No, it is already in english, no need to translate at all.
If you want to interpret, be my guest, but don't expect that I or anyone else will consider your interpretation correct. I think I was plain and clear in my words, and no interpretation is really required.
People always forget about the second mission of the NSA - securing the government computing infrastructure. That's why they cough up stuff like SELinux, or their hardening manuals.
Putting a backdoor into windows would be stupid unless you at the same time make sure there is a backdoor-free version for government use. Ensuring that would mean no government office can ever buy a windows off-the-shelf, it all has to be coordinated centrally. At an operation that size, I'm not sure you could keep it a secret.
Securing windows against foreign attacks, on the other hand, makes a whole lot of sense if you expect it to be running government computers.
Not saying they didn't, as I don't know for sure. But it appears that the securing mission gives the more likely explanation compared to the backdoor idea.
Macs have never, ever been advertised as a gaming platform,
You really need to get out of that basement more often. Several Apple conferences, Steve Jobs Keynotes and other highly public events have happened in the recent years that went quite far to bring the Mac into public perception as a gaming platform. And while the market has always been small, the Mac does have a history of great games, even some Mac exclusives like Marathon that were ahead of their PC competition.
Sure, it has not been put forth so much as a gaming platform, compared to the PC, but "never, ever" is just stupid to say, and not true.
Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck. Some books don't make good movies, and many movies would suck in book form. Likewise, while a few games make good movies and vice versa, the usual case is that they don't, so why try?
A movie is first and foremost about storytelling, in a carefully set up series of scenes, with a dramatic curve and a specific ending that everything in the movie is subtly linked to so that near the end you get the feeling of everything falling together like the pieces of a puzzle. Well, good movies anyway. It's about changing perspective, it can tell the story from various angles, leave storylines hanging for a while then return to them - there is a lot in the way how the story is told, in pacing and in letting the viewer know more than the protagonists on the screen.
Games are about decisions, reactions, about finding out clues and hints and about consequences. You are the protagonist, so even if they include cinematics of the evil guy planning his next move, the protagonist then knows about it. The pacing depends on you more than on the story. There are usually multiple routes and endings. It is a lot more about your character than about the story. And one of the challenges is that even the most meaningless random encounter could kill you, while in the movies we all know the hero never gets hurt except by the bad guy himself or one of his leutenants. All the nameless "random encounter" guys are just there as targets.
A good movie and a good game are not made following the same recipe. A good movie about a game, or a good game about a movie, will have little in common except the setting. Example: The Aliens and the Predator movies, and the AvP games (don't get me started about the AvP movies, they were crap). Great movies, great games, exactly because the games did not try to copy the movies but created their own world within the movie setting.
Don't use all-quantors, it makes it trivial to prove you wrong, because a single counter-example suffices.
I am a gamer, and there is no non-Mac computer in my home (anymore).
(although even the most pimped out Mac pales before a fully-loaded custom rig)
Which 0.0001% of gamers own. You, sir, are stuck in the 80s, when one needed a university degree to be a gamer because one pretty much had to build ones own machine and the global gaming market was a few million bucks. Today, "gamers" includes most of the population and I dare to say the top-50 or so games run perfectly well on a 5-year-old machine because they are called FarmVille and the like. Maybe WoW is on that list somewhere, but very likely it's the only game on that list requiring a 3D graphics card.
There's honestly no need for them to release a Mac version
True, most Mac users use BootCamp to run windows on their Mac for gaming purposes. For a "I want this" game, doing only a windows version will work. But, honestly, most games are in the "looks nice, maybe I'll take a look" category. If they are available for the Mac, I will buy them (I've bought quite a few indie games for the Mac, for example). If they are windows-only, chances are that I'd rather visit torrentz.com than Steam. And if it's not there, I'll probably forget about it. If you can't be arsed to make the game for my system, then I can't be arsed to get out my wallet.
Or, as someone else put it nicely - would you rather have 0.1% of the 90% market share, or 10% of the 5% market share?
But statistically, those annoying ads *work*. They wouldn't be used otherwise - I'm sure the advertising industry has done many studies of this.
