The BBC usually tries to prevent/control debates as much as possible. They used to have a system where people would send in emails to the "Have Your Say" page, and they would select the ones they liked. After lots of complaints of censorship, they changed over to a system where you could post instantly (like Slashdot). However, they quickly backtracked so that virtually all debates are "Fully Moderated". Much of the time perfectly valid comments are not published. Occasionally they do have "Reactively Moderated" discussions on trivial topics like the Oscars, but if anyone ever dares to criticise the BBC, the posts are removed very quickly.
For example, a while back the BBC had a "Have Your Say" topic on Google's participation in censorship in China. Some posters rightly pointed out that the BBC also censors things. These posts were removed at breakneck speed, but this prompted complaints at the new censorship. The BBC then started removing the new complaints, prompting even more complaints. Eventually they gave up and as you can see, the top rated posts are about the BBC's censorship, not China's. See here
When I complained to the BBC about this, I was told that posts about BBC Censorship were "off topic". So posts about the BBC's own censorship on a topic about China's Censorship are so wildly off-topic they have to be removed? People are becoming very tired of the BBCs censorship and sites like NewsSnifferhave started to appear. NewsSniffer automatically logs censored posts on the few open debates that are allowed to exist (It also logs the changes made to news reports)
Most people who were interested in real debate at the BBC never really used "Have Your Say" because of the BBC's control over the limited number of topics and the general low-probability of having your post accepted. Instead many people used the BBC Message Boards, which are sort of hidden away from public view. The busiest was probably the Today International board where people discussed the top news stories in more depth than was reported and covering many things the reporters were either ignorant of or chose to leave out. Unfortunately, the BBC has recently shut this down in favour of a system where the topics are picked by BBC Staff. Their excuse for this was budgetary concerns (they only get £4 Billion or so). Today's topical, controversial and cutting edge debates are 1. Do children need to learn Britishness at school?, 2. Are scientific terms like homo sapien out of date?, 3. Does affluence bring misery? (See for yourself http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbtoday/F5963509).
Considering the BBC's astronomical budget and the technology available, they could quite easily have a "Discuss" button underneath each news story which would take people to an open discussion. They'll never do it though. The BBC have opposed open debate at every turn.
The use of this device would effectively amount to torture. Using it on a crowd of protesters you want removed would be equivalent to going around and Tazering all of them. Passive resistance does not justify the use of torture.
All the implementations I've seen out there are Linux-only (or at best UNIX/Linux), which makes them less than useless for most of the general public.
TrueCrypt allows for hidden volumes (i.e. encrypted areas within encrypted areas) and it's a windows program. They claim it's not possible to detect the hidden volumes, but I have to take their word for it.
To me the greatest thing that camera phones (and cheap digital cameras in general) bring is a possible curb on government oppression. Around the world in both totalitarian regimes and democracies, people gather to protest about various government actions and decisions. In totalitarian regimes and sadly also in our democracies, these protests are often met with grossly excessive force from riot police. In democracies the police often wait until the media finish and leave before making their move on the protesters.
However, now that so many people have camera phones (even in non-democracies), it's much harder to get away with such oppression. All it takes is for one person to film a police officer beating an unarmed man cowering on the ground and it will be around the world very quickly.
I think this prevalence of cheap and portable video-capable devices has lead to a change of tactics in some countries. In an environment where everything the police do is being recorded on video, governments are seeking to avoid confrontation altogether. It has become increasingly popular to either herd protesters into "Free Speech Zones" (in the US) or just effectively ban protests altogether as is the case in the UK, for half a mile or so around parliament square.
In case you're wondering, I've never actually been on a protest myself. Like most people I am either too lazy or too scared of being clubbed by Police to attend (which is exactly the attitude governments like).
