Want to shoot a war movie? Need access to military assets? You're going to have to run the movie by the Pentagon first to make sure it portrays "The Right Side of the Story".
Also the US has tax credits for scripts which incorporate messages in support of the war on drugs. This is why you see ridiculous bullshit on CSI like kids dying after falling off a roof while high on.. GASP.. MARIJUANA!
Land of the free, home of the brainwashed. This is why I try not to consume very much mainstream media. It's not exactly on the level with denial of historical events - people wouldn't stand for that. It has to be more subtle, and it is, and it works.
Oh right. I find this so transparent that I find it difficult to even begin to use the word propaganda. But I could be dangerously out of touch with "the common man" or whatever.
Basically, if someone tries to tell me something is bad and it's not a paper on PubMed, I don't really buy it. But I guess most people believe secondary sources.
>> You're going to have to run the movie by the Pentagon first to make sure it portrays "The Right Side of the Story".
You mean like Avatar? Or Redacted? Stop-Loss? Battle For Haditha? Green Zone? Or any of a host of other war movies made by Hollywood in the last 40 years that trash the US military to varying degrees. Go further back in time and you get movies like Casualties of War, Apocalypse Now, etc.
You accuse others of lying in the service of their politics, all the while you engage in that very thing. The term for this is projection.
You forgot about: Need access to military assets? Avatar had zero need for military assets.
The most effective form of censorship is self censorship. Let's not say really bad things about X, because I don't want to burn any bridges. There is a popular image of the US military has little to do with reality. Consider the number of times an active army US soldier is portrayed as raping someone in a movie vs the other guy's army. Or the extremely high unemployment rate rate for soldiers you only serve one tour.
So you are saying that if you want to shoot a film about the army killing and raping people the Pentagon won't help you out by letting you borrow some tanks for some of the scenes? You could still use replicas, CGI, or even borrow a privately owned tank so I don't see this issue.
The reason you see a positive portrayal of the US soldier in movies is because a large percentage of the audience either is or if friends with someone who is a soldier. So unless you movie is explicitly about evil US soldiers there is no profit to be had in portraying the US army in a negative light.
Sorry, I was not clear. The military uses a light touch to shape perceptions, but the most powerful force is still indirect censorship.
Filmmakers don't offend people without gaining something from it. It's not just a question of the military + audience but also producers and actors etc. Also, sound effects people don't bother using actual hoof beats when people are so used to hearing cocoanuts and writers / producers don't challenge perceptions unless that's their direct goal.
PS: The DoD does not try and get people to think that most US soldiers are Captain America wannabes. The goal is closer to: "Well trained, Deadly, Loyal, Young, Americans, that need all the support they can get." For various reasons they would rather be seen as crazy than infective.
This should be called The Coder's Path for the same reason this site should be called Coder News. A whole section on "Gettin’ Paid, Makin’ Money"? Fucking please.
Eventually every artist has to learn how to sell their work. Is it because they're selling out, just doing it for the cash? No. Some of us have families to feed.
You are confusing the difference between approaching the process of becoming a hacker for-profit and approaching the path to hackerdom because you seek enlightenment. When you are primarily seeking promised riches at the end of the path, you aren't following the path.
P2P twitter is absolutely necessary but it has to be done right.
First of all, ensure privacy with public key cryptography. Sign tweets for authenticity.
Retweets can just be additional signatures.
If a distributed microblogging protocol was interoperable with twitter and user friendly, it would probably be able to siphon people off of twitter proper. Certainly it would be an attractive alternative to anyone who NEEDED the service, and that's the important thing, right?
Hopefully work out a way so that tweets on twitter.com can be captured and distributed in this P2P network. These tweets could be unsigned since if you include a link to the original tweet they can be verified.
Defining protocols instead of providing services democratizes a layer of the OSI model. We need to think deeper than that, though. We need to democratize the physical layer as well. Luckily we've proven that you don't need a high bandwidth link to be useful in a crisis situation. Twitter will do. To that end, I suggest that this project make an even more lofty goal:
Create a small embedded device interoperable with this P2P microblogging network. The device can communicate with peers over a Software Defined Radio. The device should be capable of bridging to a wi-fi or 3g network. This would accomplish the democratization of the physical layer which is so important to combat censorship and oppression.
You can't monetize democracy. This is why these projects will only happen on a volunteer/charity basis.
Due to personal issues and a tight deadline it was not featureful as I wished but it worked, although there is a central point that works as gateway to the overlay.
Anyway, after this point, it works fully decentralized.
I agree with you in principle, but I don't ever see something like this becoming mainstream, even if it does interoperate with Twitter and is as easy to use as Twitter. Simply put, there will be no selling point. Switching would give the user the same capability of subscribing to short messages from other people as they already have on Twitter. So, why switch? Even if they can continue to follow everyone they already follow, what's the incentive aside from technology they don't understand anyway?
Or, maybe this will cause users to take Jabber/XMPP more seriously and stop using proprietary technology for corporate IM.
I've worked at places where management is completely gaga over Skype and would push me to support it despite the fact that I had no ability to block spam, troubleshoot messaging problems or integrate our IM system into existing Asterisk, SSO, monitoring and collaboration solutions.
IMHO, Openfire is far more flexible, extensible, secure, reliable and most importantly - manageable as a service.
When an XMPP solution that's as easy to use as Skype comes out I'll be all for this. As it stands, even Google's video chat is much more difficult for end-users to install and use.
I used to use Ekiga for video chat and it was much shoddier than Skype, constantly dropping calls, refusing to release the audio or video device so that we couldn't call back, and other serious bugs. Skype "just works".
I really hope that someone comes up with a decent free software competitor, but it doesn't really exist at this point. The fastest way to solve this problem would be for Skype to become free software.
Another problem with recruiters is conflict of interest. They likely can't be seen to poach one client's employees for another.
If the recruiter is large and they represent many clients, the pool of talent you can pull from via the recruiter may not include someone very qualified and presently employed somewhere with no room for advancement they deserve.
If you had just advertised the job on LinkedIn and done some cursory research yourself before going to a headhunter, you might be able to access that resource. At a cheaper price, even.
I dont read reddit much so that concept has a much more positive association for me since it brings to mind Accelerado and the crazy economics 2.0 with its sentient corporations using humans as currency and crazy intelligent 419 scams.
You're talking about the content of anon114's link, but what was reddit-like about his comment was the formulaic "I'll just leave this here: <link>" which doesn't contribute as much to the discussion as the comments that do get upvoted.
Want to shoot a war movie? Need access to military assets? You're going to have to run the movie by the Pentagon first to make sure it portrays "The Right Side of the Story".
Also the US has tax credits for scripts which incorporate messages in support of the war on drugs. This is why you see ridiculous bullshit on CSI like kids dying after falling off a roof while high on.. GASP.. MARIJUANA!
Land of the free, home of the brainwashed. This is why I try not to consume very much mainstream media. It's not exactly on the level with denial of historical events - people wouldn't stand for that. It has to be more subtle, and it is, and it works.