1) Iranians already knew the US put the Shah in power and any "apology" only reasserted facts that had been commonplace since the 70s, and which the British had already acknowledged in any event. What most Iranians are waiting for is the apology from the US for putting the Ayatollah in power -- my Persian girlfriend (left in 2005) tells me that pretty much everyone in the democratic and monarchist movements in Iran assume that the US was behind exiling the Shah to Egypt and putting Ayatollah Khomeini in power, and it really doesn't matter how many times I try to explain to her that the US had nothing to gain from it. All Iranian reformers know is that their country has been completely fucked up by the ayatollahs, America benefits from Iran being fucked up (for oil, ???, profit), thus America put the ayatollahs in power, QED.
2) The Wikileaks cables made it clear that the MEK is a cult that once proposed mass suicides and uses brainwashing to adhere members. It's lobbying campaign in the US Congress and ability to win support in that august body is despicable.
3) The leader of the 2009 uprising, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was a strident supporter of Iran's nuclear program and the constitution of the Iranian republic in general -- we could discount his claims as rhetoric, but then we have to throw out just about everything Ahmadi says on the same grounds. The fact is there are no good options for "regime change" in Iran for the US, or Israel for that matter -- the current leaders are bad, their rivals in the reform movement agree with them on everything that bothers the US and Israel, the Iranian people are naturally and endogenously hostile to US and Israeli regional goals (because those goals are imperialist), and the only way you could take Iran off the threat board is by putting a deeply unpopular government in power and making Iran a client state. And the Iranian people know this and support the regime accordingly, because it's a hell of a lot better than any solution the west proposes.
The idea that democracies are less belligerent is a fallacy. A democratic Iran would be spinning just as many centrifuges as an Islamic Republic. More even.
With regard to the list of all the horrible things Iran has done to the US, yeah it's rough but this is the sort of thing countries do to each other. Some plot against the Saudi ambassador isn't a causus belli any more than the US and Mossad's covert murders of Iranian scientists. And refraining from bombing them isn't "appeasement."
There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not.
That's not democratic -- democratic means we hold a vote and if a majority decides to sanction Iran, we pass a law forbidding everyone. It's majority rule, not majority rules the majority.
What you're proposing is the free market, which wouldn't work, because in the end there'd be people who would be willing to trade with Iran, they'd be able to collect higher profits from their transactions because of the smaller market and their liberty to set prices, and in the end the people who refuse to participate in the boycott are the ones who end up profiting.
Because you're fighting another one, like "because God says so," or in Wikipedia's case, "because the Cloud says so." There's no such thing as a null epistemology.
I couldn't agree more: the major problem with the idea of a classically edited encyclopedia is that it's mostly useless, at least for schoolwork of any sort, and I don't even mean college.
Encyclopedias of all kinds, wether curated or open, are never primary sources and are never to be used for citation, or any kind of thoroughgoing reference on any subject. If you wanna know something, click the citation link and read the source, just like in the EB you should seek out the bibliographic reference. If there is no citation, you can't consider what you're reading to be "true."
The encyclopedia was originally designed to present very concise bits information in a systematic way, not to be The Book in which all information is available. Most of Wikipedia's perennial problems and cycles of character defamation, truthiness, edit wars, and cliques stem from the fact that Wikipedia's mission creeps far outside the scope of a concise reference work. Classical encyclopedia editors intentionally cut off articles the moment they start to become pedagogical, or too specific, or too technical. Nobody on Wikipedia does that, so you end up with something that is gobs bigger, with all the attendant bureaucratic demands every fact, every qualification, every section and subsection, and every mode of presentation requires. Old-school encyclopedias are sorta designed to stop right before they get to actionable information, because that's where 99% of the arguments are had, where reasonable experts tend to disagree the most, and where information really should be under an author's name, and given full airing. Better to have a five-sentence entry that tells you where to go, than a six-page half-assed textbook chapter written by nobody.
