You're misunderstanding a key part of the process. The system doesn't need to be perfectly accurate. It just needs to be accurate enough to fit the workload of the humans involved. The system may identify 10,000 "terrorists" in a month, which can then be passed off to a team of 100 humans who can pull up more records to see if there's anything actually suspicious, or if the system's just inaccurate as usual. The dozen or so each month that have enough evidence could then be submitted for real search warrants to start a full investigation.
The problem with such a human-moderated system is the imbalance in consequences between finding or dismissing an actual terrorist. None of those 100 reviewers wants to be the guy who let a terrorist escape, so they're likely to have lowering standards of evidence. Schneier has covered the problem well.
The implication of that quote is that such information is given out so freely that it's not a Fourth-Amendment-covered "search" to gather it, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Note the paragraph directly above:
He also found that the right to be free from search and seizures "is fundamental, but not absolute."
That part has been upheld by the SCOTUS repeatedly.
I've been using Perl for 10 years. It's actually one of my preferred languages. I've encountered far better excuses to bash Perl, but that's not the point.
What I don't like about threading in Perl is that nothing is shared by default, unless you use threads::shared, but that only works on variable that are explicitly defined as being shared, which cannot easily be done deeply. You can easily make a deep copy whose first level is shared, but often that isn't sufficient.
It's fine if your threads are just going to be trivial workers running independently, or large processing engines passing small amounts of data (but in that case I'd rather just fork). For parallelizing complex tasks, though, I find Perl's threads unwieldy.
PowerShell works on a similar design: Everything is local, except a few things explicitly passed to a new job. Everything must be passed into the new job all at once as the job is started, though, and that job will run in a separate context which may or may not inherit settings from the parent.
This is Slashdot! We don't care what any silly judge says, or what the law says! We'll voice support for what we want the law to be, specially tailored to our limited knowledge of this situation, based on our own prejudices for or against the companies in question.
On the other hand, I could go to The Daily WTF and see discussions that aren't censored by a hivemind, and a few particularly good comments that have been blessed by the admins to get special notice.
Slashdot's source material is generally better than most other sites, so its post-moderation quality gets a natural boost. Go dive into stories about Aaron Swartz, patents, or the NSA, and count up the mods on different viewpoints. The posts that agree with the hivemind will rarely get "redundant" mods, regardless of whether they actually have new information to add to the discussion. The posts that disagree will often quickly get "offtopic" or "overrated" mods, which slows their progress to higher filtration levels, even if upward mods are eventually added. Posts that insult the dissenter are often modded "funny" or "insightful", depending on how clever their mud-slinging is.
I like the phrasing of the comment above yours. Slashdot's mod system is among the least bad. Let's not assume it's faultless, though.
By similar logic to yours, iOS isn't a walled garden, because any idiot who could open a PDF - meaning literally anyone, since there are thousands of copies of suitable PDF files around the world - can jailbreak their device in some fashion... but I digress
Where exactly was that connection information published, and who provided the education and tech support to connect people who wanted in? Oh right, that was primarily the academic circles and major tech companies, until AOL opened the floodgates.
The early Internet wasn't a very strict walled garden, but it was certainly an exclusive club. Once inside those walls, the sysops had full control of their systems and could censor at will, and some did. There was never the free-for-all orgy of free speech you expression to remember, without the blessing of the sysops. Servers have always had their masters.
The Eternal September allowed the unwashed masses to access the Internet that had previously been a walled garden for academics. Those walls work both ways, and you seem to have enjoyed being on the inside.
Yes, you can enable SSH on ESXi. There are also varying levels of support from third parties, most of which are easier to deal with than Microsoft.
Perhaps I should clarify what I mean when I say I'm a "Windows sysadmin"... For the past two years, I've been doing systems work with Windows. For the first year, it was mostly in a bog-standard admin capacity, but for the past year I've been working exclusively on a project in Windows Server 2012, using PowerShell heavily. I'm now in charge of maintaining and improving about 10k lines of PowerShell scripts.
Powershell is the second-worst language I've encountered in almost two decades of programming. Here's a few reasons why:
It's supposedly all based around objects, but you can't natively define your own classes. You have to embed C# for that.
The "pipeline" passes objects from one command to the next, but there is no standard for what semantics a passed object must support.
Opaque objects can't easily be manipulated or constructed for debugging.
Commands are loaded modularly, but there are no namespaces. Collisions are inevitable.
No include-like functionality for scripts. You can import (with.) a modular script multiple times, but it'll run multiple times.
