I think he's serious. Someone crazy enough to believe the garbage in his signature (and live in Pittsburgh, apparently), could easily be crazy enough to pay more than retail to beta test a game.
They actually use the term 'the people', which is defined as such:
"We the people of the United States..."-Preamble, U.S. Constitution
I think that pretty clearly indicates US citizens. There is nothing in the constitution mentioning foreign nationals. And the constitution is the supreme law of the land, so unless an amendment is passed that says the constitutional rights apply to more than 'the people', our laws can be written to apply to foreigners however we choose. We do grant many constitutional rights to people that enter our country legally...and to enter legally, you have to pass through customs.
"There's something along those lines, but in this case, the SCOTUS has decided that unless there are actual laws that require foreign nationals to be treated according to these treaties, they are not binding even if they were signed by the US."
And that's basically what I meant by 'accepted'...most countries generally follow them, but they don't have to (they are a sovereign nation, they can do whatever the hell they want, although depending on the situation somtimes it's in their best interests to do so, less they piss someone off with a bigger military than them).
I'll admit that it was quite late and I didn't word that as intended. The point was, we are not required to guarantee them any rights (aside from some very basic international provisions, and those get ignored by other countries sometimes too). We choose to do so in most cases, but we can revoke them as we see fit.
We can deny anyone entry to our country. If you refsue to let your laptop be searched, then we refuse to let you enter...it's pretty simple. There are a lot of countries that do a lot worse.
And I'll be arrogant if I want, and laugh at all the jealous foreigners that talk about how much they hate America. I know the US will have to come down off it's high horse sooner or later, our wealth will eventually even out to other countries. But we'll probably both be dead and buried before that happens (at least in any significant, noticable way...yes the dollar is dropping like a rock, but it will still take quite some time for evertyhing to spread out). Also, what 'interests' do other countries protect for us? W. has pretty much thrown our military muscle at any 'interests' we might have.
The Gitmo loophole is circumventing a combination of Geneva conventions and our legal procedures for charging anyone who breaks US law. The point is, our law does not require us to apply the constitution to non-citizens, but we do in most circumstances anyway. Also, I am pretty sure there is some sort of accepted international law on how to treat foreign citizens. And compared to some countries, holding their laptop for 24 hours is pretty minor. I'm a little paranoid every time I pass through Chinese customs, because I know they would lock me up and throw away the key without a second thought. With the US, I don't have to worry about that. (Gitmo is for people captured in Iraq/Afghanistan, not US soil).
I appreciate the thought, but I have karma to burn:-) Why else would I dare to post anything that doesn't comply with the Slashdot Privacy Nazis? Also, some of the replies I am getting are pure gold.
And like I said in another post, you have to have a disciplinary system to limit abuse of power as much as possible. You have to entrust people with power for society to function. And there will always be people who abuse power. But believe it or not, most people aren't all bad, and are generally just average Joes like you trying to live out their own crappy life and mind their own damn business.
It was an analogy to explain to the GP that filters can never work 100%, and you have to have acceptable margins of error, or undesireable results wil occur. Not to say that blocking spam is of equal importance to blocking a terrorist. FFS.
If you don't like it, then don't go through US customs. There are a lot of ways to do it, I would suggest the one where you leave the country and never come back. Pretty simple, really.
No, I don't drink, not as a matter of principle, I just don't like the taste.
For starters, non-citizens have basically no rights and if they want in they have to do what we tell them.
Secondly, your house does not leave the country and come back. If this was happening in domestic airports, it would be a COMPLETELY different matter. Customs has always had the ability to search your person and luggage for anything they believe is contraband. And information on a laptop/etc can be contraband. They do not have the right to copy your sex pictures with your wife. They do have the right to copy incriminating documents (it's up to the lawyers/judge to decide if they can be permitted as evidence), just like they would if they were on a piece of paper in your pocket.
And actually, yes, as long as they put everything back exactly how it was, I wouldn't care. The porn mags are under the bed. I don't have anything else to hide.
It's a loose analogy. And one missed e-mail due to a spam filter can make or break someone's livelihood as well. In fact, I bet it's happened far more than Customs siezures of laptops.
The spam thing was a loose analogy. Basically the point is, filters are not perfect. You get some undesirable activity in any case (oh, if have a perfect spam filter like you are talking about, since all others apparently fail, I am sure Postini, Symantec, McAffe and others would pay top dollar for it).