They have to deligitimise any resistance against "coalition" forces as much as possible, and propaganda is the tool of choice. The word "Resistance" would remind people of the French Resistance and they might start to think we are the real aggressors. Right from the beginning they had to prevent the public from thinking that the Iraqi people were resisting our invasion. So initially there was a big focus on "Foreign Fighters". So they created the perception that it was all due to foreign fighters, certainly not the Iraqi people. That position has become more and more unbelievable since poll after poll has shown the majority of Iraqis want us to leave and an increasing number support attacks against coalition forces. This probably explains why the US Military has felt it necessary to plant stories favourable to the occupation in the Iraqi Media (first revealed by The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times).
Simple words and phrases can be incredibly powerful in forming opinions and you have to be on your guard all the time. For example the Bush administration tried to label the idea of leaving Iraq with the term "cut and run". It is hardly a neutral term and was designed to make leaving Iraq look like a cowardly act and a bad thing. The term "cut and run" was widely adopted by the media and that can't help but have an effect on public opinion.
Another favourite bit of propaganda is the question "Do you support our troops?". Obviously you are compelled to say yes, but the question is about as meaningful as asking "Do you support the people of New York?". Well the answer is yes in the sense I don't want them to die, but that's about it. The real question should be "Do you support our troops being there?" and suddenly you don't feel compelled to say yes anymore.
Obviously he's getting a bit old for these roles now but...
I think in the future actors will be able to go on for longer in these roles using technology such as http://www.mova.com/ . The actors head would be scanned in high resolution when they are younger and then when they are past it, film-makers can use the digital version of them instead.
I agree. The fact that someone without permission videoed the execution is a minor infraction. The important thing is the content. Some politicians have said that it is wrong to show the execution, but I disagree. We should all see how horrible an execution is, just like we should all see how horrible a war is in graphic detail. If you wake up in the night with a sweat, good because these things should have that effect on you and perhaps that will influence the people we vote for.
Ah, I see. So, as usual, it's blame the US time. Pol Pot wasn't responsible for his crimes!
In my post I said that Pol Pot was "completely insane, and totally murderous", so I was hardly claiming he wasn't responsible for his crimes. What you have done is exaggerate/distort my argument to make it look ridiculous and therefore easier to defeat. This kind of attack is commonly known as a "Straw Man" argument.
Pol Pot was certainly responsible for his actions. However, the US, China and other countries that supported him are also responsible for their actions. i.e. Knowingly supporting a mass murderer.
Thanks, I needed a laugh. Where did you read the bit about the SAS, anyway? PRAVDA?
There were lots of reports about it over the years and lots of denials in Parliament. It eventually came out in Parliament in 1991. Here is an extract from Hansard (it's the official source for Parlimentary discussions).
"I confirm that there is no British Government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them."
That may have been true on 9 October 1990, but what the Prime Minister omitted to say was that we had been training them up to a year before that. The phrase--the wording is always identical-- "or those allied to them"
appeared in a succession of ministerial letters around that time. The Foreign Secretary and various other Ministers wrote that, and they all did so in the knowledge that the training had been going on and had stopped only just before that. That is being rather economical with the truth.
Did the idea of a foreign power helping a nasty regime seem so unbelievable to you? History is littered with examples. e.g. The CIA trained the brutal SAVAK secret police in Iran under the Shah and the Iraqis have just hung a mass murderer (Saddam Hussein) who was supported by the west for many years. The list is very long.
Is it possible anywhere to get a full field of vision helmet or goggles?
Not as far as I am aware, but this company (http://www.leepvr.com/index.php) realises the importance of full FOV. You can't buy one yet. They'll need to get some big player involved like Sony.
From what I've read on VR, the effect of immersion doesn't work until your field of vision is very near completely covered.
I think that's largely correct. It's probably even more important than stereoscopic vision, which breaks down quite quickly with distance. I've been waiting for home VR since I played Dactyl Nightmare in the early nineties. I really think it's long overdue. Providing a VR headset and VR-Suitable games would surely provide an advantage for any company involved in the console wars.
