Biggest problem for the Nomad was they had no iTunes, so it relied on users being technically competent enough, or unlazy enough to be arsed to rip their CD collection or download pirated music.
That was never going to work long term. People inherently want convenience, and the iPod gave them that, as much as I hate it, because personally I thought my Zen was a much more awesome device than my iPod, but then, I was one of those with an MP3 library big enough to appreciate it.
"Wanting to control our population numbers is NOT RACIST."
It is if it's targetted at certain groups, like, say, hispanics.
Many Americans will complain about Mexicans crossing the border, but just about none would bat an eyelid at an immigrant from Europe.
"Dont you think as a sovereign nation, we have the right to say who can and cannot come here?"
Of course you do, but that doesn't mean you're not racist.
"We dont have a vast frontier anymore"
Actually, you kind of do. Call us with this excuse when you have the same kind of population density across your country as the likes of Japan, Europe, or China. Just to make a point, the EU could be fit inside the US and then some, but has nearly twice the population, and has a bigger economy, greater average life expecancy, lower infant mortality, and sees heavy immigration from Africa and war torn sections of the middle east. Obviously it hasn't caused Europe any problems, why are you so scared of it? Don't worry - I'll answer that for you, xenophobia.
"we dont need nor want a flood of unskilled dregs added to our society"
Ah I see, all foreign immigrants are unskilled dregs, and you say you're not racist?
It's funny because we have people with your attitude here in the UK, they often say the same about Polish immigrants, claiming they take our jobs and so forth, yet having met and worked with a number of such immigrants they have a work ethic that puts that of most British born people to shame. Really, what those people making such claims dislike is that there are now people in the country who are harder working than them and lose out on job interviews to them not because there's an obscure inherent bias towards immigrants, but because they were just the better candidates.
You have a high end education system in the US, you have opportunities far beyond those available to citizens of many other countries in the world, so if you work hard and take advantage of those benefits you've nothing to worry about from immigration - you've got a massive head start over any immigrant if not only because you natively speak the language and don't have any communication issues because of your accent. If you haven't worked hard however, if you've been lazy, then perhaps there's the real problem, but are you expecting us to have sympathy for people who threw all their chances away losing out on jobs to immigrants who were willing to give up and risk everything they have to have the same chances you threw away?
The problem is many members of society in the West have become lazy, they believe the world owes them, that they're entitled to things, and that's really why they hate immigration - because the poorer countries from which people move to the West from, are full of people who would give everything to have the opportunities the West provides, and so quite often have a far better work ethic as a result.
"The National Guard was called into New Orleans to help organize rescues, provide food and shelter, and prevent looting and rioting that occur at times of great destruction and uncertainty."
This is a very ethnocentric view. In many nations the reaction of citizens after a disaster is not to loot and riot, but instead help each other. Why do you think rioting and looting was an issue in New Orleans? Wealth disparity.
You're somewhat right about capitalism, certainly you can't do away with it altogether for the reasons you cite - but that was exactly my point, it's about balance. The problem the US has is that it's horribly unbalanced, focussed too far towards pure capitalism and too far away from socialism because socialism has been billed as some evil word akin to communism. The reason I believe the US system is too far down the capitalism road is simple, despite being the most wealthy nation in the world, it suffers from a combination of lower levels of literacy, numeracy, higher infant mortality, lower levels of average personal happiness, shorter life expectancy, and lower levels of violent and non-violent crime to name a few. When the US is so much more wealthy, why do you think this is the case? It's about poor political balance. The problem is that whilst the 1% can afford things like the best healthcare in the world, the 99% end up with below average healthcare, bringing down the averages.
"People who do not live in the US and even some that do tend to ignore things like this. Reading an European news source leaves some people with the impression that sick and injured people are being denied help and thrown out on the street and that is a distorted view of reality."
Yes, but what's not distorted are the stats. When you have noticably lower life expectancy, severe issues with problems like obesity, and higher infant mortality, then it's obviously you're doing something wrong. It doesn't really matter what the papers say when the stats tell the real story. Healthcare is about more than just emergency room treatment also, part the reason healthcare in places like Europe is cheaper overall yet effective in supporting greater life expectancy is because they don't wait until people end up in the emergency room, they offer regular checkups, and advice. It's treated as an ongoing thing.
"It might be that he's stress-sensitive and unable to socially interact like a normal person, "
That is a mental health issue though, and particularly in the likes of the US jail system thousands of miles from home and his family then of course he's a suicide risk at that point - some people kill themselves in jail even when they're otherwise mentally healthy based on that alone, the added trauma of facing that when you're socially inept surrounded by in your face prisoners is bound to make him higher risk than usual.
No one is saying his crime is excusable, just that extradition isn't the right form of punishment. Trial in a British court and detention in the much less harsh British system, or under house arrest with a ban on the use of computers is punishment enough for someone like this if he even needs to be punished any further. The UK focuses much more on rehabilitation, I think after 10 years of this being dragged out he knows full well he shouldn't have done what he did, wont do it again, and has faced enough stress from it all to be punishment enough.
It's not like he killed or hurt anyone, not like he leaked anything sensitive, really, the worst he did was embarassed a bunch of incompetent sysadmins and wasted the man hours required to sort it out. I think there's a fair argument though that it needed sorting out, and a security audit doing regardless of whether McKinnon had hacked in or not.
"What civil liberties have been lost? Freedom of Speech? Freedom to assemble (not compile)? Freedom of the Press? Right to a jury trial?"
Most of those. Restrictions on speech are much greater now, the DHS is censoring websites (ICE seizures), people in Guantanamo suffered detention without trial and the US has committed summary execution of it's own citizens with drone strikes in Pakistan. Warrantless wiretapping, and intrusive body scanners and searches.
"You need to check your dictionary. When you use words like genocide in describing only US actions you are obscuring the true horror of what real genocide really is."
You seem to be going off on a tangent now, your suggestion was that if the US commits to military action it should just whipe out everything in an area - it is that that I said would be genocide, not anything the US has done to date.