Yes and no. Mind you, my marketing class has been more than 10 years ago, but I'm not sure if the basics have changed so much. True is that the marketing industry does invest a lot into research and studies. However, like in many other areas in business, that doesn't mean those results actually get applied. And while results of ad campaign get regularily checked, more often than not the results tell you whether it worked or not (i.e. sales increased) but not why. Which results in many, many legends that have no empirical support whatsoever, but a huge "nobody ever got fired for..." effect - basically, there are things you just do because if you don't and the campaign fails, everyone will blame it on you.
People will learn to just ignore unobtrusive advertising,
People are great at filtering out pretty much anything. It's just that the obtrusive stuff requires more subconscious processing power.
I don't know what comes next. Maybe sites in another year will start requiring users answer a simple question about the advert before they can access the content, to prove that attention really was paid.
Usually, things move in sinus-like waves. I don't know if we have reached the top yet, but I can hardly imagine how much worser it could get. So I imagine pretty soon things will start to move in the other direction, and we just may get the ad insanity under control again. Or things escalate further, until the counter-reaction is likewise strong and we will see a flat-out global ban on advertisement. Now that would be a sight to behold.
I started blocking ads when two things happened, pretty much simultaneously:
One, ad content took over a considerable part of the screen real estate and two, ads started to distract from the actual content through animation, blinking, sound, etc.
I know advertisement is all about getting your attention, but it tries to do that in contexts where I don't want my attention diverted to something else. I don't mind advertisement on the WC or on the bus that much, it's not as if I had anything better to do there. But when I'm driving or browsing, I hate every single ad I encounter. Luckily, for browsing there is AdBlock.
And I don't like the whining, either. If you business model relies on ads, then your business model is broken. But if you absolutely want to give me ads, how about using text ads? I don't mind those, they are a ton less distracting, which greatly improves your chances of me actually clicking one instead of hating it.
Just as we have to suppress animal rage when encountering bad drivers, we should take a few breaths and step back to make more reasoned responses.
There is a german proverb that says "der Klügere gibt nach" - translates roughly to "the smarter one backs down".
There is a very popular extension of this proverb that goes "der Klügere gibt solange nach, bis er der Dümmere ist" - translated roughly: "the smarter one backs down so often that he ends up being the dumber one."
As with all things, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I am not a friend of DDoS attacks myself, just like I am not a friend of violence. And yet, if someone were to harm my girlfriend, I would not stand and watch and call the police. I would kill the motherfucker, right then and there. With whatever is available, my bare hands if necessary. And the same is true of the DDoS attacks currently. Until someone makes a better suggestion for payback, this is the best we have and better than doing nothing at all.
I think when some people see a bank site taken down, they may have fears of identity theft, late payment penalties, loss of access to gas at some unattended plastic-driven station in the middle of nowhere late at night etc...
I'm sure some white folks were afraid of being robbed, raped or "tainted" when so many black people made those sit-ins to protest for their rights. But should the ignorance of some prevent others from protesting? We don't think like that in the real world - why in the virtual?
Vote with your wallets, call email write or fax your bank or Paypal or Ebay,
It doesn't work like that in social networks and monopolies.
Try to work within the system
That doesn't work if it is the system itself you are protesting against. Apartheid in South Africa would have never been abolished if the blacks had at all times stayed within the then-valid laws.
Their antics just keep giving politicians reasons to clamp down on the internet. Way to go, idiots!
As if.
Politicians make up reasons if you don't give them some. It really doesn't make a difference. What do you suggest instead? Bending over and taking it like a man?
the *idea* behind wikileaks was good, but Assange is an Ass-hat with an overinflated ego, who needs to go.
Wikileaks needs and ass-hat with an overinflated ego to work at all. Very few of the couch-potatoes posting to/. would have the guts to do what he does and take the risks he takes.
If you check your history books, you will find that many of the heroes we celebrate today where ass-hats with overinflated egos.
You and the US can no longer be outraged at China after what the US has done.
So many false assumptions in such a short sentence.:-)
I'm a German living in Germany. I quite dislike most of what the US is doing these days, especially including the Wikileaks suppression. I'm quite a bit less outraged at the Chinese, who for all their faults at least aren't corrupt liars claiming the moral high grounds for themselves.
So easy. Is anyone even remotely willing to acknowledge the slightest possibility that Assange may be, in fact, a scumbag, and that raping women is just something that scumbags do?
