Slashdot Mirror
DoJ - Making Data Public Would 'Crash System'
orthogonal writes "The Justice Department today denied Freedom of Information Act requests to make public data on foreign lobbyists, claiming that '[i]mplementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating'. The requestor responded that '[t]his was a new one on us. We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them,' Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity said Tuesday. Maybe we should tell John Ashcroft about open source database and copying solutions?"
Hmm, so I guess they don't keep backups of their own data, if making copies of it would cause the data to be lost. I guess we just have to hope (or not) that their computers or hard drives never fail.
Does this mean that they never make backups either? Sounds like just a bad excuse...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Wow, i think I broke something whilst picking my jaw up off the floor.
If the computer will crash by accessing these records, then this implies the records are inaccessible. Not to mention that if the records magically 'disappear' all they have to say it "look we told you so"
I dont think anyone is gonna believe this for a second. More like a lot of people want this information permanently buried as to avoid letting the public know whats going on.
How will the FBI put all that old information on these new systems then?
Open Source Sushi
particularly because the policy allows withholding information due to "foreseeable harm" to the Administration, and not necessarily to the country.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The government said an overhaul of the system should be finished by December and copies should be available then.
Not available until after the November election, eh? How conveeeenient.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
This paces the Justice Department on par with Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the recently retired Iraqi Information Minister in it's inovation of repartee in the face of fact!
I hope they do not copyright this reason as it is so good I think I will use it (if I can) when the circumstances arise.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
This makes me glad that I live in a state that utilizes MATRIX and seems to strive against individuals' digital personas being kept close to the individual's chest. *sigh*
On a more serious note, perhaps the government should look into being this tight-lipped when it comes to combining, merging, and actively data- and text-mining databases and data sets ... you know, such as those that paint a complete and full picture about a person from individually innocuous bits of datum. Maybe EFF ought to get involved in this (don't flame - I've not hopped over to EFF for soem time now; I'm sure that they actually *are* involved). Then again, hopefully the INDIVIDUAL would ultimately attain/retain ALL IP over their OWN data.
Yeah, I know. I can hear 100,000 people muttering, pipedream, along with me.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Whatever process they use to look at the data could be used to copy it and give it to the FOIA petitioners.
Or maybe they just put stuff in there and don't look at the data, because it would crash. That would make a lot of sense.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
What this is, is perjury, and Ashcroft should be brought to task for it by Congress (*sigh* As _if_ they could be expected to do their job...).
Ashcroft issued a directive upon taking office that F.O.I.A. requests should be obstructed as far as possible, in line with the secrecy that has surrounded this entire administration. This is merely one more crass lie in furtherance of that ideology. The man has lied constantly since taking office and has been allowed to get away with it. Why?
Have we stopped caring about transparancy and republican values at home, whilst at the same time singing the praises of 'democracy' abroad? Are we all content to allow this proud nation to slip slowly but surely into a permanently-militarised social order? Will _you_ accept the suspension of habeus corpus, or of the entire Constitution, and live happily in a police state?
Me, I'd rather die on my feet, with my fist in the air, than my knees. I refuse to trade my freedom for cold comfort.
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
If they could do it then, why can't they do it now?
--Mike--
That works great for the end of the year, but what about all this money they take from every paycheck, from every item I purchase, from all the gas I pump, from simply owning a car, from using the telephone, from connecting 3 computers via a private network (soon to be in FL).
It's really quite terrifying when you list all the things you're taxed for. In fact it takes about a thousand times less effort to list things you aren't taxed for .... yet.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
The feds can't handle the /. effect, eh? :)
My MythTV HowTo
Remember perjury? It was all about sex, right?
Well, now it's all about terrorism, so live with the monster you created.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I couldn't read the article because it was slashdotted, but I think he must have been talking about our form of government: the feudal system.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Obviously you've never worked in a government agency. The rule of thumb in the government IT department at the agency I once worked for was this: "If it's inexpensive (or free) it can't be good. If it's not made my Microsoft or Oracle, it can't be good. If it contributes to a heterogeneous environment in any way, it can't be good. If you came up with a solution to a vexing problem on your own and it doesn't cost millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to complete, you're fired."