"Yes. Have they specifically targeted civilians? No."
Whilst I also agree with much of what you said in that paragraph regardless of the relevance of it to my comment, I do disagree with this particular quote. There are a number of cases where civilians were specifically targetted, which were poorly dealt with / outright denied by the US justice system. Importantly though the Wikileaks cables for Afghanistan document cases where US special forces indiscriminately called down artillery support on civilian compounds without care for whatever civilians were there as they hadn't verified it was clear of any of them, the hope was to get the militants without worrying about civilian casualties, this is just one example. US track record on minimising civilian casualties is one of the major reasons the US struggles to get any kind of decisive victory in most of it's military engagements. The US military focuses far too hard on killing and destruction, and it takes far more than just that to win a war.
"China is supposed to be a communist Peoples Republic so how did they produce so many billionaires?"
Because it's not. China is, nowadays, more capitalist than America. This is by and large because it doesn't even have many laws protecting employee rights. It doesn't vindicate US capitalism - on the contrary, it shows how bad US style capitalism can be if uncontrolled. China calling itself communist is merely a relic of not wanting to admit communism failed it in the last century, and that it was wrong about communism. It's a pride thing - pretend their success is all about communism, when in fact they just made the shift to capitalism.
"That blowhard in Venezuela preaches power to the people but how come his family wealth has greatly expanded since he has been in power?"
Because it's a dictatorship thinly veiled as a democracy, and that's what happens in dictatorships. Regardless, income disparity has actually decreased extensively under Chavez's socialist dictatorship, so I'm not sure how this helps your point either.
"Even the old USSR system had it's share of millionaires and billionaires."
To an extent, but again this is the result of dictatorship. I suspect you overstate the situation though, I think you're confusing the post USSR gold rush billionaires with what was before the fall of the USSR. Income disparity in Russia has actually increased since it went capitalist too.
This isn't to say I'm against capitalism, but as is the case with most things - moving to the extreme of ANY system is bad, really you want a moderation of a number of systems. The problem with US style capitalism is that it doesn't have that balance, and that's fine if you're middle class or rich, but the poor in the US really are poor compared to say, the poor in Europe. Communities in places like parts of New Orleans, and Detroit for example are more representative of the 3rd world than any first world nation, and that kind of disparity in a country as rich as the US is going to be a major source of tension. Why do you think the US had to deploy the national guard and armed mercenairies to restore order after Katrina hit and those peo
Yes but the point is who actually cares if the police investigate this? Virgin has the option of changing the security of it's boxes to prevent, or detect culprits and then carrying out civil action. As it seemed to know who the culprits were (or if it didn't it could hire a PI) it still has the option of taking civil action there.
The point is no one wants their tax money used on this, and even with Virgin's contribution it's still going to be a tax payer subsidised action, and removes the ability of police to focus on what the tax payers do pay them to do.
Even if it is criminal fraud it's just not something anyone would prioritise other than Virgin themselves - because it's cheaper to hijack the police with bribes than it is to just sort the problem themselves which is what they should be doing. They've determined that changing security of their boxes for legit customers is more costly than just bribing the police, so they've gone for that route, and it's unacceptable. It's not like Virgin's business was under threat, and thousands of jobs at risk, just that they saw the opportunity to spend a relatively small sum (for them) to pay police to do something that may or may not help boost their profits.
Also, as I say, I'm not even convinced that illegally chipping a million set top boxes justifies a more serious punishment than rape or murder - the scale of the latter two crimes is just so many orders of magnitude more serious than a bit of fraud that it doesn't compare, yet those far more serious crimes have much lower penalties.
"A) Because they didn't "leave the door wide open.""
There's no better definition of wide open on the internet than a public facing computer with blank, or no password. If you think this isn't wide open, then please, for the love of god, don't ever get a job in IT, or if you have one, kindly vacate it immediately.
"B) You may as well argue that people who don't lock their front door should be charged with a crime because someone steals from them. Because, that is exactly what you are doing."
No you may as well not, because people who don't lock their front door aren't being paid by the tax payer to look after national security. It's a question of competence, and leaving defence network computers open on the public internet can be firmly filed under gross negligence.
"C) Walking in and taking things is still a CRIME."
Well he didn't take anything - it was all still there when he left, but yes you're right, walking in is still a crime. Not the sort any sane person would expect you to get extradited to a foreign country to serve 70 years in prison over though.
"D) 35 is not "Some poor kid with a computer and a modem and a random dialer."
Yes you're right, but he's not fully mentally healthy like a typical adult either, the truth is thus somewhere in between.
Not at all, if he isn't extradited he'll face trial in the UK.
The only caveat however is that this has been dragging on so long that I suspect even if found guilty in the UK now any judge will say he has suffered punishment enough and probably not make him spend even a minute in jail. If they do I think that's a pretty fair assessment - the mental anguish something like this must cause being dragged out over 10 years is pretty awful.
Virgin, one of the UK's only two cable TV providers actually paid the police to raid some people's houses who had been chipping the set top boxes so people could access the content without paying. These people then got 3 years in jail for it.
Keep in mind that people often get less time for burglary, rape, and in some rare occurences even murder.
Yes, giving people free content is now more serious than rape and murder, simply because companies have paid for this to be the case.
"The US leaves Iraq and a civil war breaks out the next day and the different groups get back to killing one another."
It broke out a few months after your initially invaded in 2003, the surge merely pushed it behind closed doors well enough that you could use it as an excuse to leave.
"When do we start holding the Iraqis and Afghan's responsible for their own actions?"
I agree this is a problem, but the solution was not to go in Iraq in the first place. The US was actually making progress in Afghanistan and it was genuinely winnable for some time, but Iraq stirred up a hornets nest, polarised anger against the US and gave Iran the justification it needed to start fuelling things in Afghanistan too. Iran was actually quite scared after 9/11 and offered to help the US deal with the Taliban but instead it turned it down and destroyed the greatest balance against Iran in existence - Iraq, and this gave Iran the boldness it needed to become confident enough to be the biggest problem in the region, happy to stand up to the US.
