Intelligence Chief Reveals Eavesdropping Details

The Bush administration has confirmed for the first time that American telecommunications companies played a key role in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program after asserting for nearly two years that any role played by the companies was a “state secret.”

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USA Changes Its Name to LCD (Lowest Common Demoninator)

America is soon to adopt a new acronym to replace USA. The new, easily remembered replacement will be LCD. The "dumbing down of America" is both the cause and the effect of our eventual destruction if we let it.

Sadly, though the citizens did not cause its own dumbing down; the corporatists, in an attempt to separate the intelligencia from the support of the people, has conditioned us to accept the best of the worst, a "lowest common denominator (LCD)" approach, like everything else in modern society. It is the source of the causes of our electing actors and idiots as Presidents, because they are as "ordinary as us", as opposed to celebrating brilliance. All of this is a consciousness that stupid people are more easily led, like rats into the sea following the pied piper.

If a basketball player has skills, we celebrate him; he scores more points; evidence of his superiority. Many never consider that the largest part of this is the superiority of his mind. They wrongly attribute this to his physical prowess, but somehow the tallest, most muscular player is not the highest scorer.

It appears many Americans would rather have a President with whom they could drink a beer and from whom they could hear a good joke, than to have one who knows how to improve their lives. It is not Mr. Bush's fault he is by far the least intelligent President to be elected in recent history. He is a product of the citizens and the devious puppet-masters who surround him. I am sure Mr. Bush is smarter than the average grocery store manager, but couldn't we have had higher expectations of the the requirements to become the "decider" for the world's only military superpower?

Regarding politics and even business, somehow it never occurs to many Americans that intelligence and logical persuasion are characteristics of an executive or lawyer that any of us would want to hire if we fully expect to win our cases, make more money and/or stay out of jail, yet somehow that has a taint when considering our number one legal and business minds in America. We have watched so many movies where emotionality won out over pure logical intelligence and truth, that we think demagoguery is the modern dogma of success. It never occurs to them, companies and the country should be run by the most intelligent, and that intelligence should feed our effective persuasion rather than weaponry and a loud mouth.

Then we wonder why the rest of the world laughs at us in the world frontier of policy and action. We have recently fallen from number one to number seven in a particularly important category:

U.S. falls from first to seventh place in global information technology ranking (Article)

This is a factor that will quickly translate into a poor economy for the USA/LCD. Somehow we have let anti-intellectual businesspersons convince us that there is a paramount value that something being profit driven/capitalistic is automatically going to make it superior. Now, by calling them "anti-intellectual" I am not saying they, themselves, are "stupid"; they just believe that keeping us that way will make them more money.

This may very well be true, in the short run, for those who became successful through inheritance instead of better ideas and hard work. The less intelligent the US is, the more we will celebrate the lazy, stupid sons of their fathers rise to the top as if they are royalty.

For example, it never occurs to many people that insurance companies are driven by profit, therefore the least likely to make decisions based on giving the best product for the lowest price. Their job is to spend the least by any means and to provide the very least. This is why America has the worst yet most expensive medical care among industrial nations. Some people will defend to the death, the right of insurance and pharmaceutical companies to make more money while providing less and less services to consumers.

After all, "profit is the measure of success" right? If I am CEO and I make a higher profit this year, you might assume I am the better businessman than the CEO who has a longterm plan for maximized profits. We have come to believe that making a million dollars overnight is preferable to making a billion over a period of ten years. Some couldn't tell you that 1- million is a thousand times lower than 1-billion. I can easily increase the profit of any company by selling off its most valuable assets all in one year while laying off its most experienced and highly paid middle managers. But this "instant results mentality" is killing America.

This is exactly how this super-corporation called America is being run today. We are allowing our executives to run up debt so they can pay themselves more and appease the impatient stockholders with a better standard of living, even if their actions will inevitably kill the goose that laid the golden egg, and I don't mean the company itself; I mean the consumers that support its growth.

Some may think it is a "conspiracy" but that would require greater intelligence than these overnight successes actually have. No, it is the system itself that has been ignored and abused. Anti-trust laws encourage the long-term health of a system; they are now intended to destroy profits but to guarantee that profits go to companies that make a better mousetrap instead of playing accounting games through mergers and acquisitions.

