> "the US box office doesn't seem to be suffering too much as it is about to record its best year ever."
Source? (I remember the last time I saw that claim on Slashdot, and discovered it was wrong.)
Yeah, I think you've understood the plot of Battlfield 4 perfectly.
"Battlefield 4's single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China's current government. If he succeeds, Chang will have full support from the Russians, bringing China to the brink of war with the United States."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_4#Setting_and_characters
> "It's a populist screed about how America is going to help the first influential person with "dreams of democracy" make a coup d'etat against the government of China."
Really? That's not what the wikipedia page says --
"Battlefield 4's single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have beem running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China's current government. If he succeeds, Chang will have full support from the Russians, bringing China to the brink of war with the United States... the player hears their commanding officer, Captain Garrison, talking over the phone about the intel: that Admiral Chang is planning a military coup d'état, and if he succeeds, he will gain full Russian support, confirming an earlier report from an asset in China.[10][11][25] Tombstone returns to the USS Valkyrie, an amphibious assault carrier en route to China's eastern coast.[25] On board, Garrison informs them of the assassination of Chinese presidential candidate Jin Jié; and how Chang convinced the Chinese that the United States was responsible." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_4#Setting_and_characters
Yeah, I heard about the Amazon-Disney takeaway. That isn't what caused the decline, which began in the exact year the Napster came along.
I know I can always count on BoingBoing to give a dumb opinion about cpoyright and DRM. Cory Doctorow has always been a huge advocate for giving media away. Of course, there's some major flaws in Doctorow's philosophy. For one thing: Doctorow is a book author and he makes a lot of money from the BoingBoing blog. Most people want to read books in their printed form (not pirated off the internet). It's not hard to figure out that, in the context of a public that prefers printed books, that book authors would be less threatened by piracy than creators of other digital media (for example, software ONLY runs on computers, there isn't a "printed" form that people think is superior; similarly with music: nobody really wants those flat pieces of plastic called CDs, they want their music on the computer or media player).
Ergo, Doctorow is going to have less to lose by transitioning to the "give everything away" model. Plus, he gets lots of popularity based on his opinions (which translates to lots of extra sales). But what works for one author doesn't necessarily work for an industry. As far as his co-ownership of the BoingBoing blog - well, blogs make money by creating streams of information and getting ad-revenue. They have virtually nothing to lose by promoting the "free for all" because users have to keep coming back to their site over and over for the latest stuff - which means ad revenue. I'd like to see how happy Doctorow would be if every single person who visited BoingBoing used an ad-blocker and then he and his friends would have to foot the bill for their heavy bandwidth usage.
> "The music and movie industries are in decline simply because they won't provide content their customers want in the form their customers want it."
Sounds like a lot of feel-good pirate nonsense. The music industry started selling DRM-free music years ago. It continues to decline. I think it's time to all admit to yourselves that *some* people will pay for stuff and some people are going to try to avoid spending money on music and movies so they can by expensive clothes, iPhones, expensive laptops, and other physical stuff. I actually have a couple friends who are pirates and they say stuff like "Why do you pay for stuff you can get for free (via piracy)?" Translation: You're stupid if you pay for digital stuff because everything digital can be stolen off the internet.
Yawn. Anther anti-DRM rant on Slashdot. The summary is boring and looks like Slashdot just randomly picked a comment from any article on piracy from within the past 15 years and reposted it. The article itself isn't even all that well thought out. Honestly, it looks kind-of amateurish. It talks about how revenues went up after DRM was removed. Of course, it ignores the fact that music has always had a giant analog hole, so there's an easy way to bypass any DRM.
