While you are just trolling, the ultimate goal of the "total information awareness" program is in fact to quantify data used to predict events before they happen. This especially applies to the concept of "pre-crime," where your data would be fed through an algorithm. If your actions are undesireable to the establishment, then you will be followed and arrested with the first excuse they can muster.
Baloney. What would a private company with no visible gov't affiliations care about any of that? Its about marketing, plain and simple-- theres no conspiracy or Minority Report scenario needed to explain this, and Occam's Razor points straight to what they claim to be-- analytics and marketing.
And a fact most appropriate to your user ID - Religious lobbying in America has increased 500%. Among the most important issues of religious lobbying groups are:
Trying to link this to religious groups is such a reach its not even funny. Can you point to a single bit of lobbying that went into this CarrierIQ situation? I thought not.
You completely fail to grasp that "separation of church and state" has NOTHING to do with what your values are and how they are formed. "A pastor voting in line with his religious views" isnt a violation of separation of church and state, its protected speech under the first amendment and in line with everything the constitution stands for.
So yes, this is all related, because Christians are in charge of America, and Christians believe that everybody else should be subject to the same overbearing parenting that Christians were subject to as children.
That calls for a big bold [CITATION NEEDED]. All the religious christians I know-- including myself-- regard a big overbearing government as a pretty bad thing, and understand that big groups of powerful authority figures are rarely a pure win. It MIGHT occur to you that pretty much everywhere protestantism took hold eventually became a democracy, and our founding fathers were at LEAST theist with some of them being more overtly christian.
Im actually more worried about secular states that think they can achieve a utopia here and now, because those are the places that tend to turn into nightmarish totalitarian states.
One can be illegal, the other is upholding the law. It is going way out of bounds and probably can be fought in court if your employer attempts to control your non-work-related speech through threats about your salary. It is completely legal for Knopf Books to sue you into the ground for reproducing The Golden Compass without securing permission from them or the author. One is censorship, one is just called "suing".
Whether they are employees or not absolutely makes a difference, and you will note that the wikipedia article referenced explicitly mentioned categories of people who had a business relationship with the corporation. People who do not have a business relationship cannot be subject to "corporate censorship".
And what Fox News talk show gave you this understanding?
I dont watch fox news talk shows. Just because we agree on politics doesnt mean I enjoy hearing them talk.
Its odd, if its not the reality of the situation, that Obama would feel it necessary to announce "I will veto any attempt to delay or push off the automatic spending cuts..." from the supercommittee failure. I mean, if thats NOT the normal state of affairs, why would he feel a need to say anything?
It was a conservative state, so naturally conservatives are just better at cutting spending than liberals, right?
Thats not where I was going with this. Its pretty simple, if you have a political career, it is for one of two reasons (and probably both)-- A) you like money and power, or B) you like being able to make a difference and shape the country's direction (presumably for what you consider to be the best).
In either scenario, you are not likely to be the sort of person who wants LESS power given to them. Ron Paul is kind of an oddity when you consider the vast vast vast majority of congress and the government.
Thats not to say that someone WONT ever relinquish power or money, but it goes against our human nature-- especially for politicians.
Even if it isn't the sole factor, it does seem to be something that winds a certain section of the Republican base up even more.
So would it be equally fair to assert that a lot of black democrats' problems with republicans is that they tend to be white(y)? And that thats why black republicans get an unusual amount of flak from dems?
Or would that be going too far playing the race card?
My understanding is this-- that the problem is, were republicans to compromise and increase taxes, increase debt ceiling, etc, everything the dems wanted, and in return secured cuts of several hundred billion, all the cuts would be postponed over the next 10 years so that they never happened, and meanwhile taxes WOULD be higher and borrowing would continue.
Its not because of who Dems are, its because of the nature of government. Governments will NEVER want to lower spending, it is phenomenally hard to do so-- even when default is around the corner (look at Greece). So, aside from already being a republican, I understand why you cant just compromise down the middle, because it will inevitably NOT be down the middle once the scores are all settled.
Honestly, I think its a little crazy to talk of super big spending cuts in military while we still have military forces out and about, but sure-- if they could release a budget for this year with equal cuts to entitlements and military THIS YEAR that would really stick, I would be for that.