Multiple overlapping APIs. In addition to the PowerShell native commands, there are interfaces to.NET, WMI, COM, and command-line executables, any one of which may be the expected (or only) way to accomplish a given task, and of course the available features change with every revision of Windows.
Context-sensitive errors. Assign several kinds of Get-* results to variables, and you can check that variable safely in an IF condition. Checking the Get-* directly in the condition will throw an error if the Get-* operation returns an empty set.
Little control over command output. Either you nitpick each command to accommodate its error, warning, and output streams, or you change the global error-handling variables
As with all Microsoft products, absolutely no guarantee of support beyond the current version. As soon as Microsoft decides that SuperShell is the next big thing, PowerShell will go join other abandoned systems like COM, WSH, and VBScript.
My theory is that PowerShell started as a way to tack.NET support onto batch files, but then some brain-dead executive thought it'd be a suitable competitor to Bash, so they had to add pipes, but it's just gotta use objects, because Windows is all about the objects! Then somebody actually tried to use it for something productive, and realized it was still limited, so they added half-assed module support so it could be more useful later. Executives saw the progress, and declared that it had to be integrated into all the new 2012 stuff, so that meant that each team had to figure out their own way to make PowerShell make sense. Of course, in typical Microsoft fashion, nobody thought to look over a
In Linux, I throw together a few dozen lines of Perl or Bash, and drop that into a cron job. Then I forget about it, and my boss just enjoys having reports emailed to him.
Yes, that's exactly what it means, and that's exactly what was done. Telecom and data companies allowed the NSA to access the information that Americans willingly handed over. Despite your dismissal, it is indeed the Supreme Court's job to interpret the Constitution's applicability to particular situations, and they have not ruled on this one yet. You as an individual do not get to unilaterally declare something unconstitutional.
Privacy had nothing to do with the opposition to the Bill of Rights. The main opponents of the Bill of Rights were the Anti-Federalists, who mostly wanted to have the Constitution remain objectionable so they could form a second constitutional convention to rebuild the entire thing. Some Federalists also opposed the Bill of Rights, but on the grounds that it was unnecessary as the states already held independent power.
Privacy didn't really enter the realm of law until the 20th century. Prior to that, privacy was generally simply expected to be nonexistent, as cities weren't really built to encourage privacy. Everyone in a community would simply hear or see what happened, and everyone would likely recognize everyone else of importance.
As for the "fishing expeditions", no, they haven't always been rejected. They're only rejected if the police want to search something that has been established to be within the realm of the Fourth Amendment, which does not cover anything done in public or given to a third party. The Fourth Amendment was, after all, originally written only to protect against British-style harassment by police officers, which would mainly be used to disrupt a citizen's life until they acquiesced to the officers' demands. The idea of a search that didn't disrupt daily life was never really a concern until more modern times.
The libertarian thing to do, then, is to order many individual packages during December, with careful attention paid to the origin and destination so as to maximize the expected profit.
The invisible hand of the free market will finally serve the consumer!
I'm pretty sure you're just trolling now. I might as well kill some time, though.
My goal is to establish the provable facts, not to defend or accuse anyone. By questioning my intent while invoking the NSA's name, you're distracting from the issue in exactly the same manner as a comparison to Hitler. The name now evokes an emotional response, undermining any logical evaluation.
Again, my goal is a logical progression, not anyone's opinion. Asking my personal opinion of the matter is also distracting from the question at hand (which, I note, is still unanswered), as is the oversimplified analogy which lacks the defining "mass" characteristic of "mass surveillance".
That is, in fact, one of the open questions regarding the NSA's surveillance. It has been established that targeted detailed surveillance of an individual requires a search warrant, but it has also been established that widespread general observation does not. Widespread detailed surveillance is new, and it's not yet clear how it should fit into the existing legal framework.
Unfortunately, law and logic do not often factor into discussions. Rather, anyone asking for a valid argument is merely insulted.
you see that oppression almost inevitably follows this type of surveillance.
Please provide examples. I'm very curious as to which regime only became oppressive after implementing surveillance. All the history I can recall has shown that oppressive regimes like to use surveillance to enforce their already-oppressive policies, and sometimes enables them to expand those policies, but I don't recall any instances where the surveillance started the oppression.
I'm arguing for a logical discussion, rather that one steeped in bias and knee-jerk reactions. To that end, I've taken the liberty of highlighting the fallacious arguments in your statements.
The question of whether it's "inherently harmful" is completely different from the question of whether what the government is doing is constitutional, and anyone with a brain knows that it isn't.
