I advise you strongly to abort your comments criticizing the government in any form, in any forum.
Ridicule is the psychological weapon of the supporters of unchecked authority. If they do not find you here on Slashdot they will identify you indirectly in society--in public, at pubs, at your job, in any social forum which you find.
Do yourself a favor. Give in to the unquestionable authority of those in power. They know what is best for you. You will only earn yourself a life of misery should you ever manage to make a real argument.
There is no underground movement to overthrow them. There is only an above-ground movement to continually keep them in their place by asking them upon what authority or justification they continue to exercise their abuse of power.
I can't expect you to understand. With only 227 comments to your name you are a new-comer to this line of thought. Better for you to give up now than endure the targeted harassment which will come your way.
Do not dare to question the actions nor the motives of the current government administration, or indeed any government administration.
The AC trolls will employ all tactics of ridicule to jump all over you. Lest you become a target, do not pursue your course of action.
For a classic demonstration, see my comments on the the EFF's latest action. This is not just a special case. This is the kind of resistance which I have received for years.
Thank people like D-side, CryptoCat (aka TenBaseT), and siglite on the Undernet IRC network. These people are self-important, self-secure, and they will stop at nothing to attack their opposition using any means possible.
Rather than continue to hide behind the curtain of terrorists, let's consider who else is making international telephone calls:
Any international business. Insurance companies, military contractors, GM, Ford, pharmaceutical companies Colleges and Universities. Checking references for international applicants. Military. Yes, every phone call that Johnny gets to make home is probably being listened to (but we really already knew that) Embassies. No political motivation here, eh? Vacationers. Calling family back home. Family. Plenty of people in the US have family or in-laws who live in Europe.
No. I'm not frightened by "big brother" surveilling. I'm disappointed and suspicious that it's being done so far under the table.
But at least the people who support it so staunchly should quit using the buzzword "terrorist" to rile up the troops. It's getting to be so overused that it is losing its effect.
In many US cities "public intoxication" is a perfectly legal reason to detain someone.
In many localities a public intox detention carries a minimum of 8 hour "drying out" period in detention and no breathalyzer is necessary. By comparison, a "driving under the influence" charge with a BAC lower than the legal limit for intoxication will let people out of detention in as little as 2 hours.
Don't feel so safe doing the right thing and walking home.
You can speak out against the government without fear of retribution from the government
Oh? Can you now? Look at the number of times I've been trolled by ACs using blatantly offensive material, grade-school type insults, and the sneer of political superiority in this topic alone.
You may be able to speak out against the government here in the US but the fear of retribution is every bit as real here as it is anywhere else. In any documented forum the sheer number of the AC attacks lined against me, coupled with their particular form of sneering and hate, could probably be enough to file a lawsuit of harassment.
Don't know. What I do know is the current set of evidence relies far too much on subjective interpretation and, in some cases, outright misrepresentation. I don't have access to the Congressional archives or the intelligence community papers. Heck, even the 9/11 Commission couldn't get access to everything they wanted. If they couldn't then how can anyone just blindly accept their conclusions to be perfect fact when even the Commission recognizes that there was plenty of information withheld?
Too many questions. Too many questions. If ObL was, truly, involved then there's no way that he was exclusively involved. Probably find money interests tying half the UN to the event if you could get all the real data.
As far as I understand, air traffic control is usually automatically alerted when an airliner gets even a thousand feet out of its proper flight path. Flying an airplace at ~800 feet down a main boulevard of New York is probably at least few thousand feet out of the proper flight path.
Your question about ObL is what's known as "blind man's bluff". I don't know what the scam is but the evidence is far too suspicious for everyone else involved in the game to be innocent.
Demonstrating perfectly that the nations which you've mentioned have not managed, thought out, or prepared their policies of oppression.
The most oppressive regime is the regime which can treat the underclass with complete impunity because they know that the underclass has no real power against it. The power of a regime can be demonstrated by the effort which it must put into tracking those who dare speak out against it.
In the US the regime gets AT&T to do the tracking for them.