As for raising taxes, the question becomes, if the government has spent the money it was given really really poorly, why do we want to give them more money to spend, rather than making them actually make the hard choices and fix their budget now? It seems an awful lot like getting another hit of heroin and promising everyone that NEXT week you'll go clean.
Theyre talking about people who work for or are associated with the company-- that is, if your company told you "dont write a review of Brillo pads, or we will slash your salary". That would be corporate censorship.
RIAA / MPAA being litigious and nasty because people are pirating their stuff isnt censorship at all.
Youre acting like I have an interest in not knowing these things. Why couldnt someone have come out 10 posts ago and just linked to an article like that or simply said "Ishaqi incident"?
He released tens (hundreds?) of thousands of documents for basically one or two issues that might have been significant. Presumably he leaked them because he knew what some of them said, and was horrified by them, yes? Why not release those?
Or are you REALLY arguing that someone leaking a company's illegal dumping practices has latitude to also leak their short and long term strategies, their financials, their lobbying plans, their acquisition plans, and all R&D that they do? Because I dont think any court in the world would find that to be protected.
You can't counter emotive appeals with facts. While it may be logically sound and correct, people don't care about logic and correctness.
The only proper way to expose half-truths and emotional BS is to clearly show why theyre half-truths and BS. Responding with your own BS just makes people realize that noone is capable of rational discussion anymore, and causes both sides to lose credibility.
o the fake dora's are 10 times cheaper than the original ones, that are actually the same ones (made in the same country, by the same labor, with the same production cost...)
Yea, that doesnt follow. The knockoffs can be made with different materials (read: lead paint), no QA, etc. Having been there and been burned on knockoff products, I know that to assume what youre assuming is a recipe for disappointment (im still holding out hope on my "North Face" jacket tho).
It kind of gets on my nerves that noone seems to get what censorship is. HINT: A book publisher trying to stop people printing unauthorized copies of their book is NOT censorship, full stop.
You want to criticize a bad plan for being a bad plan, act like an adult and focus on the issue rather than bringing in unrelated words like censorship just for the emotional effect.
I think the problem is that the strongest opposition to these type of acts seems unfortunately to come not from a sincere desire to reform the copyright system, spur the economy, or protect free speech, but simply because people want to use bittorrent.
There are good reasons to change the copyright system, but if youre looking to college students to argue for those when its easier to pull out the good old satire "you wouldnt download a car would you", you will be disappointed.
Same mostly applies to infecting grub. It's not a read-only FS, but it is in an area that shouldn't be writable by regular users and regular users are all you should ever have.
SOMEONE has permissions to install packages such as grub2. Once you have that, you can install "grub2+" and youre golden. Im not seeing how you will stop that.
1) Manning DID NOT release the documents, as you keep asserting. He transmitted them to Wikileaks, a trusted organization that kept secret whistleblowers secret.
Yea, see, that right there is releasing sensitive information. He is the one who had the original access to it, and he is the source of the leak. You might as well claim that, had he put it on bittorrent, it wasnt HIS fault that it was broken up into a zillion pieces and spread all over the internet.
If you have a problem, take it up with the newspapers, not Manning, not Wikileaks.
The newspapers arent being charged, last I checked, since they didnt break any agreements or violate any military codes.
Manning and Wikileaks exercise due diligence and made sure that they released nothing harmful to the troops by giving control of the release to responsible reporters who were supposed to know what they are doing. That is precisely how responsible leakers have always done it.
That might have held some water if he hadnt realeased such an incredible amount of stuff which amounted to basically however much he could get his hands on.
This is not about oaths and laws.
See, thats where youre wrong-- laws and oaths are precisely why Manning is on trial, and would have been at any point in US history. What he did has never been acceptable, and never will be. As for right and wrong, for him to take the moral high ground he would have had to exercise a great deal more restraint and specificity on what he leaked than he did.
Regardless of whatever else he found, he released 24,000 unrelated diplomatic wires that had nothing to do with any atrocities and basically just served to piss a ton of countries off and hurt relations with most of them.
Specifically, Im still wondering why he released cables about Tsvingarai's discussions with the US. What atrocities were going on there that needed released?