There's a good reason Iran's nuclear programme was halted a short time after 9/11, and started progressing again when Iraq had been whiped out the equation, and America was facing a decline in world respect.
I understand what's done is done, and I'm not saying you shouldn't just pull out, much of what you say is quite right but you really are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I think the only real solution would actually be to deal with Pakistan, so that al Qaeda and the Taliban no longer have state support, but that's a hell of a high stakes gamble, and understandably no one will take it, so the only option is to just accept you're going to face a few decades of hate from that part of the world no matter what you do.
"And exactly what country has that capability?"
America.
You only have to look at what happened to your country post 9/11 - a massive erosion of civil liberties and so forth and a rise, by, what in the rest of the world, would be classed as border line far-right in politics. America is suffering a massive clash between the liberals and the conservatives and a handful more terrorist attacks would bring that to boiling point and tear the country apart. Wealth disparity is already through the roof in the US and states like California are already questioning why they're subisidising the poorer states. It's not too big a problem right now as it's only playing out in politics for the most part (but even there it's having a harmful effect, hence why S&P dropped the US' AAA rating), but it wouldn't take much more of a push to boil over.
"However, if the US does deploy it's military I beleive they should not hold back and destroy everything that gets in the way leaving no doubt about who won or lost. If the US is not willing to do that why bother with it in the first place?"
Because that's called genocide, and whilst the US has a history of somewhat, to completely failed interventions ranging from Korea, to Vietnam, from Lebanon to Somalia, from Afghanistan, to Iraq, many other countries don't, and the problem is how America goes about fighting wars - there's focus on nothing but aggression, but winning a war is as much about winning the people over, as it is decisive action- sometimes the people can't be won, i.e. Iraq, in which case don't go in in the first place, sometimes they can- Afghanistan, but don't be suprised if that changes when you do it wrong. See British intervention in Sierra Leone as a textbook example of doing it quickly, efficiently, cleanly, and with the praise of the people afterwards.
Yep, this is where Siri is strong - not in that it's some major advance in AI as some Apple fanboys claim, but that it's well integrated into the OS so that the things that are linked to phone functions, are linked in a nice seamless manner.
"otherwise they'd be complaining about/to every tech company in the country. They just want the ratings that come with putting "Apple" in a story."
Of course there is another, more likely possibility, though I suspect you missed it because your post really sounded just like a thinly veiled "I love Apple and they can do no wrong!" post.
The more likely possibility is that reporters quite often do actually take an interest in human rights issues, and that they're focussing on Apple indeed partly because it's the most prominent target right now, but by hitting the most prominent, and most profitable target you're hitting the firm that has the most clout available to make the required changes, and the most to lose if it doesn't. You open the door for other firms to advertise their more ethical businesses if they take a stand and Apple doesn't, you basically leave Apple an ultimatum - change, or risk being outflanked by any competitors that do.
This doesn't mean it'll work, if all firms decide to hold their ground and none are willing to change then it's of little benefit, but this tactic by reporters has worked well before. Your latter paragraph is evidence enough of that - Greenpeace was very vocal in pointing out Apple's poor track record on pollutants, and despite Steve Jobs initially telling them to f off, he was eventually left with little choice but to start changing things, as other firms started getting positive headlines because they were more green, whilst Apple was seeing continued negative press on the issue. Since then Apple has changed, but also the industry as a whole has upped it's game on the issue, so if it has the potential to work, unless you're one of those people who throws a fit if the press dares mention that Apple could improve in some area, then what's the problem?
"I'm still not sure what Siri does that's particularly special"
It doesn't.
More telling is Googling for things Siri can't answer, for which there are thousands of results. When you start to see what it can't do you begin to realise that it's really little more than voice-to-text, passed over to a search engine, with a few key words and terms mapped to local applications like "weather", "calendar", "appointment" and so on.
Just like any other search engine out there, there are a lot of questions it really struggles with when posed in natural language form.
Then expect the world's sympathy when a bunch of terrorists you armed 20 years before come and blow up the centrepiece of your financial district with airliners?
You've already got your fingers in too many pies, you can't just withdraw from everything right now without suffering repercussions of the hatred you've stirred up in the places you've fucked up.
You can wait until the dust settles if you want, but you might find that with all the resentment of your nation you've stirred up, that you're not one of those places left standing.
You've embedded yourself as a key part of the game, and it's not a game in which you can just throw your toys up in the air and say "I'm not playing anymore".
"Civil disobedience means that if they decide to sue you that you plead guilty to the crime, take the sentence they give you, and forego appeals."
Er, so you're saying civil disobedience is about being obedient and doing exactly as the authorities would like you to do? They'd love nothing more for you to plead guilty and accept the punishment, and that would achieve what exactly?
This isn't something worth throwing your life away over, but it doesn't make civil disobedience any less justified. On the contrary, not pleading guilty wastes more of the MPAA/RIAA's time and money as they have to fight it in the courts, run the risk of losing, and hence is more productive in halting/slowing their activities.
"Well but now you're talking just 'carriers' and not 'supercarriers'."
How do you define the difference? the new Chinese carriers due for around 2015 are going to be 65t, the same as the UK's two projected carriers. You previously mentioned this British carriers, and the Chinese carrier is in exactly the same class as these.
"The US navy is so astronomically bigger than potentially hostile counterparts it wouldn't meaningfully hurt overall us capabilities to shrink down a bit."
This is stupid, you seem to be under the impression carriers will only ever go up against carriers. That's simply not the case, they have to go up against airfields too, so it doesn't matter if the enemy has less carriers, if it has more airfields then the US fleet can be destroyed if it dares to defend something strategic like Taiwan or Japan off the Chinese coast.
Carriers aren't designed to just sit in the middle of the pacific and sit waiting patiently to see if anything comes their way, they're designed to move off the coast of potential conflict zones, and with the size of China's land based forces, and their increasing arsenal of anti-carrier weapons, there's soon going to be an area of the world that's a no go zone for US ships, especially if they shrink their fleet.
