"...and then someone made one with five blades, and it's better enough that people will buy it."
No, it isn't better at all. But people still buy it.
I don't know how you justify putting "better" in there, but in my experience they work LESS well than the old 2-blade razors. The 3-blade models should have been a fad, but the marketing folks have managed to put it over on everybody.
It's just a way to make them more expensive, and maximize profits. If, in my opinion, I thought they were "better", I would buy them. But there are still plenty of older-style 2-blade razors to be found.
"Women's" razors were already marketed-up until they were a joke... going to 5 blades made the joke not even funny anymore.
"I have news for you. They get given leaks at a somewhat frequent rate. But to use your own term.. They are NOT HANDLED. Just because there is not a damn media shit storm about the data, does not mean that our adversaries did not get ahold of the information."
This is 100% irrelevant to the point I made: that they "handle" Top Secret information all the time, yet the stuff Manning had was not even Top Secret.
If their operations are not "hardened" enough to handle Top Secret information, then how is it that they DO deal with it, all the time?
But considering that by your own admission they DO deal with it all the time, why do you say they were not qualified to handle stuff that was NOT Top Secret?
My point has almost nothing to do with what you are saying. My main point was this: if the press deals with top secret information all the time (and very definitely get away with it), why are THEY not facing charges and prison time, along with the Washington insiders who leak to them?
"But surely a website named after a verb that means "to taunt, tease, ridicule, etc., with reference to anything embarrassing" will be a wise investment where these other two social media sites have failed..."
Yes, exactly. Stock options and VC money mean little to employees unless the company has value to people.
At least Facebook, while fundamentally evil, has a vision and can write software. Twitter has been short on both of these.
Twitter bought out what many people consider to be the best Twitter client ever, TweetDeck, and then butchered it. Their newest version does not work anywhere near as well as the version from 3 years ago, from before the acquisition. I could post whole pages of basic interface mistakes and other errors they made with it.
They bought up the blogging site, Posterous, which had some pretty nice features. Then they tried to turn it into some kind of "social" medium. (A blogging service? Made social? What?) It soon stopped working as well as it had before they bought it, and eventually they killed it outright. Just shut it off.
Having said all that: I don't think it's a fundamental problem with the idea of social media. I think it's an issue of social media being repeatedly -- and rather blatantly in some cases -- done wrong.
Sure, but that's not what I was discussing, which was just that figures of speech are generally not required to follow standard rules of grammar. Whether that figure of speech itself was used properly is a different question.
"Which means GP's argument that "begging the question" was "proper english" doesn't apply either."
I certainly don't want to get into an argument over whether figures of speech are "proper English". I don't think that's a debate anybody can win definitively.
"NFC has the same problem. You just can't see it with your own eyes."
NFC has a far bigger problem, because (A) its security was broken before it was even widely available, and (B) researchers showed they could snarf NFC credentials from smartphones from several feet away, using very cheap equipment (on the order of a few hundred $). And that's when the NFC wasn't even actively in use... just turned on.
Add to that the fact that if you had a large enough antenna array, you could put it behind a wall TENS of feet away, and catch all the NFC transactions going through the checkout lanes in an entire store. Who would be the wiser?
People tend to forget that weak RF signals are not security. Not against relatively sophisticated equipment, anyway. Remember the researcher who read peoples' passport credentials from their pockets, via their RFID chips, from 30 feet away in his car? (That was in San Francisco a few years ago.) The same guy helped break NFC.
With LFC, you could put it up against a guard (like a rubber eye cup) and there would be no way to see the signals at a distance. You can't do that effectively with NFC.
The only useful purpose for NFC right now, in my opinion, is for transferring contacts from one phone to another. But you could do that with the IR on a Palm Pilot 10 years ago. I have NFC, and have never even turned it on.
"You think just because OMGZ he gave them an encrypted file OMGZ. That the data was secure? Not a chance in hell."
I have a clue for you: Big news organizations handle Top Secret leaks all the damned time (and the journalists even write books about it)... but none of the stuff Manning had was even top secret.
The important thing is what was meant, not the exact words. For example, a person's "papers" were their personal records. Today, a person's personal records can be their income tax returns, their emails, or their telephone bills (including location data).
The whole purpose of the 4th Amendment was to prevent government from collecting this kind of data about people willy-nilly. That's the important part. It doesn't matter if it isn't printed on "paper".
Please read my tagline above; I disagree that it is, any popular sense, a "living document".
Rather, it is a set of absolute rules intended to limit the power of Federal government. But "absolute" does not refer to an "interpretation" of the words; rather, it means that laws are to be followed in the way that the original writers intended. Not according to modern changed meanings of words or phrases, or in some way that a non-scholar might read them without knowing the history.
