Maybe you should be locked up in a prison on suspicion of a crime, especially a crime you didn't commit, and be tortured and sexually humiliated in front of a camera and then have those pictures shown to your friends and family if not the whole world.
Here , read this, its the testimony of one of the people tortured at Abu Graib. He was and is being held on "suspicion" of theft, not terrorism or decapitating people or anything he had been convicted of. Try putting yourself in his shoes while you are reading it and maybe you will stop being such an arrogant American dick.
I don't think ANY of the people tortured in Abu Graib were "terrorists" that had decapitated peoples. Most of them were people arrested for ordinary crimes, especially looting which EVERYONE in Iraq was doing after the invasion, or innocent people just caught up in dragnets when the U.S. was rounding up people looking mostly in vain for insurgents and Saddam loyalists.
Its key, NONE of the people in Abu Ghraib had been "convicted" of anything. They were suspects. You are basicly dropping the bar so low that the U.S. government can arrest and torture anyone, anywhere on suspicion, and maybe torture a confession out of them that isn't worth the paper its printed on. If they aren't found to be guilty of anything how do you justify torturing them?
You are in fact endorsing EXACTLY the same thing the U.S. has been so indignant about Saddam doing and used as an excuse to overthrow him. The stuff you are taking about is the antithesis of the "Freedom and Democracy" the Bush administration cons everyone in to thinking we brought to Iraq. It is a key reason the Iraqi people have become to despise the U.S. occupation force so much because it managed, with ease, to put itself at the same level as Saddam with arbitrary arrests, torture and killing innocent civilians, often women, children and wounded, unarmed combatants.
All in all you should probably turn in your U.S. citizenship because you have NO CLUE what your country is supposed to stand for, in particular due process is the most basic underpinning of the rule of law and if you chose to cast it aside for some people its a matter of time its thrown aside for everyone, you included, and you have a police state no different from Saddam's.
As for Geneva conventions not applying in Iraq they most certainly do. Its legal hair splitting if they apply to Al Qaida but they sure as hell apply to Iraq. When your nation invades and occupies a sovereign nation there are most definitely rules on how you treat the civilian population of that occupied country, they most definitely apply to the U.S. as a signatory no matter how much you and the Bush administration want to pretend they don't. They forbid:
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;... (c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
The U.S. has done EVERY one of these in Iraq.
If you want to cast aside U.S. adherence to the Geneva conventions then DON'T get mad if American's are taken as prisoners of war, in the upcoming war in Iran for example, if they are tortured and sexually humiliated, you've given every American adversary the rationale to do it and the world which just say America is getting what it deserves. You better also hope that you are never in place that is invaded and occupied because again you are giving the invading army a blank check to arrest, torture, sexually humiliate and kill you because you are an American who has chosen to cast aside the Geneva conventions.
"But are you willing to pay part of the billions of dollars (annually!) it would add to the federal budget to make all of that info that available?"
Yea actually I am. In fact I think it would be a small price to pay and it would actually result a dramatic improvement in government efficiency and probably pay for itself many times over in the long run. Maybe its not feasible to put all old paper docs on line but you sure could put all new documents on line and it would be a huge benefit, as long as they secure it properly.
The FBI is a great example. Well they did waste $170 million to try and create an on line system to make all their cases and records available electronicly to their agents, agency wide. They botched it completely but that is because of incompetence of government contractors who are there to soak up your tax dollars instead of doing a good job. It was a great idea just badly executed and they should have used off the shelf open source software put together by a small team of smart, probably unemployed, open source programmers and not a pork laden government contractor.
If you got someone competent to do it, like Google for example though they would never get entangled in a government contar, and all the FBI's records were available online then:
A. The could quickly answer FOIA requests, especially moving forward (putting all the old documents on line is still problematic but at least you are fixing the problem from this point on).
B. The FBI, if it had this system in place in 2000 might have actually caught on to the fact muslim extremists were training in American flight schools to take off and not land airliners. They had the information in their files it just wasn't being communicated throughout the agency. If the FBI had all its information online in an internal google they might well have stopped 9/11 and how much would that have saved this country, that price tag is probably in the trillions by now if you count wasteful government spending, two wars and the untolled economic damage since.
"Watch less TV and read some actual information - it will make you want to vote for people that are trying to streamline and minimize the government, not bloat it more and more to service interests that don't actually produce anything."
If you can cite some numbers showing how much the DOD actually spends on the FOIA maybe I'll subscribe to your arguement, I personally wager its a fly speck in their budget but I can't immediately find the figure in Google. Whatever it is its a really small price to pay to allow the public and watchdog groups to shine some light on the workings of the government. I am pretty confident the actual fraud, waste, abuse and pork in our government, which the FOIA is designed to help root out, far outstrips anything we spend on the FOIA.
I assure you it does produce priceless information especially in the hands of experienced watchdog groups like EPIC and the ACLU, that more than make up for all the frivolous requests. Here are EPIC's annual FOIA summaries.
Here are some recent gems uncovered by the ACLU. The only thing that suggests the FOIA is a waste of money is dynamite like this comes out, its in the news a day or two and then it disappears in to a black hole. These discoveries indicate our government is violating the most basic tenets of what our country and its Constitution stand for and we as citizens just don't care, neither we or elected representatives do anything about, and it just continues on unchecked. The DOD assembles a jury of biased soliders and hangs a few grunts for Abu Graib and we as citizens choose to ignore that the use of torture is OBVIOUSLY widespread and a matter of policy in the DOD and the FOIA shows this. It is no doubt endorsed at the highest levels and we do nothing about it.
All in all it sure would be interesting to find how much fraud, waste and abuse has been uncovered by the FOIA and whistelblower laws to see if they in fact pay for themselves, many times over, though much of it is intangible, if for example it stopped people from being tortured by our government and in our name, what price tag would you put on that.
So even if it is costing us a lot its a small price to pay to weed out corruption, abuse and incompetence in our government. On the other hand if the Bush administration in particular manages to completely frustrate legitimate FOIA requests as they are want to do then yes, it is a complete waste of money. If that becomes the case that is not the fault of the law but of the people whose legal duty it is to implement it, and those people are working against the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives in Congress and when that happens we don't live in the representative Democracy we've been led to believe we do.
Not sure how the law reads for access to court records but for FOIA requests it is well established practice the FOIA office in the agency answering the request, and every agency has to have one, has to review the documents and censor all information that is classified or would violate the privacy of individuals.
At least as far as FOIA requests go your argument is a red herring.
Unfortunately this censorship can be abused to wipe out information that should be made public but the responding agency just doesn't want the public to know. FOIA requests on the TSA no fly list were answered this way, when they did release documents on the heart of the matter, who ran it, how names got on it, how names get taken off or names on the list, the documents were either censored in to oblivion, and many were simply withheld because they were "classified".
The content of this list should be public information, and how its managed MUST be public information because it directly impacts everyone who flies, especially innocent people unfortunate enough to have names that match names on the list and even aliases of suspected terrorists on the list, which is what they claimed when Senator Kennedy was prevented from flying by the list. Its a complete crap shoot if you can be accused of being a terrorist and prevented from flying because of the random chance your name is on the list and the mechanism for an average citizen to get there name off the list is ill defined. You are better off just slightly mutating your name until it stops matching. It would be trivial for an actual terrorist to circumvent this list, and the only way to fix that would be to make it an even more intrusive invasion of privacy as has been attempted several times with CAPPS.
I'd agree the situation here is not clear though I imagine the FBI, or more probably their masters in White House and the Pentagon, developed a strong desire to frustrate and stonewall FOIA seraches when these. surfaced.
Of concern, DOD interrogators impersonating Supervisory Special Agents of the FBI told a detainee that REDACTED. These same interrogation teams then REDACTED. The detainee was also told by this interrogation team REDACTED. These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and CITF believes that techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done the FBI interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public.
Not sure how much truth there this is to Seymour Hersh's recent expose on Pentagon special ops in Iran, I wouldn't be surprised if the Bush administration is duping Hersh' and feeding him all this to rattle cages around the globe and at home. If its true though it tends to suggest the Bush administration is making one Presidential finding after another in which they are giving the Pentagon a blank check to wage the war on "Terrorism" without congressional oversight, with complete disregard for the integrity of borders of sovereign nations, some probably ostensibly American allies, and most probably with complete disregard for the Geneva conventions and U.S. law against torturing prisoners. I'm pretty sure you send an FOIA request to the Pentagon you will get back sheets of wide black magic marker lines.
From Hersh's article:
"The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia."
"The Presidents decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the booksfree from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) The Pentagon doesnt feel obligated to report any of this to Congress, the former high-level intelligence official said. They dont even call it covert opsits too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, its black reconnaissance. Theyre not even going to tell the CINCsthe regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)"
""Bush's inauguration costs too much! Rich people are paying for it! The money should go to Tsunami relief! The money should go to the poor! There shouldn't be an inauguration!!!""
I'll have to agree with you on this one. Ranting about the cost and extravagance of the inauguration is silly. About the only criticism I can make of it is:
- Some of those singers they were unbelievable. Kind of proves Republicans are some combination of tone deaf or don't know how to throw a party. The fact they are going after Sponge Bob now confirms a few screws are loose someplace. - That speech Bush gave was silly. All that never ending repetition of freedom, democracy and liberty. Everyone knows he his only going to liberate countries that are:
o Anti American
o Have oil
o Are a threat to Israel
Amazingly Iran pops to the top of the list on all counts. Venezuela is right up there too though they happen to have a democraticly elected government, it wasn't a perfect election but it was better than all the countries below. Meanwhile he ain't gonna lift a finger about the dicatorships in:
o Saudi Arabia
o Kuwait
o Egypt
o Pakistan
o Russia
o China
o Tajikistan, etc.
I love it how right wingers used to rant about Communist dictatorships but now that they are all making a killing in China they love the place and its government, though it hasn't really changed other than they threw open the door to the running dogs to make a fortune on their cheap labor, and transfered the world's economy to China's control. The Chinese are genius, they beat capitalism at its own game and destroyed it without firing a shot.
So all in all I'd agree ranting about the inauguration shows a lack of focus on the part of the media and the left. Lets:
- Focus on the quagmire of a war in Iraq. Here is an interview with an Army medic back from Iraq. Right wingers rant Iraq is going great and its the "liberal media" thats just making it look bad. Well this is grunt that was there and his main complaint is nobody in Iraq wants the U.S. there anymore and he had no clue what the point of the war is other than control of oil and he apparently isn't alone among the enlisted men. Don't listen to officers on Iraq, they are gonna spew the company line, the grunts will tell the truth.
