"You must assume I'm some sort of hardcore partisan Republican. I'm not. For the purposes of truly staying anonymous, I'll just say that the makeup of the forum ranges wildly, and there is *plenty* of bickering, but I fail to see these guys that get hardons in the intelligence community from unreasonable searches and seizures."
No, I don't know what you are but your post appears either naive, pretentious or you are telling stories designed to impress the lowly geeks on Slashdot. If you valued your position as "moderator" maybe you should stop ranting about it on Slashdot. Anyone in your "forum" who reads Slashdot can easily deduce who you are. Did you use "Tor", heh.
You score high on naive if you think these people would be chatting about abuses of power on your forum. Geez, they aren't stupid. If they are chatting in a forum they aren't going to expose all their dirty laundry, get fired and up in a Federal Penitentiary. They are going to tell stories about what wonderful, noble people they are and how they are the last line of defense for "Freedom and Democracy". Only time the dirty laundry is going to come out if they screw up, someone blows the whistle on them or there is a real Congressional investigation, and then as in Iran Contra most of it will still get brushed under the rug and everyone will be pardoned.
"I'd be very interested in your credibility or foresight into this. I'm not arguing the history of 30 years. I'm talking at most 3 years, which is all that I have access to."
Maybe you should have qualified your ridiculously broad statement, a reminder:
"I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power."
You didn't say
"I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power in the last three years."
You also didn't qualify which agency you were refering to. The DOD and CIA have both been clearly implicated in torturing and murdering prisoners in the last 3 year. The FBI has been routinely arresting people and holding them without charge in the last three years which is abuse. Maybe you are arguing their "intent" is good in they are trying to defeat the "terrorists" but their intent is severly misguided if they think the end justifies the means in this case, which is descending to the same level as Saddam.
As for the NSA, the Slashdot article at the head of this trhead cites a cause for deep concern that they want to resume unconstrained spying in America. Sure it will start out spying on suspected "terrorists" but once the ball gets rolling they will spy on everyone and it will be abused just like Nixon and J. Edgar abused it which is why it was banned in the first place, because it WAS abused, blatantly.
I'm not saying everyone in these agencies are bad. I'm sure most of them are thoroughly good people doing thouroughly good work. Some analysts in the CIA deserve a medal for trying to expose the deception the Bush administration was engaged in in fabricating the case for a war in Iraq. Instead they were thoroughly spanked, many fired, and a fanatical partisan Porter Goss was installed as their chief to discipline them for not toeing the party line. The Bush adminsitration no longer trusts the CIA because they didn't toe the party line so it appears they are being marginalized in favor of the loyalists in the DOD who have no scruples.
The NSA does useful work protecting secret U.S. communication and trying to eavesdrop on legitimate enemies of the U.S. unfortunately they often stray from that mission, doing economic espionage on Europe being an obvious well known example, and chances are high they are or soon will be spying on everyone again.
The problem is not most of the people in these agencies, its the few fanatics in their midst with an agenda and a willingness to abuse their power. The civilian politicians who hold their reigns are especially undeserving of any trust and they give them their marching orders.
Duh, I know where it came from. Makes no difference to me. Either it falls under
- Much truth is said in jest
- Or he has such poor tast in humor that he doesn't grasp saying something this offense, and anti-democratic, as a joke is not something a sane President would do. Its right up there with his "joke" about the photos of him looking for something in the Oval office, and joking that he couldn't find the missing WMD's from Iraq. Well 1500 Americans are dead, more than 10,000 wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered looking for those fabricated WMD's. Great joke, ha ha. Such a comedian.
A. A federal judge for whatever reason says you are wrong.
B. All the precedents you site were enacted during a paranoid frenzy just like we have now. They don't prove much other than you can use armed conflict and "security" to dismantle basic civil liberties and the rule of law everytime and you usually regret it when the war is over. We certainly did regret siezing all the property and interning Japanese Americans during World War II. If you want to use World War II precedents, which you obviously do, then we should be rounding up all Arabs and Muslims, siezing their property and putting them in internment camps
C. No war has been declared. These are war powers you are talking about and you need Congress to pass a declaration of war for there to be any chance of invoking them. No such declaraion has been passed. In fact I'm not sure the U.S. has legally declared a war since World War II which is why most of the wars since have been a bloody mess, because we've been fighting them in a half assed and illegal way.
D. It is very likely that the "War on Terror" will most probably never end, because there are going to be Muslim extremists who may be out to get the U.S. from now until eternity, so if you let this precedent stand the President will have sweeping dictatorial powers in perpituity. If you want to plead war powers to justify this abuse of power this time you are allowing when no war has been declared and that undeclared war will most likely never end.
E. Padilla hasn't been tried by anyone to my knowledge, even a military commission. If he was it was done in secret. Not sure he's ever had access to a lawyer or if he has it was only every recently.
F. All of this precedent is based on a person acting on behalf of a belligerant foreign government. Al Qaida is not a government which is exactly why the Bush administration is claiming they are not protected by the Geneva convention. You can't have it both ways, they are a belligerant government to use this precedent, and not a belligerant government when it comes to the Geneva conventions.
Bottomline is you can go down this road, which you obviously are OK with, but you will for all practical purposes be imposeing martial law in the U.S. for most probably ever, and you will give the executive broad and perpetual powers to arrest anyone they choose. All in all they would have been far better served, if they care about our constitution which they obviously don't, to make a case against Padilla in a court of law, and let something other than a kangaroo court of a military tribunal either convict or exonerate him.
Here is a pretty good write up about why everyone hates Roland. He is basicly making a living by finding someone elses interesting article, submitting it to Slashdot and using it to generate ad revenue on his web site. He has improved lately since he actually links to the original article first and to his web site second. Used to be you were steered to his web site first I gather.
Haven't checked myself but the writeup indicates that EVERY article he was submitting to Slashdot was being accepted which is a near impossibility unless he is recieving somekind of preferential treatement from Slashdot or its parent company.
The worst case conspiracy theory is he is partnered with Slashdot, or its parent company, or he is sending a kickback from his ad revenues to Slashdot and they are in turn insuring every one of his submissions makes the front page.
Its a real stretch to say that what they've been doing is even legal. Its no accident the U.S. is puting most of its prisoners in Gitmo or unnamed spots around the world and outside the U.S. They are using Gitmo because its mostly outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system and its obviously not under the jurisdiction of the host country, Cuba. They are using Gitmo precisely so they can skirt the law and international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory.
They are also using the CIA's semi secret rendition program for the same reason. They ship prisoners to countries who are eager to torture prisoners during interrogation, they take the usally bad intelligence that results(and most intelligence from torture is bad because people will say anything to make the pain stop) so they are completely complicit in the torture. This allows the American's to deny they are torturing anyone though in fact they are the ones snatching, often innocent, people off the street with no proof they are guilty of anything, cutting their clothes of with razors, shoving a tranquilizer up their ass and flying them to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria or Jordan to be tortured. These aren't "terrorists" for the most part, they are suspects. This is the whole problem with the civil rights abuses in the "War on Terror". There is usually little or no evidence most of these people being held indefinitely, tortured and sometimes killed have actually done anything. The extermely fallible agencies and agents involved are acting as judge, jury and executioner. When you do this you are flouting the rule of law, something the U.S. constantly preaches to other countries about. Well the U.S. circumvents the rule of law any and everytime they find it necessary so it is rank hypocrisy for the U.S. to lecture anyone else about it. Rendition is also clearly violating the sovereignty of countries where snatches have taken place without the consent and cooperation of the host country.
Fact is the U.S Senate approved the UN treaty on torture in 1994 and the Geneva conventions go back further than that and the U.S. is clearly violating these treaties. Countries sign the UN and Geneva conventions on torture as a measure of protection for their citizens to discourage them from being tortured if the are imprisoned. Now that America has established a clear track record of endorsing torture, its citizens will no moral high ground to protect them if they are imprisoned.
You might be able to argue stateless combantants like Al Qaeda don't fall under the Geneva conventions but I assure you every Iraqi tortured in Abu Graib did as did every Afghani in Afghanistan. When Gonzalez opened the pandora's box on torture for Al Qaeda he opened it up in Iraq and Afghanistan where it is clearly a violation of international treaties, to which the U.S. is a signatory, to torture citizens of an occupied country. When such violations occur they are normally considered war crimes, if it were any country doing it other than the precious U.S. with its double standards that is. The Geneva conventions, to which the U.S. is a signatory clearly defines how you treat citizens of an occupied country which both Iraq and Afghanistan are, and this covers all citizens of the country not uniformed combatants. There is a seperate article for uniformed combatants that clearly doesn't apply here which is something Gonzalez and company glossed over. The citizens of an occupied country rules clearly do apply to Afghans in Afghanistan and Iraqis in Iraq. The convention for treatement of people in occupied countries specificly bans torture and humiliation of prisoners.
Uh, you do realize that the President's party controls both houses of congress so he can pretty much tell them to jump and they jump. I think you are picking a nit whether its the Republican President or the Republican Congress spending us in to benkruptcy, it appears to be a great team effort. It wouldn't be so bad were it not for all of those decades of the Republicans ranting about the Democrats fiscal irresponsibility and as soon as they have total power they started spending like drunken sailors. How do you spell hypocrisy?
The only check the Democrats have over anything is they can, as a last ditch measure of desperation fillibuster in the Senate. The Democrats in the House are completely powerless as long as the Republicans hold a party line vote. In the last couple of years most important legislation is being authored in closed door, Republican only conference committees where they throw out what was passed in the House and Senate, rewrite it under the direction of Dick Cheney and then ram it through both houses again on a party line vote. Its turned Congress in to a bad joke.
Now if the Democrats do fillibuster something, that matters, the Republicans have already made it clear earlier this year they will exercise the "nuclear option" and just change the Senate rules on closure, so closure can be voted with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes. At that point we are in a one party state and the Democrats don't even need to bother showing up. It appears the Democrats are to spineless to filibuster anything at this point but if they do it will sure be interesting to see if the Republicans take the opportunity to sieze absolute power.
