebay but you seem to be in denial of the obvious. I'm not enough of a Luddite to think it can be stopped. I just worry about a world in which we no longer have investigative journalists. We already have too much unbridled corruption in this world. Without journalism at all chances are it will just get worse.
"I'm not sure Google makes money on their search business"
You don't seem to be grasping how the world works which must be why I'm not making any head way with my argument. Google search business IS their ad business. The two are one and the same. Their search business drives their ad business. They have some ad business not search related through Doubleclick but their river of money comes from ads next to their search results.
If you didn't know that explains why you aren't grasping any of the rest of this thread.
"Google may be a giant in the market, and some pretty stiff competition, but, they certainly do not have a monopoly in either the search, or the advertising business."
Google search market share is around 60-70%. Its nearest competitors Yahoo and Microsoft are in the teens. It is a defacto monopoly the same as Microsoft has with Windows.
"I don't see the newspapers clamoring to do much to help Google, either. You are in competing businesses."
Lets see, you want companies who are about to go bankrupt help a company making billions of dollars a year, interesting.
And finally to repeat. Google News DOESN'T help any of the newspapers it aggregates. It drives a little traffic to them but it more than compensate by turning them in to an indistinguishable commodity and it eliminates any loyalty to any particular site among news readers which is deadly to web sites. Google News is cool, I use it all the time, it was an awesome idea in the theoretical sense, but its a simple fact its helping destroy all the newspapers that provide its content along with Craigslist taking all the classified ads. Its kind of a chronic problem that they do things that are cool at an engineering level, but they have a total disregard for the unintended consequences. As long as they have their river of money and are paying their engineers a million bucks for ideas, they will do just about anything, even something EVIL like destroy journalism which is what they are doing along with Craigslist.
I certainly hope it works but I'm wondering how its going to save the worlds climate if China continues to expand its use of coal to generate electricity faster than the entire rest of the world can reduce their output of CO2. Likewise how is it really going to solve our climate problem if, as American's switch to fuel efficient cars, India and China drive to put their billions of people IN TO cars and create cities with clogged freeways in their drive to emulate American stupidity.
If the U.S. and Europe had done this 40-50 years the benefits would have been huge. At this point the U.S. and Western Europe are mostly just cutting back to allow China and India to assume their rightful role, due to their overpopulation, as consumers of most of the world's fossil fuels and producers of most of its pollution.
Cap and trade really only solves our climate problem if they whole world does is. So far China in particular is refusing because they say they are a developing economy and they have the right to pollute and squander energy the same way the U.S. and Europe did during their industrial revolution. They view it as unfair for the west to have gotten away with polluting to build their wealth and now telling them they can't just as they are building their own.
I recall reading an article on cap and trade in Europe, I think in the NY times some time ago. It pointed out that some of its "success" was because many industries, that were major producers of CO2, and which would be hammered by the caps, just moved off shore to Africa, China or anyplace but the EU. In probably resulted in those factories polluting more since they weren't under any pollution constraints at all once they left the EU.
Unfortunately much the same thing will happen in the U.S. for any manufacturing industry that is CO2 heavy. It will just accelerate the flight of manufacturing to China and India where there are NO pollution controls worth mentioning, energy is cheap due to most of it coming from coal, and labor is cheap too. China is trying to build more nuclear and hydro in their defense, and they know they have a problem. But they also HAVE to grow their economy 7-8% a year just to keep their growing population employed. Chances are they will do a major expansion in clean energy AND continue a dramatic expansion in burning coal.
The only solution to the China problem is you have to place tariffs on Chinese exports to inflict the cap and trade on them against their will and then you get in to a global trade war.
Cap and trade is likely to really only work in the U.S. on captive CO2 producers who can't flee to escape the tax, like coal fired power plants, driving and airlines. It will just accelerate the flight of manufacturing and maybe even data centers to places without cap and trade and with cheaper electricity. Only manufacturing that will stay in this country is the manufacturing being government subsidized like our car companies lately.
I appreciate the value of cap and trade in punishing coal fired power plants. They are a horror. But unless this country actually starts a Manhattan project to develop an energy source that is cheap, clean, abundant and renewable, cap and trade is going to have negative economic consequences. If the U.S. could, for example, accelerate the ignition facility and get us workable fusion power SOON that would be a boon to our economy. I fear its blind optimism to think that making "green energy" competitive by making everything else more expensive wont hammer our economy. We started using coal and oil for energy precisely because you need the cheapest possible energy to drive an industrialized economy. The more expensive your energy source is the more of a drag it is on your economy.
I think a lot of people in America are probably of the opinion that wiping out all of those agencies and Washington D.C. would be a major improvement. It would be an initial shock but if you eliminated the massive tax burden Washington D.C. and the defense industrial establishment imposes on this country chances are we would eventually have a much stronger economy.
Doesn't matter whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power, the way they squander money and set policy is retarded. The $700+ Billion squandered on that retarded stimulus plan alone proved that. If you had invested that money wisely in something useful it could have SOLVED some major problems like renewable energy, health care or maybe even education. What we got is $700 billion more in debt and nothing to show for it beyond transient spending. The $700 Billion on TARP to bail out crooked banks and insurance companies and incompetent car companies likewise was retarded.
This "cyber command" is no doubt just an excuse to pump money in to defense contractors and we wont get anything useful back for it. It will spawn a bunch of multiyear software contracts and in a few years they will all be behind schedule, over budget and the software they produce will be complete garbage, like EVERY government software development project for as long as I can remember. The combination of government and contractors, for whatever reason, always produces garbage software. It is a completely failed business model but we keep doing it because its a jobs program for government contractors who have GREAT lobbyists.
I do really cherish the prospect that instead of just spying on all our email, web surfing and phone calls now the NSA will have a charter to actively break in to our computers and intranets and poke around there too.
"Do you have any actual evidence to back this up? I don't either."
It must be impossible for Google News to make money. They don't put any ads on the site, at least I don't see any. Its a free service leeching off newspaper web sites who are paying for all the content Google is leeching. Maybe Google News will monetize it someday with ads but I doubt they care. As long as they have the river of money coming in from their search and ad business they can do stuff like that for free. As long as the newspapers pay all the bills for the content, Google doesn't need to monetize it.
There is this problem with Google, they are extremely anti competitive whether they intend to be or not. They have a river of money from ads and search and they can do EVERYTHING else for free and destroy everyone else in the markets they are doing for free, because no one else has the river of money from ads and search to put food on the table. Google can afford to do Android for free because their Android team is funded out of their ad and search business, and chances are they are going to put extreme pressure on Symbian, WinCE, Opera, etc in the mobile space. Its kind of like what Microsoft did with browsing, they had a river of money from Windows and Office, they poured it in to IE and crushed Netscape. Anti-trust law was supposed to prevent people from abusing monopolies like that but its been so gutted it never does.
"As long as the news story is available for free, the publishers should be happy about this, as finding their story would be like finding a needle in a haystack without services like Google's."
A. As I said, chances of it being available for free for much longer are not good. Newspapers are either going to fail, switch to a paid subscription model, or slowly fire and strangle all their reporters and end up being blogs. The trend for them turning in to mediocre blogs is already pretty prevalent.
B. Google News is the only one getting anything out of aggregation. Google and Google News is the only thing the consumers are aware of. You click on the link, read the article and leave and you are barely conscious of where you were reading it, or how much it cost them to produce the content. I never see the ads or click on anything else on the newspaper site. Google News gives a pretty big preference to New York Times and Washington Post in their news placement and they are both still failing. Google News simply doesn't help any newspapers. It turns them all in to an undistinguished sea of free news, presented to you by..... Google.
C. At least some publishers are not happy about it all. Rupert Murdoch in particular has lambasted Google News for leeching off the content for free it takes newspapers a lot of money to produce. Murdoch does have a huge stake in the online news industry and may well move the Wall Street Journal to a place Google can't leech it.
Needless to say its an anagram of Unix, presumably a play on Un-Unix. Whomever owns the Unix trademark should suit them!!!... Can you sue for anagrams of trademarks? SCO doesn't own the Unix trademark do they, I lost track?
