I'm hoping this election cycle results in the GOP splitting in two.
How does that not happen without the Democrats splitting similarly?
I have a number of strongly Democratic friends on Facebook. I have NEVER seen such a massive dislike of the front-runner (Hillary) and support for the candidates being shafted (Sanders). I would be surprised if even half of the Democrats I know will vote for Hillary ever.
This is a very astute observation. If anything, I have the impression that a lot more Sanders supporters are flat out refusing to vote at all than there are former Republicans swearing to vote for Hillary. It's so bad that George Takei just made a video (disclaimer - I haven't watched it) that apparently is begging Sanders supporters to vote for Hillary and not sit out the election.
I keep thinking how the US will drone strike wedding receptions on flimsy evidence, even assassinating our own citizens and their children for even *meeting* with an alleged terrorist
...and a single drone strike in NK could solve much of the world's conflict.
Take one of the Chinese ambassadors aside, have a quiet word, get a secret "OK" from the leadership, and *BANG!*. No more fear, uncertainty, and doubt in South Korea or Japan.
You are right, that this could be done. But the situation is a bit more complex.
1) China is sincere when they say they want a nuclear free Korean peninsula, but they view all NK regime changes as bad for them with no possible good outcomes. They fear that once the peninsula is unified under a South Korean government that the US won't leave Korea and will, in fact, station US troops on China's borders. China also benefits from the current situation by, among other things, getting cut rate prices on North Korean rare earths that they in turn resell.
2) It would probably take a nuclear strike to ensure that the leadership is killed en masse. The US is hesitant to use nukes and even then, there's no telling what the remaining NK military leadership would do. They might fight to the death.
3) Seoul is unfortunately too close to the border and any surviving NK military units will probably launch devastating missile stirkes at Seoul, possibly including biological weapons. I have my doubts that NK has a rocket with a nuke on it they could possibly launch without plenty of advance detection by the US, but if I'm wrong, that would be very bad. A best case scenario for Seoul would be tens of thousands dead without any bio weapons or nukes involved.
4) Nobody really wants to pay for reconstruction once the peninsula is unified. Cost estimates are staggeringly high. You think that George W's adventures in Iran and Afghanistan were expensive? Rebuilding NK might be multiple times more costly.
Basically this is why the US doesn't take advantage of the situation to kill the leadership in one strike.
What, because they refused to bow down and enforce the US's laws in their territory?
Keep in mind that EU countries do that all the time to the USA. The US is certainly not alone in that. The EU's "right to be forgotten", which as is typical for many EU countries is a bit of feeling sorry for poor criminals, has been said by several EU courts to apply everywhere in the world. For example, Google can't just restrict searches that originate in Germany from finding results where some applicant has applied for a crime to be "forgotten" in Germany, the EU courts don't want any Google search anywhere in the world to return the results. I'm sure that there are cases where China and other major countries have tried to insist that the US follow their local laws too. This is certainly not something that only the US does, although the US may well whine about it more than anybody else does.
The guy is a sociopath. He has no sincerely held views, no real beliefs, he's just a pure political animal, a Frank Underwood with eyeliner.
Your description is just about perfect for Marco Rubio but it's completely wrong, well except maybe for the sociopath part, about Cruz. Very little of what Rubio believes makes any sense. He has spent almost all of his post law school life in some sort of government job. Rubio is a liar, has few if any ethics, and loves and needs money (he and his wife outspend their incomes). Rubio accepts positions based on contributions he gets. He does not have a belief that doesn't have a price attached to it. Rubio will use anything and anyone to get and hold power. He's not really a Tea Party kind of guy, but he had no problem pretending he was to get elected Senator. Honestly, I'm really surprised that he chose not to run for re-election as Senator but look for him to run for governor of Florida in 2018. He needs the money and he loves the power, so he's not yet finished as a politician, although he probably won't ever be president.
The problem with Cruz is that he really does believe all that whack job stuff he spouts. He's a bona fide Tea Party member, which immediately means that he truly believes a lot of anti-government nonsense he spouts, which sort of makes him something like an anarchist who wants to be president. The biggest component of his beliefs is the "Religious Whack Job" component, which I put at about 80% of his beliefs. The rest is just typical far right wing Republican nonsense - cut taxes to the bone, especially for businesses - stop as much government regulation as possible, all if possible - stop anything that remotely resembles environmentalism - businesses are always right so let them do whatever they like - and so on.
A long time? No banned from federal service for life.
Incorrect. They may have been banned from becoming controllers again, but they were most definitely not banned from federal service for life. How do I know? I'm old enough to have worked in federal service IT with a fired former ATC. This would have been in the late 1980s. He had no problems getting a government clearance to do IT work as a federal employee at a US military base, but he could never be an ATC again. He didn't talk much about it except I do remember that he still thought he did the right thing in going on strike, which was an opinion I did not share.
* Japan seemed unwilling to concede to unconditional surrender, even in the face of certain military defeat, instead adopting a strategy of inflicting massive casualties against invaders to force more favorable terms.
Correct. There's evidence that they were willing to surrender, but they had guarantees they wanted and the US demanded an unconditional surrender. I don't think it's hard to understand why they would have been unwilling to do an unconditional surrender after all the propaganda they heard about how evil American soldiers were. Even after 2 atomic bombs got dropped, it took the emperor himself to force the military to do an unconditional surrender. There were still plenty of people int he military who wanted to fight on.
Not to digress but by at least by January 1945 if not a few months earlier both Himmler and Goring were trying separately to secretly negotiate a surrender to the non-Soviet allies that would have allowed that guy to run Germany in a post WWII order. The US refused, telling both of them that they had to go to trial for war crimes at the end of the war. I think it's worth questioning whether the desire for revenge on one guy (whichever offer they took, the Allies could have demanded the other guy go to trial) was worth spending 4 more months of fighting and all those lives lost on all sides just to ensure that those guys went to a war crimes trial. In fact, Himmler killed himself with a cyanide pill shortly after his identity was discovered when he was in a POW camp and as we know Goring had a cyanide pill smuggled to him hours before his execution so so much for the idea of bringing them justice.
