Radar isn't the kind of radiation that causes damage. It passes harmlessly through you.
I'm sure that's what a few Darwin-Award-winning Amana RadaRange owners thought, too, when they decided to defeat the door interlock to "watch the food cook". The poor blind SOB's. Radar energy can cause your cornea to heat and become cataract-like.
No, as a former civilian avionics tech that worked on radar, it can cause blindness/serious injury/death (depending on TX power and exposure time) if you're close to the business end of the antenna/dish of a radar transmitter.
3: require all men to own and carry a firearm in public. 4: require all women to own and carry a firearm in public (this will also reduce the rate of sexual assault).
Sorry, there are too many stupid, panicky types out there to make me agree to that
Not for long.
Stupid, panicky types will quickly succumb to Darwinian weeding-out from society and the gene pool. As will muggers, rapists, and violent criminal types in general. It would also tend to weed out the worst of politicians which means that this will never, *ever* be allowed to happen. I also feel that it would result in a much more polite and considerate society in general. It would also tend to reduce public police violence and abuse.
Free software will not be impacted by the ACTA as these are legal downloads. In other news, all other legal content downloaded will likewise avoid any impact from the ACTA outside of the all so predictable bogus take down notices....
In this scenario, it might work out that ISPs and consumers adopt a "default-deny" in the distribution of movies, music, and software due to the legal penalties and difficulties/costs involved within the regulation. Proprietary OS's and applications will likely include some form of automatic permission/license term checking. This will put a huge handicap on "free" content and software, as there will be no free inclusion of licensing/permission on the "official" authentication servers.
I can also imagine that this would be in addition to having to, in the case of FOSS, obtaining legal licensing permissions from every single developer that contributed code to the satisfaction of whatever bureaucracy is placed in charge of overseeing the system. It could effectively make the cost and complication of legally distributing FOSS and "free" content unmanageable for many, if not most.
This would also greatly benefit governments and politicians. For instance, say there's an election going on, and you've come across damning evidence against the party/politician in power/office, and you want to disseminate that information in a timely manner before the election. Oops, sorry! There's been a delay in the paperwork giving you permission to distribute. Corrupt party/politician gets re-elected, evidence is destroyed/covered up in the meantime, and you are personally smeared/discredited/destroyed.
God, you are totally misinformed and a complete idiot. The founding fathers ripped apart the original constitution, the Articles of Confederation, because it was way too weak and didn`t allow for a powerful central government. They understood that as times changed so did the need for a larger, more centralized power. You`re an idiot for warping history to fit your own narrow-minded, bizarre belief system.
I will ignore the personal insults. Before you act oh-so-informed and dismissive of other viewpoints, perhaps you should read Thomas Payne's "Common Sense" and the Federalist Papers.
Thomas Jefferson also spoke about precisely these things.
It probably wouldn't hurt for you to also read "Arguing With Idiots" by Glenn Beck. I will refrain from any cheap shots linking the books' title with your posts.
What policy maker will risk flying in the face of that? They'd be taken to the nearest tree and hanged. Figuratively of course, we are a democracy.
Not just "figuratively". The founders of the US foresaw the federal government growing outside of the role(s) and scope they intended. This is why they included the 2nd amendment. So that when a bloated & corrupt government stopped being the Peoples' servant and fancied itself our master, the People could revolt and start decorating the trees along the Mall in Washington DC with politicians.
It used to be that politicians were restricted by fear of the People. That is no longer the case, and the politicians have lost their fear of the People. It's time to change that, before a tipping-point is reached where the system cascades into a full totalitarian state.
To keep those in government honest, it's necessary that they feel a tiny frisson of fear whenever they look out their cushy DC office window at a tree. Mortal fear of death/imprisonment is the only reliable way to keep those in government from using the reins of power to enhance their own personal power and feed their greed at the expense of the Peoples' freedoms.
"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
I'd love to see a campaign to start dedicating "Jefferson trees" along the Mall in Washington DC to individual politicians. It could be fun. Say, a fruit tree for Barney Frank, and a walnut tree for Pelosi?
It is unfortunate, but the only way to keep the politicians from doing what you don't want them to do is by having an active populace.
A couple thoughts here.
It has been argued quite well and by people much more knowledgeable than I that corruption increases with the size of government, and that an active and attentive population is needed even with small government, and at increasing levels of citizen attention and effort (as well as taxes) as government size increases, until a tipping point is reached where the government seizes and holds all power.
Historically, there has never been a government without corruption and the only proven-successful strategy is to attempt to keep governments' power and reach to a minimum so that the temptation/rewards in corruption are far, far smaller than the risks and to minimize any damage possible. By keeping government small and more local in nature, and thus a distributed system, it eliminates the possibility of corruption taking over the system through a single point of failure.
So, it's simple really; citizens must choose between the size of their government and the amount of corruption, taxation, and loss-of-freedom they are willing to accept against their willingness to pay attention to, pay for, and participate in, governing. The argument for smaller government is apparent from this view in that loss of individual freedom, corruption, and taxation are smaller factors, thus reducing the amount of attention & resources citizens must expend to keep government under control and maintain an acceptable level of freedom and costs in taxation and regulation.