"Okay, so what is your alternative? Pandora's box is already open. There is no going back."
I proposed it elsewhere. Someone like Google or Craigslist, with deep pockets and who actually makes money on Internet advertising rather than just aggregating news needs to hire the best and brightest journalists and turn them loose to ply their trade whether they make money or not.
"I think they will gravitate towards news aggregation"
News aggregation is only working now because there are still large numbers of newspapers publishing online for free. If they switch to pay per view or go out of business the news aggregaters eventually have nothing to aggregate. Google being a leading news aggregater once again suggests Google should be funding journalists. Not sure Craigslist makes enough money to support any journalists but they kind of owe a debt to society for destroying newspapers and journalism.
I seriously doubt news aggregaters are going to pay enough to keep journalists afloat out of their business model. I think they pay some for access to AP and Reuters but I doubt its enough to support healthy journalism. I doubt Google News makes any money now and the only reason it exists is because its leaching off all the news the online newspapers are giving them for free and which is costing them a lot of money to produce. All the online news sources fold so do aggregaters.
I'll take Wikipedia over you. Wikipedia has problems with pages on current events but their history is usually pretty good and it corresponds with everything else I've read about TPAJAX over the years. The CIA agent who planned it wrote a document about it, Clandestine Service History Overthrow Of Premier Mossadeq of Iran: November 1952-August 1953 by Donald Wilber. Like I said Obama recently officially admitted the U.S. staged the coup, though everyone has known it for years.
"a few people at CIA didn't and don't have the power to effect a regime change in a country like Iran"
I think we are arguing over splitting hairs. Of course the CIA worked with a native movement to stage the coup. They always used native movements because they are a clandestine agency. They used the Nortern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban but that was most definitely a CIA war. The role of the U.S. and Britain was much bigger than you are trying to make it sound. Britain started blockading Iranian oil exports as soon as the nationalization occurred and it was strangling the Iranian economy. The blockade alone might have eventually toppled the government.
The CIA gave General Fazlollah Zahed something like $5 million during the coup to fund it. There is a lot of irony that the U.S. and Britain backed Zahed because a few years early the British had him in jail during World War II because he'd tried to install a pro Nazi government in Iran. He was pretty much a Fascist and Nazi protege. Shows you how low their standards were for the new Iranian government that they helped a Nazi stage the coup. All they cared about was the new government sign a new oil deal and give the Western oil companies all of Iran's oil for next to nothing. Ironically the British lost their monopoly on Iranian oil because the new oil deal gave cuts to the U.S. and the Dutch. Actually a former Nazi was a pretty good fit for a U.S. coup in the 1950's because they could count on a Nazi to crush the communists in Iran. Crushing the Tudeh, the Iranian communist party was the other goal of the CIA coup.
"You deserve to get paid for the things you create that people find valuable enough to pay you for it."
Simply doesn't work in the Internet era. Newspapers only used to work when their wasn't so much competition, and so many sources, and especially because they had a lock on classified ads. Craigslist and EBay destroyed the only business model they had that worked.
People just aren't going to pay for news writing, even if its really good. There are too many free sources, which even if they suck, will beat out any high quality writer who tries to charge. Only place you will pull it off is in business and financial news, and maybe sports. I can see the Wall Street Journal doing it because enough people use what they write to make money that they will pay for it.
Don't think Woodward and Bernstein would have made a nickel if they'd broke Watergate on the web. What they did was priceless because they exposed a completely crooked government and drove it out of power. The irony is classified ads probably paid for them to do it. Same thing happens in the future the crooked government may well get away with it, unless some blogger gets lucky.
Not sure if you are trolling or not. If you are.... good one.... and you must really hate journalists. If you are serious I'm pretty sure only journalists who completely suck are going to appreciate you suggesting that they should turn in their careers to write marketing shlock. That is seriously.... cold.
Another key point, which you alluded to, is investigative journalism takes lawyers, not just for when people suit you for libel but when the powers that be retaliate against you and put you in jail on trumped up charges or for not revealing your sources. You need someone good who is not in jail to work on getting you out. The New York Times has had to mount one major legal defense after another during the Bush administration. Only one I wish they hadn't is if they should have left Judith Miller in jail for ScooterGate because that's where she belongs. Her WMD/Iraq reporting was criminal.
I seriously dread the day when our journalists are all gone and all we have are bloggers. I kind of wish someone with deep pockets like Google would hire all the good ones and put them in a well funded play pen where they could ply their trade without any pressure from execs, advertisers and editors shilling for execs and advertisers, and let them just generate page hits, where they make money or not.
To be honest we've been worrying about SCO for years now, "the sky is falling" worrying, a couple front page/. articles a month kind of worrying, and to date SCO has won basically nothing, and have done very little actual harm excepting that caused by people worrying about and being scared by them enough to do stupid things they didn't need to do. They've run up some legal bills but they were mostly paid by companies that could afford them like IBM and Novell, and those big companies usually have lawyers sitting around spoiling for a fight anyway.
I'm making a resolution to absolutely stop caring about SCO until they actually win something in a courtroom or do ANYTHING which actually proves to be a real and substantive threat. Everyone constantly worrying about them has done more damage than if we had just yawned, and said "move along, nothing to see here".
"This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts."
Well I would tend to agree subsidizing the mostly corporatized newspaper empires is a little nuts.
On the other hand I would REALLY like for someone to figure out a way for journalism to be a viable career, and to insure there are substantial numbers of professional investigative journalists digging up stories in the world precisely because it make people sweat who don't wan those stories dug up. They should absolutely all stopping killing trees to print their news, put it all online, and make sure there is a good way to make it available to commuters, but they also need to get paid and right putting it on line for free mostly means they don't make anything because Google is the only one making money on online ads it seems.
I love online news sites, I appreciate what they do, but I like everyone else am too cheap to pay them if I can get their stuff for free. If I can't get their stuff for free I wont go to their site. Google in particular is the one making huge amount of money exploiting all their news gathering and should be figuring out a way to share some of their wealth to keep deserving professional journalists employed, and ideally lettting all the hacks and newspaper execs starve.
It is true there have been massive failures on the part of professional journalists, like Judith Miller and her propaganda campaign for the Bush administration on WMD's used to perpetrate the war in Iraq. Oh hell.... professional journalists failed en masse during the first six years of the Bush regime. But I blame that mostly on 9/11 and an American public that got seduced in to picking flag waving over truth and the press pandered to what the people wanted. Same thing happened after Pearl Harbor and "Remeber the Maine" in 1898.
Its also true the current corporate empires that own most media outlets and employ most professional journalist are scum, like most greedy executives, and are causing many of the problems as you suggest.
But.... I also don't want to see a world where what passes for journalism degenerates in to a bunch of bloggers sitting around regurgitating the crap they found surfing the web, mixed with a heavy dose of opinion and rumor.......... kind of like I'm doing here. I would actually like to see a restoration of investigative journalists who go out and actually dig up the truth, make people uncomfortable who deserve to be uncomfortable, and put it on the web instead of on dead tress.
They should get paid for it, and if they are good at it get paid well.
Exactly right. The U.S. tries to actively intervene in any way in this the Islamists will immediately seize on it that the U.S. is trying to overthrow the Iranian government just like they did in 1953. Most of the young people in the streets today probably barely remember the Shah but most older Iranians still do, still hate him, still hate the U.S. for putting him in power. If the U.S. gets involved on the side of the protestors Iranian nationalists will side with the Iranian government just because they hate the U.S. and the Shah's memory so much.
The Shah's son, former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, was moronic enough to put out a statement a few days ago supporting the protesters which was probably the dumbest thing imaginable. The last thing the protesters need, and probably want, is for it to look like the Shah's son and the U.S. are sitting outside Iran waiting to capitalize on the current anarchy to overthrow another Iranian government and install another Shah in power. Its improbable but the mere appearance of the Shah's son making public statements supporting the protests is an instant propaganda coup for the Islamic regime in Iran.