People in Russia, sadly, don't seem to care much about Panama Papers.
Yeah, I really don't care. The people of Russia clearly aren't terribly interested in a free press, an uncorrupt government or any semblance of a modern open democratic state. If that's what they want, that's what they get and I'm not going to get too worked up about their choices.
You are correct. I can't tell you why it's that way though, but it's been that way for a long time. I posted on this earlier in the week. There are stories going back to the days of the Tsars where the Tsar would send out his minions to rough up or kill the peasants and the survivors would wail and say "If only the Tsar knew what was happening, he would save us!" when what happened was because he ordered it. Russians love to believe the guy at the top is wonderful and kind and it's really the people under him who are evil. This is why it's not difficult at all to find people in Russia who revere Stalin still, which to me is just a hair breadth's of difference from revering Hitler. I've read that Putin himself doesn't seem to own much of anything but his daughters, son-in-law and close friends have billions. So it allows him to provide enough plausible deniability that he's not corrupt and crooked for the public to buy it. They really don't care.
Something I often wonder is why we don't hear about 'new' geniuses in art. It's always the same guys from the 1700 and 1800s (once in a while an author from the 1900s sneaks in).
Uh, well, you might want to have a look here, where there are links to probably a couple hundred painters of the 20th century who are regarded as significant. There are many people in the art world who consider a lot of them to be "geniuses."
Imagine if you will that everybody you know only listens to classical music and they only listen to works written before 1900. You have never even heard of The Beatles, for example. Everybody you know probably would tell you that all "modern" music sucks and you would be pretty much baffled to identify works by people like Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Nirvana, etc. That's kind of how art is. Starting in the latter part of the 1800s there was the impressionism movement and some other movements that began to move painting away from the classic realistic style the first poster is probably familiar with (ie. Rembrandt). These movements continued in the 1900s and on resulting in works that are very divisive. For example, I get what Picasso was doing, but he's not my favorite artist and I think his early career, more realistic paintings were crap. I think Salvador Dali was a genius and he could even paint in the classical style when he wanted to and he was outstanding at it and pretty much everything he ever did. I also like Fernand Leger's work, but not so much Piet Mondrian (Dali had a very funny and insulting comment about his work once) and Jackson Pollock. More recent paintings have gotten ever further away from the classical style to the point that I honestly think that a few painters are just scam artists and they're not really even trying to produce anything that's actually art, but merely deliberately putting crap on canvas to see if suckers will buy it.
rsilvergun - If you have a chance to go a good art gallery in a major US metropolitan city, you might find some modern things you actually like. Or perhaps you are just a fan of the older styles. I never thought much of most of the movements in the 1900s until I actually had a chance to see some of the paintings from them in art museums and I discovered that there actually are some artists I do really like who don't paint in a realistic style at all.
But as long as you don't talk about it, you can view whatever the fuck you want.
I wouldn't go quite that far. While I'm sure that there are subjects they will let you look at without talking to you, I wouldn't interpret to mean that there's not anything you can view on your own without having to, ahem, talk to the local authorities about. The CCP is still off the charts opposed to Falun Gong and nobody but the upper levels of the party itself seems to know exactly why this is. I've read several completely different explanations for this and they can't really be reconciled. My ex-girlfriend was born and raised in southern China and she told me a story of how when she was in college, she and her dormmates were all taken out once and interrogated pretty roughly by the police because one of the girls had family members who followed Falun Gong. None of the other girls, including my ex-girlfriend, had any knowledge of this. I doubt that normal Chinese people can go to websites supporting Falun Gong without the authorities becoming interested.
The Kremlin on the other hand has already called the Panama Papers a CIA plot, (big surprise there). Hopefully, if the Panama Papers do reveal Putin used a shell to hide his money, Russia's citizens will not stand for it and force his hand.
Not likely. Here's why. And I speak from personal experience. I speak Russian rather well and I've spent more time in the ex-USSR than most people who aren't from there. One of the problems with Russians in particular is that for centuries they've had this rather quaint idea that the guy at the top is a really great, caring guy and the greatest leader in the world and it's those evil underlings beneath him who are corrupt and not doing his will. There are stories of peasants in the old days of the Tsars who would be abused or even killed by the Tsar's henchmen and the peasants would say "If only the Tsar knew what was happening! He'd save us!" when in fact the henchmen were expressly carrying out his orders on them. Stalin was an extraordinarily evil man. I know in the West it's popular to say that Hitler was the most evil man ever, but I think Stalin may actually have been worse. Well, maybe not if you're Jewish, but still you could make a strong case for Stalin being worse and I think we in the West could agree he was really really bad even if less bad than Hitler. You wouldn't have to walk far at all in Russia to find people telling you what a great guy Stalin was and how they wish he was still around. Khrushchev was easily the greatest leader of the USSR and nobody generally thinks very much of him over there. The USSR peaked under Khrushchev and it was all downhill before him and after him, but Stalin is The Man to many Russians. Putin is thought to be just a fantastic guy who has incompetent, greedy people under him who have hidden their crimes from him (yet somehow the fact that the citizens know what these underlings have done and Putin doesn't know doesn't make them question Putin's fitness to run the show there) and if he, like the peasant oppressing Tsar before him, only knew what was really happening, he would surely fix it. While some report that Putin's popularity is dropping and it may be true, I don't expect any changes. I had a lot of hope for Medvedev and while I think he was a genuinely good president for Russia, I've been pretty disappointed with a lot of things he's said now as PM and I just don't know if he's just saying what Putin wants to hear or if Medvedev really believes what he says now. The alternatives in Russia actually may be worse than Putin with some really nutso nationalists who'd like to provoke a war with the US and/or Europe and maybe even China. I expect most citizens to believe that Putin did nothing wrong and this to die down pretty quickly.
May 1 was a banking holiday in China. The following Monday they were able to get assistance from local law enforcement and banking officials to freeze the account that held the stolen funds. Two days later, the money was recovered.
Translation - Mattel was able to find the right banking and local law enforcement officials to bribe in China to get help on this and they were able to recover 90% of the money by only paying 10% out in bribes.