Yepp.
As a remote, slight possibility.
So far, what info I could find about the events and the women in question make it a lot more likely that two women learn their treasure fuck has also had someone else around the same time, and it's surprisingly common in those cases for the two "cheated" women to band together against the guy and get some revenge. I think anyone with a somewhat interesting sex history has seen it happen.
Rape victims that twitter their rape experience as a great night the day after are... well... a little less common.
So until new evidence arises, my take is that it could have been a rape, but the chances are slight indeed.
I was wondering what it'd take for the same people who yell "censorship!" whenever someone proposes to restrict traffic for political, copyright or other legal reasons to come around with their own version of it.
Not routing to China is censorship based on political views, plain and simple.
"money issued from central banks" is a subset of money.
Enlighten me, which money in widespread use is not issued from a central bank?
For the sake of simplicity, let's talk about the scientology church instead. You think that, even not resorting to their peculiar techniques that to me seem brainwashing, none of its member is acting in good faith?
Again, I am not talking about members of any religion. I am talking about priests, always have in this entire discussion.
For a priest, I maintain my point that you can not be a good person and at the same time participate actively in the machinery of evil, promoting it and furthering its goals. If you were serious about being good, the first step would be to distance yourself, to stop actively spreading the taint. You can not play in the mud without getting dirty.
Whoever is doing it, such attacks are just plain wrong. Attacking infrastructure may be harmful and amounts to terrorism. That would apply even more so if transaction servers were hit.
Someone else summed it up quite well:
If the old guard has decided to play it dirty, so should we.
There are times when you have to decide if you want to be the moral winner, or the actual winner. You can sometimes be both, but not always. Or, as my driving instructor put it nicely, would you rather yield anyways, or have "he had the right of way" written on your gravestone?
While Julian Assange has done some great services, he is probably not the person to head such an organisation.
I disagree.
He made Wikileaks happen. It is high time that we choose our leaders based on having guts, standing up for what they believe in, and remaining reliably on the course they promised - instead of the current qualities of meandering around any issue, trying to not let anything stick to you and opportunistic opinion changes.
Julian doesn't make his agenda a secret, he is very open with his personal views. You may not like them, but you can hardly disagree with the leader of an organisation that is all for transparency being transparent himself.
Also don't forget that the publicity is Julian's life insurance. I'm not so certain he'd still be around without it. Both Wikileaks and Julian need to stay in the public spotlight now that they have made an enemy out of people who can make you disappear.
If you think someone else could make a better job, then have them show they can. There is plenty of room for Wikileaks competitors.
I love it out everyone is always able to point out the flaws in some action. Well, how about proposing a better alternative? You can always find something wrong in something, but by doing that you have not proven that it is not the best option available, merely that it isn't flawless.
It's simply a corollary of your thesis to make its flaw evident.
No it isn't. You equate "money" with "central bank" and that equation is false. Money is in universal use, some of it right and some wrong. You could equate it to language. Sure many a demagoge have used language to their evil ends, but that does not make language an evil system.
To stay within that context, the equivalent of what I say is something like "good people don't support propaganda and brainwashing" and from that you somehow jump to the conclusion of "good people do not use language". Sorry, that's not a reductio ad absurdum, it's a non sequitur.
Back to the original point, I never claimed that good people can not be religious. But you can't be a good person and a priest of the catholic church. You can use language, but you can't be a demagoge. You can use money, but you can't be a banker. See the difference?
Ok, then no really good people work to acquire money.
I fail to see how you jump to that conclusion. It's a very wide jump, so you'll have to enlighten me on the exact trajectory.
As for bankers: ideally banks should provide the means for people to succeed, a banker who believes the ideals is not evil. Probably he's an "useful idiot".
Good point. Yes, I will admit that some people who support evil systems are not themselves evil by conscious decision, but evil by dumbness. I still maintain that they are evil. In fact, people committing evil acts in the honest belief that they are doing something good are the worst kind.
Yet I would venture to guess that the "collective determination of society" would disagree with the point that churches are evil systems.
Does it? Give it time. At least over here in Europe, people have been leaving the churches for decades, and the trend is accelerating year after year. It appears that less and less people want to support the system. In fact, at least in Germany a lot of people are only members of the church because of an odd twist in the laws that makes you a member automatically if your parents are. If you had to actively sign up to become a church member, I'd predict the two major churches would be down to 10% of their current member count.