Also unlike any other encyclopedia ever written, Wikipedia makes no attempt to organize knowledge in an epistemological model. The "framework" over knowledge that encyclopedias create is the biggest value-add they offer, and the Wiki has no voice on this issue. Diderot's Cyclopedia wasn't written in order to compile all knowledge, it was written in order to argue for rationalism and to change the way people think about all knowledge, as relating to real facts in the real world, instead of to "common sense," authority or God. Wikipedia definitely has a mission, but it more to change the way people think about authorship dissemination of knowledge, than about knowledge as such. If anything, Wikipedia is the biggest disseminator of false "common sense" the world has ever seen.
I've never understood why in hell Mozilla couldn't use codecs that are installed on the damn system as it wouldn't be their asses on the line in a lawsuit.
If you run our software, you can only use codecs that we allow. You see, it's called "Freedom."
It's really about pushing around users and making them pawns in Mozilla and Google's political games with the W3C and MPEG-LA.
You might want to consider actually watching all of these movies before rendering any sort of summary judgement. That you haven't seen the Best Picture nominees of 1969 doesn't mean they aren't good, it just means you haven't seen a lot of really good movies.
Sci-Fi is simply the modernization of Western, Pirate, Horror and Exoticism genre films -- the audience demographic, the plots, and the stock characters are all comparable, and genre films have never been given much respect either.
Most genre filmmaking is for children -- if you think they're going to hand out Oscars to people who simply take Lost Horizon and stick apostrophes in all the character's names, you have another thing coming.
I've seen Oliver!, The Lion in Winter, Funny Girl and Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary's Baby, The Battle of Algiers, Faces, Star!, Ice Station Zebra and many, many of the films released around then and in direct competition with 2001. Lion in Winter and Rosemary's Baby are amazing movies, and it's a crime people don't talk about The Battle of Algiers as much as they talk about 2001. Oliver! is competent and really crowd-pleasing entertainment, and you don't have to be high to get anything out of the last two reels (though it's an interesting idea).
2001 is just the beneficiary of being ahead of the curve and appealing to critical constituencies and tastemakers. It got a ton of free press from critics trying to stake themselves out on the countercultural vanguard, and despite the fact that it's not really fun, or has anything like intelligent characters, or human drama, or a social message, it became a sort of shibboleth for people who wanted to talk about modernism in cinema.
I mean it IS a great film, but it's not for all tastes, and it's a far cry from "entertainment," MGM was basically thrown into bankruptcy making it and the company was disassembled by Kirk Kerkorian a couple years afterward. Movies that win Oscars generally have to make money and not blow up any studios in the process, Academy voters have not interest in burning the village to roast their favorite pig.
You're right, I can't imagine why they'd work with a vendor with a three-decade track record of on time deliveries and at-cost wartime contracting, when an academic and known schizophrenic with no manufacturing or operational experience was available.
We haven't seen the implementation of this yet, but if you were to set Apple's certificates to untrusted, their signatures, and revocations, would probably have no effect.
Note also that if you're committed to using some code they've revoked cert for, you can strip out a Mach-O binary's signatures.
Quite simply put, no BitCoin exchange -- neither Tradehill nor Mt. Gox -- is going to be able to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act.
I disagree. As long as an exchange keeps identity records for all of its business and for all of the address endpoints it creates, it'd probably be able to comply with US Treasury Department regulations. Bitcoin isn't anonymous. Things only start to get murky once you are moving bitcoins around off an exchange, but that's not the exchange's problem.
It's a bit like an Emacs user's reductio ad absurdum : a keyboard that is all modifiers.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 2
As long as a corporation is a separate "person," that can take on loans and enter into contracts with no liability on dividend recipients, the money passing through dividends is "new" money in the same way that a landlord receiving rent is getting after-tax income from his tenants, money that is also "taxed twice."
Income taxes aren't taxes on money, that would be a wealth tax; an income tax liability attaches to the activity of acquiring money in various ways. As long as the activities of a corporation and the activities of a shareholder are distinguishable, and they're independent economic actors, their tax liabilities are distinguishable.
What Texas does not have is a state regular income tax, but then again Texas saves all kinds of money that other states would normally spend on death penalty trial defenders and non-fraudulent arson investigators.
In my rather normal Mazda hatchback, my phone can be in its cradle in the dashboard, about three feet away, and the transcription is generally faultless; definitely different results when I try to use it with the radio on:)
I confess I respect your honesty, in that you don't actually dangle the bullshit argument that professional artists will have a modus vivendi in your proposed utopia. Most freepers aren't so forthcoming.