"What does the fact that I wonder if I should post this anonymously say?"
Hate to break it to you but everything you just said doesn't matter one iota to the executive branch or its minions. It is unfortunately just so much pissing in the wind, like the millions of similar rants posted to the Internet every year.
You could probably advocate overthrowing the government and the Federal government still wouldn't care unless you said something that suggested you were going to actually do something about it. If you threatened the life of the President now then the Secret Service might come down on you like a ton of bricks as they are want to do, though with the high volume of drivel on the Internet I doubt they bother to chase most of that down unless it has a particular edge to it.
You see, new psuedo democratic police states like you find in the U.S. and U.K. now aren't like Stalinist, Nazi or Chinese police states. These new style police states are going to let you rant all you want as long as you don't actually do anything to threaten their power. They aren't seeking to censor your every word, they don' want to, they don't have to, and in fact by not doing that it helps them maintain the facade that everyone is free.
In particular as long as you are alone, isolated, and sedentary they could care less what you say. Now if you started to organize, create a movement that takes hold, that gains a large following that they percieve threatens their power they will come down on you like a ton of bricks, like the did for example with Martin Luther King. They will use all the massive spying and enforcement power they have in the NSA, FBI, CIA, DOD and Secret Service to do it and it will hurt. They will probably win. Even if you start a little organization, like ELF, that is in the big scheme of things is a gnat, they might stomp you just to make an example out of you, or then to they might let it flourish just so they have a "domstic terrorist" organization they can use as justification for more repression.
Failing to organize and act in unison with millions of others, if you choose to fight back with violence, again they will come down on you like a ton of bricks. You will fill up the 24 hour news channels for a few hours, you will be branded as a wacko, they will parade every detail of your life and your internet surfing habits for the world to see, and you will end up either dead, in a mental institution or in jail for a very long time. They win again.
Only way you are going to beat the rising tide of Fascism in the U.S. and U.K. is to organize, to communicate a message to enough people, who receptive to hearing it, that enough is enough, that you build a movement that state can't ignore.
Maybe you could then defeat the power that be at the ballot box but they have massive control of the electoral process, the media, and the pulpit. A key problem you is can't pick one party as being pro freedom and hitch your wagon to it. Democrats and Republicans appear to be both equally fond of a big overpowering government, stripping our civil liberties and selling us down the river as they pandering to big corporate interests(Fascist do pander to big corporate interests as long as the corporations are led by their rich and powerful friends). Since both parties in the U.S. have fallen pray to people who want a police state, its unlikely you will change the course of either party, and its not every likely a third party will ever unseat them. They have completely stacked the deck against a third party gaining real power today.
Perhaps if you organized you could stage a peaceful revolution as we saw in Ukraine, or Eastern Europe and Russia when the iron curtain fell. First problem is you need a squeaky clean, charismatic, and brilliant leader like Ghandi and I doubt there are any such people in America today. Nadar is the closest we have and he can never get any traction because the media have painted him as fringe nut job, whose role is to add a little color and p
Rack one up for gullible Slashdot readers who moderated this guy's B.S. as interesting, I guess as B.S. goes it is interesting, but it is B.S. or a troll. I'll let half of this obnoxious grand standing go but these deserve some attention:
"1) The NSA is the most likely to be concerned about "unreasonable searches and seizures" and other Bill of Rights issues. The FBI and CIA routinely take the "extreme circumstance" route and use common loopholes to justify citizen and non-citizen monitoring. I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power."
You must be working a technicality, like you haven't physically "seen" the abuse but the DOD, NSA, FBI and CIA have all engaged in well documented and proven abuses of their powers over the years. They haven't been nailed lately but that is only because we are living in, for all practical purposes, a one party state, and the Republican's especially since 9/11 has been literally letting these agencies get away with murder. For example the Pentagon last week investigated itself and amazingly found itself innocent of ordering or condoning torture, though there are documented cases of varying degress of torture going on across the globe, far to widespread to be rogue national gaurdsmen. When abuse is this wide spread in the military either the chain of command is ordering or condoning it, or there is massive deriliciton of duty in the chain of command, the officers and civilian leadership, in letting it happen on such a large scale.
When you say something this blatantly and provably false it so undermines your credibility, we can safely assume the rest of your post is either a troll or B.S. too.
"2) Members from all branches of the Department of Defense are active Slashdot readers and contributers. They just never talk about what they do and some use "Tor" to post from work."
Not sure I follow why they anyone in the DOD would be using Tor to post to this silly little web site. Not like anyone on Slashdot is tracking their IP address. If someone is using Tor from a DOD facility with DOD's blessing, and posting on Slashdot or anywhere else, it tends to suggest they must be part of the DOD's rapidly growing propaganda machine, so you can't believe a thing they say. I have no doubt people from all branches of government read and post here, SO WHAT. If they post anything controversial or sensitive, from a government facility, they are just begging to be fired. I'm sure the DOD can read everything they are posting, and Tor isn't going to make any difference. Not sure I've ever read any post on Slashdot that rose to a level of importance the DOD would ever care.
"5) There is one member of the CIA that is single-handedly responsible for saving us from the plan devised by Jose Padilla. Unfortunately, they will never get the credit they deserve. It only took one person to say, "Why is this American talking with Abu Zubaydah twice?"."
Whatever Padilla was planning, if anything, wasn't nearly as dangerous as the precedent being set by the Bush administration in how they've abused his most basic civil liberties in arresting and detaining indefinitely, in isolation in a military brig in South Carolina. The Bush administration is seeking, through Padilla, to establish a precedent where the executive branch can arrest any American citizen, anywhere and deprive him or her of all of the most basic constitutional protections we thought we had in this country. In particular American citizens have a right to an attorney, a right to be charged, and a right to a speedy trial, and to be imprisoned only if found guilty by a jury of their peers. If Padilla is guilty of something, charge him, prove it, get a conviction or let him go.
The Supreme Court, spineless politicians that they are have passed on hearing his case on technicalities leaving this precedent in place for two years. A federal judge a week or two ago ruled the executive branch has NO constitutional authority to arrest, and hold in ind
How about Gator/Claria. Oh right, I forget, instead of being shut down by the government they've been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "privacy board" [sic].
I wonder if the FTC can take down Homeland Security, or for that matter I wonder if they can take down the whole Bush administration for false advertising, deception etc. For example in 2001 George W. promised to keep the giant surplus coming in from our Social Security payroll taxes sacred. He has since proceeded to spend every bit of it on tax cuts for the rich and the war in Iraq, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars worth. The Social Security "trust fund" is in fact a couple filing cabinets of worthless IOU's from one government agency to another and will in fact never probably be repaid. If our payroll taxes had been saved and conservatively invested it would be 2042 before it ran out of money. Instead it will in fact run out of money 2018 or so, leading to either slashing benefits or raising payroll taxes, which punish low and middle income people the most. The Bush administration, being the cynical manipulators that they are, are helping drive Social Security in to bankruptcy, declaring it to be a crisis and then proposing private accounts as the solution. Well private accounts would prevent the government from spending our Social Security money, but THE BUSH ADMINSTRATION IS THE WORST OFFENDER FOR SPENDING IT.
Dude, chill out. I was just googling for interesting comments about Mike Griffin and that was one. Trying to paint me as rascist for quoting something that had nothing to do with race is going off the deep end.
"Wouldn't it serve the best interests of the press to expose these people rather than protect them?"
It would serve the best interests of the public, yes, but it would mean these two reporters would effectively destroy their careers because no confidential source would ever trust them again, therefor they would never get any confidential information which is what most good journalists live for. There isn't much demand for journalists who only write about things that are already public knowledge.
I'm inclined to say Judith Miller does deserve some jail time but not in this case. She wisely opted to not publish this story, presumably because she appreciated the dangers of outing a CIA agent, or she realized that by doing it she was just being a pawn in a White House scheme to punish Wilson and his wife for daring to challenge the White House or their sham case for war against Iraq.
The thing Judith Miller does deserve some hard time for was being a lead cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq and the shameless extent to which she pumped up the national paranoia about biological weapons in particular. I'd dearly love to know what the motivation was for her little campaign to whip America in to a frenzy over biological weapons:
- Legitimate concern for the safety and well being of Americans - Realized it would be a way to make a lot of money, especially by writing a book on biological weapons - Unwitting pawn of the Bush administration in their desire to whip up a case for sham war in Iraq - Witting pawn of the Bush administration in their desire to whip up a case for sham war in Iraq
The only two reporters who deserve some hard time in the Plame/Wilson affair are Robert Novak and maybe Jeff Gannon, but since they are both fanatical conservatives and darlings of the one party in charge of the one party state we live in now chances are they will get off scott free while the reporter from the despicable psuedo liberal rag the one party state hates so much, the New York Times, will go down and down hard.
The Bush administration seems to have a flair for sham investigations. For example this week the Pentagon investigation in to an apparent global epidemic of prisoner abuse and torture remarkably found the Pentagon to be completely innocent and it just happens elisted soldiers in Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably other secret locales around the world all took it upon themselves to torture prisoners, and of course the CIA's Rendition program was delivering 100's of prisoners to despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia's specificly for the purposes of interrogating them via torture. The irony here is either the chain of command ordered the torture, or the chain of command failed to prevent it. You cant have enlisted men do bad things in the military without an officer either ordering it, or being derelict in his duty for letting it happen without orders. Enlisted soldiers aren't free spirits who can just do their own thing in the military. They have a chain of command whose job it is to insure they do what the chain of command tells them to do.
The one concern I would have is I think he was spearheaded Bush Senior's Space Exploration Initiative(SEI) which was Bush Seniors version of going back to the Moon and Mars, and he presided over a program that dead ended. You have to wonder if Bush Junior is hoping for a different outcome the second time around, or if he doing a bad rerun of SEI meaning the current initiative is doomed.