No, Operation AJAX, is a well documented CIA operation to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953. I included the Wikipedia link which you apparently didn't read. It was initiated by American and British intelligence agencies when Mossadeq nationalized British oil fields in Iran. In a recent speech by Obama, maybe the one in Cairo, he for the first time officially acknowledged that the U.S. overthrew the Iranian government in 1953. The "loyal factions of the Iranian Military" you cite were lead by General Fazlollah Zahedi who was working with/for the CIA who were running the coup.
"were the Q'oran thumping whackjobs who opposed or replaced him any better"
I never said or implied any such thing. The Islamists who overthrew the Shah are just as bad if not worse. Only difference is one is pro western and the other is Islamic so the repression has a different flavor. The Basij and Revolutionary Guards are just as bad if not worse than SAVAK. The one redeeming quality of the Islamic revolution, in the eyes of Iranian nationalists, is they aren't stooges of the American government, the Shah was. A lot of Iranians still hate America for putting the Shah in power.
You should read the link I put in my original article on Mohammed Mosaddeq. He was a secular Socialist, not an Islamist, moderate, very popular, and I'm sure women would have faired as well or better under his government than the Shah. The fatal mistake he made is he screwed British oil companies, by taking back control of Iran's oil fields, and you didn't screw with British and American oil companies in the 1950's.
The point I was making which was apparently completely lost on you is both the Shah, and the current Islamic regime are terrible. The best chance Iran had for a good government was Mossadeq. He probably wasn't perfect but the U.S. and Britian overthrew him, deprived Iran of a chance at a moderate regime and plunged Iran in to 56 years of brutal authoritarian rule which continues today, half under the Shah and half under the current Islamic Regime.
The U.S. did the same thing all over the world throughout the 20tj century and is still doing it today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately the U.S. consistently abused its power to install one repressive dictator after another as long at they were:
A. pro business and let U.S. companies profitably exploit their resources whether they be oil or bananas (the U.S. installing dictators in Central America to protect the plantations of United Fruit is where the term Banana Republic comes from.
B. anti worker and labor union because places like United Fruit wanted their labor as cheap and exploitable as possible, which meant crushing unions
Exactly right. The U.S. and Britain started this whole fiasco in 1953 by meddling in Iran's affairs and overthrowing Mohammed Mosaddeq in Operation AJAX. They installed the Shah, a ruthless dictator with a security apparatus as bad or worse than the current Iran Regime, SAVAK. The Iranian people hated the Shah so much they turned to the Islamists in the 1978/1979 Iranian revolution to overthrew him, and replaced the devil they knew with the devil they have now. Mossaddeq nationalized British run oil fields in Iran and the U.S. and Britain over thew him to regain control of the oil. It was one of the early and most vivid proofs that yes in fact the U.S. and Britain will do just about anything to control oil fields including coups and wars. All things considered if Mossaddeq had been left in power Iranian would have been a lot better and happier place.
Anyone with the slightest sense of history realizes the U.S. and Britain need to stay completely out of this because their involvement will just give the current regime a potent propaganda tool to say the protests are a western imperialist instigated counter revolution to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Its bad enough things like Twitter and Facebook are U.S. based.
LOL, well that suspicion certainly had crossed my mind. I sure hope its not the truth because it reaffirms everything the right says about the Post, and about the undeserved honeymoon the "Liberal" media is giving Obama.
I give Obama some credit for not being a liberal ideologue the right painted him to be, but there are a lot of issues where he really has turned out to be Bush Lite and we needed a lot cleaner break from Cheney Inc. than he's given us. His failure to stop warrantless wire tapping in particular has dropped him a few notches in my eyes though it was obvious from his Senate votes that was coming. That brain dead stimulus package he signed was probably the worst. If they had spent that money intelligently they could have solve our energy problems, and maybe health care and education too, instead they added a trillion to our national debt and we are getting nothing out of it. If nothing else hand out coupons for appliances and stuff like the Chinese, at least their stimulus seems to be actually working.
Well since I've never lived anywhere near D.C., which is something I am very happy about, I didn't really start reading it until their online version took off. I did like Froomkin's stuff even though he was often just aggregating snippets from around the web to make his point. I liked Broder and even Ignatius for old school, though I take Ignatius with a heavy dose of salt. At this point there aren't any of their other editorialists I go out of my way to read. It scares me a little but I'm mostly just reading the New York Times lately, some New Yorker, some Counterpunch for left field stuff, occasionally Christian Science Monitor and like everyone else a lot of Google News.
I'd like to balance it out with something conservative but haven't found anything with substance worth the time, I'm trying National Review but I don't think its what it was under Buckley. Anyone know a good conservative online news source, that has substance and isn't just a bunch of wingnuts sawing the same horses they've been sawing since Reagan... like Fox?
... but last week they fired Daniel Froomkin who was one of the more fearless critics of the power that be. He was pretty merciless to the Bush administration across a range of issues including torture. Then to show he is a class act he was starting to be a pretty merciless critic of the Obama administration too. I think he was having some kind of spat with the Post's resident right wingnut... Krauthammer but I would be interested if anyone knows the dirt on why exactly he was fired. To fire Froomkin and keep Krauthammer has dramatically diminished my opinion of the Post and I am not reading it at all lately.
Even prior to firing Froomkin my impression is the quality of their editorials, and original news reporting in general, has been in steep decline lately.
I think the Iranian revolution you must be referring to was in 1978/1979.
"then send them almost naked and unarmed into a minefield to clear a path for soldiers."
Many of these "children" were members of the Basij. Its a little simplistic to portray the people who join the Basij as not know what they were doing. They new about as well as anyone who joins a fanatical, fundamentalist organization, whether it be the Basij or the Taliban. Ahmandinejad came out of the Basij too. Its a little misleading to lay the misuse of martyrdom on just the current Iranian regime. Martrydom is an integral part of Islam and a number of other religions and social movements. It was integral to Japanese culture as well. The same thing happens many other places including the 9/11 hijackers and human wave attacks by the Japanese in World War II. I think I would blame the ability of organized religions to manipulate people in to doing really stupid things, and that problem is not specific to Iran, Iran's current regime, nor is it specific to Islam. America has used religion throughout its history to encourage people to get killed in wars too.
I'm not entirely sure of the dates but I think Moussavi, the current champion of democracy and freedom in Iran today was, was in the 1980's, the Prime Minister of the Iran during part of the Iran Iraq war. I'm not positive but there is a pretty fair chance he was complicit in the human wave attacks as much as the rest of the Iranian regime you are railing against.
The Iranian human wave attacks really aren't much different than Pickett's charge at Gettysberg and pretty much every offensive waged in World War I by the French, Germans, British, Russians and Americans. The death toll in World War I far surpassed 500 thousand. They killed that many young men in a few days. In World War I the solders might have been slightly older, and packing rifles, but they were slaughtered in exactly the same way by machine guns, artillery and mustard gas and the fact the were carrying rifles was usually pretty irrelevant. Most of them had been told by their ministers and rabbi's that heaven awaited if they didn't make it, which most of them didn't. Its a shameless ploy of most nation states and organized religions to use the promise of an after life to get soldiers to throw away the life they have in wars.
The Iranian human wave attacks certainly were brutal but you are also somewhat over the top in how you are using it for propaganda purposes against the current regime. Iran was fighting a war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Iraq was getting a LOT of military aid from the U.S. and Britain in particular while Iran was mostly being embargoed. Iraq had vastly superior weaponry as a result and the west was also encouraging Saddam to use chemical weapons against the Iranians. One of Iran's few assets is it had more people, so use of human wave attacks may be the only thing that kept them from losing the war against Iraq. Pretty much all they did was sacrifice poorly trained, poorly equipped soldiers to clear the way for their experienced soldiers, it was brutal, but they were desperate, it did work, it isn't the first time it was done nor was it the last. All war is brutal, nit picking the details like you are doing for propaganda purposes is pretty transparent and shameless. The Allies intentionally killed millions of civilians, including women and children, in Germany and Japan through strategic bombing and no one seems to bat an eye about that, and in a lot of ways that was much worse.