But I doubt many homeless men earn more than $300 a year or month.
Are you kidding me!?!? There are homeless that make enough from squeegeeing windshields, panhandling, and the like to support a hundreds-a-day crack-cocaine and heroin habit!
Yeah except Microsoft and the stores are saying Win7 is a free upgrade. Misleading and deceptive. Like when I visited a car dealer and "won" an 1 gigabyte MP4 player for "free". Yeah the actual item may have been technically free, but the S&H cost $30 so basically I paid for it.
I returned it and now I'm going after paypal to get a refund, since the battery only lasted 15 minutes. What good is that?
More importantly, the US is the source of Israels' 400 nukes.
Citation? As I'd understood it, Israel secretly developed nukes on their own and the US was extremely upset with Israel when it found out about it. However, once Israel (or any other country) had nukes, there was really no practical way to un-ring that bell.
In the scenarios I've heard discussed concerning an Israeli strike against Iran, they've all for the most part revolved around the idea of Israel performing an air strike against Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, and the conventional wisdom is that it wouldn't work because those facilities are too far underground for bunker-buster bombs and there may be unknown secret facilities that have remained undiscovered.
What I haven't heard discussed is that Israel, in the face of world indifference and even hostility to its' continued survival, may come to the same conclusion and decide it has nothing to lose by nuking Tehran and the known & suspected enrichment facilities and putting the world on notice that any counter-attack by any nation will result in a nuclear response.
DHS is sending out reports warning against pretty much anything anyone working for them can dream up, no matter how comic book.
I was an 0311/8541 in the USMC, and I don't think it is a legitimate threat.
Thank you for your service. Semper Fi. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the military and those who serve and have served. You and those like you put your lives on the line to protect the country and the people, and to defend the Constitution.
I agree, those who have served are the ones who most love the country and are the least likely to attack it, generally speaking. Of course there are nutcases, but there are nutcases from all walks of life and every vocation. Some of the worst nutcases hold the title of Senator or Representative.
DHS is a bad joke. Security theater with bad actors. I could see them fearing veterans if the "powers that be" plan to overthrow our Constitutional democratic republic and replace it with something else, however. In that case they would be fools not to. That would be, in my mind, the only reason to fear veterans any more than anyone else and why those reports are creepy.
Where do you think you'd find 10 or 20 actual snipers willing to do this?
Probably the same place the military and the police do...volunteers that will train for it or are trained (veterans). Why do you think that DHS is sending out domestic threat assessment reports warning against military combat vets, and why do you think street gangs are sending members into the military?
I'm not getting why you think the gmail user should get to keep the bank account data.
Umm, because the email account owner has done nothing wrong and has not had his day in court to defend himself? In olden times we used to call this "due process", something that government these days seems to consider too much of a burden to "progress" and "expediency".
The bank is ducking responsibility for their actions here and covering up their incompetence while not doing anything to actually protect the customers whose data was leaked, therefor cheating their customers of being able to assess this banks' competence as a business while shifting blame and penalty to some poor schmuck that was unlucky enough to be this email accounts' owner.
If it were me and my mail account and I had a copy of the list, I'd normally be disposed to delete the data. Upon discovering I'd had my email account erased while I was away/on vacation/otherwise hadn't checked that account, I'd use secure & anonymous means to make sure the data got spread as wide as possible, including Wikileaks.
Would a singe round of buckshot at the emitters do the trick?
It would require getting far too close. A shotgun isn't exactly the most concealable weapon. The shotgun-toting protester would be spotted and gunned down long before they reached shotgun range.
Purely theoretically, it would be far more effective to position snipers in tall structures in advance just like the police & military do and simply decorate the nearby area with pieces of the $50K cannon. If they lost several of these very expensive units at every protest, their budgets would collapse.
Fear works both ways. They attempt to use terror against civilians to suppress protest against the government and its' policies. A cop with a family making ~$45K-$65K/yr would seriously consider a sudden career change if ordered to man/operate such crowd suppression devices after seeing a few devices ripped to very expensive confetti.
Ten to twenty competent radio-equipped snipers at an average-sized demonstration using 30-06 and similar long-reach high-velocity scoped rifles that easily penetrate body armor & helmets placed strategically around the area could even observe and suppress any police snipers or other Rambo wanna-be's that think using weapons on unarmed protesters is a good idea.
Again, this is purely a *theoretical* discussion of tactics. I do *not* advocate violence toward police or their weapons...err, their "crowd control devices" under normal circumstances.
I've come to expect that here on/. whenever anyone voices an opinion or presents a case against the expansion of the national governments' power and/or liberal/progressive ideals.
They seem ready to grant legitimacy and moral equivalency to practically anyone and any socio-political system unless they/it disagree or are critical of said government expansion or liberal/progressive ideals.
If you feel that the only way you can prevail in a competition to convince people of the correctness of your ideas is to silence any disagreement or criticism, that doesn't say much for your ideas or even your own confidence in those ideas, and should be a red flag to everyone that there must be a reason that you're willing to silence divergent opinions.
Um, we nuked Japan and it turned out okay. What's not to like?