A few noteworthy Google hits on Mike Griffin below, a hard name to Google because its so common.
I gather he invented Faster, Better, Cheaper while at SDIO, a concept that has some merit if properly done, it has a lot in common with Kelly Johnson and the old Lockheed Skunkworkds that built the U-2 and SR-71, but became much maligned when Dan Goldin tried to implement it at NASA, because NASA is institutionally and structurally incapable of doing faster, better, cheaper and have it end up being actually faster, better and cheaper.
Mike Griffin, a former senior NASA manager and aerospace industry executive, presented the most charitable assessment of NASA's human space flight efforts, ranking it second in priority only to building a new, more reliable heavy lift launcher.Griffin advised following through with space station, which means returning the shuttle to flight, while setting a new course that includes Mars. To accomplish this, Griffin recommends increasing NASA's budget from $15 billion a year to $20 billion.
"NASA costs each American 14 cents a day. A really robust program could be had for about 20 cents a day," Griffin said. "Americans spend more on pizza then they do on space."
The final nail in the coffin of Goldin's "legacy" came when NASA published its damning critique of his vaunted "better, faster, cheaper" approach. A couple of points on this greatly misunderstood concept.. First, FBC is not Dan Goldin's invention. It came out of the old SDIO ("Star Wars") organization back in the late '80s. At the time, the dominant paradigm in both military and civil space was big, complex, very capable spacecraft, on which any and all instruments and experiments could be accommodated. This development model led to decade-long, multi-billion dollar missions (e.g., Galileo, Milstar). When these kind of missions screw-up (e.g., Hubble Telescope, Galileo antenna), the public and Congressional ramifications can be devastating. "FBC" was devised as a way to deal with this problem. I believe it was mostly developed by Mike Griffin, then Director of Technology at SDIO. The concept was simple: cut costs by having a small, compact, "Skunk Works"-type development team. Fly small satellites, each with one or two instruments, more often. As you are launching smaller sats more often, you have more flight opportunities, so if there IS a failure, you can recover from it quickly. In short, the objective is the knowledge gained from space flight, not to design and fly the most capable vehicle. It's "faster" because you don't have decadal development times as the satellites as smaller and less complex. It's "cheaper" because you're not paying a marching army of highly paid technical staff (where the true costs of space flight really are). It's "better" because for a given amount of expenditure, you get more data, more often. You can criticize this all you want to, but the simple fact is that FBC "worked" on a lot of the SDI flight projects of the early 90s (e.g., Delta Star, MSTI), culminating with the successful space test of the Brilliant Pebble spacecraft, the Clementine mission in 1994. Goldin and NASA (specifically, JPL) never really understood this concept. They understood "cheaper" in the sense of reducing engineering development costs, but kept the glacial JPL pace, which ran the manpower costs right back up again. The Mars Pathfinder mission, NASA's FBC "success" story, was successful o
"While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?"
In the case of Carly Fiorina all indications are the effects are overwhelming positive. Though rumours were circulating she might be tapped by the Bush administration to lead the World Bank, or a similar position of great influence, continuing the Bush administration policy of promoting incompetence. not clear if Carly has a clue about economics though she does have degrees in business administration. She does grasp the one principal apparently most important to todays business leaders and politicians, ""There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,"
The article isn't clear if this exodus is U.S. only or globally. If its U.S. only perhaps its just an indicator that women are more astute and more career and survival savvy. IT is NOT a good profession since the bubble burst unless maybe you work at Google. I suspect most of the people who cashed in on the bubble were more the con artists than the IT professionals anyway.
Let's hop in the way back machine and remember John Chambers last year prognosticating on the future of IT in America:
"China will become the IT centre of the world and we can have a healthy discussion about whether that's in 2020 or 2040."
"What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company," Chambers said.
There is great irony in American business and political elite bragging about the superiority of "Freedom and Democracy", "Free Markets" and Capitalism as they rush to embrace a Socialist Dictatorship and transfer most of America's wealth there. The routinely point out China's education system is superior, labor is firmly controlled and oppressed so they have a "disciplined" work force, every aspect of their markets, including their currency, are heavily manipulated. They also routinely implement massive trade barriers which are requiring companies like Cisco and IBM to transfer massive numbers of jobs, capital, market access and intellectual property to China in order to gain access to Chinese markets which are decidely not free.
There is great irony in this hypocrisy. Its pretty obvious America's business and political leaders dont want "Freedom and Democracy", they want dictatorship, manipulated markets, and cheap, oppressed labor. Since its difficult to retrofit this system on the U.S. at this point it appears they are just moving all their wealth where such a system is already in place.
Here is a quick summary of the new U.S. economy. Bottomline is if you want to have a future the career fields you want to be in are:
- Business administration - Marketing - Service jobs that can't be outsourced and where you aren't competing against illegal immigrants
The long term future in business administration and marketing is open to doubt once the Chinese and Indians have reached the point they no longer need their American partners (i.e. after they've learned the markets, once American markets collapse due to the fundemental unsoundness of the current U.S. economy and they possess all the production capacity and IP).
All in all its become pretty apparently American politicians, business leaders and shareholders are selling their own nation down the river in the name of short term profits and their personal wealth. It appears likely the U.S. economy could be collapsing and the stock markets would still flourish since most large U.S. companies are rushing to globalization that they can probably continue to be profitable even if the U.S. economy is deteriorating. Stock markets are most probably riding a wave of improved profitability from exploiting cheap Chinese labor and goods. Globalized American companies can flourish while America does not.
FOSS is not great because it tends to suffer a surplus of prima donnas, all of whom would rather be the boss of their own project rather than cooperate on one project. And of course once they fork their own project they continue to be prima donnas and make life miserable for people who want to contribute to their project, causing those people to want to fork and start their own project to escape Prima Donna #1, and in the process have a high risk of becoming Prima Donna's #2 through 8.
FOSS is great when a project stagnates like XFree86 so X.org starts fresh and fixes a broken system.
FOSS is not great when you have massive duplication of effort, for example in putting out a Linux distribution mutation #106. It takes a lot of work to collect all the bits for a distribution, build them, get a critical mass of people to test them, and fix the bugs. When you fragment and duplicate this effort 106 times you are wasting vast amounts of man(woman) power that could better be spent moving forward instead of reinventing the same wheel over and over again.
FOSS is not great when it develops 10 GUI "standards", 8 audio "standards" and 104 window managers. Its great for tinkerers but it is living hell for people who just want to develop and deploy applications that solve problems and for users who just want their problems solved.
Anytime you develop the urge to be a prima donna or to fork, just look at Linus. He is, in my book, not worthy of the God status most bestow on him around here, but his one greatest attribute is he holds together a complex and often problematic development team and he has so far managed to avoid a serious fork that would potentially wreck future kernel development. He is great because he is not a prima donna.
Not sure what your standard is for "sucks" but MathML works reasonably well and is supported in Firefox/Mozilla, though you need some particular fonts.
Some of the MIT OpenCourseWare like, Calculus makes fairly extensive use of fairly involved formulas.
I wish it worked on Konqueror, maybe it does, but it didn't last time I tried it.
Probably would be nice if this stuff was supported in a more standard way in Linux/Firefox distributions too, without having to rummage around.
It would be great to see stuff like MathML and the MIT course ware get a lot wider exposure, especially to young people. Maybe it would counter the general bad education system, especially in the U.S.
Maybe next time you can try to be more creative. The tinfoil thing is a worn out Slashdot standard. Sometimes its used legitimately when someone goes off the deep end about an unprovable conspiracy theory. In the case of Rendition you are just using it so you can stick your head in the sand and enter a state of denial about something that is increasingly well documented, and that you don't want to admit your beloved country does. As you are using it here:
tinfoil == denial
Maybe you object to the use of the term Fascist police state to the U.S. but that isn't conspiracy theory, its more a matter of opinion on how you describe the bizarre political path the U.S. is taking. To me this term is a case of if the shoe fits..... Fascism became a dirty word in World War II so it became politically incorrect to use it, so we have terms for left wing police states, Communist or Socialist, but we have no "allowed" politically correct term for right wing police states though the world has them, they are now a form of government with no name. At the moment the U.S., the U.K., Italy and Columbia certainly qualify as shades of Fascist state though they haven't yet achieved the extremes of World War II era German, Italy and Japan. Spain was pretty close to one before its government was pushed out of power at the ballot box last year. They are kinder, gentler fascist states to be sure, maybe compassionate fascism. Today's fascist states maintain a greater pretense of Democracy, they rely on a majority at the ballot box from a fascist leaning populace to keep them in power. It appears in the U.S. that we are now very close to being a one party state. As soon as the Republicans change the Senate rules on the filibuster so that they can vote closure with a simple majority the Democratic party will be essentially powerless at the Federal level and they can pretty much just stop bothering to show up. The Republicans are teetering on the verge of doing this, they call it the "nuclear option". If they exercise it they will eliminate the only remaining obstacle to their political agenda, the Senate fillibuster. Then they just need to bombard the American people with propaganda so that American's vote away their freedom, and vote Fascist, every 2 years.
As for the CIA's Rendition there isn't much that is conspiracy theory about it now. The government admits its happening, just not the details, there are numerous witnesses to the snatches in various countries around the world, the tail numbers of the two planes that are used are well known, one is a Gulfstream, the other a 737, owned by a front company for the CIA. The planes are crewed by men who were black masks to conceal their identity though the tail numbers on the planes tell everyone they are American.
Their flight plans aren't secret so they've left a trail of the places they've been including Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
An ex CIA agent admits he worked on it.
Congress is investigating it, its being referred to by them as "outsourced torture".
A number of people have been caught up in it and often released, usually by intervention of countries who still value basic civil liberties like Sweden and Canada. The program isn't disappearing all of its victims quite as perfectly as it would like.
