Because then Greenwald and Poitras and the Guardian would be under threat of imprisonment to reveal their source, and would be the target of White House retaliation for revealing classified information.
Faced with these threats, no publisher would go with a single anonymous source (unless, of course, that source is "an unnamed administration official"). They would be far more easily convinced by the White House / Pentagon to keep the documents under wraps, or destroy them. That's why Wikileaks found a niche to fill.
Also because coming forward gives him some protection from retaliation -- if Snowden remained anonymous and they found out who he is, he'd probably just be assassinated or, worse, locked in a dungeon somewhere for eternity.
All in all, I think Snowden did a fairly competent job for someone faced with an ethical dilemma: break the law to reveal a greater crime, or obey the law and conceal a greater crime. But his refusal to face the consequences of his own crime undermines his ethical position; even Manning did this. He mostly did the right thing up until he accepted Russian asylum. He needed to lawyer up and agree to turn himself in on condition that he receive a fair trial in an objective court, and monitored probation until such time as such a court could be found. If ever...
Not only this, but two successive White House administrations went to extraordinary lengths to put domestic wiretapping in place in secrecy and keep it in place, without approval or oversight from Congress, much less public opinion.
When seeking authorization for domestic wiretapping in 2004 using convoluted legalese and twisted definitions, Bush White House lawyers Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales couldn't get approval from the acting Attorney General, James Comey, who cited a DOJ opinion that the program lacked oversight and doubt that the Executive branch had the authority to issue such an order. He later stated (I'm paraphrasing) if the American people learned of the extent of this program they'd be appalled. And so Card and Gonzales visited John Ashcroft in the hospital to go over Comey's head, knowing he was in intensive care, under heavy sedation. Comey managed to arrive in time to make his side of the argument and delay the approval. (Cite)
We're talking about John Ashcroft here, USA Patriot Act cheerleader. Even he wouldn't approve it. And now we know why.
But it was only a delay. The Bush-Cheney White House went ahead and implemented the program. There's no public information on whether or when the Ashcroft DOJ approved this, only that some oversight was added (ineffective as it was in retrospect), and by 2005 Ashcroft had been replaced by Gonzales as Attorney General, the very guy who tried to go over Comey's head. It's quite apparent now that the NSA had carte blanche from then on.
And the succeeding Administration comes in with a record of avoiding any sort of investigation or oversight of the program, granting immunity to civilian corporate participants, and goes on to aggressively prosecute ethically-motivated whistleblowers to the degree of fabricating evidence to incarcerate them.
In this kind of environment, do you think a new "you must report" order is going to improve the constitutionality of this kind of spying?
All it's going to do is weed out anyone who's not fully on board with the program, or has any ethical qualms about it, and permit even more crackdown on people who try to effect change, legally and by the books, from the inside.
did she have sex? could the guy tell she hadn't showered?
There are several before-during-after photos in this this blog article at the NYT. You decide.
I know a lot of guys who'd give her a go, regardless of how she smelled (or, ftfa, like "fresh-cut onions and pungent marijuana," maybe because of it).
Personally, I find other things far more of a deterrent than greasy hair and kronik BO: she looks too much like my sister... and the laptop's fisheye lens and that deathly pallor from the LED display aren't helping her prospects, either.
Haven't you been paying attention for the past 15 years? 'Utilities' are fair game for profitmongers now. First it was electric power exchanges, then municipal water (especially in developing countries in S. America and Africa) and now phone/internet. And don't even get me started on proposals to start charging tolls for interstate highway usage.
It won't be long before someone 'innovates' a way to charge you for the air you breathe.
Well, based on the additions they've made to their services in the past, their 'innovations' can only be 1) giving your data to the NSA 2) reporting your copyright infringement to the MPAA and RIAA, and/or 3) throttling your service based on your transfer protocol or content.
Oh, wait. Maybe they're using the finance industry's definition of 'innovation' which basically means finding or creating loopholes in the law that allow them to collude to steal your money while not technically committing any crimes.
Why is this moderated 'Troll?' While I don't like his conclusion, I won't call him wrong. And his summary of the regulatory situation is generally informative.
If you don't agree with someone's point, don't downmod them (and if you absolutely must, certainly don't use Troll or Flambait unless they actually are trolling or flaming). Post a reply, or mod up a counterargument.
Yes, but despite appearances and accusations otherwise, Obama doesn't get to decide who gets appointed as chief regulator for the FCC or any other agency that oversees major business sectors like telecom, energy, pharma, etc.
Regulatory capture is complete, from the administrative agencies to the legislative committees and now apparently even to the courts. GP is correct. This is no longer a democracy... it's a corporate plutocracy.