Actually, a very good point. We here in the US know, for instance, that terrorists will never, *ever* nuke Washington D.C. The terrorists know that, at this point, the American people would probably end up being forever grateful and that getting rid of those 535 corrupt, self-serving, power-&-wealth-lusting people would only serve to make the US a better, saner, and stronger nation than it has been for at least the past 50-100 years.
I'd say that well over 90% of the problems in the US are the direct or indirect result of a too large and powerful federal government. Whenever national governments get large and powerful, systemic corruption *will* become a problem. No amount of lawmaking, oversight programs, or other regulatory power can change it, as it's part of basic human nature.
The "we just need better oversight" excuse you hear from those in government when they're caught in some embarrassing/dishonest behavior is disingenuous at best. We need a much smaller federal government and the powers that the federal government has usurped from the states and the people respectively need to be returned.
To minimize corruption and power-seeking, a central government must be weak and poor enough that it's simply not worth cheating the system, and gaining control over it clandestinely won't provide any significant power over the citizens themselves because most of the actual domestic governing is done more locally.
It is unclear how large a threat this is to the end user. However the fact that XP is being loaded on netbooks suggests that Microsoft has a revenue stream that it should protect by writing a patch if it is serious.
The Coca-Cola Corporation also had a steady worldwide revenue stream with its nearly 80 years old original Coke formula, and everything went smoothly when it upgraded it to the improved and more delicious New Coke- Oh wait.
Well, this is just MS's own business practices backfiring. MS with XP, Vista, and Win7 is now competing with itself, so MS's own aggressive monopoly defenses/dirty tricks dept. is seeking to derail it's own most successful OS! I wonder if they'll try to embrace, extend, and extinguish themselves next?
I'm not against drilling; drill away. The problem is that there isn't enough; even if we just started drilling in every spot we could, we wouldn't have enough. It's. Not. Sustainable. Every time we find a new pocket of oil, everybody falls silent and slows down work on alternative energy. Look at our alternative energy options: all of them rely on oil in some way. We have no plans, and drilling to fix our oil problems is so short term that it's laughable.
That depends on what you call "sustainable". Nuclear is not "sustainable". Our sun is not "sustainable". The universe will die of heat-death and is not "sustainable". Nothing is "sustainable". Two or three hundred years of oil combined with a sensible usage & conservation policy should be sufficient to see us start to harvest comets and other off-planet resources for hydrocarbons.
We have nothing practical in the immediate future to replace oil. The only way we could make truly significant cuts (20-30-40%) in oil usage over the next 2-3 decades would involve much death and suffering. People would not tolerate it and would throw out any government that attempted it.
Take the example of the Chinese export bans on rare metals. Would you be ok with and re-elect politicians in the US and/or other Western countries that favored banning production and ownership of private-citizen-owned personal computers to conserve resources?
Or would you insist that they mine domestically?
This is one of the reasons we need a well-funded and aggressive space program. No matter how much we conserve we will run out of stuff on this planet.
Not dry, but not nearly enough to supply us. If we stopped importing oil and relied on just our remaining oil, we wouldn't even be able to power the country for a year.
Well then, we need to tell the environmental groups to shut up and start drilling in ANWAR and the Gulf of Mexico where there were new huge deposits just discovered and in all the other places where they scream either about some lizard, worm, fish, or where they're completely talking out of their ass like with Caribou in Alaska which absolutely love pipelines, etc. Their numbers skyrocket because of the favorable conditions. We also need to tell the NIMBY crowd tough toodles too.
I'm sick to death of the people who scream bloody murder about domestic oil drilling while expecting society to provide them with a lifestyle, technology, and consumer goods & services that demand we do things they protest about. You can't have it both ways. TANSTAAFL.
Technology and our knowledge & skills have advanced and we can now drill with far, far less impact than in the '60s, or even the '90s. The same goes for mining.
Resource infrastructure is really where the US is lacking and what drives the US to engage in much of the types of foreign-policy nastiness so many dislike in order to obtain what our modern society needs to sustain itself while refusing to pay the price ourselves. There are resources the country *must* have to sustain itself and our lifestyles.
If we prevent those resources from being obtained domestically, then we'll have to live with making nice with countries that abuse their people, trample freedom, are militarily aggressive, support terrorism, and want to harm the US & the West in general. And who, by the way, also don't give a crap how much they pollute the planet. We just end up outsourcing our pollution and enable bad people to do bad things.
At least if we're drilling in ANWAR, the Gulf, and offshore in California, or mining in California and elsewhere domestically, we can limit the environmental impact which won't happen if we're getting our resources from China, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
We can mitigate our oil consumption to an extent, but it will realistically take 3 to 5 decades to make a truly significant impact unless we are prepared to allow many people to suffer and many to die unnecessary deaths. We will still need large amounts of oil to sustain plastics, medicines, etc even if we reduce transportation-related uses significantly.
Or, alternatively, we can just keep whining about domestic oil drilling and domestic mining, in which case little will change except for things getting worse.
It's fascinating to watch the mod battle on my comment above.