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Hmmm....
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
"come up with ANOTHER bogus reason"
You mean the guy who did not feel compelled to give ANY reason to Congress to not hand over memos they requested? Apparently Ashcroft does even HAVE to invent bogus reasons.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
No, sir. Not a terrorist.
..." doesn't qualify as "Information".
;)
Simply not "+5, Informative"
Moderators, get a clue. Your job, when moderating something as "Informative", is to promote posts which, when viewed with a reasonably objective eye, actual contain (get ready now...) Information.
Perhaps I'm just not enough of a lib-leftie wing-nut, but "ultra-right wing Jesus freak who actively hates gays, black people, non-Christians,
If, to the liberals in the group, this does indeed qualify as "Information", then please accept my humble apology...
-- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
it's about more than just "Select * from foreignlobbyists order by date desc"
They undoubtedly have thousands and thousands of scanned images of documents, records, transcripts, etc. Inserting new data and adding things is a heck of a lot less of a load than getting all of it out.
I do think it's pretty absurd of an argument... but if they were truly trying to hide all of it, don't you think they'd come up with something more clever than, 'uhh, well... it'll crash our system'. Maybe it's rediculous enough to be true.
Read Dean's book. Ashcroft has been pissing on the FOIA since he entered office. There's plenty of evidence that he lied, over and over again. I watched him do it to a Congressional investigation a couple weeks ago. They threatened him with contempt of Congress, but he just sat there glowering. They asked him to submit documents and he refused. They asked for a reason and he refused to give one. They suggested executive privelege and he said no. He forced the Patriot act through congress and suggested that even taking the time to read the bill before signing it would make them unpatriotic. He refused to open gun records of suspected terrorists for fear of pissing off his buddies in the NRA. He refused to investigate anthrax attacks in the US once it became clear that the prime suspect was an American. He refused to investigate the thousands of anthrax hoax attacks targeted at abortion clinics after 9/11. He encouraged government agencies to deny all FOIA requests on principle. He's been having peaceful advocacy groups with no terrorist ties watched and infiltrated, while practically ignoring home grown terrorist threats (including cases involving WMD, such as this one). All the while he wastes our money and resources fighting smut. Now this? A legitimate FOIA request, and his reason for denying it is utter transparent bullshit. He's the Attorney General. The American people deserve better than this.
Hmm. Nowhere in the bible does it say 'abortion = murder' or 'an unborn child is a full fledged human being' or anything like that. If you can find it, let me know.
If you really want to go biblical, lets make male masturbation a felony.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Translation, for any non-techies visiting today:
Seriously folks, I firmly believe that another four years under this administration threatens our physical security, as well as our civil liberties. I'm not one to usualy cry "Special Interests!", but this is exactly the kind of data that must be made public for a democratic republic to work. December is just too late to allow voters to make an informed decision, but I suspect thats the point.
The second someone resorts to the lazy intellectual copout of calling someone a "Nazi," not only do they dilute the real tragedy of what happened in history as a result of real Nazis, they reveal themself as the lame thinker that they are.
Read up on what real Nazis did. Denying some information request for a technical reason (witness all of Slashdot pretending to know the "real" reasons when it could very well be a database-in-transition issue) has nothing to do with being a "cocksucker," believing in Jesus (not that it's a bad thing, right, "open-minded" liberals?), or being a Nazi. Take that gutter ball political garbage somewhere else.
I don't know quite how these things tend to play in the states, but over here I would read this as "that database on which we spent X millions of your money is in fact total crap and we couldn't find our arses with both hands"
While most readers will [probably correctly] take this to be a rather poor government whitewash, it could equally be a sign that the government's IT strategy has been fragmented and piecemeal for ages.
This tends to happen in democratic nations because big IT contracts, like other government contracts, tend to go to companies favoured by the extant administration (despite all the charming fiction about open tendering).