About the only thing that is not provable, by design, is exactly how much torture is being used on the people snatched by rendition, and how many have died in the process.
About the only thing the Bush administration is denying is that they are technically endorsing the use of torture. Again by design they are sending people to countries who use torture in interrogation, and claiming their hands are clean because they have no control over what happens once the victims land in Egyptian or Saudi hands, though they gleefully take the intelligence that comes back from the process. The worst problem being, and most interrogators will tell you, is the intelligence is usually worth
Pretty sure there is no safe place to go in the world anymore to escape the rising tide of fascist police states.
If you've been following the news the last few days on the secret CIA Rendition program, the U.S. has bestowed upon itself the right to pretty much snatch anyone, anywhere on the globe, blindfold you, cut your clothes of with razors, stick a tranquilizer up your ass, put you in a private jet and fly you to various places to be tortured. One of which is Uzbekistan which apparently favors torturing you by putting parts of your body in boiling water.
If sometime later they deduce they made a mistake and you are in fact not a terrorist they just drop you in the middle of nowhere in Albania and say oops. One guy was disappeared for 5 months and had to find his family in Lebanon after they left Gemany thinking he had abandoned them.
When they pick you up they pretty much tell you that you are completely out of range of any judicial system or due process. They tell you they will take you places where you can be tortured or killed, and no one will ever know what happened to you.
How do you spell Hypocrisy to rant about Saddam's arbitrary arrests and torture, and making that a justification for the invasion. At least Saddam mostly stuck to torturing people in Iraq. The U.S. will snatch and torture anyone, anywhere in the world, often flaunting the most basic sovereignty of the nations where they are operating.
I think at this point since we can't escape it, its rapidly becoming time to fight it, hard.
I should add Rendition started during the reign of Bush the First or Clinton, Bush the Second has just been going to town with it. It does show that neither of the screwed up parties that run America have the most basic understand of what "Freedom and Democracy" actually means. First off it means you shouldn't be snatched off the street and tortured in to a confession when you may not be guilt of anything. In America we have this little thing called a constitution, due process, and civil rights but our corrupt government seems to have forgotten. They seem to need an attitude adjustment.
They don't look the same, they don't work the same, the use different UI conventions, they interoperate better than they used to but still don't interoperate especially well. And you are massively bloating up the memory footprint loading two or mote massive GUI frameworks who do pretty much exactly the same things differently.
You can pretend its OK to tell an ordinary user, not a geek, to deal with this bullshit but they will probably back away from you slowly and switch to OSX or Windows where they don't have to put up with lack of consistency in UI standards.
Thought freedesktop had something like it wxWidgets or something. Tried it a while ago and don't think it did Qt but I forget now.
Probably wont play particularly well with a serious application developer who likes to QA their stuff, and document it well with screenshots for example. You still have to QA it on all the toolkits your going to see it run on unless you are half assed.
There is some new mode now where you can force GTK apps like OpenOffice to use Qt, I've been meaning to try it soon. I'm a KDE user and would like OpenOffice to play right with KDE. Would consider Firefox to maybe were it not so much more bloated and slow compared to Konqueror.
OK, I'll add yet another audio API to the list. Heard of it, lost track of it. To many bloody audio API's to keep track of and figure out which one is IN and which ones are OUT.
How many actual Linux machines is it installed on? Not on mine.
Didn't have the license immediately obvious on the web page. Is there a BSD'ish license that lets you link it in to a commerical app to get around it not being installed everywhere.
How exactly does it get around that fact that if the machine is running OSS, which is still the standard on 2.4.x kernels, and some other app has the sound device allocted that it can't get to it. Its not terrible getting one app to work with audio on Linux, its more of a pain to get two or more apps to work on Linux at the same time and share.
I think you are a suffering from a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. The proprietary UNIX vendors cratered for a few simple reasons. Nitpicking over their GUI standards weren't much of it:
A. Their business model demanded steeply inflated profit margins, leading to steeply inflated hardware and software costs. As soon as Microsoft could do most of the same things at a fraction of the price they were partially doomed. As soon as Linux could do ALL of the same things at even a smaller fraction of the price they were completely doomed. Proprietary UNIX had its heyday because people had to pay them buckets of money for there stuff because there was no other way, not true anymore.
B. The vast majority of the for profit computer hardware and software business, is completely depdendent on high volume and economy of scale. The fragmentation that killed the proprietary UNIX vendors was steep R&D costs for relatively small and deeply fragmented customer base. Gates figured out a long time ago the cost of developing software is fairly constant. The more copies of software you sell the less it costs and the more money you make. Volume is king in most software development. The proprieatary UNIX also couldn't compete in developing things like their proprietary CPU's because with each new generation CPU development get ever more expensive to develop and the didn't have the volume to cover the cost. IBM with their deep pockets being an obvious exception.
C. Fragmentation in standards did lead to fragmentation in application development. Software developers were almost universally forced to either pick the market leader(Windows) and pander to them, or waste fairly extensive resources trying to develop on multiple platforms, especially the QA resources to test on all of them.
Microsoft wins hands down on attracting software developers because they have the biggest market and they do for the most part keep binary applications running on their platforms for nearly ever.
Its a simple proven fact of the life the thing that drains application developers of their enthusiasm for Linux the most are:
- There is no GUI standard. You either pick one and code to it and blow off all the potential customers who want to use another, or try to code to multiple standard which no one does, or users are forced to CONSTANTLY switch gears between GUI look and feel. That really hacks off users. OSX wins hands with users and developers because everything works predictably and the same. OSX wins with developers because there are finite number of ways to develop things. There are a few to many generations of frameworks to choose from but that is mostly sue to supporting legacy apps.
- There is no decent audio standard if you are developing audio apps. Between OSS, ALSA, esd, arts, gstreamer and bad mixer implementations(though these are better in newer GNOME and KDE) its simply a royal pain to develop and audio app on Linux and hope for it to run right on every machine.
I guess I should save this and cut and paste it since I post it everytime Slashdot has a dupe or bogus front page story which is at least twice a day lately.
This site is all about open source and freedom from proprietarty BS so why is Slashdot editing locked in to a small number of biased people who really obviously don't read their own web site or they would notice all the dupes. The proprietary editing system isn't so bothersome when the editors seem to actually care enough to do a good job but that doesn't seem to be the case lately.
If slashdot editing were software we would be screaming about the fact its buggy and we can't fix it because its proprietary. Why don't we demand the same rules for our top website we hold for our software.
My suggestions:
A. Make a page where we can all view all the submissions in the last day or two so we can do our own editing. I wanted to see what slashdotters find interesting enough to submit and not what a small group of self appointed gods find interesting. Maybe the editors can censor the juvenile crap and garbage but otherwise I want to see raw submissions.
B. Give people moderator points for front page stories and let moderators pick story. I'd suggest this be in edition to the self appointed gods, maybe just let moderators pick a few stories a day from the stuff the corporate editors don't pick.
You would need some kind of UI so that submissions on the same topic are all grouped together so only the top moderated one in the group gets picked. Similarly you want a UI to mark dupes of stuff already submitted.
Then every so many hours automaticly pull the top rated submission and put it on the front page.
Maybe the self appointed gods could start crutching off the moderation so they could still pretend to be editors but not look like the goofs they've looked like in the last couple of months
But assuming there will be no changed and as far as editing goes this is a closed source, proprietary shop what is the next best site out there like Slashdot but with editing that doesn't bite as much as it has around here lately.
Or how hard do think it would be to start Slashdot 2.0, carry the source code to a new URL and servers and start it fresh but with users moderating the front page stories.
Wireless is still young. With standardization, and when all computers have it built in, not just laptops, like Ethernet is, it can be made just as easy to setup as Ethernet and broadband. Not like most people don't have trouble setting up modems and ethernet broadband too.
If necessary the city can mail fliers with the proceedure, and create a help desk which is what a commercial provider will do, and yes a help desk will cost money.
"There's a reason cable is called a natural monopoly"
BZzzzzzt. Wrong again. There is this thing called satellite TV, there are at least two competitors for your cable company, Dish and DirectTV, its no more a natural monopoly than wireless would be and it still bites, because your cable company and the two satellite companies jack up prices at a pretty similar rate. Not sure the collude as much as they all ahve to pay a small handful of networks for the content and the networks are close to a monopoly at this point due to merger. Cable and oil are real similar. There is the pretense of competition, but there are few big players and they are all glad to collude on pricing and supply so they all profit equally at our expense, and Exxon/Mobile is profiting mightily at our expense.
"It is much easier to create a competing Wi-Fi access system, and with more Wi-Fi, you get more competition, which lowers prices."
Yea, and the first thing a big company with deep pockets will do when they want the market is buy out any them that has a customer base worth having. Thats what big companies in the capitalist world do consolidate, monopolize and inflate.
"because you're paying for it, just in another, less efficient form"
Please make a case why it would be less efficient. You have absolutely zero basis for that claim other than you are obviously an ingrained big government hater so you assume its a given, well it isn't. I hate big government too, mostly at the federal and state level. Most cities do a fine job of keeping our home towns functioning, some suck but so do most companies providing basic services like phone and cable and are just as bureaucratic as city governments if not more so. If your city government sucks its a lot easier to do something about it through the ballot box, or running yourself, than it is at the state level,
"Oh, and forget about freedom from censorship, I'm sure they'll put a nice little web site blocker on it too."
Dude get real. You are putting out internet access in to the air where any 12 year old who can scrape together the hardware can use it. it SHOULD be censored to block porn. If you want high bandwidth access to porn so you can jack off all day, which is apparently something you value:) pay premium prices for cable or DSL. Don't need you bogging down the wireless net with that time wasting, garbage in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
"You must assume I'm some sort of hardcore partisan Republican. I'm not. For the purposes of truly staying anonymous, I'll just say that the makeup of the forum ranges wildly, and there is *plenty* of bickering, but I fail to see these guys that get hardons in the intelligence community from unreasonable searches and seizures."
