Get real, my friend. Stuxnet was designed to prevent psychotic religious fanatics from developing nuclear bombs. There is no real question as to whether the Iranians would use any nuclear bomb under their control to murder 100,000s of Jews in Israel. They have said that they will do it in so many words over and over again in their internal religious sermons. To the foreigners they're a little more diplomatic.

    The American-Ashkanzim alliance is the most productive alliance between peoples in all of history. We, as Americans, will never just sit back and watch fascist demented assholes like the Iranian mullahs murder thousands of Jewish people as we did in the early 1940s.

    There is no comparison between using hacking to destroy nuclear proliferation and using hacking to suppress an embarrassing Hollywood comedy movie. Anyone who thinks that the two are equal is a fool.

    You're a smart person if you're on Slashdot. Don't be a fool.

I'm an old Castro and Che fan from the 1960s. . After having met and talked with many Cuban exiles of my own age who have arrived in my city over the years, I now realize that the entire Cuban revolution was bullshit Things suck there. They are always getting worse. I call bullshit on Cuban government's proposal to 'allow' internet access to its citizens. That country is run by fascist assholes. They will never all access to the internet to ordinary citizens. Only Cuban 'stasi' goon-squad assholes and their trusted weasels will be allowed to view Huff Post or Slashdot.

This speech translator is trés cool.

For a while I've been bugging techies with my conception of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These would be 'ordinary' glasses that would have microphones and nano-technology CPUs inside the frame. The microphones would hear the speech of the person that you are looking at (who is speaking a foreign language), translate that speech into English, and display the text of the translation onto the bottom of the user's frame. Like subtitles in a foreign movie for those of you who have ever seen a subtitled foreign movie. Many Germans haven't. The power to operate these 'subtitle sunglasses' would come from the generators creating electricity from the movement's of the user's head.

I challenge teckies to approximate how long in the future it will be before this kind of product is available for purchase in the $500 range.

One unusually aspect of Moore's Law is that we can project when a product like this will be actually available. We take the cost of making any science fiction concept using today's technology and use future-value calculations of accounting to project a future price time-frame given that the price of the technology will fall by half every 18 months.

Another trick is to use this example as a crude intelligence IQ test. Claim that the Japanese have actually developed 'subtitle sunglasses' but they only translate English into Japanese. Claim that you have been able to obtain a secret advanced prototype of such glasses. Give an ordinary pair of reading glasses to a person and claim that these are actual real 'subtitle sunglasses' that have tiny speakers that create synthetic spoken sound inside the ears. Invite them to try them on. When they put on the glasses, start speaking in Japanese (learn a few phrases well beforehand). The time that it takes them to realize that you are completely bulllshitting them is an indication of how intelligent they are. Hope that they don't get violent.

They establishment Republicans have already rolled over with the passing of Cromnibus. I expect that if the push Jeb Bush to the front there will be record apathy among conservatives in the 2016 election.

To amplify on that point, never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. :-P

the composition and political thrust of the parties changed dramatically with the Republican southern strategy of the 60s

Let me put you some f'in knowledge.

And more.

And even more.

On top of that, how do you explain the Democrats' only really starting to lose their stranglehold on southern-state governorships and legislatures in the '90s and later?

Totally skewed by your own perceptions, which are incorrect.

This is an assertion without foundation. You're dismissing any of the many corrective features of consumers and competition in the market. You're also assuming that there is no corrective mechanism for corruptions in your assumed democratically elected representative body. You have a lot of assumptions of elements in your model that are not necessary for free markets to exist and thrive. Indeed, history tells us that even huge and abusive corporations like Standard Oil cannot continue indefinitely. Look carefully at the history and you'll see that the "trust busting" activities of the Federal government during that episode was driven by corrupt ambitions of politicians, and the market was ALREADY CORRECTING. Standard Oil was losing market share, and competition, as well as blowback from high-level consumers, was working to bring things back into equilibrium.

Besides, we don't have anything better, or even as good, on a large scale.

No need for that. People that complain about capitalism never want to look at more than, at most, about 150 years of history. Look at a minimum of 800-1000 years if you want a significant sample size.

WTF? So you're going to ask a question like this as some sort of trap, where you pick apart everything I said. I guess you picked this up from Sean Hannity. Not taking the bait, sorry. Find your own definition. It's not hard. Keep in mind that in a free market (that's what I'm talking about, free market capitalism), the producers chase consumer resources. Consumers call the shots by voting for the best producers with their money. It requires enough regulation to prevent violence and fraud from having much of an impact. There's one of the issues with Somalia. It also requires limits on regulation to prevent THAT from having a significant impact on markets. Heavily regulated markets incentive producers to focus their efforts on influencing the regulating authority instead of serving consumer demands.

... in your twisted mind that values the well being of the collective more than the rights of individuals, I'm sure it is. Save it for someone that buys your idea that benevolent dictatorships can remain benevolent for any significant length of time.

Why? Because you say so? Or because you've seen it *sometimes* happen? I can certainly see that it's happened, but claiming it's an "unavoidable outcome" is simply an assertion without support. In fact, it seems to be a false one, since capitalistic markets have existing in many places throughout history without those issues surfacing.

Communism doesn't necessarily require an oppressive authority, that's just how it's usually implemented. In small groups, it works very well without a powerful leadership involved, but in large groups it becomes difficult to enforce the required contributions because of the complexity of the matrices of so many relationships. Communism should not require exchanging of tokens for resources, but "Communist" governments never seem to be able to eliminate it.

Nothing is free of problems when it involves humans. Free market capitalism, however, has the best historical track record for improving living conditions. The biggest problem with it in the US today, IMHO, is the ability to buy and sell representatives and administrators. These people are not supposed be commodities, they are supposed to regulate the markets just enough to maintain a competitive environment in which consumers retain power over the producers. I don't think there is an easy answer to that problem, especially with such a large proportion of the population uninvolved and susceptible to marketing.

Yes, exactly. People that forget history is doomed to repeat it. Functioning capitalist markets enabled the vibrant middle class, and now that the elites have fiddled with interventionist policies to the point where capitalism has been transformed into some sort of corporatism/fascism hybrid, they've convinced a lot of people that capitalism is the problem and should be done away with. Why they think it will be better than the dark ages before capitalism I don't know.

This is why we need a wealth tax.

Indeed. Even the very wealthy complain about the high cost of iPhones.

And they can't afford $500 for a phone or $800 on a game console but they still do. $1000 is within reach of enough people to be called "consumer grade". That doesn't mean everyone can afford it. Not everyone can even afford a computer, but we still consider them consumer goods.

Haha. Nice try, jackass. Total strawman, because I never made any assertion about anything, other than the WH narrative was false, and known false. Whether that is "untoward" or not is is an exercise left to those who would interpret the facts. The OP's rant was simply a distraction from his unwillingness to acknowledge facts. Your misguided attack is nothing but a way to distract yourself from uncomfortable truths about your own worldview.