Starting Score: 1 point Moderation -1
40% Offtopic
30% Flamebait
30% Insightful Extra 'Offtopic' Modifier 0 (Edit) Total Score: 0
Seems like I've stirred up quite the mod-battle. I guess that means I've made people think and/or scared some people who don't want people to read and think. I wonder who might benefit from people not seeing and thus not thinking about the things in my post?
Rom Emmanuel, is that you with the "Flamebait" and "Offtopic" mods from different Slashdot shell accounts?
And sounds a lot like what was being accomplished by Bush. Unpatriotic was the charge leveled repeatedly. The insane spending was initiated by Bush. The only howls are because a few different groups are getting the payouts and bribes than the Republicans would have given. Many of the payouts are the same under either party. The key to recognize is that the corporations don't care which party is in charge as long as they have been thoroughly bought. In fact, by having 2 and only two parties, the parties can fight over 'issues' and make voting seem important, when the (big) corporations still win. And having small companies die is great for the big corporations because they get them for a song. And it's not stockholders who make out like bandits, it's the actual bandits, CEO's, CFO's and cronies, who have the SEC in their back pocket.
I totally agree, both parties are corrupt, Bush is/was part & parcel to the corruption, and the big corporations have seen this as opportunity to advance their interests. However, the corporations should realize that once the politicians have the power structure in place, they will all be nationalized and the ones in charge now in the boardrooms will be thrown out and the shareholders screwed out of their investments.
I believe that Obama and his minions (not all Democrats or liberals) are intent on taking this to a whole new level and are seeking to radically change the basic structure of this nation to more-resemble that of Venezuela or Cuba, and do it sooner rather than later.
The Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative fighting going on and being egged on in the media and blogs is a distraction, merely a puppet show so the American people don't realize what is coming until it's too late to save the dream of Freedom that drove the Founding Fathers to form this great nation.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
What I think is unappreciated or underappreciated about abominations like Mussolini is that nothing they did was a chance, coincident, or accident. They understood very well what they were working for and where it was leading and accomplished it by a series of carefully planned maneuvers, each one of which had its own excuse, its own official story. Usually that story says that this is necessary, good for the country, designed to safeguard the people, intended to stop a national enemy, or that lack of patriotism is the only reason to oppose it. Above all, there is a distinctive pattern to it and once recognized, it is easy to spot, even in its early stages.
That sounds precisely like what President Obama and his minions are doing here in the USA currently, even including the accusations of being "unpatriotic", "racist", and many others that have been leveled at people who are in opposition to his sweeping changes, insane spending in a recession, and takeover of the private sector. As you say, it's easy to spot even in it's early stages...it's just that one has to be willing to accept what ones' eyes and ears tell them, which has been the problem with people here in the US.
There's a reason why Obama has surrounded himself with self-avowed socialists and communists and '60s radical-types. It's not just poor vetting either. He's just gathering the people that have the expertise with the type of government he plans to transition us to, like Van "Che" Jones. When he vowed to "fundamentally change America" he was being perfectly honest.
Socialism/fascism/communism would be a fundamental change from capitalism.
We have the capacity to keep using fossil fuels for a couple of centuries still, so if we care about the massive self inflicted damage that would cause, we have to stop using dirty fuel sources for that reason, not because it makes economical sense to do so. It doesn't hurt to have cheap available solar cells though.
I'm as much for a cleaner planet as anyone. However, people still have to live and afford to heat in winter & cool in summer. The higher that energy costs rise, the more poor people that will be freezing to death or dying from heat. People have to be able to afford to commute to work and to travel about for all the other things that living in a modern society requires.
Farmers have to use tractors and other machinery to keep the food supply cheap enough to feed everyone. They also need energy to irrigate land (heck, right now California farmers are watching their crops die for lack of water and food will become more expensive and harder to get, especially for the poor/minorities/inner-city-dwellers, because environmentalists want to save a bait-fish rather than feed people). Grocery stores have to refrigerate the food. Trucks have to bring the food to the stores.
That's the disconnect that many environmentalist types suffer. They put a clean environment and animals ahead of the lives of people, refusing compromise so human lives may be preserved and then wonder why they make so little progress.
When environmentalists are willing to seriously damage the nations' food supply because of some perceived risk to a bait-fish's population numbers as in the current situation in California, it makes all the other perfectly reasonable environmental proposals that much harder to get taken seriously by the general public and the politicians. At least by those politicians that need to worry about getting re-elected, as many are in districts with voters that would re-elect them no matter what they did short of turning into Satan Himself on national TV and clubbing baby seals live in HD.
I'm sure there will be numerous environmental groups that will come out against this, as they won't be able to see past OMGZ!! COAL!!! and realize it's a step in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Radar isn't the kind of radiation that causes damage. It passes harmlessly through you.
I'm sure that's what a few Darwin-Award-winning Amana RadaRange owners thought, too, when they decided to defeat the door interlock to "watch the food cook". The poor blind SOB's. Radar energy can cause your cornea to heat and become cataract-like.
No, as a former civilian avionics tech that worked on radar, it can cause blindness/serious injury/death (depending on TX power and exposure time) if you're close to the business end of the antenna/dish of a radar transmitter.