People get profiled all the time at customs (Have you been through it before, or do you just debate foreign affairs from your mother's basement?). Sure, occasionally it's race, but mostly it is country of origin (the passport is kind of a givaway). I travel with a co-worker from the Philippines. Every time we go through customs, almost without fail, he takes considerably longer because they ask him several questions. I almost never get questioned (US citizen). We primarily travel to China, Hong Kong, US, and the Philippines (yes, it takes him longer to get through his own customs than I do). Another example is one of our company owners was born in Iran, and is a US citizen now. He travels to other countries at least once a month, usually more. He almost never gets stopped, even though he is clearly of Arab descent.
Any position of power will be abused. It will happen. The only two things you can do are 1) Put effective disciplinary systems in place to minimize the abuse, and 2) Quit being such a whiny pessimist and have at least little god damn faith in your fellow man. For someone arguing an 'innocent until proven guilty' standpoint, you sure have a hard time trusting people.
And let's try some real statistics...or at least one to play with. 86 Million people passed through air customs in 2005...so that should be a relativly safe number to use. Now you have to think that this does not only target terrorists...I'm sure drug smugglers are a pretty big target too, as will as other types of criminals. And there are a hell of a lot more than 5,000 terrorists (but the question is, how many are in a position to come in and do damage to the US). So let's double your number to 10,000, and get a percentage off 86. That's 1.16%...but that number would be spread out over years...but even over 10 years, it's.16%. Quite a scary figure, actually. The question is then, how many innocent people should be inconvenienced to potentially save lives?
Then there is another factor of how many of these people aren't even US Citizens, and we are allowing them the privelidge of entering our country...they do not even have constitutional rights in the first place. But I won't get into that mess.
Unless you're hiking in the wilderness (in which case you probably didn't need it too badly), you will have a hotel address your laptop can be shipped to rather easily.
IANAL, but probable cause is much more than just reasonable suspicion. Soemthing along the lines of having other evidence against the person than what you gathered simply by noticing something at customs.
If they have probably cause, they can do a hell of a lot more than search your laptop anyway. Very, very few cases would exist where they have probable cause before crossing the border.
Think in computer terms. You can't block spam, spam, and only spam. Sometimes you have to block non-spam to catch most of the spam, or you block nothing but the most obvious spam, and still have a trashed inbox.
Yes, there is an order of magnitude of difference between a penis pill e-mail and a terrorist, but the general principle is the same. It's a pain in the ass to sort through your junk mail box to get that legitimate message, just like it would be a royal pain in the ass to have your laptop siezed for a day.
I think this is a fairly reasonable compromise, assuming the terms for the laptop return (expedited shipping to whever you are going to be) are favorable and reasonable suspicion is truly reasonable.
I supported our decision to invade Iraq and while I rather wish we weren't there now, I feel we need to stay there until we are certain the Iraqi government can keep the country stable on their own. And no, we didn't need any more penniless hippies with SUV envy throwing around one-sided statistics to promote a bogus theory that we are the cause of the current global warming trend.
Yeah, agree with you there. Some low-mid stuff they may be able to give it away depending on what they buy, but the big stuff still is worth some dough.
That's pretty funny. You don't understand that most of the hardware you just mentioned is considerably cheaper to the manufacturer than what you pay (Aside from some of the stuff in the Sun boxes...but those aren't really necessary for a lot of businesses that would still have uses for Oracle). I would say the majority of the cost is for support and to fatten their wallets. Enterprise-grade anything has insane profit margins.
SANs are expensive because of the software/firmware that runs the controllers, failovers, etc. The hardware in them is relatively cheap...most of the components are standard, it's just the controller board that gets custom-designed, which is still not an overly expensive process. (SANs use the same chips that are in $1-2k NICs from Alacritech and others, and even cheaper RAID controllers from LSI, etc.)
Now I don't see making it free, but it would be a good way for them to make it seem like they are giving huge discounts. Take that 40k SAN and cut the cost to 10k and break even. Maybe on lower-end servers it would work...you can easily spec out a throw-away Supermicro for $2k that could handle a hundred or so DB users without flinching.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he's serious. Someone crazy enough to believe the garbage in his signature (and live in Pittsburgh, apparently), could easily be crazy enough to pay more than retail to beta test a game.
They actually use the term 'the people', which is defined as such:
"We the people of the United States..."-Preamble, U.S. Constitution
I think that pretty clearly indicates US citizens. There is nothing in the constitution mentioning foreign nationals. And the constitution is the supreme law of the land, so unless an amendment is passed that says the constitutional rights apply to more than 'the people', our laws can be written to apply to foreigners however we choose. We do grant many constitutional rights to people that enter our country legally...and to enter legally, you have to pass through customs.
