The catch is that massive data collection and observation allows all kinds of progress. Is it really so wrong that your car insurance company can tell how fast you drive and whether you leave bars late at night? Or how about a medical insurance or life insurance discount because it is clear that you eat a lot of green leafy vegetables and not Spam sandwiches for lunch? Or how about knowing where your wife and kids have really been all week? Or how about linking cancer rates to locations or habits or even knowing your DNA and how it will tolerate such behaviors? And for crime prevention and punishment it is hard to beat heavy duty surveillance.
"Those who willingly surrender freedom for security deserve neither and will lose both."
Not a student of history or human nature, are you? That's always the refrain of the tyrant; "It's for your own good".
Such beliefs have fueled some of the most horrible atrocities in the history of mankind and killed many tens of millions of people.
A Panopticon that's only available to those in power guarantees those in power become tyrants and the citizens become slaves.
The world is a large place. Someone might want to tell Mr. Bigwig that his laws mean jack in all but one country.
Except that this trend towards increased government surveillance of the general populace by government intelligence and LE agencies, often in blatant violation of their nations' own laws and founding documents & principles, is a global phenomenon, particularly in the West, and no longer limited to a handful of dictatorships and totalitarian nations.
Blowing this stuff off because "just switch to a foreign provider" is short-sighted.
Individual freedom around the world, particularly digital privacy/security against intrusive, and often illegal by their own laws, digital spying by governments against their own citizens, is on a downward trend as the US and other Western nations grow increasingly paranoid and authoritarian.
The struggle against such invasive surveillance must likewise be global as these regimes work together both in the actual surveillance and also on the political side to increase their scope and power ever further.
This is particularly true among "Five Eyes" nations like Australia. What good would it do to switch to using services outside the country you're in if all the practical alternatives are just as bad or worse?
The specific legislation to which Alexander referred was unclear. Angela Canterbury, the policy director for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said she was unaware of any such bill. Neither was Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.
Well, duh!
The laws were passed and signed into law by the secret FISA Congress and the secret FISA POTUS, naturally!
I'm sure the secret FISA SCOTUS has already reviewed these laws and found them reasonable & necessary.
The Secret FISA VISA.
It's everywhere you want to spy!!
I wonder how long it will take for attacks on the NSA's and their contractors' workers by the public to start?
Robot soldiers that won't question, lie, or disobey orders.
Every megalomaniacs' and oppressive police states' wet-dream.
What could possibly go wrong?
The only thing worse than a self-aware "Skynet" is a "Skynet" under human control. Machines don't enjoy needless cruelty and the deliberate infliction of pain & suffering for their own sakes.
[Obvious use]...Great for spying on people's phone communications
Or, alternately, enabling people to set up their own local networks (throw in a dash of encryption, maybe?) when a government shuts down the carriers to aid in suppressing mass political/popular opposition, protests, marches, demonstrations, etc.
It could ultimately be tracked down by the government, but even with no attempts to transmission-wise obscure the source/location (well, lets be real...it would necessarily be on a low-power transmitter, so there's that) it's damned hard, particularly in a dense urban area, to locate a signal from the ground.
There's also the practical matter of logistics for the authorities. There aren't a whole lot of radio tracking & location vans around. The FCC has typically only had one or two in most of the States in the US, with exceptions for the larger States like California where the vast area of the State demands a larger fleet, but still relatively very few for covering a huge area. Michigan for instance had two (one was almost always parked and served as a backup vehicle against mechanical failures/repair) the last I'd heard.
Helicopters would be faster, but there aren't that many so equipped either, even in the military. The military signal tracking capabilities are more focused on weapons systems and target tracking, not domestic small-transmitter rabbit-hunting that doesn't involve something akin to a HARM missile taking out a half-block area. That might go largely unnoticed and be considered by many to be an improvement in large sections of Detroit, but elsewhere it would definitely cause mass anti-government public demonstrations, protests, uprisings, death, and violence.
I really doubt it is actually meant to blow itself up though.
If they used the right kind of battery it could;-)
All you'd need to do is build it on a flammable PCB with a nichrome-wire-style electrical ignition element embedded within it, and discharge the (I would assume normally inaccessible without tripping the destruct) battery through it. The destruct could even have it's own built-in and seperate battery
What was it you called a country where the government and powerful, "connected" private business interests merge?
Ohhh, silly me! *Now* I remember!
A Fascist Oligarchy, of course!