When a new administration is eventually voted in, it's time for them to pay back various favours to certain friendly companies, and so new expenditure will be announced.
The end result of this is government departments and organisations each with their own mishmash of systems with no thought at all given to interoperability.
The chances of them ever getting their shit together enough to collate everything into a massive uber-database with every record on every citizen in the UK is nil, so I'm not that worried.
Like I said, I don't know the situation in the States vis-a-vis government records, but everywhere in the world, governments all share the same founding principles of confusion and inertia.
That, and there's waaay more people in the USA. 5x population = at least 5x records = a lot more than 5x complexity.
All that being said, this remains a transparent and contemptible display of ass-covering by Ashcroft..
It's intended to give the Government full access to information across it's many levels - not so the public can access it..
Really, who are we trying to fool here? The Gov't is not going to release anything it considers useful for at least 50-100 years.
Sorry, I guess I dont have much faith in the legal system when Judges and Gov't officials can outweigh the will of the people - this is not the America I was born in....frankly its more like the Russia I remember as a kid and thinking 'I sure am glad I live here in a Free Country'..... Now I sit here and wonder when an 'honest' Judicial/Governmental system will come around and really think about the people's needs instead of who's lining their pocket book..
I'm not holding my breath on this being released - because the Gov't is more paranoid about giving up data than p2p users are in sharing in public places, lol.
"Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free."
-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
"The truth is found when men are free to pursue it."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-- George Orwell, 1945
"Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them."
-- Dwight David Eisenhower, 1963
"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant."
-- Robert F. Kennedy, 1964
"Go fuck yourself."
-- Dick Cheney, 2004
First of all, I can't believe anyone with a brain would try to use an open database during a software upgrade. I know ours won't let anyone log in during the upgrade process. I can't believe how lame this whole discussion is. Even though I *really* don't like some of Ashcroft's decisions, he's still better than the former by far. Anyway...
B A C K U P
Hasn't anyone thought about this??? Good grief. I NEVER work on a live database. We ALWAYS work from backups no matter what we're doing with them. I'm stunned that an excuse like this would even be spoken by someone in IT. "Oh yeah, it'll crash my system if I make that BACKUP/export that information... so I don't make backups or do exports...". Backup, export, whatever. If the system is that unstable whoever's running it should have a backup every hour or a darned good alternative job plan when it does crash.
I'm sorry I sound pissy, but it just irritates me to no end when people don't use simple common sense.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
One of the scariest things about this administration is the sheer lack of transparency. While all governments like hiding things, this one seems to think that the public has no right to know anything, of course for their own good. Even Congress seems to be out of the info loop! Everytime someone tries to ask them for transparency or information they stonewall them sometimes with ridiculous reasons like this (or by swearing at them aka. our vice-president). Combine this with laws that reduce rights of ordinary citizens (aka. Patriot Act) and how they are trying to increasingly concentrate power in the hands of the President (who seems to think that Congressional and Judicial oversight of his activities is a bad thing) who professes the theory that a President is legally allowed to do anything to foreign and US citizens eg. torture, infinitely holding them, invading a country etc. and the only reason he doesn't do it is because he's nice (rather than because it's say illegal to torture someone) and America is heading towards dangerous waters.
It's possible that ready access to the information requested would reveal more unseemly activity. That might be the reason for stonewalling on this particular subject matter.
I disagree that there's debate about the nature of the things listed above. I don't think that anyone is still saying there was no deceit in those cases. Exactly who knew, to what extent, and when are the only details in contention.
I do agree that to make as assertion this stupid must come from unbelievable arrogance. Then again the strategy of denial and ridicule has been succsesful in the past.
... and not the spirit of the law all they have to do is make access available over a single 300 baud modem line where no one entity can be on for more than 5 minutes.