- Focus on the fact Bush has increased government spending over 25% in three years at the same time he slashed taxes for the wealthy and is pushing U.S. debt to unsustainable levels. The U.S. government is becoming so in debt to China and Japan they can start dictating policy to the U.S. There is an old axiom the Bush administration has forgotten, "Neither a borrower or a lender be", well at least the borrower part is true. The U.S. is by a huge margin the world's largest debtor nation now and that debt is going to come home to roost. Just because it hasn't yet doesn't mean it wont especially when its hitting these extravagant levels.
- Focus on the staggering trade deficits the U.S. is running with the world especially with China. It is crossing the 5% of GDP market and deficits of those levels violate every tenent of sound fiscal policy and again are not sustainable. The U.S. will be come so mired in debt it will again be vulnerable to foreign blackmail or foreign induced economic collapse
- Look at the state of the U.S. dollar especially compared to the Euro. It makes U.S. exports cheap but otherwise its a disaster waiting to happen and its cratering because of fundementally unsound fiscal policy coming out of the Bush administration. Foreign investors, especially OPEC states are getting tired of taking a bath on their dollars and are dumping them for Euros. There is also a real risk now they will start selling their oil in Euros and the dollar will stop being the worlds main currency. That will be another devastating blow to the U.S. economy and the dollar's value.
And of course there is no crisis other than the one George W. is trying to manufacture. Medicare and Medicaid are going to go bankrupt long before Social Security ever will(and it will never go bankrupt it will just have shortfalls leading to benefit cuts or higher taxes). Health care and drugs costs skyrocketing in this country are the crisis he should be dealing with NOW, along with seniors who abuse and overuse the medical system for every health problem as long as Medicare pays for it.
Eventually there will be a short fall and Social Security will have to cash in all the treasuries its hopefully holding which I imagine the government would prefer they didn't if it continues running the huge deficits. Social Security is running a large surplus at the moment and George W. is spending every bit of it and then some and giving the Social Security administration potentially worthless paper in exchange for it. Our payroll taxes are in effect subsidizing his tax cuts for the wealthy.
The only good thing I can say about George W's proposal is that it would give people some control over money that is now being sucked out of our paychecks and over which we have no control. If you die before you collect on it disappears and is used to pay benefits to someone you don't know. Me personally I WOULD LOVE IT IF THEY JUST GAVE ME BACK TODAY WHAT I'VE PAID IN AND LET ME DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH IT, blow it and starve when I retire or invest it wisely and have the money at my disposal now and not gamble on not living till 65 and losing 12.5% of my income to socialism.
Its lost on most workers but by they are paying something like 12.5% of their wages to Social Security so when George W. says the low income don't pay taxes he is glossing over that fact. The hide how large the tax bite is from workers by subtracting only half of the contribution out of your paycheck but your employer pays the other half and that is money that could be used to pay you higher wages if that bite wasn't there so you do pay really pay 12.5%.
What is the main motive in George W.'s plan, he want to put even more stress on Social Security, start it down the road to withering away, and fulfill a long running conservative dream of killing it, a dream they've had since it passed in the 30's. If you have program with future revenue shortfalls reducing the money going in to the program isn't going to make it better, its going to make it worse and lead to its demise.
It also is going to be a windfall for the stock market, big banks and investment companies that are the Republican's best friends, and I'm not sure that isn't the real driving force behind this. If will lear to a big influx of money to big banks and investment companies that is now going in to T bills and bonds. Instead it will go in to gambling on the stock market and in new fees for the investment companies. They will get a windfall profit off it either in the fees, or in the inflated stock prices it will yield, or in manipulating the stock market so they win big and these retirement accounts win small. The big banks are adept at selling stocks at the top, and manufacturing ups and down in the market they cash in on, while this retirement money will just sit and ride the roller coaster they manufacture.
And of course there is always a chance they will generate a big bubble they cash in on, and then a crash that will wipe out people's retirements. Just because the U.S. stock market has trended up historicly doesn't mean it always will especially in the face of dramatic increases in foreign competition, gigantic trade and budget deficits, and very unsound fiscal policy like we have now which is cratering the dollar.
The big questions, is VMS more secure or are today's hackers just increasingly ignorant of it, and study it less, so they are less likely to know its weaknesses or where to begin to try to exploit it. Linux, Mac and Windows all have hackers who know every angle and known vulnerability, I doubt VMS has that kind of dubious following.
"I have a feeling that if you want to fix your relationship with redhat, there's an option - get in touch with their marketing team and work out a deal. If you don't, carping to an employee here is obviously not helpful."
I appreciate the advice but I thought I made it clear I don't want to fix any relationship with RedHat and I don't what to get in touch with their marketing team, that would just tick me off about as much as Nailer did running down all the excuses why they think their shit don't stink.
Replacing Gentoo with Red Hat would be a giant step backward in my book. I guess your right, now that I think about it, I should apologize to RedHat. If they hadn't done what they done I never would have been motivated to switch to Gentoo. They did me a great service. THANKS RED HAT!!!
Don't think I was carping to an employee here, I think their employee was carping at me. I just thought I'd giving everyone a rundown all the wonderful things RedHat did last year, and which are a matter of record, and which are so thoroughly burned in my memory... since we were talking about Red Hat making a feeble attempt to try and straighten out that which they wrought.
I give up. You aren't gonna say anything thats gonna make me happy with your company, and you really are just digging a deeper hole as far as I'm concerned, though I know your goal here is to point out what an "idiot" I am to everyone else. You seem to be from the "the customer is always wrong and I'm always right school".
All I'll say about all your ranting that I'm a bad customer because I didn't call you up and whine, is there wasn't any point. Your company took a gigantic strategic left turn and you hung many of your customers out to dry, the only way you could have fixed that was to do a gigantic undo of your whole strategy and little ol' me wasn't gonna make that happen no matter how much I grovelled at your feet.
Instead of spending futile days trying to find the right people at your company to talk to it was way easier and more satisfying to just download Gentoo CD's and kiss your company goodbye. Low and behold I liked Gentoo better anyway but thats just me. This is what's called a customer voting with his feet.
I just delight in reminding everyone of your recent stellar performance everytime there is a/. article about your company's vain attempt to try and straighten out the royal mess its made of itself.
So, lets just leave it that I had enough of your company a year ago, I ain't gonna come back, and I ain't alone. There hows that for grammar.
"If you're complaining about 8 being end of lifed 2 years after release (and then being further extended by Red Hat),"
If this was some kind of long established plan how did you manage to end of life THREE major versions in the space of quarter. You didn't release them all in the space of a quarter did you?
"That's a problem they've acknowledged - if you actually talk to them about this grievance, rather than screaming loudly on Slashdot amongst a bunch of lies, they'll cut you a rather nice deal on RHEL support."
HAHAHA...HA...HAHAHA....HAHAHA...HAHAHA..HAHAHA
Stop it your killing me.
So you just screwed me on my previous subscription and your solution is I go beg and plead to you and if I'm nice to you and give you even MORE money for a NEW subscription, which you have an established a track record for screwing people over on, you will CUT ME A DEAL.
HAHAHA....HAHAHAHAH...HAHAHAHA
You oughta be a comedian or in marketing, though only maroons are gonna reward you with more business after you screw them the first time around. Like I said it was way easier to just nuke your sorry OS and install Gentoo than grovel at your feet. You aren't one of the good guys any more so I really have no desire to give you any money.
So if this end of lifing frenzy was part of this long term, well publicized plan, then how how did this problem which you "acknowledge" come about. Either A. everything was according to plan so there is no problem to acknowledge or B. you intentionally screwed paying customers and it appears you "acknowledge" you did.
"As a result, we need to focus on customers that will pay us for what we do (rather than if something goes wrong)."
Uh, I paid you when I bought a box set for nearly every minor release, whether I needed to or not (though I could have burned bandwidth and time and burned my own). Why because Red Hat used to be the good guys and I was glad to give you money so you would succeed and the box sets were nice to have.
I bought your subscription service and was gonna give you money every year in perpetuity.
I think you meant to say "we need to focus on customers that will pay buckets of money in big whacks" instead of paying attention to all the little people that took Red Hat from a couple people in an apartment to an eight hundred person company with billions in the bank and made Bob Young filthy rich.
"Er, that Fedora has a new numbering scheme doesn't make it not the successor to Red Hat Linux,"
You are pissing in the wind. You completely screwed your brand when you did it and it was for no particularly good reason other a marketing guys brain fart. If you need to change the name from Red Hat to Fedora great, call it Fedora 10.X and stay the course and you wouldn't have pissed everyone off. I'm assuming your marketing people got there degrees from a degree mill because they seem to have no clue they had a valuable brand and a loyal customer base and they intentionally gave both the finger.
"You mean Fedora, not whitebox."
Once again you are just showing your product strategy is incoherent. It clear as mud what exactly the difference is between Fedora, Whitebox and Enterprise, other than a big whack of money comes in to the mix with Enterprise. Only thing that is clear is you have an out of control marketeer.
"The Enterprise / Fedora split makes things clear - if you want support, pay us."
Ok so what is Whitebox again then, I'm sooooo confused.
"Will fetch foo from your various sources (RHN, directories, yum servers, apt-get servers - it works with them all and can resolve dependencies) between them. Again, go read before you complain."
Ya until you need some software that isn't on those, or you load some mis-packaged betas, or you uninstall something and the unistall rules are bad, or your OS is end of lifed and the updates stop coming, or after a while the RPM history gets slow or goes south and you pretty much
"The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about?"
Uh, I guess nuthin other than you abandoned support for Red hat 7, 8 and 9 in the space of a quarter. I was on 8, 9 being a rather minor update and no one knows why you did a major version bump and I didn't bother with it.
I guess I should be thankful to your fine company that I was in the middle of a one year subscription when you stopped doing any updates and abandoned your distributions while they were still in their prime, and told everyone to go buy support from a third party, because you were apparently bored with supporting your products or it was dragging your Wall Stree numbers. At a minimum you should have probably done an automated check as part of my paying you money and told me I was wasting my money buying support for an OS you were abandoning in a few months.
People are paying you for support service so you SUPPORT your distributions even if they aren't the latest and greatest. Microsoft support there old OS's way longer which is what a computer has to do to maintain customer loyalty.