Welcome to the DRNA comrades! (Democratic Republic of North America) The new flag will be a black silhouette of a boot stomping a human face on a blood-red background.
Just wait until they run out of money they can rape from the domestic economy and begin a policy of international aggression to keep their hookers and blow flowing. The world is going to burn.
Sure, they'd still be valuable to people who don't seem to realize what they're backed by, and their actual value, is the same: absolutely nothing.
Just like the US Dollar.
There's nothing there. It's just bits in a Federal Reserve computer system. All the gold deposited by other nations at the NY Fed is gone, has been gone for years. Other nations have all but stopped loaning the US money at anywhere near sane rates. The US Treasury is now buying our own bonds to keep things from collapsing, but it cannot continue.
The US Dollar is backed by nothing more than US government propaganda. People around the world are already waking to this fact. There are already international actions under way to move away from the US dollar as a reserve currency for international trade in things like oil. It won't be long before the US Dollar and the US economy collapses, maybe two years at the outside.
And rightly so, as those in the US government are running it like some banana republic, or the Wiemar Republic.
Fine. Unfortunately that doesn't change the court rulings that have found the NSA and FBI actions that many find so disagreeable as being legal. As far as I have read they are complying with the law.
Courts (including the SCOTUS) are not Constitutionally designated as the final arbiters of what is Constitutional. They were never intended to be.
At least, according to one of the main architects of the Constitution's writing.
"You seem... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy... The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal." - Thomas Jefferson
The entire aim of the modern US intelligence apparatus is to locate and identify for isolation/neutralization/eradication any new Thomas Jeffersons, Ben Franklins, John Adams, etc etc in order to protect the Oligarchs in power.
Yes, to those who believe that there should be limits to government power.
It's certainly not surprising or unexpected for those who've been paying attention.
At it's root, the cause is simple.
People want government to provide more and more stuff and do more and more things.
In order to do all that, government must have the wealth and powers to accomplish it.
Because human nature is what it is, giving any person or group that much power insures eventual corruption, and ultimately, results in an authoritarian/totalitarian regime if left unchecked.
It's like gravity, in that one cannot set in place any set of laws/rules/etc to change it. That's why the writers of the US Constitution tried to make as much of government as possible a strictly local matter and leave very little for the central government to do except things like treaties and wars. We left that behind in the early-1900s thanks to Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the Progressive movement, and haven't looked back.
In order for government to grow, individual freedom, choice, and wealth must suffer, as it is only from limiting/taking the people's wealth, freedom, and power of choice that government is able to act.
Everybody is born free, government can only limit that freedom just as government creates no wealth and can only take it from those who create actual wealth.
More government = less freedom. It's a zero-sum equation. More of one necessitates less of the other.
How much less-free do you want to be today?
Bastardizing or just plain ignoring the Constitution to grow government since the 1950s at a nearly geometric rate to feed the entitlement bread-and-circuses to buy votes and paying for it by enslaving future generations with our bills and loss of freedoms and choices has been working out *great* so far.
$17 trillion in debt and an emerging authoritarian police/surveillance state with thermonuclear/biological weapons and one of the top3, if not the top, military in the world, great.
The world needs to pay attention, because once those in the US government have secured their power here and raped the domestic economy, that military will be sent out to secure more wealth from other countries to feed the beast.
You people in other countries had better pray to whatever/whoever you hold dear that those citizens in the US fighting to try to reduce the size and power of the US Federal government succeed or, and heed my words well, what will be coming your way if they fail will make the Nazi reign of terror and death look like a Cub Scout jamboree and George Orwell's "1984" look like an independent-thinker's and truth-lover's Utopia.
Blame the victims? You have it backwards. The American army began sticking it's nose into middle eastern conflicts long before the locals retaliated. You are the aggressor, not the victim.
No, Barbary pirates operating mostly out of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli started a program of targeted piracy against US ships in the 1800s. The same place that's in violent turmoil today.They just found another attack vector and set of tactics for today's world.
That's why the US Marines were originally formed. They were called "Leathernecks" because they wore high reinforced collars as protection against beheading by scimitar during hand-to-hand battles.
Oh no. The government of the United States, how untrustworthy compared to an anonymous stranger on the internet.
With the US government's track record for truthfulness and "transparency", particularly over the last 20 years, I'd be far more inclined to trust Joe Isuzu over the US the government.
Since when is 1/2 megaton large for an atomic bomb?
A 500 kiloton purely atomic device IS rather large.. Remember, the ones dropped on Japan were only about 20 kilotons.