Strat
3: require all men to own and carry a firearm in public.
4: require all women to own and carry a firearm in public (this will also reduce the rate of sexual assault).
Sorry, there are too many stupid, panicky types out there to make me agree to that
Not for long.
Stupid, panicky types will quickly succumb to Darwinian weeding-out from society and the gene pool. As will muggers, rapists, and violent criminal types in general. It would also tend to weed out the worst of politicians which means that this will never, *ever* be allowed to happen. I also feel that it would result in a much more polite and considerate society in general. It would also tend to reduce public police violence and abuse.
Strat
Free software will not be impacted by the ACTA as these are legal downloads. In other news, all other legal content downloaded will likewise avoid any impact from the ACTA outside of the all so predictable bogus take down notices....
In this scenario, it might work out that ISPs and consumers adopt a "default-deny" in the distribution of movies, music, and software due to the legal penalties and difficulties/costs involved within the regulation. Proprietary OS's and applications will likely include some form of automatic permission/license term checking. This will put a huge handicap on "free" content and software, as there will be no free inclusion of licensing/permission on the "official" authentication servers.
I can also imagine that this would be in addition to having to, in the case of FOSS, obtaining legal licensing permissions from every single developer that contributed code to the satisfaction of whatever bureaucracy is placed in charge of overseeing the system. It could effectively make the cost and complication of legally distributing FOSS and "free" content unmanageable for many, if not most.
This would also greatly benefit governments and politicians. For instance, say there's an election going on, and you've come across damning evidence against the party/politician in power/office, and you want to disseminate that information in a timely manner before the election. Oops, sorry! There's been a delay in the paperwork giving you permission to distribute. Corrupt party/politician gets re-elected, evidence is destroyed/covered up in the meantime, and you are personally smeared/discredited/destroyed.
Just something else to think about.
Strat
God, you are totally misinformed and a complete idiot. The founding fathers ripped apart the original constitution, the Articles of Confederation, because it was way too weak and didn`t allow for a powerful central government. They understood that as times changed so did the need for a larger, more centralized power. You`re an idiot for warping history to fit your own narrow-minded, bizarre belief system.
I will ignore the personal insults. Before you act oh-so-informed and dismissive of other viewpoints, perhaps you should read Thomas Payne's "Common Sense" and the Federalist Papers.
Thomas Jefferson also spoke about precisely these things.
It probably wouldn't hurt for you to also read "Arguing With Idiots" by Glenn Beck. I will refrain from any cheap shots linking the books' title with your posts.
Strat
What policy maker will risk flying in the face of that? They'd be taken to the nearest tree and hanged. Figuratively of course, we are a democracy.
Not just "figuratively". The founders of the US foresaw the federal government growing outside of the role(s) and scope they intended. This is why they included the 2nd amendment. So that when a bloated & corrupt government stopped being the Peoples' servant and fancied itself our master, the People could revolt and start decorating the trees along the Mall in Washington DC with politicians.
It used to be that politicians were restricted by fear of the People. That is no longer the case, and the politicians have lost their fear of the People. It's time to change that, before a tipping-point is reached where the system cascades into a full totalitarian state.
To keep those in government honest, it's necessary that they feel a tiny frisson of fear whenever they look out their cushy DC office window at a tree. Mortal fear of death/imprisonment is the only reliable way to keep those in government from using the reins of power to enhance their own personal power and feed their greed at the expense of the Peoples' freedoms.
"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
I'd love to see a campaign to start dedicating "Jefferson trees" along the Mall in Washington DC to individual politicians. It could be fun. Say, a fruit tree for Barney Frank, and a walnut tree for Pelosi?
Strat
It is unfortunate, but the only way to keep the politicians from doing what you don't want them to do is by having an active populace.
A couple thoughts here.
It has been argued quite well and by people much more knowledgeable than I that corruption increases with the size of government, and that an active and attentive population is needed even with small government, and at increasing levels of citizen attention and effort (as well as taxes) as government size increases, until a tipping point is reached where the government seizes and holds all power.
Historically, there has never been a government without corruption and the only proven-successful strategy is to attempt to keep governments' power and reach to a minimum so that the temptation/rewards in corruption are far, far smaller than the risks and to minimize any damage possible. By keeping government small and more local in nature, and thus a distributed system, it eliminates the possibility of corruption taking over the system through a single point of failure.
So, it's simple really; citizens must choose between the size of their government and the amount of corruption, taxation, and loss-of-freedom they are willing to accept against their willingness to pay attention to, pay for, and participate in, governing. The argument for smaller government is apparent from this view in that loss of individual freedom, corruption, and taxation are smaller factors, thus reducing the amount of attention & resources citizens must expend to keep government under control and maintain an acceptable level of freedom and costs in taxation and regulation.
Strat
LP098 5B6FR
1. LP098 5B6FR
2. ZD002J WPRRNS3 QOR3N7L
3. ???
4. Profit!
Strat
But I doubt many homeless men earn more than $300 a year or month.
Are you kidding me!?!? There are homeless that make enough from squeegeeing windshields, panhandling, and the like to support a hundreds-a-day crack-cocaine and heroin habit!