It'd be nice if these articles were a little less narrow minded, a little less circle-jerkish, and would, at least, acknowledge the fact that piracy has been a huge problem for the industry. Looking at the industry's decline in revenue, I can't say that Jack Valenti's statement about the Boston Strangler looks all that silly anymore. See this graph to understand what I'm talking about (and this graph is a few years old, I'm sure it looks even worse than this, now): http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg
I wish feminism was restricted to "women==people" (or "women=people"). Saying it is a "radical notion" seems rather hyperbolic. (Case in point: lookup the death rates for men, women, and children on the Titianic. Even back in the early 1900s, women and children were far more likely to live than men were because women and children were given priority access to the life boats. I guess when threatened with death, you save your "possessions" rather than people. [/sarcasm].) http://optional.is/required/2012/04/25/titanic-visualized/
My point being: this notion that popular society thinks women aren't persons is silly hyperbole.
I was with you, but the twitter link you provided doesn't show any examples of trying to get people fired from their jobs. At worst, I saw one guy say that he would use it as a hiring blacklist.
I detected a flaw in your idea: "If enough users launch it". There's virtually no benefit for anyone to install this app except to make a very tiny contribution to undermining Facebook's algorithm (while eating up your wireless data), and most people don't really care enough about that to do the work. Your idea seems like a clever way to undermine Facebooks algorithms, but it won't actually be used widely enough to make a dent in the system, which means it's gives people false hope that you this thing can be undermined. Personally, I'm actually less bothered by the fact that Facebook can infer income based on web-browsing habits, and I'm more bothered by the fact that it can be patented. It makes me want to destroy the patent system, because if stuff like this can be patented, our patent system is broken.
Holding a gun to people's heads and demanding money does not make you liked.
Oh, is that the analogy we're using now? Remind me again when musicians "held a gun to their fans heads and demanded money". Oh right - copyright works the same way that the entire merchandise market works: if you want something you pay for it, if you don't want it you don't pay (and you don't get the stuff). Saying that musicians held a gun to people's heads and demanded money is about as ridiculous as saying every single store holds a gun to your head and demands money (because they won't give you their merchandise for free). I don't know what universe people live in where "they won't give me their stuff for free = they hold a gun to my head and demand money". It's a retarded analogy and it's meant to elicit sympathy for pirates (or, to continue the analogy, shoplifters).
I heard an interview with him, and it's worth pointing out that just because you have gene(s) that predispose you to something doesn't mean it's a random roll of the dice whether you get it or not. There's an interaction between genes and environment (it's not a simple "is it nature or nurture?"). In his case, the psychopathic tendencies only come out if you have a bad childhood. In other words, if two children have bad childhoods, the one with the bad genes will end up being truly bad, but the one with the good genes ends up without the psychopathic tendencies. But, if both children have good nurturing childhoods, your genes don't matter so much.
I always hated that quote because it presumes so much. From a backward-looking perspective (i.e. the winners), perhaps things did follow that progression. But, the reality of the situation tends to follow a progression more like:
(Step 1) They ignore you. (90% chance you fail after this step, 10% chance you progress to step 2)
(Step 2) They laugh at you. (90% chance you fail after this step, 10% chance you progress to step 3)
(Step 3) They fight you. (90% chance you fail after this step, 10% chance you progress to step 4)
(Step 4) You win. (Congruatulations, you're part of the 0.1%)
I'm sure there are plenty of "free energy" device creators who use that original quote to build-up their confidence that their device is going to revolutionize the world. (Not that I'm comparing solar to "free energy", I'm just pointing out the deficiencies of that quote.)
If children are so great, then why do we spend so much money on them, but get so little labor out of them? (i.e. from a national/economic standpoint, children are a money pit for decades. But, once they mature, they do become productive. I feel much the same way about a lot of technologies. If you're going to judge a technology on the basis of whether it's a net-positive in the short term, you'll be brainlessly following short term incentives and undermining your long term future.)
Out of curiosity, do you think that Red Cross employees are aliens from another planet, or do you think that Red Cross employees in Germany might've been Germans and that they might've sympathized with the Nazis? It just seems like a strange argument to make - that German Red Cross employees should be impervious to being swept up in the ideas of "normal" Germans, and that the International Red Cross is responsible for the behavior of their German employees during the Second World War.
