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Comment Re:The Founding Fathers are crying.. (Score 1) 284

Thus, in libertarian heaven, all search engines are indeed private, so... everything you read and see and hear is subject to whatever the company owners collectively think you should. Tyranny, same as if they owned the roads you travel on.

"Sorry, My. Grumpy, but our manager informs that you are not welcome on Roads Numbers 456-780. Please remove your vehicle from our private property or we'll notify our private police force, which you'll notice have a laser battery pointed at you up above. And oh, yes, it seems you are banned on all competing roads in the area, just to give you a heads up. You must have got someone important angry over at corporate, ha ha. You know, watch what you say, watch what you do. Words to live by, indeed. We hope for your future patronage on the Richard Cheney Memorial Highway System, Incorporated. Have a nice day. Get out or get shot."

Comment So? (Score 1) 284

God handed the constitution to Jefferson on a mountain in the 1780's? The founders did not envision a private (government-controlled, for fuck's sake!) company controlling access to the world. They didn't have to. They didn't want to. They expected us to evolve and add more rights. They did not see the document as holy writ. They gave us the 9th amendment to slap us in the face with that fact. Rights exist whether or not the holy book explicitly enumerates those rights. So, fuck the constitution, as I am sure Jefferson would say. Fuck private company takeover of the world. Corporations are legal government-created fictions. They are OUR dogs. We are not theirs. HEEL, bitches.

Comment The same place we get all our rights (Score 2) 284

The right to force a business which has sole control (in China) of access to the world's news and uses that access to control the populations' perception? That right comes from our ass. Same as the rights to free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom not to be killed like a dog on the street if some business deems it necessary. There are no "rights" other than those we seize for ourselves, never have been. Rights are artificial and we buy them with intelligence, sweat, and blood.
We do not derive our rights from a "piece of paper", as Bush dismissively called it, but from our collective will. The constitution of the United States is not a holy book. It was a flawed piece of work, as its writers understood. That's why they crafted the 9th Amendment: rights enumerated in the document are not the static and only rights of man. Other rights exist, and they left that open for future generations to define.
The writers lived in houses without communications systems. They walked or rode horses. Corporations did not really exist. They did not envision a world in which mega-sized non-human non-governmental essentially lawless and untouchable and unfindable entities would seize control of the news outlets and "privately" censor the world.
NO. They would not approve of that and neither should anyone else. They'd kill to stop it.
A world of "private" businesses controlling our spaces, communications, food, water and employment is a feudal oligopoly. We did not build our country only to finally grant utter tyranny to rich Randian collectivists we can't even begin to overthrow because they don't physically exist. Hell, they have their own private police and armies to protect them from overthrow.
Take the right or live in hell. Your choice. Unless, of course, you're planning on cooperating with the new world order and being one of the bosses.

Science

Physics Forum At Fermilab Bans Powerpoint 181

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Amanda Solliday reports at Symmetry that six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks. 'Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,' says Andrew Askew. 'We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.' In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments. Elliot Hughes, a Rutgers University doctoral student and a participant in the forum, says the ban on slides has encouraged the physicists to connect with their audience. 'Frequently, in physics, presenters design slides for people who didn't even listen to the talk in the first place,' says Hughes. 'In my experience, the best talks could not possibly be fully understood without the speaker.'"
Bitcoin

Police Say No Foul Play In Death of Bitcoin Exchange CEO Autumn Radtke 126

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "The CEO of a virtual-currency exchange was found dead near her home in Singapore. A police spokesman said Thursday that initial investigations indicated there was no suspicion of 'foul play' in the Feb. 26 death, meaning officers do not suspect murder. The spokesman said police found 28-year-old Autumn Radtke, an American, lying motionless near the apartment tower where she lived. Police have so far classified the death as 'unnatural,' which can mean an accident, misadventure, or suicide." Hat tip to Jamie McCarthy for Slate's thoughtful take on Radtke's death, and the way it's been reported (notably, several sources have speculated that her death was a suicide, with little support).

Comment Re:Mobile phones used as tracking devices?? Parano (Score 2) 256

Sure they had such. Well, Iraq certainly did.

We invaded. The "alliance" was a creature we created for our own purpose.

You can't impose a democracy on an invaded people; they get cranky about the invasion and will call anyone who cooperates with the invader a quisling, and justifiably so. They aren't angry because they are illiterate. They are angry because they are living in an occupied country. They have an excellent grasp of current events.

If the US had been invaded by the Taliban because Canada, Mexico and Grenada said it was fine by them, Americans would not cooperate either. People in foreign cultures are no less proud and no more willing to be conquered than we are. The US went insane because 40-odd people scattered around the world (not Afghanistan - they were almost all Saudi) set up 4 plane attacks (they couldn't get manpower to crash the planned 12) and killed 3000 Americans on our home soil. Can you imagine what the US response would be if the Taliban bombed us, conquered us, and tried to install a Muslim government and sneered at our ignorance when we refused?

The Taliban rose to power because the mountain tribal thugs we elevated to power after we used them to fight off the Soviet invaders (who were worried themselves of fundamentalist revolutionaries on their border) were such murderous raping hillbillies that the Taliban was welcomed as a less oppressive solution.

The Taliban never attacked us - they weren't suicidal. Some of the people in the loose thing called the Taliban apparently had granted Al Qaida a place to train fighters - but that wasn't ALL the Taliban, just as the Michigan Militia ain't the United States of America. We bombed the country because they wouldn't give up the AQ boys without proof of guilt - somewhat reasonable, granted their culture and common sense. Bush said no proof - give over or die. They chose pride and we blew them up. AQ - all forty of them - mostly got away for awhile, because we were chasing oil in Iraq, but the people of Afghanistan - and Iraq - were annihilated by our blind rage and need to lash out at ANYthing. Thing is, we blew any goals we had - the bad guy got away, and turned the damned planet against us.

I don't see how it was justified. AQ wasn't the Taliban. We conflated, and still conflate, all Muslims who defy us as AQ. We blew up a country - two countries - that had nothing to do with the attack against the US. This is the cognitive dissonance that Americans won't confront, because then we wouldn't be good guys. We needed their cooperation, and instead turned them into enemies. and once again, the bad guy got clean away.

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