Probably just as bad as the Iranian human waves was for the U.S. and Britain to arm Saddam, encourage him to attack his neighbors(Iran) and encourage him to use weapons of mass destruction against them one decade and then wage two wars against him in each of the next two decades for attacking his neighbors(this time Kuwait) and using WMD's this time against the Kurds. It was the height of hypocrisy. The U.S. and Britain were just goading Arabs in to killing each other to gain their strategic goals, mostly control of Middle Eastern oil.
"For example, the author criticizes KDE for the audacity of thinking about implementing social networking features into the desktop."
Actually as far as I'm concerned the absolute last thing I want anyone to be implementing in my desktop is "social networking". Social networking should be an application that people who want to use social networking should run from the desktop or in a browser but in no way, shape or form should it be "integrated" in to my desktop. That would be a case of a developer making a choice for me he shouldn't be making.
I've used Linux as my primary desktop for more than ten years and KDE for many of those, I mostly loved KDE 3.x. It appears there are probably myriad reason for what happened in KDE 4.x, I blame Trolltech and Qt 4.x for forcing a major rewrite in particular, but all I can say is whatever happened it turned my stomach and helped finish me with Linux on the desktop. KDE 4.0 was to Linux what Vista was to Windows for me.
Certainly I made the foolish mistake of installing KDE while it was half assed and half baked, you know KDE 4.0, which wasn't supposed to be released to the public until it was ready.... which it wasn't, it wasn't even close. Maybe it sucks less now. KDE 4.0 and years of disgust with audio on Linux were the two driving reasons for me switching to a Mac for my desktop, and I've been way happy ever since. Its really nice to just have stuff that works and works consistently. I'm willing to pay extra to have Apple develop and test apps that work, and follow consistent UI guidelines. The OS X calendar kind of sucks, I don't exactly like the shell or cut and paste, and I could live without the Mac document model but damn its worth it to just have audio that always works, GUI conventions, and a really nice desktop standard and a really good set of apps.
After ten years of drinking the open source Kool-Aid I discovered its actually not so bad to pay people to develop software if they do a really good job of pandering to my needs and desires. The open source model does an awesome job of developing a kernel, a server, a software development platform and some apps like Firefox. Unfortunately when it comes to a modern, consistent, multimedia desktop I would have to say, so far, Linux is a fail. What's worse, just like with Linux audio, the Linux community seems to be completely lacking in the introspection or will to turn it around. Step 1 is to accept that there is a problem with the Linux desktop, and the crux of the problem is you have somewhere between two and a hundred different Linux desktops to choose from. What are the odds Apple would ship OS X with ten, or even two completely different desktops and sets of desktop apps. Zero, it would be a disaster.
"is any cell phone securely taped to a Smith & Wesson."
The 1978/1979 Iranian revolution that put the current regime in power succeeded largely because on September 8, 1978... Black Friday... the Shah's security service openly shot and killed dozens of unarmed demonstrators. Not because armed protesters shot it out with the security services.
A key factor in India's drive to independence was the massacre by British troops of unarmed protestors at Jallianwala not because Indians defeated the British military in armed conflict.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Basij number in the millions and they are well trained to be armed thugs if the need arises. I'm pretty sure most of the Iranian protesters are young urban yuppies with a limited grasp of armed conflict. If they were to try to shoot it out with the Iranian secuirty apparatus they would probably lose and lose badly and they would also lose the moral high ground.
Gandhi's methods will almost certainly serve them better than yours, though it may well mean some brave Iranian kids will have to get them selves killed, tortured or imprisoned in the process, and they will have to have some serious patience and staying power in the face of a brutal backlash from the state.
I sure hope Moussavi and Rafsanjani are worth the price the Green movement might have to pay for them to win power. Moussavi is a former prime minister from the early years of the Revolution, during a time when the clerics killed thousands of political prisoners. The Ayatollahs wouldn't have let him run in the first place if he were not part of the current regime, he apparently just went rogue on them. Its not certain he will be a bastion of democracy, freedom and reform if he gains power unless he's changed a lot over the last 20 years.
"What we ought to be looking at is beginning construction of a moon base and the development of the infrastructure to perform longhaul transport back and forth from the Earth to the Moon."
NASA has had a problem since Apollo of plucking a goal out of the air to use as a justification to keep the manned space program alive, without actually setting a goal that really makes sense and is worth doing. We need to figure out a reason or reasons to have a base on the moon, ideally some reasons with some benefits that will justify the massive expenditure of resources. Without that it will end up exactly like Apollo and ISS. We will spend huge amounts of money and when we finally get there everyone will be asking why did we spend all this money and what do we do now that we are here just like Apollo and ISS. Luckily for Apollo there were a lot of technology spin offs but I wouldn't count on that being the case the second time around since. There is a lot more reusing existing technology while under Apollo there was a necessity for some huge breakthroughs or it wouldn't have been possible.
If you could mine helium-3 on the moon and solve our energy crisis that would be one such activity that would justify a lunar base but I don't think we have the way to use helium-3 to produced energy yet. If you could mine the moon for materials you need to do other things in space that might be interesting. Astronomy on the moon would be cool, but I don't think its going to win broad acceptance as justifying the huge price tag with the general public.
Fact is the moon is pretty nasty place, severe temperatures, nasty dust that gets in to everything, hard vacuum, and I'm not sure its really that great place to put a base. You have this kind of scary possibility a moon base would end up being a very expensive and kind of useless ISS Part two.
Most of the proposals for a moon base seem to be focused on it as just a place to practice that is close to Earth with the real the goal being a trip to Mars. The moon being just for practice isn't an entirely compelling goal either.
Slashdot Mirror
"Opponents of this bill hate capitalism, pure and simple."
Not true. I only hate this bill because its creating an artificial market. The cap and trade system ONLY works if its a global market, this is. This bill is creating a market where American companies have to pay for a commodity while their competitors in China and India do not. It instantly places U.S. companies at an even greater disadvantage than they already are. They already have massive problems due to labor rates, currency manipulations, health insurance costs, OSHA, workmen's comp, payroll taxes, etc., this is just one more straw on the camel's back.
When the EU instituted cap and trade many factories that were CO2 expensive just moved off shore to Africa and China and polluted even more once they left the EU. Cap and trade was often a net loss for the environment. Cap and trade only works if the entire world is under the same market, and they aren't. China has already eclipsed the U.S. in pollution and coal burning and its rate of growth in pollution will more than offset any reduction in the U.S. Cap and trade will just accelerate pollution in China as more U.S. manufacturing migrates there to escape rising energy costs in the U.S. due to this.
My opposition to cap and trade would be instantly solved if this bill included tariffs on imports from countries that don't institute cap and trade. Chances of that are about zero because every big multinational does all their manufacturing in China now and wont let their lobbyists, let Congress slap tarifs on their goods when they come in to the U.S.
"You don't purposefully pollute your environment because it's doomed anyway."
Fine. Assuming you live in the U.S. just don't come crying to me when you are living in a country which is completely bankrupt, where there are NO jobs, and where if you don't get foreign aid shipments from China you starve. Oh and by the way climate change will continue unabated while you are broke and starving. I am 100% behimd cap and trade. as long as you slap tarrifs on imports from China and India until they adopt it too. Simple solution, problem solved.
The U.S. is heading for third world status because we simply can't continue to drive all our jobs offshore, whether they be manufacturing or IT, import everything we consume through Walmart and run one and two trillion dollar current account deficits every year. Only reason we've gotten away with it this long is the dollar is still the world's reserve currency. If it weren't for that we would be borrowing money from the IMF to stay afloat like every other bankrupt country in the world. Due to our economic fiasco of the last year its unlikely the dollar will stay the reserve currency much longer. If the rest of the world dumps the dollar, or dollar hyperinflation sets in, you will be living in a bankrupt country.