I'm actually thinking that IBM (a non-German company who helped Germany) and BMW (a German company who built weapons for the Nazis) are actually more culpable for harm done during WW2 than the Red Cross is. (I assume you're still boycotting them.)
Personally, I was pretty annoyed that the Red Cross was offering first aid to Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Though, in their defense, they have a policy of taking no sides in a conflict, and I would suppose that it might help protect them from being killed by those reprehensible Jihadis.
Considering that the Silk Road won't stop the Drug War (it might actually intensify it), I'd suggest that you work on getting the laws changed and getting laws changed requires changing people's minds (there are still plenty of people who support the drug war). That's the proper way to do it. And let's not forget that the Silk Road also offers other illegal services besides the drugs. The last guy who ran the Silk Road used it to hire hitmen to kill two different people.
This article only goes to prove that large inequalities in wealth don't lead to anything good. The Arab market is chasing the ultra-rich, because that's where the money is at. If money were distributed more equitably, the car manufacturers would work on things that actually move humanity forward (like producing better technology). This kind of opulence just goes to show that when the market is twisted to chase after the ultra-rich (because large wealth inequalities exist), it goes to nothing good - just diamonds and opulence and conspicuous consumption designed to let princes show off how big their "dick" is. (Yeah, I can already hear the Republicans saying that mining diamonds produces jobs - but they are worthless, non-helping-humanity-move-forward kind of jobs. We are rich not because of the amount of rocks we dig out of the ground, but we are rich because of our technology.)
It sounds to me like liberal policies designed to reduce wealth inequalities are the only thing that will move humanity forward.
The argument in the summary is absolutely awful. Here's why:
First, let's start with two facts, and let's assume they are true: "the US has increased its crude production by about 2 million barrels a day" and "Iran's oil exports have been cut in half since 2011 (PDF), from 2.5 million barrels per day to a bit more than 1 million today". The implication in the summary is that Iran's oil production was reduced because the US increased oil production. Let's think about this for a second. This argument would make sense if all three of these claims were true: (1) Iran and the US were the only oil producers in the world, (2) The US was the only oil consumer in the world, (3) US oil consumption remained stable over the past two years. None of these claims are true. First, oil is a global commodity - there are plenty of producers and plenty of consumers. To put this in context, the global oil production is about 80-90 million barrels per day ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production ). So, why would it be true that an increase in 2 million barrels per day in the US would lead directly to a 1.5 million barrel reduction in Iran? Even worse, the US does not purchase any oil from Iran.(though there could be indirect effects, for example, a reduction in US oil purchasing could result in other nations purchasing more oil from Saudi Arabia or Canada, thus reducing their need to buy from Iran). If this is an indirect effect, then we would expect all oil-producing nations (*not* just Iran) to have a small reduction in oil sales (i.e. Saudi Arabia and Canada and Venezuela and other net-oil-export nations would all share in the decline).
In short, it's absolutely absurd to tie an increase of 2 million barrels/oil per day in the US to a 1.5 million barrel/oil per day sales reduction in Iran. These two things don't have any cause-and-effect relationship. They are merely correlated in time. (And I'd bet $100 that if the US never did any fracking, Iran would see the exact same decline in oil production.)
I can see the political implications of making this claim though: it allows (pro-oil) Republicans to pretend that fracking (which they support) resulted in forcing Iran (the country they hate) into a weaker position which pressures them to negotiate with the US. This allows them to take credit for Iran coming to the negotiating table while also undermining any anti-fracking talk. In short: if you damn liberals try to stop fracking, you're helping "Death to America" Iran. Why do you hate freedom?
Your argument is awful. This is not a sexbot (and yes, I read your arguments in this thread). Not only is a CGI of a child not a sexbot (because the CGI child is not engaging in any sexual talk or behavior whatsoever), but if you believe that, then I guess you'd also believe that a sting operation involving a cop dressed like a prostitute means "the police are making prostitutes!" - as if the cop was actually engaging in sexual acts for money. Similarly, if your argument held any weight, it would mean that parents should be held liable if a pedophile is attracted to their child - because they brought their child out in public or some nonsense.
