The original model for the entertainment industry was: entertainers appear live and perform. This had high overheads and physical limitations.
And so they contracted the disease of the British economy; the desire to rid yourself of physical capital ASAP and subsist entirely on rent-seeking and financial services. The notion seems to be that you can generate wealth simply by moving money around, and that actually making shit that is worth something is some kind of old-fashioned socialist nonsense.
And the motherfuckers in charge can't figure out why we are still in recession whilst western civilisation as a whole is in recovery.
True. The distinction is almost academic; capital is either controlled by a state apparatchik or by a scheming CEO - and as you correctly pointed out there is no reason these two roles can't be filled by the same person in the transition from one to the other. The view from the shop floor doesn't change either; average joe is not in control of his life and spends his day subject to the whims of his paymaster. In short; same shit, same arsehole.
If the UK regime is going to milk the population for cash, perhaps they ought to be pumping that cash into floundering UK science. The STFC is cutting funds from vital research, whilst a bunch of twats who played guitar instead of paying attention in maths class get to use the government coffers and their personal fucking piggy bank.
I'm burning with anger over the pure injustice of this. There is an -ocracy word meaning 'rule by the worst' that I can't remember right now, but it fits the situation. I guess I can stick with 'Kleptocracy' for the moment.
And the Tories know they have 5 years of power in the bag already so aren't even going to pretend they are not a purely malignant club for old Etonians. Once they get in power, by the way, they've promised to reduce the number of MPs by redrawing electoral boundaries. This combined with Labour publicly flipping off its own base for the past 12 years is going to make those motherfuckers hard to dislodge through elections.
What on Earth makes you think these people would be moved by letters or by peaceful protest? Both of them are quite effectively contained.
Of course you are going to feel that way. These people have basically declared how much profit they want and their crony Mandelson simply takes that money from people who are powerless to stop him. The music industry is purely based on rent-seeking, and the most efficient method of rent-seeking is paying a universally corrupt government to do it for you. Committing what, from your position, must look like an act of economic sabotage is a fairly measured response.
Appearance? No-one is under any illusions as to the nature of Mandelson (As Frankie Boyle put it, "Who made him a lord? The Sith?"). The thing is, that despite this man being almost universally loathed, and not elected into his present position, he is allowed to push these laws that punish people on the say so of a corporate entity without them having been found guilty of anything by a jury or even a magistrate. The fact this is going on so damn brazenly, surely indicates that the UK electoral system is profoundly broken and in desperate need of reform.
Reform cannot happen though, because (most of) the people in power rely on the system of 'first past the post', 'safe seats', and aren't about to throw away their effectively unchallenged positions. The selection of an MP is far more influenced by internal party politics (i.e. cronyism and brown nosing) than by public politics.
Perhaps a more direct system, such as the Swiss have, would keep the Mandelson's of this country in check.Their way has been criticized recently for giving a minor victory to the far right there, but is that perhaps a preferable option to having totally unaccountable politicians.
Are you trying to imply Thatcher was an even half competent and non-corrupt PM? Shows how little you know of UK history rather than Tory revisionist propaganda, which fails to mention the failure of monetarism, the use of martial law and extra-judicial executions, the economically unnecessary destruction of manufacturing (which is now turning out downright harmful) and the obfuscating of the dramatic surge in unemployment that they tried to conceal by shifting people on to incapacity benefits instead of jobseekers allowance.
Margaret Thatcher was an evil, elitist, sociopath whose fanatical crusade to force neoliberalism on an unwilling population triggered a slow societal collapse which is still going on today. Any other view on her premiership is based on lies, frankly.
Its very different in the UK: "Today a lady rang the BBC and asked if there was a hurricane on the way, well if you are watching don't worry, there isn't". Guess what happened next.
Yes, do watch David Attenborogh. At an age when a lot of peoples main hobby is drooling on themselves, he is as engaging as ever. When he commentates on something, you really feel like you are being shown something wonderful. Like being a child and your favourite uncle shows you all the different types of bugs down the bottom of your garden, but the experience doesn't get tired (largely because Attenborough has a camera crew and a budget, and can show you so much more).
He may not cover every frame with speech, he does interject often, and when he does its with excellent deliver and content.
What kind of brainwashing and delusions made him think he could take down an airliner with a bag of stuff he regurgitated and cooked up in a plane toilet? This guy was a clown.
His own father had warned the US authorities about his extremism already, but they had basically opened a file then ignored him. Perhaps they made a realistic assessment that this guy was only a threat to his own trousers?
Yes we need to stop worrying, but you missed a point.
You can't bring down an airliner with a matchhead bomb. You can't bring down your own seat with a matchhead bomb. All you can do is set your trousers on fire like this nonce did. The same goes for the idiot who tried to mix a bomb with liquids he took on board. The idea that you can cook serious explosives in airplane toilets with the chemicals he had is laughable, yet we have these ridiculous rules about the liquids we can take on board because of this non-existent threat.