Or recognise that as educated people they're smart enough to realise that it doesn't matter how much evidence you put forth towards denialists that they wont change their mind because they are not rational people and no amount of reason will work on them because making decisions about what they belief based on the balance of evidence is not something they're capable of - for them, emotions weight out over reason and logic, so the best you can do is to make it clear that the majority of scientists disagree with them such that they can't at least say "Hey look, even scientists disagree with global warming!" which is really what this WSJ article is trying to give the impression of.
Yeah, fundamentally the reason the US has and wants carriers now is for Asia more than anything - it has one (or two?) deployed around the gulf area sure, but you can be rest assured this is more about being positioned and based somewhere they can access the China region rather than about the gulf, because as you say, they have land bases there.
But China also now has a carrier, and is building more which the post further up this thread missed/ignored. That's the primary reason America wants to maintain a decent carrier force for the forseeable future.
Personally I'm not convinced China is the threat the US makes out, but the US certainly views it as it's biggest threat moving forward.
Things like carrying gun schematics because you have a love of guns in your country of residence where it's not illegal would in itself be a reasonable excuse.
The problem is in this case, that the police found evidence counter to the guy's reasonable excuse, suggesting he didn't actually have a reasonable excuse.
I'm not defending the law, I think it stinks, but it's not like people get randomly arrested and sent to jail when they genuinely do have no link to terrorism, no matter how tenuous.
It's worth noting that far more cases over this sort of thing have failed here in the UK. This case just happened to be one that tipped over the line where the courts felt the evidence was strong enough that he wasn't just some innocent joe "seeing what all the fuss is about". Slashdot being Slashdot just assumes this guy was completely innocent of everything, and that this is some law whereby if you even think about how fun it would be to blow something up you'll get sent to prison for life - it's really nothing like that. This guy pleaded guilty, and had also written a letter saying he was prepared physically, and financially for jihad, along with a handwritten shopping list for grenades and such.
There's a fair argument that this still shouldn't be enough to arrest him I suppose, but in this case it's just what tipped the scales in favour of his excuse not being reasonable. The argument that he was just interested in seeing what it was all about kind of falls flat on it's face when you also write a shopping list for prohibited explosives and firearms, and write a letter of admission that you're prepared for jihad.
""Libya - The US Currency Protection War" is not the entire story, but neither is "Libya - The US and NATO Spend Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Liberate Poor People Out of the Pure Goodness of their Hearts" - that's laughable."
I didn't say it was. The point is the conspiracy theory implies this was some great planned event, it wasn't, Western action was very much reactionary, and it may be a reaction carried out in part because it was seen as an opportunity to get more favourable oil contracts or whatever, but the idea that the whole uprising was some kind of CIA planned and organised event or whatever is as utterly rediculous as saying the Tunisian guy who set himself alight was a CIA operative doing so to trigger the whole arab spring.
The arab spring is very much a reaction caused by the citizens of that region reaching boiling point over the oppression they suffer, and acting out because of it. Yes the West may see opportunities from this and take advantage of them where it can, but it hasn't planned the whole thing, it's not instigating it.
America can't even keep it's own diplomatic cables secret, much less a major conspiracy involving hundreds of millions of people.
The first demonstrates a pipeline that pipes gas from Turkey to Europe, and that passes well away from Kosovo, so what exactly has the US and Kosovo got to do with it?
The latter pipes gas from Turkmenistan to India. Again, what the fuck has that got to do with the US?
What do either of these have to do with oil and the petrodollar?
This is why so many conspiracy theories are so laughably bad- even their basic underlying premises are completely wrong.
"And lets not forget the Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga."
Perhaps he's actually a Chinese man with lots of plastic surgery, and has the go code for the space based China world-mind control device? Obviously because of this the NSA needed to set him up as a rapist.
They had to take out Gaddaffi because he was threatening the strategic oil transport route of Kosovo, which is a nation so large no one could ever pass round it.
I agree, Afghanistan as an oil transit route was important, because they had to stop Iran pumping oil to Uzbekistan, as it meant the Uzbeks were able to use modern machinery to start harvesting their cotton, creating a real challenged to America's cotton industry.
I think you're wrong about Venezuela though, I think the next target after Iran is Canada, I hear those bastards are considering upping the price of bacon, and well, they have a fair bit of oil, and decent amounts of gold reserves so that makes them an obvious target.
Lebanon is just lucky the US hasn't realised that it's got a decent amount of oil, some of the largest gold reserves in the world, and too an islamist insurgency loyal to Iran and Syria that has just about taken control of the country. I mean, it's obvious that America has avoided going after Lebanon recently as part of this grand plan because they simply forgot about them. It couldn't possibly be because there is no grand conspiracy or anything like that.
It's not a case of claiming to be unaware, it's a case of claiming to have unintentionally breached the legislation.
As Slashdot likes car analogies, imagine you are driving along, and through no fault of your own, due to a manufacturing fault, your car's left wheel falls off and you go flying into someone elses car. You're at fault, but it doesn't mean you didn't know the rules of the road or how to drive safely, it was just an accident.
We have to treat companies who claim the same thing the same way because a company can't be expected to know that someone in their firm wont accidently screw up, and because it's not fair on a company if someone malicious joins their firm and breaks the law on purpose. The problem is that being lenient on companies/people for genuine mistakes means that it's sometimes hard to tell if it is genuine, and so assholes tend to abuse the fact we er on the side of caution. I think it's good that we do er on the side of caution as there's no point ruining someone's life over something that they were powerless to prevent - would you want to be made redundant because your employer couldn't afford to pay you anymore because a colleague maliciously tried to get the company in trouble?
The problem is as I say, it'll also be used as an excuse for bad companies to profit by breaking the law in cases like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Biggest problem for the Nomad was they had no iTunes, so it relied on users being technically competent enough, or unlazy enough to be arsed to rip their CD collection or download pirated music.