Now, a thermonuclear device that was only 500KT would be quite small.
My hope with this asteroid capture plan is that, if there's a serious mistake and the object impacts Earth, it hits square in Washington, D.C. with no warning and wipes it out.
From the video I just watched, there's some kind of lens in front of the laser beam that disperses it into a wider light beam. The laser should only be thought of as a bulb, then.
Wrong idea.
The lasers only illuminate a phosphor emitter, which then produces the actual headlight beam. No laser light is emitted at all. It's more akin to the way a CRT works.
A thousand internets to the first one that figures out how to make the lasers scan the phosphors CRT-like to produce projected video. Stuck behind a semi for miles at night and bored? Just project a movie against the rear of the trailer ahead of you with your raster-capable headlights!
I think you have a very valid point which is why this such a scary issue. However, the emails were obtained through a court ordered subpoena during an investigation and retrieved through back ups the government is required to keep.
It's much scarier than that.
The NSA has all the official certs, the exploits, and the technical ability (along with the ability to coerce/force ISPs, phone carriers, etc to help) to forge and place an email or any other digital evidence on pretty much anyone's system that they wish to, and have it appear forensically to have been created/saved/received on any past time/date they wish.
Throw in a little "parallel construction" and you're suddenly a convicted felon on the way to a new, very "friendly" cell-mate for a few decades, all legal-like. This is a tool the Stasi would have wet-dreams about.
No, those beginnings were not in the 60s. The first games were 1896. Before 1906, they didn't even have national teams.
The Olympic Games started with the ancient Greeks in Olympia (hence the name) with records going back as far as at least 776 BC, and may well have begun even earlier.
For sure. But at least BitCoin is an upgrade from the fiat fiasco currencies.
The US Federal Reserve and the entire US Federal Government must all be using bootleg copies of Timmy "Tall-Tale" Geithner's TurboTax program.
Or, they're...you know...criminals. The people that are supposed to be tried in a criminal court, and if convicted, incarcerated in a Federal penitentiary to protect the public.
But, for some strange reason, Tweedledum won't prosecute nor convict Tweedledee, and Tweedledee won't prosecute nor convict Tweedledum. They're just running game on some "dum dees" because they buy into the (D)/(R), L/R, White/Black, Rich/Poor race/class/party-warfare and fight each other while they and their children are being robbed blind on multiple levels and in multiple ways.
The Olympics stopped being about amateur sports a long time ago.
It's never actually been about "amateur sports" in anything other than name and some niceties to dress the illusion. It's always been a contest of international/inter-cultural/ideological propaganda campaigns, international one-upsmanship, and a sort of warfare without armies.
Now, it's just an ultra-commercialized piece of garbage. I'm glad I don't have to be subjected to it online, and even happier that the information superhighway won't be slowed down by all those big trucks full of Olympics video internets..
I remember as a kid in the '60s, the Olympics were *covered* by the major networks. You know, as they happened, few interruptions, etc? No endless advertisements and "color commentary" with only tiny bits of actual competition "highlights". By the late '70s going into the '80s, it was well on the way to jumping the shark and I paid less and less attention.
By the time the '90s and the crap they called the "Olympics" came around looking more and more like an infomercial, I stopped watching or caring.
It seems cops in NY could certainly use some serious reining-in. In this incident, an officer allegedly kicked and broke the leg of a 10-YO boy who used his mother's phone to video record them, and then also sexually assaulted the mother.
Slashdot Mirror
The catch is that massive data collection and observation allows all kinds of progress. Is it really so wrong that your car insurance company can tell how fast you drive and whether you leave bars late at night? Or how about a medical insurance or life insurance discount because it is clear that you eat a lot of green leafy vegetables and not Spam sandwiches for lunch? Or how about knowing where your wife and kids have really been all week? Or how about linking cancer rates to locations or habits or even knowing your DNA and how it will tolerate such behaviors? And for crime prevention and punishment it is hard to beat heavy duty surveillance.
"Those who willingly surrender freedom for security deserve neither and will lose both."
Not a student of history or human nature, are you? That's always the refrain of the tyrant; "It's for your own good".
Such beliefs have fueled some of the most horrible atrocities in the history of mankind and killed many tens of millions of people.
A Panopticon that's only available to those in power guarantees those in power become tyrants and the citizens become slaves.
Strat
Here's the third: Take your business elsewhere.
The world is a large place. Someone might want to tell Mr. Bigwig that his laws mean jack in all but one country.