"Fedora is a logical sucessor to Red Hat Linux."
You've been drinking a little to much of your companies marketing koolaid. The logical succession would have been to call Red Hat 9 what it was, 8.1 and then there would be 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 10.0 etc and I could still buy a box set in store. And you might have end of lifed support for 7.x but my subscription to Red Hat 8.0 support should still work and I would have paid you to renew it a while ago and I wouldn't be running Gentoo now.
"If you want RHEL, but don't want to buy support, get Whitebox."
Uh, because I'm like the other guy that posted here. Your companies sorry attitude motivated me to finally nuke your OS off my machines, switch to Gentoo and I've never been so happy. No living RPM hell too which was a big bonus. I can update my systems with security fixes as soon as they are out, no hassle, no charge, no RPM hell.
Again this gets back to being totally clueless about preserving your brand. You created a massive discontinuity in your product line at RH 9. If Whitebox is basicly the same thing as Red Hat 9 was why the hell didn't you just call it 10.x or whatever and stop PLAYING THE STUPID MARKETING GAMES. I don't even know what Whitebox is because you totally lost your marketing way.
"Why does Red Hat cop so much crap when we've been about as Evil as Google (what about Suse pushing proprietary software for so long)?"
Uh, because you did a bunch of stupid shit that massively pissed off your loyal customers, and whats worse you apparently didn't even notice or are in complete denial that you did it.
"Idiots."
If thats your attitude, and the attitude of your company, towards your former loyal customers, now your unhappy ex-customers I guess we all understand why you are doing the things you are doing. May your sales and your stock crater.
I hope you can make money off the dumb suits and corporate CTO's that fall for your crap, me personally I don't know a single linux geek any more that hasn't switched to Debian, Gentoo, Suse or anything but Red Hat. They all used to be loyal Red Hat geeks, me included, no more.
"although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired"
I dont know about that.... Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt pretty much sums up Fedora and the new Red Hat pretty darn well. You know since they:
- stuck a knife in the back of their loyal users, customers and flagship distribution that was a popular and well known standard. If nothing else they don't know anything about protecting their brand -Started a subscription update service and then in less than a year(and the length of a subscription) stuck a knife in it too and screwed all the people who were paying them money for it. - Started Fedora and tried to sucker a bunch of unpaid volunteers in to doing all their work for them while they kept all the control and power. Certainly a good way to improve your profitability if you can find enough unpaid and cluefull volunteers who are suckers enough to work on a project on which they have no say while you rake in the salary and the stock options. - And of course with Enterprise Linux they converted Linux from being the low cost solution in to one that makes Windows, SCO and proprietary Unix look almost cheap
I think you are the one that started ranting about political leanings and really went off topic:
"And now we see what side of the political spectrum you sit on. Not that there was really any doubt. How much do you give to the Sea Shepherds every year?"
Not sure moderators need you to coach them especially since you dove for the cover of AC after your first post.
I had to break it to my post on the Bush administrations well known antipathy to scientists in the government highlighting the evidence supporting global warming is 100% on topic if not the heart of problem. Americans and American corporations are a leading contributor to green house gases glovally, and the Bush administration is making it worse, not better, especially through their "Clean Coal" propaganda. Meanwhile the Bush crowd are actively trying to suppress all the scientific findings that global warming is happening and fossil fuel pollution is a key contributor. No I'd say that is thoroughly on topic.
It is speculation on my part but if you are dealing with devout born again Christians, though I'm not sure George isn't a faker on that score, why would they care about the long term well being of the planet because they are in fact waiting for the second coming and the rapture. If a politician is a devout born again chances are it distorts and colors every policy decision he makes which is one reason born against are pretty dangerous politicians especially when the run the biggest military on the planet and have their finger on one button initiator for apocalypse.
I mean if we are to take the fundementalist slant on Earth's history the whole things only been around a few thousand years, the Grand Canyon was carved in Noah's great flood, and all that ice age crap never happened in the first place. No wonder George doesn't buy in to global warming.
Here is a pretty nice case study on how useless the FOIA is.
"The U.S. government has a lot of work to do"
In the above case the government was apparently too busy practicing various forms of torture to be bothered with FOIA requests. In particular DOD interrogators were posing as FBI agents as they were torturing people presumably so the FBI would get blamed instead of the Pentagon if they got caught.
You see the problem is most governments have a tendency to corruption and abuse of power. The FOIA is just one little tool our enlightened society put in a while ago(though we've stopped being an enlightened society lately) so watch dog groups have a chance to catch them at abuse, expose it and reign it in. You are completely missing the point if you think FOIA requests have much to do with fixing roads. They are mostly a tool for preventing our government from becoming corrupt or abusing its power ot worst case becoming a corrupt police state though it appears the FOIA and the watch dog groups are losing that battle.
There have been attempts to use the FOIA to expose the incompetence and abuse behind the TSA's no fly list though the TSA/DOJ were more successful in censoring every important detail on that one. The end result is we have this super secret list of names of people who will get hassled when they fly or simply can no longer fly. Well its not real secret because if you have a name thats on it and try to fly its obvious that name is on the list. Ted Kennedy and Cat Stevens among others made the list. No one knows how names are added to the list or more importantly how to get yours off. You see it is just a list of names and even aliases of people that some anonymous bureaucrat decided might be the name of a terrorist. Unfortunately if you happen to have the same name you get to be treated like a terrorist even if you are a little old lady or gent who has never even had a parking ticket. If you are smart you just mutate your name slightly like throw in your middle initial and the list magically stops harrassing you. It is quite a magical exercise in bureaucratic incompetence and abuse of power.
All in all I think we need a little more FOIA and not less.
Your quick or you must have sigs shut off. My sig pretty much spells out what I think of the moron sitting in the White House these days. I honestly can't think of one intelligent thing I've ever heard him say and that covers global warming to WMD's to Jesus, can you? I like a lot of what Jesus said. George doesn't seems to have understood a bit of it.
What's worse its pretty obvious he is outright lieing half the time, like how he was sure there were WMD's in Iraq, and how big a threat Iraq was to the U.S., or how Social Security is on the verge of collapse so he can redirect more trillions in deficits in to the pockets of his friends on Wall Street via "private accounts". Well maybe Social Security will collapse in 30-40 years but its only because he is using the current huge payroll tax surplus to defray the huge deficits he's running thanks to his tax cuts for the rich. I think its so cool to use payroll taxes from working people who are just making ends meet to offset tax cuts for the rich. Welcome to regressive taxation.
Well I hate to point it out but you've back pedaled on nearly everything you said when you started this thread. If you recall you started out saying "But on the large scale, global warming is one of those things that is coming, we can't do anything about it, and will go away whether we are here or not by that time."
"How are we going to generate enough electricity to power our vehicles, our homes, our entire way of life?"
Hello, Mr. Conservationist, one way is to just conserve some. Just boosting Miles Per Gallon on new cars would save millions of barrels of oil. Do we. No. Why:
- Oil companies don't want us to use less of their product or for oil prices to go down because its would cut in to their profits - Car companies want to sell big high margin gas guzzlers, especially SUV's - People, especially Americans, want to buy big gas guzzlers and commute 3 hours a day, solo in an SUV.
I hate to break it to you but developing alternative energy sources is pro technology and pro progress. It means pushing the technology envelope to develop something new instead of just keep on doing what we've done for a century, burning oil, coal and gas. Will we, probably not because big oil and big coal companies have enough power to kill off any serious effort to make their products obsolete.
"So we've already gone over why fossil fuels are bad. This is the number one cause of manmade CO2 emissions. It's not caused by cars, cigarettes, or farting cows."
Hello, Mr. Scientist, if you followed anything I posted farting cows and CO2 don't have any connection. The farting cows is METHANE and its a green house gas too, and its on the rise to and it contributes to the green house effect just like CO2. You can keep talking about how you are all over the science of this but you sure never show the most basic understanding of the simplest things and still refuse to believe that it is in fact a well known problem and not a joke.
"Getting rid of this reliance on oil is the first step to cleaning up the air."
Well actually not really. Breaking the reliance on oil would help but again you are missing most of the big problem here. COAL is the worst of the problem, and its not likely to run out anytime soon and thats how the U.S. and China produces a big percentage of their power and its use is increasing not decreasing. The Bush administration's big con is we have "Clean Coal" now so its OK to burn more of it. Well they are cleaning up some of the sulfides and nitrates but there is no good mechanism for cutting the carbon dioxide emissions so we are still churn out these big plumes of green house gases out of these giant smoke stacks that are burning coal on a huge scale. We are building more of them, not fewer.
"There is a solution here, but Iceland's example is not viable anywhere but there, and reverting to the stone age isn't an option. Sorry."
And here were back to you saying I said the whole world should just do the Iceland thing. Well at this point I quit because your reading comprehension appears to be so low its a waste of time churning out words for you to not comprehend. One thing Iceland's doing is Hydrogen powered cars. Well low and behold George Bush wants to do that too, though its mostly empty rhetoric on his part and they are actually doing it, so I guess maybe they are doing something the rest of the world can use as an example. Hydrogen is great as long as you aren't getting it from fossil fuels which is one of the two Bush administration strategies (it just happens to put more money in the pockets of his friends in the oil and gas business). Why is it a problem because the byproduct is carbon dioxide again, though at least in this case you can pump it in to the ground instead of the air. The other Bush source is of course big nuke plants churning out electricity to take it out of water.
I think your login pretty much says it all about your posts.
"Do you really believe a couple billion bags of cells with delusions of intelligence can change the weather of an entire planet?"
I think you don't have to look much further than the undisputed fact that those meat sacks nearly destroyed the ozone layer with aerosol cans and Freon. Not exactly weather but its pretty much the same concept, technology induced global calamity. If we hadn't taken measures to stop it, it would have also eventually wiped us just from the ultraviolet end of the spectrum instead of the infrared.
"It changed before we existed, and will keep changing once we are gone."
Thanks for conceeding my point. I guess we can hope that once we wipe human kind off the face of the planet with a global population/climatic disaster that the earth will right itself in a hundred million years or so. I just don't think its fair that we will probably take out a whole bunch of innocent species with us.