Just saying.
Strat
Yeah except Microsoft and the stores are saying Win7 is a free upgrade. Misleading and deceptive. Like when I visited a car dealer and "won" an 1 gigabyte MP4 player for "free". Yeah the actual item may have been technically free, but the S&H cost $30 so basically I paid for it.
I returned it and now I'm going after paypal to get a refund, since the battery only lasted 15 minutes. What good is that?
TANSTAAFL
HTH
HAND
More importantly, the US is the source of Israels' 400 nukes.
Citation? As I'd understood it, Israel secretly developed nukes on their own and the US was extremely upset with Israel when it found out about it. However, once Israel (or any other country) had nukes, there was really no practical way to un-ring that bell.
In the scenarios I've heard discussed concerning an Israeli strike against Iran, they've all for the most part revolved around the idea of Israel performing an air strike against Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, and the conventional wisdom is that it wouldn't work because those facilities are too far underground for bunker-buster bombs and there may be unknown secret facilities that have remained undiscovered.
What I haven't heard discussed is that Israel, in the face of world indifference and even hostility to its' continued survival, may come to the same conclusion and decide it has nothing to lose by nuking Tehran and the known & suspected enrichment facilities and putting the world on notice that any counter-attack by any nation will result in a nuclear response.
Strat
DHS is sending out reports warning against pretty much anything anyone working for them can dream up, no matter how comic book.
I was an 0311/8541 in the USMC, and I don't think it is a legitimate threat.
Thank you for your service. Semper Fi. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the military and those who serve and have served. You and those like you put your lives on the line to protect the country and the people, and to defend the Constitution.
I agree, those who have served are the ones who most love the country and are the least likely to attack it, generally speaking. Of course there are nutcases, but there are nutcases from all walks of life and every vocation. Some of the worst nutcases hold the title of Senator or Representative.
DHS is a bad joke. Security theater with bad actors. I could see them fearing veterans if the "powers that be" plan to overthrow our Constitutional democratic republic and replace it with something else, however. In that case they would be fools not to. That would be, in my mind, the only reason to fear veterans any more than anyone else and why those reports are creepy.
Strat
Where do you think you'd find 10 or 20 actual snipers willing to do this?
Probably the same place the military and the police do...volunteers that will train for it or are trained (veterans). Why do you think that DHS is sending out domestic threat assessment reports warning against military combat vets, and why do you think street gangs are sending members into the military?
Strat
I'm not getting why you think the gmail user should get to keep the bank account data.
Umm, because the email account owner has done nothing wrong and has not had his day in court to defend himself? In olden times we used to call this "due process", something that government these days seems to consider too much of a burden to "progress" and "expediency".
The bank is ducking responsibility for their actions here and covering up their incompetence while not doing anything to actually protect the customers whose data was leaked, therefor cheating their customers of being able to assess this banks' competence as a business while shifting blame and penalty to some poor schmuck that was unlucky enough to be this email accounts' owner.
If it were me and my mail account and I had a copy of the list, I'd normally be disposed to delete the data. Upon discovering I'd had my email account erased while I was away/on vacation/otherwise hadn't checked that account, I'd use secure & anonymous means to make sure the data got spread as wide as possible, including Wikileaks.
Strat
Would a singe round of buckshot at the emitters do the trick?
It would require getting far too close. A shotgun isn't exactly the most concealable weapon. The shotgun-toting protester would be spotted and gunned down long before they reached shotgun range.
Purely theoretically, it would be far more effective to position snipers in tall structures in advance just like the police & military do and simply decorate the nearby area with pieces of the $50K cannon. If they lost several of these very expensive units at every protest, their budgets would collapse.
Fear works both ways. They attempt to use terror against civilians to suppress protest against the government and its' policies. A cop with a family making ~$45K-$65K/yr would seriously consider a sudden career change if ordered to man/operate such crowd suppression devices after seeing a few devices ripped to very expensive confetti.
Ten to twenty competent radio-equipped snipers at an average-sized demonstration using 30-06 and similar long-reach high-velocity scoped rifles that easily penetrate body armor & helmets placed strategically around the area could even observe and suppress any police snipers or other Rambo wanna-be's that think using weapons on unarmed protesters is a good idea.
Again, this is purely a *theoretical* discussion of tactics. I do *not* advocate violence toward police or their weapons...err, their "crowd control devices" under normal circumstances.
Strat
Have to try and make taxes fair to everyone, because in a free country, they always have the option of packing up and moving somewhere else.
Don't worry.
This oversight is being corrected.
Strat
Thanks Fudrucker and Joebagodonuts.
I've come to expect that here on /. whenever anyone voices an opinion or presents a case against the expansion of the national governments' power and/or liberal/progressive ideals.
They seem ready to grant legitimacy and moral equivalency to practically anyone and any socio-political system unless they/it disagree or are critical of said government expansion or liberal/progressive ideals.
If you feel that the only way you can prevail in a competition to convince people of the correctness of your ideas is to silence any disagreement or criticism, that doesn't say much for your ideas or even your own confidence in those ideas, and should be a red flag to everyone that there must be a reason that you're willing to silence divergent opinions.