By "VR-Suitable games" I mean games that allow you to walk in one direction (controlled with a mouse) while being able to look in any direction. From what I have seen in current systems, the head-tracking just emulates a mouse, so you walk exactly where you look, which is not so nice. Games would really have to be designed with VR in mind.
The plan was strongly focused on SIMULATED terrorist attacks, not real causalities The document actually does suggest sinking a real U.S. ship, which would have resulted in US Navy casualties. There was also a suggestion of the "real or simulated" sinking of Cuban refugees. So while mostly it was about faking things, there was the potential for real casualties. And anyway, even if all the plans involved faking deaths (which they did not) surely lying to the public and sending enthusiastic twenty-somethings off to die based on those lies, is quite bad enough.
No, they aren't. They're taken in context by the mainstream media, and only blown out of proportion by individuals with an agenda, like yourself.
I don't really think the media pay much attention at all to most of these revelations, which is why people look at you quizzically when you mention things like COINTELPRO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cointelpro). Is being a bit outraged at the idea of staging fake/real terrorist attacks on the US in order to justify a war against Cuba really "blowing things out of proportion"?
"Anything that flies on anything that moves" was said in the context of bombing Cambodia (illegally). Some 100,000 Cambodians were killed with several million made homeless. The fact that even worse carnage came later does not excuse the US bombing.
In fact, despite the Khmer Rouge/Pol Pot being communist, completely insane, and totally murderous, the US and China both supported the regime, due to its anti-Soviet/anti-Vietnamese stance. Under the US/Chinese-Supported Khmer Rouge regime, up to 2 million Cambodians died. It should be noted that there are also indications that British SAS troops were involved in training Cambodian troops.
Actually I am always amazed at the amount of incredibly damaging stuff that gets released in the US. For example, things like Operation Northwoods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods ), which although never carried out, was a plan to stage terrorist attacks on US assets and blame it on Cuba as an excuse for war.
Then there are minutes of meetings that provide evidence of war crimes by certain individuals. For example, minutes were released of Henry Kissinger saying "Anything that flies on anything that moves" , which were his bombing orders for Cambodia. If they had evidence like that against Milosevic, his trial would have been over within days.
Fortunately these damning revelations are largely ignored by the US media. If they were not, perhaps they would stop releasing them in the first place.
Ford and Kissinger visited Jakarta in 1975 and gave approval for the invasion of East Timor.
Kissenger told Suharto...
It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.
Well it did succeed and over 200,000 East Timorese died during the invasion and subsequent occupation. It's strange that neither Ford nor Kissinger mentioned they gave the green light for the East Timor invasion in their memoirs. It must have slipped their minds. Fortunately details of their meetings with Suharto are now available (released by the National Security Archive in 2001). Yes Ford will be sorely missed by the people of East Timor.
Perhaps you would like to purchase the PS3 game I have just written.
It's called "Factorial of one million". It's not as much fun as Doom 3 but it will use the CPU quite heavily.
That was in the US though, which is a little different. If you are actually in the country whose government you are protesting against, that is a whole different situation. That said, they certainly didn't seem scared towards the end, even when violence was used against them.
I believe they did, in fact, do this. It was called the 1979 Iranian Revolution, if I recall correctly.
Well, of course yes, there was eventually a revolution. I was talking about the odd protest though. The Shah had a secret police called SAVAK which was trained by CIA. They ruthlessly repressed any opposition to the Shah. SAVAK had a large number of student spies, even operating in the US.
Leave it to a Chomskyite to glorify an otherwise utterly trite observation, made countless times before, and by more insightful individuals at that.
Really? I think its a pretty interesting observation. Most people do not think of things in that way. i.e. That the public are effectively viewed as an enemy by government. Occasionally they use violence, e.g. in dissuading people from protesting, but violence is mostly not an option anymore, so most of the time they can only wage propaganda warfare. A relevant Chomsky quote (which you may again find trite) is "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." It's not just a throwaway sound bite either. It has real meaning. If you look at the history of the US, UK etc, violent repression becomes less and less of an option over time, and has been replaced with a propaganda model of control.