> "I fucking hate child sex abuse. I'm one of those bleeding heart feminists."
I don't understand what those sentences have to do with each other, unless you think that only feminists hate child abuse.
It's both. On the topic of "natural talent", there's been a lot of DNA studies on athletic performance. There's actually a lot of genes involved. Some genes give you extra red-blood cells. Other genes cause your body to respond to training (i.e. if you train for 10 weeks, you'll get better gains in athletic performance than someone who trains for 10 weeks but has worse genes). In the case of athleticism, it's not just about interest and putting your time in. I don't know if "math skill" is similar, but it's at least worth pointing out that we don't know certain things about what makes a top performer. We shouldn't jump to conclusions about it all being about "interest" and "putting the time in".
Well, I guess we know who the conservatives are on Slashdot, now. It amazing to see how much they complain when criticism is aimed at rich people who are swaying elections in directions that they appreciate.
I'm confused about what the article is saying. Here's an excerpt:
Lavabit gave up the encryption keys after the government obtained court orders – including a grand jury subpoena and a stored communications act –and an authorised search warrant. The court denied Lavabit's motion to quash the warrants, and when the company failed to do so by the stipulated deadline, the court held Lavabit in contempt.
"The district court's contempt holding should be reversed, because the underlying orders requiring Lavabit to disclose its private keys imposed an unreasonable burden on the company. Although innocent third parties have a duty to assist law enforcement agents in their investigations, they also have a right not to be compelled "to render assistance without limitation regardless of the burden involved", ACLU said in its brief.
The first sentence seems to say that Lavabit would give up the encryption keys of specific users in response to a warrant. But, then the next few sentences seem to say that Lavabit fought the warrants and then ended up in "contempt of court" and argues that giving up the encryption keys "imposed an unreasonable burden on the company". (Presumably, giving up the encryption details of any particular client, even in response to a warrant could be considered to be "unreasonable".)
I'm a little confused because if Lavabit refused to give-up encryption keys of specific users in response to a warrant (under the argument that compromising their service in response to a warrant would render the "secure" part of their email service useless), then I'd side with the government.
But if the government wanted the encryption details which would give them access to the emails of all their users, then I'd side with Lavabit.
Or maybe Lavabit had an encryption system that was the same for every user - meaning giving up the encryption key for any user would compromise all users, then I'd think that Lavabit did a crappy job of securing the emails and I don't really feel that bad for them.
Lavabit closed its service in August after the US authorities demanded he hand over the encryption keys for its entire service – a move Levison said would have compromised the personal details of his 40,000 clients.
Are they saying that the personal details (e.g. the name of the user, etc) but not the emails themselves were at risk if someone had the encryption key? So it's the encryption key for the metadata about their users? (Which wouldn't surprise me if they had one encryption scheme for their database of users, though I'd wonder how the government got the encrypted database of Lavabit's users.)
So, because the US prevented US citizens from gambling online in Antigua, now Antiqua has the right to sell my (and everyone else's) copyrighted works to anyone in the world? That's fucking retarded.
Of course, what will make up the $21 million won't be goods sold at anything like US prices. For example, that $9.99 album you just bought on iTunes? Maybe it will be $0.99. Or less.
On the other hand, since there's nothing in it for Antuqua (beyond the initial $21 million), I don't see how they will care about selling intellectual property at cheap prices. I know pirates love the idea of Antigua selling giving stuff away or selling it for a penny, but what's the incentive (other than spite) for Antigua to sell all this stuff for cheap? It would still cost a fortune to setup the store for the stuff to get sold in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
> "the US box office doesn't seem to be suffering too much as it is about to record its best year ever."
Source? (I remember the last time I saw that claim on Slashdot, and discovered it was wrong.)
Yeah, I think you've understood the plot of Battlfield 4 perfectly.
"Battlefield 4's single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China's current government. If he succeeds, Chang will have full support from the Russians, bringing China to the brink of war with the United States." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_4#Setting_and_characters
> "It's a populist screed about how America is going to help the first influential person with "dreams of democracy" make a coup d'etat against the government of China."