No, I don't know what you are but your post appears either naive, pretentious or you are telling stories designed to impress the lowly geeks on Slashdot. If you valued your position as "moderator" maybe you should stop ranting about it on Slashdot. Anyone in your "forum" who reads Slashdot can easily deduce who you are. Did you use "Tor", heh.
You score high on naive if you think these people would be chatting about abuses of power on your forum. Geez, they aren't stupid. If they are chatting in a forum they aren't going to expose all their dirty laundry, get fired and up in a Federal Penitentiary. They are going to tell stories about what wonderful, noble people they are and how they are the last line of defense for "Freedom and Democracy". Only time the dirty laundry is going to come out if they screw up, someone blows the whistle on them or there is a real Congressional investigation, and then as in Iran Contra most of it will still get brushed under the rug and everyone will be pardoned.
"I'd be very interested in your credibility or foresight into this. I'm not arguing the history of 30 years. I'm talking at most 3 years, which is all that I have access to."
Maybe you should have qualified your ridiculously broad statement, a reminder:
"I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power."
You didn't say
"I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power in the last three years."
You also didn't qualify which agency you were refering to. The DOD and CIA have both been clearly implicated in torturing and murdering prisoners in the last 3 year. The FBI has been routinely arresting people and holding them without charge in the last three years which is abuse. Maybe you are arguing their "intent" is good in they are trying to defeat the "terrorists" but their intent is severly misguided if they think the end justifies the means in this case, which is descending to the same level as Saddam.
As for the NSA, the Slashdot article at the head of this trhead cites a cause for deep concern that they want to resume unconstrained spying in America. Sure it will start out spying on suspected "terrorists" but once the ball gets rolling they will spy on everyone and it will be abused just like Nixon and J. Edgar abused it which is why it was banned in the first place, because it WAS abused, blatantly.
I'm not saying everyone in these agencies are bad. I'm sure most of them are thoroughly good people doing thouroughly good work. Some analysts in the CIA deserve a medal for trying to expose the deception the Bush administration was engaged in in fabricating the case for a war in Iraq. Instead they were thoroughly spanked, many fired, and a fanatical partisan Porter Goss was installed as their chief to discipline them for not toeing the party line. The Bush adminsitration no longer trusts the CIA because they didn't toe the party line so it appears they are being marginalized in favor of the loyalists in the DOD who have no scruples.
The NSA does useful work protecting secret U.S. communication and trying to eavesdrop on legitimate enemies of the U.S. unfortunately they often stray from that mission, doing economic espionage on Europe being an obvious well known example, and chances are high they are or soon will be spying on everyone again.
The problem is not most of the people in these agencies, its the few fanatics in their midst with an agenda and a willingness to abuse their power. The civilian politicians who hold their reigns are especially undeserving of any trust and they give them their marching orders.
Bottomline is ma
Duh, I know where it came from. Makes no difference to me. Either it falls under
- Much truth is said in jest
- Or he has such poor tast in humor that he doesn't grasp saying something this offense, and anti-democratic, as a joke is not something a sane President would do. Its right up there with his "joke" about the photos of him looking for something in the Oval office, and joking that he couldn't find the missing WMD's from Iraq. Well 1500 Americans are dead, more than 10,000 wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars squandered looking for those fabricated WMD's. Great joke, ha ha. Such a comedian.
A. A federal judge for whatever reason says you are wrong.
B. All the precedents you site were enacted during a paranoid frenzy just like we have now. They don't prove much other than you can use armed conflict and "security" to dismantle basic civil liberties and the rule of law everytime and you usually regret it when the war is over. We certainly did regret siezing all the property and interning Japanese Americans during World War II. If you want to use World War II precedents, which you obviously do, then we should be rounding up all Arabs and Muslims, siezing their property and putting them in internment camps
C. No war has been declared. These are war powers you are talking about and you need Congress to pass a declaration of war for there to be any chance of invoking them. No such declaraion has been passed. In fact I'm not sure the U.S. has legally declared a war since World War II which is why most of the wars since have been a bloody mess, because we've been fighting them in a half assed and illegal way.
D. It is very likely that the "War on Terror" will most probably never end, because there are going to be Muslim extremists who may be out to get the U.S. from now until eternity, so if you let this precedent stand the President will have sweeping dictatorial powers in perpituity. If you want to plead war powers to justify this abuse of power this time you are allowing when no war has been declared and that undeclared war will most likely never end.
E. Padilla hasn't been tried by anyone to my knowledge, even a military commission. If he was it was done in secret. Not sure he's ever had access to a lawyer or if he has it was only every recently.
F. All of this precedent is based on a person acting on behalf of a belligerant foreign government. Al Qaida is not a government which is exactly why the Bush administration is claiming they are not protected by the Geneva convention. You can't have it both ways, they are a belligerant government to use this precedent, and not a belligerant government when it comes to the Geneva conventions.
Bottomline is you can go down this road, which you obviously are OK with, but you will for all practical purposes be imposeing martial law in the U.S. for most probably ever, and you will give the executive broad and perpetual powers to arrest anyone they choose. All in all they would have been far better served, if they care about our constitution which they obviously don't, to make a case against Padilla in a court of law, and let something other than a kangaroo court of a military tribunal either convict or exonerate him.
Here is a pretty good write up about why everyone hates Roland. He is basicly making a living by finding someone elses interesting article, submitting it to Slashdot and using it to generate ad revenue on his web site. He has improved lately since he actually links to the original article first and to his web site second. Used to be you were steered to his web site first I gather.
Haven't checked myself but the writeup indicates that EVERY article he was submitting to Slashdot was being accepted which is a near impossibility unless he is recieving somekind of preferential treatement from Slashdot or its parent company.
The worst case conspiracy theory is he is partnered with Slashdot, or its parent company, or he is sending a kickback from his ad revenues to Slashdot and they are in turn insuring every one of his submissions makes the front page.
Its a real stretch to say that what they've been doing is even legal. Its no accident the U.S. is puting most of its prisoners in Gitmo or unnamed spots around the world and outside the U.S. They are using Gitmo because its mostly outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system and its obviously not under the jurisdiction of the host country, Cuba. They are using Gitmo precisely so they can skirt the law and international treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory.
They are also using the CIA's semi secret rendition program for the same reason. They ship prisoners to countries who are eager to torture prisoners during interrogation, they take the usally bad intelligence that results(and most intelligence from torture is bad because people will say anything to make the pain stop) so they are completely complicit in the torture. This allows the American's to deny they are torturing anyone though in fact they are the ones snatching, often innocent, people off the street with no proof they are guilty of anything, cutting their clothes of with razors, shoving a tranquilizer up their ass and flying them to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria or Jordan to be tortured. These aren't "terrorists" for the most part, they are suspects. This is the whole problem with the civil rights abuses in the "War on Terror". There is usually little or no evidence most of these people being held indefinitely, tortured and sometimes killed have actually done anything. The extermely fallible agencies and agents involved are acting as judge, jury and executioner. When you do this you are flouting the rule of law, something the U.S. constantly preaches to other countries about. Well the U.S. circumvents the rule of law any and everytime they find it necessary so it is rank hypocrisy for the U.S. to lecture anyone else about it. Rendition is also clearly violating the sovereignty of countries where snatches have taken place without the consent and cooperation of the host country.
Fact is the U.S Senate approved the UN treaty on torture in 1994 and the Geneva conventions go back further than that and the U.S. is clearly violating these treaties. Countries sign the UN and Geneva conventions on torture as a measure of protection for their citizens to discourage them from being tortured if the are imprisoned. Now that America has established a clear track record of endorsing torture, its citizens will no moral high ground to protect them if they are imprisoned.
You might be able to argue stateless combantants like Al Qaeda don't fall under the Geneva conventions but I assure you every Iraqi tortured in Abu Graib did as did every Afghani in Afghanistan. When Gonzalez opened the pandora's box on torture for Al Qaeda he opened it up in Iraq and Afghanistan where it is clearly a violation of international treaties, to which the U.S. is a signatory, to torture citizens of an occupied country. When such violations occur they are normally considered war crimes, if it were any country doing it other than the precious U.S. with its double standards that is. The Geneva conventions, to which the U.S. is a signatory clearly defines how you treat citizens of an occupied country which both Iraq and Afghanistan are, and this covers all citizens of the country not uniformed combatants. There is a seperate article for uniformed combatants that clearly doesn't apply here which is something Gonzalez and company glossed over. The citizens of an occupied country rules clearly do apply to Afghans in Afghanistan and Iraqis in Iraq. The convention for treatement of people in occupied countries specificly bans torture and humiliation of prisoners.
Uh, you do realize that the President's party controls both houses of congress so he can pretty much tell them to jump and they jump. I think you are picking a nit whether its the Republican President or the Republican Congress spending us in to benkruptcy, it appears to be a great team effort. It wouldn't be so bad were it not for all of those decades of the Republicans ranting about the Democrats fiscal irresponsibility and as soon as they have total power they started spending like drunken sailors. How do you spell hypocrisy?
The only check the Democrats have over anything is they can, as a last ditch measure of desperation fillibuster in the Senate. The Democrats in the House are completely powerless as long as the Republicans hold a party line vote. In the last couple of years most important legislation is being authored in closed door, Republican only conference committees where they throw out what was passed in the House and Senate, rewrite it under the direction of Dick Cheney and then ram it through both houses again on a party line vote. Its turned Congress in to a bad joke.
Now if the Democrats do fillibuster something, that matters, the Republicans have already made it clear earlier this year they will exercise the "nuclear option" and just change the Senate rules on closure, so closure can be voted with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes. At that point we are in a one party state and the Democrats don't even need to bother showing up. It appears the Democrats are to spineless to filibuster anything at this point but if they do it will sure be interesting to see if the Republicans take the opportunity to sieze absolute power.