The only sense in which the Constitution is "living", is in the sense that there is an already well defined method of changing if we want. That method is known as "amendment" and there are solid and well-established rules for amending it.
"The point is the type of 'records' doesn't matter except in very very specific cases. If it's held by a 3rd party, you don't have grounds to invoke the 4th Amendment."
I disagree about whether that is "the point". I think the court is missing "the whole point" of the 4th Amendment. Remember that generally speaking, it is not the letter of the law that is important, but what the authors of the law meant when they wrote it.
There are a couple of things that are pretty clear about this, given the realities of the day: (1) that this kind of electronic record is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to "the papers and effects" envisioned when the 4th Amendment was written; and (2) these are essential parts of many people's daily lives without which they cannot function normally in society, not something you are "voluntarily" turning over to a 3rd party.
The spirit of the law says this court was wrong. In fact this is precisely the kind of information that the 4th Amendment was created to protect.
---
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson
"Its like sticking a group of children in a room full of knives and blaming the children when someone gets hurt."
I disagree completely. These were supposedly responsible news organizations. So what it was really like was sticking a group of adults in a room full of knives, and blaming those adults when someone gets hurt.
If you loan someone a dangerous object... say you loan someone your rifle because they want to go hunting, or because Grandma is coming over and she is a little crazy and you don't want the gun in the house... and that person then goes out and shoots somebody with your gun, YOU are not responsible. Either legally or morally.
A news media organization messed up. And it wasn't deliberate, it was an accident. But they were adults, and should have known better.
I should have adeed: this court seems to have been paying attention to the letter of the law, while ignoring the whole reason the 4th Amendment exists.
"While the ruling is troubling on a number of levels the concept itself is fine. "
There is another aspect to it that is being ignored here, and by the court as well.
Other courts (I don't have a specific citation at hand, but it's been in the news) have ruled that while collecting specific data may not be a search, aggregating data over time can constitute surveillance or a search subject to 4th Amendment protection.
I think it is pretty clear that cell phone location data is aggregated over time, and can reveal things about one's life that even a direct search (or police "tail") might not do. So it seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of data is covered by that precedent, but this court ignored that.
"After all, they need the location data for billing purposes."
I would argue over whether they even need this much... to a degree anyway.
On a typical plan, all they need to know is: "Is it 'native', or roaming?" and "Is it long distance, or local?"
Because most plans only distinguish between home area and roaming, and long distance or local. And some unlimited plans do not even do that. Further, most cell plans don't even distinguish between local and long distance anymore, as long as it is within the U.S.
So the location data in most cases can be broadened to simply "Were they in their home coverage area?" Which, for many providers, is a rather large percentage of the U.S.
Yes, the nature of cell phones does require fairly specific location data at the time of call. But there is no user-specific need to retain those records.
Just generally speaking, don't you know... it is fascinating to me how some people can complain about the actions of others, then turn around and hypocritically indulge in the widely vilified, socially unacceptable practice of sock puppetry. Fascinating indeed.
And I will point out one other thing: none of what Manning "leaked" was classified Top Secret. Yet there are Washington insiders talking to the press just about every week about things that *are* top secret. You read about it all the time, and some of those journalists have written whole books about the Top Secret things they were leaked.
Yet those Washington insiders, and those journalists, are not only NOT in prison, they aren't even accused of crimes.
"... many of the documents were simply things we didn't want the entire world to know, but didn't actually indicate any wrongdoing."
Yes, that's true too. But I just don't really know if it would have been possible for him to separate them all out.
Someone else here reminded me that Manning actually delivered these documents to others, who WERE supposed to try to separate that out. But somebody goofed. So I'm not sure that can honestly be blamed on Manning, who actually did make an effort to expose wrongdoing while not releasing those other things to the public.
And -- this is just a guess, you understand -- you also consider that calling someone a "bully" and accusing them of "projecting" is also not an insult?
Slashdot Mirror
"No they dont. and No they dont."
Yes, they do, and yes, they do. Jesus Christ, man, learn something about the subject you're discussing before arguing about it, eh?
For just the single most obvious example, look up Bob Woodward. Or even better, read some of his books.
Doesn't work that way for me. You must be one of those minorities The Onion likes to make fun of.
"...and then someone made one with five blades, and it's better enough that people will buy it."
No, it isn't better at all. But people still buy it.
I don't know how you justify putting "better" in there, but in my experience they work LESS well than the old 2-blade razors. The 3-blade models should have been a fad, but the marketing folks have managed to put it over on everybody.