Lots and lots of people agree that many actions within the church are evil. Most believe it kind of balances out with all the good things the church does. Which is why both church and politics (our current government is a christian party) fight violently against the disclosure of the financial details, details like most of the good church institutions like kindergardens and hospitals being actually paid for by the government. Everyone I know who has learned about this has changed their opinion of the church.
The alleged "support" for the churches is mostly caused by tradition and misinformation. Give it time before you judge. Slavery wasn't abolished in a day, and neither was communism, fascism or anything else we today consider evil.
Tell me, Mr Atheist, what is "good" and what is "evil"?
Not on/., the subject is a little too complicated. There are plenty of philosophical discussions of this available in a search. The base summary in this context is that it has surprisingly little to do with religion, which at all times has more codified whatever the moral standards were at the time than defined them.
So, you'd take Mother Theresa (if she were still alive), and try her along side of rapists, child molesters, and torturers. And potentially sentence her to prison or worse?
Absolutely. That woman specifically was a walking definition of exploitation and misery. Have you seen any actual researched stuff on here? For the very short version, check out anything by Christopher Hitchens on her (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60). If you want to call him a nutjob, first take into account that on the matter of her sainthood, it was the Vatican himself who asked Hitchens to be the Advocatus Diaboli in her case.
I just want to get this straight. After all, she supported this "system of evil", as priests do.
She is very much an incarnation of this evil system. Getting hold of the weakest of the weak and instead of giving them treatment or at least easing their suffering, abusing them for your own "looking good" and feeding them religious lies in their weakest hours, over years and years on a large scale is certainly up there with torture and rape. And let's not forget the suffering that is caused by the utterly revolting rejection of both contraception and abortion.
Slashdot Mirror
Translates to
No, it is already in english, no need to translate at all.
If you want to interpret, be my guest, but don't expect that I or anyone else will consider your interpretation correct. I think I was plain and clear in my words, and no interpretation is really required.
People always forget about the second mission of the NSA - securing the government computing infrastructure. That's why they cough up stuff like SELinux, or their hardening manuals.
Putting a backdoor into windows would be stupid unless you at the same time make sure there is a backdoor-free version for government use. Ensuring that would mean no government office can ever buy a windows off-the-shelf, it all has to be coordinated centrally. At an operation that size, I'm not sure you could keep it a secret.
Securing windows against foreign attacks, on the other hand, makes a whole lot of sense if you expect it to be running government computers.
Not saying they didn't, as I don't know for sure. But it appears that the securing mission gives the more likely explanation compared to the backdoor idea.
Macs have never, ever been advertised as a gaming platform,
You really need to get out of that basement more often. Several Apple conferences, Steve Jobs Keynotes and other highly public events have happened in the recent years that went quite far to bring the Mac into public perception as a gaming platform. And while the market has always been small, the Mac does have a history of great games, even some Mac exclusives like Marathon that were ahead of their PC competition.
Sure, it has not been put forth so much as a gaming platform, compared to the PC, but "never, ever" is just stupid to say, and not true.
Can we keep seperate types of art seperate? There is no need to unify everything, just for the sake of doing it. The Mona Lisa is a great painting, I'm sure a novel about it would suck. Some books don't make good movies, and many movies would suck in book form. Likewise, while a few games make good movies and vice versa, the usual case is that they don't, so why try?
A movie is first and foremost about storytelling, in a carefully set up series of scenes, with a dramatic curve and a specific ending that everything in the movie is subtly linked to so that near the end you get the feeling of everything falling together like the pieces of a puzzle. Well, good movies anyway. It's about changing perspective, it can tell the story from various angles, leave storylines hanging for a while then return to them - there is a lot in the way how the story is told, in pacing and in letting the viewer know more than the protagonists on the screen.
Games are about decisions, reactions, about finding out clues and hints and about consequences. You are the protagonist, so even if they include cinematics of the evil guy planning his next move, the protagonist then knows about it. The pacing depends on you more than on the story. There are usually multiple routes and endings. It is a lot more about your character than about the story. And one of the challenges is that even the most meaningless random encounter could kill you, while in the movies we all know the hero never gets hurt except by the bad guy himself or one of his leutenants. All the nameless "random encounter" guys are just there as targets.