Anyone who still believes the president has the power to decide policy over anything that affects corporate profits is living in a fantasy world.
I made the mistake of seeing Aliens in 1986 during its first run in theaters... after eating a gram of shrooms. (It was that or The Song Remains the Same for the fifth time instead.)
It's still my favorite movie of all time. Spawned my username, too. Been using it ever since.
I can't wait for this to get into cars. Who doesn't want a perfectly empty dashboard with all the controls crammed into the right corner.
It's already in my fucking car. I went to go buy an aftermarket stereo "upgrade" and every goddamned one has all of the options and controls accessed by a menu navigated with one pushbutton knob. Not a single choice was available with the [enter] and [exit] command functions on separate controls from the [select/scroll] functions.
That's right. Want to change the time and date, press the knob, then spin the same knob until you get to SYSTEM (not SETUP or FUNCTIONS mind you), then press the button again to select TIME SET, then again to set the hour, spin it until the hour is set, then press it again, then spin it to set... and oh shit you hit a bump and pressed the knob accidentally so you're advancing the AM/PM now, exit all the way to the SYSTEM menu and start over...
It's the same way with things you need to access frequently: audio quality controls, station settings, etc. They're all buried two or three layers deep in a menu accessed by this press/twist control that is very easy to accidentally bump. And if you aren't watching what you're doing, a single bump will activate one of the options (RFDS?) that resets every fucking station preset to the factory defaults. (If you've seen someone on CA-101 suddenly scream at his car stereo and trying not to smash the faceplate in rage, that was me or another Pioneer customer.)
In addition to being susceptible to bumps (unheard of in a moving vehicle, right?) you can't dead reckon -- and you can't see what the next/previous selection is going to be. You have to constantly keep your eyes on the display not the road. And the fucking things are all so dim you need a second hand to shade the display from the sun, so now you're using both hands and both eyes to operate the goddamn radio.
It's the shittiest idea to come along in user interface design since the god forsaken Office 2007 toolbars. Worse.
I think the same pissant who worked on the Office UI team in the mid-2000's went to work for Pioneer shortly thereafter. He wasn't finished fucking with people's heads.
Agreed. Does EVERY generation of commercial software designers* have to re-learn the hazards of conflating instructions with data?
A search term is data. A url is an address/instruction. FFS, don't try to combine the two!
__ *Cause you know for damn sure these constant unnecessary UI updates aren't pushed by code developers. It's all marketing and people who feel like they constantly have to leave a visible mark in order to justify their existence.
So let's say you're an advanced interstellar civilization looking about for other worlds with life for trade and/or colonization. You have system spanning optics capable of resolving individual planetary systems and resolving the atmospheric spectra thereof. And you find a small yellow star with 8 or 9 planets, including a couple of respectable gas giants and three rocky planets in the habitable zone. Two of those rocky planets clearly have stale atmospheres that have long ago achieved chemical steady state. But the third has an interesting mix of O2, CO2 and CH4, along with multiple other hydrocarbons, all apparently far from a stable state.
But alas, that planet has a HUGE moon... a well-known explanation for the spectra, and the cause of many, many failed planetary exploration missions.
The investment bureacrats HATE uncertainty. If you take a risk and it fails, it will cost your entire clan their wealth and status. You instead decide to commit your finite resources to explore planets with more exploitable natural resources than humongous gas giants and small rocky planets deep within the stellar gravity well.
perversions can also be introduced manually, for instance, by the simple operation of holding one end of a helical telephone cord fixed and twisting the other in a direction counter to its initial chirality
This explains why I must keep my phone on the left side of my desk to avoid tangling the handset cord. When it's on the right, I give the handset nearly a full twist to get it from the cradle to my left ear (to keep my right hand free for writing/mousing) -- and then another twist back to set it back down on the cradle. Since I'm grabbing with my right hand, the right hand twist is "counter to its initial chirality," which is left handed for most cords I've seen. (Left hand rule - wire coiling in the direction of the left fingers advances in the direction of the left thumb.) After only a few months, it's twisted into such a perverted state, it won't stretch without tangling, and I have to replace it.
Keeping the phone on the left seems to prevent this... the half turn picking up the phone is left-handed, concurrent with the chirality of the coil. Also it's closer to a half twist than a full twist.
Nice to finally have an answer to why this works the way it does.
I switched to recording America's Funniest Videos on Sundays after the sloppy wet one they gave Amazon last year. They were on probation after the propaganda microphone they gave to the NSA last year, and the string of soggy panty pieces Lara Logan has been giving for their coverage of the US military abroad.
