I always laugh when I hear liberals like this trying to berate me for being a 'fascist' - THEY'RE the ones who don't agree with democracy, if the majority don't agree with them.
Laugh while you can monkey-boy. Most intelligent people regardless of political leaning understand that two wolves and a chicken voting on what to have for dinner is not particularly fair.
And right now about the only people with "freedom isn't free" ribbon bumper stickers are people who support Bush. Those things piss me off royally, because this administration has done more to make me less free than any other, and it just keeps getting worse.
Don't you understand? Freedom isn't free means that you must give up freedom in order to have freedom. Remember - War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
For the purposes of having a discussion, I hope that you'll excuse me for not having the time to give more concrete evidence, however this seems to be the case for everyone involved.
The difference is that your position, as you have stated it, is one in which facts can't matter. Not that you just don't have time to rationalize your beliefs, but that regardless of whatever the facts might be, your mind is made up. If you believe your position to be based on logic rather than emotion you need to go back and read your own postings with a critical eye.
FWIW, in case you feel like dismissing my criticism as some pro-gun word-play, I've never owned a gun and probably never will. But I have lots of exposure to the nature of human risk assesment and have learned that big, loud and in your face events like shoot-outs, terrorist bombings, stock-market crashes, mass homocides, etc cause people to assign an irrationally disproportionate level of risk to the related events. While at the same time, it is human nature to under-rate the risks associated with less splashy occurances like car accidents and un-reported crimes. Your postings so clearly bear the earmark of the former that I could not resist commenting.
The rumours are that the next generation of intel graphics chips will be closer to competitive with whatever ATI and Nvidia have by then than the current ones. Presuming that is true, it sure would be nice if they maintain their current policy about open-source / open-specs for the chips.
So basically your gut tells you that there is no way gun ownership could ever be a net benefit. You do indeed have the essential truthiness of the issue firmly in your grasp.
Did the fact that the police officers were armed and returning fire in any way dissuade this individual as one of the parent poster's suggested? See for yourself if you like.
Haven't read what the other poster said, but if that's what they meant then they vastly over-simplified the whole guns-as-deterrence argument.
There whole point of guns-as-deterrence is that you never hear about the cases where it worked because nothing happened - the crime was deterred. The only way you find out about those situations is indirectly, like the oft cited statistics in Florida and other states, showing significant drops in violent crime rates following the adoption of concealed-carry laws, while nationwide the rates continued to climb.
My point is that I don't think that any safety afforded by citizens being able to arm themselves is not worth it if tragedies like this are going to occur.
Really? ANY safety regardless of actual numbers? Sounds like truthiness.
Oh god... arguing that Kim Jong-il is no more insane than Bush. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
There are striking similarities. Both are the sons of privilege and former rulers of their respective countries. Both were massively irresponsible party animals in their youth. Both go to extremes to demonize the other to their citizens. Neither get as much respect as their fathers did when they had the same job. Both use highly inflated threats of attacks from outside to justify most of their policies. Both have been buddy-buddy with Pakistan in order to achieve their own objectives. But there are a few differences too. Only one has ever invaded even just one country. Only one pretends to represent the will of the common man. Only one of them takes personal direction from God.
Caramon:There is a big dragon coming towards us! Raistlin:Caramon, you and Sturm get the sword protocols! I will open a socket to the magic protocols while Tanis handles the arrow protocols!
Not only did they drop it, but CNN/FOX/MSNBC offer premium content on their webpage for free.
What makes it "premium?" Since it is free, you aren't paying extra for it. Since it is free, it is not above the normal offerings. Have you been drinking the marketing kool-aid again?
by the time you get to the point where a potential passport snooper isn't making himself *really* suspicious by running around an airport waving his briefcase next to everyone's baggage, you've got yourself quite an RFID reader.
Of all the possible threat models, you've picked the least likely. If you are in an airport you can probably just look at the guy's luggage tags.
No, the threat is out in the real world where there is plenty of opportunity to disguise super-huge equipment. Like a doorway where the entire frame is a field generator and detector and the target is still only a few inches away, or the entire trunk of the car parked along the roadside, or along the sidewalk where the wall of that warehouse you are strolling by is just a thin piece of wood and on the other side is a some big-ass (and relatively cheap since there is no need to miniaturize) detection equipment.