Really? That's not what the wikipedia page says --
"Battlefield 4's single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have beem running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China's current government. If he succeeds, Chang will have full support from the Russians, bringing China to the brink of war with the United States... the player hears their commanding officer, Captain Garrison, talking over the phone about the intel: that Admiral Chang is planning a military coup d'état, and if he succeeds, he will gain full Russian support, confirming an earlier report from an asset in China.[10][11][25] Tombstone returns to the USS Valkyrie, an amphibious assault carrier en route to China's eastern coast.[25] On board, Garrison informs them of the assassination of Chinese presidential candidate Jin Jié; and how Chang convinced the Chinese that the United States was responsible." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_4#Setting_and_characters
Uh, I'm pretty sure you haven't made any effort to understand the plot of Battlefield 4.
Yeah, I heard about the Amazon-Disney takeaway. That isn't what caused the decline, which began in the exact year the Napster came along.
I know I can always count on BoingBoing to give a dumb opinion about cpoyright and DRM. Cory Doctorow has always been a huge advocate for giving media away. Of course, there's some major flaws in Doctorow's philosophy. For one thing: Doctorow is a book author and he makes a lot of money from the BoingBoing blog. Most people want to read books in their printed form (not pirated off the internet). It's not hard to figure out that, in the context of a public that prefers printed books, that book authors would be less threatened by piracy than creators of other digital media (for example, software ONLY runs on computers, there isn't a "printed" form that people think is superior; similarly with music: nobody really wants those flat pieces of plastic called CDs, they want their music on the computer or media player).
Source: "Slashdot: In a new Rasmussen poll, 75% of American adults would rather read a book in traditional print format than in an ebook format. Only 15% prefer the ebook format (the other 10% are undecided)." http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/21/1143210/poll-shows-that-75-prefer-printed-books-to-ebooks
Ergo, Doctorow is going to have less to lose by transitioning to the "give everything away" model. Plus, he gets lots of popularity based on his opinions (which translates to lots of extra sales). But what works for one author doesn't necessarily work for an industry. As far as his co-ownership of the BoingBoing blog - well, blogs make money by creating streams of information and getting ad-revenue. They have virtually nothing to lose by promoting the "free for all" because users have to keep coming back to their site over and over for the latest stuff - which means ad revenue. I'd like to see how happy Doctorow would be if every single person who visited BoingBoing used an ad-blocker and then he and his friends would have to foot the bill for their heavy bandwidth usage.
> "The music and movie industries are in decline simply because they won't provide content their customers want in the form their customers want it."
Sounds like a lot of feel-good pirate nonsense. The music industry started selling DRM-free music years ago. It continues to decline. I think it's time to all admit to yourselves that *some* people will pay for stuff and some people are going to try to avoid spending money on music and movies so they can by expensive clothes, iPhones, expensive laptops, and other physical stuff. I actually have a couple friends who are pirates and they say stuff like "Why do you pay for stuff you can get for free (via piracy)?" Translation: You're stupid if you pay for digital stuff because everything digital can be stolen off the internet.
Yawn. Anther anti-DRM rant on Slashdot. The summary is boring and looks like Slashdot just randomly picked a comment from any article on piracy from within the past 15 years and reposted it. The article itself isn't even all that well thought out. Honestly, it looks kind-of amateurish. It talks about how revenues went up after DRM was removed. Of course, it ignores the fact that music has always had a giant analog hole, so there's an easy way to bypass any DRM.
It'd be nice if these articles were a little less narrow minded, a little less circle-jerkish, and would, at least, acknowledge the fact that piracy has been a huge problem for the industry. Looking at the industry's decline in revenue, I can't say that Jack Valenti's statement about the Boston Strangler looks all that silly anymore. See this graph to understand what I'm talking about (and this graph is a few years old, I'm sure it looks even worse than this, now): http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg
I wish feminism was restricted to "women==people" (or "women=people"). Saying it is a "radical notion" seems rather hyperbolic. (Case in point: lookup the death rates for men, women, and children on the Titianic. Even back in the early 1900s, women and children were far more likely to live than men were because women and children were given priority access to the life boats. I guess when threatened with death, you save your "possessions" rather than people. [/sarcasm].) http://optional.is/required/2012/04/25/titanic-visualized/
My point being: this notion that popular society thinks women aren't persons is silly hyperbole.