Yes. It is questionable whether or not she actually said it but there's little doubt in my mind that it is indeed representative of the general feeling of people in a position of power.
If it's humor then it's only the sick humor that can only be displayed by a person who is secure and protected enough to be able to harass, hound, or otherwise harangue another human with complete impunity for sport or amusement. That gets pretty close to the root definition of oppression.
If you look at the US colonies before 1776 as an example then the people receiving communication from the enemy were, most likely, the people in positions of legal, political, and business authority. The governors were on the British payroll, the judges were on the British payroll, and the major international traders were on the British payroll. On the other side of the pond the colonial representatives, such as Ben Franklin, were watched but never, to my knowledge, formally arrested by the British.
I think that the nation has once again reached the circa 1750 state--where the best interests of the governing class are so far removed from the best interests of the governed class that situations like the current one shouldn't be at all surprising.
That's the point. We don't really know. I had this discussion with a fellow at work who was confident that he had copies of all the Osama tapes which showed irrefutable proof that Osama was involved. So we made an evening of it one time to watch the tapes. If you listen to them with a critical eye then the evidence is circumstantial. Half of them are passed through an American interpreter and just changing verb tense in many situations, given the context of the addresses which ObL was making, even my staunch government supporting friend agreed that it would have been very easy to create ObL's supposed claims of responsibility by nudging the translation.
There simply is not a single piece of objective irrefutable evidence tying the whole situation together. Passports which were found weeks after the fact in only marginally connected residences. Passenger lists which changed several times within the first 48 hours. I watched a special on A&E just last night, I only watched about 20 minutes, but the Port Authority had initially told everyone in the 2nd tower that they could go back inside because there was no further threat. What the heck? How does one miss a second plane flying at low altitude out of its legitimate flight pattern?
There are far too many parts of that entire situation which are easily fabricated, easily misinterpreted, and easily subjective. There's just no way it can be as nicely and neatly blamed on ObL and Al Qaeda as we're supposed to believe.
Like I said. I don't know what the scam is but anyone with an even marginally objective eye can see that there's an awful lot with the whole thing which isn't quite right. Lots of people are hiding lots of somethings... and it isn't for our own good.
Imagine a cancerous lump the size of your fist in your stomach. A single vote is like taking a single cell out of that lump. We've long past the point where the votes of the people mean anything. There are too many cancerous cells constantly respawning to replenish the tumor. Even movements as large as the Greens, the Libertarians, or a well funded independent such as Perot result in no real change.
I can only assume that your attitude comes from a position of comfort and probably privelege. The nobility has never had a problem with the royalty no matter how many commoners must be imprisoned or outright killed to preserve their authority. In today's society we don't even need to be imprisoned to be rendered completely ineffective. At the wage level of the average American household the people work too much, pay too much in taxes, have too much responsibility to family and friends, to have any time left for political vigilance.
I'm not going to defend Saddam as a person but, in terms of Kuwait, he was set up.
He had a legitimate quarrel over political boundaries which were being exploited for someone else's financial gain. He took it to the proper authorities who shut him out, at best, or teld him to cope, at worst. He notified people ahead of time that he was going to be forced to take military action if the issue could not be resolved peaceably. The international community sat back and said "do whatever you feel you have to do." When he moved then he was trumped up as having acted completely out of the blue without any instigation.
There is not a single issue of international politics which can be broken down to "these people are the innocent victims" and "these people are the unrepentent aggressors". The more the US tries to claim being the shining paladin in white armor the more I'm suspicious of everything they do.
And other than a few vague tapes stating a desire to take revenge on the US regime I have never been convinced that ObL, or his organization, was truly responsible for that incident. I'm not subscribing to some conspiracy thoery and I'm certainly not on the Michael Moore bandwagon. Where I am, though, is on a skeptical middle ground where it's just too plain obvious that ObL's tapes are taken out of context and misinterpreted on a regular basis.
I don't know what did happen, and I don't have any real good theories of my own, but what I do know is that the current popular theory blaming this on some vague organization across the globe stinks like shit.