Security through obscurity. A government tradition.
why the rest of the world believes you are not living in a "free society". Maybe NATO should invade your country and free you for your opressors.
http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XVII_4/p age1.htm
"Second, the amendments will require agencies to use electronic information technology to enhance the availability of their reading room records. They specify that for any newly created reading room records (i.e., "records created on or after November 1, 1996"), an agency must make them available to the public by "electronic means." 5 U.S.C. 552(a)(2). The amendments embody a strong statutory preference that this new electronic availability be provided by agencies in the form of on-line access, which can be most efficient for both agencies and the public alike, and they allow until November 1, 1997 for it to be provided. To meet this new requirement through on-line access, agencies should have Internet or World Wide Web sites prepared to serve this "electronic reading room" function by no later than that date. "
What am I missing here? Why are they allowed to act like the FOI act and the Internet were just invented last Tuesday, and they haven't had time to comply?
Perhaps it's not as simple as that. From what the DOJ seems to be saying, extracting and compiling a report of this size using the existing interface could, quite understandably, render the system unstable. In theory, then, such a system may behave unpredictably and could potentially damage the database. That would, of course, imply that the DOJ database is built on unstable, outdated technology--but we already knew that. They're working to improve that, but it will take many years and millions of dollars.
The reporters aren't asking for (nor are they entitled to) a complete backup of the database. That would be comparatively easy to provide, but is obviously out of the question, as it would include much more than just the authorized content.
Perhaps they'd have better luck if they made a whole bunch of small queries: Instead of saying "send me everything you've got", they could say "Send me all relevant content for August 1947", then "Send me all relevant content for September 1947", and so on.
You could argue that the instead of forcing the reporters to take the time and money to make thousands of small, separate requests, they should be able to make a single blanket request and have the government office subdivide it internally. However, such an assumption would not take into consideration the fact that you're working with a government office that is only helping you because they're required to by law. Give them a single excuse to say no and they won't hesitate to give you nothing at all.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
when he said "will crash the system" he really ment "will crash The System" .... ie having the people know more about what the government is doing is inherently bad for having a well run govt. and besides if we find out who's paying off who it might be made to stop
lie thru your teeth about somthing you know nothing about..WTG US GOVt.
If the data is so bloody critical IT HAD BETTER BE BACKED UP ON A REGULAR BASIS, Make one of the backups available for retore and public perusal, I'd think that 30 day opld data would be sufficient for most uses.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
There one was a datavault built on compartively unusual hardware which operated post-maintenance for many years, it was an insanity to empty because the vendor did not do Gigabit ethernet for it and the 100 MBit cards were scrounged from the vendor's junk-pile. Sucking terrabytes of data from crappy, second qaulity NICs took months. So negligence rather than conspiracy might be the actual reason.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Let me tell you sometime about the rows and rows of three-ring binders the FAA uses to keep track of data on its radar sites.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I believe they misquoted Thomas J. McIntyre at the top of the article. This should have read:
"Implementing such a request risks a crash of our Administration that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of credibility, which would be devastating to our hopes of being reelected."
Notice that they will be able to supply this information in December, which is conveniently after November.
This could work out like Nixon's tapes though; the fact that this information exists and the current administration is withholding it from us could be enough evidence to damn them in the court of public opinion.
Wanting Bush gone doesn't make you a Democrat. It makes you sane. Frankly I think Kerry could become one of the worst Presidents this country has ever had to endure, but I'll vote for him enthusiastically because we are currently saddled with the very worst. Ever.
Yes, I'm an independent. Yes, I've voted for Republicans. Just because you are against one group doesn't mean you are a supporter of their largest competitors. I'd rather there were other viable competitors, but there aren't. Sorry Mr. Nader, the risk of Bush getting re-elected is so high that I can bear to swallow my pride and vote for a candidate that I despise.
I'm not voting for Kerry--I'm voting against Bush.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can get out of paying taxes by giving it to a non-profit instead.
Don't be silly; of course you can. If you make $50,000 in income this year, you can donate $47,000 of it to charity, keep $3k (which is about the same as the exemption credit for a single person), and then you'll have $0 of taxable income. Viola! No taxes!
Of course, you'll have to live with your parents and eat ramen noodles every day to survive on $3k...