As for that mass murder, are you speaking of "collateral murder"? Because that wasnt a "mass murder", it was 2 reporters that were mis-identified (as can be confirmed by the soldier's chatter). If its NOT "collateral murder", then I have no idea what youre talking about, as noone seems to want to give a link, a date, a location, or anything else, and the wikipedia article on "mass murders" has nothing.
Just so you can understand why Im having such a hard time believing anyone here, here are the responses ive gotten to "what were the atrocities?" *Mis-classifying data as sensitive that was not (really, an atrocity?) *Murdering a group of black people because they were black people *Killing a bunch of women and children, and then burying them in a mass grave (would have thought that would have gotten a UN censure or something, but oh well) *A crowd of soldiers murdering a crowd
And all of these in reply to a request for citation-- without anyone actually giving a citation. Somehow, I suspect that most of these posters havent even looked at the source material. And they wonder why I think they have 0 credibility.
You know, myself, I would have reserved the word "atrocity" for "jewish holocaust" or "rape of nanking"; Im not really sure that "classifying data that Nursie thinks should be public" really fits that category.
If that is really all people were accusing the gov't of, they could have said so, and I simply would never have posted-- because I agree.
Rather than railing about modding conspiracies and whatnot, can someone please give a specific, google-able example of what we were supposed to see in the leaks?
Thats really all I was asking for. I have no vested interest in government corruption being hidden; I simply think that 90% of the people on slashdot are unable to simply let facts speak for themselves and instead have to resort to hyperbole, massive spin, and tenuous accusations to prove their point, reality be damned.
Just a heads up, since this seems to bug you so much-- every time someone leaps to accuse the US government of something, and then it turns out their claim was 90% bullshit, all further such claims have their credibilty hurt. Years of seeing this crap on slashdot have made me realize that as messed up as the government might be, its still a sure thing that most of the accusations leveled against it are bogus and perpetrated by people who have an axe to grind and dont really care if reality is more nuanced than "government is bad" or "leaks are good".
Or option C, if someone intends to present a statement as facts, they should either source it or be specific enough that someone can tell if theyre just full of crap, as is far too common on slashdot?
Why is it, in most slashdot threads, when someone is called on uncited, vague, un-backed up claims, their response is inevitably NOT to provide a source or citation, but to lash out as if its everyone elses fault that they cant provide some token of credibility? Good gracious if the poster had a specific instance in mind, he could have given SOMETHING that could have been googled or looked up rather than pouting and acting like a 3 year old about it.
As for why I dont accept such claims without a source, years of hearing Bush attacked for "2 unauthorized wars", only to find out upon researching it that every one of the Bushs' wars were authorized by congress (In the case of Bush jr, by landslide votes), as well as other similar lies, have made me incredibly cynical of any "fact" posted on slashdot without citation. Until someone gives me some reason to trust them as credible, I assume everything they say is at LEAST out of context or heavily spun, if not a complete fabrication.
One other thing-- single user mode is (unless im mistaken) just runlevel 1, and (again, unless im mistaken) could be subverted by modifying the rc1.d scripts so that your virus loads before the shell prompt drops.
Slashdot Mirror
While you are just trolling, the ultimate goal of the "total information awareness" program is in fact to quantify data used to predict events before they happen. This especially applies to the concept of "pre-crime," where your data would be fed through an algorithm. If your actions are undesireable to the establishment, then you will be followed and arrested with the first excuse they can muster.
Baloney. What would a private company with no visible gov't affiliations care about any of that? Its about marketing, plain and simple-- theres no conspiracy or Minority Report scenario needed to explain this, and Occam's Razor points straight to what they claim to be-- analytics and marketing.
And a fact most appropriate to your user ID - Religious lobbying in America has increased 500%. Among the most important issues of religious lobbying groups are:
Trying to link this to religious groups is such a reach its not even funny. Can you point to a single bit of lobbying that went into this CarrierIQ situation? I thought not.
You completely fail to grasp that "separation of church and state" has NOTHING to do with what your values are and how they are formed. "A pastor voting in line with his religious views" isnt a violation of separation of church and state, its protected speech under the first amendment and in line with everything the constitution stands for.