Not saying it's impossible to make a device that effectively identifies Americans by their passports, just saying that everyone should probably put their tinfoil hats on now because a device like that would probably give you one heck of a headache.
Yeah, because humans have that 6th sense - the one that lets us detect EM waves. If you are lucky, maybe your watch will stop working, or your cell phone will drop a call and crash. Neither of which are particularly obvious clues to the layman that he's been whacked with a ton of EM.
BTW, here's a guy demonstrating a system to detect these RFIDs from at least 50 ft and who claims it goes a lot further. Note that whether or not he actually reads any of the data from the RFID is irrelevant, the fact that you've got one in the first place is plenty of information all on its own. http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/000798 .html
I'll answer that, although I don't have the time to elaborate on every detail.
In brief - copyright is about putting restrictions on a non-rivalrous good so that it takes on the market characteristics of a rivalrous good. That approach used to be reasonably feasible when limitations in technology had the same effect -- essentially all copyrighted material was fixed in some kind of physical form that was itself rivalrous (e.g. a book, a record, a CD, etc).
But the net changed that. Information does not have to be fixed in a rivalrous good any more. It can be redistributed in a purely non-rivalrous form. So copyright can no longer rely on the "laws of nature" for primary enforcement.
Copyright is against human nature - the natural inclination to share knowledge that we think is useful. Human society is based on information sharing. We probably would not have even been able to get to the level of apes without information sharing.
So now we are left with an essentially unenforceable restriction that goes completely against fundamental human nature. I can't think of a situation more broken than that.
The studios purport to be every bit as unhappy with Clearplay as the re-recording service providers that were the subject of this lawsuit. They are currently suing Clearplay in the case Huntsman v. Soderbergh/a? which is pending.
That's odd. The Family Movie Act of 2005 seems to be pretty clear about legalizing Clearplay's business model. The law was passed as a "compromise" in that the studios got a bunch of new draconian punishments for copyright violators but in exchange they had to accept the bible-thumpers using "censor tracks."
Here's the revelant bit of the law:
Title II: Exemption from Infringement for Skipping Audio and Video Content In Motion Pictures - Family Movie Act of 2005 - (Sec. 202) Creates an exemption from copyright infringement for: (1) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing from an authorized copy of the motion picture; or (2) the creation or provision of technology that enables such editing, is designed and marketed for such use, creates no fixed copy of the altered version, and makes no changes, deletions or additions to commercial advertisements or promotional announcements that would otherwise be performed or displayed.
Amends the Trademark Act of 1946 to protect from liability for trademark infringement: (1) persons who engage in the above-referenced conduct; and (2) manufacturers of technology that enables such editing if notice is provided that the performance of the movie is altered from the director's or copyright holder's intended performance.
I'd argue that a creative interpretation of the above would even cover what cleanflicks does, but that reading is more than a little contentious.
Copyright law is about respecting the creations of others
That claim is false.
At least it is false in countries that, like the USA, follow the Anglo-Saxon common law definition of Copyright. The US Constitution says so explicitly -- "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." There is nothing in there about "respect" - it is quite simply 100% about increasing the body of public knowledge.
While you, like many others, may disagree with the US constitution. You might feel that an author has "moral rights" to the result of his labors. You would still be wrong.
Doh. At first I assumed it was the Denver cases, but the Family Movie Act was passed explicitly as a result of those lawsuits being filed. I had assumed the lawsuits were made moot by the act, so a Canadian news source would be the ones talking about the canadian equivalents...
My read of the verbiage in the Family Movie Act is that part 1 makes it ok for a business to make a modified copy of a pre-bought DVD ("from an authorized copy of the motion picture"), one previously purchased by a "private household" but not to "pre-modify" the DVDs ahead of time (as a video rental store would need).
Since part 1 does not say anything about disallowing a fixed copy (as does part 2 which is an "OR" part not an "AND") I think it would allow for redistribution of the altered work since "an exemption from copyright infringement" sound really broad.
But, all in all, this is yet another example of just how fucking byzantine copyright law is. Even a simple two paragraph clause is fairly opaque to interested laymen.