What is "Chomskyite" supposed to mean anyway? Just that I quoted Chomsky? Or perhaps you are implying I believe everything he says without question, and am thus an idiot. I have read a number of Chomsky books over the years and I usually check up on everything he says, not because I don't trust him, but because you shouldn't really trust what any one person writes.
I'm sure Iran is not exactly a bastion of free expression, but I've seen plenty of Iranian people who have been interviewed on camera criticizing the Iranian government and calling them all a bunch of idiots. Then there was the recent case of Iranian students jeering the President, burning a picture of him, and throwing fireworks (http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1 462_2043334,00.html). That's not the sort of thing you do if you are terrified of your government. Iraqis would certainly never have dared do that to Saddam Hussein (backed by the US et al, for many years), and Iranians would probably not have dared do it to the brutal US/UK-backed Shah of Iran either.
I've worked with a number of people from around the Middle East and all of them said that Saudi Arabia was far worse than Iran. Perhaps it would be wise to tackle the most oppressive countries first.
I have no idea whether Iranian police normally herd student protesters into "Free Speech" Zones well away from President Ahmadinejad, as is common practice in the US. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) or whether the Iranian government enforces huge protest exclusion zones in Tehran, using the threat of terrorism as some kind of bizarre justification. In the UK there is a half-mile protest exclusion zone around parliament, which was introduced in 2005, 2 years after a million angry citizens marched outside Parliament in full view of the media. Maya Evans, a woman who read out the names of dead soldiers within the zone was arrested, charged and convicted of breaching the "Serious Organised Crime and Police Act" by staging an unauthorised protest. I think it was Chomsky who said "The worst enemy of a government is its own population". It's certainly beginning to seem that way.
I wonder if the murderer was stupid enough to have a mobile phone with him when he dumped the bodies. All you would have to do is do a search of all mobile phones that have been in those particular cells at the estimated times of death of each victim. The bodies were dumped in the surrounding countryside so it might narrow it down to a few phones. Another possible line of attack is that the murderer's mobile phone would have been in the same cell as each victims mobile phone for some amount of time. Once you have his mobile number, the game is up. Even if it was not purchased in his name, the phone would spend most of its time where he lives, so it would be simple to narrow it down to the row of houses where he lives.
You can get an IP Camera (Camera you can view and control over the net) quite cheaply. Just set it up in your "abandoned house" and log in every now and then to check that all is ok.
The times when a group of civilians could contend with an equally numerous group of soldiers are long gone.
Really? Tell that to the US soldiers who are being killed day in and day out in Iraq. It's not just Al Qaeda, but a lot of pissed of Civilians who have had family members killed in US air strikes. A determined civilian can learn some pretty lethal skills quite quickly. They won't fight in the same way as well equipped soldiers, but fight they will.
I seem to remember something about DivX networks originally running an open-source project to collect people's ideas, then closing it down and going closed-source. Were any Slashdotters involved in the open-source project and the subsequent dispute?
No, I was talking about a problem with reference counting. Reference Counting was the method that VB (or more correctly the underlying COM) used to manage its objects. I don't know about problems with Garbage Collection, but I have had no problems so far. You can force the CLR to collect all the garbage with a function call, and I have seen an applications memory drop accordingly. I think the method is something like "GC.Collect" but I can't remember.
The answer to all this is to bypass the broadcasters altogether. They are completely pointless middlemen who are of no interest to the consumer. Their business is shoving adverts down our throats and they probably find it extremely annoying that they have to pay for content to entice us into watching. What consumers want is to watch good films and programs and those are made by the content providers. What we need is for the content providers to sell us their wares directly over the net. There's no reason it couldn't be done as cheaply as your Blockbuster postal DVD rental. You could pay $20 or whatever per month and that would give you the right to have X amount of films and TV Series episodes etc, on your machine at once. When you are finished with some content, it just gets deactivated and you can download something new.