You should study history. The pinnacle of an oppressive regime is the ability to sit behind closed doors, inside of protective walls, while the underclass demonstrates outside.
"Let them eat cake" comes to mind. You were probably too eager with your ridicule to remember that, though.
Congress HAS NO LEGAL AUTHORITY to give the president the power to suspend the 4th amendment
I'm happy to see that more people are beginning to recognize this. Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court have been reaffirming each other for decades--yet nobody seems to notice that none of the three branches had the authority to give to the other to begin with.
If the best way the president can come up with to protect us from people who feel screwed over by his business buddies (remembering, of course, that we once had very favorable ties with many of the top terrorists) is to place us in a permanent state of war then, honestly, I don't want his protection. He's not my president. He's broken his Oath of Office. Maybe you can rationalize it to your satisfaction but, until we know honestly why those people are so pissed (and no, this isn't just about religion), it'll never be explained to my satisfaction.
It worries you not at all, you don't see anything wrong, with setting a legal precedent which says that for all practical purposes... we might as well conduct ourselves as a nation at war from now until the end of the world? In my opinion there's something seriously wrong with a nation which needs to declare indefinite war on an indefinite for to justify actions which amount to little more than blatant paranoia.
There is always going to be some fringe group someplace which, given half the chance, will start spewing hate speech. Many of them can be found in low-income communities right here in the US. I'd much prefer that we investigate why these people feel oppressed, used, and underpriveleged rather than tracking them like animals just waiting for the excuse to spring on them.
I don't know which bothers me more. Bush's exercision of wartime powers without any formal declaration of war, or AT&T's Daytona database.
From one of the deep-linked pages:
For example, Daytona is managing over 312 terabytes of data in a 7x24 production data warehouse whose largest table contains over 743 billion rows as of Sept 2005. Indeed, for this database, Daytona is managing over 1.924 trillion rows; it could easily manage more but we ran out of data.
I'm all for letting companies collect necessary customer information but there's just something about a database that large which really makes me doubt that it's used solely for business-related purposes. There's nothing which an oppressive government regime enjoys more than a database which contains so much information that, at any time of any day, they could probably massage the database into providing damning evidence against anyone.
Well, actually, that's precisely what is expected of us.
What can we, as individuals, really do? We honestly live in what appears to be the most well managed, well thought out, and well prepared oppressive regime in history. The system of control, mostly based upon financial necessities in modern life and social backlash for displaying resistant behavior, is so nearly perfect that there's very little outright violence needed. In a way the cattle are packed so tightly together that there's no room to break out of the cattle farm even if one wanted to. With such a well managed system in place even people who, in centuries past, may have identified and resisted the oppression are unable to notice any oppression. To them, this is just the way things should always be.
How I wish I had been born as one of those average folk who could be satisified by nightly television and a cookie cutter job. Unless a person finds themselves accepted into social circles filled with already-powerful individuals the desire to excel is a sentence of lifelong misery. Ridicule and ostricism comes from the average folk--the overwhelming majority--and denial, ridicule, harassment, and ostricism comes from the priveleged folk.
Marketing, intellectual property, ownership, etc. Google may be our best friend... but on a sliding scale, your best friend isn't really truly your friend if they still have allegiances with entities which work against you. Google has allegiance to shareholders, business partners, ISPs, and software companies who would leave F/OSS dead on the side of the road if they had half the chance. It's much more profitable to fleece us blind.
I'd expect this to be a test market product. If Goobuntu makes any significant impact they'll probably spin off the OS department and fund them from behind the 19th hole at the local CEO golf club. Heck, they may start a spin-off as a front and then let the investors put up a back-channel Gentoo knock-off just to create a dog-and-pony show for the investors to buy in on.
Everything in life is fast becoming a multiyear subscription service. Health care, car insurance, rent/mortgage, car payments, cell phones, network access. The list goes on.
Pretty soon the maternity ward at hospitals will be a subscription service--payment (first month and security deposit) due the moment you take your first breath.