That was never going to work long term. People inherently want convenience, and the iPod gave them that, as much as I hate it, because personally I thought my Zen was a much more awesome device than my iPod, but then, I was one of those with an MP3 library big enough to appreciate it.
"Wanting to control our population numbers is NOT RACIST."
It is if it's targetted at certain groups, like, say, hispanics.
Many Americans will complain about Mexicans crossing the border, but just about none would bat an eyelid at an immigrant from Europe.
"Dont you think as a sovereign nation, we have the right to say who can and cannot come here?"
Of course you do, but that doesn't mean you're not racist.
"We dont have a vast frontier anymore"
Actually, you kind of do. Call us with this excuse when you have the same kind of population density across your country as the likes of Japan, Europe, or China. Just to make a point, the EU could be fit inside the US and then some, but has nearly twice the population, and has a bigger economy, greater average life expecancy, lower infant mortality, and sees heavy immigration from Africa and war torn sections of the middle east. Obviously it hasn't caused Europe any problems, why are you so scared of it? Don't worry - I'll answer that for you, xenophobia.
"we dont need nor want a flood of unskilled dregs added to our society"
Ah I see, all foreign immigrants are unskilled dregs, and you say you're not racist?
It's funny because we have people with your attitude here in the UK, they often say the same about Polish immigrants, claiming they take our jobs and so forth, yet having met and worked with a number of such immigrants they have a work ethic that puts that of most British born people to shame. Really, what those people making such claims dislike is that there are now people in the country who are harder working than them and lose out on job interviews to them not because there's an obscure inherent bias towards immigrants, but because they were just the better candidates.
You have a high end education system in the US, you have opportunities far beyond those available to citizens of many other countries in the world, so if you work hard and take advantage of those benefits you've nothing to worry about from immigration - you've got a massive head start over any immigrant if not only because you natively speak the language and don't have any communication issues because of your accent. If you haven't worked hard however, if you've been lazy, then perhaps there's the real problem, but are you expecting us to have sympathy for people who threw all their chances away losing out on jobs to immigrants who were willing to give up and risk everything they have to have the same chances you threw away?
The problem is many members of society in the West have become lazy, they believe the world owes them, that they're entitled to things, and that's really why they hate immigration - because the poorer countries from which people move to the West from, are full of people who would give everything to have the opportunities the West provides, and so quite often have a far better work ethic as a result.
"The National Guard was called into New Orleans to help organize rescues, provide food and shelter, and prevent looting and rioting that occur at times of great destruction and uncertainty."
This is a very ethnocentric view. In many nations the reaction of citizens after a disaster is not to loot and riot, but instead help each other. Why do you think rioting and looting was an issue in New Orleans? Wealth disparity.
You're somewhat right about capitalism, certainly you can't do away with it altogether for the reasons you cite - but that was exactly my point, it's about balance. The problem the US has is that it's horribly unbalanced, focussed too far towards pure capitalism and too far away from socialism because socialism has been billed as some evil word akin to communism. The reason I believe the US system is too far down the capitalism road is simple, despite being the most wealthy nation in the world, it suffers from a combination of lower levels of literacy, numeracy, higher infant mortality, lower levels of average personal happiness, shorter life expectancy, and lower levels of violent and non-violent crime to name a few. When the US is so much more wealthy, why do you think this is the case? It's about poor political balance. The problem is that whilst the 1% can afford things like the best healthcare in the world, the 99% end up with below average healthcare, bringing down the averages.
"People who do not live in the US and even some that do tend to ignore things like this. Reading an European news source leaves some people with the impression that sick and injured people are being denied help and thrown out on the street and that is a distorted view of reality."
Yes, but what's not distorted are the stats. When you have noticably lower life expectancy, severe issues with problems like obesity, and higher infant mortality, then it's obviously you're doing something wrong. It doesn't really matter what the papers say when the stats tell the real story. Healthcare is about more than just emergency room treatment also, part the reason healthcare in places like Europe is cheaper overall yet effective in supporting greater life expectancy is because they don't wait until people end up in the emergency room, they offer regular checkups, and advice. It's treated as an ongoing thing.
"It might be that he's stress-sensitive and unable to socially interact like a normal person, "
That is a mental health issue though, and particularly in the likes of the US jail system thousands of miles from home and his family then of course he's a suicide risk at that point - some people kill themselves in jail even when they're otherwise mentally healthy based on that alone, the added trauma of facing that when you're socially inept surrounded by in your face prisoners is bound to make him higher risk than usual.
No one is saying his crime is excusable, just that extradition isn't the right form of punishment. Trial in a British court and detention in the much less harsh British system, or under house arrest with a ban on the use of computers is punishment enough for someone like this if he even needs to be punished any further. The UK focuses much more on rehabilitation, I think after 10 years of this being dragged out he knows full well he shouldn't have done what he did, wont do it again, and has faced enough stress from it all to be punishment enough.
It's not like he killed or hurt anyone, not like he leaked anything sensitive, really, the worst he did was embarassed a bunch of incompetent sysadmins and wasted the man hours required to sort it out. I think there's a fair argument though that it needed sorting out, and a security audit doing regardless of whether McKinnon had hacked in or not.
"What civil liberties have been lost? Freedom of Speech? Freedom to assemble (not compile)? Freedom of the Press? Right to a jury trial?"
Most of those. Restrictions on speech are much greater now, the DHS is censoring websites (ICE seizures), people in Guantanamo suffered detention without trial and the US has committed summary execution of it's own citizens with drone strikes in Pakistan. Warrantless wiretapping, and intrusive body scanners and searches.
"You need to check your dictionary. When you use words like genocide in describing only US actions you are obscuring the true horror of what real genocide really is."
You seem to be going off on a tangent now, your suggestion was that if the US commits to military action it should just whipe out everything in an area - it is that that I said would be genocide, not anything the US has done to date.
"Yes. Have they specifically targeted civilians? No."