A good movie and a good game are not made following the same recipe. A good movie about a game, or a good game about a movie, will have little in common except the setting. Example: The Aliens and the Predator movies, and the AvP games (don't get me started about the AvP movies, they were crap). Great movies, great games, exactly because the games did not try to copy the movies but created their own world within the movie setting.
Uh, gamers don't use Macs. At all.
Don't use all-quantors, it makes it trivial to prove you wrong, because a single counter-example suffices.
I am a gamer, and there is no non-Mac computer in my home (anymore).
(although even the most pimped out Mac pales before a fully-loaded custom rig)
Which 0.0001% of gamers own. You, sir, are stuck in the 80s, when one needed a university degree to be a gamer because one pretty much had to build ones own machine and the global gaming market was a few million bucks. Today, "gamers" includes most of the population and I dare to say the top-50 or so games run perfectly well on a 5-year-old machine because they are called FarmVille and the like. Maybe WoW is on that list somewhere, but very likely it's the only game on that list requiring a 3D graphics card.
There's honestly no need for them to release a Mac version
True, most Mac users use BootCamp to run windows on their Mac for gaming purposes. For a "I want this" game, doing only a windows version will work. But, honestly, most games are in the "looks nice, maybe I'll take a look" category. If they are available for the Mac, I will buy them (I've bought quite a few indie games for the Mac, for example). If they are windows-only, chances are that I'd rather visit torrentz.com than Steam. And if it's not there, I'll probably forget about it. If you can't be arsed to make the game for my system, then I can't be arsed to get out my wallet.
Or, as someone else put it nicely - would you rather have 0.1% of the 90% market share, or 10% of the 5% market share?
uh right. Language error, sorry. The german word for "sine" is "Sinus".
But statistically, those annoying ads *work*. They wouldn't be used otherwise - I'm sure the advertising industry has done many studies of this.
Yes and no. Mind you, my marketing class has been more than 10 years ago, but I'm not sure if the basics have changed so much. True is that the marketing industry does invest a lot into research and studies. However, like in many other areas in business, that doesn't mean those results actually get applied. And while results of ad campaign get regularily checked, more often than not the results tell you whether it worked or not (i.e. sales increased) but not why. Which results in many, many legends that have no empirical support whatsoever, but a huge "nobody ever got fired for..." effect - basically, there are things you just do because if you don't and the campaign fails, everyone will blame it on you.
People will learn to just ignore unobtrusive advertising,
People are great at filtering out pretty much anything. It's just that the obtrusive stuff requires more subconscious processing power.
I don't know what comes next. Maybe sites in another year will start requiring users answer a simple question about the advert before they can access the content, to prove that attention really was paid.
Usually, things move in sinus-like waves. I don't know if we have reached the top yet, but I can hardly imagine how much worser it could get. So I imagine pretty soon things will start to move in the other direction, and we just may get the ad insanity under control again. Or things escalate further, until the counter-reaction is likewise strong and we will see a flat-out global ban on advertisement. Now that would be a sight to behold.
add animated GIFs to that list.
I started blocking ads when two things happened, pretty much simultaneously:
One, ad content took over a considerable part of the screen real estate and
two, ads started to distract from the actual content through animation, blinking, sound, etc.
I know advertisement is all about getting your attention, but it tries to do that in contexts where I don't want my attention diverted to something else. I don't mind advertisement on the WC or on the bus that much, it's not as if I had anything better to do there. But when I'm driving or browsing, I hate every single ad I encounter. Luckily, for browsing there is AdBlock.
And I don't like the whining, either. If you business model relies on ads, then your business model is broken. But if you absolutely want to give me ads, how about using text ads? I don't mind those, they are a ton less distracting, which greatly improves your chances of me actually clicking one instead of hating it.
Just as we have to suppress animal rage when encountering bad drivers, we should take a few breaths and step back to make more reasoned responses.
There is a german proverb that says "der Klügere gibt nach" - translates roughly to "the smarter one backs down".
There is a very popular extension of this proverb that goes "der Klügere gibt solange nach, bis er der Dümmere ist" - translated roughly: "the smarter one backs down so often that he ends up being the dumber one."