Ewieling's claim is that surveillance is unconstitutional because it's a punishment. However, there are two questions to that claim that need proving: that surveillance is a punishment in itself, and that such a punishment is prohibited by the Constitution. I would accept "harmful" as a substitute for "punishment", but that's not proven, either.
When a person is incarcerated they lose their privacy.
When a person posts on Slashdot, they send information over the Internet.
Clearly sending information over the Internet does not always mean that one is posting on the Internet. Be careful of begging the question. You'll need to actually prove that losing one's privacy is inherently harmful.
The "right to privacy" may not be spelled out in the constitution but I think it is obvious the government considers taking away a person's privacy to be a form of punishment.
Or it's a necessary part of certain investigations, with a sliding scale of how much privacy one can expect compared to how necessary it is. In fact, many high-profile cases over the past few decades have shown the need for additional privacy (which the courts have often granted) for those accused or convicted of a crime.
The Constitution says the government may not punish the citizens without a trial.
Where's that? The Fifth Amendment only prohibits taking "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law", but says nothing about generic "punishment". Other amendments (6 & 7) refer to which particular cases must have a trial, but also say nothing about any situation where there is no actual provable harm to the citizen.
...do they pay 15% on it as normal income, or 0% as long term capital gains, or something else entirely?
Realistically, it doesn't matter, as long as you report it (so of course the 0% seems better).
Note that I am not an accountant, I am not your accountant and this is not accounting advice.
The IRS (and any other tax agency) cares mostly about getting their cut. They really don't actually care how much that amount is. You are free to define any activity or income using any applicable definition that you think is appropriate, but note that you may need to redefine it later. If your Bitcoin activities meet the right criteria to be taxed at 0%, then you can legally just report them as such, and pay no tax. Similarly, if you can arrange your finances so your profits are sent to Ireland, for example, you can pay less tax that way. Note that this is not tax evasion. You are still paying all the taxes that are due; you're just carefully limiting how much tax will be due.
Due to various aspects of my own finances, I have particularly difficult tax paperwork every year. I've been audited, and had to submit many corrections. It's not really that big of a deal if you can justify every claim you make and show that you're not trying to outright hide money.
The 6th? Really? When did the NSA start a criminal prosecution?
Once that prosecution was brought to an actual trial, who was denied a jury per the 7th?
Of course we must bring up the 10th amendment, because this is Slashdot, where we've forgotten that for the last hundred years of political history, national security has been a responsibility of the whole nation rather than the individual states.
Slashdot Mirror
You're misunderstanding a key part of the process. The system doesn't need to be perfectly accurate. It just needs to be accurate enough to fit the workload of the humans involved. The system may identify 10,000 "terrorists" in a month, which can then be passed off to a team of 100 humans who can pull up more records to see if there's anything actually suspicious, or if the system's just inaccurate as usual. The dozen or so each month that have enough evidence could then be submitted for real search warrants to start a full investigation.
The problem with such a human-moderated system is the imbalance in consequences between finding or dismissing an actual terrorist. None of those 100 reviewers wants to be the guy who let a terrorist escape, so they're likely to have lowering standards of evidence. Schneier has covered the problem well.
The implication of that quote is that such information is given out so freely that it's not a Fourth-Amendment-covered "search" to gather it, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Note the paragraph directly above:
He also found that the right to be free from search and seizures "is fundamental, but not absolute."
That part has been upheld by the SCOTUS repeatedly.
I've been using Perl for 10 years. It's actually one of my preferred languages. I've encountered far better excuses to bash Perl, but that's not the point.
What I don't like about threading in Perl is that nothing is shared by default, unless you use threads::shared, but that only works on variable that are explicitly defined as being shared, which cannot easily be done deeply. You can easily make a deep copy whose first level is shared, but often that isn't sufficient.
It's fine if your threads are just going to be trivial workers running independently, or large processing engines passing small amounts of data (but in that case I'd rather just fork). For parallelizing complex tasks, though, I find Perl's threads unwieldy.
PowerShell works on a similar design: Everything is local, except a few things explicitly passed to a new job. Everything must be passed into the new job all at once as the job is started, though, and that job will run in a separate context which may or may not inherit settings from the parent.
This is Slashdot! We don't care what any silly judge says, or what the law says! We'll voice support for what we want the law to be, specially tailored to our limited knowledge of this situation, based on our own prejudices for or against the companies in question.
On the other hand, I could go to The Daily WTF and see discussions that aren't censored by a hivemind, and a few particularly good comments that have been blessed by the admins to get special notice.