It's just a way to make them more expensive, and maximize profits. If, in my opinion, I thought they were "better", I would buy them. But there are still plenty of older-style 2-blade razors to be found.
"Women's" razors were already marketed-up until they were a joke... going to 5 blades made the joke not even funny anymore.
"I have news for you. They get given leaks at a somewhat frequent rate. But to use your own term.. They are NOT HANDLED. Just because there is not a damn media shit storm about the data, does not mean that our adversaries did not get ahold of the information."
This is 100% irrelevant to the point I made: that they "handle" Top Secret information all the time, yet the stuff Manning had was not even Top Secret.
If their operations are not "hardened" enough to handle Top Secret information, then how is it that they DO deal with it, all the time?
But considering that by your own admission they DO deal with it all the time, why do you say they were not qualified to handle stuff that was NOT Top Secret?
My point has almost nothing to do with what you are saying. My main point was this: if the press deals with top secret information all the time (and very definitely get away with it), why are THEY not facing charges and prison time, along with the Washington insiders who leak to them?
"But surely a website named after a verb that means "to taunt, tease, ridicule, etc., with reference to anything embarrassing" will be a wise investment where these other two social media sites have failed..."
Yes, exactly. Stock options and VC money mean little to employees unless the company has value to people.
At least Facebook, while fundamentally evil, has a vision and can write software. Twitter has been short on both of these.
Twitter bought out what many people consider to be the best Twitter client ever, TweetDeck, and then butchered it. Their newest version does not work anywhere near as well as the version from 3 years ago, from before the acquisition. I could post whole pages of basic interface mistakes and other errors they made with it.
They bought up the blogging site, Posterous, which had some pretty nice features. Then they tried to turn it into some kind of "social" medium. (A blogging service? Made social? What?) It soon stopped working as well as it had before they bought it, and eventually they killed it outright. Just shut it off.
Having said all that: I don't think it's a fundamental problem with the idea of social media. I think it's an issue of social media being repeatedly -- and rather blatantly in some cases -- done wrong.
This was my thought.
"Now you can run EVERYTHING on your phone, not just searches, directly though Google's servers!"
How convenient.
Sure, but that's not what I was discussing, which was just that figures of speech are generally not required to follow standard rules of grammar. Whether that figure of speech itself was used properly is a different question.
"Which means GP's argument that "begging the question" was "proper english" doesn't apply either."
I certainly don't want to get into an argument over whether figures of speech are "proper English". I don't think that's a debate anybody can win definitively.
"But by normal rules of grammar the phrase "begging the question" clearly has the question as the subject, not the object of the begging."
Normal rules of grammar generally do not apply to figures of speech.
There. Fixed that for you.
"NFC has the same problem. You just can't see it with your own eyes."
NFC has a far bigger problem, because (A) its security was broken before it was even widely available, and (B) researchers showed they could snarf NFC credentials from smartphones from several feet away, using very cheap equipment (on the order of a few hundred $). And that's when the NFC wasn't even actively in use... just turned on.
Add to that the fact that if you had a large enough antenna array, you could put it behind a wall TENS of feet away, and catch all the NFC transactions going through the checkout lanes in an entire store. Who would be the wiser?
People tend to forget that weak RF signals are not security. Not against relatively sophisticated equipment, anyway. Remember the researcher who read peoples' passport credentials from their pockets, via their RFID chips, from 30 feet away in his car? (That was in San Francisco a few years ago.) The same guy helped break NFC.
With LFC, you could put it up against a guard (like a rubber eye cup) and there would be no way to see the signals at a distance. You can't do that effectively with NFC.
The only useful purpose for NFC right now, in my opinion, is for transferring contacts from one phone to another. But you could do that with the IR on a Palm Pilot 10 years ago. I have NFC, and have never even turned it on.
"You think just because OMGZ he gave them an encrypted file OMGZ. That the data was secure? Not a chance in hell."
I have a clue for you: Big news organizations handle Top Secret leaks all the damned time (and the journalists even write books about it)... but none of the stuff Manning had was even top secret.
Pardon me. Income tax returns is a really bad example. But emails and phone records are good examples.
But the concept that electronic records are considered part of a person's "papers and effects" has already been ruled by some courts.
No, big WHOOSH. You missed my point entirely.
The important thing is what was meant, not the exact words. For example, a person's "papers" were their personal records. Today, a person's personal records can be their income tax returns, their emails, or their telephone bills (including location data).
The whole purpose of the 4th Amendment was to prevent government from collecting this kind of data about people willy-nilly. That's the important part. It doesn't matter if it isn't printed on "paper".
Please read my tagline above; I disagree that it is, any popular sense, a "living document".
