I'm sure if you could isolate out the data from california and those who lost money on enron, that Lay's total was well over 1,000 other people dead- some by suicide, some by heart attacks, some by illness (from stress), some from lack of medicine (because they didn't have the money to buy required medicine)....
I'm not sure what Zarqawi's total was (at most 5,000 shared with the actual perpetrators executing his plans?)
Oh, well, as long as it was only 5,000+ or so actual for-real murders from bombings and beheadings, compared with a completely unsubstantiated rhetorical 1,000 people, then that definitely makes Ken Lay worse than a local Al Qaida franchise operator any day.
Would you like some apples to go with those oranges?
He hurt more Americans than Zarqawi, and an honest tally would likely show that he was responsible for more deaths.
Calling him "evil" is certainly a valid judgement, depending on your frame of reference (I don't think, for example, that the hipster/nerd use of the word "evil" means quite what it used to... as in, "it's evil to use VB when you could use Java" - that doesn't quite measure up to, say, Zarqawi-grade evil).
But forget about semantics. How about not eroding your general point with a bit of nonsense about how Lay killed thousands of people? Because Zarqawi actually did. Rants are better when the bogus embedded factoids don't wreck the whole mood.
('course, at $7, is it really worth fighting for it?)
No, I made the rest of the people in line pay, but having to wait while we called his manager over, who then ran and got a new loaf, for which he didn't charge me. I would guess that the clerk had some splainin' to do on his next review... it may have cost him that $0.10 raise he was banking on to send him to Baked Goods Handling School.
Blatant? How about a sitting senator that considers naming everything in West Virginia after himself to be his top priority? That, and having his friends in the road business pave it over with your tax dollars. That is pretty blatant... but it's not nearly as delicious as a congressman with $90,000 in his freezer. No, blatancy is not peculiar to one party or the other.
Actually, everyone who decided that Enron and a handful of others could be extrapolated to the entire US economy are the ones to thank for our having to live with Sarbanes-Oxley.
Shocked! I am shocked that you would... um... say something so, well, correct, here on slashdot. Thanks.
Did you want to use it as an oar? Was it really necessary for it to remain whole?
I'll forgive you, this once, since you were obviously raised by wolves, or in California.
A significant part of putting a baguette and a nice piece of artery-clogging cheese on the table (to be complemented, of course, by a nice bottle of red wine, chock full of anti-oxidants that magically cures the cheese problem) is the presentation. Plus, it's nice not to have the middle third smashed flat by the cashier - if I wanted pita bread, I'd have bought pita bread.
How about finding a 5 1/4" disc in a 3 1/2" drive? The client said he didn't have the bigger drive, so he figured if he folded the disc over and shoved it in.
Which, while very off topic, reminds me of when I was at the local grocery store buying a nice little piece of brie and a baguette to go with dinner that night. At the register, the Neanderthal clerk scans the wedge of cheese, drops in the suspended plastic bag, then scans the 24" baguette, drops it in the bag, and finds that it rather wants to fall out for being sort of top heavy. So, without blinking, he folds the loaf of bread in half, and sticks it down in the plastic bag. "$6.98, sir!"
I had a remote user sitting in front of an NT3.5 machine, needing to do some work in a FoxPro app. We were having some library problems, etc... but lacking remote desktop tools for that session, I was relying on the user to tell me what she was seeing as she clicked on what I told her to click on. After tracking down the right icon, I asked her to run the app. "Yep," she said, "it's running! Now, how long before I see the program?"
This went on for a long, long time. Finally I asked her how she knew it was running, when, well... it obviously wasn't running. She said, "Well, obviously I can see its legs moving."
Never heard that one before. Long pause.
Ah... remember the animated pointer sets that NT came with? You know, the one where the "busy" mouse pointer (hourglass) could be replaced with an animation of... a running horse? Gaaah!
Of course now we have something to fear as thousands of Iraqis who have watched thier families die at American hands and are now ripe for recruitment by terrorist groups.
How about the millions that died at Saddam's hands? And how the large, brutal, and deliberate death toll inflicted on Iraqis by Syrians, Jordanians, and a Sunni minority being armed and funded by Iranians and Saudis? Do you think the average Iraqi really thinks it's the US that drives car bombs into marketplaces to kill people for being Shiites? Do you really think that a family that lost someone who was dragged out of the house to be used by Saddam's troops as a human shield doesn't remember who did the dragging? Do you really think that local Iraqis - other than the Tikriti minority that lost their cash-flow-sugar-daddy when Saddam's regime finally died - are the ones that are so dead set against an elected and constitutionally governed country? The millions that voted would suggest otherwise.
The terror recruits you're worried about are the ones that are being ushered into on-the-job training after crossing the border from Syria and Iran. They're there to kill coalition troops when they get a chance, as a bonus, but mostly they're there expressly to terrorize the Iraqi population in hopes of making their new form of government seem too unpleasant, as opposed to something more "secure" and Taliban-ish. Stopping that cancer is critical for our national security, and is the only decent thing to do for all those people that voted, even as the happily late Zarqawi said he'd cut the heads off anyone who did.
Bartering demands a lower standard of living
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Shuttle Launch Success
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Money is a form of control developed by the powerful. The barter system would transfer power semi-randomly, and those who hunger for power cannot allow that.
Look, someday when you've turned 13 or 14, you'll realize how ridiculous you sound. "Money," meaning, a token that represents the value of something else (like a sack of flour, or an hour of your labor), isn't a form of control - it's a form of liberty. If you had to rely on the physical movement of bartered goods from one barterer to another, or could only barter your services with people that happened to have in hand just thing you neeeded that day (broccoli? some new refridgerant?), you'd get very, very little done and have very few choices.