I've never liked HTML anyway. Anything which doesn't keep linefeeds and spaces where I put them without special tags and renders 6 different ways in 6 different engines isn't a language--it's a moody beast. "I am HTML. I have no rules except for the ones that I choose to observe today. Those very well may change tomorrow."
Slashdot Mirror
I advise you strongly to abort your comments criticizing the government in any form, in any forum.
Ridicule is the psychological weapon of the supporters of unchecked authority. If they do not find you here on Slashdot they will identify you indirectly in society--in public, at pubs, at your job, in any social forum which you find.
Do yourself a favor. Give in to the unquestionable authority of those in power. They know what is best for you. You will only earn yourself a life of misery should you ever manage to make a real argument.
There is no underground movement to overthrow them. There is only an above-ground movement to continually keep them in their place by asking them upon what authority or justification they continue to exercise their abuse of power.
I can't expect you to understand. With only 227 comments to your name you are a new-comer to this line of thought. Better for you to give up now than endure the targeted harassment which will come your way.
Do not dare to question the actions nor the motives of the current government administration, or indeed any government administration.
The AC trolls will employ all tactics of ridicule to jump all over you. Lest you become a target, do not pursue your course of action.
For a classic demonstration, see my comments on the the EFF's latest action. This is not just a special case. This is the kind of resistance which I have received for years.
Thank people like D-side, CryptoCat (aka TenBaseT), and siglite on the Undernet IRC network. These people are self-important, self-secure, and they will stop at nothing to attack their opposition using any means possible.
Enjoy.
Invoking nuclear weapons is really silly anyway since the only nation ever to have shown its willingness to use them is the US.
Rather than continue to hide behind the curtain of terrorists, let's consider who else is making international telephone calls:
Any international business. Insurance companies, military contractors, GM, Ford, pharmaceutical companies
Colleges and Universities. Checking references for international applicants.
Military. Yes, every phone call that Johnny gets to make home is probably being listened to (but we really already knew that)
Embassies. No political motivation here, eh?
Vacationers. Calling family back home.
Family. Plenty of people in the US have family or in-laws who live in Europe.
No. I'm not frightened by "big brother" surveilling. I'm disappointed and suspicious that it's being done so far under the table.
But at least the people who support it so staunchly should quit using the buzzword "terrorist" to rile up the troops. It's getting to be so overused that it is losing its effect.
In many US cities "public intoxication" is a perfectly legal reason to detain someone.
In many localities a public intox detention carries a minimum of 8 hour "drying out" period in detention and no breathalyzer is necessary. By comparison, a "driving under the influence" charge with a BAC lower than the legal limit for intoxication will let people out of detention in as little as 2 hours.
Don't feel so safe doing the right thing and walking home.
You may be able to speak out against the government here in the US but the fear of retribution is every bit as real here as it is anywhere else. In any documented forum the sheer number of the AC attacks lined against me, coupled with their particular form of sneering and hate, could probably be enough to file a lawsuit of harassment.
Don't know. What I do know is the current set of evidence relies far too much on subjective interpretation and, in some cases, outright misrepresentation. I don't have access to the Congressional archives or the intelligence community papers. Heck, even the 9/11 Commission couldn't get access to everything they wanted. If they couldn't then how can anyone just blindly accept their conclusions to be perfect fact when even the Commission recognizes that there was plenty of information withheld?
Too many questions. Too many questions. If ObL was, truly, involved then there's no way that he was exclusively involved. Probably find money interests tying half the UN to the event if you could get all the real data.
As far as I understand, air traffic control is usually automatically alerted when an airliner gets even a thousand feet out of its proper flight path. Flying an airplace at ~800 feet down a main boulevard of New York is probably at least few thousand feet out of the proper flight path.
Your question about ObL is what's known as "blind man's bluff". I don't know what the scam is but the evidence is far too suspicious for everyone else involved in the game to be innocent.
Demonstrating perfectly that the nations which you've mentioned have not managed, thought out, or prepared their policies of oppression.