Here is the same link I posted from the EPA/National Science Foundation posted to rebut the other ostrich in this thread. It takes balls for anyone in the EPA or NSF to still be saying this stuff publicly because their boss has made it abundantly clear his faith based approach to climatology doesn't have any room for the possibility of human induced global warming. Of course then Little George and most of the people in his administration are Born Again's and are sitting around waiting for the second coming, the rapture and to be called to sit on the right hand of Jesus. If you have that kind of an outlook on the world I guess it doesn't really matter if we may crater the Earth's climate in the next hundred years. Heck maybe a run away climate is just part of the fireworks to punctuate acting out the Book of Revelations.
"Venus has an atmosphere of about 95% CO2. It is physically impossible for humans to create anywhere near that level of CO2 here on Earth."
You also don't need anything close to that to devestate life on earth. If we push up the Earth's average temperature 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit that will be enough to cause a massive disruption in our climate and lives. 10 degrees is within the range currently estimated by the National Science Foundation for the next 100 years especially if we make no attempt to check green house gas production.
"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%."
"Since 1979, scientists have generally agreed that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases the earth?s average surface temperature by 1.5-4.5C (3-8F). More recent studies have suggested that the warming is likely to occur more rapidly over land than the open seas."
"Global mean surface temperatures have increased 0.5-1.0F since the late 19th century. The 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. Globally, sea level has risen 4-8 inches over the past century. Worldwide precipitation over land has increased by about one percent. The frequency of extreme rainfall events has increased throughout much of the United States." **Reference California this week.
"At first, the cooler oceans will tend to absorb much of the additional heat and thereby decrease the warming of the atmosphere. Only when the ocean comes into equilibrium with the higher level of CO2 will the full warming occur."
"The conservationist looks for the best way to solve an environmental issue taking into account as much science as is possible. The environmentalist already knows what the right way to solve an issue is and finds the science to back him up. I think this is why you got upset that I mocked your assertion that cow farts are causing global warming."
I'm sorry but your rhetoric throughout this thread shows you are anything but a conservationist and you don't give a rats ass about any of the science involved. Your approach to the science is the ostrich approach, stick your head in the sand and hope for the best. I'm giving you reference after reference, and you give me denial, tangents and empty rhetoric. A conservationist isn't going to pick fossil fuels and nukes as the only two viable energy sources for the planet.
Nuclear is an option but it comes laced with problems in particular safety, especially in an age where they are inviting terrorism targets, waste disposal and the obvious fact the U.S. wont stand for most places around the world having it due to the weapons proliferation problems. One little accident with a big nuclear plant and you poison a vast area and they simply aren't fool proof no matter how good the design.
"your outrageous claims that the planet will be turning into another Venus,"
Lets chalk that up to a failed attempt to catch your attention about what a runaway greenhouse effect looks like. You quickly forget I didn't say Earth "is turning in to another Venus". All I said is its one of the many possibilities and it is both the worst case and quite possible.
You see the problem with you and all those like you is there is NOTHING that will convince you that its possible human activity is having adverse effects on the Earth's climate. The only thing that will apparently convince you is when Earth becomes uninhabitable and at that points it a little too late. Most of us just want to explore all the possibilities and if possible refrain from choosing the paths that will wipe out, our seriously degrade life on this one and only planet of ours.
The catch in all your talk about natural climate change is the Earth has never had 6 billion mammals with tool skills covering nearly every inhabitable nook and cranny. The dynamics of today's earth is COMPLETELY different from anything in its history.
"Unfortunately, that is not the case for virtually any other country in the world."
Actually you are wrong, AGAIN. There are geothermal resource available all over the planet, there are places all around the Pacific Rim's ring of fire that have them. Yellowstone is rich in it. Pretty much anyplace where there is an active or even dorman volcano is sure to have it. If you drill deep enough you can find them anywhere, our planet has a molten core in case you didn't know.
You are once again just being dense. My point isn't that the entire world should do exactly what Iceland is doing. The point is every country should be working hard to move to alternative and renewable energy sources that they have the resource for and that aren't going to dump vast quantities of carbon dioxide in to the air. Hydroelectric, solar, wind, tidal and carefully done nuclear all work especially if you do a mix of them all. Fossil fuels and nuclear aren't the only two options, they are just the two American's big corporations want to do because they have the best profit potential(assuming the U.S. government eliminates all the regulations that currently hamstring them).
The point about Iceland is they've set a goal to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels and they are working to achieve it. Most of the rest of the world isn't even trying. American and China are two of the worst offenders for clinging to burning coal until it wrecks the climate and at present it appear no one is going to talk them out of it.
If you are an example of the high intellect America is producing these days living in adobe huts and eating mice and hay is probably more than you should be aspiring to. Set your sights on attainable goals, I'm thinking caves and eating bugs is probably about your level:)
If you want to see an example of some smart, resourceful people dealing with the problem, instead of denying it, you need look no further than today's post on Iceland. They aren't as dumb and arrogant as you appear to be.
"Better stop and learn from our mistakes on Venus!"
Uh no, the lesson is, see what a planet with a runaway greenhouse effect looks like. By the time you get a chance to see it on Earth we will all be dead.
"And people claim that psychic phenomenon"
A couple key points. The survival of life on earth isn't hanging in the balance on whether you believe in psychics or not, big difference. There is also already empirical evidence that suggests global warming is happening and rapidly. You don't need to look much further than the fact the Arctic ice cap is melting and we are soon going to have a blue water ocean there. Ages old glaciers in many mountains are also disappearing.
"But when the chart with the temperatures at the end flying straight up and off the page is shown, it's a little hard to take seriously."
Maybe you should try proofreading your post a little better. I think you meant "Until the chart...". "When the charts" go ballistic me thinks maybe dumbasses like you will be saying "Oops". Again at the point chances are it will be to late to stop it and again everyone will be dead not long thereafter. All of the charts, ice surveys etc, already indicate the earth IS warming at a dramaticly faster rate than it did before the industrial age started and we started burning fossil fuels at a furious pace, and the population exploded, and we started wiping out the world's forests.
"The problem of cattle is not the methane."
You are quite wrong. Do a google search on "Cattle methane green house gas". Here is one of many references.
"The biggest polluters now are China, India, and Mexico."
Whats your point? I'm the one that said China is becoming the world's biggest polluter? I think you are trying to say global pollutions is not America's fault? I guess its lost on you that China and Mexico in particular are where all of America's factories and jobs moved to. Big American multinationals are moving them there precisely because there are no environmental regulations there oh and the cheap, exploitable labor and the cheap currencies.
America was one of the world's biggest polluters but sure its getting a lot better thanks to environment regulation, oh and all those dirty factories moved to Mexico and China precisely because the U.S. became an uncompetitive place for them partially because we have environmental regulations. We still do have a bounty of coal fired power plants though. And then too the Bush administration is doing its best to try to dismantle those regulations at every opportunity so his friends can make more money in the U.S. too.
"But on the large scale, global warming is one of those things that is coming, we can't do anything about it, and will go away whether we are here or not by that time."
You really have no clue what you are talking about do you. Just because the world does have climate cycles doesn't mean that human activity might not be dramaticly changing and accelerating that cycle. Human activity could easily completely upset the natural cycles and create a runaway greenhouse effect. If it does the planet could end up uninhabitable like Venus.
Not saying that IS going to happen but its possible and you are completely wrong to dismiss the possibility. People like you and more importantly people who think like you in powerful places like the Bush administration could dismiss the danger until its to late and we really can't do anything about it.
What might we do to prevent cataclysmic climate change:
- Reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other green house gases, especially by eliminating dependence on fossil fuels which are eventually going to run out anyway. Its reached the point it is just common sense to stop relying on them, we have the technology if we just have the will, reference today's post on Iceland. - Stop mowing down the world's forests which convert carbon dioxide back to oxygen - Stop poisoning the oceans since they also scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. - Reduce dependence on cattle as a food source, they put out really large quantities of green house gasses(Methane) as err... by products.
If man develops the technology to exploit the earth on the massive scale we are today, there is a responsibility that comes with it to restrain that exploitation so the Earth will sustain life for future generations. Getting rich today at the expense of future generations isn't sane.
China alone is turning in to a ecological disaster of epic proportions as it rushes to attain wealth. I recently read an editorial by someone lecturing there. Thanks to massive dependence on coal fired power plants and a massive over development of coal fired steel smelters the air in many cities is becoming outright poisonous. Water pollution is equally bad with raw sewage and unchecked industrial waste being dumped in to every water way. Its the price we pay for cheap goods at Walmart and why all American capitalits are rushing to move there(along with currency manipulations and easily exploited cheap labor). Its a lot cheaper to engage in heavy manufacturing if you can dump the waste in the air and water without the inconvenience and expense of enivronmental regulations.
Actually the cost of the technoology is dropping rapidly, its in most high end GM cars already, its called OnStar. I'm sure never going to buy a car with it and when they all have it I'll go to whatever lengths necessary to rip out their uplink/downlink.
Given a few years the police wont NEED to surreptitiously install one of these. The precedents being set here will no doubt open the flood gate so the police can eventually just ring up OnStar or the eventual equivalent that will appear in every new car and they will be able to get tracking data on anyone, anytime.
OK you take it to the Nixonian level, and the "authorties" start using it to track political opponents and dissidents. You don't have to necessarily find anything illegal, it sure makes it easier to find sexual liasons that can be used as blackmail or to discredit. Thats what J Edgar Hoover used FBI surveillance for against Martin Luther King Jr. to discover he was having an affair, which was really none of J. Edgar's business. J. Edgar would have loved America today. He could have spied on way more people with a whole lot less manpower.
Needless to say the burning question raised is if they can put GPS in my car, without a warrant, then I can obviously put them in their cars or anyones else's car I want. Apparently having one in Bernard Kerick's(former New York Police Commissioner and Bush's failed Homeland Security nominee) car would be real interesting. He was having affairs with two women apparently at the same time in the same secret apartment and was probably getting payola from a mob connected construction company. How does a civil servant afford a $1.2 million dollar house and a secret apartment in New York.
I wager most of their pre IPO developers are a little busy watching the value of their stock, debating whether to buy a Porsche or Mercedes, shopping for the country estate, and trying to decide when the perfect time to retire to maximimize their wealth.
The 60 minutes piece on them suggests the company culture is try to compel them to not flaunt their wealth and keep their head screwed on straight but when people become millionaires and billionaires overnight chances are high that they are going to lose the will to do security audits, grind out code, and fix bugs. I guess they have new hires to do that but new hires are... well... new hires.
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"I still can't get over this Abu Graib thing."
...