You own the physical book. You can do what you want with it... including tearing out pages
You might think so but you would be wrong. There have been a few cases in which doing exactly that - tearing the pages out of a book - and reselling the pages was deemed a copyright violation.
One guy was buying books of art by Patrick Nagel (you know those famous acrylics of semi-naked semi-asian hot-chicks) and mounting the pages on some kind of framing and then selling that. No copying made. He lost in court due to it being ruled a "derivative work" - there are a couple of other similar cases like this one that involved similar practices.
Note that are number of well respected jurists who think that those rulings are bad law, but they still establish precedent in their districts.
This is Canada folks - in the US similar lawsuits were made moot by: the Family Movie Act of 2005 as part of S.167 which was passed with provisions that explicitly exempt editing for content. Here's the summary from Thomas:
Title II: Exemption from Infringement for Skipping Audio and Video Content In Motion Pictures - Family Movie Act of 2005 - (Sec. 202) Creates an exemption from copyright infringement for: (1) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing from an authorized copy of the motion picture; or (2) the creation or provision of technology that enables such editing, is designed and marketed for such use, creates no fixed copy of the altered version, and makes no changes, deletions or additions to commercial advertisements or promotional announcements that would otherwise be performed or displayed.
Amends the Trademark Act of 1946 to protect from liability for trademark infringement: (1) persons who engage in the above-referenced conduct; and (2) manufacturers of technology that enables such editing if notice is provided that the performance of the movie is altered from the director's or copyright holder's intended performance.
Additionally, Canada's copyright law draws from "contintental" (aka French) law much more than American copyright law does. The French have the concept of "Moral Rights" (which are distinct from 'property rights' and generally can not be assigned) - one of the moral rights of the author is the "right to the respect of the work" (droit au respect de l'intégrité de l'oeuvre) which boils down to the author being able to prevent any changes to the work that he believes conflict with his original artistic vision.
My guess is that the judge in Canada made his ruling based primarily on that particular moral right.
FWIW, I am going to have agree with the right-wing moralists here - this ruling is censorship plain and simple. This judgement has the government indirectly dictating how the films must be viewed. It reduces the artistic works available to the public. If hollywood had a brain, they would be making their own versions (like they do for in-flight movies) for the terminally fragile of heart because there is obviously a market for that kind of product.
The assumption is that the North Korean government is sane.
Lol! I was just going to post a joke about how we are suppossed to believe the standard demonization that our enemy is a "madman."
I seriously doubt any government that systematically starves its own people to death over a few decades would have any trouble watching the same people die in a "glorious" fire.
You should doubt it.
Only in movies do insane people end up runnning countries. Letting the population starve is not a symptom of insanity - it is a symptom of a ruling class lacking accountability to the citizens.
The North Koreans are not insane, they just have a different perspective than the one our news media feeds us. Were Bush and Rumsfeld insane because they ignored counsel from the pentagon about how securing Iraq would require 2x-3x more troops than they wanted to allocate? No, they just saw the facts differently - incorrect they were, but not insane.
Same thing goes for North Korea's government. For example - they still consider themselves to be at war, no truce was ever signed - only an armistice which is just a little bit stronger than a "cease fire." To an American, 10,000 miles away, it sure seems like the korean war is over - but anyone who gets near the DMZ and sees the patrols on both sides (or has even just seen the movie Joint Security Area), it isn't so clear any more. North Korea has always felt like it needs to be prepared for an attack at any time and has thus kept its military at a full state of rediness.
North Korea has made a lot of dumb decisions, but that doesn't mean they are insane any more than Bush's (mis)handling of the war in Iraq means he is insane.
"It" ? You read one blog posting and you are now an expert? Give me a break. There is a lot more information out there than my first link. I guess you are new here - I suggest familiarizing yourself with a website called "google.com"
Makes no sense to me. It would be rather difficult for the CIA to keep any modifications to that equipment along the way a secret under the later scrutiny, since there shouldn't even be any Americans involved in the transaction.
Lol. If you think only Americans work for the CIA you've got a lot of learning to do. I didn't just pull the CIA out of my ass for that post - you can just as easily read all of the (public) analysis of the event that I did and evaluate the arguments for and against all of the suspected agencies yourself. You might even come up with an educated opinion at that point.