Not joking here. That's probably what really happened. Or the bad guys failed to bribe the right people in China to look the other way and the authorities decided to punish them be sending the money back.
No, their policy of making people take off their shoes is causing long lines.
It's up to the individual airport, but some US airports actually tell you not to take off your shoes for security but others still want you to do it. I've been in both in the past couple of years.
Did the FBI just get one judge to issue an illegal order, then they withdrew the case while that order was under appeal, and claim a precedent-setting win?
I doubt the order they got was "illegal" as you say. Just because you don't like it, that doesn't make it "illegal". But yes, the article has a link to another article that says that the FBI got a federal judge in Riverside, California to give them an order mandating that Apple create a custom firmware file. It happened almost 2 weeks ago and this is the first I'm hearing about it.
How else can the poster boast about his intelligence, unless you use an obscure Acronym, and just expect everyone else to know it.
On Slashdot there is a wide variety of geeky interests, and we don't have the time to follow all of them.
This seems to be happening with more frequency here. Last week we had a similar post where the submitter was clearly upset about some sort of injustice and it involved something so obscure that I don't remember the name of it. It got a lot of "What the bleep is ________?" posts though.
Hah... Doomed to fail, or make only very little difference, unless the company also leads social change as a national brand.
Korean work culture is all kinds of fucked up, and everyone is unwillingly complicit. Everyone does it, for some unknown reason, so you feel you have to do it too.
Examples:
-- Expected late working hours until the boss leaves, sometimes >10pm, because showing your face at work is more valued than the work itself getting done. And the boss probably feels pressure to stay late, to not appear lazy. Very little actual work gets done in those late hours.
In the previous decade I worked for what was probably the 2nd most important American office for a major European telco. I don't like to name them because frankly they don't deserve any publicity, not even bad publicity, after they way they have treated their American employees over the years. Once I got sent to our HQ office in Europe and my co-workers were very honest with me and told me that almost every day they worked 10 hours or more, but the last 2-3 hours were a complete waste of time. They were a support team and we had a world wide support model. Around 4 PM they had actually handed off their support duties to North America, but their management expected them to stay until 6 PM, so they did, even if they didn't do any real work. And note that this was an a country that Americans think is infamous for not having 40 hour work weeks.
-- Expected drinks with colleagues after work into the late hours, and not only that but also shady, overtly sexist atmospheres and goings-on at bars. If you don't partake you're viewed as not part of the team.
I read an article a few years ago by a Korean American who was born and raised in the USA but whose parents taught him how to speak Korean. He thought it might be cool to move back there, so he did. He talked about these after hours drinking parties and said that not only could you not get out of them more than maybe one time (and then never again), but there was tremendous pressure to make sure you abused alcohol while you were there. So you can't just go and pretend to drink. It's probably no wonder that South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world with a society like this.
Since the system gives you the ability to cancel orders, I don't see what the guy did as illegal.
It is within the rules of the game, so it is legal 100%.
Assuming, you are American, you have free speech rights protected in the Constitution. But your Constitutional rights are not absolute. Even the late Justice Scalia said that the 2nd amendment didn't mean that there could never be any restrictions on guns. So to use the easiest example for you to understand, you have the right to yell "Fire!" at the top of your lungs. If you do that at home and nobody else hears you, then there's no problem. If you exercise this right in a crowded theater where there is no fire and cause a panic and people die from being trampled, you're going to jail. It's just not that hard to conceive of a situation where a legal action taken to an extreme becomes a crime. The US is charging that the guy in question wiped $1 trillion off the books to make about $40 million himself. As a stock holder (I'm not Warren Buffet but I do own some stocks), I probably lost some value thanks to what he did. I'm not personally impressed that he devalued my stock holdings simply to make himself rich.
They thought that Apple would fold, and the public would all support the hack. They guessed wrong.
Majority of public != Majority of Slashdotters
They guessed wrong on Apple folding, but every poll I read about had a clear majority of the US public favoring the hack being done. Do many of you here even have any kind of relationship with people who aren't in IT? I mean I know we joke about guys living in their mom's basement and playing video games all day, but time and time again folks here assume incorrectly that the vast majority if the American public supports their personal stances on various issues and it's just not true at all.
One of my friends uses Blender to create his own videos at times. His content isn't earth shattering or likely to be of interest to anybody outside of his circle of friends and acquaintances. He canceled his YouTube account a few years ago because he got tired of continually getting his videos flagged over the music they used. He was very careful to use old classical music not under copyright with performances available under a Creative Commons license, and YouTube kept flagging them all and pointing him to a licensing service. He decided that basically YouTube just wanted to shake him down for some money (pretty sure they get a cut of what the licensing company makes) and he objected to it, so he closed his account and moved his videos to a different service. I'm not sure, but I think he's using Vimeo now.
It's not impossible to get your own videos through YouTube without any problem. My nephews have done it for goofy stuff they shot themselves with friends that doesn't use any music. I took a quick look at the linked to article and we need a lot more info than seems to be provided on just what exactly these videos are. YouTube is pretty inconsistent in what they flag. I've seen some interesting tricks used to get copyrighted stuff past the monitoring bots. If the complainer is trying to get, for example, TV or movie excerpts through or even worse entire episodes or movies, there might be good reasons why it's being flagged.
I agree that many of the problems are associated with Islam, but there is the counterfactual argument that holds that states like Indonesia and Malaysia while having large Muslim populations don't seem to have much of a terrorism base and contribute very little to the problem of Islamic terrorism.
Incorrect about Indonesia. You don't remember the Bali bombings in 2002. Jemaah Islamiyah is the local Indonesian terrorist group associated with that. They're still active in causing problems in the Philippines and they tried to set off some bombs years ago in Singapore but the local authorities somehow got word of it and stopped them. They've had a lot of members killed or imprisoned since then after an initial Indonesian government response of trying to ignore them or slap them on the wrist. While they don't appear to currently be a big problem in Indonesian, they're not completely gone and I suppose they could come back if they're able to get some motivated recruits.