Maybe you should be locked up in a prison on suspicion of a crime, especially a crime you didn't commit, and be tortured and sexually humiliated in front of a camera and then have those pictures shown to your friends and family if not the whole world.
Here , read this, its the testimony of one of the people tortured at Abu Graib. He was and is being held on "suspicion" of theft, not terrorism or decapitating people or anything he had been convicted of. Try putting yourself in his shoes while you are reading it and maybe you will stop being such an arrogant American dick.
I don't think ANY of the people tortured in Abu Graib were "terrorists" that had decapitated peoples. Most of them were people arrested for ordinary crimes, especially looting which EVERYONE in Iraq was doing after the invasion, or innocent people just caught up in dragnets when the U.S. was rounding up people looking mostly in vain for insurgents and Saddam loyalists.
Its key, NONE of the people in Abu Ghraib had been "convicted" of anything. They were suspects. You are basicly dropping the bar so low that the U.S. government can arrest and torture anyone, anywhere on suspicion, and maybe torture a confession out of them that isn't worth the paper its printed on. If they aren't found to be guilty of anything how do you justify torturing them?
You are in fact endorsing EXACTLY the same thing the U.S. has been so indignant about Saddam doing and used as an excuse to overthrow him. The stuff you are taking about is the antithesis of the "Freedom and Democracy" the Bush administration cons everyone in to thinking we brought to Iraq. It is a key reason the Iraqi people have become to despise the U.S. occupation force so much because it managed, with ease, to put itself at the same level as Saddam with arbitrary arrests, torture and killing innocent civilians, often women, children and wounded, unarmed combatants.
All in all you should probably turn in your U.S. citizenship because you have NO CLUE what your country is supposed to stand for, in particular due process is the most basic underpinning of the rule of law and if you chose to cast it aside for some people its a matter of time its thrown aside for everyone, you included, and you have a police state no different from Saddam's.
As for Geneva conventions not applying in Iraq they most certainly do. Its legal hair splitting if they apply to Al Qaida but they sure as hell apply to Iraq. When your nation invades and occupies a sovereign nation there are most definitely rules on how you treat the civilian population of that occupied country, they most definitely apply to the U.S. as a signatory no matter how much you and the Bush administration want to pretend they don't. They forbid:
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
The U.S. has done EVERY one of these in Iraq.
If you want to cast aside U.S. adherence to the Geneva conventions then DON'T get mad if American's are taken as prisoners of war, in the upcoming war in Iran for example, if they are tortured and sexually humiliated, you've given every American adversary the rationale to do it and the world which just say America is getting what it deserves. You better also hope that you are never in place that is invaded and occupied because again you are giving the invading army a blank check to arrest, torture, sexually humiliate and kill you because you are an American who has chosen to cast aside the Geneva conventions.
"But are you willing to pay part of the billions of dollars (annually!) it would add to the federal budget to make all of that info that available?"
Yea actually I am. In fact I think it would be a small price to pay and it would actually result a dramatic improvement in government efficiency and probably pay for itself many times over in the long run. Maybe its not feasible to put all old paper docs on line but you sure could put all new documents on line and it would be a huge benefit, as long as they secure it properly.
The FBI is a great example. Well they did waste $170 million to try and create an on line system to make all their cases and records available electronicly to their agents, agency wide. They botched it completely but that is because of incompetence of government contractors who are there to soak up your tax dollars instead of doing a good job. It was a great idea just badly executed and they should have used off the shelf open source software put together by a small team of smart, probably unemployed, open source programmers and not a pork laden government contractor.
If you got someone competent to do it, like Google for example though they would never get entangled in a government contar, and all the FBI's records were available online then:
A. The could quickly answer FOIA requests, especially moving forward (putting all the old documents on line is still problematic but at least you are fixing the problem from this point on).
B. The FBI, if it had this system in place in 2000 might have actually caught on to the fact muslim extremists were training in American flight schools to take off and not land airliners. They had the information in their files it just wasn't being communicated throughout the agency. If the FBI had all its information online in an internal google they might well have stopped 9/11 and how much would that have saved this country, that price tag is probably in the trillions by now if you count wasteful government spending, two wars and the untolled economic damage since.
"Watch less TV and read some actual information - it will make you want to vote for people that are trying to streamline and minimize the government, not bloat it more and more to service interests that don't actually produce anything."
If you can cite some numbers showing how much the DOD actually spends on the FOIA maybe I'll subscribe to your arguement, I personally wager its a fly speck in their budget but I can't immediately find the figure in Google. Whatever it is its a really small price to pay to allow the public and watchdog groups to shine some light on the workings of the government. I am pretty confident the actual fraud, waste, abuse and pork in our government, which the FOIA is designed to help root out, far outstrips anything we spend on the FOIA.
I assure you it does produce priceless information especially in the hands of experienced watchdog groups like EPIC and the ACLU, that more than make up for all the frivolous requests. Here are EPIC's annual FOIA summaries.
Here are some recent gems uncovered by the ACLU. The only thing that suggests the FOIA is a waste of money is dynamite like this comes out, its in the news a day or two and then it disappears in to a black hole. These discoveries indicate our government is violating the most basic tenets of what our country and its Constitution stand for and we as citizens just don't care, neither we or elected representatives do anything about, and it just continues on unchecked. The DOD assembles a jury of biased soliders and hangs a few grunts for Abu Graib and we as citizens choose to ignore that the use of torture is OBVIOUSLY widespread and a matter of policy in the DOD and the FOIA shows this. It is no doubt endorsed at the highest levels and we do nothing about it.
All in all it sure would be interesting to find how much fraud, waste and abuse has been uncovered by the FOIA and whistelblower laws to see if they in fact pay for themselves, many times over, though much of it is intangible, if for example it stopped people from being tortured by our government and in our name, what price tag would you put on that.
So even if it is costing us a lot its a small price to pay to weed out corruption, abuse and incompetence in our government. On the other hand if the Bush administration in particular manages to completely frustrate legitimate FOIA requests as they are want to do then yes, it is a complete waste of money. If that becomes the case that is not the fault of the law but of the people whose legal duty it is to implement it, and those people are working against the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives in Congress and when that happens we don't live in the representative Democracy we've been led to believe we do.
Not sure how the law reads for access to court records but for FOIA requests it is well established practice the FOIA office in the agency answering the request, and every agency has to have one, has to review the documents and censor all information that is classified or would violate the privacy of individuals.
At least as far as FOIA requests go your argument is a red herring.
Unfortunately this censorship can be abused to wipe out information that should be made public but the responding agency just doesn't want the public to know. FOIA requests on the TSA no fly list were answered this way, when they did release documents on the heart of the matter, who ran it, how names got on it, how names get taken off or names on the list, the documents were either censored in to oblivion, and many were simply withheld because they were "classified".
The content of this list should be public information, and how its managed MUST be public information because it directly impacts everyone who flies, especially innocent people unfortunate enough to have names that match names on the list and even aliases of suspected terrorists on the list, which is what they claimed when Senator Kennedy was prevented from flying by the list. Its a complete crap shoot if you can be accused of being a terrorist and prevented from flying because of the random chance your name is on the list and the mechanism for an average citizen to get there name off the list is ill defined. You are better off just slightly mutating your name until it stops matching. It would be trivial for an actual terrorist to circumvent this list, and the only way to fix that would be to make it an even more intrusive invasion of privacy as has been attempted several times with CAPPS.
I'd agree the situation here is not clear though I imagine the FBI, or more probably their masters in White House and the Pentagon, developed a strong desire to frustrate and stonewall FOIA seraches when these. surfaced.
Of concern, DOD interrogators impersonating Supervisory Special Agents of the FBI told a detainee that REDACTED. These same interrogation teams then REDACTED. The detainee was also told by this interrogation team REDACTED. These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and CITF believes that techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done the FBI interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public.
Not sure how much truth there this is to Seymour Hersh's recent expose on Pentagon special ops in Iran, I wouldn't be surprised if the Bush administration is duping Hersh' and feeding him all this to rattle cages around the globe and at home. If its true though it tends to suggest the Bush administration is making one Presidential finding after another in which they are giving the Pentagon a blank check to wage the war on "Terrorism" without congressional oversight, with complete disregard for the integrity of borders of sovereign nations, some probably ostensibly American allies, and most probably with complete disregard for the Geneva conventions and U.S. law against torturing prisoners. I'm pretty sure you send an FOIA request to the Pentagon you will get back sheets of wide black magic marker lines.
From Hersh's article:
"The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia."
"The Presidents decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the booksfree from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) The Pentagon doesnt feel obligated to report any of this to Congress, the former high-level intelligence official said. They dont even call it covert opsits too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, its black reconnaissance. Theyre not even going to tell the CINCsthe regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)"
""Bush's inauguration costs too much! Rich people are paying for it! The money should go to Tsunami relief! The money should go to the poor! There shouldn't be an inauguration!!!""
I'll have to agree with you on this one. Ranting about the cost and extravagance of the inauguration is silly. About the only criticism I can make of it is:
- Some of those singers they were unbelievable. Kind of proves Republicans are some combination of tone deaf or don't know how to throw a party. The fact they are going after Sponge Bob now confirms a few screws are loose someplace.
- That speech Bush gave was silly. All that never ending repetition of freedom, democracy and liberty. Everyone knows he his only going to liberate countries that are:
o Anti American
o Have oil
o Are a threat to Israel
Amazingly Iran pops to the top of the list on all counts. Venezuela is right up there too though they happen to have a democraticly elected government, it wasn't a perfect election but it was better than all the countries below. Meanwhile he ain't gonna lift a finger about the dicatorships in:
o Saudi Arabia
o Kuwait
o Egypt
o Pakistan
o Russia
o China
o Tajikistan, etc.
I love it how right wingers used to rant about Communist dictatorships but now that they are all making a killing in China they love the place and its government, though it hasn't really changed other than they threw open the door to the running dogs to make a fortune on their cheap labor, and transfered the world's economy to China's control. The Chinese are genius, they beat capitalism at its own game and destroyed it without firing a shot.
So all in all I'd agree ranting about the inauguration shows a lack of focus on the part of the media and the left. Lets:
- Focus on the quagmire of a war in Iraq. Here is an interview with an Army medic back from Iraq. Right wingers rant Iraq is going great and its the "liberal media" thats just making it look bad. Well this is grunt that was there and his main complaint is nobody in Iraq wants the U.S. there anymore and he had no clue what the point of the war is other than control of oil and he apparently isn't alone among the enlisted men. Don't listen to officers on Iraq, they are gonna spew the company line, the grunts will tell the truth.