There's more truth in 60 seconds of AFV than there is in an entire episode of 60 Minutes.
In my city, every signal-controlled intersection has sensors, even though most intersections between heavily trafficked streets appear to work on timers. The side streets with signals, however, use the sensor to interrupt cross traffic - usually after some combination of delay and count of waiting cars.
Unfortunately this combination appears more often than not to waste fuel and create more pollution. This is because the algorithm doesn't coordinate between intersections, or use cross-street sensors to detect a break in the cross traffic that will allow the one or two side street cars cross. Instead, Murphy's law reigns, and one or two cars needing to cross the main boulevard will be forced to wait at a red light while gaps in the cross traffic go by, and then several dozen cars will be forced to stop while the one or two cars use the intersection, and then several dozen cars must accelerate from a stop again.
My city is home to JPL and Cal Tech. We can send robots to Mars and spacecraft into interstellar space. But we can't coordinate sensors across the city to prevent me (and 30 others) from having to stop at a red light so that one car can pass, and then watch the intersection go unused for another 90 seconds... again and again and again as I cross town. Even more frequently, I see people sit at lights on side streets waiting thru gaps in traffic clearly long enough for crossing.
We have the necessary high bandwidth wireless communication, mesh networking technology, and computing power to change this. But it isn't happening.
I know that the only reason it's not already done is because it's not important to the people who manage this sort of thing, not important enough to spend the necessary money on R&D and implementation, anyway. But air quality and pollution are very important in Southern California. Isn't it important enough for something as solveable as this?
Surely someone in Pasadena or Cambridge or Santa Clara or Pasadena or Austin or Raleigh or Atlanta -- name your tech hub -- has an interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Because then Greenwald and Poitras and the Guardian would be under threat of imprisonment to reveal their source, and would be the target of White House retaliation for revealing classified information.
Faced with these threats, no publisher would go with a single anonymous source (unless, of course, that source is "an unnamed administration official"). They would be far more easily convinced by the White House / Pentagon to keep the documents under wraps, or destroy them. That's why Wikileaks found a niche to fill.
Also because coming forward gives him some protection from retaliation -- if Snowden remained anonymous and they found out who he is, he'd probably just be assassinated or, worse, locked in a dungeon somewhere for eternity.
All in all, I think Snowden did a fairly competent job for someone faced with an ethical dilemma: break the law to reveal a greater crime, or obey the law and conceal a greater crime. But his refusal to face the consequences of his own crime undermines his ethical position; even Manning did this. He mostly did the right thing up until he accepted Russian asylum. He needed to lawyer up and agree to turn himself in on condition that he receive a fair trial in an objective court, and monitored probation until such time as such a court could be found. If ever...
Not only this, but two successive White House administrations went to extraordinary lengths to put domestic wiretapping in place in secrecy and keep it in place, without approval or oversight from Congress, much less public opinion.
When seeking authorization for domestic wiretapping in 2004 using convoluted legalese and twisted definitions, Bush White House lawyers Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales couldn't get approval from the acting Attorney General, James Comey, who cited a DOJ opinion that the program lacked oversight and doubt that the Executive branch had the authority to issue such an order. He later stated (I'm paraphrasing) if the American people learned of the extent of this program they'd be appalled. And so Card and Gonzales visited John Ashcroft in the hospital to go over Comey's head, knowing he was in intensive care, under heavy sedation. Comey managed to arrive in time to make his side of the argument and delay the approval. (Cite)
We're talking about John Ashcroft here, USA Patriot Act cheerleader. Even he wouldn't approve it. And now we know why.
But it was only a delay. The Bush-Cheney White House went ahead and implemented the program. There's no public information on whether or when the Ashcroft DOJ approved this, only that some oversight was added (ineffective as it was in retrospect), and by 2005 Ashcroft had been replaced by Gonzales as Attorney General, the very guy who tried to go over Comey's head. It's quite apparent now that the NSA had carte blanche from then on.
And the succeeding Administration comes in with a record of avoiding any sort of investigation or oversight of the program, granting immunity to civilian corporate participants, and goes on to aggressively prosecute ethically-motivated whistleblowers to the degree of fabricating evidence to incarcerate them.
In this kind of environment, do you think a new "you must report" order is going to improve the constitutionality of this kind of spying?
All it's going to do is weed out anyone who's not fully on board with the program, or has any ethical qualms about it, and permit even more crackdown on people who try to effect change, legally and by the books, from the inside.
Keep your nose clean, citizen.
did she have sex? could the guy tell she hadn't showered?
There are several before-during-after photos in this this blog article at the NYT. You decide.
