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Comment: It is a coup, it is Treason, it is tyranny (Score 2) 98

by lew2048 (#44062049) Attached to: Nationwide Snooping System Launched In India
Our government has rewritten the fundamental agreement between We, the People and itself. The rewrite changes the fundamentals of how our system of We, the People and government works. It did so in secret. That is a coup. The rewrite makes our government sovereign. The Constitution acknowledges that We, the People, are sovereign. Thus, the coup is also Treason. The US government is now the most powerful government in history, as it has detailed blackmail information on all of its own citizens and many citizens around the world. No entity possessing any modicum of power has remained un-corrupted in all of human history, and we can be confident that the NSA and US gov will not be the first. Intelligence analysts do not evaluate 'intent', they evaluate 'capabilities', as 'intent' can change in a moment. Our government has the capability to be the most tyrannical in history. I know of no entity that has walked away from such an opportunity. If we all don't get really excited about this and start acting like a complete crazy, our gov will finish this coup, and many of us will find ourselves in the gulag they have prepared. Given how they treated something as insignificant as OWS, we can expect a lot of killings when the real protests get going. This is now a contest of who is willing to take more damage : them to their legitimacy as rulers or We, the People, in deaths on the streets. I am looking for a bookie that will take bets on the number of people here in the US that will be killed by authorities in the first year of protests on this issue. But that assumes protests, and the propaganda machine is so good in this country ...

Comment: Treason (Score 5, Insightful) 163

by lew2048 (#44044483) Attached to: Google Files First Amendment Challenge Against FISA Gag Order
Our government unilaterally rewrote the basic agreement between We, the People who are sovereign, and the government which is supposed to report to us. As a result, no citizen can understand the reasons behind the actions of his Representatives or the government. Thus, the government is sovereign as We, the People, have no control of it. This is treason. This is the functional equivalent to a coup, kept secret by the people who did it. We cannot allow the government to engage in anything that require secrecy, or we will be in this situation again. So, time to become a neutral nation the way the guys who wrote the Constitution intended. Bring the troops home and repudiate all of the treaties that allow them to be overseas. Repeal the acts enabling our NSA, CIA, FBI and FISA, as these are all more dangerous to us as citizens than anything they purport to protect us against. Purge the Department of Justice, which seems to exist to write memos justifying obviously bogus interpretations of laws and the Constitution. Remove every person from government who knew about, and did nothing to oppose, any episode of torture, drone attacks on US citizens, or any of this spying, Un-elect all Representatives who knew about and did nothing to oppose these things. Anything less than this, the coup will ultimately succeed.

Comment: There is no outside threat the threat of NSA, .. (Score 1) 130

by lew2048 (#43997453) Attached to: New Bill Would Declassify FISC Opinions
It is a common thing for countries to be dominated by their intelligence organizations. Even considering the deaths due to the tax burden and other side-effects of devoting wealth to NSA, CIA, FBI, DIA, and the other 60 or so intelligence groups, there is no external threat that has produced more deaths. Given that many of our 'external threats' are a direct consequence of previous actions of exactly those completely corrupt agenices, they should all be abolished immediately, the country will be safer and wealthier. Ditto for the Department of Justice, whose main work product has been memos justifying obvious violations of the Constitution. There is no conceivable 'reform' that would put them back in the Constitutional box, if they are allowed to declare any information top secret.

Comment: Stanford Prison Experiment (Score 1) 422

by lew2048 (#42076269) Attached to: Could Testing Block Psychopaths From Senior Management?
Who couldn't learn to fake it? Isn't that what the article is claiming that psychopaths do? In addition, the majority of dishonest behavior in every institution is performed by perfectly ordinary people. Milgram and Zimbardo and many others in 1000s of studies have shown that most people take their cues from superiors and peers. We evolved, after all, in groups of 20 -- 200 where everyone knew everyone else's capabilities, decisions were mostly out in the open, group concensus was generally pretty 'right', and go along to get along thus was a good strategy for survival. Which is why it is so very easy to corrupt any institution, and why any dishonesty in a CEO is rapidly copied throughout their organization. Further, I don't think that psychopaths can get to the top in organizations that value honesty : people compare notes and rapidly detect dishonesty. Psychopaths depend on dishonesty, so if you want to protect an organization against them, a culture of bend-over-backwards, open-kimono honesty is better than garlic on vampires (or whatever creature garlic works against, I am a bit weak on that technology.)

Comment: Yes, I was a big fan (Score 2) 280

by lew2048 (#41613361) Attached to: Ubuntu Asks Users To Pay What They Want
I thought Ubuntu was wonderful under KDE and Gnome both. Would have been pleased to donate, never saw a web page that asked me to do so. Then they shoved Unity down my throat, far before it was ready, and I didn't upgrade for 2 releases. 10.10, I believe, finally broke via upgrades that didn't work (3rd team must have been assigned to that), and I finally had to use Unity on 12.04. I couldn't make the old gnome work for some reason. PITA. I wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of loyalty in that mess. Now they ask for donations. There is something very wrong in their thinking. So I will make a donation for past services, but I am looking for a new distribution.

Comment: Hundreds or thousands of orbits in the future ... (Score 2) 241

by lew2048 (#39561921) Attached to: Neil deGrasse Tyson Outlines a Plan For Saving Earth From Asteroids
3-body problem --> non-linear feedback --> mathematical chaos --> must simulate, but very sensitive to initial conditions. There is a lot of matter in our solar system for which the orbits are not known. ==> I don't believe 'hundreds of orbits in the future'.

Comment: You don't need to engineer a virus (Score 1) 144

by lew2048 (#39434527) Attached to: Killing Cancer With Engineered Viruses
unless you are a Big Pharma who wants to make $ out of the treatment. The reovirus and about 10 other viruses already attack cancer cells in this way. There have been clinical trails, somewhere in Canada, I believe. If you catch reovirus naturally, you will perhaps feel under the weather for a week or so. On the other hand, the clinical trials that inject reovirus into the tumor have a high rate of complete remission of the cancer. So rethink the usefulness of the FDA : it makes it impossible for 'natural' treatments to be used in medicine by making the cost of taking a substance through the FDA's regulations in the neighborhood of $500M. Without the ability to patent the treatment, no drug company will do that. Next, rethink the entire medical cartel. Every oncologist knows about dozens of these treatments. None can use them without jeopardizing their license to practice medicine. The FDA kills 100s of 1000s of people in the US yearly because it prevents the development of new drugs and the use of 'natural substances' in treatments. We don't die of unsafe drugs (tho the FDA has been pretty bad at that lately), we die of no new drugs at all. Regulations == programming for an open environment == a conceptual oxymoron.