Malaysia appears at present to not have any troublesome terrorist groups, but I don't feel comfortable assuming that the problem is permanently solved. Malaysia has a very corrupt government that is facing some internal political pressure and various friendly nations don't fully trust it. Malaysia has some quirky laws related to religion that could potentially be troublesome. I wouldn't be extremely worried about Malaysia, but I would definitely keep an eye on it. If the main minority political party starts to get slightly larger support, enough to form the next government, the current ruling party might just resort to violence to stay in power and that kind of thing could maybe promote a Muslim backlash from people with issues with the current government.
Thailand and the Philippines have smaller, but constant problems from homegrown Muslim insurgents trying to "liberate" various parts of those countries with majority Muslim populations.
If you are a fan of President Obama, could you please explain to me why you think Senator Cruz is wrong about this? Because at the moment I agree with Senator Cruz. President Obama's administration has dropped the embargo and helped out the government of Cuba, and I'm not aware of a single demand that Cuba has granted in return.
The embargo is not dropped. It should be in my opinion, but I get no say. Congress has to make the decision. They have not done so.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but Cuba did us a huge favor recently that they didn't have to do. Since everything is always better if you let private industry do it (rolling my eyes as I write that), the geniuses who outsource everything they can hired a French company to ship a Hellfire missile back to the USA. Only it didn't go to the USA at all. It "mistakenly" went to Cuba. Was it a mistake? Was it a devious plan? Who knows? But Cuba shipped it back to the USA without any problems. That wouldn't have happened just a few years ago.
I don't claim to be a Cuban expert, but if they were given truly free elections I'm not sure that they wouldn't just freely choose to keep Raul Castro and the Communist Party in power. The fact that there are dissidents doesn't necessarily mean that most people there are extremely unhappy with the government. Americans may not understand that, but that doesn't mean it's now how it is.
I mean let's not be mean spirited about it. The Senate should consider him, and consider him some more. Then after that is all done why not consider him again. Let's consider the fuck out of him. Make him the most considered appointment never to get appointed.
I just want to point out that despite your apparent hopes to the contrary, at some point the Senate will actually be in Democratic hands again. I'd put the odds of that happening as actually pretty good should Trump be elected president. If the Senate does this then you don't get to come back and cry like a little beyotch when the Democrats do the exact same thing to the nominee of a Republican president.
What Abrams, Jackson and the other rich director/producer types are thinking:
Movies cost about $15 each ticket and up so a family of four could find this to be a good deal!
What will really happen:
The same family of four that will pay $60 or more to go to the movies will balk at paying a slightly lower charge at home because they won't make the "This is cheaper than 4 individual tickets" connection that the big shots think. They will see it as "I could pay $15 to see this film. Why should I pay $50?"
This seems to be very unlikely to be anything that groups smaller than 4 will want (ie. singles, childless couples, etc.).
Some in Hollywood will refuse to cooperate and see this is a threat to their standard business model. Not to mention push back from the theater chains. All hell broke loose over the release of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - Sword Of Destiny" to home video on the same date as theaters and all the major theater chains in the USA refused to show the film as they viewed it as a threat. Do Abrams and the others really want to risk having all the major chains tell them "Yeah, we're not going to carry your film if you do that"? They'll back down. if this ever ever gets off the ground I expect that it will only show films with limited audiences, which will make it seem to be a failure.
Pacifist nations get conquered unless they pay to non-pacifist nations to protect them. Blame human nature, but dare not to ignore it.
It is no longer clear that independent Japan is more valuable to US than trade with China, as such protection is less guaranteed. Look at much weaker Russia getting away with annexing parts of Georgia and Ukraine that only resulted in anemic sanctions and rhetoric.
Your first paragraph is fine. Your second - not so much.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Georgia and Ukraine were not NATO members and had no treaties requiring other nations to come to their aid if attacked. Japan has a mutual self-defense treaty with the USA and the US has made it clear to China that it will honor this treaty by saying that it recognizes Japanese control over some disputed islands that China also claims. The reason that South Korea and Japan don't have nuclear weapons isn't because they are too stupid to create them. They don't have them because basically the security treaties they have with the USA are strong enough that they don't feel - yet - that they need to violate international law and build nuclear weapons on their own. But China's continual asshat behavior may eventually lead to Japan reconsidering that and while South Korea and China have no territorial disputes, aggressive North Korean behavior may also convince South Korea and Japan that they need nuclear weapons of their own. China's current government cannot be trusted at all and some Asia watchers have speculated that that some years from now the so-called Peoples Liberation Army may stage a coup and take over China themselves. And nobody knows what will happen then,. I can tell you that my impression is that too many years of Communist Party propaganda have created a PLA that is somewhat divorced from reality and literally believes it is invincible. Japan's fears are real and they would be best served to strengthen their own military now while they have time rather than wish they had done so later when facing a possible Chinese military dictatorship. I believe it is inevitable that the Chinese Communist Party will be removed from power, probably within 10 years. Whether that removal leads to a democratic China or a crazy military dictatorship that in a worst case scenario could be like dealing with a gigantic North Korea, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that the Chinese military leaders are not as sane as rational as they need to be and it's not going to be good at all for anybody if they end up running the show there.
Lankov is Russian and is based in Russia. Do I really have to point out that nobody in Russia is a reliable source of information under Putin? For all you or I know, he has Kremlin ties. I do think it's certainly possible that private markets are helping stability, I'm not convinced that Lankov doesn't have an agenda straight from Putin and for a variety of reasons it is in Putin's interests at the moment to paint North Korea in a picture as rosy as possible. I have read Victor Cha's book _The Impossible State_ and I recommend it. Cha points out that China basically has no choice but to support North Korea. They don't want refugees flooding over the border, which not only would cost them money but would take up valuable resources they are going to need to keep the population in line as the economy declines. China lost Taiwan, perhaps forever, as a result of going to North Korea's aid in the Korean War. This is still a major sticking point for them. Their desire to have complete control over Taiwan is insatiable. Also, China paid a real price in blood to save North Korea, including the loss of one of Mao's sons. And finally to give China something for their support, North Korea is basically letting them ravage the environment to dig up rare earths that China pays a huge discount for. Cha states that while China has more influence than they are willing to use most of the time, they actually have less real influence than is commonly believed in the west. North Korea knows that ultimately it can do what it wants because there are real limits to how much China will push back.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hoping this election cycle results in the GOP splitting in two.