- Focus on the fact Bush has increased government spending over 25% in three years at the same time he slashed taxes for the wealthy and is pushing U.S. debt to unsustainable levels. The U.S. government is becoming so in debt to China and Japan they can start dictating policy to the U.S. There is an old axiom the Bush administration has forgotten, "Neither a borrower or a lender be", well at least the borrower part is true. The U.S. is by a huge margin the world's largest debtor nation now and that debt is going to come home to roost. Just because it hasn't yet doesn't mean it wont especially when its hitting these extravagant levels.
- Focus on the staggering trade deficits the U.S. is running with the world especially with China. It is crossing the 5% of GDP market and deficits of those levels violate every tenent of sound fiscal policy and again are not sustainable. The U.S. will be come so mired in debt it will again be vulnerable to foreign blackmail or foreign induced economic collapse
- Look at the state of the U.S. dollar especially compared to the Euro. It makes U.S. exports cheap but otherwise its a disaster waiting to happen and its cratering because of fundementally unsound fiscal policy coming out of the Bush administration. Foreign investors, especially OPEC states are getting tired of taking a bath on their dollars and are dumping them for Euros. There is also a real risk now they will start selling their oil in Euros and the dollar will stop being the worlds main currency. That will be another devastating blow to the U.S. economy and the dollar's value.
- Foc
And of course there is no crisis other than the one George W. is trying to manufacture. Medicare and Medicaid are going to go bankrupt long before Social Security ever will(and it will never go bankrupt it will just have shortfalls leading to benefit cuts or higher taxes). Health care and drugs costs skyrocketing in this country are the crisis he should be dealing with NOW, along with seniors who abuse and overuse the medical system for every health problem as long as Medicare pays for it.
Eventually there will be a short fall and Social Security will have to cash in all the treasuries its hopefully holding which I imagine the government would prefer they didn't if it continues running the huge deficits. Social Security is running a large surplus at the moment and George W. is spending every bit of it and then some and giving the Social Security administration potentially worthless paper in exchange for it. Our payroll taxes are in effect subsidizing his tax cuts for the wealthy.
The only good thing I can say about George W's proposal is that it would give people some control over money that is now being sucked out of our paychecks and over which we have no control. If you die before you collect on it disappears and is used to pay benefits to someone you don't know. Me personally I WOULD LOVE IT IF THEY JUST GAVE ME BACK TODAY WHAT I'VE PAID IN AND LET ME DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH IT, blow it and starve when I retire or invest it wisely and have the money at my disposal now and not gamble on not living till 65 and losing 12.5% of my income to socialism.
Its lost on most workers but by they are paying something like 12.5% of their wages to Social Security so when George W. says the low income don't pay taxes he is glossing over that fact. The hide how large the tax bite is from workers by subtracting only half of the contribution out of your paycheck but your employer pays the other half and that is money that could be used to pay you higher wages if that bite wasn't there so you do pay really pay 12.5%.
What is the main motive in George W.'s plan, he want to put even more stress on Social Security, start it down the road to withering away, and fulfill a long running conservative dream of killing it, a dream they've had since it passed in the 30's. If you have program with future revenue shortfalls reducing the money going in to the program isn't going to make it better, its going to make it worse and lead to its demise.
It also is going to be a windfall for the stock market, big banks and investment companies that are the Republican's best friends, and I'm not sure that isn't the real driving force behind this. If will lear to a big influx of money to big banks and investment companies that is now going in to T bills and bonds. Instead it will go in to gambling on the stock market and in new fees for the investment companies. They will get a windfall profit off it either in the fees, or in the inflated stock prices it will yield, or in manipulating the stock market so they win big and these retirement accounts win small. The big banks are adept at selling stocks at the top, and manufacturing ups and down in the market they cash in on, while this retirement money will just sit and ride the roller coaster they manufacture.
And of course there is always a chance they will generate a big bubble they cash in on, and then a crash that will wipe out people's retirements. Just because the U.S. stock market has trended up historicly doesn't mean it always will especially in the face of dramatic increases in foreign competition, gigantic trade and budget deficits, and very unsound fiscal policy like we have now which is cratering the dollar.
The big questions, is VMS more secure or are today's hackers just increasingly ignorant of it, and study it less, so they are less likely to know its weaknesses or where to begin to try to exploit it. Linux, Mac and Windows all have hackers who know every angle and known vulnerability, I doubt VMS has that kind of dubious following.
"I have a feeling that if you want to fix your relationship with redhat, there's an option - get in touch with their marketing team and work out a deal. If you don't, carping to an employee here is obviously not helpful."
... since we were talking about Red Hat making a feeble attempt to try and straighten out that which they wrought.
I appreciate the advice but I thought I made it clear I don't want to fix any relationship with RedHat and I don't what to get in touch with their marketing team, that would just tick me off about as much as Nailer did running down all the excuses why they think their shit don't stink.
Replacing Gentoo with Red Hat would be a giant step backward in my book. I guess your right, now that I think about it, I should apologize to RedHat. If they hadn't done what they done I never would have been motivated to switch to Gentoo. They did me a great service. THANKS RED HAT!!!
Don't think I was carping to an employee here, I think their employee was carping at me. I just thought I'd giving everyone a rundown all the wonderful things RedHat did last year, and which are a matter of record, and which are so thoroughly burned in my memory
I give up. You aren't gonna say anything thats gonna make me happy with your company, and you really are just digging a deeper hole as far as I'm concerned, though I know your goal here is to point out what an "idiot" I am to everyone else. You seem to be from the "the customer is always wrong and I'm always right school".
/. article about your company's vain attempt to try and straighten out the royal mess its made of itself.
All I'll say about all your ranting that I'm a bad customer because I didn't call you up and whine, is there wasn't any point. Your company took a gigantic strategic left turn and you hung many of your customers out to dry, the only way you could have fixed that was to do a gigantic undo of your whole strategy and little ol' me wasn't gonna make that happen no matter how much I grovelled at your feet.
Instead of spending futile days trying to find the right people at your company to talk to it was way easier and more satisfying to just download Gentoo CD's and kiss your company goodbye. Low and behold I liked Gentoo better anyway but thats just me. This is what's called a customer voting with his feet.
I just delight in reminding everyone of your recent stellar performance everytime there is a
So, lets just leave it that I had enough of your company a year ago, I ain't gonna come back, and I ain't alone. There hows that for grammar.
Later dude.
"If you're complaining about 8 being end of lifed 2 years after release (and then being further extended by Red Hat),"
If this was some kind of long established plan how did you manage to end of life THREE major versions in the space of quarter. You didn't release them all in the space of a quarter did you?
"That's a problem they've acknowledged - if you actually talk to them about this grievance, rather than screaming loudly on Slashdot amongst a bunch of lies, they'll cut you a rather nice deal on RHEL support."
HAHAHA...HA...HAHAHA....HAHAHA...HAHAHA..HAHAHA
Stop it your killing me.
So you just screwed me on my previous subscription and your solution is I go beg and plead to you and if I'm nice to you and give you even MORE money for a NEW subscription, which you have an established a track record for screwing people over on, you will CUT ME A DEAL.
HAHAHA....HAHAHAHAH...HAHAHAHA
You oughta be a comedian or in marketing, though only maroons are gonna reward you with more business after you screw them the first time around. Like I said it was way easier to just nuke your sorry OS and install Gentoo than grovel at your feet. You aren't one of the good guys any more so I really have no desire to give you any money.
So if this end of lifing frenzy was part of this long term, well publicized plan, then how how did this problem which you "acknowledge" come about. Either A. everything was according to plan so there is no problem to acknowledge or B. you intentionally screwed paying customers and it appears you "acknowledge" you did.
"As a result, we need to focus on customers that will pay us for what we do (rather than if something goes wrong)."
Uh, I paid you when I bought a box set for nearly every minor release, whether I needed to or not (though I could have burned bandwidth and time and burned my own). Why because Red Hat used to be the good guys and I was glad to give you money so you would succeed and the box sets were nice to have.
I bought your subscription service and was gonna give you money every year in perpetuity.
I think you meant to say "we need to focus on customers that will pay buckets of money in big whacks" instead of paying attention to all the little people that took Red Hat from a couple people in an apartment to an eight hundred person company with billions in the bank and made Bob Young filthy rich.
"Er, that Fedora has a new numbering scheme doesn't make it not the successor to Red Hat Linux,"
You are pissing in the wind. You completely screwed your brand when you did it and it was for no particularly good reason other a marketing guys brain fart. If you need to change the name from Red Hat to Fedora great, call it Fedora 10.X and stay the course and you wouldn't have pissed everyone off. I'm assuming your marketing people got there degrees from a degree mill because they seem to have no clue they had a valuable brand and a loyal customer base and they intentionally gave both the finger.
"You mean Fedora, not whitebox."
Once again you are just showing your product strategy is incoherent. It clear as mud what exactly the difference is between Fedora, Whitebox and Enterprise, other than a big whack of money comes in to the mix with Enterprise. Only thing that is clear is you have an out of control marketeer.
"The Enterprise / Fedora split makes things clear - if you want support, pay us."
Ok so what is Whitebox again then, I'm sooooo confused.
"Will fetch foo from your various sources (RHN, directories, yum servers, apt-get servers - it works with them all and can resolve dependencies) between them. Again, go read before you complain."
Ya until you need some software that isn't on those, or you load some mis-packaged betas, or you uninstall something and the unistall rules are bad, or your OS is end of lifed and the updates stop coming, or after a while the RPM history gets slow or goes south and you pretty much
"The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about?"
Uh, I guess nuthin other than you abandoned support for Red hat 7, 8 and 9 in the space of a quarter. I was on 8, 9 being a rather minor update and no one knows why you did a major version bump and I didn't bother with it.
I guess I should be thankful to your fine company that I was in the middle of a one year subscription when you stopped doing any updates and abandoned your distributions while they were still in their prime, and told everyone to go buy support from a third party, because you were apparently bored with supporting your products or it was dragging your Wall Stree numbers. At a minimum you should have probably done an automated check as part of my paying you money and told me I was wasting my money buying support for an OS you were abandoning in a few months.
People are paying you for support service so you SUPPORT your distributions even if they aren't the latest and greatest. Microsoft support there old OS's way longer which is what a computer has to do to maintain customer loyalty.