As with all things, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I am not a friend of DDoS attacks myself, just like I am not a friend of violence. And yet, if someone were to harm my girlfriend, I would not stand and watch and call the police. I would kill the motherfucker, right then and there. With whatever is available, my bare hands if necessary. And the same is true of the DDoS attacks currently. Until someone makes a better suggestion for payback, this is the best we have and better than doing nothing at all.
I think when some people see a bank site taken down, they may have fears of identity theft, late payment penalties, loss of access to gas at some unattended plastic-driven station in the middle of nowhere late at night etc...
I'm sure some white folks were afraid of being robbed, raped or "tainted" when so many black people made those sit-ins to protest for their rights. But should the ignorance of some prevent others from protesting? We don't think like that in the real world - why in the virtual?
Vote with your wallets, call email write or fax your bank or Paypal or Ebay,
It doesn't work like that in social networks and monopolies.
Try to work within the system
That doesn't work if it is the system itself you are protesting against. Apartheid in South Africa would have never been abolished if the blacks had at all times stayed within the then-valid laws.
Their antics just keep giving politicians reasons to clamp down on the internet. Way to go, idiots!
As if.
Politicians make up reasons if you don't give them some. It really doesn't make a difference. What do you suggest instead? Bending over and taking it like a man?
the *idea* behind wikileaks was good, but Assange is an Ass-hat with an overinflated ego, who needs to go.
Wikileaks needs and ass-hat with an overinflated ego to work at all. Very few of the couch-potatoes posting to /. would have the guts to do what he does and take the risks he takes.
If you check your history books, you will find that many of the heroes we celebrate today where ass-hats with overinflated egos.
You don't need a time machine. Standing up and preventing your government from doing these stunts again and again would do.
Who threw the first stone?
Some monkey in Africa, ca. 1,000,000 BC - why ?
You and the US can no longer be outraged at China after what the US has done.
So many false assumptions in such a short sentence. :-)
I'm a German living in Germany. I quite dislike most of what the US is doing these days, especially including the Wikileaks suppression. I'm quite a bit less outraged at the Chinese, who for all their faults at least aren't corrupt liars claiming the moral high grounds for themselves.
So easy. Is anyone even remotely willing to acknowledge the slightest possibility that Assange may be, in fact, a scumbag, and that raping women is just something that scumbags do?
Yepp.
As a remote, slight possibility.
So far, what info I could find about the events and the women in question make it a lot more likely that two women learn their treasure fuck has also had someone else around the same time, and it's surprisingly common in those cases for the two "cheated" women to band together against the guy and get some revenge. I think anyone with a somewhat interesting sex history has seen it happen.
Rape victims that twitter their rape experience as a great night the day after are... well... a little less common.
So until new evidence arises, my take is that it could have been a rape, but the chances are slight indeed.
I was wondering what it'd take for the same people who yell "censorship!" whenever someone proposes to restrict traffic for political, copyright or other legal reasons to come around with their own version of it.
Not routing to China is censorship based on political views, plain and simple.
"money issued from central banks" is a subset of money.
Enlighten me, which money in widespread use is not issued from a central bank?
For the sake of simplicity, let's talk about the scientology church instead. You think that, even not resorting to their peculiar techniques that to me seem brainwashing, none of its member is acting in good faith?
Again, I am not talking about members of any religion. I am talking about priests, always have in this entire discussion.
For a priest, I maintain my point that you can not be a good person and at the same time participate actively in the machinery of evil, promoting it and furthering its goals. If you were serious about being good, the first step would be to distance yourself, to stop actively spreading the taint. You can not play in the mud without getting dirty.
Whoever is doing it, such attacks are just plain wrong. Attacking infrastructure may be harmful and amounts to terrorism. That would apply even more so if transaction servers were hit.
Someone else summed it up quite well:
If the old guard has decided to play it dirty, so should we.
There are times when you have to decide if you want to be the moral winner, or the actual winner. You can sometimes be both, but not always. Or, as my driving instructor put it nicely, would you rather yield anyways, or have "he had the right of way" written on your gravestone?
While Julian Assange has done some great services, he is probably not the person to head such an organisation.
I disagree.