Rather, it is a set of absolute rules intended to limit the power of Federal government. But "absolute" does not refer to an "interpretation" of the words; rather, it means that laws are to be followed in the way that the original writers intended. Not according to modern changed meanings of words or phrases, or in some way that a non-scholar might read them without knowing the history.
The only sense in which the Constitution is "living", is in the sense that there is an already well defined method of changing if we want. That method is known as "amendment" and there are solid and well-established rules for amending it.
"The point is the type of 'records' doesn't matter except in very very specific cases. If it's held by a 3rd party, you don't have grounds to invoke the 4th Amendment."
I disagree about whether that is "the point". I think the court is missing "the whole point" of the 4th Amendment. Remember that generally speaking, it is not the letter of the law that is important, but what the authors of the law meant when they wrote it.
There are a couple of things that are pretty clear about this, given the realities of the day: (1) that this kind of electronic record is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to "the papers and effects" envisioned when the 4th Amendment was written; and (2) these are essential parts of many people's daily lives without which they cannot function normally in society, not something you are "voluntarily" turning over to a 3rd party.
The spirit of the law says this court was wrong. In fact this is precisely the kind of information that the 4th Amendment was created to protect.
---
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson
"Its like sticking a group of children in a room full of knives and blaming the children when someone gets hurt."
I disagree completely. These were supposedly responsible news organizations. So what it was really like was sticking a group of adults in a room full of knives, and blaming those adults when someone gets hurt.
If you loan someone a dangerous object... say you loan someone your rifle because they want to go hunting, or because Grandma is coming over and she is a little crazy and you don't want the gun in the house... and that person then goes out and shoots somebody with your gun, YOU are not responsible. Either legally or morally.
A news media organization messed up. And it wasn't deliberate, it was an accident. But they were adults, and should have known better.
I should have adeed: this court seems to have been paying attention to the letter of the law, while ignoring the whole reason the 4th Amendment exists.
"While the ruling is troubling on a number of levels the concept itself is fine. "
There is another aspect to it that is being ignored here, and by the court as well.
Other courts (I don't have a specific citation at hand, but it's been in the news) have ruled that while collecting specific data may not be a search, aggregating data over time can constitute surveillance or a search subject to 4th Amendment protection.
I think it is pretty clear that cell phone location data is aggregated over time, and can reveal things about one's life that even a direct search (or police "tail") might not do. So it seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of data is covered by that precedent, but this court ignored that.
"After all, they need the location data for billing purposes."
I would argue over whether they even need this much... to a degree anyway.
On a typical plan, all they need to know is: "Is it 'native', or roaming?" and "Is it long distance, or local?"
Because most plans only distinguish between home area and roaming, and long distance or local. And some unlimited plans do not even do that. Further, most cell plans don't even distinguish between local and long distance anymore, as long as it is within the U.S.
So the location data in most cases can be broadened to simply "Were they in their home coverage area?" Which, for many providers, is a rather large percentage of the U.S.
Yes, the nature of cell phones does require fairly specific location data at the time of call. But there is no user-specific need to retain those records.
Speaking of fascinating.
Just generally speaking, don't you know... it is fascinating to me how some people can complain about the actions of others, then turn around and hypocritically indulge in the widely vilified, socially unacceptable practice of sock puppetry. Fascinating indeed.
And I will point out one other thing: none of what Manning "leaked" was classified Top Secret. Yet there are Washington insiders talking to the press just about every week about things that *are* top secret. You read about it all the time, and some of those journalists have written whole books about the Top Secret things they were leaked.
Yet those Washington insiders, and those journalists, are not only NOT in prison, they aren't even accused of crimes.
So you tell me: where is the justice here?
"That's kind of a huge abdication of responsibility on his part, don't you think?"
No, I don't. He sent it to supposedly responsible news media outlets, whose job arguably *IS* to sort those things out.
"... many of the documents were simply things we didn't want the entire world to know, but didn't actually indicate any wrongdoing."
Yes, that's true too. But I just don't really know if it would have been possible for him to separate them all out.
Someone else here reminded me that Manning actually delivered these documents to others, who WERE supposed to try to separate that out. But somebody goofed. So I'm not sure that can honestly be blamed on Manning, who actually did make an effort to expose wrongdoing while not releasing those other things to the public.
I say this freely... I'm just leading you on because I am interested to see just what level of bullshit you will stoop to.
And also, because I still suspect sock-puppetry and I'm waiting for you to hang yourself. I could be wrong about that, but maybe we'll see.
And -- this is just a guess, you understand -- you also consider that calling someone a "bully" and accusing them of "projecting" is also not an insult?