"Fedora is a logical sucessor to Red Hat Linux."
You've been drinking a little to much of your companies marketing koolaid. The logical succession would have been to call Red Hat 9 what it was, 8.1 and then there would be 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 10.0 etc and I could still buy a box set in store. And you might have end of lifed support for 7.x but my subscription to Red Hat 8.0 support should still work and I would have paid you to renew it a while ago and I wouldn't be running Gentoo now.
"If you want RHEL, but don't want to buy support, get Whitebox."
Uh, because I'm like the other guy that posted here. Your companies sorry attitude motivated me to finally nuke your OS off my machines, switch to Gentoo and I've never been so happy. No living RPM hell too which was a big bonus. I can update my systems with security fixes as soon as they are out, no hassle, no charge, no RPM hell.
Again this gets back to being totally clueless about preserving your brand. You created a massive discontinuity in your product line at RH 9. If Whitebox is basicly the same thing as Red Hat 9 was why the hell didn't you just call it 10.x or whatever and stop PLAYING THE STUPID MARKETING GAMES. I don't even know what Whitebox is because you totally lost your marketing way.
"Why does Red Hat cop so much crap when we've been about as Evil as Google (what about Suse pushing proprietary software for so long)?"
Uh, because you did a bunch of stupid shit that massively pissed off your loyal customers, and whats worse you apparently didn't even notice or are in complete denial that you did it.
"Idiots."
If thats your attitude, and the attitude of your company, towards your former loyal customers, now your unhappy ex-customers I guess we all understand why you are doing the things you are doing. May your sales and your stock crater.
I hope you can make money off the dumb suits and corporate CTO's that fall for your crap, me personally I don't know a single linux geek any more that hasn't switched to Debian, Gentoo, Suse or anything but Red Hat. They all used to be loyal Red Hat geeks, me included, no more.
"although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired"
.... Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt pretty much sums up Fedora and the new Red Hat pretty darn well. You know since they:
I dont know about that
- stuck a knife in the back of their loyal users, customers and flagship distribution that was a popular and well known standard. If nothing else they don't know anything about protecting their brand
-Started a subscription update service and then in less than a year(and the length of a subscription) stuck a knife in it too and screwed all the people who were paying them money for it.
- Started Fedora and tried to sucker a bunch of unpaid volunteers in to doing all their work for them while they kept all the control and power. Certainly a good way to improve your profitability if you can find enough unpaid and cluefull volunteers who are suckers enough to work on a project on which they have no say while you rake in the salary and the stock options.
- And of course with Enterprise Linux they converted Linux from being the low cost solution in to one that makes Windows, SCO and proprietary Unix look almost cheap
I think you are the one that started ranting about political leanings and really went off topic:
"And now we see what side of the political spectrum you sit on. Not that there was really any doubt. How much do you give to the Sea Shepherds every year?"
Not sure moderators need you to coach them especially since you dove for the cover of AC after your first post.
I had to break it to my post on the Bush administrations well known antipathy to scientists in the government highlighting the evidence supporting global warming is 100% on topic if not the heart of problem. Americans and American corporations are a leading contributor to green house gases glovally, and the Bush administration is making it worse, not better, especially through their "Clean Coal" propaganda. Meanwhile the Bush crowd are actively trying to suppress all the scientific findings that global warming is happening and fossil fuel pollution is a key contributor. No I'd say that is thoroughly on topic.
It is speculation on my part but if you are dealing with devout born again Christians, though I'm not sure George isn't a faker on that score, why would they care about the long term well being of the planet because they are in fact waiting for the second coming and the rapture. If a politician is a devout born again chances are it distorts and colors every policy decision he makes which is one reason born against are pretty dangerous politicians especially when the run the biggest military on the planet and have their finger on one button initiator for apocalypse.
I mean if we are to take the fundementalist slant on Earth's history the whole things only been around a few thousand years, the Grand Canyon was carved in Noah's great flood, and all that ice age crap never happened in the first place. No wonder George doesn't buy in to global warming.
Here is a pretty nice case study on how useless the FOIA is.
"The U.S. government has a lot of work to do"
In the above case the government was apparently too busy practicing various forms of torture to be bothered with FOIA requests. In particular DOD interrogators were posing as FBI agents as they were torturing people presumably so the FBI would get blamed instead of the Pentagon if they got caught.
You see the problem is most governments have a tendency to corruption and abuse of power. The FOIA is just one little tool our enlightened society put in a while ago(though we've stopped being an enlightened society lately) so watch dog groups have a chance to catch them at abuse, expose it and reign it in. You are completely missing the point if you think FOIA requests have much to do with fixing roads. They are mostly a tool for preventing our government from becoming corrupt or abusing its power ot worst case becoming a corrupt police state though it appears the FOIA and the watch dog groups are losing that battle.
There have been attempts to use the FOIA to expose the incompetence and abuse behind the TSA's no fly list though the TSA/DOJ were more successful in censoring every important detail on that one. The end result is we have this super secret list of names of people who will get hassled when they fly or simply can no longer fly. Well its not real secret because if you have a name thats on it and try to fly its obvious that name is on the list. Ted Kennedy and Cat Stevens among others made the list. No one knows how names are added to the list or more importantly how to get yours off. You see it is just a list of names and even aliases of people that some anonymous bureaucrat decided might be the name of a terrorist. Unfortunately if you happen to have the same name you get to be treated like a terrorist even if you are a little old lady or gent who has never even had a parking ticket. If you are smart you just mutate your name slightly like throw in your middle initial and the list magically stops harrassing you. It is quite a magical exercise in bureaucratic incompetence and abuse of power.
All in all I think we need a little more FOIA and not less.
Your quick or you must have sigs shut off. My sig pretty much spells out what I think of the moron sitting in the White House these days. I honestly can't think of one intelligent thing I've ever heard him say and that covers global warming to WMD's to Jesus, can you? I like a lot of what Jesus said. George doesn't seems to have understood a bit of it.
What's worse its pretty obvious he is outright lieing half the time, like how he was sure there were WMD's in Iraq, and how big a threat Iraq was to the U.S., or how Social Security is on the verge of collapse so he can redirect more trillions in deficits in to the pockets of his friends on Wall Street via "private accounts". Well maybe Social Security will collapse in 30-40 years but its only because he is using the current huge payroll tax surplus to defray the huge deficits he's running thanks to his tax cuts for the rich. I think its so cool to use payroll taxes from working people who are just making ends meet to offset tax cuts for the rich. Welcome to regressive taxation.
Well I hate to point it out but you've back pedaled on nearly everything you said when you started this thread. If you recall you started out saying "But on the large scale, global warming is one of those things that is coming, we can't do anything about it, and will go away whether we are here or not by that time."
"How are we going to generate enough electricity to power our vehicles, our homes, our entire way of life?"
Hello, Mr. Conservationist, one way is to just conserve some. Just boosting Miles Per Gallon on new cars would save millions of barrels of oil. Do we. No. Why:
- Oil companies don't want us to use less of their product or for oil prices to go down because its would cut in to their profits
- Car companies want to sell big high margin gas guzzlers, especially SUV's
- People, especially Americans, want to buy big gas guzzlers and commute 3 hours a day, solo in an SUV.
I hate to break it to you but developing alternative energy sources is pro technology and pro progress. It means pushing the technology envelope to develop something new instead of just keep on doing what we've done for a century, burning oil, coal and gas. Will we, probably not because big oil and big coal companies have enough power to kill off any serious effort to make their products obsolete.
"So we've already gone over why fossil fuels are bad. This is the number one cause of manmade CO2 emissions. It's not caused by cars, cigarettes, or farting cows."
Hello, Mr. Scientist, if you followed anything I posted farting cows and CO2 don't have any connection. The farting cows is METHANE and its a green house gas too, and its on the rise to and it contributes to the green house effect just like CO2. You can keep talking about how you are all over the science of this but you sure never show the most basic understanding of the simplest things and still refuse to believe that it is in fact a well known problem and not a joke.
"Getting rid of this reliance on oil is the first step to cleaning up the air."
Well actually not really. Breaking the reliance on oil would help but again you are missing most of the big problem here. COAL is the worst of the problem, and its not likely to run out anytime soon and thats how the U.S. and China produces a big percentage of their power and its use is increasing not decreasing. The Bush administration's big con is we have "Clean Coal" now so its OK to burn more of it. Well they are cleaning up some of the sulfides and nitrates but there is no good mechanism for cutting the carbon dioxide emissions so we are still churn out these big plumes of green house gases out of these giant smoke stacks that are burning coal on a huge scale. We are building more of them, not fewer.
"There is a solution here, but Iceland's example is not viable anywhere but there, and reverting to the stone age isn't an option. Sorry."
And here were back to you saying I said the whole world should just do the Iceland thing. Well at this point I quit because your reading comprehension appears to be so low its a waste of time churning out words for you to not comprehend. One thing Iceland's doing is Hydrogen powered cars. Well low and behold George Bush wants to do that too, though its mostly empty rhetoric on his part and they are actually doing it, so I guess maybe they are doing something the rest of the world can use as an example. Hydrogen is great as long as you aren't getting it from fossil fuels which is one of the two Bush administration strategies (it just happens to put more money in the pockets of his friends in the oil and gas business). Why is it a problem because the byproduct is carbon dioxide again, though at least in this case you can pump it in to the ground instead of the air. The other Bush source is of course big nuke plants churning out electricity to take it out of water.
I think your login pretty much says it all about your posts.
"Do you really believe a couple billion bags of cells with delusions of intelligence can change the weather of an entire planet?"
I think you don't have to look much further than the undisputed fact that those meat sacks nearly destroyed the ozone layer with aerosol cans and Freon. Not exactly weather but its pretty much the same concept, technology induced global calamity. If we hadn't taken measures to stop it, it would have also eventually wiped us just from the ultraviolet end of the spectrum instead of the infrared.
"It changed before we existed, and will keep changing once we are gone."
Thanks for conceeding my point. I guess we can hope that once we wipe human kind off the face of the planet with a global population/climatic disaster that the earth will right itself in a hundred million years or so. I just don't think its fair that we will probably take out a whole bunch of innocent species with us.