How does that not happen without the Democrats splitting similarly?
I have a number of strongly Democratic friends on Facebook. I have NEVER seen such a massive dislike of the front-runner (Hillary) and support for the candidates being shafted (Sanders). I would be surprised if even half of the Democrats I know will vote for Hillary ever.
This is a very astute observation. If anything, I have the impression that a lot more Sanders supporters are flat out refusing to vote at all than there are former Republicans swearing to vote for Hillary. It's so bad that George Takei just made a video (disclaimer - I haven't watched it) that apparently is begging Sanders supporters to vote for Hillary and not sit out the election.
I keep thinking how the US will drone strike wedding receptions on flimsy evidence, even assassinating our own citizens and their children for even *meeting* with an alleged terrorist
Take one of the Chinese ambassadors aside, have a quiet word, get a secret "OK" from the leadership, and *BANG!*. No more fear, uncertainty, and doubt in South Korea or Japan.
You are right, that this could be done. But the situation is a bit more complex.
1) China is sincere when they say they want a nuclear free Korean peninsula, but they view all NK regime changes as bad for them with no possible good outcomes. They fear that once the peninsula is unified under a South Korean government that the US won't leave Korea and will, in fact, station US troops on China's borders. China also benefits from the current situation by, among other things, getting cut rate prices on North Korean rare earths that they in turn resell.
2) It would probably take a nuclear strike to ensure that the leadership is killed en masse. The US is hesitant to use nukes and even then, there's no telling what the remaining NK military leadership would do. They might fight to the death.
3) Seoul is unfortunately too close to the border and any surviving NK military units will probably launch devastating missile stirkes at Seoul, possibly including biological weapons. I have my doubts that NK has a rocket with a nuke on it they could possibly launch without plenty of advance detection by the US, but if I'm wrong, that would be very bad. A best case scenario for Seoul would be tens of thousands dead without any bio weapons or nukes involved.
4) Nobody really wants to pay for reconstruction once the peninsula is unified. Cost estimates are staggeringly high. You think that George W's adventures in Iran and Afghanistan were expensive? Rebuilding NK might be multiple times more costly.
Basically this is why the US doesn't take advantage of the situation to kill the leadership in one strike.
What, because they refused to bow down and enforce the US's laws in their territory?
Keep in mind that EU countries do that all the time to the USA. The US is certainly not alone in that. The EU's "right to be forgotten", which as is typical for many EU countries is a bit of feeling sorry for poor criminals, has been said by several EU courts to apply everywhere in the world. For example, Google can't just restrict searches that originate in Germany from finding results where some applicant has applied for a crime to be "forgotten" in Germany, the EU courts don't want any Google search anywhere in the world to return the results. I'm sure that there are cases where China and other major countries have tried to insist that the US follow their local laws too. This is certainly not something that only the US does, although the US may well whine about it more than anybody else does.
The guy is a sociopath. He has no sincerely held views, no real beliefs, he's just a pure political animal, a Frank Underwood with eyeliner.
Your description is just about perfect for Marco Rubio but it's completely wrong, well except maybe for the sociopath part, about Cruz. Very little of what Rubio believes makes any sense. He has spent almost all of his post law school life in some sort of government job. Rubio is a liar, has few if any ethics, and loves and needs money (he and his wife outspend their incomes). Rubio accepts positions based on contributions he gets. He does not have a belief that doesn't have a price attached to it. Rubio will use anything and anyone to get and hold power. He's not really a Tea Party kind of guy, but he had no problem pretending he was to get elected Senator. Honestly, I'm really surprised that he chose not to run for re-election as Senator but look for him to run for governor of Florida in 2018. He needs the money and he loves the power, so he's not yet finished as a politician, although he probably won't ever be president.
The problem with Cruz is that he really does believe all that whack job stuff he spouts. He's a bona fide Tea Party member, which immediately means that he truly believes a lot of anti-government nonsense he spouts, which sort of makes him something like an anarchist who wants to be president. The biggest component of his beliefs is the "Religious Whack Job" component, which I put at about 80% of his beliefs. The rest is just typical far right wing Republican nonsense - cut taxes to the bone, especially for businesses - stop as much government regulation as possible, all if possible - stop anything that remotely resembles environmentalism - businesses are always right so let them do whatever they like - and so on.
A long time? No banned from federal service for life.
Incorrect. They may have been banned from becoming controllers again, but they were most definitely not banned from federal service for life. How do I know? I'm old enough to have worked in federal service IT with a fired former ATC. This would have been in the late 1980s. He had no problems getting a government clearance to do IT work as a federal employee at a US military base, but he could never be an ATC again. He didn't talk much about it except I do remember that he still thought he did the right thing in going on strike, which was an opinion I did not share.
* Japan seemed unwilling to concede to unconditional surrender, even in the face of certain military defeat, instead adopting a strategy of inflicting massive casualties against invaders to force more favorable terms.
Correct. There's evidence that they were willing to surrender, but they had guarantees they wanted and the US demanded an unconditional surrender. I don't think it's hard to understand why they would have been unwilling to do an unconditional surrender after all the propaganda they heard about how evil American soldiers were. Even after 2 atomic bombs got dropped, it took the emperor himself to force the military to do an unconditional surrender. There were still plenty of people int he military who wanted to fight on.
Not to digress but by at least by January 1945 if not a few months earlier both Himmler and Goring were trying separately to secretly negotiate a surrender to the non-Soviet allies that would have allowed that guy to run Germany in a post WWII order. The US refused, telling both of them that they had to go to trial for war crimes at the end of the war. I think it's worth questioning whether the desire for revenge on one guy (whichever offer they took, the Allies could have demanded the other guy go to trial) was worth spending 4 more months of fighting and all those lives lost on all sides just to ensure that those guys went to a war crimes trial. In fact, Himmler killed himself with a cyanide pill shortly after his identity was discovered when he was in a POW camp and as we know Goring had a cyanide pill smuggled to him hours before his execution so so much for the idea of bringing them justice.