Oh, poor guy. Having to pay taxes on the goods you buy to support the roads you use, the police who protect you, the judges and district attorneys who fight for your rights against much more corruptable institutions than even government.
Taxes don't all go to the same place. Federal income taxes pay for federal programs. State income taxes and sales taxes pay for state programs. Property taxes pay for municipal governments and schools. Each of these layers of government helps you out in some way. Many of them (most probably at the local level) run very efficiently, lest they make some huge mistake encouraging you to vote them out. Personally, I don't find anything "quite terrifying" about government being able to pay for itself. I'm more terrified when it can't.
Don't like taxes? Move. But good luck finding some place to move to. Globally speaking, US citizens pay a relatively low amount of income tax, and our sales tax is much lower than, oh say, Europe or Canada. Here's a little info: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001201.html, and you can google for more.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Wow, you totally missed the boat.
Of course a fetus is alive.
Of course a fetus has unique DNA (unless its a twin..maybe its ok to kill one of a pair of twins?).
And of course a fetus is a human with human DNA.
However, cancer cells also have unique human DNA. Should chemotherapy be illegal?
Sperm cells have unique human DNA. Should masturbation be illegal? Hundreds of sperm would still die even upon successful conception during sex. There goes all that wonderful unique human DNA.
No, the question is NOT whether fetuses have dna, are human, or are alive. Those are all undoubtably true.
The question is are fetuses valuable, and to whom does that value belong. Until some arbitrary time (birth) we currently say that the fetus is the mother's baby, and she can decide what to do with it. A fetus has very little value - anyone can go have sex and create a living human fetus with unique dna.
Once a baby is born, or shortly thereafter, a lot of other people and organizations in society have contributed to the value of the baby. It is no a parasite of the mother's.
A fetus takes one sweaty night and two people to make.
A 10 year old requires an investment of hundreds or thousands of relatives, teachers, doctors, friends, and strangers. Every one of them contributes to the child, and as a result the child is more valuable, and becomes share property. No longer property of the mother, but instead property of society, and subject to society's laws on murder.
To be realistic, just because fetuses are easy to make, doesn't make them worthless. A piece of blank paper is much cheaper than a book, but it's still stupid to go and buy some and throw it in the trash can.
Oh yeah, and btw...souls dont exist. That dead cow on your plate at dinner is worth just as much as the dead fetus at the abortion clinic. It might taste better with ketchup, but that's the only difference. Unless of course, you think that stupid organisms deserve to be killed and eaten. In which case a fetus is even stupider than an adult cow, so perhaps we should be eating fetus with freedom fries for dinner...
I must disagree, this is one time that both mainstream candidates are so bad that voting third party is a no brainer.
Normally I'd agree. In fact four years ago I *did* agree and voted for Nader (not that it mattered, my state went for Gore). Nevertheless, I have seen what can happen when political gridlock is pretty much removed from the equation and one party is in control of the executive, judicial, and both houses of the legislative branch. Now I greatly desire a return to political gridlock. This is actually an achievable goal (split the government between two parties), as opposed to, say, Nader getting elected.
Maybe Kerry will some day be made to answer for violating US treaties (i.e. the UN Charter by authorizing an invasion of Iraq). It would make me happy if someday that happened. But there are higher priorities. The first thing to do to help a mugging victim is stop them from being mugged--then you can worry about mending broken bones. Voting for Nader now is like offering crutches to the victim, and not doing anything about the mugger.
The political excuse of this time appears to be something like "I'm a useless idiot so it isn't my fault - and I didn't know about the money no matter how many people told me". An excuse like that should not be acceptable.
This current excuse that letting people look at things will let all the smoke out of the magic box is just childish.
In the city where I live a state government department (not in USA) has a wharehouse full of boxes with dates marked on them, and no other form of identification. These boxes have been building up for decades, and all of the paperwork is effectively inaccessable.The paperwork involving lobbying is undoubtably a different story - we got to see the Nixon-Saharto connection (Indonesion president - big donation one day proir to the invasion of Timor) when the paperwork was released recently, but the information would have been a tightly gaurded secret back in 1975 since it could have brought down the government sooner.