"There's something along those lines, but in this case, the SCOTUS has decided that unless there are actual laws that require foreign nationals to be treated according to these treaties, they are not binding even if they were signed by the US."
And that's basically what I meant by 'accepted'...most countries generally follow them, but they don't have to (they are a sovereign nation, they can do whatever the hell they want, although depending on the situation somtimes it's in their best interests to do so, less they piss someone off with a bigger military than them).
Hell, I'd trust the greedy bastards at Verisign way before the UN.
But yeah, all those options kinda suck. ICANN is the lesser of the evils tough by a wide margin.
Fuck you too, buddy.
I'll admit that it was quite late and I didn't word that as intended. The point was, we are not required to guarantee them any rights (aside from some very basic international provisions, and those get ignored by other countries sometimes too). We choose to do so in most cases, but we can revoke them as we see fit.
We can deny anyone entry to our country. If you refsue to let your laptop be searched, then we refuse to let you enter...it's pretty simple. There are a lot of countries that do a lot worse.
And I'll be arrogant if I want, and laugh at all the jealous foreigners that talk about how much they hate America. I know the US will have to come down off it's high horse sooner or later, our wealth will eventually even out to other countries. But we'll probably both be dead and buried before that happens (at least in any significant, noticable way...yes the dollar is dropping like a rock, but it will still take quite some time for evertyhing to spread out). Also, what 'interests' do other countries protect for us? W. has pretty much thrown our military muscle at any 'interests' we might have.
The whole point is to find evidence of terrorism or criminal activity so they can detain the individual in question. Not take their laptop away.
Your little dialog made me chuckle though :-)
The Gitmo loophole is circumventing a combination of Geneva conventions and our legal procedures for charging anyone who breaks US law. The point is, our law does not require us to apply the constitution to non-citizens, but we do in most circumstances anyway. Also, I am pretty sure there is some sort of accepted international law on how to treat foreign citizens. And compared to some countries, holding their laptop for 24 hours is pretty minor. I'm a little paranoid every time I pass through Chinese customs, because I know they would lock me up and throw away the key without a second thought. With the US, I don't have to worry about that. (Gitmo is for people captured in Iraq/Afghanistan, not US soil).
I appreciate the thought, but I have karma to burn :-) Why else would I dare to post anything that doesn't comply with the Slashdot Privacy Nazis? Also, some of the replies I am getting are pure gold.
And like I said in another post, you have to have a disciplinary system to limit abuse of power as much as possible. You have to entrust people with power for society to function. And there will always be people who abuse power. But believe it or not, most people aren't all bad, and are generally just average Joes like you trying to live out their own crappy life and mind their own damn business.
It was an analogy to explain to the GP that filters can never work 100%, and you have to have acceptable margins of error, or undesireable results wil occur. Not to say that blocking spam is of equal importance to blocking a terrorist. FFS.
If you don't like it, then don't go through US customs. There are a lot of ways to do it, I would suggest the one where you leave the country and never come back. Pretty simple, really.
No, I don't drink, not as a matter of principle, I just don't like the taste.
For starters, non-citizens have basically no rights and if they want in they have to do what we tell them.
Secondly, your house does not leave the country and come back. If this was happening in domestic airports, it would be a COMPLETELY different matter. Customs has always had the ability to search your person and luggage for anything they believe is contraband. And information on a laptop/etc can be contraband. They do not have the right to copy your sex pictures with your wife. They do have the right to copy incriminating documents (it's up to the lawyers/judge to decide if they can be permitted as evidence), just like they would if they were on a piece of paper in your pocket.
And actually, yes, as long as they put everything back exactly how it was, I wouldn't care. The porn mags are under the bed. I don't have anything else to hide.
It's a loose analogy. And one missed e-mail due to a spam filter can make or break someone's livelihood as well. In fact, I bet it's happened far more than Customs siezures of laptops.
The spam thing was a loose analogy. Basically the point is, filters are not perfect. You get some undesirable activity in any case (oh, if have a perfect spam filter like you are talking about, since all others apparently fail, I am sure Postini, Symantec, McAffe and others would pay top dollar for it).