People in Russia, sadly, don't seem to care much about Panama Papers.
Yeah, I really don't care. The people of Russia clearly aren't terribly interested in a free press, an uncorrupt government or any semblance of a modern open democratic state. If that's what they want, that's what they get and I'm not going to get too worked up about their choices.
You are correct. I can't tell you why it's that way though, but it's been that way for a long time. I posted on this earlier in the week. There are stories going back to the days of the Tsars where the Tsar would send out his minions to rough up or kill the peasants and the survivors would wail and say "If only the Tsar knew what was happening, he would save us!" when what happened was because he ordered it. Russians love to believe the guy at the top is wonderful and kind and it's really the people under him who are evil. This is why it's not difficult at all to find people in Russia who revere Stalin still, which to me is just a hair breadth's of difference from revering Hitler. I've read that Putin himself doesn't seem to own much of anything but his daughters, son-in-law and close friends have billions. So it allows him to provide enough plausible deniability that he's not corrupt and crooked for the public to buy it. They really don't care.
Something I often wonder is why we don't hear about 'new' geniuses in art. It's always the same guys from the 1700 and 1800s (once in a while an author from the 1900s sneaks in).
Uh, well, you might want to have a look here, where there are links to probably a couple hundred painters of the 20th century who are regarded as significant. There are many people in the art world who consider a lot of them to be "geniuses."
Imagine if you will that everybody you know only listens to classical music and they only listen to works written before 1900. You have never even heard of The Beatles, for example. Everybody you know probably would tell you that all "modern" music sucks and you would be pretty much baffled to identify works by people like Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Nirvana, etc. That's kind of how art is. Starting in the latter part of the 1800s there was the impressionism movement and some other movements that began to move painting away from the classic realistic style the first poster is probably familiar with (ie. Rembrandt). These movements continued in the 1900s and on resulting in works that are very divisive. For example, I get what Picasso was doing, but he's not my favorite artist and I think his early career, more realistic paintings were crap. I think Salvador Dali was a genius and he could even paint in the classical style when he wanted to and he was outstanding at it and pretty much everything he ever did. I also like Fernand Leger's work, but not so much Piet Mondrian (Dali had a very funny and insulting comment about his work once) and Jackson Pollock. More recent paintings have gotten ever further away from the classical style to the point that I honestly think that a few painters are just scam artists and they're not really even trying to produce anything that's actually art, but merely deliberately putting crap on canvas to see if suckers will buy it.
rsilvergun - If you have a chance to go a good art gallery in a major US metropolitan city, you might find some modern things you actually like. Or perhaps you are just a fan of the older styles. I never thought much of most of the movements in the 1900s until I actually had a chance to see some of the paintings from them in art museums and I discovered that there actually are some artists I do really like who don't paint in a realistic style at all.
But as long as you don't talk about it, you can view whatever the fuck you want.
I wouldn't go quite that far. While I'm sure that there are subjects they will let you look at without talking to you, I wouldn't interpret to mean that there's not anything you can view on your own without having to, ahem, talk to the local authorities about. The CCP is still off the charts opposed to Falun Gong and nobody but the upper levels of the party itself seems to know exactly why this is. I've read several completely different explanations for this and they can't really be reconciled. My ex-girlfriend was born and raised in southern China and she told me a story of how when she was in college, she and her dormmates were all taken out once and interrogated pretty roughly by the police because one of the girls had family members who followed Falun Gong. None of the other girls, including my ex-girlfriend, had any knowledge of this. I doubt that normal Chinese people can go to websites supporting Falun Gong without the authorities becoming interested.
The Kremlin on the other hand has already called the Panama Papers a CIA plot, (big surprise there). Hopefully, if the Panama Papers do reveal Putin used a shell to hide his money, Russia's citizens will not stand for it and force his hand.
Not likely. Here's why. And I speak from personal experience. I speak Russian rather well and I've spent more time in the ex-USSR than most people who aren't from there. One of the problems with Russians in particular is that for centuries they've had this rather quaint idea that the guy at the top is a really great, caring guy and the greatest leader in the world and it's those evil underlings beneath him who are corrupt and not doing his will. There are stories of peasants in the old days of the Tsars who would be abused or even killed by the Tsar's henchmen and the peasants would say "If only the Tsar knew what was happening! He'd save us!" when in fact the henchmen were expressly carrying out his orders on them. Stalin was an extraordinarily evil man. I know in the West it's popular to say that Hitler was the most evil man ever, but I think Stalin may actually have been worse. Well, maybe not if you're Jewish, but still you could make a strong case for Stalin being worse and I think we in the West could agree he was really really bad even if less bad than Hitler. You wouldn't have to walk far at all in Russia to find people telling you what a great guy Stalin was and how they wish he was still around. Khrushchev was easily the greatest leader of the USSR and nobody generally thinks very much of him over there. The USSR peaked under Khrushchev and it was all downhill before him and after him, but Stalin is The Man to many Russians. Putin is thought to be just a fantastic guy who has incompetent, greedy people under him who have hidden their crimes from him (yet somehow the fact that the citizens know what these underlings have done and Putin doesn't know doesn't make them question Putin's fitness to run the show there) and if he, like the peasant oppressing Tsar before him, only knew what was really happening, he would surely fix it. While some report that Putin's popularity is dropping and it may be true, I don't expect any changes. I had a lot of hope for Medvedev and while I think he was a genuinely good president for Russia, I've been pretty disappointed with a lot of things he's said now as PM and I just don't know if he's just saying what Putin wants to hear or if Medvedev really believes what he says now. The alternatives in Russia actually may be worse than Putin with some really nutso nationalists who'd like to provoke a war with the US and/or Europe and maybe even China. I expect most citizens to believe that Putin did nothing wrong and this to die down pretty quickly.
You may find better elsewhere, but you'll never pay more!
It's right there in the article.
Translation - Mattel was able to find the right banking and local law enforcement officials to bribe in China to get help on this and they were able to recover 90% of the money by only paying 10% out in bribes.
Not joking here. That's probably what really happened. Or the bad guys failed to bribe the right people in China to look the other way and the authorities decided to punish them be sending the money back.