If you can't put food on the table your priority on environmentalism will change fast, trust me. I tend to lean somewhat to pro environmentalism but my dad was born in the depression and knows what its like to starve. He hates environmentalists because to him most of them are spoiled rotten, don't work for a living and are living off the wealth their ancestors generated for them. None of them have ever had to live through really hard times. Environmentalists kill jobs and companies to save the environment with total disregard of the economic consequences. They can get away with it only because they are living off the vast wealth their ancestors created for them during the U.S. industrial boom when it polluted with abandon. That wealth is disappearing fast. When its gone all the environmentalists are in for a rude awakening when their bank accounts are empty, they have no jobs or a way to make money, and no food on the table. I hope they can survive in a barter economy. If you are an environmentalist living in a city... good luck.
We live in a globally competitive world, like it or not. The U.S. has, across a range of economic issues, committed unilateral economic disarmament, this is just another instance. We threw our markets wide open to free trade, but look the other way while China, India, Japan and Korea erect massive barriers to U.S. companies and imports. The Chinese manipulate their currency to insure we aren't competitive. When we took all the trade barriers down it became nearly impossible for U.S. workers to compete against Chinese workers making $100 a month, with no health insurance, no workmans'comp, in factories with no OSHA or EPA. Cap and trade is just the next step in economic capitulation to China and India.
Environmental protection is important, China pays a steep price for its life threatening pollution. A lot of the pollution in the U.S. in the 20th century was pure stupidity in the long run but greedy people trying to make a buck will do it, now its just the Chinese doing it instead of us.
About all I'm saying is the U.S. needs to refrain from further destroying its economy to try save the world, while China and India destroy it anyway and break us economically while they do it.
The only good solution here is to sink money in to a Manhattan project to develop a clean, cheap and abundant energy source like fusion. Our current approaches to green energy, relying on impractical initiatives like Ethanol, wind, solar and electric cars, and tax everything else to make them competitive just really isn't very smart. I hope cap and trade forces development of practical clean energy sources, but its not a given due to the stupidity of this country and especially our government sometimes. Somehow our g
"I hope I haven't offended you personally"
Not sure what makes you think I am... I'm just trying to convey to you that newspapers and journalism are doomed thanks to Craigslist, Google and Ebay but you seem to be in denial of the obvious. I'm not enough of a Luddite to think it can be stopped. I just worry about a world in which we no longer have investigative journalists. We already have too much unbridled corruption in this world. Without journalism at all chances are it will just get worse.
"I'm not sure Google makes money on their search business"
You don't seem to be grasping how the world works which must be why I'm not making any head way with my argument. Google search business IS their ad business. The two are one and the same. Their search business drives their ad business. They have some ad business not search related through Doubleclick but their river of money comes from ads next to their search results.
If you didn't know that explains why you aren't grasping any of the rest of this thread.
"Google may be a giant in the market, and some pretty stiff competition, but, they certainly do not have a monopoly in either the search, or the advertising business."
Google search market share is around 60-70%. Its nearest competitors Yahoo and Microsoft are in the teens. It is a defacto monopoly the same as Microsoft has with Windows.
"I don't see the newspapers clamoring to do much to help Google, either. You are in competing businesses."
Lets see, you want companies who are about to go bankrupt help a company making billions of dollars a year, interesting.
And finally to repeat. Google News DOESN'T help any of the newspapers it aggregates. It drives a little traffic to them but it more than compensate by turning them in to an indistinguishable commodity and it eliminates any loyalty to any particular site among news readers which is deadly to web sites. Google News is cool, I use it all the time, it was an awesome idea in the theoretical sense, but its a simple fact its helping destroy all the newspapers that provide its content along with Craigslist taking all the classified ads. Its kind of a chronic problem that they do things that are cool at an engineering level, but they have a total disregard for the unintended consequences. As long as they have their river of money and are paying their engineers a million bucks for ideas, they will do just about anything, even something EVIL like destroy journalism which is what they are doing along with Craigslist.
I certainly hope it works but I'm wondering how its going to save the worlds climate if China continues to expand its use of coal to generate electricity faster than the entire rest of the world can reduce their output of CO2. Likewise how is it really going to solve our climate problem if, as American's switch to fuel efficient cars, India and China drive to put their billions of people IN TO cars and create cities with clogged freeways in their drive to emulate American stupidity.
If the U.S. and Europe had done this 40-50 years the benefits would have been huge. At this point the U.S. and Western Europe are mostly just cutting back to allow China and India to assume their rightful role, due to their overpopulation, as consumers of most of the world's fossil fuels and producers of most of its pollution.
Cap and trade really only solves our climate problem if they whole world does is. So far China in particular is refusing because they say they are a developing economy and they have the right to pollute and squander energy the same way the U.S. and Europe did during their industrial revolution. They view it as unfair for the west to have gotten away with polluting to build their wealth and now telling them they can't just as they are building their own.
I recall reading an article on cap and trade in Europe, I think in the NY times some time ago. It pointed out that some of its "success" was because many industries, that were major producers of CO2, and which would be hammered by the caps, just moved off shore to Africa, China or anyplace but the EU. In probably resulted in those factories polluting more since they weren't under any pollution constraints at all once they left the EU.
Unfortunately much the same thing will happen in the U.S. for any manufacturing industry that is CO2 heavy. It will just accelerate the flight of manufacturing to China and India where there are NO pollution controls worth mentioning, energy is cheap due to most of it coming from coal, and labor is cheap too. China is trying to build more nuclear and hydro in their defense, and they know they have a problem. But they also HAVE to grow their economy 7-8% a year just to keep their growing population employed. Chances are they will do a major expansion in clean energy AND continue a dramatic expansion in burning coal.
The only solution to the China problem is you have to place tariffs on Chinese exports to inflict the cap and trade on them against their will and then you get in to a global trade war.
Cap and trade is likely to really only work in the U.S. on captive CO2 producers who can't flee to escape the tax, like coal fired power plants, driving and airlines. It will just accelerate the flight of manufacturing and maybe even data centers to places without cap and trade and with cheaper electricity. Only manufacturing that will stay in this country is the manufacturing being government subsidized like our car companies lately.
I appreciate the value of cap and trade in punishing coal fired power plants. They are a horror. But unless this country actually starts a Manhattan project to develop an energy source that is cheap, clean, abundant and renewable, cap and trade is going to have negative economic consequences. If the U.S. could, for example, accelerate the ignition facility and get us workable fusion power SOON that would be a boon to our economy. I fear its blind optimism to think that making "green energy" competitive by making everything else more expensive wont hammer our economy. We started using coal and oil for energy precisely because you need the cheapest possible energy to drive an industrialized economy. The more expensive your energy source is the more of a drag it is on your economy.
I think a lot of people in America are probably of the opinion that wiping out all of those agencies and Washington D.C. would be a major improvement. It would be an initial shock but if you eliminated the massive tax burden Washington D.C. and the defense industrial establishment imposes on this country chances are we would eventually have a much stronger economy.
Doesn't matter whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power, the way they squander money and set policy is retarded. The $700+ Billion squandered on that retarded stimulus plan alone proved that. If you had invested that money wisely in something useful it could have SOLVED some major problems like renewable energy, health care or maybe even education. What we got is $700 billion more in debt and nothing to show for it beyond transient spending. The $700 Billion on TARP to bail out crooked banks and insurance companies and incompetent car companies likewise was retarded.
This "cyber command" is no doubt just an excuse to pump money in to defense contractors and we wont get anything useful back for it. It will spawn a bunch of multiyear software contracts and in a few years they will all be behind schedule, over budget and the software they produce will be complete garbage, like EVERY government software development project for as long as I can remember. The combination of government and contractors, for whatever reason, always produces garbage software. It is a completely failed business model but we keep doing it because its a jobs program for government contractors who have GREAT lobbyists.
I do really cherish the prospect that instead of just spying on all our email, web surfing and phone calls now the NSA will have a charter to actively break in to our computers and intranets and poke around there too.
"Do you have any actual evidence to back this up? I don't either."