The job could not have been pulled off without the presence of automated wire-tapping functionality built into the Ericsson switches in Greece. What makes the "greek experience" relevant here is that Greece didn't even purchase the wire-tapping "option" to their switches, it would have cost millions more and they decided to save the money and thought that by not purchasing the extra software and hardware they didn't even have to worry about the issue. They were very wrong.
If ever there was proof that wire-tapping features built into systems for law-enforcement use can and will be exploited by unauthorized users, this is it. It really does not get more clean-cut than this - except for the speculation as to who exactly these unauthorized wire-tappers were - the leading candidate is the CIA. Which would lead even just a mildly paranoid person to wonder if perhaps the FBI is jealous of the CIA's latitude in foreign operations and they just want the same, easily-abused by themselves, features within their own jurisdiction.
Lots of reports of features falling out of the Vista - but there is one (anti-)feature that never gets that kind of press - "Trusted Computing," aka support for Defective Recorded Media (DRM).
It is like it is more important to microsoft that they cater to the MAFIAA than it is for them to provide features that their paying customers might actually want.
I sure wish I had a couple of bazillion dollars to piss it away on developing stuff that nobody wants to pay for. Except I'd spend it on designing and building the world's best yacht - with the largest capacity of nubile beauty pagent winners.
Jah-Wren Ryel's answer to the same question is more radical -- Ryel suggests that perhaps "none at all" is the best approach. He asks "What makes you think that any system could work?" Rather than spending money on elaborate surveillance or other intelligence-gathering efforts, Ryel says, "spend it on emergency services instead.
Damn. Not only did I not say the words without quotes, I didn't mean anything like that either. Here's what I really said.
Note two main differences -
1) The "What makes you think that ANY system would work?" applies to any system of identity-based filtering. It's not like terrorists can't simply get a false id for money pickups at western union - and if you really know enough to confidently stop them from doing cash transactions, then you ought to know enough to have them detained. The "no fly" list is just as pointless - a list of people so evil that we can't let them on a plane, but so lilly-white that we can't even arrest them either.
2) No way did I even imply that no money should be spent on "elaborate surveillence or other intelligence-gathering" - what I said was: "So instead of fucking with people - 99.999% of whom have nothing to do with terrorism - spend it on the infrastructure..."
While I agree that POOR intelligence-gathering can often mean just fucking with people - this whole western union story is not about intel or surveillence - it's about trying to make life hard for terrorists but really only affecting the lives of ordinary lawful people. Either way, there is no intelligence-gathering going on here - just the misapplication of dubious intelligence.
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I always laugh when I hear liberals like this trying to berate me for being a 'fascist' - THEY'RE the ones who don't agree with democracy, if the majority don't agree with them.
Laugh while you can monkey-boy. Most intelligent people regardless of political leaning understand that two wolves and a chicken voting on what to have for dinner is not particularly fair.
And right now about the only people with "freedom isn't free" ribbon bumper stickers are people who support Bush. Those things piss me off royally, because this administration has done more to make me less free than any other, and it just keeps getting worse.
Don't you understand? Freedom isn't free means that you must give up freedom in order to have freedom.
Remember - War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
For the purposes of having a discussion, I hope that you'll excuse me for not having the time to give more concrete evidence, however this seems to be the case for everyone involved.
The difference is that your position, as you have stated it, is one in which facts can't matter. Not that you just don't have time to rationalize your beliefs, but that regardless of whatever the facts might be, your mind is made up. If you believe your position to be based on logic rather than emotion you need to go back and read your own postings with a critical eye.
FWIW, in case you feel like dismissing my criticism as some pro-gun word-play, I've never owned a gun and probably never will. But I have lots of exposure to the nature of human risk assesment and have learned that big, loud and in your face events like shoot-outs, terrorist bombings, stock-market crashes, mass homocides, etc cause people to assign an irrationally disproportionate level of risk to the related events. While at the same time, it is human nature to under-rate the risks associated with less splashy occurances like car accidents and un-reported crimes. Your postings so clearly bear the earmark of the former that I could not resist commenting.