Wow, that's creative. I've personally never heard of people refer to a human as "departed" except in death Hence the problem with applying modern day euphimisms with a 6,000 year old lawbook.
"He's the Attorney General. The American people deserve better than this."
OK, so he's a modern day J. Edgar Hoover.
how are you doing this? I would like to know. most online information is hardly reputable or believable.
/.? :-p
So you ask an anonymous source on
Your line of argument is purely utilitarian, and with it comes eugenics, euthenasia, and forcible socialism. Do we really want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and discard our history of unalienable personal rights?
Realistically, which I'm sure you won't argue with, we're all just hunks of meat walking around trying to create more hunks of meat. There's less difference, molecularly, between you and an adult cow than there is between a fetus and an adult cow, due to developmental states, metabolism, and relative size. There's also a lot more meat on your bones, so why don't we eat you instead of the fetus? Are you really more valuable than a cow? You both have about the same metabolic rate, and thus the same meat per pound of food. One disadvantage is that you can't digest grass, but is that the only reason we don't eat people?
The whole point of human society is that we've built our entire world view and lifestyle out of something mundane and relatively common. It has meaning for us, which is why we do it. To devolve back to an animal state where individuals are worth the meat on their bones or the work they can produce, or even the stem cells they create, won't lead us anywhere that evolution hasn't been before. What's the point in that?
Lincoln's act was equally indefensible. The Civil War was completely unconstitutional and, contrary to high school history myth, was _not_ fought to defeat slavery. No provision of the Constitution bars states from leaving a union that they freely entered into, and the express implications (from the Founders' writings) would indicate that the opposite was true--that the individual states would always retain this privilege.
As for Lincoln, he knew that he lacked the authority to abolish slavery, and he never did so. Have you read the Emancipation proclamation? It did _not_ free the slaves and was intended only as a temporary economic punishment for the rebellious states. Note that the three slave states that remained in the Union did not lose their slaves until the passage of the 13th amendment.
Besides, even had Lincoln wished to carry on with an illegal war against American citizens*, he could just as easily have re-located the capital to New York (where it was initially) and let Maryland secede; suspending the Constitution to 'save' it sounds like fragile and specious reasoning to this historian.
* Note that, as the Confederate States were never recognised as an independent nation, the United States Army was utilised in a 'war' against American citizens, in flagrant violation of the Constitution. Lincoln was indeed a great man in many respects, but his actions shredded the Constitution and completely re-fashioned the executive branch and its purview.
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
Now there's an established precedent for other large databases to be non-discloseable, i.e. ;-)
"No, Mr. Ashcroft, I can't give you {my list of '2600' subscribers} / {my ISP customers' DHCP logs} / {my library-card-holders' book-borrowing history}
because it would crash my database."
As for the responder who said od Ashcroft, "but I've had it with this guy": how can anything like this really surprise you by now? It's an anti-populace [sic] mentality that starts at the top and pervades throughout this President's administration. To paraphrase , "It's turd-els, all the way down." They no longer have even the decency to feign shame or embarassment at the lameness and transparency of their evasions. ("We don't need no stinkin' justifications!")
Another responder said, "the FOIA requestor isn't entitled to request the entire DB backup".
Errmmm, why not? How is that different from having the right to request all the separate entries individually? It's a DB of FOREIGN LOBBYISTS, for pete's sake -- what could be in it that we shouldn't be allowed to see?
A suggestion for the original FOIA requestors: change the form of your request. IANAL, but I know of nothing in the FOI Act which bars requests for info which didn't exist until the day *after* the request is made. "OK, Mr Ashcroft, let's do this instead. Surely your people must be using this DB for something, right? OK, my request is, for the next week, whenever your people update or access the DB, I'd like a hard-copy. A screen-print will be fine, thank you. I'll even loan you a camera to capture the screen image. And btw, I'll be back each week with an identical request, until your DB is 'stable'."