Strat
Um, we nuked Japan and it turned out okay. What's not to like?
Actually, a very good point. We here in the US know, for instance, that terrorists will never, *ever* nuke Washington D.C. The terrorists know that, at this point, the American people would probably end up being forever grateful and that getting rid of those 535 corrupt, self-serving, power-&-wealth-lusting people would only serve to make the US a better, saner, and stronger nation than it has been for at least the past 50-100 years.
I'd say that well over 90% of the problems in the US are the direct or indirect result of a too large and powerful federal government. Whenever national governments get large and powerful, systemic corruption *will* become a problem. No amount of lawmaking, oversight programs, or other regulatory power can change it, as it's part of basic human nature.
The "we just need better oversight" excuse you hear from those in government when they're caught in some embarrassing/dishonest behavior is disingenuous at best. We need a much smaller federal government and the powers that the federal government has usurped from the states and the people respectively need to be returned.
To minimize corruption and power-seeking, a central government must be weak and poor enough that it's simply not worth cheating the system, and gaining control over it clandestinely won't provide any significant power over the citizens themselves because most of the actual domestic governing is done more locally.
Strat
It is unclear how large a threat this is to the end user. However the fact that XP is being loaded on netbooks suggests that Microsoft has a revenue stream that it should protect by writing a patch if it is serious.
The Coca-Cola Corporation also had a steady worldwide revenue stream with its nearly 80 years old original Coke formula, and everything went smoothly when it upgraded it to the improved and more delicious New Coke- Oh wait.
Well, this is just MS's own business practices backfiring. MS with XP, Vista, and Win7 is now competing with itself, so MS's own aggressive monopoly defenses/dirty tricks dept. is seeking to derail it's own most successful OS! I wonder if they'll try to embrace, extend, and extinguish themselves next?
Yes kiddies, that was sarcasm.
Strat
Of course. How else are we going to watch the new remake of "The Parent Trap"?
Curse you! You've made me gouge out my inner-eye! Scenes from that idiotic film are now stuck in my head like a bad tune! Make it stop!!! :P
I'm not against drilling; drill away. The problem is that there isn't enough; even if we just started drilling in every spot we could, we wouldn't have enough. It's. Not. Sustainable. Every time we find a new pocket of oil, everybody falls silent and slows down work on alternative energy. Look at our alternative energy options: all of them rely on oil in some way. We have no plans, and drilling to fix our oil problems is so short term that it's laughable.
That depends on what you call "sustainable". Nuclear is not "sustainable". Our sun is not "sustainable". The universe will die of heat-death and is not "sustainable". Nothing is "sustainable". Two or three hundred years of oil combined with a sensible usage & conservation policy should be sufficient to see us start to harvest comets and other off-planet resources for hydrocarbons.
We have nothing practical in the immediate future to replace oil. The only way we could make truly significant cuts (20-30-40%) in oil usage over the next 2-3 decades would involve much death and suffering. People would not tolerate it and would throw out any government that attempted it.
Take the example of the Chinese export bans on rare metals. Would you be ok with and re-elect politicians in the US and/or other Western countries that favored banning production and ownership of private-citizen-owned personal computers to conserve resources?
Or would you insist that they mine domestically?
This is one of the reasons we need a well-funded and aggressive space program. No matter how much we conserve we will run out of stuff on this planet.
Strat
Not dry, but not nearly enough to supply us. If we stopped importing oil and relied on just our remaining oil, we wouldn't even be able to power the country for a year.
Well then, we need to tell the environmental groups to shut up and start drilling in ANWAR and the Gulf of Mexico where there were new huge deposits just discovered and in all the other places where they scream either about some lizard, worm, fish, or where they're completely talking out of their ass like with Caribou in Alaska which absolutely love pipelines, etc. Their numbers skyrocket because of the favorable conditions. We also need to tell the NIMBY crowd tough toodles too.
I'm sick to death of the people who scream bloody murder about domestic oil drilling while expecting society to provide them with a lifestyle, technology, and consumer goods & services that demand we do things they protest about. You can't have it both ways. TANSTAAFL.
Technology and our knowledge & skills have advanced and we can now drill with far, far less impact than in the '60s, or even the '90s. The same goes for mining.
Resource infrastructure is really where the US is lacking and what drives the US to engage in much of the types of foreign-policy nastiness so many dislike in order to obtain what our modern society needs to sustain itself while refusing to pay the price ourselves. There are resources the country *must* have to sustain itself and our lifestyles.
If we prevent those resources from being obtained domestically, then we'll have to live with making nice with countries that abuse their people, trample freedom, are militarily aggressive, support terrorism, and want to harm the US & the West in general. And who, by the way, also don't give a crap how much they pollute the planet. We just end up outsourcing our pollution and enable bad people to do bad things.
At least if we're drilling in ANWAR, the Gulf, and offshore in California, or mining in California and elsewhere domestically, we can limit the environmental impact which won't happen if we're getting our resources from China, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
We can mitigate our oil consumption to an extent, but it will realistically take 3 to 5 decades to make a truly significant impact unless we are prepared to allow many people to suffer and many to die unnecessary deaths. We will still need large amounts of oil to sustain plastics, medicines, etc even if we reduce transportation-related uses significantly.