But wait: I can hear it now... you say: but what about some global version of Craig's List, or some other online way to arrange bartering, so that no one needs evil money? Um... OK, so how do you advetise what you're willing to barter? Say you've got a dozen eggs, and you need everything from some antibiotics for a sick child, new toothpaste, some lumber for your collapsing roof, and a thousand other things. What do you do... list all of the things (and quantities of those things) you're willing to exchange for eggs? Ah... you're setting a price. Now, you've got a thousand other people all doing the same thing... a gigantic, inefficient bartering matrix that requires constant fiddling to see if you can get what you want, and whether it's available for a barter you can make. And, while you're spending all that time trying to get the best barter for your eggs, you could have been better doing what you're good at, and improving your egg production in the first place.
And then, what if you know you'll find such a barter a week from now, but your eggs are only valuable while they're fresh? What do you do, barter them for something else that looks valuable, just to hold the value in your hand while you look around for a good trade on the other things you need? If so, the interim thing you're holding is just a token representing the value of the eggs. What is it, a car battery? Some firewood? A basket of turnips? Here's an idea: how about we get together as a society, and provide everyone a vastly better standard of living by removing the third-world marketplace components of all of that, and use currency instead. Oh, right - we already do that.
And it allows you to do work when and as you can, and then get the goods and services when and as you need them... later. That frees you from the tyranny of proximity, and frees you from worrying about who controls your timing, when it comes to certain trades/barters. And with currency, you can pool your resources to do long-term things like build pharamceutical labs and factories so that you can actually have the antibiotics you need for a sick child... when you need them, not just when you happen to have eggs at the same time that someone with antibiotics happens to want an omlet.
A group of these smart people developed money.
No, a group of these smart people realized they were wasting their lives carrying their value around on their backs and haggling in vegetable markets all day, just so they could swap out what they produce when they're not busy looking for someone to barter with. Money is super-flexible, time-shifted bartering at distance, and if you can't see that, no wonder you're unhappy.
It's so scary cuz it's no longer the group of smart men, it's became an idea.
You want scary? Go back to standing around with a basket of eggs and wondering how you'll get what you need if no one in the vicinity happens to need your eggs that day. Or having some other need on a week when you don't happen to have any eggs to trade. Currency and a banking system take the capriciousness out of it, and reduce fear. You've got it backwards.
Thanks for taking one for team and saying what everyone else was thinking. But just in case anyone is really thinking there's an important parallel there or anything, remember that her case was substantially different: most of her brain was literally dead and gone - actually a mush of fluid. Rewiring "around" an injured area (as in the case cited) depends upon having surrounding brain material that's still viable. She was coasting on real low-level left-overs, and there simply wasn't a platform for that sort of recovery.
If you want to leave zero physical traces then boot the notebook over the network with the built-in wifi and then clone the drive with netcat, remember to always wear goves and to first put the notebook in a clean sealed clear platic bag that you can type through
I do understand this. My (second) point was that anyone that sophisticated would have done just that, in a matter of minutes, probably doing it to the laptop right where it sat... and walked back out of the house without there being any sign of the data having been stolen. I truly sleek, inside job would have been far more graceful than what we saw happen, which is why I'm guessing it was more likely to be exactly what it appeared to be (a clumsy theft by a non-tech-savvy burglar and then a transparent reach for the reward money when the heat came on).
Interesting. I think, believe it or not, that the hardest part for your average burglar is this:
That burglar then sells the laptop, as is, to identity thieves
Because most break-ins are committed by very low-brow thieves. Most are looking for quick cash to fuel a drug habit, or by kids trying to lay hands on gear they want but can't buy (game consoles, DVDs, etc). Tracking down a connection to a big-ticket ID-theft person/ring is well outside the normal criminal relations of your average B&E punk. Not saying impossible, just not likely. Most of them would be scared to death once they heard what they had, and would have either chucked it in the river or (my guess), looked for a way to say "uh... I guy I know stole this... can I have the fifty large, now, in small bills?"
Unless you really understand and believe that, you'll dream this merry life of good vs evil, right vs wrong when corporations have no such concepts
Do you actually know anyone who works in an incorporated business? Are they all drooling zombies? No? I didn't think so. Most of the people I know are involved in one way or another with a corporate business, because that's how big expensive things get done. None of them check their morality at the door, sure as hell don't check with the board of directors or the accounting office before "picking up a wandering child" (to use your example).
The thrust of his comments are this: if we're dealing with casual laptop theives (as the circumstances of the house burglary suggest), then the usual built-in flags and dates that the O/S uses will tell the tale. If we're dealing with someone clever enough to do what they (the foresics lab) likely did, they'd have removed the drive and used other equipment to make a passive bit-for-bit copy, and then re-installed the drive... and he's suggesting that it would fairly hard to do that without leaving some tell-tale signs inside the case (tool marks, DNA, mechanical changes to connectors, etc).
A response to his blog entry suggests that someone might have booted the machine with another external O/S and copied the data that way (with the drive in read-only mode, as seen from the other O/S). I presume we're talking knoppix, etc. There'd be very little to find on the machine, if that were the case.
So the gamble comes down to this: are we dealing with very advanced spooky thieves that happened to know this guy would have that data on his machine, and were staking out his house to catch the laptop there unguarded, and then faked a very pedestrian looking robbery, and clean-roomed the machine, and then turned it into the FBI?
Or, did Mr. Occam come along, rob the house, grab the laptop and other portable goodies from the house (which happened), and then later realize that the machine wasn't exactly fenceable (especially with US Government Property markings on it, etc), and he either passed it off to someone else or made arrangements for indirect involvement in turning it into the Baltimore FBI office for a shot at the $50k reward money?