Whilst I also agree with much of what you said in that paragraph regardless of the relevance of it to my comment, I do disagree with this particular quote. There are a number of cases where civilians were specifically targetted, which were poorly dealt with / outright denied by the US justice system. Importantly though the Wikileaks cables for Afghanistan document cases where US special forces indiscriminately called down artillery support on civilian compounds without care for whatever civilians were there as they hadn't verified it was clear of any of them, the hope was to get the militants without worrying about civilian casualties, this is just one example. US track record on minimising civilian casualties is one of the major reasons the US struggles to get any kind of decisive victory in most of it's military engagements. The US military focuses far too hard on killing and destruction, and it takes far more than just that to win a war.
"China is supposed to be a communist Peoples Republic so how did they produce so many billionaires?"
Because it's not. China is, nowadays, more capitalist than America. This is by and large because it doesn't even have many laws protecting employee rights. It doesn't vindicate US capitalism - on the contrary, it shows how bad US style capitalism can be if uncontrolled. China calling itself communist is merely a relic of not wanting to admit communism failed it in the last century, and that it was wrong about communism. It's a pride thing - pretend their success is all about communism, when in fact they just made the shift to capitalism.
"That blowhard in Venezuela preaches power to the people but how come his family wealth has greatly expanded since he has been in power?"
Because it's a dictatorship thinly veiled as a democracy, and that's what happens in dictatorships. Regardless, income disparity has actually decreased extensively under Chavez's socialist dictatorship, so I'm not sure how this helps your point either.
"Even the old USSR system had it's share of millionaires and billionaires."
To an extent, but again this is the result of dictatorship. I suspect you overstate the situation though, I think you're confusing the post USSR gold rush billionaires with what was before the fall of the USSR. Income disparity in Russia has actually increased since it went capitalist too.
This isn't to say I'm against capitalism, but as is the case with most things - moving to the extreme of ANY system is bad, really you want a moderation of a number of systems. The problem with US style capitalism is that it doesn't have that balance, and that's fine if you're middle class or rich, but the poor in the US really are poor compared to say, the poor in Europe. Communities in places like parts of New Orleans, and Detroit for example are more representative of the 3rd world than any first world nation, and that kind of disparity in a country as rich as the US is going to be a major source of tension. Why do you think the US had to deploy the national guard and armed mercenairies to restore order after Katrina hit and those peo
Yes but the point is who actually cares if the police investigate this? Virgin has the option of changing the security of it's boxes to prevent, or detect culprits and then carrying out civil action. As it seemed to know who the culprits were (or if it didn't it could hire a PI) it still has the option of taking civil action there.
The point is no one wants their tax money used on this, and even with Virgin's contribution it's still going to be a tax payer subsidised action, and removes the ability of police to focus on what the tax payers do pay them to do.
Even if it is criminal fraud it's just not something anyone would prioritise other than Virgin themselves - because it's cheaper to hijack the police with bribes than it is to just sort the problem themselves which is what they should be doing. They've determined that changing security of their boxes for legit customers is more costly than just bribing the police, so they've gone for that route, and it's unacceptable. It's not like Virgin's business was under threat, and thousands of jobs at risk, just that they saw the opportunity to spend a relatively small sum (for them) to pay police to do something that may or may not help boost their profits.
Also, as I say, I'm not even convinced that illegally chipping a million set top boxes justifies a more serious punishment than rape or murder - the scale of the latter two crimes is just so many orders of magnitude more serious than a bit of fraud that it doesn't compare, yet those far more serious crimes have much lower penalties.
"A) Because they didn't "leave the door wide open.""
There's no better definition of wide open on the internet than a public facing computer with blank, or no password. If you think this isn't wide open, then please, for the love of god, don't ever get a job in IT, or if you have one, kindly vacate it immediately.
"B) You may as well argue that people who don't lock their front door should be charged with a crime because someone steals from them. Because, that is exactly what you are doing."
No you may as well not, because people who don't lock their front door aren't being paid by the tax payer to look after national security. It's a question of competence, and leaving defence network computers open on the public internet can be firmly filed under gross negligence.
"C) Walking in and taking things is still a CRIME."
Well he didn't take anything - it was all still there when he left, but yes you're right, walking in is still a crime. Not the sort any sane person would expect you to get extradited to a foreign country to serve 70 years in prison over though.
"D) 35 is not "Some poor kid with a computer and a modem and a random dialer."
Yes you're right, but he's not fully mentally healthy like a typical adult either, the truth is thus somewhere in between.
Not at all, if he isn't extradited he'll face trial in the UK.
The only caveat however is that this has been dragging on so long that I suspect even if found guilty in the UK now any judge will say he has suffered punishment enough and probably not make him spend even a minute in jail. If they do I think that's a pretty fair assessment - the mental anguish something like this must cause being dragged out over 10 years is pretty awful.
Yes, take this story from yesterday for example:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-16788627
Virgin, one of the UK's only two cable TV providers actually paid the police to raid some people's houses who had been chipping the set top boxes so people could access the content without paying. These people then got 3 years in jail for it.
Keep in mind that people often get less time for burglary, rape, and in some rare occurences even murder.
Yes, giving people free content is now more serious than rape and murder, simply because companies have paid for this to be the case.
"The US leaves Iraq and a civil war breaks out the next day and the different groups get back to killing one another."
It broke out a few months after your initially invaded in 2003, the surge merely pushed it behind closed doors well enough that you could use it as an excuse to leave.
"When do we start holding the Iraqis and Afghan's responsible for their own actions?"
I agree this is a problem, but the solution was not to go in Iraq in the first place. The US was actually making progress in Afghanistan and it was genuinely winnable for some time, but Iraq stirred up a hornets nest, polarised anger against the US and gave Iran the justification it needed to start fuelling things in Afghanistan too. Iran was actually quite scared after 9/11 and offered to help the US deal with the Taliban but instead it turned it down and destroyed the greatest balance against Iran in existence - Iraq, and this gave Iran the boldness it needed to become confident enough to be the biggest problem in the region, happy to stand up to the US.