The rumours are that the next generation of intel graphics chips will be closer to competitive with whatever ATI and Nvidia have by then than the current ones. Presuming that is true, it sure would be nice if they maintain their current policy about open-source / open-specs for the chips.
I would rather...
...
I highly doubt is the case
Numbers aside...
So basically your gut tells you that there is no way gun ownership could ever be a net benefit. You do indeed have the essential truthiness of the issue firmly in your grasp.
It sure is a good thing that the UK has over 4 MILLION CCTV CAMERAS WATCHING THE PEOPLE. All those ipod owners can rest easy knowing that in having given up their essential liberties they are now safe and protected from such criminals.
:(
Right?
Right?
You neglect to mention that the rules of evidence for ASBOs have been significantly weakend, allowing, for example, the use of hearsay.
Did the fact that the police officers were armed and returning fire in any way dissuade this individual as one of the parent poster's suggested? See for yourself if you like.
Haven't read what the other poster said, but if that's what they meant then they vastly over-simplified the whole guns-as-deterrence argument.
There whole point of guns-as-deterrence is that you never hear about the cases where it worked because nothing happened - the crime was deterred. The only way you find out about those situations is indirectly, like the oft cited statistics in Florida and other states, showing significant drops in violent crime rates following the adoption of concealed-carry laws, while nationwide the rates continued to climb.
My point is that I don't think that any safety afforded by citizens being able to arm themselves is not worth it if tragedies like this are going to occur.
Really? ANY safety regardless of actual numbers? Sounds like truthiness.
This car is not a true Tesla Car.
If it were, it would have no batteries at all. Instead it would gets it energy from some kind of wireless source like microwave power transmission or even the Earth's magnetic field.
Oh god... arguing that Kim Jong-il is no more insane than Bush. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
There are striking similarities. Both are the sons of privilege and former rulers of their respective countries. Both were massively irresponsible party animals in their youth. Both go to extremes to demonize the other to their citizens. Neither get as much respect as their fathers did when they had the same job. Both use highly inflated threats of attacks from outside to justify most of their policies. Both have been buddy-buddy with Pakistan in order to achieve their own objectives. But there are a few differences too. Only one has ever invaded even just one country. Only one pretends to represent the will of the common man. Only one of them takes personal direction from God.
Caramon: There is a big dragon coming towards us!
Raistlin: Caramon, you and Sturm get the sword protocols! I will open a socket to the magic protocols while Tanis handles the arrow protocols!
Not only did they drop it, but CNN/FOX/MSNBC offer premium content on their webpage for free.
What makes it "premium?" Since it is free, you aren't paying extra for it. Since it is free, it is not above the normal offerings. Have you been drinking the marketing kool-aid again?
by the time you get to the point where a potential passport snooper isn't making himself *really* suspicious by running around an airport waving his briefcase next to everyone's baggage, you've got yourself quite an RFID reader.
8 .html
Of all the possible threat models, you've picked the least likely. If you are in an airport you can probably just look at the guy's luggage tags.
No, the threat is out in the real world where there is plenty of opportunity to disguise super-huge equipment. Like a doorway where the entire frame is a field generator and detector and the target is still only a few inches away, or the entire trunk of the car parked along the roadside, or along the sidewalk where the wall of that warehouse you are strolling by is just a thin piece of wood and on the other side is a some big-ass (and relatively cheap since there is no need to miniaturize) detection equipment.
Not saying it's impossible to make a device that effectively identifies Americans by their passports, just saying that everyone should probably put their tinfoil hats on now because a device like that would probably give you one heck of a headache.
Yeah, because humans have that 6th sense - the one that lets us detect EM waves. If you are lucky, maybe your watch will stop working, or your cell phone will drop a call and crash. Neither of which are particularly obvious clues to the layman that he's been whacked with a ton of EM.
BTW, here's a guy demonstrating a system to detect these RFIDs from at least 50 ft and who claims it goes a lot further. Note that whether or not he actually reads any of the data from the RFID is irrelevant, the fact that you've got one in the first place is plenty of information all on its own. http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/00079
You stated that copyright doesn't work. Why?
I'll answer that, although I don't have the time to elaborate on every detail.