The second scenario seems a lot more likely, since in the first, an operation that polished usually has other ways to get the data, and even if laying hands on the laptop WAS the only way to get the data, they could have done so in place in a matter of minutes (since the guy the would have to have been casing was already gone from the house), and left the laptop right where it is, thus making the stolen data much more valuable (since its theft would have not been broadcast to the world).
If you owned the controlling shares in this company and you found out that the president was planning on suing a russian company that he has no way to actually enforce a verdict on the off chance they'll win, what would you say?
I'd say, "Go, and how can I help?" Because the country that's harboring these jackasses does want to have normal economic relations with the rest of the world, while also being able to enjoy having their own little black market economy thriving on the side - and this sort of proceeding helps to shine a very bright light on their hypocrisy.
And is there any way to fob this off onto the artists and the minority shareholders?
You actually have some indication that one set of shareholders is somehow passing along the costs of this sort of thing to some other subset of shareholders? Really? Do tell.
Or are you one of those internet people who think they have the moral high ground and will argue pointlessly to prove that moral superiority?
There are only a few reasons you'd pose that question:
1) You know you're wrong on this, and you're hoping to just rhetorically shout down someone who might point that out. That's just plain cowardice.
2) You think you're right, in which case insisting that someone else stop trying to counter you makes you exactly the person you say you dislike. The irony's delicious, in this case.
3) You're really not sure which position is right, and you don't want a clarifying discussion to actually have to make you take a solid stand. This is far more craven than (1), above.
discussion is pointless as is, and this kind of illogical posturing makes it practically toxic.
Not at all. The discussion is focusing on the appropriateness of bearing the cost of the court action, and lies at the heart of whether artists should be expected to defend against people who rip them off - even if only symbolically, when getting the Russian government to shut down pirates isn't immediately practical. It's an act of going on record, and I'd say that artists who have done things like start their own record labels to promte the sales of their work and the new talent they bring along (and are the major shareholders if not the sole proprieters of such businesses) are probabaly, in real numbers, willing to write a check towards that goal.
This type of thing is to be expected in political endeavors. Their purpose is never to satisfy the stated goals but to advance constituencies political agendas. For a political project failure is not only an option but often the most desirable one.
Perhaps we can use the Hubble, which was carried and serviced by this vehicle, to peer down with great resolution and find the part of your comment that's not a troll? Or, just point out the controlling political entity that actually has a vested interest in the failure of the shuttle.
The universe would not allow earth's civilization to end until after Pixar releases "Ratatooie." Otherwise, the cosmos will not yet have been properly balanced, in terms of Really Good Jokes About French Cooking(tm).
Also, Capital One won't let civilization end as long as I'm carrying a balance, so we can rely their Astroid Defense System, which works 21.5% even more than necessary. So, there's redundancy.
seeing as how the republican bloggers are calling for
Damn. Irratible Monday morning peeve alert. To say "the republican bloggers" suggests that you think all of them are saying that, or that that's your impression. That's like when you see news saying "scientists agree with Al Gore" (as if there were none that don't), etc. There have to be some qualifiers in a statement like that. "Some republican bloggers..." makes you sound like a better observer of what's really happening. Otherwise, it would also make sense to say, "Democrat bloggers agree that we should allow Hugo Chavez to run US oil companies," or "Blogs show that non-Republicans back Streisand as new spokeswoman for the left."
I'm always bugged by such unqualified statements, since the audience for them will only bring their own perspective and fill in the qualifiers that most appeal to them, lacking an explicit one from the author.
That being said, the blog in question is more subtly funny than, say, Steven Colbert. He was funnier when he was just appearing occasionally on Stewart's show and was a bit more of a cypher for the casual viewer.
Hezbollah has nothing to do with all of this. They are freedom fighters
Yes, yes, a fine bunch of fellows.
Saddam loudly proclaimed his support ($25k) for any family that lost a member in a suicide attack against Israeli interests, and over time doled out millions in support for Palestinian terrorists, their families, etc. This was less about expressly supporting the Palestinian cause as it was precisely to woo the opinions of other foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Israeli groups and factions that might impact the larger middle east picture, relative to his conflict with the coalition, after Kuwait. There was no love lost between Saddam (and his fellow Sunni Tikritis) and Shiite groups like Hezbollah (who claim they're happy he's gone), but in a really callow bit of grasping PR, he did his best to seem generous to any organization that was overtly anti-US and anti-Israel. Hezbollah knew very well how unpleasant it would be for them to actually lose Saddam in the neighborhood - he was the devil they knew, as it were. But certainly most of their support came from, and still comes from Iran.
Baathist Syria has been very supportive of Hezbollah, but they've toned it down a bit of late because it's bad for their image, and they'd much rather get the sort of treatment that Lybia is now about to receive. But back when Saddam was still (sort of) a player, Syria was totally in bed with both Saddam (as a weapons trading partner and conduit for materials that were supposed to be banned through sanctions), and likewise with Hezbollah. To the extent that Saddam was lavishly throwing money at any group that dedicated itself to the destruction of Israel, he was on the same team as Hezbollah, in terms of people that were shipping money, weapons, etc to groups like Hamas. His inclination, though, was to simply make life more miserable, if possible for Israel - not so much to saddle up next to his Shiite rivals.
Don't pretend that, through the nexus of Baathist Syria, that Saddam's interests and Hezbollah's didn't overlap. They held their nose about him just like we held our nose about him back with he was in a cold war proxy fight with Iran.