It must be impossible for Google News to make money. They don't put any ads on the site, at least I don't see any. Its a free service leeching off newspaper web sites who are paying for all the content Google is leeching. Maybe Google News will monetize it someday with ads but I doubt they care. As long as they have the river of money coming in from their search and ad business they can do stuff like that for free. As long as the newspapers pay all the bills for the content, Google doesn't need to monetize it.
There is this problem with Google, they are extremely anti competitive whether they intend to be or not. They have a river of money from ads and search and they can do EVERYTHING else for free and destroy everyone else in the markets they are doing for free, because no one else has the river of money from ads and search to put food on the table. Google can afford to do Android for free because their Android team is funded out of their ad and search business, and chances are they are going to put extreme pressure on Symbian, WinCE, Opera, etc in the mobile space. Its kind of like what Microsoft did with browsing, they had a river of money from Windows and Office, they poured it in to IE and crushed Netscape. Anti-trust law was supposed to prevent people from abusing monopolies like that but its been so gutted it never does.
"As long as the news story is available for free, the publishers should be happy about this, as finding their story would be like finding a needle in a haystack without services like Google's."
A. As I said, chances of it being available for free for much longer are not good. Newspapers are either going to fail, switch to a paid subscription model, or slowly fire and strangle all their reporters and end up being blogs. The trend for them turning in to mediocre blogs is already pretty prevalent.
B. Google News is the only one getting anything out of aggregation. Google and Google News is the only thing the consumers are aware of. You click on the link, read the article and leave and you are barely conscious of where you were reading it, or how much it cost them to produce the content. I never see the ads or click on anything else on the newspaper site. Google News gives a pretty big preference to New York Times and Washington Post in their news placement and they are both still failing. Google News simply doesn't help any newspapers. It turns them all in to an undistinguished sea of free news, presented to you by..... Google.
C. At least some publishers are not happy about it all. Rupert Murdoch in particular has lambasted Google News for leeching off the content for free it takes newspapers a lot of money to produce. Murdoch does have a huge stake in the online news industry and may well move the Wall Street Journal to a place Google can't leech it.
Needless to say its an anagram of Unix, presumably a play on Un-Unix. Whomever owns the Unix trademark should suit them!!! ... Can you sue for anagrams of trademarks? SCO doesn't own the Unix trademark do they, I lost track?
"Okay, so what is your alternative? Pandora's box is already open. There is no going back."
I proposed it elsewhere. Someone like Google or Craigslist, with deep pockets and who actually makes money on Internet advertising rather than just aggregating news needs to hire the best and brightest journalists and turn them loose to ply their trade whether they make money or not.
"I think they will gravitate towards news aggregation"
News aggregation is only working now because there are still large numbers of newspapers publishing online for free. If they switch to pay per view or go out of business the news aggregaters eventually have nothing to aggregate. Google being a leading news aggregater once again suggests Google should be funding journalists. Not sure Craigslist makes enough money to support any journalists but they kind of owe a debt to society for destroying newspapers and journalism.
I seriously doubt news aggregaters are going to pay enough to keep journalists afloat out of their business model. I think they pay some for access to AP and Reuters but I doubt its enough to support healthy journalism. I doubt Google News makes any money now and the only reason it exists is because its leaching off all the news the online newspapers are giving them for free and which is costing them a lot of money to produce. All the online news sources fold so do aggregaters.
"but you mistakenly believe a wikipedia entry"
I'll take Wikipedia over you. Wikipedia has problems with pages on current events but their history is usually pretty good and it corresponds with everything else I've read about TPAJAX over the years. The CIA agent who planned it wrote a document about it, Clandestine Service History Overthrow Of Premier Mossadeq of Iran: November 1952-August 1953 by Donald Wilber. Like I said Obama recently officially admitted the U.S. staged the coup, though everyone has known it for years.
"a few people at CIA didn't and don't have the power to effect a regime change in a country like Iran"
I think we are arguing over splitting hairs. Of course the CIA worked with a native movement to stage the coup. They always used native movements because they are a clandestine agency. They used the Nortern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban but that was most definitely a CIA war. The role of the U.S. and Britain was much bigger than you are trying to make it sound. Britain started blockading Iranian oil exports as soon as the nationalization occurred and it was strangling the Iranian economy. The blockade alone might have eventually toppled the government.
The CIA gave General Fazlollah Zahed something like $5 million during the coup to fund it. There is a lot of irony that the U.S. and Britain backed Zahed because a few years early the British had him in jail during World War II because he'd tried to install a pro Nazi government in Iran. He was pretty much a Fascist and Nazi protege. Shows you how low their standards were for the new Iranian government that they helped a Nazi stage the coup. All they cared about was the new government sign a new oil deal and give the Western oil companies all of Iran's oil for next to nothing. Ironically the British lost their monopoly on Iranian oil because the new oil deal gave cuts to the U.S. and the Dutch. Actually a former Nazi was a pretty good fit for a U.S. coup in the 1950's because they could count on a Nazi to crush the communists in Iran. Crushing the Tudeh, the Iranian communist party was the other goal of the CIA coup.
"You deserve to get paid for the things you create that people find valuable enough to pay you for it."
Simply doesn't work in the Internet era. Newspapers only used to work when their wasn't so much competition, and so many sources, and especially because they had a lock on classified ads. Craigslist and EBay destroyed the only business model they had that worked.
People just aren't going to pay for news writing, even if its really good. There are too many free sources, which even if they suck, will beat out any high quality writer who tries to charge. Only place you will pull it off is in business and financial news, and maybe sports. I can see the Wall Street Journal doing it because enough people use what they write to make money that they will pay for it.
Don't think Woodward and Bernstein would have made a nickel if they'd broke Watergate on the web. What they did was priceless because they exposed a completely crooked government and drove it out of power. The irony is classified ads probably paid for them to do it. Same thing happens in the future the crooked government may well get away with it, unless some blogger gets lucky.
Not sure if you are trolling or not. If you are.... good one.... and you must really hate journalists. If you are serious I'm pretty sure only journalists who completely suck are going to appreciate you suggesting that they should turn in their careers to write marketing shlock. That is seriously.... cold.
"Real journalism takes money."
Another key point, which you alluded to, is investigative journalism takes lawyers, not just for when people suit you for libel but when the powers that be retaliate against you and put you in jail on trumped up charges or for not revealing your sources. You need someone good who is not in jail to work on getting you out. The New York Times has had to mount one major legal defense after another during the Bush administration. Only one I wish they hadn't is if they should have left Judith Miller in jail for ScooterGate because that's where she belongs. Her WMD/Iraq reporting was criminal.
I seriously dread the day when our journalists are all gone and all we have are bloggers. I kind of wish someone with deep pockets like Google would hire all the good ones and put them in a well funded play pen where they could ply their trade without any pressure from execs, advertisers and editors shilling for execs and advertisers, and let them just generate page hits, where they make money or not.
To be honest we've been worrying about SCO for years now, "the sky is falling" worrying, a couple front page /. articles a month kind of worrying, and to date SCO has won basically nothing, and have done very little actual harm excepting that caused by people worrying about and being scared by them enough to do stupid things they didn't need to do. They've run up some legal bills but they were mostly paid by companies that could afford them like IBM and Novell, and those big companies usually have lawyers sitting around spoiling for a fight anyway.
I'm making a resolution to absolutely stop caring about SCO until they actually win something in a courtroom or do ANYTHING which actually proves to be a real and substantive threat. Everyone constantly worrying about them has done more damage than if we had just yawned, and said "move along, nothing to see here".
"This whole "the print media industry needs government help!" crap is making me nuts."
Well I would tend to agree subsidizing the mostly corporatized newspaper empires is a little nuts.
On the other hand I would REALLY like for someone to figure out a way for journalism to be a viable career, and to insure there are substantial numbers of professional investigative journalists digging up stories in the world precisely because it make people sweat who don't wan those stories dug up. They should absolutely all stopping killing trees to print their news, put it all online, and make sure there is a good way to make it available to commuters, but they also need to get paid and right putting it on line for free mostly means they don't make anything because Google is the only one making money on online ads it seems.