I know a lot of guys who'd give her a go, regardless of how she smelled (or, ftfa, like "fresh-cut onions and pungent marijuana," maybe because of it).
Personally, I find other things far more of a deterrent than greasy hair and kronik BO: she looks too much like my sister... and the laptop's fisheye lens and that deathly pallor from the LED display aren't helping her prospects, either.
I'm absolutely positive you'd look sexier wearing them underneath your jeans.
No, he's gurps_npc.
GURPS plays him.
Haven't you been paying attention for the past 15 years? 'Utilities' are fair game for profitmongers now. First it was electric power exchanges, then municipal water (especially in developing countries in S. America and Africa) and now phone/internet. And don't even get me started on proposals to start charging tolls for interstate highway usage.
It won't be long before someone 'innovates' a way to charge you for the air you breathe.
Well, based on the additions they've made to their services in the past, their 'innovations' can only be 1) giving your data to the NSA 2) reporting your copyright infringement to the MPAA and RIAA, and/or 3) throttling your service based on your transfer protocol or content.
Oh, wait. Maybe they're using the finance industry's definition of 'innovation' which basically means finding or creating loopholes in the law that allow them to collude to steal your money while not technically committing any crimes.
Why is this moderated 'Troll?' While I don't like his conclusion, I won't call him wrong. And his summary of the regulatory situation is generally informative.
If you don't agree with someone's point, don't downmod them (and if you absolutely must, certainly don't use Troll or Flambait unless they actually are trolling or flaming). Post a reply, or mod up a counterargument.
Yes, but despite appearances and accusations otherwise, Obama doesn't get to decide who gets appointed as chief regulator for the FCC or any other agency that oversees major business sectors like telecom, energy, pharma, etc.
Regulatory capture is complete, from the administrative agencies to the legislative committees and now apparently even to the courts. GP is correct. This is no longer a democracy... it's a corporate plutocracy.
Anyone who still believes the president has the power to decide policy over anything that affects corporate profits is living in a fantasy world.
I kinda know how you feel.
I made the mistake of seeing Aliens in 1986 during its first run in theaters... after eating a gram of shrooms. (It was that or The Song Remains the Same for the fifth time instead.)
It's still my favorite movie of all time. Spawned my username, too. Been using it ever since.
I hope he's gone to his personal heaven...
Because I quail from imagining what his hell might look like.
And sometimes, it's a face full of alien wing-wong.
'Minimalism' is driven by Marketing, so that you can hide the UI for a nice pretty glossy magazine ad or catchy TV advert.
'Minimalist' is not useful. It's photogenic. Period.
I can't wait for this to get into cars. Who doesn't want a perfectly empty dashboard with all the controls crammed into the right corner.
It's already in my fucking car. I went to go buy an aftermarket stereo "upgrade" and every goddamned one has all of the options and controls accessed by a menu navigated with one pushbutton knob. Not a single choice was available with the [enter] and [exit] command functions on separate controls from the [select/scroll] functions.
That's right. Want to change the time and date, press the knob, then spin the same knob until you get to SYSTEM (not SETUP or FUNCTIONS mind you), then press the button again to select TIME SET, then again to set the hour, spin it until the hour is set, then press it again, then spin it to set... and oh shit you hit a bump and pressed the knob accidentally so you're advancing the AM/PM now, exit all the way to the SYSTEM menu and start over...
It's the same way with things you need to access frequently: audio quality controls, station settings, etc. They're all buried two or three layers deep in a menu accessed by this press/twist control that is very easy to accidentally bump. And if you aren't watching what you're doing, a single bump will activate one of the options (RFDS?) that resets every fucking station preset to the factory defaults. (If you've seen someone on CA-101 suddenly scream at his car stereo and trying not to smash the faceplate in rage, that was me or another Pioneer customer.)
In addition to being susceptible to bumps (unheard of in a moving vehicle, right?) you can't dead reckon -- and you can't see what the next/previous selection is going to be. You have to constantly keep your eyes on the display not the road. And the fucking things are all so dim you need a second hand to shade the display from the sun, so now you're using both hands and both eyes to operate the goddamn radio.
It's the shittiest idea to come along in user interface design since the god forsaken Office 2007 toolbars. Worse.
I think the same pissant who worked on the Office UI team in the mid-2000's went to work for Pioneer shortly thereafter. He wasn't finished fucking with people's heads.
Now, apparently, he's at Mozilla.
Combined address and search is a terrible idea
Agreed. Does EVERY generation of commercial software designers* have to re-learn the hazards of conflating instructions with data?
A search term is data. A url is an address/instruction. FFS, don't try to combine the two!