At he moment, America suffers from the bloat of having been number one for so long that it became a monopoly. Now, it acts like one; stifling innovation and shooting messengers of bad news. It has become the greatest incentivizer of saying "yes" to the boss and "no" to the employees, and refusing change. The worker or the citizen, in this case, has the greatest motive to steal from the supply room, and to blame failure on others. There is no reason for self-improvement, as that would just draw attention and make him a target of petty office politics, as it is much easier to shoot down ideas than to have them or promote them. Destruction is much easier than creation and invention.

In fact, to some, it would make the most sense to let things fall apart so they may more easily steal from the company as it falters. Using Katrina and New Orleans as a perfect example, despite the destruction of the city costing the larger corporation a huge fortune in the long run, it has made many companies a small fortune through the contracts of rebuilding it. So, the incentive was to let the levies fail knowing that reconstruction contracts would be very profitable to a few companies while costing the larger consumer base a huge loss.

It is time America become aware that it has a mental deficit, so that it may first choose to improve itself. You cannot possibly solve a problem until you see it "as a problem". We have to lay down our egos and admit we have become stupid, not looking for blame but realizing the cause of our current failure as a nation. Denial will do no good; it will only make things worse. If we realize there is such a problem, when is it appropriate to solve it? I have always heard, "NOW" was a good time.

Related Articles:
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
The Dumbing Down of America
Dumbing Down American Readers

When Will Apple Grow Up?

Art: Choices by Bryan E. Hall

"Hello, I'm a Mac," says the guy on the right (who is much younger and dressed in jeans). "And I'm a PC," says the guy on the left (who wears dorky glasses, ill-fitting khakis, and a jacket and tie). The two men discuss the many advantages of using a Mac and seem to agree that Macs are "better" than PCs. (Click here to see the ads.)

For years now, Apple has depended on a naivete and youth appeal that frankly borders on religion. Nothing against religion, but it reminds me of the dedication page of the most used textbook on Logic by Hurley in which it quotes W. K. Clifford: "It is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." He was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry. His philosophical writings coined the phrase "mind-stuff". I am also reminded of a quote of Nicola Tesla: "Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance."

It is with both of these considerations that I challenge Apple to begin to appeal to us with logic instead of a high school popularity dream. As an owner and avid user of Apples and DOS products since 1980 (yes, I even had Commodores) and as one who now uses them interchangeably, I find the current ads to be insulting not only to PCs but to intelligence.

Anyone who uses both, knows the limitations of either. Frankly, I would be hard pressed to find a reasonable selection of VOIP products for my Macs. In fact, the proprietary microphone on the Mac outright inflames me. True, Apple has both style and substance, but for them to play a psychological game tantamount to calling PCs "Fatty" is entirely too much like a time we would all like to forget.

Click to see Mac Ads

To play on the the imagery of teen rebellion against adults is counterproductive and may very well contribute to the very thing that causes young American workers to be easily outsourced by people with a good attitude.

The current Apple campaign plays on an ignorance that stems from pissing contests and comparison of penis size. I once asked a student in Japan to logically explain what the real differences between Mac and PC are; he began to explain to me that he wanted to "lick his Mac" that the PC didn't taste good.

Frankly, women don't fall for such silliness, and older men, who do make decisions in the business world may, in fact, backlash, which is neither good advertising nor true.

Anyone who uses both will tell you that Video capabilities of the two are comparable when properly configured; Audio of the Mac is great but isolated and unattractive to developers; and computing speed--- well, unless you are daisy chaining multiple Macs and trying to create a Supercomputer, dollar for dollar, PCs far outperform. The initial price tag of Macs have come down for their entry level products, but when you hit the mid-range and up, PCs leave them far behind.

The operating systems may be cheaper for the cutting edge product among Macs, but the availability of excellent Freeware for PCs far outpaces Mac by a 10:1 margin, disproportionate to the market share.

We Mac and PC users need to pull together and demand that Apple respect our intelligence as we have grown up, and we need to demand that our children be encouraged to think logically.

Steve J, I challenge you to present intelligent reasons to buy your products and you will fairly reap benefits and avoid insulting those of us who have grown out of our faddish phase.

Buyers, I challenge you to make substantial arguments about why I should replace my multitude of cheap, dependable, fast and relatively maintenance-free PCs with machines that require that I buy other Apple products ad infinitum and fail to maintain backward compatibility. (Note: I love my Apples, but I am glad someone else is paying for the software. And, no I don't lick mine.)