However, given regime change (really this sort of legal reform would be called "expropriation"), don't you see a huge deadweight loss from pricing high quality and low quality entertainment at the same rate? The "experience" is the fundamental value proposition to the viewer. My biggest bitch is that ISPs and cable companies make a mint shipping this material to people's houses, and their whole value proposition is based on offering this stuff. Basically the risk is that you'll make the Internet a huge common of the most tragic sort.
If copyright were abolished, kickstarter-style funding would be more common
Why? My position is that it's a failure regardless of the regime, and that it'll never work for provision of entertainment. The point is that even under ideal conditions it'll never pay for entertaining motion pictures, it simply doesn't map to the entertainment market or to the natural demand signals that entertainment consumers send. Even in fields where copyright is basically demolished, like music, people don't fund albums and tours with Kickstarter funds. The model is fundamentally incompatible with having a good time. It basically turns artistic work into the sort of political clusterfuck that ruins the open source movement -- raising $25 million from five people is political enough, imagine the nonsense of having to sell yourself to 50,000 donators and keep their politics satisfied.
And it would absolutely impact the quality, as I said, the end result would be the end of professionalism in art and creative crafts. All recorded creative works, be they films, music, computer software, or books, would become the province of hobbyists.
I don't really see the "competition" argument -- how does someone giving money to a Kickstarter project keep them from going to see a movie, or vice versus? Is it that they're competitive, or that you'd prefer a different cultural norm? 'Cause that's a different thing.
Yeah, it's no fair that crappy-looking Kickstarter movies have to compete with awesome-looking Hollywood movies, if Hollywood movies looked crappy then it'd be a fairer fight. I call it the "Harrison Bergeron Film Reform Plan." The quality of product would go WAY down, but our ideological commitment would be satisfied...
Slashdot Mirror
1) Iranians already knew the US put the Shah in power and any "apology" only reasserted facts that had been commonplace since the 70s, and which the British had already acknowledged in any event. What most Iranians are waiting for is the apology from the US for putting the Ayatollah in power -- my Persian girlfriend (left in 2005) tells me that pretty much everyone in the democratic and monarchist movements in Iran assume that the US was behind exiling the Shah to Egypt and putting Ayatollah Khomeini in power, and it really doesn't matter how many times I try to explain to her that the US had nothing to gain from it. All Iranian reformers know is that their country has been completely fucked up by the ayatollahs, America benefits from Iran being fucked up (for oil, ???, profit), thus America put the ayatollahs in power, QED.
2) The Wikileaks cables made it clear that the MEK is a cult that once proposed mass suicides and uses brainwashing to adhere members. It's lobbying campaign in the US Congress and ability to win support in that august body is despicable.
3) The leader of the 2009 uprising, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was a strident supporter of Iran's nuclear program and the constitution of the Iranian republic in general -- we could discount his claims as rhetoric, but then we have to throw out just about everything Ahmadi says on the same grounds. The fact is there are no good options for "regime change" in Iran for the US, or Israel for that matter -- the current leaders are bad, their rivals in the reform movement agree with them on everything that bothers the US and Israel, the Iranian people are naturally and endogenously hostile to US and Israeli regional goals (because those goals are imperialist), and the only way you could take Iran off the threat board is by putting a deeply unpopular government in power and making Iran a client state. And the Iranian people know this and support the regime accordingly, because it's a hell of a lot better than any solution the west proposes.
The idea that democracies are less belligerent is a fallacy. A democratic Iran would be spinning just as many centrifuges as an Islamic Republic. More even.
With regard to the list of all the horrible things Iran has done to the US, yeah it's rough but this is the sort of thing countries do to each other. Some plot against the Saudi ambassador isn't a causus belli any more than the US and Mossad's covert murders of Iranian scientists. And refraining from bombing them isn't "appeasement."
That's not democratic -- democratic means we hold a vote and if a majority decides to sanction Iran, we pass a law forbidding everyone. It's majority rule, not majority rules the majority.