It wouldn't matter that it was all DRM'd since you would be renting the content, rather than expecting to "own" anything. There would be little point in piracy since you would be able to watch what you want, when you want for a very reasonable monthly charge. There doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm from the content providers yet, but the public seem to be quite enthusiastic about downloading content. They have to realise that people want to watch things at their whim, not be at the mercy of a TV schedule or waiting for a DVD in the post that may not be available for weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC usually tries to prevent/control debates as much as possible. They used to have a system where people would send in emails to the "Have Your Say" page, and they would select the ones they liked. After lots of complaints of censorship, they changed over to a system where you could post instantly (like Slashdot). However, they quickly backtracked so that virtually all debates are "Fully Moderated". Much of the time perfectly valid comments are not published. Occasionally they do have "Reactively Moderated" discussions on trivial topics like the Oscars, but if anyone ever dares to criticise the BBC, the posts are removed very quickly.
For example, a while back the BBC had a "Have Your Say" topic on Google's participation in censorship in China. Some posters rightly pointed out that the BBC also censors things. These posts were removed at breakneck speed, but this prompted complaints at the new censorship. The BBC then started removing the new complaints, prompting even more complaints. Eventually they gave up and as you can see, the top rated posts are about the BBC's censorship, not China's. See here
When I complained to the BBC about this, I was told that posts about BBC Censorship were "off topic". So posts about the BBC's own censorship on a topic about China's Censorship are so wildly off-topic they have to be removed? People are becoming very tired of the BBCs censorship and sites like NewsSnifferhave started to appear. NewsSniffer automatically logs censored posts on the few open debates that are allowed to exist (It also logs the changes made to news reports)
Most people who were interested in real debate at the BBC never really used "Have Your Say" because of the BBC's control over the limited number of topics and the general low-probability of having your post accepted. Instead many people used the BBC Message Boards, which are sort of hidden away from public view. The busiest was probably the Today International board where people discussed the top news stories in more depth than was reported and covering many things the reporters were either ignorant of or chose to leave out. Unfortunately, the BBC has recently shut this down in favour of a system where the topics are picked by BBC Staff. Their excuse for this was budgetary concerns (they only get £4 Billion or so). Today's topical, controversial and cutting edge debates are 1. Do children need to learn Britishness at school?, 2. Are scientific terms like homo sapien out of date?, 3. Does affluence bring misery? (See for yourself http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbtoday/F5963509).
Considering the BBC's astronomical budget and the technology available, they could quite easily have a "Discuss" button underneath each news story which would take people to an open discussion. They'll never do it though. The BBC have opposed open debate at every turn.
The use of this device would effectively amount to torture. Using it on a crowd of protesters you want removed would be equivalent to going around and Tazering all of them. Passive resistance does not justify the use of torture.
TrueCrypt allows for hidden volumes (i.e. encrypted areas within encrypted areas) and it's a windows program. They claim it's not possible to detect the hidden volumes, but I have to take their word for it.
To me the greatest thing that camera phones (and cheap digital cameras in general) bring is a possible curb on government oppression. Around the world in both totalitarian regimes and democracies, people gather to protest about various government actions and decisions. In totalitarian regimes and sadly also in our democracies, these protests are often met with grossly excessive force from riot police. In democracies the police often wait until the media finish and leave before making their move on the protesters.
However, now that so many people have camera phones (even in non-democracies), it's much harder to get away with such oppression. All it takes is for one person to film a police officer beating an unarmed man cowering on the ground and it will be around the world very quickly.
I think this prevalence of cheap and portable video-capable devices has lead to a change of tactics in some countries. In an environment where everything the police do is being recorded on video, governments are seeking to avoid confrontation altogether. It has become increasingly popular to either herd protesters into "Free Speech Zones" (in the US) or just effectively ban protests altogether as is the case in the UK, for half a mile or so around parliament square.
In case you're wondering, I've never actually been on a protest myself. Like most people I am either too lazy or too scared of being clubbed by Police to attend (which is exactly the attitude governments like).