Other's reviews to get you started:

As usual, Apple hopes to shift the debate away from a battle over specs and value and toward a battle we can all understand: cool kid versus nerd. But these days, aren't nerds like John Hodgman the new cool kids? And isn't smug superiority (no matter how affable and casually dressed) a bit off-putting as a brand strategy? --Seth Stevenson - Slate.com


shdwsclan--

These mac commercials are pretty sad !!!!

This once again proves that macs are for soccer moms and old people.

I work part time as a graphic designer while I'm in college, and guess what, all 15 of us complain to the “old guy”, our boss.

Many of these machines have to be reformatted multiple ties during the course of the year by Applecare.

They should really tell people the truth about mac…

Here are the awful truths that the commercial FAILS to mention when you actually try to work on a mac.

The Mach micro kernel makes the Linux under mac unbearably slow. So slow in fact, that graphic design is unbearable. I had to install yellow dog Linux and run gimp because it was so unbearable.

Windows 2003 Workstation is the fastest OS on the market.

Where the hell is the eject button. It doesn't work.
Yes, ejecting the CD stops functioning completely if you keep a disk in there too long. This is true for zip and CD. Manually ejecting will eject the disk, but you will have to reboot the unit.
In windows and in Linux, the eject button works and is never unnecessarily locked. Only when something is being written to a CD is it locked on a windows machine. Zip is always left unlocked.
In a normal day, i have to reboot the mac 12-20 times, since a lot of our templates are kept on DVDs[we make vehicle decals]. Sure we’re paid by the hour, but now we can show him that we cant work very fast because of the macs.

Plug-n-play!?
They have the audacity to compare plug-n-play. I'm sorry, but this is just false advertising. For all you novices, that means that the Japanese camera has to speak English. Windows and Linux will ALWAYS detect the camera as a removable drive.
What mac wont do using their magically crappy plug and play is detect controller cards, initialize foreign hides, foreign sound cards, or any other non-mac hardware.
Both [Debian-my flavor]Linux, and windows have plug-in-play systems much much much much much more developed than mac. If you have a piece odd and new, or specialize hardware, i guarantee that it wont work on a mac even if mac.
NOW, if you install yellow dog Linux, then most of the crazy hardware, like a sound card, will work.

Crashing !?
Even funnier. As i said already, most of us have to reboot these macs 12-20 times on a good day!!!
Macs can crash predictably !!!
Why don't they show safari loading eBay !!!
OK, now lets talk about crashing in general. We generally have our entire adobe ad Macromedia packages crash regularly. The crashes occur WITHOUT ANY NOTICE.
Macs never crash because they never tell you they did, so you’ll be wondering if YOU closed the app accidentally.

Finder ?
Finder is terrible.
Try searching multiple files, multiple times when recompiling freehand files and converting them to pdfs and AIs. Ive already mentioned how bad finder is on removable drives. Adding to that, why do you have download tinker tool to actually see ALL the hidden files.

Jumping from MAC OS 9-10.
Fonts are totally messed up.
Example.
Narrow helvetica was NHelvetica on mac os 9
Helvetica \ Narrow is actually the STANDARD font, and they’ve started to use this standard on newer versions of x. We found this out when we upgraded Tiger.
Also, mac keeps generating XF exception errors on loading a converted freehand file. Being the only one studying computer science, i had to crazy things to find out that it was actually a missing font. In windows IT ACTUALLY TELLS YOU.

Mac modularity is terrible. switching between apps is horrible, especially trying to multi task.

Printing. THE WORST IVE EVER SEEN.
For some reason, mac likes print cmyk pantone previews as ghostly images. Mac actually directly tries to mix the pantone colors, when we don't have pantone specific cartridges. On a windows or Linux machine, since we are only printing previews, they actually adjust to print the closest color possible, unlike mac.

Instead, they should really be airing
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6553260189868317794&q=mac
To save professional from making a mistake.

Mac is not for professionals.
If your a novice, otherwise, don't know how a computer works, then mac is for you.
I repeat, macs are not for professional.
Mac is the least technologically advanced system on the market. It uses BSD Linux underneath.
All there really is, is a shiny GUI, nothing else.