No, their policy of making people take off their shoes is causing long lines.
It's up to the individual airport, but some US airports actually tell you not to take off your shoes for security but others still want you to do it. I've been in both in the past couple of years.
Did the FBI just get one judge to issue an illegal order, then they withdrew the case while that order was under appeal, and claim a precedent-setting win?
I doubt the order they got was "illegal" as you say. Just because you don't like it, that doesn't make it "illegal". But yes, the article has a link to another article that says that the FBI got a federal judge in Riverside, California to give them an order mandating that Apple create a custom firmware file. It happened almost 2 weeks ago and this is the first I'm hearing about it.
How else can the poster boast about his intelligence, unless you use an obscure Acronym, and just expect everyone else to know it. On Slashdot there is a wide variety of geeky interests, and we don't have the time to follow all of them.
This seems to be happening with more frequency here. Last week we had a similar post where the submitter was clearly upset about some sort of injustice and it involved something so obscure that I don't remember the name of it. It got a lot of "What the bleep is ________?" posts though.
Hah... Doomed to fail, or make only very little difference, unless the company also leads social change as a national brand. Korean work culture is all kinds of fucked up, and everyone is unwillingly complicit. Everyone does it, for some unknown reason, so you feel you have to do it too. Examples: -- Expected late working hours until the boss leaves, sometimes >10pm, because showing your face at work is more valued than the work itself getting done. And the boss probably feels pressure to stay late, to not appear lazy. Very little actual work gets done in those late hours.
In the previous decade I worked for what was probably the 2nd most important American office for a major European telco. I don't like to name them because frankly they don't deserve any publicity, not even bad publicity, after they way they have treated their American employees over the years. Once I got sent to our HQ office in Europe and my co-workers were very honest with me and told me that almost every day they worked 10 hours or more, but the last 2-3 hours were a complete waste of time. They were a support team and we had a world wide support model. Around 4 PM they had actually handed off their support duties to North America, but their management expected them to stay until 6 PM, so they did, even if they didn't do any real work. And note that this was an a country that Americans think is infamous for not having 40 hour work weeks.
-- Expected drinks with colleagues after work into the late hours, and not only that but also shady, overtly sexist atmospheres and goings-on at bars. If you don't partake you're viewed as not part of the team.
I read an article a few years ago by a Korean American who was born and raised in the USA but whose parents taught him how to speak Korean. He thought it might be cool to move back there, so he did. He talked about these after hours drinking parties and said that not only could you not get out of them more than maybe one time (and then never again), but there was tremendous pressure to make sure you abused alcohol while you were there. So you can't just go and pretend to drink. It's probably no wonder that South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world with a society like this.
Since the system gives you the ability to cancel orders, I don't see what the guy did as illegal.
It is within the rules of the game, so it is legal 100%.
Assuming, you are American, you have free speech rights protected in the Constitution. But your Constitutional rights are not absolute. Even the late Justice Scalia said that the 2nd amendment didn't mean that there could never be any restrictions on guns. So to use the easiest example for you to understand, you have the right to yell "Fire!" at the top of your lungs. If you do that at home and nobody else hears you, then there's no problem. If you exercise this right in a crowded theater where there is no fire and cause a panic and people die from being trampled, you're going to jail. It's just not that hard to conceive of a situation where a legal action taken to an extreme becomes a crime. The US is charging that the guy in question wiped $1 trillion off the books to make about $40 million himself. As a stock holder (I'm not Warren Buffet but I do own some stocks), I probably lost some value thanks to what he did. I'm not personally impressed that he devalued my stock holdings simply to make himself rich.
They thought that Apple would fold, and the public would all support the hack. They guessed wrong.
Majority of public != Majority of Slashdotters
They guessed wrong on Apple folding, but every poll I read about had a clear majority of the US public favoring the hack being done. Do many of you here even have any kind of relationship with people who aren't in IT? I mean I know we joke about guys living in their mom's basement and playing video games all day, but time and time again folks here assume incorrectly that the vast majority if the American public supports their personal stances on various issues and it's just not true at all.
One of my friends uses Blender to create his own videos at times. His content isn't earth shattering or likely to be of interest to anybody outside of his circle of friends and acquaintances. He canceled his YouTube account a few years ago because he got tired of continually getting his videos flagged over the music they used. He was very careful to use old classical music not under copyright with performances available under a Creative Commons license, and YouTube kept flagging them all and pointing him to a licensing service. He decided that basically YouTube just wanted to shake him down for some money (pretty sure they get a cut of what the licensing company makes) and he objected to it, so he closed his account and moved his videos to a different service. I'm not sure, but I think he's using Vimeo now.
It's not impossible to get your own videos through YouTube without any problem. My nephews have done it for goofy stuff they shot themselves with friends that doesn't use any music. I took a quick look at the linked to article and we need a lot more info than seems to be provided on just what exactly these videos are. YouTube is pretty inconsistent in what they flag. I've seen some interesting tricks used to get copyrighted stuff past the monitoring bots. If the complainer is trying to get, for example, TV or movie excerpts through or even worse entire episodes or movies, there might be good reasons why it's being flagged.
I agree that many of the problems are associated with Islam, but there is the counterfactual argument that holds that states like Indonesia and Malaysia while having large Muslim populations don't seem to have much of a terrorism base and contribute very little to the problem of Islamic terrorism.
Incorrect about Indonesia. You don't remember the Bali bombings in 2002. Jemaah Islamiyah is the local Indonesian terrorist group associated with that. They're still active in causing problems in the Philippines and they tried to set off some bombs years ago in Singapore but the local authorities somehow got word of it and stopped them. They've had a lot of members killed or imprisoned since then after an initial Indonesian government response of trying to ignore them or slap them on the wrist. While they don't appear to currently be a big problem in Indonesian, they're not completely gone and I suppose they could come back if they're able to get some motivated recruits.
Malaysia appears at present to not have any troublesome terrorist groups, but I don't feel comfortable assuming that the problem is permanently solved. Malaysia has a very corrupt government that is facing some internal political pressure and various friendly nations don't fully trust it. Malaysia has some quirky laws related to religion that could potentially be troublesome. I wouldn't be extremely worried about Malaysia, but I would definitely keep an eye on it. If the main minority political party starts to get slightly larger support, enough to form the next government, the current ruling party might just resort to violence to stay in power and that kind of thing could maybe promote a Muslim backlash from people with issues with the current government.