"What does the fact that I wonder if I should post this anonymously say?"
Hate to break it to you but everything you just said doesn't matter one iota to the executive branch or its minions. It is unfortunately just so much pissing in the wind, like the millions of similar rants posted to the Internet every year.
You could probably advocate overthrowing the government and the Federal government still wouldn't care unless you said something that suggested you were going to actually do something about it. If you threatened the life of the President now then the Secret Service might come down on you like a ton of bricks as they are want to do, though with the high volume of drivel on the Internet I doubt they bother to chase most of that down unless it has a particular edge to it.
You see, new psuedo democratic police states like you find in the U.S. and U.K. now aren't like Stalinist, Nazi or Chinese police states. These new style police states are going to let you rant all you want as long as you don't actually do anything to threaten their power. They aren't seeking to censor your every word, they don' want to, they don't have to, and in fact by not doing that it helps them maintain the facade that everyone is free.
In particular as long as you are alone, isolated, and sedentary they could care less what you say. Now if you started to organize, create a movement that takes hold, that gains a large following that they percieve threatens their power they will come down on you like a ton of bricks, like the did for example with Martin Luther King. They will use all the massive spying and enforcement power they have in the NSA, FBI, CIA, DOD and Secret Service to do it and it will hurt. They will probably win. Even if you start a little organization, like ELF, that is in the big scheme of things is a gnat, they might stomp you just to make an example out of you, or then to they might let it flourish just so they have a "domstic terrorist" organization they can use as justification for more repression.
Failing to organize and act in unison with millions of others, if you choose to fight back with violence, again they will come down on you like a ton of bricks. You will fill up the 24 hour news channels for a few hours, you will be branded as a wacko, they will parade every detail of your life and your internet surfing habits for the world to see, and you will end up either dead, in a mental institution or in jail for a very long time. They win again.
Only way you are going to beat the rising tide of Fascism in the U.S. and U.K. is to organize, to communicate a message to enough people, who receptive to hearing it, that enough is enough, that you build a movement that state can't ignore.
Maybe you could then defeat the power that be at the ballot box but they have massive control of the electoral process, the media, and the pulpit. A key problem you is can't pick one party as being pro freedom and hitch your wagon to it. Democrats and Republicans appear to be both equally fond of a big overpowering government, stripping our civil liberties and selling us down the river as they pandering to big corporate interests(Fascist do pander to big corporate interests as long as the corporations are led by their rich and powerful friends). Since both parties in the U.S. have fallen pray to people who want a police state, its unlikely you will change the course of either party, and its not every likely a third party will ever unseat them. They have completely stacked the deck against a third party gaining real power today.
Perhaps if you organized you could stage a peaceful revolution as we saw in Ukraine, or Eastern Europe and Russia when the iron curtain fell. First problem is you need a squeaky clean, charismatic, and brilliant leader like Ghandi and I doubt there are any such people in America today. Nadar is the closest we have and he can never get any traction because the media have painted him as fringe nut job, whose role is to add a little color and p
Rack one up for gullible Slashdot readers who moderated this guy's B.S. as interesting, I guess as B.S. goes it is interesting, but it is B.S. or a troll. I'll let half of this obnoxious grand standing go but these deserve some attention:
"1) The NSA is the most likely to be concerned about "unreasonable searches and seizures" and other Bill of Rights issues. The FBI and CIA routinely take the "extreme circumstance" route and use common loopholes to justify citizen and non-citizen monitoring. I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power."
You must be working a technicality, like you haven't physically "seen" the abuse but the DOD, NSA, FBI and CIA have all engaged in well documented and proven abuses of their powers over the years. They haven't been nailed lately but that is only because we are living in, for all practical purposes, a one party state, and the Republican's especially since 9/11 has been literally letting these agencies get away with murder. For example the Pentagon last week investigated itself and amazingly found itself innocent of ordering or condoning torture, though there are documented cases of varying degress of torture going on across the globe, far to widespread to be rogue national gaurdsmen. When abuse is this wide spread in the military either the chain of command is ordering or condoning it, or there is massive deriliciton of duty in the chain of command, the officers and civilian leadership, in letting it happen on such a large scale.
When you say something this blatantly and provably false it so undermines your credibility, we can safely assume the rest of your post is either a troll or B.S. too.
"2) Members from all branches of the Department of Defense are active Slashdot readers and contributers. They just never talk about what they do and some use "Tor" to post from work."
Not sure I follow why they anyone in the DOD would be using Tor to post to this silly little web site. Not like anyone on Slashdot is tracking their IP address. If someone is using Tor from a DOD facility with DOD's blessing, and posting on Slashdot or anywhere else, it tends to suggest they must be part of the DOD's rapidly growing propaganda machine, so you can't believe a thing they say. I have no doubt people from all branches of government read and post here, SO WHAT. If they post anything controversial or sensitive, from a government facility, they are just begging to be fired. I'm sure the DOD can read everything they are posting, and Tor isn't going to make any difference. Not sure I've ever read any post on Slashdot that rose to a level of importance the DOD would ever care.
"5) There is one member of the CIA that is single-handedly responsible for saving us from the plan devised by Jose Padilla. Unfortunately, they will never get the credit they deserve. It only took one person to say, "Why is this American talking with Abu Zubaydah twice?"."
Whatever Padilla was planning, if anything, wasn't nearly as dangerous as the precedent being set by the Bush administration in how they've abused his most basic civil liberties in arresting and detaining indefinitely, in isolation in a military brig in South Carolina. The Bush administration is seeking, through Padilla, to establish a precedent where the executive branch can arrest any American citizen, anywhere and deprive him or her of all of the most basic constitutional protections we thought we had in this country. In particular American citizens have a right to an attorney, a right to be charged, and a right to a speedy trial, and to be imprisoned only if found guilty by a jury of their peers. If Padilla is guilty of something, charge him, prove it, get a conviction or let him go.
The Supreme Court, spineless politicians that they are have passed on hearing his case on technicalities leaving this precedent in place for two years. A federal judge a week or two ago ruled the executive branch has NO constitutional authority to arrest, and hold in ind
How about Gator/Claria. Oh right, I forget, instead of being shut down by the government they've been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "privacy board" [sic].
I wonder if the FTC can take down Homeland Security, or for that matter I wonder if they can take down the whole Bush administration for false advertising, deception etc. For example in 2001 George W. promised to keep the giant surplus coming in from our Social Security payroll taxes sacred. He has since proceeded to spend every bit of it on tax cuts for the rich and the war in Iraq, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars worth. The Social Security "trust fund" is in fact a couple filing cabinets of worthless IOU's from one government agency to another and will in fact never probably be repaid. If our payroll taxes had been saved and conservatively invested it would be 2042 before it ran out of money. Instead it will in fact run out of money 2018 or so, leading to either slashing benefits or raising payroll taxes, which punish low and middle income people the most. The Bush administration, being the cynical manipulators that they are, are helping drive Social Security in to bankruptcy, declaring it to be a crisis and then proposing private accounts as the solution. Well private accounts would prevent the government from spending our Social Security money, but THE BUSH ADMINSTRATION IS THE WORST OFFENDER FOR SPENDING IT.
Dude, chill out. I was just googling for interesting comments about Mike Griffin and that was one. Trying to paint me as rascist for quoting something that had nothing to do with race is going off the deep end.
"Wouldn't it serve the best interests of the press to expose these people rather than protect them?"
It would serve the best interests of the public, yes, but it would mean these two reporters would effectively destroy their careers because no confidential source would ever trust them again, therefor they would never get any confidential information which is what most good journalists live for. There isn't much demand for journalists who only write about things that are already public knowledge.
I'm inclined to say Judith Miller does deserve some jail time but not in this case. She wisely opted to not publish this story, presumably because she appreciated the dangers of outing a CIA agent, or she realized that by doing it she was just being a pawn in a White House scheme to punish Wilson and his wife for daring to challenge the White House or their sham case for war against Iraq.
The thing Judith Miller does deserve some hard time for was being a lead cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq and the shameless extent to which she pumped up the national paranoia about biological weapons in particular. I'd dearly love to know what the motivation was for her little campaign to whip America in to a frenzy over biological weapons:
- Legitimate concern for the safety and well being of Americans
- Realized it would be a way to make a lot of money, especially by writing a book on biological weapons
- Unwitting pawn of the Bush administration in their desire to whip up a case for sham war in Iraq
- Witting pawn of the Bush administration in their desire to whip up a case for sham war in Iraq
The only two reporters who deserve some hard time in the Plame/Wilson affair are Robert Novak and maybe Jeff Gannon, but since they are both fanatical conservatives and darlings of the one party in charge of the one party state we live in now chances are they will get off scott free while the reporter from the despicable psuedo liberal rag the one party state hates so much, the New York Times, will go down and down hard.
The Bush administration seems to have a flair for sham investigations. For example this week the Pentagon investigation in to an apparent global epidemic of prisoner abuse and torture remarkably found the Pentagon to be completely innocent and it just happens elisted soldiers in Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably other secret locales around the world all took it upon themselves to torture prisoners, and of course the CIA's Rendition program was delivering 100's of prisoners to despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia's specificly for the purposes of interrogating them via torture. The irony here is either the chain of command ordered the torture, or the chain of command failed to prevent it. You cant have enlisted men do bad things in the military without an officer either ordering it, or being derelict in his duty for letting it happen without orders. Enlisted soldiers aren't free spirits who can just do their own thing in the military. They have a chain of command whose job it is to insure they do what the chain of command tells them to do.
The one concern I would have is I think he was spearheaded Bush Senior's Space Exploration Initiative(SEI) which was Bush Seniors version of going back to the Moon and Mars, and he presided over a program that dead ended. You have to wonder if Bush Junior is hoping for a different outcome the second time around, or if he doing a bad rerun of SEI meaning the current initiative is doomed.