I was with you, but the twitter link you provided doesn't show any examples of trying to get people fired from their jobs. At worst, I saw one guy say that he would use it as a hiring blacklist.
I detected a flaw in your idea: "If enough users launch it". There's virtually no benefit for anyone to install this app except to make a very tiny contribution to undermining Facebook's algorithm (while eating up your wireless data), and most people don't really care enough about that to do the work. Your idea seems like a clever way to undermine Facebooks algorithms, but it won't actually be used widely enough to make a dent in the system, which means it's gives people false hope that you this thing can be undermined. Personally, I'm actually less bothered by the fact that Facebook can infer income based on web-browsing habits, and I'm more bothered by the fact that it can be patented. It makes me want to destroy the patent system, because if stuff like this can be patented, our patent system is broken.
Holding a gun to people's heads and demanding money does not make you liked.
Oh, is that the analogy we're using now? Remind me again when musicians "held a gun to their fans heads and demanded money". Oh right - copyright works the same way that the entire merchandise market works: if you want something you pay for it, if you don't want it you don't pay (and you don't get the stuff). Saying that musicians held a gun to people's heads and demanded money is about as ridiculous as saying every single store holds a gun to your head and demands money (because they won't give you their merchandise for free). I don't know what universe people live in where "they won't give me their stuff for free = they hold a gun to my head and demand money". It's a retarded analogy and it's meant to elicit sympathy for pirates (or, to continue the analogy, shoplifters).
They were at $90 five months ago. (Not sure why you're modded as "informative" when you're inaccurate.) https://coinbase.com/charts
I heard an interview with him, and it's worth pointing out that just because you have gene(s) that predispose you to something doesn't mean it's a random roll of the dice whether you get it or not. There's an interaction between genes and environment (it's not a simple "is it nature or nurture?"). In his case, the psychopathic tendencies only come out if you have a bad childhood. In other words, if two children have bad childhoods, the one with the bad genes will end up being truly bad, but the one with the good genes ends up without the psychopathic tendencies. But, if both children have good nurturing childhoods, your genes don't matter so much.
I always hated that quote because it presumes so much. From a backward-looking perspective (i.e. the winners), perhaps things did follow that progression. But, the reality of the situation tends to follow a progression more like:
(Step 1) They ignore you. (90% chance you fail after this step, 10% chance you progress to step 2)
(Step 2) They laugh at you. (90% chance you fail after this step, 10% chance you progress to step 3)
(Step 3) They fight you. (90% chance you fail after this step, 10% chance you progress to step 4)
(Step 4) You win. (Congruatulations, you're part of the 0.1%)
I'm sure there are plenty of "free energy" device creators who use that original quote to build-up their confidence that their device is going to revolutionize the world. (Not that I'm comparing solar to "free energy", I'm just pointing out the deficiencies of that quote.)
If children are so great, then why do we spend so much money on them, but get so little labor out of them? (i.e. from a national/economic standpoint, children are a money pit for decades. But, once they mature, they do become productive. I feel much the same way about a lot of technologies. If you're going to judge a technology on the basis of whether it's a net-positive in the short term, you'll be brainlessly following short term incentives and undermining your long term future.)
Out of curiosity, do you think that Red Cross employees are aliens from another planet, or do you think that Red Cross employees in Germany might've been Germans and that they might've sympathized with the Nazis? It just seems like a strange argument to make - that German Red Cross employees should be impervious to being swept up in the ideas of "normal" Germans, and that the International Red Cross is responsible for the behavior of their German employees during the Second World War.