The most oppressive regime is the regime which can treat the underclass with complete impunity because they know that the underclass has no real power against it. The power of a regime can be demonstrated by the effort which it must put into tracking those who dare speak out against it.
In the US the regime gets AT&T to do the tracking for them.
Yes. It is questionable whether or not she actually said it but there's little doubt in my mind that it is indeed representative of the general feeling of people in a position of power.
If it's humor then it's only the sick humor that can only be displayed by a person who is secure and protected enough to be able to harass, hound, or otherwise harangue another human with complete impunity for sport or amusement. That gets pretty close to the root definition of oppression.
If you look at the US colonies before 1776 as an example then the people receiving communication from the enemy were, most likely, the people in positions of legal, political, and business authority. The governors were on the British payroll, the judges were on the British payroll, and the major international traders were on the British payroll. On the other side of the pond the colonial representatives, such as Ben Franklin, were watched but never, to my knowledge, formally arrested by the British.
I think that the nation has once again reached the circa 1750 state--where the best interests of the governing class are so far removed from the best interests of the governed class that situations like the current one shouldn't be at all surprising.
That's the point. We don't really know. I had this discussion with a fellow at work who was confident that he had copies of all the Osama tapes which showed irrefutable proof that Osama was involved. So we made an evening of it one time to watch the tapes. If you listen to them with a critical eye then the evidence is circumstantial. Half of them are passed through an American interpreter and just changing verb tense in many situations, given the context of the addresses which ObL was making, even my staunch government supporting friend agreed that it would have been very easy to create ObL's supposed claims of responsibility by nudging the translation.
There simply is not a single piece of objective irrefutable evidence tying the whole situation together. Passports which were found weeks after the fact in only marginally connected residences. Passenger lists which changed several times within the first 48 hours. I watched a special on A&E just last night, I only watched about 20 minutes, but the Port Authority had initially told everyone in the 2nd tower that they could go back inside because there was no further threat. What the heck? How does one miss a second plane flying at low altitude out of its legitimate flight pattern?
There are far too many parts of that entire situation which are easily fabricated, easily misinterpreted, and easily subjective. There's just no way it can be as nicely and neatly blamed on ObL and Al Qaeda as we're supposed to believe.
Like I said. I don't know what the scam is but anyone with an even marginally objective eye can see that there's an awful lot with the whole thing which isn't quite right. Lots of people are hiding lots of somethings... and it isn't for our own good.
Imagine a cancerous lump the size of your fist in your stomach. A single vote is like taking a single cell out of that lump. We've long past the point where the votes of the people mean anything. There are too many cancerous cells constantly respawning to replenish the tumor. Even movements as large as the Greens, the Libertarians, or a well funded independent such as Perot result in no real change.
I can only assume that your attitude comes from a position of comfort and probably privelege. The nobility has never had a problem with the royalty no matter how many commoners must be imprisoned or outright killed to preserve their authority. In today's society we don't even need to be imprisoned to be rendered completely ineffective. At the wage level of the average American household the people work too much, pay too much in taxes, have too much responsibility to family and friends, to have any time left for political vigilance.
I'm not going to defend Saddam as a person but, in terms of Kuwait, he was set up.
He had a legitimate quarrel over political boundaries which were being exploited for someone else's financial gain. He took it to the proper authorities who shut him out, at best, or teld him to cope, at worst. He notified people ahead of time that he was going to be forced to take military action if the issue could not be resolved peaceably. The international community sat back and said "do whatever you feel you have to do." When he moved then he was trumped up as having acted completely out of the blue without any instigation.
There is not a single issue of international politics which can be broken down to "these people are the innocent victims" and "these people are the unrepentent aggressors". The more the US tries to claim being the shining paladin in white armor the more I'm suspicious of everything they do.
And other than a few vague tapes stating a desire to take revenge on the US regime I have never been convinced that ObL, or his organization, was truly responsible for that incident. I'm not subscribing to some conspiracy thoery and I'm certainly not on the Michael Moore bandwagon. Where I am, though, is on a skeptical middle ground where it's just too plain obvious that ObL's tapes are taken out of context and misinterpreted on a regular basis.