There's a good reason Iran's nuclear programme was halted a short time after 9/11, and started progressing again when Iraq had been whiped out the equation, and America was facing a decline in world respect.
I understand what's done is done, and I'm not saying you shouldn't just pull out, much of what you say is quite right but you really are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I think the only real solution would actually be to deal with Pakistan, so that al Qaeda and the Taliban no longer have state support, but that's a hell of a high stakes gamble, and understandably no one will take it, so the only option is to just accept you're going to face a few decades of hate from that part of the world no matter what you do.
"And exactly what country has that capability?"
America.
You only have to look at what happened to your country post 9/11 - a massive erosion of civil liberties and so forth and a rise, by, what in the rest of the world, would be classed as border line far-right in politics. America is suffering a massive clash between the liberals and the conservatives and a handful more terrorist attacks would bring that to boiling point and tear the country apart. Wealth disparity is already through the roof in the US and states like California are already questioning why they're subisidising the poorer states. It's not too big a problem right now as it's only playing out in politics for the most part (but even there it's having a harmful effect, hence why S&P dropped the US' AAA rating), but it wouldn't take much more of a push to boil over.
"However, if the US does deploy it's military I beleive they should not hold back and destroy everything that gets in the way leaving no doubt about who won or lost. If the US is not willing to do that why bother with it in the first place?"
Because that's called genocide, and whilst the US has a history of somewhat, to completely failed interventions ranging from Korea, to Vietnam, from Lebanon to Somalia, from Afghanistan, to Iraq, many other countries don't, and the problem is how America goes about fighting wars - there's focus on nothing but aggression, but winning a war is as much about winning the people over, as it is decisive action- sometimes the people can't be won, i.e. Iraq, in which case don't go in in the first place, sometimes they can- Afghanistan, but don't be suprised if that changes when you do it wrong. See British intervention in Sierra Leone as a textbook example of doing it quickly, efficiently, cleanly, and with the praise of the people afterwards.
Yep, this is where Siri is strong - not in that it's some major advance in AI as some Apple fanboys claim, but that it's well integrated into the OS so that the things that are linked to phone functions, are linked in a nice seamless manner.
"otherwise they'd be complaining about/to every tech company in the country. They just want the ratings that come with putting "Apple" in a story."
Of course there is another, more likely possibility, though I suspect you missed it because your post really sounded just like a thinly veiled "I love Apple and they can do no wrong!" post.
The more likely possibility is that reporters quite often do actually take an interest in human rights issues, and that they're focussing on Apple indeed partly because it's the most prominent target right now, but by hitting the most prominent, and most profitable target you're hitting the firm that has the most clout available to make the required changes, and the most to lose if it doesn't. You open the door for other firms to advertise their more ethical businesses if they take a stand and Apple doesn't, you basically leave Apple an ultimatum - change, or risk being outflanked by any competitors that do.
This doesn't mean it'll work, if all firms decide to hold their ground and none are willing to change then it's of little benefit, but this tactic by reporters has worked well before. Your latter paragraph is evidence enough of that - Greenpeace was very vocal in pointing out Apple's poor track record on pollutants, and despite Steve Jobs initially telling them to f off, he was eventually left with little choice but to start changing things, as other firms started getting positive headlines because they were more green, whilst Apple was seeing continued negative press on the issue. Since then Apple has changed, but also the industry as a whole has upped it's game on the issue, so if it has the potential to work, unless you're one of those people who throws a fit if the press dares mention that Apple could improve in some area, then what's the problem?
"I'm still not sure what Siri does that's particularly special"
It doesn't.
More telling is Googling for things Siri can't answer, for which there are thousands of results. When you start to see what it can't do you begin to realise that it's really little more than voice-to-text, passed over to a search engine, with a few key words and terms mapped to local applications like "weather", "calendar", "appointment" and so on.
Just like any other search engine out there, there are a lot of questions it really struggles with when posed in natural language form.
Then expect the world's sympathy when a bunch of terrorists you armed 20 years before come and blow up the centrepiece of your financial district with airliners?
You've already got your fingers in too many pies, you can't just withdraw from everything right now without suffering repercussions of the hatred you've stirred up in the places you've fucked up.
You can wait until the dust settles if you want, but you might find that with all the resentment of your nation you've stirred up, that you're not one of those places left standing.
You've embedded yourself as a key part of the game, and it's not a game in which you can just throw your toys up in the air and say "I'm not playing anymore".
"Civil disobedience means that if they decide to sue you that you plead guilty to the crime, take the sentence they give you, and forego appeals."
Er, so you're saying civil disobedience is about being obedient and doing exactly as the authorities would like you to do? They'd love nothing more for you to plead guilty and accept the punishment, and that would achieve what exactly?
This isn't something worth throwing your life away over, but it doesn't make civil disobedience any less justified. On the contrary, not pleading guilty wastes more of the MPAA/RIAA's time and money as they have to fight it in the courts, run the risk of losing, and hence is more productive in halting/slowing their activities.
"Well but now you're talking just 'carriers' and not 'supercarriers'."
How do you define the difference? the new Chinese carriers due for around 2015 are going to be 65t, the same as the UK's two projected carriers. You previously mentioned this British carriers, and the Chinese carrier is in exactly the same class as these.
"The US navy is so astronomically bigger than potentially hostile counterparts it wouldn't meaningfully hurt overall us capabilities to shrink down a bit."
This is stupid, you seem to be under the impression carriers will only ever go up against carriers. That's simply not the case, they have to go up against airfields too, so it doesn't matter if the enemy has less carriers, if it has more airfields then the US fleet can be destroyed if it dares to defend something strategic like Taiwan or Japan off the Chinese coast.
Carriers aren't designed to just sit in the middle of the pacific and sit waiting patiently to see if anything comes their way, they're designed to move off the coast of potential conflict zones, and with the size of China's land based forces, and their increasing arsenal of anti-carrier weapons, there's soon going to be an area of the world that's a no go zone for US ships, especially if they shrink their fleet.