Except that this trend towards increased government surveillance of the general populace by government intelligence and LE agencies, often in blatant violation of their nations' own laws and founding documents & principles, is a global phenomenon, particularly in the West, and no longer limited to a handful of dictatorships and totalitarian nations.
Blowing this stuff off because "just switch to a foreign provider" is short-sighted.
Individual freedom around the world, particularly digital privacy/security against intrusive, and often illegal by their own laws, digital spying by governments against their own citizens, is on a downward trend as the US and other Western nations grow increasingly paranoid and authoritarian.
The struggle against such invasive surveillance must likewise be global as these regimes work together both in the actual surveillance and also on the political side to increase their scope and power ever further.
This is particularly true among "Five Eyes" nations like Australia. What good would it do to switch to using services outside the country you're in if all the practical alternatives are just as bad or worse?
Strat
Obvious AC whoosh is obvious.
Strat :)
Really... it's 2014. A Briefcase?!
If I'm going carry a scooter in a case, it's going to be a guitar case!!
Obvious username is obvious.
Strat
FTFA:
The specific legislation to which Alexander referred was unclear. Angela Canterbury, the policy director for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said she was unaware of any such bill. Neither was Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.
Well, duh!
The laws were passed and signed into law by the secret FISA Congress and the secret FISA POTUS, naturally!
I'm sure the secret FISA SCOTUS has already reviewed these laws and found them reasonable & necessary.
The Secret FISA VISA.
It's everywhere you want to spy!!
I wonder how long it will take for attacks on the NSA's and their contractors' workers by the public to start?
Strat
So, how long until Iron Man, now?
Not long.
Not long at all. At least, for something a bit less "sci-fi" (umm, "palm thrusters"?) but more practical for the real-world foot-soldier.
http://youtu.be/p2W23ysgWKI
But soon there will be very little need for large numbers of (human) infantry.
Atlas http://youtu.be/hFKVSLNyADk
Atlas rocky terrain and balance tests. http://youtu.be/S-WRjDsyL0s
Robot soldiers that won't question, lie, or disobey orders.
Every megalomaniacs' and oppressive police states' wet-dream.
What could possibly go wrong?
The only thing worse than a self-aware "Skynet" is a "Skynet" under human control. Machines don't enjoy needless cruelty and the deliberate infliction of pain & suffering for their own sakes.
Strat
I'm sure whoever accidentally requisitioned hundreds of bipedal forklifts instead of ordinary forklifts got the last laugh that day.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying bipedal forklifts"?
Doesn't have the same ring.
Strat
[Obvious use]...Great for spying on people's phone communications
Or, alternately, enabling people to set up their own local networks (throw in a dash of encryption, maybe?) when a government shuts down the carriers to aid in suppressing mass political/popular opposition, protests, marches, demonstrations, etc.
It could ultimately be tracked down by the government, but even with no attempts to transmission-wise obscure the source/location (well, lets be real...it would necessarily be on a low-power transmitter, so there's that) it's damned hard, particularly in a dense urban area, to locate a signal from the ground.
There's also the practical matter of logistics for the authorities. There aren't a whole lot of radio tracking & location vans around. The FCC has typically only had one or two in most of the States in the US, with exceptions for the larger States like California where the vast area of the State demands a larger fleet, but still relatively very few for covering a huge area. Michigan for instance had two (one was almost always parked and served as a backup vehicle against mechanical failures/repair) the last I'd heard.
Helicopters would be faster, but there aren't that many so equipped either, even in the military. The military signal tracking capabilities are more focused on weapons systems and target tracking, not domestic small-transmitter rabbit-hunting that doesn't involve something akin to a HARM missile taking out a half-block area. That might go largely unnoticed and be considered by many to be an improvement in large sections of Detroit, but elsewhere it would definitely cause mass anti-government public demonstrations, protests, uprisings, death, and violence.
And, I think we can *all* agree, here...
"Ain't nobody got time for that!"
Strat
All you'd need to do is build it on a flammable PCB with a nichrome-wire-style electrical ignition element embedded within it, and discharge the (I would assume normally inaccessible without tripping the destruct) battery through it. The destruct could even have it's own built-in and seperate battery
*Poof*, original "Mission Impossible"-style.
"Good morning, Mr. Phelps..."
Sometimes the old tech is the best tech. ;-)
Strat
What was it you called a country where the government and powerful, "connected" private business interests merge?
Ohhh, silly me! *Now* I remember!
A Fascist Oligarchy, of course!
