Greg Palast with some great coverage:
Perhaps major oil corporations should be nationalized and all abnormal profits spent on subsidizing sustainable energy alternatives. This would help force the oil industry into major downsizing. Some of the subsidization could be spent countering the structural unemployment that would come as a result.
It’s like the Halloween Documents, but by homophobes. They want to embrace and extend the “Latino vote” in order to extinguish gay marriage. And “the blacks”? Well, they’re NOM’s SCO.
I tend to agree with economists who favor legalizing insider trading and think the law is mistaken to classify insider trading as a subset of securities fraud.
For instance, take the charges against Kim Schmitz (known as Kim Dotcom now). Let’s say Schmitz did have every intention/possibility of investing 50 million euros in Letsbuyit.com. If he let some know in advance (“insiders”) and they got a jump on other buyers, where’s the harm in that? Like it or not, that’s what the stock market is; a place where those who have the most accurate information the soonest, tend to win. However, Schmitz reportedly had no means/intent to invest yet reportedly pulled in enormous personal gain using his relatively small original stake ($375,000) and others he gave false information to. If so, then that’s fraud; yet he was found guilty of “insider trading” despite not having any inside information to give.
Rick Santorum on abortion in the case of rape:
I respect the consistency of this position (“in every case”) though I disagree with its underlying premise. What I don’t understand is how anyone believing abortion is killing an innocent person can claim, in good conscience, that it’s OK if the embryo/fetus exists as a result of rape. It’s not OK to kill another person to make someone else’s bad situation marginally better.
While I’d agree with Santorum that a human life is present after conception, I disagree with Santorum’s premise that “a human life is the same as a person“. An embryo lacks the experience of complex mental activity to be considered a person. Human life that has only existed in body isn’t precious. Claiming otherwise is puzzling and I don’t see an inherent right to life for that human being. For this reason, there’s nothing unethical in a pregnant woman choosing to abort. Therefore, I support the right of women to choose and the right of doctors to help her carry out that choice safely.
Note also that Santorum slips up when he says his position “is not a matter of religious values” yet later argues that women should, “accept what God has given“. It is likely that Santorum really means “soul” but uses the term “person” to appear more secular in this matter.
I fear death in that I fear deep sadness for the few who are very close to me and the possibility of physical suffering before the light goes out. The good news is, I think the few who love me dearly will be able to get on with fulfilling and happy lives. And, my pain is at least temporary. Admittedly though, the thought of suffering physical pain (either excruciatingly and/or continually) still freaks me out. I guess I don’t fear “losing” anything since I can’t imagine that an afterlife capable of such reflection is anything but a fantasy.
I’m taking a course on the basics of open networks and my tutor Koos Baas used a great letter/envelope analogy to describe the addition/removal of PDU PCI headers as data moves down and up the stack. I wondered what other analogies might work to describe a user sending a message to another. I remembered the doll I had and took a snapshot:
The smallest doll could be thought of as the data from the sender’s application. The largest doll could be thought of as a frame, just before being turned into bits for the physical layer. Shortly thereafter, the unpacking begins until the recipient gets the smallest doll at their application layer.
To my sister Lesley who gave me this gift I say, spasiba!
There are all sorts of lies and euphemisms employed in an attempt to counter this:
(Image source unknown. If you know, please inform me and I’ll attribute.)“Unfortunate but necessary” is one twisted take. “Collateral” is a weapon that has been used by those who push the buttons. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against another who, when backed into a corner, becomes a vicious animal…that would be hypocritical of me. But throwing a stranger under the bus (!?) … that’s neither natural nor justified. Only the insane or duped claim otherwise.
I’ve been discussing the issues around “cloud computing” in a class I’m taking. I think it is important to distinguish between using another’s technology as a storage unit for your information and using another’s technology to transform/crunch your information.
The implication of using X’s storage is that your data can be read by X unless you encrypt your data before sending it. If you use X’s application, you may get dubious results in your data. If X’s application is the only instance where your data can be read (as intended), then that can be extremely careless (as some might say) and therefore, potentially dangerous.
I see “cloud” storage as a solvable problem, but see many instances where “cloud computing” is truly careless computing.
Set up an FTP server on an Ubuntu machine using vsftpd. A laptop client running Ubuntu (top) connects just fine through Firefox. An Android (Honeycomb) + Firefox tablet (bottom) however…
I don’t get why the Droid doesn’t connect.
