August 2010
12 posts
“At an Afghan police training facility outside Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province, the American Marine commander, Lt. Col. Gerard Wynn, said in April that American trainers had immediately rejected 10 percent of Afghan recruits because of opium use. But the trainers did not turn away recruits who showed evidence of marijuana use because, he said, “it’s so prevalent in society that we’d be kicking everybody out.”
—Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times.
“I so much respected the mentality of President Clinton. He was the one who was smart. When my father attacked his places, he sent a few cruise missiles to my father’s training camp. He didn’t get my father, but after all the war in Afghanistan, they still don’t have my father. They have spent hundreds of billions. Better for America to keep the money for its economy. In Clinton’s time, America was very, very smart. Not like a bull that runs after the red scarf.”
—Omar bin Laden, Osama’s Prodigal Son. Rolling Stone.
“The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal,” says a British officer who serves in Kabul. “You’d be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like ‘Who the fuck is that?’ And it’s fucking Stan McChrystal.”
—Rolling Stone, The Runaway General.
how many cats can fit into a suitcase to take on a plane?
As many as the TSA will allow - usually seven. Don’t try bringing six. They throw the suitcase into a furnace if there’s only six.
Alpha Apple Napster!
I think that Alpha Apple Napster is a great fraternity name. I cannot wait to make my acquaintances swill cheap beer while I scream about pledging.
Net Neutrality →
dig.csail.mit.edu
Net neutrality is this:
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.
That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.
Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.
Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn’t pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.
There have been suggestions that we don’t need legislation because we haven’t had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past — it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred.
Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.
Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.