Welcome to the DRNA comrades! (Democratic Republic of North America) The new flag will be a black silhouette of a boot stomping a human face on a blood-red background.
Just wait until they run out of money they can rape from the domestic economy and begin a policy of international aggression to keep their hookers and blow flowing. The world is going to burn.
Strat
Full disclosure: I am atheist.
I just think it's often convenient to use their religion against them when possible.
Some Christians feel the same way about your religion.
Strat
Sure, they'd still be valuable to people who don't seem to realize what they're backed by, and their actual value, is the same: absolutely nothing.
Just like the US Dollar.
There's nothing there. It's just bits in a Federal Reserve computer system. All the gold deposited by other nations at the NY Fed is gone, has been gone for years. Other nations have all but stopped loaning the US money at anywhere near sane rates. The US Treasury is now buying our own bonds to keep things from collapsing, but it cannot continue.
The US Dollar is backed by nothing more than US government propaganda. People around the world are already waking to this fact. There are already international actions under way to move away from the US dollar as a reserve currency for international trade in things like oil. It won't be long before the US Dollar and the US economy collapses, maybe two years at the outside.
And rightly so, as those in the US government are running it like some banana republic, or the Wiemar Republic.
Strat
Fine. Unfortunately that doesn't change the court rulings that have found the NSA and FBI actions that many find so disagreeable as being legal. As far as I have read they are complying with the law.
Courts (including the SCOTUS) are not Constitutionally designated as the final arbiters of what is Constitutional. They were never intended to be.
At least, according to one of the main architects of the Constitution's writing.
"You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy... The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal." - Thomas Jefferson
The entire aim of the modern US intelligence apparatus is to locate and identify for isolation/neutralization/eradication any new Thomas Jeffersons, Ben Franklins, John Adams, etc etc in order to protect the Oligarchs in power.
Strat
You a thinker, ain't ya? We don't do none of that thinkin stuff round these parts, boy.
My apologies, Senator.
Strat
Yes, sirree! Everyone, make sure to vote Republican,
Sorry to ruin your fun at my expense, but the Republicans are just as guilty as the Democrats.
It's not an (R)/(D), Left/Right. Liberal/Conservative thing.
It's a "basic civil rights all humans are born with" thing.
Sell that partisan (R)/(D) crapola somewhere else. I'm not buying.
Strat
Yes, to those who believe that there should be limits to government power.
It's certainly not surprising or unexpected for those who've been paying attention.
At it's root, the cause is simple.
People want government to provide more and more stuff and do more and more things.
In order to do all that, government must have the wealth and powers to accomplish it.
Because human nature is what it is, giving any person or group that much power insures eventual corruption, and ultimately, results in an authoritarian/totalitarian regime if left unchecked.
It's like gravity, in that one cannot set in place any set of laws/rules/etc to change it. That's why the writers of the US Constitution tried to make as much of government as possible a strictly local matter and leave very little for the central government to do except things like treaties and wars. We left that behind in the early-1900s thanks to Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the Progressive movement, and haven't looked back.
In order for government to grow, individual freedom, choice, and wealth must suffer, as it is only from limiting/taking the people's wealth, freedom, and power of choice that government is able to act.
Everybody is born free, government can only limit that freedom just as government creates no wealth and can only take it from those who create actual wealth.
More government = less freedom. It's a zero-sum equation. More of one necessitates less of the other.
How much less-free do you want to be today?
Bastardizing or just plain ignoring the Constitution to grow government since the 1950s at a nearly geometric rate to feed the entitlement bread-and-circuses to buy votes and paying for it by enslaving future generations with our bills and loss of freedoms and choices has been working out *great* so far.
$17 trillion in debt and an emerging authoritarian police/surveillance state with thermonuclear/biological weapons and one of the top3, if not the top, military in the world, great.
The world needs to pay attention, because once those in the US government have secured their power here and raped the domestic economy, that military will be sent out to secure more wealth from other countries to feed the beast.
You people in other countries had better pray to whatever/whoever you hold dear that those citizens in the US fighting to try to reduce the size and power of the US Federal government succeed or, and heed my words well, what will be coming your way if they fail will make the Nazi reign of terror and death look like a Cub Scout jamboree and George Orwell's "1984" look like an independent-thinker's and truth-lover's Utopia.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Strat
Blame the victims? You have it backwards. The American army began sticking it's nose into middle eastern conflicts long before the locals retaliated. You are the aggressor, not the victim.