I don't know about everyone else, but I thought that most dazzling and endearing scene in the new Pixar movie was when Tow Mater went backwards at high speeds through dusky, misty, wooded landscape with his hazard lights twirling. The voice actor (Larry, the proverbial "cable guy" comic) was mostly contributing things like, "woo hoo!" Otherwise, that bit of manic choreography didn't involve any actor motion capture - it was completely, crazily synthesized out of untold hundreds of hours of desktop work.
Knowing Pixar's people, they were probably playing with toy trucks or watching video of kids scateboarding, or something... but the magic, comedy, and sweetness of that scene was entirely visual and not about the actor(s), per se - though the cast vocalizations and great foley work certainly added to the atmosphere.
I'll just mention that if "talks" with "Taliban-infested Afghanistan" are proof of guilt
The point is that Saddam was hardly isolated from the extremists that were sheltering, financing, and providing operational support for A-Q and their hosts, the Taliban. "Talks," in that context, is more than just diplomatic contact - since Saddam was providing services to some of their members. This is only worth mentioning because I was responding to someone who indicated that he had no involvement with terrorism. That's complete crap (just ask the people in Hezbollah and Islmaic Jihad that were quite literally cashing his checks). This was less because of any Islamist streak on Saddam's part, and more because he was cynically trying to gin up support among other Arab populations - but most of them weren't buying it, having seen his true colors over the years.
But trying to claim that Saddam was a threat to US security, and using that to justify a war, just makes you a laughing stock.
No, Saddam was a repeat-offender threat to the stability of the entire middle east. A less stable middle east makes a riper target for the marginal, extremist wack jobs that seek to control the main asset that provides anything like an economy in that region: oil. With oil revenue comes more influence, and in the wrong hands, that becomes either a neo-Stalinst (like Saddam), or crazies like the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia. Saddam was a major de-stabilizer in the area, and his perpetual hatred for the Shiites was part of fuel that brought on the current Iranian regime. More of that is a threat to the US because it's a threat to the entire world.
Did you have some other handy source of economy-empowering energy ready to go for Eurpope, the Americas, and the gigantic new markets of China and India? No? Well until we all do, the market that is the middle east can't be threatened by operated by the equivalent of a local mafia don with long-range missiles that he likes to lob at neighbors.
I am not going to bother replying at length to your troll. I'll just mention that...
Uh huh. Why? Because it sort of makes your other points look less meaningful? You said, essentially: "he had no weapons, was no threat." I said he did, and why. That's not a troll, it's a refutation of one (yours).
That's just silly. We know he did have WMD, we know he wanted various WMD, the point is, did he have any WMD, and was he actively working towards getting any? The answer to both those questions is NO.
Come on now, use that advanced primate brain to pretend for a second that you're back in 2003 and don't know what you magically know now, but did know what was right in front of your eyes. Things like:
He was equipping his troops with chemical suits, and had artillary battalions especially trained in handling "special" munitions. In 2003.
That the giant piles of Sarin, VX, and other nasties we know he had stockpiled could not be accounted for, and that he had his people making every possible effort to obstruct attempts to discover what happened to them - including, as the heat got really turned up with the umpteenth UN resolution, the delivery of a completely laughable "dossier" showing "everything" about their weapons programs, right down to blank CDs and binders full of, basically gibberish. Meanwhile, he was still assembling long-range missiles in direct violations of the agreements he signed, and continued to shoot at coaltion aircraft patrolling areas that included where he'd most recently stored such weapons.
Further, it's now apparent that Saddam's own weapons program peoplpe were lying to him about how much they had in the works or available, because his expectation was that he was holding onto more than was actually there. This drove much of his hightly evasive behavior - exactly what convinced every intelligence agency in the world that he had more stockpiled and under way than it turns out that he did.
But it doesn't matter what turns out to be the case, because that was enough of a risk. He was publicly sending money (along with press releases) to support suicide bombers in other countries (buying houses for Hamas killers, for example), regularly trafficking in weapons with North Korea and Syria, and in case you've forgotten, invaded Kuwait - and started lobbing long-range missiles into Israel as he was getting kicked back out. And because he utterly failed to abide by the terms of his surrender in that conflict, and persisted in continuing to appear to spending money on weapons and hiding activities all across Iraq, there wasn't a lot going towards giving him the benefit of the doubt - including his own threats.
And, of course, there's the fact that Saddam was allowing Al Queda-related people to set up camp in rural Iraq, giving medical treatment to known A-Q affiliates, and has been shown repeatedly to have had his intel people in "talks" with people in Taliban-infested Afghanistan. More documents describing those contacts and more is being translated daily. That's not to say that Saddam was in any way instrumental in 9/11, just that he was quite cozy with his enemies' enemies. Combine that with the cash he was skimming, the long-range missiles he was building right up until he was overthrown, his long-time history of aggression towards non-Tikritis, and you've got the scenario we had to contemplate, and act upon, back in 2003.
In the context of what happened since 9/11, and given the jihaddi quest for a new stomping ground, having lost their pet totalitarian regime in Afghanistan, a shaky, corrupt, and bristling Iraq that refused to abide by the terms they signed simply wasn't tolerable. Every UN resolution (including those that called for such extreme measures) that he violated was becoming a running joke, since one that literally said "and we're going to remove you from power" wasn't going to be signed by France and Russia, the two countries most benefitting from the oil-for-food scams and most hoping (oh, the irony) to capitalize on his eventual taming through profit-making sanctions... which it turns out they were already hard at work doing.
And no, you cannot argue that old, non-functioning weapons are the same as functional weapons
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure if you could isolate out the data from california and those who lost money on enron, that Lay's total was well over 1,000 other people dead- some by suicide, some by heart attacks, some by illness (from stress), some from lack of medicine (because they didn't have the money to buy required medicine). ...