In brief - copyright is about putting restrictions on a non-rivalrous good so that it takes on the market characteristics of a rivalrous good. That approach used to be reasonably feasible when limitations in technology had the same effect -- essentially all copyrighted material was fixed in some kind of physical form that was itself rivalrous (e.g. a book, a record, a CD, etc).
But the net changed that. Information does not have to be fixed in a rivalrous good any more. It can be redistributed in a purely non-rivalrous form. So copyright can no longer rely on the "laws of nature" for primary enforcement.
Copyright is against human nature - the natural inclination to share knowledge that we think is useful. Human society is based on information sharing. We probably would not have even been able to get to the level of apes without information sharing.
So now we are left with an essentially unenforceable restriction that goes completely against fundamental human nature. I can't think of a situation more broken than that.
That's odd. The Family Movie Act of 2005 seems to be pretty clear about legalizing Clearplay's business model. The law was passed as a "compromise" in that the studios got a bunch of new draconian punishments for copyright violators but in exchange they had to accept the bible-thumpers using "censor tracks."
Here's the revelant bit of the law:
I'd argue that a creative interpretation of the above would even cover what cleanflicks does, but that reading is more than a little contentious.
Copyright law is about respecting the creations of others
That claim is false.
At least it is false in countries that, like the USA, follow the Anglo-Saxon common law definition of Copyright. The US Constitution says so explicitly -- "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." There is nothing in there about "respect" - it is quite simply 100% about increasing the body of public knowledge.
While you, like many others, may disagree with the US constitution. You might feel that an author has "moral rights" to the result of his labors. You would still be wrong.
Doh. At first I assumed it was the Denver cases, but the Family Movie Act was passed explicitly as a result of those lawsuits being filed. I had assumed the lawsuits were made moot by the act, so a Canadian news source would be the ones talking about the canadian equivalents...
My read of the verbiage in the Family Movie Act is that part 1 makes it ok for a business to make a modified copy of a pre-bought DVD ("from an authorized copy of the motion picture"), one previously purchased by a "private household" but not to "pre-modify" the DVDs ahead of time (as a video rental store would need).
Since part 1 does not say anything about disallowing a fixed copy (as does part 2 which is an "OR" part not an "AND") I think it would allow for redistribution of the altered work since "an exemption from copyright infringement" sound really broad.
But, all in all, this is yet another example of just how fucking byzantine copyright law is. Even a simple two paragraph clause is fairly opaque to interested laymen.
You own the physical book. You can do what you want with it... including tearing out pages
You might think so but you would be wrong. There have been a few cases in which doing exactly that - tearing the pages out of a book - and reselling the pages was deemed a copyright violation.
One guy was buying books of art by Patrick Nagel (you know those famous acrylics of semi-naked semi-asian hot-chicks) and mounting the pages on some kind of framing and then selling that. No copying made. He lost in court due to it being ruled a "derivative work" - there are a couple of other similar cases like this one that involved similar practices.
Note that are number of well respected jurists who think that those rulings are bad law, but they still establish precedent in their districts.
Additionally, Canada's copyright law draws from "contintental" (aka French) law much more than American copyright law does. The French have the concept of "Moral Rights" (which are distinct from 'property rights' and generally can not be assigned) - one of the moral rights of the author is the "right to the respect of the work" (droit au respect de l'intégrité de l'oeuvre) which boils down to the author being able to prevent any changes to the work that he believes conflict with his original artistic vision.
My guess is that the judge in Canada made his ruling based primarily on that particular moral right.
FWIW, I am going to have agree with the right-wing moralists here - this ruling is censorship plain and simple. This judgement has the government indirectly dictating how the films must be viewed. It reduces the artistic works available to the public. If hollywood had a brain, they would be making their own versions (like they do for in-flight movies) for the terminally fragile of heart because there is obviously a market for that kind of product.
The assumption is that the North Korean government is sane.
Lol! I was just going to post a joke about how we are suppossed to believe the standard demonization that our enemy is a "madman."
I seriously doubt any government that systematically starves its own people to death over a few decades would have any trouble watching the same people die in a "glorious" fire.
You should doubt it.
Only in movies do insane people end up runnning countries. Letting the population starve is not a symptom of insanity - it is a symptom of a ruling class lacking accountability to the citizens.