Slashdot's source material is generally better than most other sites, so its post-moderation quality gets a natural boost. Go dive into stories about Aaron Swartz, patents, or the NSA, and count up the mods on different viewpoints. The posts that agree with the hivemind will rarely get "redundant" mods, regardless of whether they actually have new information to add to the discussion. The posts that disagree will often quickly get "offtopic" or "overrated" mods, which slows their progress to higher filtration levels, even if upward mods are eventually added. Posts that insult the dissenter are often modded "funny" or "insightful", depending on how clever their mud-slinging is.
I like the phrasing of the comment above yours. Slashdot's mod system is among the least bad. Let's not assume it's faultless, though.
America had promised, as part of that agreement, that we'd bring air support to Saigon if the North did invade. They did, and we didn't.
Politicians lie, intentionally or not, regardless of what party they associate with.
By similar logic to yours, iOS isn't a walled garden, because any idiot who could open a PDF - meaning literally anyone, since there are thousands of copies of suitable PDF files around the world - can jailbreak their device in some fashion... but I digress
Where exactly was that connection information published, and who provided the education and tech support to connect people who wanted in? Oh right, that was primarily the academic circles and major tech companies, until AOL opened the floodgates.
The early Internet wasn't a very strict walled garden, but it was certainly an exclusive club. Once inside those walls, the sysops had full control of their systems and could censor at will, and some did. There was never the free-for-all orgy of free speech you expression to remember, without the blessing of the sysops. Servers have always had their masters.
Gesundheit.
The Eternal September allowed the unwashed masses to access the Internet that had previously been a walled garden for academics. Those walls work both ways, and you seem to have enjoyed being on the inside.
Slashdot's moderation is also heavily dependent on the whim of the hivemind. We're not as bad as, say, 4chan, but we're still pretty awful.
Yes, you can enable SSH on ESXi. There are also varying levels of support from third parties, most of which are easier to deal with than Microsoft.
Perhaps I should clarify what I mean when I say I'm a "Windows sysadmin"... For the past two years, I've been doing systems work with Windows. For the first year, it was mostly in a bog-standard admin capacity, but for the past year I've been working exclusively on a project in Windows Server 2012, using PowerShell heavily. I'm now in charge of maintaining and improving about 10k lines of PowerShell scripts.
Powershell is the second-worst language I've encountered in almost two decades of programming. Here's a few reasons why:
My theory is that PowerShell started as a way to tack .NET support onto batch files, but then some brain-dead executive thought it'd be a suitable competitor to Bash, so they had to add pipes, but it's just gotta use objects, because Windows is all about the objects! Then somebody actually tried to use it for something productive, and realized it was still limited, so they added half-assed module support so it could be more useful later. Executives saw the progress, and declared that it had to be integrated into all the new 2012 stuff, so that meant that each team had to figure out their own way to make PowerShell make sense. Of course, in typical Microsoft fashion, nobody thought to look over a
Yes.
As infrequently as possible, in Windows.
In Linux, I throw together a few dozen lines of Perl or Bash, and drop that into a cron job. Then I forget about it, and my boss just enjoys having reports emailed to him.
Yes, that's exactly what it means, and that's exactly what was done. Telecom and data companies allowed the NSA to access the information that Americans willingly handed over. Despite your dismissal, it is indeed the Supreme Court's job to interpret the Constitution's applicability to particular situations, and they have not ruled on this one yet. You as an individual do not get to unilaterally declare something unconstitutional.
I'm currently a Windows sysadmin.
Fuck PowerShell.
I have nothing more to say.
Also being phased out because it's inconvenient, expensive, and in too limited a supply for many transactions.
It's not the voltage that kills you.
Privacy had nothing to do with the opposition to the Bill of Rights. The main opponents of the Bill of Rights were the Anti-Federalists, who mostly wanted to have the Constitution remain objectionable so they could form a second constitutional convention to rebuild the entire thing. Some Federalists also opposed the Bill of Rights, but on the grounds that it was unnecessary as the states already held independent power.
Privacy didn't really enter the realm of law until the 20th century. Prior to that, privacy was generally simply expected to be nonexistent, as cities weren't really built to encourage privacy. Everyone in a community would simply hear or see what happened, and everyone would likely recognize everyone else of importance.
As for the "fishing expeditions", no, they haven't always been rejected. They're only rejected if the police want to search something that has been established to be within the realm of the Fourth Amendment, which does not cover anything done in public or given to a third party. The Fourth Amendment was, after all, originally written only to protect against British-style harassment by police officers, which would mainly be used to disrupt a citizen's life until they acquiesced to the officers' demands. The idea of a search that didn't disrupt daily life was never really a concern until more modern times.