I'm not sure what Zarqawi's total was (at most 5,000 shared with the actual perpetrators executing his plans?)
Oh, well, as long as it was only 5,000+ or so actual for-real murders from bombings and beheadings, compared with a completely unsubstantiated rhetorical 1,000 people, then that definitely makes Ken Lay worse than a local Al Qaida franchise operator any day.
Would you like some apples to go with those oranges?
Millions, can seem to get into the millions. How about some links?
My fault, I should have simply said "over a million."
1
2>
3>
There are as many as you might want to go Googling for.
He hurt more Americans than Zarqawi, and an honest tally would likely show that he was responsible for more deaths.
... as in, "it's evil to use VB when you could use Java" - that doesn't quite measure up to, say, Zarqawi-grade evil).
Calling him "evil" is certainly a valid judgement, depending on your frame of reference (I don't think, for example, that the hipster/nerd use of the word "evil" means quite what it used to
But forget about semantics. How about not eroding your general point with a bit of nonsense about how Lay killed thousands of people? Because Zarqawi actually did. Rants are better when the bogus embedded factoids don't wreck the whole mood.
Did you pay?
('course, at $7, is it really worth fighting for it?)
No, I made the rest of the people in line pay, but having to wait while we called his manager over, who then ran and got a new loaf, for which he didn't charge me. I would guess that the clerk had some splainin' to do on his next review... it may have cost him that $0.10 raise he was banking on to send him to Baked Goods Handling School.
The Republicans are just more blatant about it
Blatant? How about a sitting senator that considers naming everything in West Virginia after himself to be his top priority? That, and having his friends in the road business pave it over with your tax dollars. That is pretty blatant... but it's not nearly as delicious as a congressman with $90,000 in his freezer. No, blatancy is not peculiar to one party or the other.
Actually, everyone who decided that Enron and a handful of others could be extrapolated to the entire US economy are the ones to thank for our having to live with Sarbanes-Oxley.
Shocked! I am shocked that you would... um... say something so, well, correct, here on slashdot. Thanks.
Did you want to use it as an oar? Was it really necessary for it to remain whole?
I'll forgive you, this once, since you were obviously raised by wolves, or in California.
A significant part of putting a baguette and a nice piece of artery-clogging cheese on the table (to be complemented, of course, by a nice bottle of red wine, chock full of anti-oxidants that magically cures the cheese problem) is the presentation. Plus, it's nice not to have the middle third smashed flat by the cashier - if I wanted pita bread, I'd have bought pita bread.
How about finding a 5 1/4" disc in a 3 1/2" drive? The client said he didn't have the bigger drive, so he figured if he folded the disc over and shoved it in.
Which, while very off topic, reminds me of when I was at the local grocery store buying a nice little piece of brie and a baguette to go with dinner that night. At the register, the Neanderthal clerk scans the wedge of cheese, drops in the suspended plastic bag, then scans the 24" baguette, drops it in the bag, and finds that it rather wants to fall out for being sort of top heavy. So, without blinking, he folds the loaf of bread in half, and sticks it down in the plastic bag. "$6.98, sir!"
I had a remote user sitting in front of an NT3.5 machine, needing to do some work in a FoxPro app. We were having some library problems, etc... but lacking remote desktop tools for that session, I was relying on the user to tell me what she was seeing as she clicked on what I told her to click on. After tracking down the right icon, I asked her to run the app. "Yep," she said, "it's running! Now, how long before I see the program?"
This went on for a long, long time. Finally I asked her how she knew it was running, when, well... it obviously wasn't running. She said, "Well, obviously I can see its legs moving."
Never heard that one before. Long pause.
Ah... remember the animated pointer sets that NT came with? You know, the one where the "busy" mouse pointer (hourglass) could be replaced with an animation of... a running horse? Gaaah!
Of course now we have something to fear as thousands of Iraqis who have watched thier families die at American hands and are now ripe for recruitment by terrorist groups.
How about the millions that died at Saddam's hands? And how the large, brutal, and deliberate death toll inflicted on Iraqis by Syrians, Jordanians, and a Sunni minority being armed and funded by Iranians and Saudis? Do you think the average Iraqi really thinks it's the US that drives car bombs into marketplaces to kill people for being Shiites? Do you really think that a family that lost someone who was dragged out of the house to be used by Saddam's troops as a human shield doesn't remember who did the dragging? Do you really think that local Iraqis - other than the Tikriti minority that lost their cash-flow-sugar-daddy when Saddam's regime finally died - are the ones that are so dead set against an elected and constitutionally governed country? The millions that voted would suggest otherwise.
The terror recruits you're worried about are the ones that are being ushered into on-the-job training after crossing the border from Syria and Iran. They're there to kill coalition troops when they get a chance, as a bonus, but mostly they're there expressly to terrorize the Iraqi population in hopes of making their new form of government seem too unpleasant, as opposed to something more "secure" and Taliban-ish. Stopping that cancer is critical for our national security, and is the only decent thing to do for all those people that voted, even as the happily late Zarqawi said he'd cut the heads off anyone who did.
Money is a form of control developed by the powerful. The barter system would transfer power semi-randomly, and those who hunger for power cannot allow that.
... later. That frees you from the tyranny of proximity, and frees you from worrying about who controls your timing, when it comes to certain trades/barters. And with currency, you can pool your resources to do long-term things like build pharamceutical labs and factories so that you can actually have the antibiotics you need for a sick child... when you need them, not just when you happen to have eggs at the same time that someone with antibiotics happens to want an omlet.