The North Koreans are not insane, they just have a different perspective than the one our news media feeds us. Were Bush and Rumsfeld insane because they ignored counsel from the pentagon about how securing Iraq would require 2x-3x more troops than they wanted to allocate? No, they just saw the facts differently - incorrect they were, but not insane.
Same thing goes for North Korea's government. For example - they still consider themselves to be at war, no truce was ever signed - only an armistice which is just a little bit stronger than a "cease fire." To an American, 10,000 miles away, it sure seems like the korean war is over - but anyone who gets near the DMZ and sees the patrols on both sides (or has even just seen the movie Joint Security Area), it isn't so clear any more. North Korea has always felt like it needs to be prepared for an attack at any time and has thus kept its military at a full state of rediness.
North Korea has made a lot of dumb decisions, but that doesn't mean they are insane any more than Bush's (mis)handling of the war in Iraq means he is insane.
I already read it.
"It" ? You read one blog posting and you are now an expert? Give me a break. There is a lot more information out there than my first link. I guess you are new here - I suggest familiarizing yourself with a website called "google.com"
Makes no sense to me. It would be rather difficult for the CIA to keep any modifications to that equipment along the way a secret under the later scrutiny, since there shouldn't even be any Americans involved in the transaction.
Lol. If you think only Americans work for the CIA you've got a lot of learning to do. I didn't just pull the CIA out of my ass for that post - you can just as easily read all of the (public) analysis of the event that I did and evaluate the arguments for and against all of the suspected agencies yourself. You might even come up with an educated opinion at that point.
Back in 2004 some of the highest-ranking politicians and other most influential people in Greece had their cell phone conversations surreptitiously recorded by an unknown organization for a period of months.
The job could not have been pulled off without the presence of automated wire-tapping functionality built into the Ericsson switches in Greece. What makes the "greek experience" relevant here is that Greece didn't even purchase the wire-tapping "option" to their switches, it would have cost millions more and they decided to save the money and thought that by not purchasing the extra software and hardware they didn't even have to worry about the issue. They were very wrong.
If ever there was proof that wire-tapping features built into systems for law-enforcement use can and will be exploited by unauthorized users, this is it. It really does not get more clean-cut than this - except for the speculation as to who exactly these unauthorized wire-tappers were - the leading candidate is the CIA. Which would lead even just a mildly paranoid person to wonder if perhaps the FBI is jealous of the CIA's latitude in foreign operations and they just want the same, easily-abused by themselves, features within their own jurisdiction.
Lots of reports of features falling out of the Vista - but there is one (anti-)feature that never gets that kind of press - "Trusted Computing," aka support for Defective Recorded Media (DRM).
It is like it is more important to microsoft that they cater to the MAFIAA than it is for them to provide features that their paying customers might actually want.
I sure wish I had a couple of bazillion dollars to piss it away on developing stuff that nobody wants to pay for. Except I'd spend it on designing and building the world's best yacht - with the largest capacity of nubile beauty pagent winners.
Jah-Wren Ryel's answer to the same question is more radical -- Ryel suggests that perhaps "none at all" is the best approach. He asks "What makes you think that any system could work?" Rather than spending money on elaborate surveillance or other intelligence-gathering efforts, Ryel says, "spend it on emergency services instead.
Damn. Not only did I not say the words without quotes, I didn't mean anything like that either.
Here's what I really said.
Note two main differences -
1) The "What makes you think that ANY system would work?" applies to any system of identity-based filtering. It's not like terrorists can't simply get a false id for money pickups at western union - and if you really know enough to confidently stop them from doing cash transactions, then you ought to know enough to have them detained. The "no fly" list is just as pointless - a list of people so evil that we can't let them on a plane, but so lilly-white that we can't even arrest them either.
2) No way did I even imply that no money should be spent on "elaborate surveillence or other intelligence-gathering" - what I said was: "So instead of fucking with people - 99.999% of whom have nothing to do with terrorism - spend it on the infrastructure..."
While I agree that POOR intelligence-gathering can often mean just fucking with people - this whole western union story is not about intel or surveillence - it's about trying to make life hard for terrorists but really only affecting the lives of ordinary lawful people. Either way, there is no intelligence-gathering going on here - just the misapplication of dubious intelligence.