I'm actually thinking that IBM (a non-German company who helped Germany) and BMW (a German company who built weapons for the Nazis) are actually more culpable for harm done during WW2 than the Red Cross is. (I assume you're still boycotting them.)
Personally, I was pretty annoyed that the Red Cross was offering first aid to Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Though, in their defense, they have a policy of taking no sides in a conflict, and I would suppose that it might help protect them from being killed by those reprehensible Jihadis.
"Newly surfaced legal documents say that the 29-year-old ordered not one but two hits on former associates." Source: http://gizmodo.com/actually-the-alleged-silk-road-kingpin-hired-a-hitman-1440610170
Considering that the Silk Road won't stop the Drug War (it might actually intensify it), I'd suggest that you work on getting the laws changed and getting laws changed requires changing people's minds (there are still plenty of people who support the drug war). That's the proper way to do it. And let's not forget that the Silk Road also offers other illegal services besides the drugs. The last guy who ran the Silk Road used it to hire hitmen to kill two different people.
This article only goes to prove that large inequalities in wealth don't lead to anything good. The Arab market is chasing the ultra-rich, because that's where the money is at. If money were distributed more equitably, the car manufacturers would work on things that actually move humanity forward (like producing better technology). This kind of opulence just goes to show that when the market is twisted to chase after the ultra-rich (because large wealth inequalities exist), it goes to nothing good - just diamonds and opulence and conspicuous consumption designed to let princes show off how big their "dick" is. (Yeah, I can already hear the Republicans saying that mining diamonds produces jobs - but they are worthless, non-helping-humanity-move-forward kind of jobs. We are rich not because of the amount of rocks we dig out of the ground, but we are rich because of our technology.)
It sounds to me like liberal policies designed to reduce wealth inequalities are the only thing that will move humanity forward.
On a related note:
TED Talk on Income Inequality by Nick Hanauer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIhOXCgSunc
TED Talk: Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
The argument in the summary is absolutely awful. Here's why:
First, let's start with two facts, and let's assume they are true: "the US has increased its crude production by about 2 million barrels a day" and "Iran's oil exports have been cut in half since 2011 (PDF), from 2.5 million barrels per day to a bit more than 1 million today". The implication in the summary is that Iran's oil production was reduced because the US increased oil production. Let's think about this for a second. This argument would make sense if all three of these claims were true: (1) Iran and the US were the only oil producers in the world, (2) The US was the only oil consumer in the world, (3) US oil consumption remained stable over the past two years. None of these claims are true. First, oil is a global commodity - there are plenty of producers and plenty of consumers. To put this in context, the global oil production is about 80-90 million barrels per day ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production ). So, why would it be true that an increase in 2 million barrels per day in the US would lead directly to a 1.5 million barrel reduction in Iran? Even worse, the US does not purchase any oil from Iran.(though there could be indirect effects, for example, a reduction in US oil purchasing could result in other nations purchasing more oil from Saudi Arabia or Canada, thus reducing their need to buy from Iran). If this is an indirect effect, then we would expect all oil-producing nations (*not* just Iran) to have a small reduction in oil sales (i.e. Saudi Arabia and Canada and Venezuela and other net-oil-export nations would all share in the decline).
In short, it's absolutely absurd to tie an increase of 2 million barrels/oil per day in the US to a 1.5 million barrel/oil per day sales reduction in Iran. These two things don't have any cause-and-effect relationship. They are merely correlated in time. (And I'd bet $100 that if the US never did any fracking, Iran would see the exact same decline in oil production.)
I can see the political implications of making this claim though: it allows (pro-oil) Republicans to pretend that fracking (which they support) resulted in forcing Iran (the country they hate) into a weaker position which pressures them to negotiate with the US. This allows them to take credit for Iran coming to the negotiating table while also undermining any anti-fracking talk. In short: if you damn liberals try to stop fracking, you're helping "Death to America" Iran. Why do you hate freedom?