Look, someday when you've turned 13 or 14, you'll realize how ridiculous you sound. "Money," meaning, a token that represents the value of something else (like a sack of flour, or an hour of your labor), isn't a form of control - it's a form of liberty. If you had to rely on the physical movement of bartered goods from one barterer to another, or could only barter your services with people that happened to have in hand just thing you neeeded that day (broccoli? some new refridgerant?), you'd get very, very little done and have very few choices.
But wait: I can hear it now... you say: but what about some global version of Craig's List, or some other online way to arrange bartering, so that no one needs evil money? Um... OK, so how do you advetise what you're willing to barter? Say you've got a dozen eggs, and you need everything from some antibiotics for a sick child, new toothpaste, some lumber for your collapsing roof, and a thousand other things. What do you do... list all of the things (and quantities of those things) you're willing to exchange for eggs? Ah... you're setting a price. Now, you've got a thousand other people all doing the same thing... a gigantic, inefficient bartering matrix that requires constant fiddling to see if you can get what you want, and whether it's available for a barter you can make. And, while you're spending all that time trying to get the best barter for your eggs, you could have been better doing what you're good at, and improving your egg production in the first place.
And then, what if you know you'll find such a barter a week from now, but your eggs are only valuable while they're fresh? What do you do, barter them for something else that looks valuable, just to hold the value in your hand while you look around for a good trade on the other things you need? If so, the interim thing you're holding is just a token representing the value of the eggs. What is it, a car battery? Some firewood? A basket of turnips? Here's an idea: how about we get together as a society, and provide everyone a vastly better standard of living by removing the third-world marketplace components of all of that, and use currency instead. Oh, right - we already do that.
And it allows you to do work when and as you can, and then get the goods and services when and as you need them
A group of these smart people developed money.
No, a group of these smart people realized they were wasting their lives carrying their value around on their backs and haggling in vegetable markets all day, just so they could swap out what they produce when they're not busy looking for someone to barter with. Money is super-flexible, time-shifted bartering at distance, and if you can't see that, no wonder you're unhappy.
It's so scary cuz it's no longer the group of smart men, it's became an idea.
You want scary? Go back to standing around with a basket of eggs and wondering how you'll get what you need if no one in the vicinity happens to need your eggs that day. Or having some other need on a week when you don't happen to have any eggs to trade. Currency and a banking system take the capriciousness out of it, and reduce fear. You've got it backwards.
Terri Schiavo ... was unavailable for comment.
Thanks for taking one for team and saying what everyone else was thinking. But just in case anyone is really thinking there's an important parallel there or anything, remember that her case was substantially different: most of her brain was literally dead and gone - actually a mush of fluid. Rewiring "around" an injured area (as in the case cited) depends upon having surrounding brain material that's still viable. She was coasting on real low-level left-overs, and there simply wasn't a platform for that sort of recovery.
If you want to leave zero physical traces then boot the notebook over the network with the built-in wifi and then clone the drive with netcat, remember to always wear goves and to first put the notebook in a clean sealed clear platic bag that you can type through
I do understand this. My (second) point was that anyone that sophisticated would have done just that, in a matter of minutes, probably doing it to the laptop right where it sat... and walked back out of the house without there being any sign of the data having been stolen. I truly sleek, inside job would have been far more graceful than what we saw happen, which is why I'm guessing it was more likely to be exactly what it appeared to be (a clumsy theft by a non-tech-savvy burglar and then a transparent reach for the reward money when the heat came on).
Interesting. I think, believe it or not, that the hardest part for your average burglar is this:
That burglar then sells the laptop, as is, to identity thieves
Because most break-ins are committed by very low-brow thieves. Most are looking for quick cash to fuel a drug habit, or by kids trying to lay hands on gear they want but can't buy (game consoles, DVDs, etc). Tracking down a connection to a big-ticket ID-theft person/ring is well outside the normal criminal relations of your average B&E punk. Not saying impossible, just not likely. Most of them would be scared to death once they heard what they had, and would have either chucked it in the river or (my guess), looked for a way to say "uh... I guy I know stole this... can I have the fifty large, now, in small bills?"
Unless you really understand and believe that, you'll dream this merry life of good vs evil, right vs wrong when corporations have no such concepts
Do you actually know anyone who works in an incorporated business? Are they all drooling zombies? No? I didn't think so. Most of the people I know are involved in one way or another with a corporate business, because that's how big expensive things get done. None of them check their morality at the door, sure as hell don't check with the board of directors or the accounting office before "picking up a wandering child" (to use your example).
The thrust of his comments are this: if we're dealing with casual laptop theives (as the circumstances of the house burglary suggest), then the usual built-in flags and dates that the O/S uses will tell the tale. If we're dealing with someone clever enough to do what they (the foresics lab) likely did, they'd have removed the drive and used other equipment to make a passive bit-for-bit copy, and then re-installed the drive... and he's suggesting that it would fairly hard to do that without leaving some tell-tale signs inside the case (tool marks, DNA, mechanical changes to connectors, etc).
A response to his blog entry suggests that someone might have booted the machine with another external O/S and copied the data that way (with the drive in read-only mode, as seen from the other O/S). I presume we're talking knoppix, etc. There'd be very little to find on the machine, if that were the case.
So the gamble comes down to this: are we dealing with very advanced spooky thieves that happened to know this guy would have that data on his machine, and were staking out his house to catch the laptop there unguarded, and then faked a very pedestrian looking robbery, and clean-roomed the machine, and then turned it into the FBI?
Or, did Mr. Occam come along, rob the house, grab the laptop and other portable goodies from the house (which happened), and then later realize that the machine wasn't exactly fenceable (especially with US Government Property markings on it, etc), and he either passed it off to someone else or made arrangements for indirect involvement in turning it into the Baltimore FBI office for a shot at the $50k reward money?