They have to deligitimise any resistance against "coalition" forces as much as possible, and propaganda is the tool of choice. The word "Resistance" would remind people of the French Resistance and they might start to think we are the real aggressors. Right from the beginning they had to prevent the public from thinking that the Iraqi people were resisting our invasion. So initially there was a big focus on "Foreign Fighters". So they created the perception that it was all due to foreign fighters, certainly not the Iraqi people. That position has become more and more unbelievable since poll after poll has shown the majority of Iraqis want us to leave and an increasing number support attacks against coalition forces. This probably explains why the US Military has felt it necessary to plant stories favourable to the occupation in the Iraqi Media (first revealed by The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times).
Simple words and phrases can be incredibly powerful in forming opinions and you have to be on your guard all the time. For example the Bush administration tried to label the idea of leaving Iraq with the term "cut and run". It is hardly a neutral term and was designed to make leaving Iraq look like a cowardly act and a bad thing. The term "cut and run" was widely adopted by the media and that can't help but have an effect on public opinion.
Another favourite bit of propaganda is the question "Do you support our troops?". Obviously you are compelled to say yes, but the question is about as meaningful as asking "Do you support the people of New York?". Well the answer is yes in the sense I don't want them to die, but that's about it. The real question should be "Do you support our troops being there?" and suddenly you don't feel compelled to say yes anymore.
Obviously he's getting a bit old for these roles now but...
I think in the future actors will be able to go on for longer in these roles using technology such as http://www.mova.com/ . The actors head would be scanned in high resolution when they are younger and then when they are past it, film-makers can use the digital version of them instead.
I agree. The fact that someone without permission videoed the execution is a minor infraction. The important thing is the content. Some politicians have said that it is wrong to show the execution, but I disagree. We should all see how horrible an execution is, just like we should all see how horrible a war is in graphic detail. If you wake up in the night with a sweat, good because these things should have that effect on you and perhaps that will influence the people we vote for.
In my post I said that Pol Pot was "completely insane, and totally murderous", so I was hardly claiming he wasn't responsible for his crimes. What you have done is exaggerate/distort my argument to make it look ridiculous and therefore easier to defeat. This kind of attack is commonly known as a "Straw Man" argument.
Pol Pot was certainly responsible for his actions. However, the US, China and other countries that supported him are also responsible for their actions. i.e. Knowingly supporting a mass murderer.
Thanks, I needed a laugh. Where did you read the bit about the SAS, anyway? PRAVDA?
There were lots of reports about it over the years and lots of denials in Parliament. It eventually came out in Parliament in 1991. Here is an extract from Hansard (it's the official source for Parlimentary discussions).
"I confirm that there is no British Government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them."
That may have been true on 9 October 1990, but what the Prime Minister omitted to say was that we had been training them up to a year before that. The phrase--the wording is always identical-- "or those allied to them"
appeared in a succession of ministerial letters around that time. The Foreign Secretary and various other Ministers wrote that, and they all did so in the knowledge that the training had been going on and had stopped only just before that. That is being rather economical with the truth.
Mrs. Alice Mahon (Halifax) : Lying.
And here is the link. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/cgi-bin/new
Did the idea of a foreign power helping a nasty regime seem so unbelievable to you? History is littered with examples. e.g. The CIA trained the brutal SAVAK secret police in Iran under the Shah and the Iraqis have just hung a mass murderer (Saddam Hussein) who was supported by the west for many years. The list is very long.
Not as far as I am aware, but this company (http://www.leepvr.com/index.php) realises the importance of full FOV. You can't buy one yet. They'll need to get some big player involved like Sony.
From what I've read on VR, the effect of immersion doesn't work until your field of vision is very near completely covered.
I think that's largely correct. It's probably even more important than stereoscopic vision, which breaks down quite quickly with distance. I've been waiting for home VR since I played Dactyl Nightmare in the early nineties. I really think it's long overdue. Providing a VR headset and VR-Suitable games would surely provide an advantage for any company involved in the console wars.