He made Wikileaks happen. It is high time that we choose our leaders based on having guts, standing up for what they believe in, and remaining reliably on the course they promised - instead of the current qualities of meandering around any issue, trying to not let anything stick to you and opportunistic opinion changes.
Julian doesn't make his agenda a secret, he is very open with his personal views. You may not like them, but you can hardly disagree with the leader of an organisation that is all for transparency being transparent himself.
Also don't forget that the publicity is Julian's life insurance. I'm not so certain he'd still be around without it. Both Wikileaks and Julian need to stay in the public spotlight now that they have made an enemy out of people who can make you disappear.
If you think someone else could make a better job, then have them show they can. There is plenty of room for Wikileaks competitors.
I love it out everyone is always able to point out the flaws in some action. Well, how about proposing a better alternative? You can always find something wrong in something, but by doing that you have not proven that it is not the best option available, merely that it isn't flawless.
It's simply a corollary of your thesis to make its flaw evident.
No it isn't. You equate "money" with "central bank" and that equation is false. Money is in universal use, some of it right and some wrong. You could equate it to language. Sure many a demagoge have used language to their evil ends, but that does not make language an evil system.
To stay within that context, the equivalent of what I say is something like "good people don't support propaganda and brainwashing" and from that you somehow jump to the conclusion of "good people do not use language". Sorry, that's not a reductio ad absurdum, it's a non sequitur.
Back to the original point, I never claimed that good people can not be religious. But you can't be a good person and a priest of the catholic church. You can use language, but you can't be a demagoge. You can use money, but you can't be a banker. See the difference?
Ok, then no really good people work to acquire money.
I fail to see how you jump to that conclusion. It's a very wide jump, so you'll have to enlighten me on the exact trajectory.
As for bankers: ideally banks should provide the means for people to succeed, a banker who believes the ideals is not evil. Probably he's an "useful idiot".
Good point. Yes, I will admit that some people who support evil systems are not themselves evil by conscious decision, but evil by dumbness. I still maintain that they are evil. In fact, people committing evil acts in the honest belief that they are doing something good are the worst kind.
Yet I would venture to guess that the "collective determination of society" would disagree with the point that churches are evil systems.
Does it? Give it time. At least over here in Europe, people have been leaving the churches for decades, and the trend is accelerating year after year. It appears that less and less people want to support the system. In fact, at least in Germany a lot of people are only members of the church because of an odd twist in the laws that makes you a member automatically if your parents are. If you had to actively sign up to become a church member, I'd predict the two major churches would be down to 10% of their current member count.
Lots and lots of people agree that many actions within the church are evil. Most believe it kind of balances out with all the good things the church does. Which is why both church and politics (our current government is a christian party) fight violently against the disclosure of the financial details, details like most of the good church institutions like kindergardens and hospitals being actually paid for by the government. Everyone I know who has learned about this has changed their opinion of the church.
The alleged "support" for the churches is mostly caused by tradition and misinformation. Give it time before you judge. Slavery wasn't abolished in a day, and neither was communism, fascism or anything else we today consider evil.
Tell me, Mr Atheist, what is "good" and what is "evil"?
Not on /., the subject is a little too complicated. There are plenty of philosophical discussions of this available in a search. The base summary in this context is that it has surprisingly little to do with religion, which at all times has more codified whatever the moral standards were at the time than defined them.
So, you'd take Mother Theresa (if she were still alive), and try her along side of rapists, child molesters, and torturers. And potentially sentence her to prison or worse?
Absolutely. That woman specifically was a walking definition of exploitation and misery. Have you seen any actual researched stuff on here? For the very short version, check out anything by Christopher Hitchens on her (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60). If you want to call him a nutjob, first take into account that on the matter of her sainthood, it was the Vatican himself who asked Hitchens to be the Advocatus Diaboli in her case.
I just want to get this straight. After all, she supported this "system of evil", as priests do.
She is very much an incarnation of this evil system. Getting hold of the weakest of the weak and instead of giving them treatment or at least easing their suffering, abusing them for your own "looking good" and feeding them religious lies in their weakest hours, over years and years on a large scale is certainly up there with torture and rape. And let's not forget the suffering that is caused by the utterly revolting rejection of both contraception and abortion.