__
*Cause you know for damn sure these constant unnecessary UI updates aren't pushed by code developers. It's all marketing and people who feel like they constantly have to leave a visible mark in order to justify their existence.
Read moar Vernor Vinge, less Iain M. Banks.
(Not that The Culture novels aren't a fun read...)
So let's say you're an advanced interstellar civilization looking about for other worlds with life for trade and/or colonization. You have system spanning optics capable of resolving individual planetary systems and resolving the atmospheric spectra thereof. And you find a small yellow star with 8 or 9 planets, including a couple of respectable gas giants and three rocky planets in the habitable zone. Two of those rocky planets clearly have stale atmospheres that have long ago achieved chemical steady state. But the third has an interesting mix of O2, CO2 and CH4, along with multiple other hydrocarbons, all apparently far from a stable state.
But alas, that planet has a HUGE moon... a well-known explanation for the spectra, and the cause of many, many failed planetary exploration missions.
The investment bureacrats HATE uncertainty. If you take a risk and it fails, it will cost your entire clan their wealth and status. You instead decide to commit your finite resources to explore planets with more exploitable natural resources than humongous gas giants and small rocky planets deep within the stellar gravity well.
Mod Parent up, I'm gonna post instead.
perversions can also be introduced manually, for instance, by the simple operation of holding one end of a helical telephone cord fixed and twisting the other in a direction counter to its initial chirality
This explains why I must keep my phone on the left side of my desk to avoid tangling the handset cord. When it's on the right, I give the handset nearly a full twist to get it from the cradle to my left ear (to keep my right hand free for writing/mousing) -- and then another twist back to set it back down on the cradle. Since I'm grabbing with my right hand, the right hand twist is "counter to its initial chirality," which is left handed for most cords I've seen. (Left hand rule - wire coiling in the direction of the left fingers advances in the direction of the left thumb.) After only a few months, it's twisted into such a perverted state, it won't stretch without tangling, and I have to replace it.
Keeping the phone on the left seems to prevent this... the half turn picking up the phone is left-handed, concurrent with the chirality of the coil. Also it's closer to a half twist than a full twist.
Nice to finally have an answer to why this works the way it does.
From the bottom up, of course...
Next up: flinging poo at mach 25.
Well if you're gonna go there, then ultimately, pretty much everything is radiatively coupled to interstellar space.
This.
I switched to recording America's Funniest Videos on Sundays after the sloppy wet one they gave Amazon last year. They were on probation after the propaganda microphone they gave to the NSA last year, and the string of soggy panty pieces Lara Logan has been giving for their coverage of the US military abroad.
There's more truth in 60 seconds of AFV than there is in an entire episode of 60 Minutes.
In my city, every signal-controlled intersection has sensors, even though most intersections between heavily trafficked streets appear to work on timers. The side streets with signals, however, use the sensor to interrupt cross traffic - usually after some combination of delay and count of waiting cars.
Unfortunately this combination appears more often than not to waste fuel and create more pollution. This is because the algorithm doesn't coordinate between intersections, or use cross-street sensors to detect a break in the cross traffic that will allow the one or two side street cars cross. Instead, Murphy's law reigns, and one or two cars needing to cross the main boulevard will be forced to wait at a red light while gaps in the cross traffic go by, and then several dozen cars will be forced to stop while the one or two cars use the intersection, and then several dozen cars must accelerate from a stop again.
My city is home to JPL and Cal Tech. We can send robots to Mars and spacecraft into interstellar space. But we can't coordinate sensors across the city to prevent me (and 30 others) from having to stop at a red light so that one car can pass, and then watch the intersection go unused for another 90 seconds... again and again and again as I cross town. Even more frequently, I see people sit at lights on side streets waiting thru gaps in traffic clearly long enough for crossing.
We have the necessary high bandwidth wireless communication, mesh networking technology, and computing power to change this. But it isn't happening.
I know that the only reason it's not already done is because it's not important to the people who manage this sort of thing, not important enough to spend the necessary money on R&D and implementation, anyway. But air quality and pollution are very important in Southern California. Isn't it important enough for something as solveable as this?
Surely someone in Pasadena or Cambridge or Santa Clara or Pasadena or Austin or Raleigh or Atlanta -- name your tech hub -- has an interest.
In my city, I've seen numerous instances where the countdown timer gets to zero and the flashing "Don't Walk" sign goes back to "Walk."
My initial response was "WTF? Is the designer just fucking with the peds' minds?"
Since then, I ignore them.
And when the levees break?
You'll have no place to stay?
Mama, you got to move?
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good.