By "VR-Suitable games" I mean games that allow you to walk in one direction (controlled with a mouse) while being able to look in any direction. From what I have seen in current systems, the head-tracking just emulates a mouse, so you walk exactly where you look, which is not so nice. Games would really have to be designed with VR in mind.
No, they aren't. They're taken in context by the mainstream media, and only blown out of proportion by individuals with an agenda, like yourself.
I don't really think the media pay much attention at all to most of these revelations, which is why people look at you quizzically when you mention things like COINTELPRO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cointelpro). Is being a bit outraged at the idea of staging fake/real terrorist attacks on the US in order to justify a war against Cuba really "blowing things out of proportion"?
"Anything that flies on anything that moves" was said in the context of bombing Cambodia (illegally). Some 100,000 Cambodians were killed with several million made homeless. The fact that even worse carnage came later does not excuse the US bombing.
In fact, despite the Khmer Rouge/Pol Pot being communist, completely insane, and totally murderous, the US and China both supported the regime, due to its anti-Soviet/anti-Vietnamese stance. Under the US/Chinese-Supported Khmer Rouge regime, up to 2 million Cambodians died. It should be noted that there are also indications that British SAS troops were involved in training Cambodian troops.
Actually I am always amazed at the amount of incredibly damaging stuff that gets released in the US. For example, things like Operation Northwoods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods ), which although never carried out, was a plan to stage terrorist attacks on US assets and blame it on Cuba as an excuse for war.
Then there are minutes of meetings that provide evidence of war crimes by certain individuals. For example, minutes were released of Henry Kissinger saying "Anything that flies on anything that moves" , which were his bombing orders for Cambodia. If they had evidence like that against Milosevic, his trial would have been over within days.
Fortunately these damning revelations are largely ignored by the US media. If they were not, perhaps they would stop releasing them in the first place.
It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.
Well it did succeed and over 200,000 East Timorese died during the invasion and subsequent occupation. It's strange that neither Ford nor Kissinger mentioned they gave the green light for the East Timor invasion in their memoirs. It must have slipped their minds. Fortunately details of their meetings with Suharto are now available (released by the National Security Archive in 2001). Yes Ford will be sorely missed by the people of East Timor.
Perhaps you would like to purchase the PS3 game I have just written. It's called "Factorial of one million". It's not as much fun as Doom 3 but it will use the CPU quite heavily.
That was in the US though, which is a little different. If you are actually in the country whose government you are protesting against, that is a whole different situation. That said, they certainly didn't seem scared towards the end, even when violence was used against them.
Well, of course yes, there was eventually a revolution. I was talking about the odd protest though. The Shah had a secret police called SAVAK which was trained by CIA. They ruthlessly repressed any opposition to the Shah. SAVAK had a large number of student spies, even operating in the US.
Leave it to a Chomskyite to glorify an otherwise utterly trite observation, made countless times before, and by more insightful individuals at that.
Really? I think its a pretty interesting observation. Most people do not think of things in that way. i.e. That the public are effectively viewed as an enemy by government. Occasionally they use violence, e.g. in dissuading people from protesting, but violence is mostly not an option anymore, so most of the time they can only wage propaganda warfare. A relevant Chomsky quote (which you may again find trite) is "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." It's not just a throwaway sound bite either. It has real meaning. If you look at the history of the US, UK etc, violent repression becomes less and less of an option over time, and has been replaced with a propaganda model of control.
What is "Chomskyite" supposed to mean anyway? Just that I quoted Chomsky? Or perhaps you are implying I believe everything he says without question, and am thus an idiot. I have read a number of Chomsky books over the years and I usually check up on everything he says, not because I don't trust him, but because you shouldn't really trust what any one person writes.