What you're proposing is the free market, which wouldn't work, because in the end there'd be people who would be willing to trade with Iran, they'd be able to collect higher profits from their transactions because of the smaller market and their liberty to set prices, and in the end the people who refuse to participate in the boycott are the ones who end up profiting.
Because you're fighting another one, like "because God says so," or in Wikipedia's case, "because the Cloud says so." There's no such thing as a null epistemology.
Encyclopedias of all kinds, wether curated or open, are never primary sources and are never to be used for citation, or any kind of thoroughgoing reference on any subject. If you wanna know something, click the citation link and read the source, just like in the EB you should seek out the bibliographic reference. If there is no citation, you can't consider what you're reading to be "true."
The encyclopedia was originally designed to present very concise bits information in a systematic way, not to be The Book in which all information is available. Most of Wikipedia's perennial problems and cycles of character defamation, truthiness, edit wars, and cliques stem from the fact that Wikipedia's mission creeps far outside the scope of a concise reference work. Classical encyclopedia editors intentionally cut off articles the moment they start to become pedagogical, or too specific, or too technical. Nobody on Wikipedia does that, so you end up with something that is gobs bigger, with all the attendant bureaucratic demands every fact, every qualification, every section and subsection, and every mode of presentation requires. Old-school encyclopedias are sorta designed to stop right before they get to actionable information, because that's where 99% of the arguments are had, where reasonable experts tend to disagree the most, and where information really should be under an author's name, and given full airing. Better to have a five-sentence entry that tells you where to go, than a six-page half-assed textbook chapter written by nobody.
Also unlike any other encyclopedia ever written, Wikipedia makes no attempt to organize knowledge in an epistemological model. The "framework" over knowledge that encyclopedias create is the biggest value-add they offer, and the Wiki has no voice on this issue. Diderot's Cyclopedia wasn't written in order to compile all knowledge, it was written in order to argue for rationalism and to change the way people think about all knowledge, as relating to real facts in the real world, instead of to "common sense," authority or God. Wikipedia definitely has a mission, but it more to change the way people think about authorship dissemination of knowledge, than about knowledge as such. If anything, Wikipedia is the biggest disseminator of false "common sense" the world has ever seen.
If you run our software, you can only use codecs that we allow. You see, it's called "Freedom."
It's really about pushing around users and making them pawns in Mozilla and Google's political games with the W3C and MPEG-LA.
Fuck-- Bullitt, the Faye Dunaway Thomas Crown Affair and Planet of the Apes were up for Oscars in '69 too. That was an amazing year.
You might want to consider actually watching all of these movies before rendering any sort of summary judgement. That you haven't seen the Best Picture nominees of 1969 doesn't mean they aren't good, it just means you haven't seen a lot of really good movies.
Sci-Fi is simply the modernization of Western, Pirate, Horror and Exoticism genre films -- the audience demographic, the plots, and the stock characters are all comparable, and genre films have never been given much respect either.
Most genre filmmaking is for children -- if you think they're going to hand out Oscars to people who simply take Lost Horizon and stick apostrophes in all the character's names, you have another thing coming.
They have these, they're called the People's Choice Awards, and they're a fucking disgrace.
I've seen Oliver!, The Lion in Winter, Funny Girl and Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary's Baby, The Battle of Algiers, Faces, Star!, Ice Station Zebra and many, many of the films released around then and in direct competition with 2001. Lion in Winter and Rosemary's Baby are amazing movies, and it's a crime people don't talk about The Battle of Algiers as much as they talk about 2001. Oliver! is competent and really crowd-pleasing entertainment, and you don't have to be high to get anything out of the last two reels (though it's an interesting idea).
2001 is just the beneficiary of being ahead of the curve and appealing to critical constituencies and tastemakers. It got a ton of free press from critics trying to stake themselves out on the countercultural vanguard, and despite the fact that it's not really fun, or has anything like intelligent characters, or human drama, or a social message, it became a sort of shibboleth for people who wanted to talk about modernism in cinema.
I mean it IS a great film, but it's not for all tastes, and it's a far cry from "entertainment," MGM was basically thrown into bankruptcy making it and the company was disassembled by Kirk Kerkorian a couple years afterward. Movies that win Oscars generally have to make money and not blow up any studios in the process, Academy voters have not interest in burning the village to roast their favorite pig.