Or, alternatively, we can just keep whining about domestic oil drilling and domestic mining, in which case little will change except for things getting worse.
Strat
It's fascinating to watch the mod battle on my comment above.
Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation -1
40% Offtopic
30% Flamebait
30% Insightful
Extra 'Offtopic' Modifier 0 (Edit)
Total Score: 0
Seems like I've stirred up quite the mod-battle. I guess that means I've made people think and/or scared some people who don't want people to read and think. I wonder who might benefit from people not seeing and thus not thinking about the things in my post?
Rom Emmanuel, is that you with the "Flamebait" and "Offtopic" mods from different Slashdot shell accounts?
Strat
And sounds a lot like what was being accomplished by Bush. Unpatriotic was the charge leveled repeatedly. The insane spending was initiated by Bush. The only howls are because a few different groups are getting the payouts and bribes than the Republicans would have given. Many of the payouts are the same under either party. The key to recognize is that the corporations don't care which party is in charge as long as they have been thoroughly bought. In fact, by having 2 and only two parties, the parties can fight over 'issues' and make voting seem important, when the (big) corporations still win. And having small companies die is great for the big corporations because they get them for a song. And it's not stockholders who make out like bandits, it's the actual bandits, CEO's, CFO's and cronies, who have the SEC in their back pocket.
I totally agree, both parties are corrupt, Bush is/was part & parcel to the corruption, and the big corporations have seen this as opportunity to advance their interests. However, the corporations should realize that once the politicians have the power structure in place, they will all be nationalized and the ones in charge now in the boardrooms will be thrown out and the shareholders screwed out of their investments.
I believe that Obama and his minions (not all Democrats or liberals) are intent on taking this to a whole new level and are seeking to radically change the basic structure of this nation to more-resemble that of Venezuela or Cuba, and do it sooner rather than later.
The Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative fighting going on and being egged on in the media and blogs is a distraction, merely a puppet show so the American people don't realize what is coming until it's too late to save the dream of Freedom that drove the Founding Fathers to form this great nation.
Strat
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
What I think is unappreciated or underappreciated about abominations like Mussolini is that nothing they did was a chance, coincident, or accident. They understood very well what they were working for and where it was leading and accomplished it by a series of carefully planned maneuvers, each one of which had its own excuse, its own official story. Usually that story says that this is necessary, good for the country, designed to safeguard the people, intended to stop a national enemy, or that lack of patriotism is the only reason to oppose it. Above all, there is a distinctive pattern to it and once recognized, it is easy to spot, even in its early stages.
That sounds precisely like what President Obama and his minions are doing here in the USA currently, even including the accusations of being "unpatriotic", "racist", and many others that have been leveled at people who are in opposition to his sweeping changes, insane spending in a recession, and takeover of the private sector. As you say, it's easy to spot even in it's early stages...it's just that one has to be willing to accept what ones' eyes and ears tell them, which has been the problem with people here in the US.
There's a reason why Obama has surrounded himself with self-avowed socialists and communists and '60s radical-types. It's not just poor vetting either. He's just gathering the people that have the expertise with the type of government he plans to transition us to, like Van "Che" Jones. When he vowed to "fundamentally change America" he was being perfectly honest.
Socialism/fascism/communism would be a fundamental change from capitalism.
Strat
We have the capacity to keep using fossil fuels for a couple of centuries still, so if we care about the massive self inflicted damage that would cause, we have to stop using dirty fuel sources for that reason, not because it makes economical sense to do so. It doesn't hurt to have cheap available solar cells though.
I'm as much for a cleaner planet as anyone. However, people still have to live and afford to heat in winter & cool in summer. The higher that energy costs rise, the more poor people that will be freezing to death or dying from heat. People have to be able to afford to commute to work and to travel about for all the other things that living in a modern society requires.
Farmers have to use tractors and other machinery to keep the food supply cheap enough to feed everyone. They also need energy to irrigate land (heck, right now California farmers are watching their crops die for lack of water and food will become more expensive and harder to get, especially for the poor/minorities/inner-city-dwellers, because environmentalists want to save a bait-fish rather than feed people). Grocery stores have to refrigerate the food. Trucks have to bring the food to the stores.
That's the disconnect that many environmentalist types suffer. They put a clean environment and animals ahead of the lives of people, refusing compromise so human lives may be preserved and then wonder why they make so little progress.
When environmentalists are willing to seriously damage the nations' food supply because of some perceived risk to a bait-fish's population numbers as in the current situation in California, it makes all the other perfectly reasonable environmental proposals that much harder to get taken seriously by the general public and the politicians. At least by those politicians that need to worry about getting re-elected, as many are in districts with voters that would re-elect them no matter what they did short of turning into Satan Himself on national TV and clubbing baby seals live in HD.
I'm sure there will be numerous environmental groups that will come out against this, as they won't be able to see past OMGZ!! COAL!!! and realize it's a step in the right direction.
Strat