People get profiled all the time at customs (Have you been through it before, or do you just debate foreign affairs from your mother's basement?). Sure, occasionally it's race, but mostly it is country of origin (the passport is kind of a givaway). I travel with a co-worker from the Philippines. Every time we go through customs, almost without fail, he takes considerably longer because they ask him several questions. I almost never get questioned (US citizen). We primarily travel to China, Hong Kong, US, and the Philippines (yes, it takes him longer to get through his own customs than I do). Another example is one of our company owners was born in Iran, and is a US citizen now. He travels to other countries at least once a month, usually more. He almost never gets stopped, even though he is clearly of Arab descent.
Any position of power will be abused. It will happen. The only two things you can do are 1) Put effective disciplinary systems in place to minimize the abuse, and 2) Quit being such a whiny pessimist and have at least little god damn faith in your fellow man. For someone arguing an 'innocent until proven guilty' standpoint, you sure have a hard time trusting people.
And let's try some real statistics...or at least one to play with. 86 Million people passed through air customs in 2005...so that should be a relativly safe number to use. Now you have to think that this does not only target terrorists...I'm sure drug smugglers are a pretty big target too, as will as other types of criminals. And there are a hell of a lot more than 5,000 terrorists (but the question is, how many are in a position to come in and do damage to the US). So let's double your number to 10,000, and get a percentage off 86. That's 1.16%...but that number would be spread out over years...but even over 10 years, it's .16%. Quite a scary figure, actually. The question is then, how many innocent people should be inconvenienced to potentially save lives?
Then there is another factor of how many of these people aren't even US Citizens, and we are allowing them the privelidge of entering our country...they do not even have constitutional rights in the first place. But I won't get into that mess.
Unless you're hiking in the wilderness (in which case you probably didn't need it too badly), you will have a hotel address your laptop can be shipped to rather easily.
IANAL, but probable cause is much more than just reasonable suspicion. Soemthing along the lines of having other evidence against the person than what you gathered simply by noticing something at customs.
If they have probably cause, they can do a hell of a lot more than search your laptop anyway. Very, very few cases would exist where they have probable cause before crossing the border.
Think in computer terms. You can't block spam, spam, and only spam. Sometimes you have to block non-spam to catch most of the spam, or you block nothing but the most obvious spam, and still have a trashed inbox.
Yes, there is an order of magnitude of difference between a penis pill e-mail and a terrorist, but the general principle is the same. It's a pain in the ass to sort through your junk mail box to get that legitimate message, just like it would be a royal pain in the ass to have your laptop siezed for a day.
I think this is a fairly reasonable compromise, assuming the terms for the laptop return (expedited shipping to whever you are going to be) are favorable and reasonable suspicion is truly reasonable.
I supported our decision to invade Iraq and while I rather wish we weren't there now, I feel we need to stay there until we are certain the Iraqi government can keep the country stable on their own. And no, we didn't need any more penniless hippies with SUV envy throwing around one-sided statistics to promote a bogus theory that we are the cause of the current global warming trend.
What Gore has done in the past eight years scares me even more than what Bush has done. I consider it a lucky break.
Yeah, agree with you there. Some low-mid stuff they may be able to give it away depending on what they buy, but the big stuff still is worth some dough.
That's pretty funny. You don't understand that most of the hardware you just mentioned is considerably cheaper to the manufacturer than what you pay (Aside from some of the stuff in the Sun boxes...but those aren't really necessary for a lot of businesses that would still have uses for Oracle). I would say the majority of the cost is for support and to fatten their wallets. Enterprise-grade anything has insane profit margins.
SANs are expensive because of the software/firmware that runs the controllers, failovers, etc. The hardware in them is relatively cheap...most of the components are standard, it's just the controller board that gets custom-designed, which is still not an overly expensive process. (SANs use the same chips that are in $1-2k NICs from Alacritech and others, and even cheaper RAID controllers from LSI, etc.)
Now I don't see making it free, but it would be a good way for them to make it seem like they are giving huge discounts. Take that 40k SAN and cut the cost to 10k and break even. Maybe on lower-end servers it would work...you can easily spec out a throw-away Supermicro for $2k that could handle a hundred or so DB users without flinching.
week=7
28-23=5
5=7
???
Mac....Gaming..... ...sorry I can't stop laughing....I mean even Linux has better gaming options.....
I thought Obama wore makeup!
Ok, who else is twitching after that comment? Mixing up details between the two most sacred geek fantasy universes is driving me nuts.
I'm sorry, I stopped reading when you used the term Web 2.0 like it meant something.
Hmmmm....think I saw Manbearpig in one of those shots too..... ....maybe Manbearpig is from Mars?!?! That explains....well not a damn thing I guess.