I repeat again, if your gonna do professional editing, like vector graphics, raster graphic, web sites, or even professional video, DON'T choose a mac. If your going to host sites, don't choose a mac.

If your looking for a professional setup, use windows workstation, with a 1 Linux firewall/router/Norton anti virus corporate server[this is all on one machine].
Basically, all windows machines interface with the Linux machine. They are all behind it. Norton updates itself automatically on the Linux machine on wine, and then automatically updates the windows workstations.

Notice, I didn't mention anything about gaming.

Gail--

Okay. I have both a PC and 2 Macs.

The commercials are not saying that PC’s suck. MAC is trying to let everyone know that PC’s are made for mathematical, etc. type work and Macs are made for graphics and so on. They are trying to let you know that the MAC is just better systematically for the various “fun” things people use a computer for.

If you think I’m wrong, call any media artist, graphic designer, or web designer.


Casey--

The ads are self-congratulatory, condescending and silly. Who in their right mind would actually believe such obviously lame marketing ploys? Um, would that be the same folks who believed that Mac processors were way faster than PC processors… before Mac decided to go Intel and now *those* are faster?

As has been said many times, vulnerability to a virus, attacks, etc are more related to open ports and services on your machine, regardless of platform. Firewalls prevent problems, but only if enabled. Admin passwords are the most powerful protection you can have.

There may be something to be said that the mac system is based on open-source software that has been heavily scrutinized for vulnerabilities - but the biggest single advantage that hackers have to the windows platform is the idiot operating it. That, and that there are SO MANY MORE of those idiots.

not an idiot your platform = safe computer


Casey--

Gail, I’ve been both a print and web designer and developer for over 10 yrs. I’ve used both (windows and mac) and even started with macs (OS7). I own both, but more windows than mac.

A tool is a tool. I don’t care whether it’s a chainsaw, software or a computer - 9/10 of all problems are operator errors. Granted, there may be some correlation between price and quality.

Someone once said to me: when making a purchase, you generally have 3 options: fast, cheap and light. Pick 2. I don’t find many things in life that don’t conform to that saying, frankly. And computers are no different.

but getting back to your general assessment that somehow designers realize that ONLY macs are OK for their work: poppycock.


What do YOU think? Of the Ads, their claims and their approach?

Chinese 3-yr Old - Rubik's Cube - 114 Secs vs American Teen - Condom Through the Nose - Now That's Achievement!

This is how Chinese parents encourage their children to use their minds.


Her record is 114 secs. She does better in front of a crowd.


Here is how American parents fail to encourage theirs. (And you think global warming is a problem)

The Anna Nicole/Idiocracy Effect

Anyone who hasn't seen Anna Nicole in the news, stop reading now and get your eyes and ears replaced. Those who haven't seen Idiocracy, it's on DVD now and you must see it to experience the discomfort of identification with present day society.

The popularity of Anna Nicole news over Iraq on any day including the day of her death can only be explained by the ever-increasing dumbing down of America. Sadly enough, even Anna Nicole knew this about America as she acted dumber than she was, in order to attract Jerry Springer viewers and Enquirer readers to her entourage. She was using a very successful model of the kind of PR, Marilyn Monroe, who actual had a brain too.

The movie, Idiocracy, is idiotic and ingenious at the same time to the same extent that Stephen Colbert is. It's a parody intended to force ignorant, shallow people to identify first with the idiots in the film, then to feel like idiots so they may seek help and change. "Get an education if you are stupid" is the message. No matter how bad things get, you can choose to improve yourself.

The film takes place 500 years in the future, when, as a result of stupid people breeding more than the smart, and corporate America encouraging stupidity, the world has become a cesspool of idiots. One example of this is that the future humans have now started watering their crops with soda pop because the soda pop company has "bought" the FDA; brilliant! Everyone in the film is like the guy that used to pick on you in school for being too smart. Intelligent language is universally referred to as "faggy". How real this is now, not 500 years in the future.

But there is hope; take the warning and change the world. Prevent this from becoming our future. Instead of giving the news organizations a legitimate, business reason to "give you what you want", reward them for giving you what you need. Maybe our cultural icons will become Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates instead of Anna Nicole Smith and pimps singing Hip Hop, because, let's face it; Hip Hop wouldn't know hip if it was connected to their ass!