People in the security services have an interest in exaggerating threats in order to improve the position in society and the personal power.
Wikileaks are asking for help at a time when people are financially struggling. If the aspects of the internet that enhance personal freedom depend on people committing their time and resources, this is a dangerous time.
SSTO isn't dead, its just resting. Basically, its been figured out that you need to get at least some of your oxyidiser from the atmosphere to give you a mass fraction that doesn't require fantasy engineering. Skylon is a promising project along these lines, but is at a very early stage of development. The company behind it just got a million euros or so to work on the engines that it will use. In a sane world they should be getting a billion (their engineering pedigree justifies that level of confidence IMHO).
Thats insightful? Claiming a company with 2, low payload, orbital launches and a lot of explosions is better than NASA simply because its a corporation rather than a government agency? The fact this comment didn't get modded down to oblivion shows there is quite a lot of blind ideology on/.
Do we have to have networking capabilities in every gods damn thing now?
I'm really hoping that whoever designed this car kept the in car WiFi physically separate from the onboard computer - otherwise you have opened the door for potential DoS (Denial of Steering) attacks. It would of course be the smart thing to do, but seeing as a modern microprocessor can probably handle the car and the WiFi at once, it wouldn't be the cheap thing to do...
And future tech will be even more complicated to produce. So the reality is that if Mars wants to rebel, all Earth needs to do is cut off shipments to them and they'll slowly wither away as things break that they can't replace.
Not necessarily; to give an example, modern computers and computer-driven machines require much less faff to program than their electromechanical counterparts. There are productivity gains to be had reducing the size of that web, so future tech might not require such large support structures. The ultimate goal is universal fabrication, that requires no additional technology - and while that is probably over a century or more away I think there will be significant steps on the path that reduce the dependence of new technology.
You sound like you are 12, and you are making a sweeping and idiotic statement of the type people normally associate with 12 year olds. The fact your sig links to a site offering T-shirts which advocate mass murder in a cheery sort of way ("we can drill through glass?" charming) doesn't exactly make people want to take you more seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
It saved their asses from Napoleon and Hitler, and this is the thanks it gets!
And so they contracted the disease of the British economy; the desire to rid yourself of physical capital ASAP and subsist entirely on rent-seeking and financial services. The notion seems to be that you can generate wealth simply by moving money around, and that actually making shit that is worth something is some kind of old-fashioned socialist nonsense.
And the motherfuckers in charge can't figure out why we are still in recession whilst western civilisation as a whole is in recovery.
True. The distinction is almost academic; capital is either controlled by a state apparatchik or by a scheming CEO - and as you correctly pointed out there is no reason these two roles can't be filled by the same person in the transition from one to the other. The view from the shop floor doesn't change either; average joe is not in control of his life and spends his day subject to the whims of his paymaster. In short; same shit, same arsehole.
The Canadian government has decided to use RPGs to take out shoplifters.
If the UK regime is going to milk the population for cash, perhaps they ought to be pumping that cash into floundering UK science. The STFC is cutting funds from vital research, whilst a bunch of twats who played guitar instead of paying attention in maths class get to use the government coffers and their personal fucking piggy bank.
I'm burning with anger over the pure injustice of this. There is an -ocracy word meaning 'rule by the worst' that I can't remember right now, but it fits the situation. I guess I can stick with 'Kleptocracy' for the moment.
And the Tories know they have 5 years of power in the bag already so aren't even going to pretend they are not a purely malignant club for old Etonians. Once they get in power, by the way, they've promised to reduce the number of MPs by redrawing electoral boundaries. This combined with Labour publicly flipping off its own base for the past 12 years is going to make those motherfuckers hard to dislodge through elections.
What on Earth makes you think these people would be moved by letters or by peaceful protest? Both of them are quite effectively contained.
Of course you are going to feel that way. These people have basically declared how much profit they want and their crony Mandelson simply takes that money from people who are powerless to stop him. The music industry is purely based on rent-seeking, and the most efficient method of rent-seeking is paying a universally corrupt government to do it for you. Committing what, from your position, must look like an act of economic sabotage is a fairly measured response.
Appearance? No-one is under any illusions as to the nature of Mandelson (As Frankie Boyle put it, "Who made him a lord? The Sith?"). The thing is, that despite this man being almost universally loathed, and not elected into his present position, he is allowed to push these laws that punish people on the say so of a corporate entity without them having been found guilty of anything by a jury or even a magistrate. The fact this is going on so damn brazenly, surely indicates that the UK electoral system is profoundly broken and in desperate need of reform.
Reform cannot happen though, because (most of) the people in power rely on the system of 'first past the post', 'safe seats', and aren't about to throw away their effectively unchallenged positions. The selection of an MP is far more influenced by internal party politics (i.e. cronyism and brown nosing) than by public politics.