Or recognise that as educated people they're smart enough to realise that it doesn't matter how much evidence you put forth towards denialists that they wont change their mind because they are not rational people and no amount of reason will work on them because making decisions about what they belief based on the balance of evidence is not something they're capable of - for them, emotions weight out over reason and logic, so the best you can do is to make it clear that the majority of scientists disagree with them such that they can't at least say "Hey look, even scientists disagree with global warming!" which is really what this WSJ article is trying to give the impression of.
Yeah, fundamentally the reason the US has and wants carriers now is for Asia more than anything - it has one (or two?) deployed around the gulf area sure, but you can be rest assured this is more about being positioned and based somewhere they can access the China region rather than about the gulf, because as you say, they have land bases there.
But China also now has a carrier, and is building more which the post further up this thread missed/ignored. That's the primary reason America wants to maintain a decent carrier force for the forseeable future.
Personally I'm not convinced China is the threat the US makes out, but the US certainly views it as it's biggest threat moving forward.
No, people here have been trying for years. He's kind of like a digital Voynich manuscript. You can try, but you'll go mad in the process.
Meh, it's not that bad yet.
Things like carrying gun schematics because you have a love of guns in your country of residence where it's not illegal would in itself be a reasonable excuse.
The problem is in this case, that the police found evidence counter to the guy's reasonable excuse, suggesting he didn't actually have a reasonable excuse.
I'm not defending the law, I think it stinks, but it's not like people get randomly arrested and sent to jail when they genuinely do have no link to terrorism, no matter how tenuous.
It's worth noting that far more cases over this sort of thing have failed here in the UK. This case just happened to be one that tipped over the line where the courts felt the evidence was strong enough that he wasn't just some innocent joe "seeing what all the fuss is about". Slashdot being Slashdot just assumes this guy was completely innocent of everything, and that this is some law whereby if you even think about how fun it would be to blow something up you'll get sent to prison for life - it's really nothing like that. This guy pleaded guilty, and had also written a letter saying he was prepared physically, and financially for jihad, along with a handwritten shopping list for grenades and such.
There's a fair argument that this still shouldn't be enough to arrest him I suppose, but in this case it's just what tipped the scales in favour of his excuse not being reasonable. The argument that he was just interested in seeing what it was all about kind of falls flat on it's face when you also write a shopping list for prohibited explosives and firearms, and write a letter of admission that you're prepared for jihad.
"Of course the downfall to this whole idea is the fact that each location would need an available kinect and projector."
At which point you might as well just have bought an interactive whiteboard instead.
""Libya - The US Currency Protection War" is not the entire story, but neither is "Libya - The US and NATO Spend Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Liberate Poor People Out of the Pure Goodness of their Hearts" - that's laughable."
I didn't say it was. The point is the conspiracy theory implies this was some great planned event, it wasn't, Western action was very much reactionary, and it may be a reaction carried out in part because it was seen as an opportunity to get more favourable oil contracts or whatever, but the idea that the whole uprising was some kind of CIA planned and organised event or whatever is as utterly rediculous as saying the Tunisian guy who set himself alight was a CIA operative doing so to trigger the whole arab spring.
The arab spring is very much a reaction caused by the citizens of that region reaching boiling point over the oppression they suffer, and acting out because of it. Yes the West may see opportunities from this and take advantage of them where it can, but it hasn't planned the whole thing, it's not instigating it.
America can't even keep it's own diplomatic cables secret, much less a major conspiracy involving hundreds of millions of people.
Did you actually follow your own links?
The first demonstrates a pipeline that pipes gas from Turkey to Europe, and that passes well away from Kosovo, so what exactly has the US and Kosovo got to do with it?
The latter pipes gas from Turkmenistan to India. Again, what the fuck has that got to do with the US?
What do either of these have to do with oil and the petrodollar?
This is why so many conspiracy theories are so laughably bad- even their basic underlying premises are completely wrong.
"And lets not forget the Dominique Strauss-Kahn saga."
Perhaps he's actually a Chinese man with lots of plastic surgery, and has the go code for the space based China world-mind control device? Obviously because of this the NSA needed to set him up as a rapist.
They had to take out Gaddaffi because he was threatening the strategic oil transport route of Kosovo, which is a nation so large no one could ever pass round it.
I agree, Afghanistan as an oil transit route was important, because they had to stop Iran pumping oil to Uzbekistan, as it meant the Uzbeks were able to use modern machinery to start harvesting their cotton, creating a real challenged to America's cotton industry.
I think you're wrong about Venezuela though, I think the next target after Iran is Canada, I hear those bastards are considering upping the price of bacon, and well, they have a fair bit of oil, and decent amounts of gold reserves so that makes them an obvious target.
Lebanon is just lucky the US hasn't realised that it's got a decent amount of oil, some of the largest gold reserves in the world, and too an islamist insurgency loyal to Iran and Syria that has just about taken control of the country. I mean, it's obvious that America has avoided going after Lebanon recently as part of this grand plan because they simply forgot about them. It couldn't possibly be because there is no grand conspiracy or anything like that.
It's not a case of claiming to be unaware, it's a case of claiming to have unintentionally breached the legislation.
As Slashdot likes car analogies, imagine you are driving along, and through no fault of your own, due to a manufacturing fault, your car's left wheel falls off and you go flying into someone elses car. You're at fault, but it doesn't mean you didn't know the rules of the road or how to drive safely, it was just an accident.
We have to treat companies who claim the same thing the same way because a company can't be expected to know that someone in their firm wont accidently screw up, and because it's not fair on a company if someone malicious joins their firm and breaks the law on purpose. The problem is that being lenient on companies/people for genuine mistakes means that it's sometimes hard to tell if it is genuine, and so assholes tend to abuse the fact we er on the side of caution. I think it's good that we do er on the side of caution as there's no point ruining someone's life over something that they were powerless to prevent - would you want to be made redundant because your employer couldn't afford to pay you anymore because a colleague maliciously tried to get the company in trouble?
The problem is as I say, it'll also be used as an excuse for bad companies to profit by breaking the law in cases like this.