Here is the same link I posted from the EPA/National Science Foundation posted to rebut the other ostrich in this thread. It takes balls for anyone in the EPA or NSF to still be saying this stuff publicly because their boss has made it abundantly clear his faith based approach to climatology doesn't have any room for the possibility of human induced global warming. Of course then Little George and most of the people in his administration are Born Again's and are sitting around waiting for the second coming, the rapture and to be called to sit on the right hand of Jesus. If you have that kind of an outlook on the world I guess it doesn't really matter if we may crater the Earth's climate in the next hundred years. Heck maybe a run away climate is just part of the fireworks to punctuate acting out the Book of Revelations.
"Venus has an atmosphere of about 95% CO2. It is physically impossible for humans to create anywhere near that level of CO2 here on Earth."
You also don't need anything close to that to devestate life on earth. If we push up the Earth's average temperature 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit that will be enough to cause a massive disruption in our climate and lives. 10 degrees is within the range currently estimated by the National Science Foundation for the next 100 years especially if we make no attempt to check green house gas production.
"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%."
"Since 1979, scientists have generally agreed that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases the earth?s average surface temperature by 1.5-4.5C (3-8F). More recent studies have suggested that the warming is likely to occur more rapidly over land than the open seas."
"Global mean surface temperatures have increased 0.5-1.0F since the late 19th century. The 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century. Of these, 1998 was the warmest year on record. The snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere and floating ice in the Arctic Ocean have decreased. Globally, sea level has risen 4-8 inches over the past century. Worldwide precipitation over land has increased by about one percent. The frequency of extreme rainfall events has increased throughout much of the United States." **Reference California this week.
"At first, the cooler oceans will tend to absorb much of the additional heat and thereby decrease the warming of the atmosphere. Only when the ocean comes into equilibrium with the higher level of CO2 will the full warming occur."
"The conservationist looks for the best way to solve an environmental issue taking into account as much science as is possible. The environmentalist already knows what the right way to solve an issue is and finds the science to back him up. I think this is why you got upset that I mocked your assertion that cow farts are causing global warming."
I'm sorry but your rhetoric throughout this thread shows you are anything but a conservationist and you don't give a rats ass about any of the science involved. Your approach to the science is the ostrich approach, stick your head in the sand and hope for the best. I'm giving you reference after reference, and you give me denial, tangents and empty rhetoric. A conservationist isn't going to pick fossil fuels and nukes as the only two viable energy sources for the planet.
Nuclear is an option but it comes laced with problems in particular safety, especially in an age where they are inviting terrorism targets, waste disposal and the obvious fact the U.S. wont stand for most places around the world having it due to the weapons proliferation problems. One little accident with a big nuclear plant and you poison a vast area and they simply aren't fool proof no matter how good the design.
"your outrageous claims that the planet will be turning into another Venus,"
Lets chalk that up to a failed attempt to catch your attention about what a runaway greenhouse effect looks like. You quickly forget I didn't say Earth "is turning in to another Venus". All I said is its one of the many possibilities and it is both the worst case and quite possible.
You see the problem with you and all those like you is there is NOTHING that will convince you that its possible human activity is having adverse effects on the Earth's climate. The only thing that will apparently convince you is when Earth becomes uninhabitable and at that points it a little too late. Most of us just want to explore all the possibilities and if possible refrain from choosing the paths that will wipe out, our seriously degrade life on this one and only planet of ours.
The catch in all your talk about natural climate change is the Earth has never had 6 billion mammals with tool skills covering nearly every inhabitable nook and cranny. The dynamics of today's earth is COMPLETELY different from anything in its history.
"Unfortunately, that is not the case for virtually any other country in the world."
Actually you are wrong, AGAIN. There are geothermal resource available all over the planet, there are places all around the Pacific Rim's ring of fire that have them. Yellowstone is rich in it. Pretty much anyplace where there is an active or even dorman volcano is sure to have it. If you drill deep enough you can find them anywhere, our planet has a molten core in case you didn't know.
You are once again just being dense. My point isn't that the entire world should do exactly what Iceland is doing. The point is every country should be working hard to move to alternative and renewable energy sources that they have the resource for and that aren't going to dump vast quantities of carbon dioxide in to the air. Hydroelectric, solar, wind, tidal and carefully done nuclear all work especially if you do a mix of them all. Fossil fuels and nuclear aren't the only two options, they are just the two American's big corporations want to do because they have the best profit potential(assuming the U.S. government eliminates all the regulations that currently hamstring them).
The point about Iceland is they've set a goal to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels and they are working to achieve it. Most of the rest of the world isn't even trying. American and China are two of the worst offenders for clinging to burning coal until it wrecks the climate and at present it appear no one is going to talk them out of it.
If you are an example of the high intellect America is producing these days living in adobe huts and eating mice and hay is probably more than you should be aspiring to. Set your sights on attainable goals, I'm thinking caves and eating bugs is probably about your level :)
If you want to see an example of some smart, resourceful people dealing with the problem, instead of denying it, you need look no further than today's post on Iceland. They aren't as dumb and arrogant as you appear to be.
"Better stop and learn from our mistakes on Venus!"
Uh no, the lesson is, see what a planet with a runaway greenhouse effect looks like. By the time you get a chance to see it on Earth we will all be dead.
"And people claim that psychic phenomenon"
A couple key points. The survival of life on earth isn't hanging in the balance on whether you believe in psychics or not, big difference. There is also already empirical evidence that suggests global warming is happening and rapidly. You don't need to look much further than the fact the Arctic ice cap is melting and we are soon going to have a blue water ocean there. Ages old glaciers in many mountains are also disappearing.
"But when the chart with the temperatures at the end flying straight up and off the page is shown, it's a little hard to take seriously."
Maybe you should try proofreading your post a little better. I think you meant "Until the chart...". "When the charts" go ballistic me thinks maybe dumbasses like you will be saying "Oops". Again at the point chances are it will be to late to stop it and again everyone will be dead not long thereafter. All of the charts, ice surveys etc, already indicate the earth IS warming at a dramaticly faster rate than it did before the industrial age started and we started burning fossil fuels at a furious pace, and the population exploded, and we started wiping out the world's forests.
"The problem of cattle is not the methane."
You are quite wrong. Do a google search on "Cattle methane green house gas". Here is one of many references.
"The biggest polluters now are China, India, and Mexico."
Whats your point? I'm the one that said China is becoming the world's biggest polluter? I think you are trying to say global pollutions is not America's fault? I guess its lost on you that China and Mexico in particular are where all of America's factories and jobs moved to. Big American multinationals are moving them there precisely because there are no environmental regulations there oh and the cheap, exploitable labor and the cheap currencies.
America was one of the world's biggest polluters but sure its getting a lot better thanks to environment regulation, oh and all those dirty factories moved to Mexico and China precisely because the U.S. became an uncompetitive place for them partially because we have environmental regulations. We still do have a bounty of coal fired power plants though. And then too the Bush administration is doing its best to try to dismantle those regulations at every opportunity so his friends can make more money in the U.S. too.
"But on the large scale, global warming is one of those things that is coming, we can't do anything about it, and will go away whether we are here or not by that time."
... by products.
You really have no clue what you are talking about do you. Just because the world does have climate cycles doesn't mean that human activity might not be dramaticly changing and accelerating that cycle. Human activity could easily completely upset the natural cycles and create a runaway greenhouse effect. If it does the planet could end up uninhabitable like Venus.
Not saying that IS going to happen but its possible and you are completely wrong to dismiss the possibility. People like you and more importantly people who think like you in powerful places like the Bush administration could dismiss the danger until its to late and we really can't do anything about it.
What might we do to prevent cataclysmic climate change:
- Reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other green house gases, especially by eliminating dependence on fossil fuels which are eventually going to run out anyway. Its reached the point it is just common sense to stop relying on them, we have the technology if we just have the will, reference today's post on Iceland.
- Stop mowing down the world's forests which convert carbon dioxide back to oxygen
- Stop poisoning the oceans since they also scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
- Reduce dependence on cattle as a food source, they put out really large quantities of green house gasses(Methane) as err
If man develops the technology to exploit the earth on the massive scale we are today, there is a responsibility that comes with it to restrain that exploitation so the Earth will sustain life for future generations. Getting rich today at the expense of future generations isn't sane.
China alone is turning in to a ecological disaster of epic proportions as it rushes to attain wealth. I recently read an editorial by someone lecturing there. Thanks to massive dependence on coal fired power plants and a massive over development of coal fired steel smelters the air in many cities is becoming outright poisonous. Water pollution is equally bad with raw sewage and unchecked industrial waste being dumped in to every water way. Its the price we pay for cheap goods at Walmart and why all American capitalits are rushing to move there(along with currency manipulations and easily exploited cheap labor). Its a lot cheaper to engage in heavy manufacturing if you can dump the waste in the air and water without the inconvenience and expense of enivronmental regulations.
Actually the cost of the technoology is dropping rapidly, its in most high end GM cars already, its called OnStar. I'm sure never going to buy a car with it and when they all have it I'll go to whatever lengths necessary to rip out their uplink/downlink.
Given a few years the police wont NEED to surreptitiously install one of these. The precedents being set here will no doubt open the flood gate so the police can eventually just ring up OnStar or the eventual equivalent that will appear in every new car and they will be able to get tracking data on anyone, anytime.
OK you take it to the Nixonian level, and the "authorties" start using it to track political opponents and dissidents. You don't have to necessarily find anything illegal, it sure makes it easier to find sexual liasons that can be used as blackmail or to discredit. Thats what J Edgar Hoover used FBI surveillance for against Martin Luther King Jr. to discover he was having an affair, which was really none of J. Edgar's business. J. Edgar would have loved America today. He could have spied on way more people with a whole lot less manpower.
Needless to say the burning question raised is if they can put GPS in my car, without a warrant, then I can obviously put them in their cars or anyones else's car I want. Apparently having one in Bernard Kerick's(former New York Police Commissioner and Bush's failed Homeland Security nominee) car would be real interesting. He was having affairs with two women apparently at the same time in the same secret apartment and was probably getting payola from a mob connected construction company. How does a civil servant afford a $1.2 million dollar house and a secret apartment in New York.
I wager most of their pre IPO developers are a little busy watching the value of their stock, debating whether to buy a Porsche or Mercedes, shopping for the country estate, and trying to decide when the perfect time to retire to maximimize their wealth.
... well ... new hires.
The 60 minutes piece on them suggests the company culture is try to compel them to not flaunt their wealth and keep their head screwed on straight but when people become millionaires and billionaires overnight chances are high that they are going to lose the will to do security audits, grind out code, and fix bugs. I guess they have new hires to do that but new hires are