You're right, I can't imagine why they'd work with a vendor with a three-decade track record of on time deliveries and at-cost wartime contracting, when an academic and known schizophrenic with no manufacturing or operational experience was available.
We haven't seen the implementation of this yet, but if you were to set Apple's certificates to untrusted, their signatures, and revocations, would probably have no effect.
Note also that if you're committed to using some code they've revoked cert for, you can strip out a Mach-O binary's signatures.
So Bitcoin is anonymous, as long as you can pass the value through a non-Bitcoin conduit?
Bitcoin is as anonymous as an advertiser clickstream. It's quite possible to correlate individuals from their transactions, and the transactions are out in the open for all to see.
I disagree. As long as an exchange keeps identity records for all of its business and for all of the address endpoints it creates, it'd probably be able to comply with US Treasury Department regulations. Bitcoin isn't anonymous. Things only start to get murky once you are moving bitcoins around off an exchange, but that's not the exchange's problem.
It's a bit like an Emacs user's reductio ad absurdum : a keyboard that is all modifiers.
As long as a corporation is a separate "person," that can take on loans and enter into contracts with no liability on dividend recipients, the money passing through dividends is "new" money in the same way that a landlord receiving rent is getting after-tax income from his tenants, money that is also "taxed twice."
Income taxes aren't taxes on money, that would be a wealth tax; an income tax liability attaches to the activity of acquiring money in various ways. As long as the activities of a corporation and the activities of a shareholder are distinguishable, and they're independent economic actors, their tax liabilities are distinguishable.
Texas counties have some of the highest property tax rates in the US.
What Texas does not have is a state regular income tax, but then again Texas saves all kinds of money that other states would normally spend on death penalty trial defenders and non-fraudulent arson investigators.
Hey that's a lot of money. Just $97 billion to go :P
In my rather normal Mazda hatchback, my phone can be in its cradle in the dashboard, about three feet away, and the transcription is generally faultless; definitely different results when I try to use it with the radio on :)
Communication (which is to say, unidirectional data transfer from a non-human entity via a billion-dollar computer network) is human nature!
I confess I respect your honesty, in that you don't actually dangle the bullshit argument that professional artists will have a modus vivendi in your proposed utopia. Most freepers aren't so forthcoming.
Actually come again, I think I sorta get it.
However, given regime change (really this sort of legal reform would be called "expropriation"), don't you see a huge deadweight loss from pricing high quality and low quality entertainment at the same rate? The "experience" is the fundamental value proposition to the viewer. My biggest bitch is that ISPs and cable companies make a mint shipping this material to people's houses, and their whole value proposition is based on offering this stuff. Basically the risk is that you'll make the Internet a huge common of the most tragic sort.
If copyright were abolished, kickstarter-style funding would be more common
Why? My position is that it's a failure regardless of the regime, and that it'll never work for provision of entertainment. The point is that even under ideal conditions it'll never pay for entertaining motion pictures, it simply doesn't map to the entertainment market or to the natural demand signals that entertainment consumers send. Even in fields where copyright is basically demolished, like music, people don't fund albums and tours with Kickstarter funds. The model is fundamentally incompatible with having a good time. It basically turns artistic work into the sort of political clusterfuck that ruins the open source movement -- raising $25 million from five people is political enough, imagine the nonsense of having to sell yourself to 50,000 donators and keep their politics satisfied.
And it would absolutely impact the quality, as I said, the end result would be the end of professionalism in art and creative crafts. All recorded creative works, be they films, music, computer software, or books, would become the province of hobbyists.
I don't really see the "competition" argument -- how does someone giving money to a Kickstarter project keep them from going to see a movie, or vice versus? Is it that they're competitive, or that you'd prefer a different cultural norm? 'Cause that's a different thing.
Yeah, it's no fair that crappy-looking Kickstarter movies have to compete with awesome-looking Hollywood movies, if Hollywood movies looked crappy then it'd be a fairer fight. I call it the "Harrison Bergeron Film Reform Plan." The quality of product would go WAY down, but our ideological commitment would be satisfied...