The libertarian thing to do, then, is to order many individual packages during December, with careful attention paid to the origin and destination so as to maximize the expected profit.
The invisible hand of the free market will finally serve the consumer!
I'm pretty sure you're just trolling now. I might as well kill some time, though.
My goal is to establish the provable facts, not to defend or accuse anyone. By questioning my intent while invoking the NSA's name, you're distracting from the issue in exactly the same manner as a comparison to Hitler. The name now evokes an emotional response, undermining any logical evaluation.
Again, my goal is a logical progression, not anyone's opinion. Asking my personal opinion of the matter is also distracting from the question at hand (which, I note, is still unanswered), as is the oversimplified analogy which lacks the defining "mass" characteristic of "mass surveillance".
That is, in fact, one of the open questions regarding the NSA's surveillance. It has been established that targeted detailed surveillance of an individual requires a search warrant, but it has also been established that widespread general observation does not. Widespread detailed surveillance is new, and it's not yet clear how it should fit into the existing legal framework.
Unfortunately, law and logic do not often factor into discussions. Rather, anyone asking for a valid argument is merely insulted.
you see that oppression almost inevitably follows this type of surveillance.
Please provide examples. I'm very curious as to which regime only became oppressive after implementing surveillance. All the history I can recall has shown that oppressive regimes like to use surveillance to enforce their already-oppressive policies, and sometimes enables them to expand those policies, but I don't recall any instances where the surveillance started the oppression.
What exactly are you arguing for? Are you trying to defend the NSA? Do you really want to live in a glass house? Would it bother you if I (or anyone) installed surveillance equipment in every single part of your house with the intention of constantly reviewing all the footage, but not doing anything else with it?
I'm arguing for a logical discussion, rather that one steeped in bias and knee-jerk reactions. To that end, I've taken the liberty of highlighting the fallacious arguments in your statements.
The question of whether it's "inherently harmful" is completely different from the question of whether what the government is doing is constitutional, and anyone with a brain knows that it isn't.
Ewieling's claim is that surveillance is unconstitutional because it's a punishment. However, there are two questions to that claim that need proving: that surveillance is a punishment in itself, and that such a punishment is prohibited by the Constitution. I would accept "harmful" as a substitute for "punishment", but that's not proven, either.
When a person is incarcerated they lose their privacy.
When a person posts on Slashdot, they send information over the Internet.
Clearly sending information over the Internet does not always mean that one is posting on the Internet. Be careful of begging the question. You'll need to actually prove that losing one's privacy is inherently harmful.
The "right to privacy" may not be spelled out in the constitution but I think it is obvious the government considers taking away a person's privacy to be a form of punishment.
Or it's a necessary part of certain investigations, with a sliding scale of how much privacy one can expect compared to how necessary it is. In fact, many high-profile cases over the past few decades have shown the need for additional privacy (which the courts have often granted) for those accused or convicted of a crime.
The Constitution says the government may not punish the citizens without a trial.
Where's that? The Fifth Amendment only prohibits taking "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law", but says nothing about generic "punishment". Other amendments (6 & 7) refer to which particular cases must have a trial, but also say nothing about any situation where there is no actual provable harm to the citizen.
...do they pay 15% on it as normal income, or 0% as long term capital gains, or something else entirely?
Realistically, it doesn't matter, as long as you report it (so of course the 0% seems better).
Note that I am not an accountant, I am not your accountant and this is not accounting advice.
The IRS (and any other tax agency) cares mostly about getting their cut. They really don't actually care how much that amount is. You are free to define any activity or income using any applicable definition that you think is appropriate, but note that you may need to redefine it later. If your Bitcoin activities meet the right criteria to be taxed at 0%, then you can legally just report them as such, and pay no tax. Similarly, if you can arrange your finances so your profits are sent to Ireland, for example, you can pay less tax that way. Note that this is not tax evasion. You are still paying all the taxes that are due; you're just carefully limiting how much tax will be due.
Due to various aspects of my own finances, I have particularly difficult tax paperwork every year. I've been audited, and had to submit many corrections. It's not really that big of a deal if you can justify every claim you make and show that you're not trying to outright hide money.
The 6th? Really? When did the NSA start a criminal prosecution?
Once that prosecution was brought to an actual trial, who was denied a jury per the 7th?
Of course we must bring up the 10th amendment, because this is Slashdot, where we've forgotten that for the last hundred years of political history, national security has been a responsibility of the whole nation rather than the individual states.