I love online news sites, I appreciate what they do, but I like everyone else am too cheap to pay them if I can get their stuff for free. If I can't get their stuff for free I wont go to their site. Google in particular is the one making huge amount of money exploiting all their news gathering and should be figuring out a way to share some of their wealth to keep deserving professional journalists employed, and ideally lettting all the hacks and newspaper execs starve.
It is true there have been massive failures on the part of professional journalists, like Judith Miller and her propaganda campaign for the Bush administration on WMD's used to perpetrate the war in Iraq. Oh hell.... professional journalists failed en masse during the first six years of the Bush regime. But I blame that mostly on 9/11 and an American public that got seduced in to picking flag waving over truth and the press pandered to what the people wanted. Same thing happened after Pearl Harbor and "Remeber the Maine" in 1898.
Its also true the current corporate empires that own most media outlets and employ most professional journalist are scum, like most greedy executives, and are causing many of the problems as you suggest.
But.... I also don't want to see a world where what passes for journalism degenerates in to a bunch of bloggers sitting around regurgitating the crap they found surfing the web, mixed with a heavy dose of opinion and rumor.......... kind of like I'm doing here. I would actually like to see a restoration of investigative journalists who go out and actually dig up the truth, make people uncomfortable who deserve to be uncomfortable, and put it on the web instead of on dead tress.
They should get paid for it, and if they are good at it get paid well.
Exactly right. The U.S. tries to actively intervene in any way in this the Islamists will immediately seize on it that the U.S. is trying to overthrow the Iranian government just like they did in 1953. Most of the young people in the streets today probably barely remember the Shah but most older Iranians still do, still hate him, still hate the U.S. for putting him in power. If the U.S. gets involved on the side of the protestors Iranian nationalists will side with the Iranian government just because they hate the U.S. and the Shah's memory so much.
The Shah's son, former crown prince Reza Pahlavi, was moronic enough to put out a statement a few days ago supporting the protesters which was probably the dumbest thing imaginable. The last thing the protesters need, and probably want, is for it to look like the Shah's son and the U.S. are sitting outside Iran waiting to capitalize on the current anarchy to overthrow another Iranian government and install another Shah in power. Its improbable but the mere appearance of the Shah's son making public statements supporting the protests is an instant propaganda coup for the Islamic regime in Iran.
"you read that in a book somewhere"
No, Operation AJAX, is a well documented CIA operation to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953. I included the Wikipedia link which you apparently didn't read. It was initiated by American and British intelligence agencies when Mossadeq nationalized British oil fields in Iran. In a recent speech by Obama, maybe the one in Cairo, he for the first time officially acknowledged that the U.S. overthrew the Iranian government in 1953. The "loyal factions of the Iranian Military" you cite were lead by General Fazlollah Zahedi who was working with/for the CIA who were running the coup.
"were the Q'oran thumping whackjobs who opposed or replaced him any better"
I never said or implied any such thing. The Islamists who overthrew the Shah are just as bad if not worse. Only difference is one is pro western and the other is Islamic so the repression has a different flavor. The Basij and Revolutionary Guards are just as bad if not worse than SAVAK. The one redeeming quality of the Islamic revolution, in the eyes of Iranian nationalists, is they aren't stooges of the American government, the Shah was. A lot of Iranians still hate America for putting the Shah in power.
You should read the link I put in my original article on Mohammed Mosaddeq. He was a secular Socialist, not an Islamist, moderate, very popular, and I'm sure women would have faired as well or better under his government than the Shah. The fatal mistake he made is he screwed British oil companies, by taking back control of Iran's oil fields, and you didn't screw with British and American oil companies in the 1950's.
The point I was making which was apparently completely lost on you is both the Shah, and the current Islamic regime are terrible. The best chance Iran had for a good government was Mossadeq. He probably wasn't perfect but the U.S. and Britian overthrew him, deprived Iran of a chance at a moderate regime and plunged Iran in to 56 years of brutal authoritarian rule which continues today, half under the Shah and half under the current Islamic Regime.
The U.S. did the same thing all over the world throughout the 20tj century and is still doing it today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately the U.S. consistently abused its power to install one repressive dictator after another as long at they were:
A. pro business and let U.S. companies profitably exploit their resources whether they be oil or bananas (the U.S. installing dictators in Central America to protect the plantations of United Fruit is where the term Banana Republic comes from.
B. anti worker and labor union because places like United Fruit wanted their labor as cheap and exploitable as possible, which meant crushing unions
C. staunchly anti Soviet Union and anti Communist
Exactly right. The U.S. and Britain started this whole fiasco in 1953 by meddling in Iran's affairs and overthrowing Mohammed Mosaddeq in Operation AJAX. They installed the Shah, a ruthless dictator with a security apparatus as bad or worse than the current Iran Regime, SAVAK. The Iranian people hated the Shah so much they turned to the Islamists in the 1978/1979 Iranian revolution to overthrew him, and replaced the devil they knew with the devil they have now. Mossaddeq nationalized British run oil fields in Iran and the U.S. and Britain over thew him to regain control of the oil. It was one of the early and most vivid proofs that yes in fact the U.S. and Britain will do just about anything to control oil fields including coups and wars. All things considered if Mossaddeq had been left in power Iranian would have been a lot better and happier place.
Anyone with the slightest sense of history realizes the U.S. and Britain need to stay completely out of this because their involvement will just give the current regime a potent propaganda tool to say the protests are a western imperialist instigated counter revolution to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Its bad enough things like Twitter and Facebook are U.S. based.
Two words.... "Sarah Palin".
P.S.
This has to be one of the lamest /. submissions of the month.
LOL, well that suspicion certainly had crossed my mind. I sure hope its not the truth because it reaffirms everything the right says about the Post, and about the undeserved honeymoon the "Liberal" media is giving Obama.
I give Obama some credit for not being a liberal ideologue the right painted him to be, but there are a lot of issues where he really has turned out to be Bush Lite and we needed a lot cleaner break from Cheney Inc. than he's given us. His failure to stop warrantless wire tapping in particular has dropped him a few notches in my eyes though it was obvious from his Senate votes that was coming. That brain dead stimulus package he signed was probably the worst. If they had spent that money intelligently they could have solve our energy problems, and maybe health care and education too, instead they added a trillion to our national debt and we are getting nothing out of it. If nothing else hand out coupons for appliances and stuff like the Chinese, at least their stimulus seems to be actually working.
Well since I've never lived anywhere near D.C., which is something I am very happy about, I didn't really start reading it until their online version took off. I did like Froomkin's stuff even though he was often just aggregating snippets from around the web to make his point. I liked Broder and even Ignatius for old school, though I take Ignatius with a heavy dose of salt. At this point there aren't any of their other editorialists I go out of my way to read. It scares me a little but I'm mostly just reading the New York Times lately, some New Yorker, some Counterpunch for left field stuff, occasionally Christian Science Monitor and like everyone else a lot of Google News.
I'd like to balance it out with something conservative but haven't found anything with substance worth the time, I'm trying National Review but I don't think its what it was under Buckley. Anyone know a good conservative online news source, that has substance and isn't just a bunch of wingnuts sawing the same horses they've been sawing since Reagan... like Fox?
... but last week they fired Daniel Froomkin who was one of the more fearless critics of the power that be. He was pretty merciless to the Bush administration across a range of issues including torture. Then to show he is a class act he was starting to be a pretty merciless critic of the Obama administration too. I think he was having some kind of spat with the Post's resident right wingnut ... Krauthammer but I would be interested if anyone knows the dirt on why exactly he was fired. To fire Froomkin and keep Krauthammer has dramatically diminished my opinion of the Post and I am not reading it at all lately.
Even prior to firing Froomkin my impression is the quality of their editorials, and original news reporting in general, has been in steep decline lately.
"specifically the 1972 revolution"
I think the Iranian revolution you must be referring to was in 1978/1979.
"then send them almost naked and unarmed into a minefield to clear a path for soldiers."
