Yes. We absolutely used proxies to slaughter "socialists" in Indonesia in 1964? perhaps the bloodiest anti-commie action we ever committed. They dragged union members by the hundreds into a sports stadium and mass-murdered them in one bloody night, as the CIA handlers listened in from the outside. Hell fucking yes.

And you know the jihadis are out to take the world over from what, exactly? Who told you this? Is it possible to convince you that the entire "war" is a fraud, based on laserlike focus on a few nutballs? You have confirmation bias - you have your conclusion ready, and everything is either true or not true, depending on whether it confirms your iron idea that jihadis are trying to take the world over. They are not. The war is every bit of a fraud as the one against commies, the anarchists, the trade unionists, the socialists, the Spaniards, the Philippines, Mexico, Cuba, drugs, copyright crime and every other confirmation-bias "war" we've ever waged. None of them were actual wars, and none were ever a threat to us, especially in the precise sense that they, in fact, issued threats to us. Our "threats" are perceptual and grown in our own minds; rarely are we threatened. We misuse the word to justify our madness.

The people who are fighting us in Iraq and Afghanistan do so because we attacked them. The few who aren't there and actually do attack us with actual bombs aren't trying to advance Islam and impose sharia on us. They are pissed off because of things that we've done - people and nations we've killed when it suited our purpose. Americans willfully refuse to listen to what they are screaming about; we'd rather have jihadis and a worldwide conspiracy to blow up with drones rather than rethink our history and our actions. We're a perfect storm of an violent empire that cannot intellectually grasp the fact that it is, in fact, a violent empire, and so we react insanely.

I don't know. It is impossible to change a person's mind, and infinitely more difficult to convince a nation that it is slaughtering innocent people while undergoing a gargantuan hallucination.

A huge number of Americans in the idea that constitutional rights are only for Americans by birth, and are not applicable to furinners. They don't see your point. A foreigner can be kidnapped from any street in the world, including American streets. They can be quietly imprisoned for life, and all communication cut off to the outside world. That was BEFORE 9/11. Now foreigners are considered something on a spectrum between terrorists and feral dogs. Unless they are rich. Rich foreigners can't be terrorists, even if they are.

Or we can assume, because they took that job, that a large number of the people who make the decisions are Islamophobic bigots running hot from Fox News. A million people on that no-fly list.

In the 1940s and 1950s, marxophobia gripped the popular imagination, fed by a national security apparatus that really had nothing else to do. The entire country danced the bigot's tango, investigating "commies" and "fellow travellers", ruining tens of thousands of lives.

If you have a secret security apparatus, bigots consumed with confirmation bias will do what they always do; imply, smear, ruin people. Now we've given them the golden ticket, the end game of all control freaks: a perfect surveillance system.

As Terry Pratchett says: "Don't give a monkey the key to the banana plantation."

Will the judge order the arrest of the GCSB? Then his opinion doesn't matter. They are immune.

The point, the very essence, of the electronic surveillance state is that YOU have no privacy or hope of leniency. Your watchers, however, are secret, immune, and implacable. Whenever someone says, "Just don't do anything wrong!", or, "What have you got to hide?" or, best, "Get the fuck over it, privacy is dead.", remember this story. The people who run the panoptikon, who can call in Copyright Commando raids against a home *in another country*, can accuse and prosecute and steal; however, they themselves can lie, hide, destroy evidence, and operate in total secrecy. Power without consequences for the corporations and governments, while *you* will be held responsible for every bad thing you've ever said or did. Anywhere in the world that has power that can get access to the panoptikon can drag your ass back to their jurisdiction (well, America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia can, anyway).

go to this link:

http://meta.slashdot.org/story...

and then click on the upper left hand slashdot banner. You're back to old school. I don't have time to find the "not-the-beta" button, which doesn't seem to exist, or isn't easily identifiable.

In Corporateworld, every cheese is Velveeta, sooner or later. The money people want all sites to be easy-to-use money-makin' clickyclickers. Slashdot is next.

The aging population should live in towns in which you can walk to where you need to go (or ride a cart); if they can't, we've made a mistake in how we design towns.

As for demanding the ability to travel anywhere, in robot cars - that's a new high in self-entitlement.

We're in a world rapidly hyperheating from fossil fuel burning a construction (25% of carbon dioxide emissions come from laying concrete, for roads I assume, mostly). We've a rapidly expanding population worldwide; wildlife is disappearing as humans build suburbs in their spaces (literally in east Africa - elephants live in a tiny swath of land surrounded by new suburbanites who are pissed the elephants are messing up their new gardens, all made possible by car access). Not a world which needs more humans demanding more access at any time. I would call that a civilization of spoiled-rotten children in adult bodies. Our selfishness is killing everything else. Perhaps a health dose of NO is needed.

Cell phones and associated toys make about 60 million tons of tech garbage every year. Your *use* may be a success story, but the off-loaded exterior costs are not passed on to you, so you don't consider what a disaster they've been. Extend this to other technologies. We need to simplify, not constantly add more circuits onto an already-overdesigned and unstable mess.

Software developers are not held liable.

Damn. The hubris.

Put ten millions of them on roads with bicycles and small children. And kids with HERF guns.

This is a solution in search of a problem. Humans + cars are the most deadly killing even in man's history, slaughter worse than all the death tolls of all our wars combined; the appropriate solution is trains.

Cars + computers is a solution to a *suburban* problem, a problem created by the existence of cars driven by people and the road topology that results from their capabilities, a problem of needing to travel long distances at any time for all reasons to random destination. That problem can't be solved by rail because the houses aren't laid out for rail.

More efficient, more sane, to lay out towns for rail access than to build billions of robot tanks to emulate trains.

Automated voting machines, self-driving cars. Same bad ideas, same misplaced abundance of faith in programming. The world isn't a video game; it's full of chaos and malice, and you can't anticipate the outcomes.

Planes, yes, cars, no. Planes have buffer space and trained commercial pilots. Cars will have people reading books, and no in practice no space or time buffers. You can dodge a random garden hose of water, but you can't dodge rain.

You may joke, but that sort of thing is why Target let 60+ million customer records get into the hands of bad guys. You will always be adding more to the programming, and it will always be failing. You can't program for chaos, and especially can't anticipate malevolent intent.

Far better stated than I did. Let me add: bicycles.