Thailand and the Philippines have smaller, but constant problems from homegrown Muslim insurgents trying to "liberate" various parts of those countries with majority Muslim populations.
If you are a fan of President Obama, could you please explain to me why you think Senator Cruz is wrong about this? Because at the moment I agree with Senator Cruz. President Obama's administration has dropped the embargo and helped out the government of Cuba, and I'm not aware of a single demand that Cuba has granted in return.
The embargo is not dropped. It should be in my opinion, but I get no say. Congress has to make the decision. They have not done so.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but Cuba did us a huge favor recently that they didn't have to do. Since everything is always better if you let private industry do it (rolling my eyes as I write that), the geniuses who outsource everything they can hired a French company to ship a Hellfire missile back to the USA. Only it didn't go to the USA at all. It "mistakenly" went to Cuba. Was it a mistake? Was it a devious plan? Who knows? But Cuba shipped it back to the USA without any problems. That wouldn't have happened just a few years ago.
I don't claim to be a Cuban expert, but if they were given truly free elections I'm not sure that they wouldn't just freely choose to keep Raul Castro and the Communist Party in power. The fact that there are dissidents doesn't necessarily mean that most people there are extremely unhappy with the government. Americans may not understand that, but that doesn't mean it's now how it is.
I mean let's not be mean spirited about it. The Senate should consider him, and consider him some more. Then after that is all done why not consider him again. Let's consider the fuck out of him. Make him the most considered appointment never to get appointed.
I just want to point out that despite your apparent hopes to the contrary, at some point the Senate will actually be in Democratic hands again. I'd put the odds of that happening as actually pretty good should Trump be elected president. If the Senate does this then you don't get to come back and cry like a little beyotch when the Democrats do the exact same thing to the nominee of a Republican president.
It seems extremely unlikely that this will work.
What Abrams, Jackson and the other rich director/producer types are thinking:
Movies cost about $15 each ticket and up so a family of four could find this to be a good deal!
What will really happen:
The same family of four that will pay $60 or more to go to the movies will balk at paying a slightly lower charge at home because they won't make the "This is cheaper than 4 individual tickets" connection that the big shots think. They will see it as "I could pay $15 to see this film. Why should I pay $50?"
This seems to be very unlikely to be anything that groups smaller than 4 will want (ie. singles, childless couples, etc.).
Some in Hollywood will refuse to cooperate and see this is a threat to their standard business model. Not to mention push back from the theater chains. All hell broke loose over the release of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - Sword Of Destiny" to home video on the same date as theaters and all the major theater chains in the USA refused to show the film as they viewed it as a threat. Do Abrams and the others really want to risk having all the major chains tell them "Yeah, we're not going to carry your film if you do that"? They'll back down. if this ever ever gets off the ground I expect that it will only show films with limited audiences, which will make it seem to be a failure.
Pacifist nations get conquered unless they pay to non-pacifist nations to protect them. Blame human nature, but dare not to ignore it.
It is no longer clear that independent Japan is more valuable to US than trade with China, as such protection is less guaranteed. Look at much weaker Russia getting away with annexing parts of Georgia and Ukraine that only resulted in anemic sanctions and rhetoric.
Your first paragraph is fine. Your second - not so much.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Georgia and Ukraine were not NATO members and had no treaties requiring other nations to come to their aid if attacked. Japan has a mutual self-defense treaty with the USA and the US has made it clear to China that it will honor this treaty by saying that it recognizes Japanese control over some disputed islands that China also claims. The reason that South Korea and Japan don't have nuclear weapons isn't because they are too stupid to create them. They don't have them because basically the security treaties they have with the USA are strong enough that they don't feel - yet - that they need to violate international law and build nuclear weapons on their own. But China's continual asshat behavior may eventually lead to Japan reconsidering that and while South Korea and China have no territorial disputes, aggressive North Korean behavior may also convince South Korea and Japan that they need nuclear weapons of their own. China's current government cannot be trusted at all and some Asia watchers have speculated that that some years from now the so-called Peoples Liberation Army may stage a coup and take over China themselves. And nobody knows what will happen then,. I can tell you that my impression is that too many years of Communist Party propaganda have created a PLA that is somewhat divorced from reality and literally believes it is invincible. Japan's fears are real and they would be best served to strengthen their own military now while they have time rather than wish they had done so later when facing a possible Chinese military dictatorship. I believe it is inevitable that the Chinese Communist Party will be removed from power, probably within 10 years. Whether that removal leads to a democratic China or a crazy military dictatorship that in a worst case scenario could be like dealing with a gigantic North Korea, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure that the Chinese military leaders are not as sane as rational as they need to be and it's not going to be good at all for anybody if they end up running the show there.
Lankov is Russian and is based in Russia. Do I really have to point out that nobody in Russia is a reliable source of information under Putin? For all you or I know, he has Kremlin ties. I do think it's certainly possible that private markets are helping stability, I'm not convinced that Lankov doesn't have an agenda straight from Putin and for a variety of reasons it is in Putin's interests at the moment to paint North Korea in a picture as rosy as possible. I have read Victor Cha's book _The Impossible State_ and I recommend it. Cha points out that China basically has no choice but to support North Korea. They don't want refugees flooding over the border, which not only would cost them money but would take up valuable resources they are going to need to keep the population in line as the economy declines. China lost Taiwan, perhaps forever, as a result of going to North Korea's aid in the Korean War. This is still a major sticking point for them. Their desire to have complete control over Taiwan is insatiable. Also, China paid a real price in blood to save North Korea, including the loss of one of Mao's sons. And finally to give China something for their support, North Korea is basically letting them ravage the environment to dig up rare earths that China pays a huge discount for. Cha states that while China has more influence than they are willing to use most of the time, they actually have less real influence than is commonly believed in the west. North Korea knows that ultimately it can do what it wants because there are real limits to how much China will push back.