This article is from 2005 http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/4/12
I'm sure Iran is not exactly a bastion of free expression, but I've seen plenty of Iranian people who have been interviewed on camera criticizing the Iranian government and calling them all a bunch of idiots. Then there was the recent case of Iranian students jeering the President, burning a picture of him, and throwing fireworks (http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1 462_2043334,00.html). That's not the sort of thing you do if you are terrified of your government. Iraqis would certainly never have dared do that to Saddam Hussein (backed by the US et al, for many years), and Iranians would probably not have dared do it to the brutal US/UK-backed Shah of Iran either.
I've worked with a number of people from around the Middle East and all of them said that Saudi Arabia was far worse than Iran. Perhaps it would be wise to tackle the most oppressive countries first.
I have no idea whether Iranian police normally herd student protesters into "Free Speech" Zones well away from President Ahmadinejad, as is common practice in the US. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) or whether the Iranian government enforces huge protest exclusion zones in Tehran, using the threat of terrorism as some kind of bizarre justification. In the UK there is a half-mile protest exclusion zone around parliament, which was introduced in 2005, 2 years after a million angry citizens marched outside Parliament in full view of the media. Maya Evans, a woman who read out the names of dead soldiers within the zone was arrested, charged and convicted of breaching the "Serious Organised Crime and Police Act" by staging an unauthorised protest. I think it was Chomsky who said "The worst enemy of a government is its own population". It's certainly beginning to seem that way.
I wonder if the murderer was stupid enough to have a mobile phone with him when he dumped the bodies. All you would have to do is do a search of all mobile phones that have been in those particular cells at the estimated times of death of each victim. The bodies were dumped in the surrounding countryside so it might narrow it down to a few phones. Another possible line of attack is that the murderer's mobile phone would have been in the same cell as each victims mobile phone for some amount of time. Once you have his mobile number, the game is up. Even if it was not purchased in his name, the phone would spend most of its time where he lives, so it would be simple to narrow it down to the row of houses where he lives.
The US government is really just too embarrassed to hand over the source code since it's all in Visual Basic 6.
You can get an IP Camera (Camera you can view and control over the net) quite cheaply. Just set it up in your "abandoned house" and log in every now and then to check that all is ok.
Really? Tell that to the US soldiers who are being killed day in and day out in Iraq. It's not just Al Qaeda, but a lot of pissed of Civilians who have had family members killed in US air strikes. A determined civilian can learn some pretty lethal skills quite quickly. They won't fight in the same way as well equipped soldiers, but fight they will.
I seem to remember something about DivX networks originally running an open-source project to collect people's ideas, then closing it down and going closed-source. Were any Slashdotters involved in the open-source project and the subsequent dispute?
No, I was talking about a problem with reference counting. Reference Counting was the method that VB (or more correctly the underlying COM) used to manage its objects. I don't know about problems with Garbage Collection, but I have had no problems so far. You can force the CLR to collect all the garbage with a function call, and I have seen an applications memory drop accordingly. I think the method is something like "GC.Collect" but I can't remember.
The answer to all this is to bypass the broadcasters altogether. They are completely pointless middlemen who are of no interest to the consumer. Their business is shoving adverts down our throats and they probably find it extremely annoying that they have to pay for content to entice us into watching. What consumers want is to watch good films and programs and those are made by the content providers. What we need is for the content providers to sell us their wares directly over the net. There's no reason it couldn't be done as cheaply as your Blockbuster postal DVD rental. You could pay $20 or whatever per month and that would give you the right to have X amount of films and TV Series episodes etc, on your machine at once. When you are finished with some content, it just gets deactivated and you can download something new.
It wouldn't matter that it was all DRM'd since you would be renting the content, rather than expecting to "own" anything. There would be little point in piracy since you would be able to watch what you want, when you want for a very reasonable monthly charge. There doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm from the content providers yet, but the public seem to be quite enthusiastic about downloading content. They have to realise that people want to watch things at their whim, not be at the mercy of a TV schedule or waiting for a DVD in the post that may not be available for weeks.