The second scenario seems a lot more likely, since in the first, an operation that polished usually has other ways to get the data, and even if laying hands on the laptop WAS the only way to get the data, they could have done so in place in a matter of minutes (since the guy the would have to have been casing was already gone from the house), and left the laptop right where it is, thus making the stolen data much more valuable (since its theft would have not been broadcast to the world).
If you owned the controlling shares in this company and you found out that the president was planning on suing a russian company that he has no way to actually enforce a verdict on the off chance they'll win, what would you say?
I'd say, "Go, and how can I help?" Because the country that's harboring these jackasses does want to have normal economic relations with the rest of the world, while also being able to enjoy having their own little black market economy thriving on the side - and this sort of proceeding helps to shine a very bright light on their hypocrisy.
And is there any way to fob this off onto the artists and the minority shareholders?
You actually have some indication that one set of shareholders is somehow passing along the costs of this sort of thing to some other subset of shareholders? Really? Do tell.
Or are you one of those internet people who think they have the moral high ground and will argue pointlessly to prove that moral superiority?
There are only a few reasons you'd pose that question:
1) You know you're wrong on this, and you're hoping to just rhetorically shout down someone who might point that out. That's just plain cowardice.
2) You think you're right, in which case insisting that someone else stop trying to counter you makes you exactly the person you say you dislike. The irony's delicious, in this case.
3) You're really not sure which position is right, and you don't want a clarifying discussion to actually have to make you take a solid stand. This is far more craven than (1), above.
discussion is pointless as is, and this kind of illogical posturing makes it practically toxic.
Not at all. The discussion is focusing on the appropriateness of bearing the cost of the court action, and lies at the heart of whether artists should be expected to defend against people who rip them off - even if only symbolically, when getting the Russian government to shut down pirates isn't immediately practical. It's an act of going on record, and I'd say that artists who have done things like start their own record labels to promte the sales of their work and the new talent they bring along (and are the major shareholders if not the sole proprieters of such businesses) are probabaly, in real numbers, willing to write a check towards that goal.
This type of thing is to be expected in political endeavors. Their purpose is never to satisfy the stated goals but to advance constituencies political agendas. For a political project failure is not only an option but often the most desirable one.
Perhaps we can use the Hubble, which was carried and serviced by this vehicle, to peer down with great resolution and find the part of your comment that's not a troll? Or, just point out the controlling political entity that actually has a vested interest in the failure of the shuttle.
I wonder who will pay the High Court costs of the whole affair. Artists? Perhaps an increase in fees. Consumers? Without a doubt. Shareholders? Nope.
Has it ever occurred to you that many artists and consumers are shareholders?
The universe would not allow earth's civilization to end until after Pixar releases "Ratatooie." Otherwise, the cosmos will not yet have been properly balanced, in terms of Really Good Jokes About French Cooking(tm).
Also, Capital One won't let civilization end as long as I'm carrying a balance, so we can rely their Astroid Defense System, which works 21.5% even more than necessary. So, there's redundancy.
seeing as how the republican bloggers are calling for
Damn. Irratible Monday morning peeve alert. To say "the republican bloggers" suggests that you think all of them are saying that, or that that's your impression. That's like when you see news saying "scientists agree with Al Gore" (as if there were none that don't), etc. There have to be some qualifiers in a statement like that. "Some republican bloggers..." makes you sound like a better observer of what's really happening. Otherwise, it would also make sense to say, "Democrat bloggers agree that we should allow Hugo Chavez to run US oil companies," or "Blogs show that non-Republicans back Streisand as new spokeswoman for the left."
I'm always bugged by such unqualified statements, since the audience for them will only bring their own perspective and fill in the qualifiers that most appeal to them, lacking an explicit one from the author.
That being said, the blog in question is more subtly funny than, say, Steven Colbert. He was funnier when he was just appearing occasionally on Stewart's show and was a bit more of a cypher for the casual viewer.
Hezbollah has nothing to do with all of this. They are freedom fighters
Yes, yes, a fine bunch of fellows.
Saddam loudly proclaimed his support ($25k) for any family that lost a member in a suicide attack against Israeli interests, and over time doled out millions in support for Palestinian terrorists, their families, etc. This was less about expressly supporting the Palestinian cause as it was precisely to woo the opinions of other foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Israeli groups and factions that might impact the larger middle east picture, relative to his conflict with the coalition, after Kuwait. There was no love lost between Saddam (and his fellow Sunni Tikritis) and Shiite groups like Hezbollah (who claim they're happy he's gone), but in a really callow bit of grasping PR, he did his best to seem generous to any organization that was overtly anti-US and anti-Israel. Hezbollah knew very well how unpleasant it would be for them to actually lose Saddam in the neighborhood - he was the devil they knew, as it were. But certainly most of their support came from, and still comes from Iran.
Baathist Syria has been very supportive of Hezbollah, but they've toned it down a bit of late because it's bad for their image, and they'd much rather get the sort of treatment that Lybia is now about to receive. But back when Saddam was still (sort of) a player, Syria was totally in bed with both Saddam (as a weapons trading partner and conduit for materials that were supposed to be banned through sanctions), and likewise with Hezbollah. To the extent that Saddam was lavishly throwing money at any group that dedicated itself to the destruction of Israel, he was on the same team as Hezbollah, in terms of people that were shipping money, weapons, etc to groups like Hamas. His inclination, though, was to simply make life more miserable, if possible for Israel - not so much to saddle up next to his Shiite rivals.
Don't pretend that, through the nexus of Baathist Syria, that Saddam's interests and Hezbollah's didn't overlap. They held their nose about him just like we held our nose about him back with he was in a cold war proxy fight with Iran.