You accuse liberals of not arguing, yet you site not a single fact. And you don't even come close to the topic. The topic was the DoJ not releasing information. The conversation turned to Bush because so far he has fought the FOIA many times to hide things from us, the reasons are up to you. What you said is unnecessary, and close to libel. Hence I think it was fair that you recieved that rating. (btw. party affiliation, and "sexual skeletons" do not go hand in hand)
RIAA and the MPAA, putting the "F U" in "fair use".
My New Living Translation edition reads as follows:
Leviticus 12:20 - You are to consider detestable all swarming insects that walk upon the ground.
Psalms 93:1 The Lord is King! He is robed in majesty. Indeed the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength. The world is firmly established; it cannot be shaken.
Now please do yourself and your arguments a favor. If you are trying to point out a factual error in scripture a) quote the whole verse, and b) pick a modern translation. King James sucks, and any biblical scholar will tell you that.
Now with the whole verse you can see that Psalms 93:1 is talking about God, not the planet. If you read the remainder of the poem (the book of Psalms are basically a collection of poems), it talks about how God has total control of the world.
Question that if you like, but make your argument without distortion.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Vote for Bush? You'll be dead. In 2001, it was only 19 terrorists. Now, you have tens of thousands who are signing up to be next, thanks to an unnecessary war.
Wrong. Even if you think both Bush and Kerry are gutter trash and the Dems and Republicans are useless, if you endorse a more liberal party (the Green Party, say), it is to your interest to see the Demms win. The Demms leech votes away from the other, more liberal parties because their margins of winning are slim, and folks would rather see a Democrat in office than a Republican. The only way that more liberal parties will *get* votes is for the Demms to get a significant majority, and then for those voters to slip away to the more liberal parties. These votes are *not* going to go directly from Republican to Green.
If Demms get twice the number of votes that the Republicans do, then it's likely that Green or others might get a significant number of votes. Anyone who chooses to keep the Demms from winning by a significant margin is simply postponing the day that other parties can become serious contenders.
Splitting voters is one of the most effective ways to gain a majority. What you are doing is one of the most useful tactics that a Republican would want to take to ensure that Bush wins the election.
May we never see th
Humor like that is why I /.org
I read
As in Liquid Crystal Diode ?
Or as in Light Emitting Display ?
I have a hard time imagining some database queries consistently causing a computer system to crash while other queries do not.
What sounds much more likely is that the concern is not about computer systems crashing, but that other non-computer "systems" might "crash" as a consequence of disclosure.
For example, a system in which foreign influence is peddled to affect U. S. government policy.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
it's that he thinks everyone else should have to, as well.
Religious beliefs are a part of what makes someone who they are. The problem with Ashcroft is that he has decided that people sould believe what he wants, and that others should be shown the errors of their ways. While cloaking the statue of Justice at the DOJ (an eerily symbolic act), he has been extraordinarily resistant to furnishing information to the public (a precondition for democracy) while being selective with his targets in the "war on terror": porn is a good target, while people who send anthrax are not, a position seemingly inconsistent with a stance taken for "public security". His "phantoms of lost liberty" comment was priceless, too - while Ashcroft claims to preserve freedom, he attempts to censure its exercise as being un-American.
Ashcroft acts as a man who believes his power does not come from people, but in spite of them; such people are dangerous, regardless of their religious beliefs. The country exists to respect the rights of its people, one of the most fundamental of which is religious freedom. His actions are in opposition to the freedoms that allow people such as he to believe what they do and to exist as believing people.
In addition, Ashcroft acts inconsistently with what he claims to believe. If God had wanted to force people to believe in Him, He could have - after all He makes the rules. God wanted people to choose freely to follow Him - a message repeated over and over in the Bible. Forcing people to believe and behave how Ashcroft believes they should contradicts this - it ultimately reinstates the falsity of the Pharisees who Jesus criticized so long ago, and might not even work anyway (because forcing actions disconnects souls from acts, and thus means that people won't know where they stand with God anyway).
So, his religious beliefs are not a problem in themselves - his insistence and his willingness to suborn democracy to make his beliefs real are.