Many of these "children" were members of the Basij. Its a little simplistic to portray the people who join the Basij as not know what they were doing. They new about as well as anyone who joins a fanatical, fundamentalist organization, whether it be the Basij or the Taliban. Ahmandinejad came out of the Basij too. Its a little misleading to lay the misuse of martyrdom on just the current Iranian regime. Martrydom is an integral part of Islam and a number of other religions and social movements. It was integral to Japanese culture as well. The same thing happens many other places including the 9/11 hijackers and human wave attacks by the Japanese in World War II. I think I would blame the ability of organized religions to manipulate people in to doing really stupid things, and that problem is not specific to Iran, Iran's current regime, nor is it specific to Islam. America has used religion throughout its history to encourage people to get killed in wars too.
I'm not entirely sure of the dates but I think Moussavi, the current champion of democracy and freedom in Iran today was, was in the 1980's, the Prime Minister of the Iran during part of the Iran Iraq war. I'm not positive but there is a pretty fair chance he was complicit in the human wave attacks as much as the rest of the Iranian regime you are railing against.
The Iranian human wave attacks really aren't much different than Pickett's charge at Gettysberg and pretty much every offensive waged in World War I by the French, Germans, British, Russians and Americans. The death toll in World War I far surpassed 500 thousand. They killed that many young men in a few days. In World War I the solders might have been slightly older, and packing rifles, but they were slaughtered in exactly the same way by machine guns, artillery and mustard gas and the fact the were carrying rifles was usually pretty irrelevant. Most of them had been told by their ministers and rabbi's that heaven awaited if they didn't make it, which most of them didn't. Its a shameless ploy of most nation states and organized religions to use the promise of an after life to get soldiers to throw away the life they have in wars.
The Iranian human wave attacks certainly were brutal but you are also somewhat over the top in how you are using it for propaganda purposes against the current regime. Iran was fighting a war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Iraq was getting a LOT of military aid from the U.S. and Britain in particular while Iran was mostly being embargoed. Iraq had vastly superior weaponry as a result and the west was also encouraging Saddam to use chemical weapons against the Iranians. One of Iran's few assets is it had more people, so use of human wave attacks may be the only thing that kept them from losing the war against Iraq. Pretty much all they did was sacrifice poorly trained, poorly equipped soldiers to clear the way for their experienced soldiers, it was brutal, but they were desperate, it did work, it isn't the first time it was done nor was it the last. All war is brutal, nit picking the details like you are doing for propaganda purposes is pretty transparent and shameless. The Allies intentionally killed millions of civilians, including women and children, in Germany and Japan through strategic bombing and no one seems to bat an eye about that, and in a lot of ways that was much worse.
Probably just as bad as the Iranian human waves was for the U.S. and Britain to arm Saddam, encourage him to attack his neighbors(Iran) and encourage him to use weapons of mass destruction against them one decade and then wage two wars against him in each of the next two decades for attacking his neighbors(this time Kuwait) and using WMD's this time against the Kurds. It was the height of hypocrisy. The U.S. and Britain were just goading Arabs in to killing each other to gain their strategic goals, mostly control of Middle Eastern oil.
"For example, the author criticizes KDE for the audacity of thinking about implementing social networking features into the desktop."
Actually as far as I'm concerned the absolute last thing I want anyone to be implementing in my desktop is "social networking". Social networking should be an application that people who want to use social networking should run from the desktop or in a browser but in no way, shape or form should it be "integrated" in to my desktop. That would be a case of a developer making a choice for me he shouldn't be making.
I've used Linux as my primary desktop for more than ten years and KDE for many of those, I mostly loved KDE 3.x. It appears there are probably myriad reason for what happened in KDE 4.x, I blame Trolltech and Qt 4.x for forcing a major rewrite in particular, but all I can say is whatever happened it turned my stomach and helped finish me with Linux on the desktop. KDE 4.0 was to Linux what Vista was to Windows for me.
Certainly I made the foolish mistake of installing KDE while it was half assed and half baked, you know KDE 4.0, which wasn't supposed to be released to the public until it was ready.... which it wasn't, it wasn't even close. Maybe it sucks less now. KDE 4.0 and years of disgust with audio on Linux were the two driving reasons for me switching to a Mac for my desktop, and I've been way happy ever since. Its really nice to just have stuff that works and works consistently. I'm willing to pay extra to have Apple develop and test apps that work, and follow consistent UI guidelines. The OS X calendar kind of sucks, I don't exactly like the shell or cut and paste, and I could live without the Mac document model but damn its worth it to just have audio that always works, GUI conventions, and a really nice desktop standard and a really good set of apps.
After ten years of drinking the open source Kool-Aid I discovered its actually not so bad to pay people to develop software if they do a really good job of pandering to my needs and desires. The open source model does an awesome job of developing a kernel, a server, a software development platform and some apps like Firefox. Unfortunately when it comes to a modern, consistent, multimedia desktop I would have to say, so far, Linux is a fail. What's worse, just like with Linux audio, the Linux community seems to be completely lacking in the introspection or will to turn it around. Step 1 is to accept that there is a problem with the Linux desktop, and the crux of the problem is you have somewhere between two and a hundred different Linux desktops to choose from. What are the odds Apple would ship OS X with ten, or even two completely different desktops and sets of desktop apps. Zero, it would be a disaster.
"is any cell phone securely taped to a Smith & Wesson."
The 1978/1979 Iranian revolution that put the current regime in power succeeded largely because on September 8, 1978... Black Friday ... the Shah's security service openly shot and killed dozens of unarmed demonstrators. Not because armed protesters shot it out with the security services.
A key factor in India's drive to independence was the massacre by British troops of unarmed protestors at Jallianwala not because Indians defeated the British military in armed conflict.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Basij number in the millions and they are well trained to be armed thugs if the need arises. I'm pretty sure most of the Iranian protesters are young urban yuppies with a limited grasp of armed conflict. If they were to try to shoot it out with the Iranian secuirty apparatus they would probably lose and lose badly and they would also lose the moral high ground.
Gandhi's methods will almost certainly serve them better than yours, though it may well mean some brave Iranian kids will have to get them selves killed, tortured or imprisoned in the process, and they will have to have some serious patience and staying power in the face of a brutal backlash from the state.
I sure hope Moussavi and Rafsanjani are worth the price the Green movement might have to pay for them to win power. Moussavi is a former prime minister from the early years of the Revolution, during a time when the clerics killed thousands of political prisoners. The Ayatollahs wouldn't have let him run in the first place if he were not part of the current regime, he apparently just went rogue on them. Its not certain he will be a bastion of democracy, freedom and reform if he gains power unless he's changed a lot over the last 20 years.
"What we ought to be looking at is beginning construction of a moon base and the development of the infrastructure to perform longhaul transport back and forth from the Earth to the Moon."
NASA has had a problem since Apollo of plucking a goal out of the air to use as a justification to keep the manned space program alive, without actually setting a goal that really makes sense and is worth doing. We need to figure out a reason or reasons to have a base on the moon, ideally some reasons with some benefits that will justify the massive expenditure of resources. Without that it will end up exactly like Apollo and ISS. We will spend huge amounts of money and when we finally get there everyone will be asking why did we spend all this money and what do we do now that we are here just like Apollo and ISS. Luckily for Apollo there were a lot of technology spin offs but I wouldn't count on that being the case the second time around since. There is a lot more reusing existing technology while under Apollo there was a necessity for some huge breakthroughs or it wouldn't have been possible.
If you could mine helium-3 on the moon and solve our energy crisis that would be one such activity that would justify a lunar base but I don't think we have the way to use helium-3 to produced energy yet. If you could mine the moon for materials you need to do other things in space that might be interesting. Astronomy on the moon would be cool, but I don't think its going to win broad acceptance as justifying the huge price tag with the general public.
Fact is the moon is pretty nasty place, severe temperatures, nasty dust that gets in to everything, hard vacuum, and I'm not sure its really that great place to put a base. You have this kind of scary possibility a moon base would end up being a very expensive and kind of useless ISS Part two.
Most of the proposals for a moon base seem to be focused on it as just a place to practice that is close to Earth with the real the goal being a trip to Mars. The moon being just for practice isn't an entirely compelling goal either.