No, Barbary pirates operating mostly out of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli started a program of targeted piracy against US ships in the 1800s. The same place that's in violent turmoil today.They just found another attack vector and set of tactics for today's world.
That's why the US Marines were originally formed. They were called "Leathernecks" because they wore high reinforced collars as protection against beheading by scimitar during hand-to-hand battles.
Strat
Oh no. The government of the United States, how untrustworthy compared to an anonymous stranger on the internet.
With the US government's track record for truthfulness and "transparency", particularly over the last 20 years, I'd be far more inclined to trust Joe Isuzu over the US the government.
http://youtu.be/nJMq_7alQpU
Strat
Since when is 1/2 megaton large for an atomic bomb?
A 500 kiloton purely atomic device IS rather large.. Remember, the ones dropped on Japan were only about 20 kilotons.
Now, a thermonuclear device that was only 500KT would be quite small.
My hope with this asteroid capture plan is that, if there's a serious mistake and the object impacts Earth, it hits square in Washington, D.C. with no warning and wipes it out.
"...And nothing of value was lost..."
Strat
From the video I just watched, there's some kind of lens in front of the laser beam that disperses it into a wider light beam. The laser should only be thought of as a bulb, then.
Wrong idea.
The lasers only illuminate a phosphor emitter, which then produces the actual headlight beam. No laser light is emitted at all. It's more akin to the way a CRT works.
A thousand internets to the first one that figures out how to make the lasers scan the phosphors CRT-like to produce projected video. Stuck behind a semi for miles at night and bored? Just project a movie against the rear of the trailer ahead of you with your raster-capable headlights!
Strat
I think you have a very valid point which is why this such a scary issue. However, the emails were obtained through a court ordered subpoena during an investigation and retrieved through back ups the government is required to keep.
It's much scarier than that.
The NSA has all the official certs, the exploits, and the technical ability (along with the ability to coerce/force ISPs, phone carriers, etc to help) to forge and place an email or any other digital evidence on pretty much anyone's system that they wish to, and have it appear forensically to have been created/saved/received on any past time/date they wish.
Throw in a little "parallel construction" and you're suddenly a convicted felon on the way to a new, very "friendly" cell-mate for a few decades, all legal-like. This is a tool the Stasi would have wet-dreams about.
It's too much power for *anyone* to have.
Strat
No, those beginnings were not in the 60s. The first games were 1896. Before 1906, they didn't even have national teams.
The Olympic Games started with the ancient Greeks in Olympia (hence the name) with records going back as far as at least 776 BC, and may well have begun even earlier.
Strat
The US Federal Reserve and the entire US Federal Government must all be using bootleg copies of Timmy "Tall-Tale" Geithner's TurboTax program.
Or, they're...you know...criminals. The people that are supposed to be tried in a criminal court, and if convicted, incarcerated in a Federal penitentiary to protect the public.
But, for some strange reason, Tweedledum won't prosecute nor convict Tweedledee, and Tweedledee won't prosecute nor convict Tweedledum. They're just running game on some "dum dees" because they buy into the (D)/(R), L/R, White/Black, Rich/Poor race/class/party-warfare and fight each other while they and their children are being robbed blind on multiple levels and in multiple ways.
Strat
The Olympics stopped being about amateur sports a long time ago.
It's never actually been about "amateur sports" in anything other than name and some niceties to dress the illusion. It's always been a contest of international/inter-cultural/ideological propaganda campaigns, international one-upsmanship, and a sort of warfare without armies.
Now, it's just an ultra-commercialized piece of garbage. I'm glad I don't have to be subjected to it online, and even happier that the information superhighway won't be slowed down by all those big trucks full of Olympics video internets..
I remember as a kid in the '60s, the Olympics were *covered* by the major networks. You know, as they happened, few interruptions, etc? No endless advertisements and "color commentary" with only tiny bits of actual competition "highlights". By the late '70s going into the '80s, it was well on the way to jumping the shark and I paid less and less attention.
By the time the '90s and the crap they called the "Olympics" came around looking more and more like an infomercial, I stopped watching or caring.
These days?
It's dead, Jim.
Strat
It seems cops in NY could certainly use some serious reining-in. In this incident, an officer allegedly kicked and broke the leg of a 10-YO boy who used his mother's phone to video record them, and then also sexually assaulted the mother.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Cretins like that would use Google Glass as a tool of oppression to aid with blackmail, extortion, and control of the population under their purview.
But as bad as thugs like that are, I'll bet even *they* say "Fuck Slashdot Beta!".
Strat