Perhaps a more direct system, such as the Swiss have, would keep the Mandelson's of this country in check.Their way has been criticized recently for giving a minor victory to the far right there, but is that perhaps a preferable option to having totally unaccountable politicians.
Are you trying to imply Thatcher was an even half competent and non-corrupt PM? Shows how little you know of UK history rather than Tory revisionist propaganda, which fails to mention the failure of monetarism, the use of martial law and extra-judicial executions, the economically unnecessary destruction of manufacturing (which is now turning out downright harmful) and the obfuscating of the dramatic surge in unemployment that they tried to conceal by shifting people on to incapacity benefits instead of jobseekers allowance.
Margaret Thatcher was an evil, elitist, sociopath whose fanatical crusade to force neoliberalism on an unwilling population triggered a slow societal collapse which is still going on today. Any other view on her premiership is based on lies, frankly.
Its very different in the UK: "Today a lady rang the BBC and asked if there was a hurricane on the way, well if you are watching don't worry, there isn't". Guess what happened next.
Yes, do watch David Attenborogh. At an age when a lot of peoples main hobby is drooling on themselves, he is as engaging as ever. When he commentates on something, you really feel like you are being shown something wonderful. Like being a child and your favourite uncle shows you all the different types of bugs down the bottom of your garden, but the experience doesn't get tired (largely because Attenborough has a camera crew and a budget, and can show you so much more).
He may not cover every frame with speech, he does interject often, and when he does its with excellent deliver and content.
As I understand it, he wanted to stand up and rant at the passengers about Afghanistan before blowing them u^H^H^H^H^Htorching his own kegs.
What kind of brainwashing and delusions made him think he could take down an airliner with a bag of stuff he regurgitated and cooked up in a plane toilet? This guy was a clown.
His own father had warned the US authorities about his extremism already, but they had basically opened a file then ignored him. Perhaps they made a realistic assessment that this guy was only a threat to his own trousers?
Yes we need to stop worrying, but you missed a point.
You can't bring down an airliner with a matchhead bomb. You can't bring down your own seat with a matchhead bomb. All you can do is set your trousers on fire like this nonce did. The same goes for the idiot who tried to mix a bomb with liquids he took on board. The idea that you can cook serious explosives in airplane toilets with the chemicals he had is laughable, yet we have these ridiculous rules about the liquids we can take on board because of this non-existent threat.
People in the security services have an interest in exaggerating threats in order to improve the position in society and the personal power.
Wikileaks are asking for help at a time when people are financially struggling. If the aspects of the internet that enhance personal freedom depend on people committing their time and resources, this is a dangerous time.
SSTO isn't dead, its just resting. Basically, its been figured out that you need to get at least some of your oxyidiser from the atmosphere to give you a mass fraction that doesn't require fantasy engineering. Skylon is a promising project along these lines, but is at a very early stage of development. The company behind it just got a million euros or so to work on the engines that it will use. In a sane world they should be getting a billion (their engineering pedigree justifies that level of confidence IMHO).
Yeah! And who wants a power source that doesn't produce nuclear waste anyway?
You are trying to say that without the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein would've destroyed NASA? Get a fucking grip.
Thats insightful? Claiming a company with 2, low payload, orbital launches and a lot of explosions is better than NASA simply because its a corporation rather than a government agency? The fact this comment didn't get modded down to oblivion shows there is quite a lot of blind ideology on /.
Of course you can't find it on Google! You are posting from China!
Do we have to have networking capabilities in every gods damn thing now?
I'm really hoping that whoever designed this car kept the in car WiFi physically separate from the onboard computer - otherwise you have opened the door for potential DoS (Denial of Steering) attacks. It would of course be the smart thing to do, but seeing as a modern microprocessor can probably handle the car and the WiFi at once, it wouldn't be the cheap thing to do...
Not necessarily; to give an example, modern computers and computer-driven machines require much less faff to program than their electromechanical counterparts. There are productivity gains to be had reducing the size of that web, so future tech might not require such large support structures. The ultimate goal is universal fabrication, that requires no additional technology - and while that is probably over a century or more away I think there will be significant steps on the path that reduce the dependence of new technology.
I call you on your advocacy of mass murder, and you nitpick about where you are doing this advocacy?
I've not engaged you in debate because you are not worthy of debate; you haven't made a rational point therefore require no rebuttal.
Yeah, because its fucking shoulder to shoulder in Norway. Learn some geography.
You sound like you are 12, and you are making a sweeping and idiotic statement of the type people normally associate with 12 year olds. The fact your sig links to a site offering T-shirts which advocate mass murder in a cheery sort of way ("we can drill through glass?" charming) doesn't exactly make people want to take you more seriously.