I don't know what did happen, and I don't have any real good theories of my own, but what I do know is that the current popular theory blaming this on some vague organization across the globe stinks like shit.
You should study history. The pinnacle of an oppressive regime is the ability to sit behind closed doors, inside of protective walls, while the underclass demonstrates outside.
"Let them eat cake" comes to mind. You were probably too eager with your ridicule to remember that, though.
If the best way the president can come up with to protect us from people who feel screwed over by his business buddies (remembering, of course, that we once had very favorable ties with many of the top terrorists) is to place us in a permanent state of war then, honestly, I don't want his protection. He's not my president. He's broken his Oath of Office. Maybe you can rationalize it to your satisfaction but, until we know honestly why those people are so pissed (and no, this isn't just about religion), it'll never be explained to my satisfaction.
It worries you not at all, you don't see anything wrong, with setting a legal precedent which says that for all practical purposes... we might as well conduct ourselves as a nation at war from now until the end of the world? In my opinion there's something seriously wrong with a nation which needs to declare indefinite war on an indefinite for to justify actions which amount to little more than blatant paranoia.
There is always going to be some fringe group someplace which, given half the chance, will start spewing hate speech. Many of them can be found in low-income communities right here in the US. I'd much prefer that we investigate why these people feel oppressed, used, and underpriveleged rather than tracking them like animals just waiting for the excuse to spring on them.
From one of the deep-linked pages:I'm all for letting companies collect necessary customer information but there's just something about a database that large which really makes me doubt that it's used solely for business-related purposes. There's nothing which an oppressive government regime enjoys more than a database which contains so much information that, at any time of any day, they could probably massage the database into providing damning evidence against anyone.
Well, actually, that's precisely what is expected of us.
What can we, as individuals, really do? We honestly live in what appears to be the most well managed, well thought out, and well prepared oppressive regime in history. The system of control, mostly based upon financial necessities in modern life and social backlash for displaying resistant behavior, is so nearly perfect that there's very little outright violence needed. In a way the cattle are packed so tightly together that there's no room to break out of the cattle farm even if one wanted to. With such a well managed system in place even people who, in centuries past, may have identified and resisted the oppression are unable to notice any oppression. To them, this is just the way things should always be.
How I wish I had been born as one of those average folk who could be satisified by nightly television and a cookie cutter job. Unless a person finds themselves accepted into social circles filled with already-powerful individuals the desire to excel is a sentence of lifelong misery. Ridicule and ostricism comes from the average folk--the overwhelming majority--and denial, ridicule, harassment, and ostricism comes from the priveleged folk.
Marketing, intellectual property, ownership, etc. Google may be our best friend... but on a sliding scale, your best friend isn't really truly your friend if they still have allegiances with entities which work against you. Google has allegiance to shareholders, business partners, ISPs, and software companies who would leave F/OSS dead on the side of the road if they had half the chance. It's much more profitable to fleece us blind.
I'd expect this to be a test market product. If Goobuntu makes any significant impact they'll probably spin off the OS department and fund them from behind the 19th hole at the local CEO golf club. Heck, they may start a spin-off as a front and then let the investors put up a back-channel Gentoo knock-off just to create a dog-and-pony show for the investors to buy in on.
Everything in life is fast becoming a multiyear subscription service. Health care, car insurance, rent/mortgage, car payments, cell phones, network access. The list goes on.
Pretty soon the maternity ward at hospitals will be a subscription service--payment (first month and security deposit) due the moment you take your first breath.
...advertisers figure out how to make pay-per-click text banner ads.
The web has become so commercialized that it's not even the web anymore. It's just an advertisement forum.
I've never liked HTML anyway. Anything which doesn't keep linefeeds and spaces where I put them without special tags and renders 6 different ways in 6 different engines isn't a language--it's a moody beast. "I am HTML. I have no rules except for the ones that I choose to observe today. Those very well may change tomorrow."