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Comment: Redundant (Score 1) 713

If you renounce your citizenship, they make it pretty much impossible to return to the US anyway. They do not treat you well at the border if you try to enter. Imagine the scene as the armored USA-USA border patrol looks at your papers. They specialize in making AMERICANS miserable; imagine indeed what they do to "traitors".

You don't come back.

Comment: Re:Not quite (Score 1) 354

by Catbeller (#40028027) Attached to: Wil Wheaton: BitTorrent Isn't Only For Piracy

Using Google Translate, we get some new rhetorical fallacies:

Most are criminals! = Maxime sunt reos
Because they are guilty! = Quia sunt reos

Examples:
1. We should allow people to use a phone anonymously, because free speech sometimes requires secrecy to prevent the powerful from punishing the speakers. (Supreme Court decision, BTW, anon pamphleteering).

Response: Then criminals would use the phones to harass employers or order illegal drugs, indulge in pedophilia, organize crimes, or wage terror on us. This cannot happen: quia sunt reos (they are guilty).

2. People should be allowed to copy media, as they always have done, because to do otherwise requires a panoptikon police state never before seen in human history, A Bad Thing indeed.

Response: Most will perform illegal deeds: maxime sunt reos (most are criminals).

Comment: Re:Not quite (Score 1) 354

by Catbeller (#40027881) Attached to: Wil Wheaton: BitTorrent Isn't Only For Piracy

Enormous numbers of cars, perhaps most, are being driven about our roads with illegal content in the car or the bodies of the drivers. Many are going places where the occupants will be performing illegal acts. Many have movie or music players that can play illegally ripped content for the occupants' pleasure. They certainly transport almost 100% of all criminals. Crime is EVERYwhere, if you lower your threshold on what "crime" is (watch a movie). QED shut down the roads.

Really, the "majority are criminals" logical argument is quite novel. We should coin a Latin phrase for it. We can selectively shut down almost anything we like using it. Singapore everywhere.

Comment: Lesson pointedly taught: Don't do this, or else. (Score 5, Insightful) 278

by Catbeller (#40010903) Attached to: 'G20 Geek' Byron Sonne Cleared of Explosives Charges

That's why the 11 months, that's why the easily refuted charges, the pointless lying by the security forces. They aren't punishing him as much as they are demonstrating what they can do to YOU or YOU or YOU, if you get lippy.

It's working. People are shutting up. You can't meter what ain't there, but public disagreement with the established police state is muted by these endless arrests. People don't want to go into debt for the rest of their lives, lose their jobs and their families, just to say "I disagree."

Stay tuned for Rahm Emmanuel's series of lessons in Chicago later this week. It's Tuesday, and already the security forces are running helicopters overhead. We have LDAPs! Let the schoolin' begin.

Comment: Re:... and college football now makes even less se (Score 5, Insightful) 684

by Catbeller (#39882093) Attached to: Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage

Not a chance in hell. Too much money. And college football is a religion in the U.S. Watch and observe denial behavior in action - it's educational. This will take decades to stop, and the supporters will scream "Liberals and government don't tell us what to do!" and "You haven't proven anything!" the entire bloody way. I can name the other topics they similarly fight the bad fight on, but that would depress all of us. A century from now, with thousands of dead players dissected and shown to be damaged, they will STILL print textbooks to tell their children that It Is A Controversy.

Comment: Re:Can someone explain to me (Score 2) 684

by Catbeller (#39881851) Attached to: Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage

You named boxing and football as occupations with deceleration injuries comparable to, say, military service. No... soldiers do not receive hundreds or thousands of collision/stop injuries. A single bomb would do it; but that's just one shock, not thousands. If they show brain damage, they should be sent home, and frequently are.
I can't think of any other non-sport job that requires head-on collisions as a price to play. Both boxing and football are killer sports.

Comment: Re:well...no shit..... (Score 3, Insightful) 684

by Catbeller (#39881707) Attached to: Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage

Football players have operated for a century without the knowledge their brains are being damaged. Now, they discover that they are being slowly killed, and will die young if they are lucky, or live to an old age of dementia and depression. "Get over it" ain't gonna do it. They did not accept the hazard; no one had looked for its existence before. Informed consent was lacking.
Now that we know we're operating the Hunger Games in slow motion, what are we going to do about it? Lie to ourselves? Ignore it? No other business would be allowed to continue killing its employees this way. Money has nothing to do with it. How much do you think dying at 42 with a damaged brain is worth? The current crop of former players are just now finding out they are doomed. The younger ones don't know or don't care - that's part of being young.
If there was a televised game, let's say, of watching college kids hit themselves in the head with hammers until they drop - would that be legal? Would bets be allowed? How about Russian Roulette? Minefield dodging? Setting yourself on fire? All those things would just kill you instantly. Football kills you ten years after your retire, when no one is looking.

Comment: Re:Correlation is not causation (Score 5, Interesting) 684

by Catbeller (#39881477) Attached to: Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage

You are misusing logic. If we went by that standard, nothing would be responsible for anything.

It is reasonable to assume that thousands of head-on collisions would damage the brain. Even one car crash can cause lifelong tissue damage; imagine what hundreds or thousands do.

That stipulated, you look for evidence. No-one had actually looked before, not really; we're sociologically prone to not look, because we like football. It's like asking people to look for brain damage caused by kneeling to pray to God, and I don't think that's too extreme a comparison.

Evidence was looked for, and found in abundance. Football players who received such shocks to the brain show, post-mortem, significant damage to the tissues. Live players who submit to tests show similar damage to their living brains. Such damage is not normally found in people who do not receive shocks to the brain for a living. It is found in those who do.

At this point, this is a done deal. Throwing people around and suddenly slamming them to a stop causes brain damage resulting in reduced capacity, depression, strange behavior, and eventually, for some, death by repeated trauma.

Now. What do we do about it? Football, American style, is crippling and killing the players. Do we stop? If not, why not? How far does the human delusion go in the face of reality?

Comment: Re:Not new (Score 1) 157

For mesh networks, we really need one of the former TV channels. Fat chance they let us do it; we could subvert the entire system they've built on the dark backend which they use to monitor everyone. A true Little Brother TV channel mesh network wouldn't need the internet backbones, not if it were cheap, easy, and used its own protocols. So it will be illegal. But, as I said elsewhere on the talkback, don't let that stop you.

We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem -- how to run a sunbeam through a meter.

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