A few noteworthy Google hits on Mike Griffin below, a hard name to Google because its so common.
I gather he invented Faster, Better, Cheaper while at SDIO, a concept that has some merit if properly done, it has a lot in common with Kelly Johnson and the old Lockheed Skunkworkds that built the U-2 and SR-71, but became much maligned when Dan Goldin tried to implement it at NASA, because NASA is institutionally and structurally incapable of doing faster, better, cheaper and have it end up being actually faster, better and cheaper.
theForce.net
Mike Griffin, a former senior NASA manager and aerospace industry executive, presented the most charitable assessment of NASA's human space flight efforts, ranking it second in priority only to building a new, more reliable heavy lift launcher.Griffin advised following through with space station, which means returning the shuttle to flight, while setting a new course that includes Mars. To accomplish this, Griffin recommends increasing NASA's budget from $15 billion a year to $20 billion.
"NASA costs each American 14 cents a day. A really robust program could be had for about 20 cents a day," Griffin said. "Americans spend more on pizza then they do on space."
Free Republic
The final nail in the coffin of Goldin's "legacy" came when NASA published its damning critique of his vaunted "better, faster, cheaper" approach.
A couple of points on this greatly misunderstood concept..
First, FBC is not Dan Goldin's invention. It came out of the old SDIO ("Star Wars") organization back in the late '80s. At the time, the dominant paradigm in both military and civil space was big, complex, very capable spacecraft, on which any and all instruments and experiments could be accommodated.
This development model led to decade-long, multi-billion dollar missions (e.g., Galileo, Milstar). When these kind of missions screw-up (e.g., Hubble Telescope, Galileo antenna), the public and Congressional ramifications can be devastating.
"FBC" was devised as a way to deal with this problem. I believe it was mostly developed by Mike Griffin, then Director of Technology at SDIO. The concept was simple: cut costs by having a small, compact, "Skunk Works"-type development team. Fly small satellites, each with one or two instruments, more often. As you are launching smaller sats more often, you have more flight opportunities, so if there IS a failure, you can recover from it quickly. In short, the objective is the knowledge gained from space flight, not to design and fly the most capable vehicle.
It's "faster" because you don't have decadal development times as the satellites as smaller and less complex. It's "cheaper" because you're not paying a marching army of highly paid technical staff (where the true costs of space flight really are). It's "better" because for a given amount of expenditure, you get more data, more often.
You can criticize this all you want to, but the simple fact is that FBC "worked" on a lot of the SDI flight projects of the early 90s (e.g., Delta Star, MSTI), culminating with the successful space test of the Brilliant Pebble spacecraft, the Clementine mission in 1994.
Goldin and NASA (specifically, JPL) never really understood this concept. They understood "cheaper" in the sense of reducing engineering development costs, but kept the glacial JPL pace, which ran the manpower costs right back up again. The Mars Pathfinder mission, NASA's FBC "success" story, was successful o
"While this is certainly a concern, what are the overall effects of such a mass departure?"
In the case of Carly Fiorina all indications are the effects are overwhelming positive. Though rumours were circulating she might be tapped by the Bush administration to lead the World Bank, or a similar position of great influence, continuing the Bush administration policy of promoting incompetence. not clear if Carly has a clue about economics though she does have degrees in business administration. She does grasp the one principal apparently most important to todays business leaders and politicians, ""There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,"
The article isn't clear if this exodus is U.S. only or globally. If its U.S. only perhaps its just an indicator that women are more astute and more career and survival savvy. IT is NOT a good profession since the bubble burst unless maybe you work at Google. I suspect most of the people who cashed in on the bubble were more the con artists than the IT professionals anyway.
Let's hop in the way back machine and remember John Chambers last year prognosticating on the future of IT in America:
"China will become the IT centre of the world and we can have a healthy discussion about whether that's in 2020 or 2040."
"What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company," Chambers said.
There is great irony in American business and political elite bragging about the superiority of "Freedom and Democracy", "Free Markets" and Capitalism as they rush to embrace a Socialist Dictatorship and transfer most of America's wealth there. The routinely point out China's education system is superior, labor is firmly controlled and oppressed so they have a "disciplined" work force, every aspect of their markets, including their currency, are heavily manipulated. They also routinely implement massive trade barriers which are requiring companies like Cisco and IBM to transfer massive numbers of jobs, capital, market access and intellectual property to China in order to gain access to Chinese markets which are decidely not free.
There is great irony in this hypocrisy. Its pretty obvious America's business and political leaders dont want "Freedom and Democracy", they want dictatorship, manipulated markets, and cheap, oppressed labor. Since its difficult to retrofit this system on the U.S. at this point it appears they are just moving all their wealth where such a system is already in place.
Here is a quick summary of the new U.S. economy. Bottomline is if you want to have a future the career fields you want to be in are:
- Business administration
- Marketing
- Service jobs that can't be outsourced and where you aren't competing against illegal immigrants
The long term future in business administration and marketing is open to doubt once the Chinese and Indians have reached the point they no longer need their American partners (i.e. after they've learned the markets, once American markets collapse due to the fundemental unsoundness of the current U.S. economy and they possess all the production capacity and IP).
All in all its become pretty apparently American politicians, business leaders and shareholders are selling their own nation down the river in the name of short term profits and their personal wealth. It appears likely the U.S. economy could be collapsing and the stock markets would still flourish since most large U.S. companies are rushing to globalization that they can probably continue to be profitable even if the U.S. economy is deteriorating. Stock markets are most probably riding a wave of improved profitability from exploiting cheap Chinese labor and goods. Globalized American companies can flourish while America does not.
You have to wonder if all the
FOSS is not great because it tends to suffer a surplus of prima donnas, all of whom would rather be the boss of their own project rather than cooperate on one project. And of course once they fork their own project they continue to be prima donnas and make life miserable for people who want to contribute to their project, causing those people to want to fork and start their own project to escape Prima Donna #1, and in the process have a high risk of becoming Prima Donna's #2 through 8.
FOSS is great when a project stagnates like XFree86 so X.org starts fresh and fixes a broken system.
FOSS is not great when you have massive duplication of effort, for example in putting out a Linux distribution mutation #106. It takes a lot of work to collect all the bits for a distribution, build them, get a critical mass of people to test them, and fix the bugs. When you fragment and duplicate this effort 106 times you are wasting vast amounts of man(woman) power that could better be spent moving forward instead of reinventing the same wheel over and over again.
FOSS is not great when it develops 10 GUI "standards", 8 audio "standards" and 104 window managers. Its great for tinkerers but it is living hell for people who just want to develop and deploy applications that solve problems and for users who just want their problems solved.
Anytime you develop the urge to be a prima donna or to fork, just look at Linus. He is, in my book, not worthy of the God status most bestow on him around here, but his one greatest attribute is he holds together a complex and often problematic development team and he has so far managed to avoid a serious fork that would potentially wreck future kernel development. He is great because he is not a prima donna.
"html sucks for equations"
Not sure what your standard is for "sucks" but MathML works reasonably well and is supported in Firefox/Mozilla, though you need some particular fonts.
Some of the MIT OpenCourseWare like, Calculus makes fairly extensive use of fairly involved formulas.
I wish it worked on Konqueror, maybe it does, but it didn't last time I tried it.
Probably would be nice if this stuff was supported in a more standard way in Linux/Firefox distributions too, without having to rummage around.
It would be great to see stuff like MathML and the MIT course ware get a lot wider exposure, especially to young people. Maybe it would counter the general bad education system, especially in the U.S.
Maybe next time you can try to be more creative. The tinfoil thing is a worn out Slashdot standard. Sometimes its used legitimately when someone goes off the deep end about an unprovable conspiracy theory. In the case of Rendition you are just using it so you can stick your head in the sand and enter a state of denial about something that is increasingly well documented, and that you don't want to admit your beloved country does. As you are using it here:
tinfoil == denial
Maybe you object to the use of the term Fascist police state to the U.S. but that isn't conspiracy theory, its more a matter of opinion on how you describe the bizarre political path the U.S. is taking. To me this term is a case of if the shoe fits..... Fascism became a dirty word in World War II so it became politically incorrect to use it, so we have terms for left wing police states, Communist or Socialist, but we have no "allowed" politically correct term for right wing police states though the world has them, they are now a form of government with no name. At the moment the U.S., the U.K., Italy and Columbia certainly qualify as shades of Fascist state though they haven't yet achieved the extremes of World War II era German, Italy and Japan. Spain was pretty close to one before its government was pushed out of power at the ballot box last year. They are kinder, gentler fascist states to be sure, maybe compassionate fascism. Today's fascist states maintain a greater pretense of Democracy, they rely on a majority at the ballot box from a fascist leaning populace to keep them in power. It appears in the U.S. that we are now very close to being a one party state. As soon as the Republicans change the Senate rules on the filibuster so that they can vote closure with a simple majority the Democratic party will be essentially powerless at the Federal level and they can pretty much just stop bothering to show up. The Republicans are teetering on the verge of doing this, they call it the "nuclear option". If they exercise it they will eliminate the only remaining obstacle to their political agenda, the Senate fillibuster. Then they just need to bombard the American people with propaganda so that American's vote away their freedom, and vote Fascist, every 2 years.
As for the CIA's Rendition there isn't much that is conspiracy theory about it now. The government admits its happening, just not the details, there are numerous witnesses to the snatches in various countries around the world, the tail numbers of the two planes that are used are well known, one is a Gulfstream, the other a 737, owned by a front company for the CIA. The planes are crewed by men who were black masks to conceal their identity though the tail numbers on the planes tell everyone they are American.
Their flight plans aren't secret so they've left a trail of the places they've been including Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
An ex CIA agent admits he worked on it.
Congress is investigating it, its being referred to by them as "outsourced torture".