Your argument is awful. This is not a sexbot (and yes, I read your arguments in this thread). Not only is a CGI of a child not a sexbot (because the CGI child is not engaging in any sexual talk or behavior whatsoever), but if you believe that, then I guess you'd also believe that a sting operation involving a cop dressed like a prostitute means "the police are making prostitutes!" - as if the cop was actually engaging in sexual acts for money. Similarly, if your argument held any weight, it would mean that parents should be held liable if a pedophile is attracted to their child - because they brought their child out in public or some nonsense.
> "I fucking hate child sex abuse. I'm one of those bleeding heart feminists."
I don't understand what those sentences have to do with each other, unless you think that only feminists hate child abuse.
It's both. On the topic of "natural talent", there's been a lot of DNA studies on athletic performance. There's actually a lot of genes involved. Some genes give you extra red-blood cells. Other genes cause your body to respond to training (i.e. if you train for 10 weeks, you'll get better gains in athletic performance than someone who trains for 10 weeks but has worse genes). In the case of athleticism, it's not just about interest and putting your time in. I don't know if "math skill" is similar, but it's at least worth pointing out that we don't know certain things about what makes a top performer. We shouldn't jump to conclusions about it all being about "interest" and "putting the time in".
A recent podcast on the interplay between genetic and athletics: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.html
An NPR interview with the same author: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/05/209160709/talent-or-skill-honing-in-on-the-elusive-sports-gene
Colorado Springs is 600 feet higher than Boulder, which would explain a lot of their craziness.
Well, I guess we know who the conservatives are on Slashdot, now. It amazing to see how much they complain when criticism is aimed at rich people who are swaying elections in directions that they appreciate.
Lavabit gave up the encryption keys after the government obtained court orders – including a grand jury subpoena and a stored communications act –and an authorised search warrant. The court denied Lavabit's motion to quash the warrants, and when the company failed to do so by the stipulated deadline, the court held Lavabit in contempt.
"The district court's contempt holding should be reversed, because the underlying orders requiring Lavabit to disclose its private keys imposed an unreasonable burden on the company. Although innocent third parties have a duty to assist law enforcement agents in their investigations, they also have a right not to be compelled "to render assistance without limitation regardless of the burden involved", ACLU said in its brief.
The first sentence seems to say that Lavabit would give up the encryption keys of specific users in response to a warrant. But, then the next few sentences seem to say that Lavabit fought the warrants and then ended up in "contempt of court" and argues that giving up the encryption keys "imposed an unreasonable burden on the company". (Presumably, giving up the encryption details of any particular client, even in response to a warrant could be considered to be "unreasonable".)
I'm a little confused because if Lavabit refused to give-up encryption keys of specific users in response to a warrant (under the argument that compromising their service in response to a warrant would render the "secure" part of their email service useless), then I'd side with the government.
But if the government wanted the encryption details which would give them access to the emails of all their users, then I'd side with Lavabit.
Or maybe Lavabit had an encryption system that was the same for every user - meaning giving up the encryption key for any user would compromise all users, then I'd think that Lavabit did a crappy job of securing the emails and I don't really feel that bad for them.
Lavabit closed its service in August after the US authorities demanded he hand over the encryption keys for its entire service – a move Levison said would have compromised the personal details of his 40,000 clients.
Are they saying that the personal details (e.g. the name of the user, etc) but not the emails themselves were at risk if someone had the encryption key? So it's the encryption key for the metadata about their users? (Which wouldn't surprise me if they had one encryption scheme for their database of users, though I'd wonder how the government got the encrypted database of Lavabit's users.)
Of course, what will make up the $21 million won't be goods sold at anything like US prices. For example, that $9.99 album you just bought on iTunes? Maybe it will be $0.99. Or less.
On the other hand, since there's nothing in it for Antuqua (beyond the initial $21 million), I don't see how they will care about selling intellectual property at cheap prices. I know pirates love the idea of Antigua selling giving stuff away or selling it for a penny, but what's the incentive (other than spite) for Antigua to sell all this stuff for cheap? It would still cost a fortune to setup the store for the stuff to get sold in the first place.