I don't know about everyone else, but I thought that most dazzling and endearing scene in the new Pixar movie was when Tow Mater went backwards at high speeds through dusky, misty, wooded landscape with his hazard lights twirling. The voice actor (Larry, the proverbial "cable guy" comic) was mostly contributing things like, "woo hoo!" Otherwise, that bit of manic choreography didn't involve any actor motion capture - it was completely, crazily synthesized out of untold hundreds of hours of desktop work.
Knowing Pixar's people, they were probably playing with toy trucks or watching video of kids scateboarding, or something... but the magic, comedy, and sweetness of that scene was entirely visual and not about the actor(s), per se - though the cast vocalizations and great foley work certainly added to the atmosphere.
I'll just mention that if "talks" with "Taliban-infested Afghanistan" are proof of guilt
The point is that Saddam was hardly isolated from the extremists that were sheltering, financing, and providing operational support for A-Q and their hosts, the Taliban. "Talks," in that context, is more than just diplomatic contact - since Saddam was providing services to some of their members. This is only worth mentioning because I was responding to someone who indicated that he had no involvement with terrorism. That's complete crap (just ask the people in Hezbollah and Islmaic Jihad that were quite literally cashing his checks). This was less because of any Islamist streak on Saddam's part, and more because he was cynically trying to gin up support among other Arab populations - but most of them weren't buying it, having seen his true colors over the years.
But trying to claim that Saddam was a threat to US security, and using that to justify a war, just makes you a laughing stock.
No, Saddam was a repeat-offender threat to the stability of the entire middle east. A less stable middle east makes a riper target for the marginal, extremist wack jobs that seek to control the main asset that provides anything like an economy in that region: oil. With oil revenue comes more influence, and in the wrong hands, that becomes either a neo-Stalinst (like Saddam), or crazies like the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia. Saddam was a major de-stabilizer in the area, and his perpetual hatred for the Shiites was part of fuel that brought on the current Iranian regime. More of that is a threat to the US because it's a threat to the entire world.
Did you have some other handy source of economy-empowering energy ready to go for Eurpope, the Americas, and the gigantic new markets of China and India? No? Well until we all do, the market that is the middle east can't be threatened by operated by the equivalent of a local mafia don with long-range missiles that he likes to lob at neighbors.
I am not going to bother replying at length to your troll. I'll just mention that...
Uh huh. Why? Because it sort of makes your other points look less meaningful? You said, essentially: "he had no weapons, was no threat." I said he did, and why. That's not a troll, it's a refutation of one (yours).
That's just silly. We know he did have WMD, we know he wanted various WMD, the point is, did he have any WMD, and was he actively working towards getting any? The answer to both those questions is NO.
... which it turns out they were already hard at work doing.
Come on now, use that advanced primate brain to pretend for a second that you're back in 2003 and don't know what you magically know now, but did know what was right in front of your eyes. Things like:
He was equipping his troops with chemical suits, and had artillary battalions especially trained in handling "special" munitions. In 2003.
That the giant piles of Sarin, VX, and other nasties we know he had stockpiled could not be accounted for, and that he had his people making every possible effort to obstruct attempts to discover what happened to them - including, as the heat got really turned up with the umpteenth UN resolution, the delivery of a completely laughable "dossier" showing "everything" about their weapons programs, right down to blank CDs and binders full of, basically gibberish. Meanwhile, he was still assembling long-range missiles in direct violations of the agreements he signed, and continued to shoot at coaltion aircraft patrolling areas that included where he'd most recently stored such weapons.
Further, it's now apparent that Saddam's own weapons program peoplpe were lying to him about how much they had in the works or available, because his expectation was that he was holding onto more than was actually there. This drove much of his hightly evasive behavior - exactly what convinced every intelligence agency in the world that he had more stockpiled and under way than it turns out that he did.
But it doesn't matter what turns out to be the case, because that was enough of a risk. He was publicly sending money (along with press releases) to support suicide bombers in other countries (buying houses for Hamas killers, for example), regularly trafficking in weapons with North Korea and Syria, and in case you've forgotten, invaded Kuwait - and started lobbing long-range missiles into Israel as he was getting kicked back out. And because he utterly failed to abide by the terms of his surrender in that conflict, and persisted in continuing to appear to spending money on weapons and hiding activities all across Iraq, there wasn't a lot going towards giving him the benefit of the doubt - including his own threats.
And, of course, there's the fact that Saddam was allowing Al Queda-related people to set up camp in rural Iraq, giving medical treatment to known A-Q affiliates, and has been shown repeatedly to have had his intel people in "talks" with people in Taliban-infested Afghanistan. More documents describing those contacts and more is being translated daily. That's not to say that Saddam was in any way instrumental in 9/11, just that he was quite cozy with his enemies' enemies. Combine that with the cash he was skimming, the long-range missiles he was building right up until he was overthrown, his long-time history of aggression towards non-Tikritis, and you've got the scenario we had to contemplate, and act upon, back in 2003.
In the context of what happened since 9/11, and given the jihaddi quest for a new stomping ground, having lost their pet totalitarian regime in Afghanistan, a shaky, corrupt, and bristling Iraq that refused to abide by the terms they signed simply wasn't tolerable. Every UN resolution (including those that called for such extreme measures) that he violated was becoming a running joke, since one that literally said "and we're going to remove you from power" wasn't going to be signed by France and Russia, the two countries most benefitting from the oil-for-food scams and most hoping (oh, the irony) to capitalize on his eventual taming through profit-making sanctions
And no, you cannot argue that old, non-functioning weapons are the same as functional weapons
So, would you b