A number of people have been caught up in it and often released, usually by intervention of countries who still value basic civil liberties like Sweden and Canada. The program isn't disappearing all of its victims quite as perfectly as it would like.
About the only thing that is not provable, by design, is exactly how much torture is being used on the people snatched by rendition, and how many have died in the process.
About the only thing the Bush administration is denying is that they are technically endorsing the use of torture. Again by design they are sending people to countries who use torture in interrogation, and claiming their hands are clean because they have no control over what happens once the victims land in Egyptian or Saudi hands, though they gleefully take the intelligence that comes back from the process. The worst problem being, and most interrogators will tell you, is the intelligence is usually worth
Pretty sure there is no safe place to go in the world anymore to escape the rising tide of fascist police states.
If you've been following the news the last few days on the secret CIA Rendition program, the U.S. has bestowed upon itself the right to pretty much snatch anyone, anywhere on the globe, blindfold you, cut your clothes of with razors, stick a tranquilizer up your ass, put you in a private jet and fly you to various places to be tortured. One of which is Uzbekistan which apparently favors torturing you by putting parts of your body in boiling water.
If sometime later they deduce they made a mistake and you are in fact not a terrorist they just drop you in the middle of nowhere in Albania and say oops. One guy was disappeared for 5 months and had to find his family in Lebanon after they left Gemany thinking he had abandoned them.
When they pick you up they pretty much tell you that you are completely out of range of any judicial system or due process. They tell you they will take you places where you can be tortured or killed, and no one will ever know what happened to you.
How do you spell Hypocrisy to rant about Saddam's arbitrary arrests and torture, and making that a justification for the invasion. At least Saddam mostly stuck to torturing people in Iraq. The U.S. will snatch and torture anyone, anywhere in the world, often flaunting the most basic sovereignty of the nations where they are operating.
I think at this point since we can't escape it, its rapidly becoming time to fight it, hard.
I should add Rendition started during the reign of Bush the First or Clinton, Bush the Second has just been going to town with it. It does show that neither of the screwed up parties that run America have the most basic understand of what "Freedom and Democracy" actually means. First off it means you shouldn't be snatched off the street and tortured in to a confession when you may not be guilt of anything. In America we have this little thing called a constitution, due process, and civil rights but our corrupt government seems to have forgotten. They seem to need an attitude adjustment.
They don't look the same, they don't work the same, the use different UI conventions, they interoperate better than they used to but still don't interoperate especially well. And you are massively bloating up the memory footprint loading two or mote massive GUI frameworks who do pretty much exactly the same things differently.
You can pretend its OK to tell an ordinary user, not a geek, to deal with this bullshit but they will probably back away from you slowly and switch to OSX or Windows where they don't have to put up with lack of consistency in UI standards.
Thought freedesktop had something like it wxWidgets or something. Tried it a while ago and don't think it did Qt but I forget now.
Probably wont play particularly well with a serious application developer who likes to QA their stuff, and document it well with screenshots for example. You still have to QA it on all the toolkits your going to see it run on unless you are half assed.
There is some new mode now where you can force GTK apps like OpenOffice to use Qt, I've been meaning to try it soon. I'm a KDE user and would like OpenOffice to play right with KDE. Would consider Firefox to maybe were it not so much more bloated and slow compared to Konqueror.
OK, I'll add yet another audio API to the list. Heard of it, lost track of it. To many bloody audio API's to keep track of and figure out which one is IN and which ones are OUT.
How many actual Linux machines is it installed on? Not on mine.
Didn't have the license immediately obvious on the web page. Is there a BSD'ish license that lets you link it in to a commerical app to get around it not being installed everywhere.
How exactly does it get around that fact that if the machine is running OSS, which is still the standard on 2.4.x kernels, and some other app has the sound device allocted that it can't get to it. Its not terrible getting one app to work with audio on Linux, its more of a pain to get two or more apps to work on Linux at the same time and share.
I think you are a suffering from a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. The proprietary UNIX vendors cratered for a few simple reasons. Nitpicking over their GUI standards weren't much of it:
A. Their business model demanded steeply inflated profit margins, leading to steeply inflated hardware and software costs. As soon as Microsoft could do most of the same things at a fraction of the price they were partially doomed. As soon as Linux could do ALL of the same things at even a smaller fraction of the price they were completely doomed. Proprietary UNIX had its heyday because people had to pay them buckets of money for there stuff because there was no other way, not true anymore.
B. The vast majority of the for profit computer hardware and software business, is completely depdendent on high volume and economy of scale. The fragmentation that killed the proprietary UNIX vendors was steep R&D costs for relatively small and deeply fragmented customer base. Gates figured out a long time ago the cost of developing software is fairly constant. The more copies of software you sell the less it costs and the more money you make. Volume is king in most software development. The proprieatary UNIX also couldn't compete in developing things like their proprietary CPU's because with each new generation CPU development get ever more expensive to develop and the didn't have the volume to cover the cost. IBM with their deep pockets being an obvious exception.
C. Fragmentation in standards did lead to fragmentation in application development. Software developers were almost universally forced to either pick the market leader(Windows) and pander to them, or waste fairly extensive resources trying to develop on multiple platforms, especially the QA resources to test on all of them.
Microsoft wins hands down on attracting software developers because they have the biggest market and they do for the most part keep binary applications running on their platforms for nearly ever.
Its a simple proven fact of the life the thing that drains application developers of their enthusiasm for Linux the most are:
- There is no GUI standard. You either pick one and code to it and blow off all the potential customers who want to use another, or try to code to multiple standard which no one does, or users are forced to CONSTANTLY switch gears between GUI look and feel. That really hacks off users. OSX wins hands with users and developers because everything works predictably and the same. OSX wins with developers because there are finite number of ways to develop things. There are a few to many generations of frameworks to choose from but that is mostly sue to supporting legacy apps.
- There is no decent audio standard if you are developing audio apps. Between OSS, ALSA, esd, arts, gstreamer and bad mixer implementations(though these are better in newer GNOME and KDE) its simply a royal pain to develop and audio app on Linux and hope for it to run right on every machine.
The problem with Fark is it needs user community moderation like here. The signal to noise ratio is fairly poor.
I guess I should save this and cut and paste it since I post it everytime Slashdot has a dupe or bogus front page story which is at least twice a day lately.
This site is all about open source and freedom from proprietarty BS so why is Slashdot editing locked in to a small number of biased people who really obviously don't read their own web site or they would notice all the dupes. The proprietary editing system isn't so bothersome when the editors seem to actually care enough to do a good job but that doesn't seem to be the case lately.
If slashdot editing were software we would be screaming about the fact its buggy and we can't fix it because its proprietary. Why don't we demand the same rules for our top website we hold for our software.
My suggestions:
A. Make a page where we can all view all the submissions in the last day or two so we can do our own editing. I wanted to see what slashdotters find interesting enough to submit and not what a small group of self appointed gods find interesting. Maybe the editors can censor the juvenile crap and garbage but otherwise I want to see raw submissions.
B. Give people moderator points for front page stories and let moderators pick story. I'd suggest this be in edition to the self appointed gods, maybe just let moderators pick a few stories a day from the stuff the corporate editors don't pick.
You would need some kind of UI so that submissions on the same topic are all grouped together so only the top moderated one in the group gets picked. Similarly you want a UI to mark dupes of stuff already submitted.
Then every so many hours automaticly pull the top rated submission and put it on the front page.
Maybe the self appointed gods could start crutching off the moderation so they could still pretend to be editors but not look like the goofs they've looked like in the last couple of months
But assuming there will be no changed and as far as editing goes this is a closed source, proprietary shop what is the next best site out there like Slashdot but with editing that doesn't bite as much as it has around here lately.
Or how hard do think it would be to start Slashdot 2.0, carry the source code to a new URL and servers and start it fresh but with users moderating the front page stories.
Wireless is still young. With standardization, and when all computers have it built in, not just laptops, like Ethernet is, it can be made just as easy to setup as Ethernet and broadband. Not like most people don't have trouble setting up modems and ethernet broadband too.
If necessary the city can mail fliers with the proceedure, and create a help desk which is what a commercial provider will do, and yes a help desk will cost money.
"There's a reason cable is called a natural monopoly"
:) pay premium prices for cable or DSL. Don't need you bogging down the wireless net with that time wasting, garbage in the first place.
BZzzzzzt. Wrong again. There is this thing called satellite TV, there are at least two competitors for your cable company, Dish and DirectTV, its no more a natural monopoly than wireless would be and it still bites, because your cable company and the two satellite companies jack up prices at a pretty similar rate. Not sure the collude as much as they all ahve to pay a small handful of networks for the content and the networks are close to a monopoly at this point due to merger. Cable and oil are real similar. There is the pretense of competition, but there are few big players and they are all glad to collude on pricing and supply so they all profit equally at our expense, and Exxon/Mobile is profiting mightily at our expense.
"It is much easier to create a competing Wi-Fi access system, and with more Wi-Fi, you get more competition, which lowers prices."
Yea, and the first thing a big company with deep pockets will do when they want the market is buy out any them that has a customer base worth having. Thats what big companies in the capitalist world do consolidate, monopolize and inflate.
"because you're paying for it, just in another, less efficient form"
Please make a case why it would be less efficient. You have absolutely zero basis for that claim other than you are obviously an ingrained big government hater so you assume its a given, well it isn't. I hate big government too, mostly at the federal and state level. Most cities do a fine job of keeping our home towns functioning, some suck but so do most companies providing basic services like phone and cable and are just as bureaucratic as city governments if not more so. If your city government sucks its a lot easier to do something about it through the ballot box, or running yourself, than it is at the state level,
"Oh, and forget about freedom from censorship, I'm sure they'll put a nice little web site blocker on it too."
Dude get real. You are putting out internet access in to the air where any 12 year old who can scrape together the hardware can use it. it SHOULD be censored to block porn. If you want high bandwidth access to porn so you can jack off all day, which is apparently something you value