So yes, this is all related, because Christians are in charge of America, and Christians believe that everybody else should be subject to the same overbearing parenting that Christians were subject to as children.
That calls for a big bold [CITATION NEEDED]. All the religious christians I know-- including myself-- regard a big overbearing government as a pretty bad thing, and understand that big groups of powerful authority figures are rarely a pure win. It MIGHT occur to you that pretty much everywhere protestantism took hold eventually became a democracy, and our founding fathers were at LEAST theist with some of them being more overtly christian.
Im actually more worried about secular states that think they can achieve a utopia here and now, because those are the places that tend to turn into nightmarish totalitarian states.
Here thar be trolls.
Dont feed them.
One can be illegal, the other is upholding the law. It is going way out of bounds and probably can be fought in court if your employer attempts to control your non-work-related speech through threats about your salary. It is completely legal for Knopf Books to sue you into the ground for reproducing The Golden Compass without securing permission from them or the author. One is censorship, one is just called "suing".
Whether they are employees or not absolutely makes a difference, and you will note that the wikipedia article referenced explicitly mentioned categories of people who had a business relationship with the corporation. People who do not have a business relationship cannot be subject to "corporate censorship".
And what Fox News talk show gave you this understanding?
I dont watch fox news talk shows. Just because we agree on politics doesnt mean I enjoy hearing them talk.
Its odd, if its not the reality of the situation, that Obama would feel it necessary to announce "I will veto any attempt to delay or push off the automatic spending cuts..." from the supercommittee failure. I mean, if thats NOT the normal state of affairs, why would he feel a need to say anything?
It was a conservative state, so naturally conservatives are just better at cutting spending than liberals, right?
Thats not where I was going with this. Its pretty simple, if you have a political career, it is for one of two reasons (and probably both)--
A) you like money and power, or
B) you like being able to make a difference and shape the country's direction (presumably for what you consider to be the best).
In either scenario, you are not likely to be the sort of person who wants LESS power given to them. Ron Paul is kind of an oddity when you consider the vast vast vast majority of congress and the government.
Thats not to say that someone WONT ever relinquish power or money, but it goes against our human nature-- especially for politicians.
Even if it isn't the sole factor, it does seem to be something that winds a certain section of the Republican base up even more.
So would it be equally fair to assert that a lot of black democrats' problems with republicans is that they tend to be white(y)? And that thats why black republicans get an unusual amount of flak from dems?
Or would that be going too far playing the race card?
with having to share the credit for passing a jobs bill with "the n*gg*r from kenya", was too much for the Racist Republican Base to stand.
Seriously, someone plays the race card and gets modded +5?
Obviously, the problem that Republicans have with a black Democrat president is that hes black. Why didnt I think of that before, it was so simple.
My understanding is this-- that the problem is, were republicans to compromise and increase taxes, increase debt ceiling, etc, everything the dems wanted, and in return secured cuts of several hundred billion, all the cuts would be postponed over the next 10 years so that they never happened, and meanwhile taxes WOULD be higher and borrowing would continue.
Its not because of who Dems are, its because of the nature of government. Governments will NEVER want to lower spending, it is phenomenally hard to do so-- even when default is around the corner (look at Greece). So, aside from already being a republican, I understand why you cant just compromise down the middle, because it will inevitably NOT be down the middle once the scores are all settled.
Honestly, I think its a little crazy to talk of super big spending cuts in military while we still have military forces out and about, but sure-- if they could release a budget for this year with equal cuts to entitlements and military THIS YEAR that would really stick, I would be for that.
As for raising taxes, the question becomes, if the government has spent the money it was given really really poorly, why do we want to give them more money to spend, rather than making them actually make the hard choices and fix their budget now? It seems an awful lot like getting another hit of heroin and promising everyone that NEXT week you'll go clean.
Theyre talking about people who work for or are associated with the company-- that is, if your company told you "dont write a review of Brillo pads, or we will slash your salary". That would be corporate censorship.
RIAA / MPAA being litigious and nasty because people are pirating their stuff isnt censorship at all.
One WOULD think that, but I would hope a discussion board like slashdot wouldnt take the stance "facts are retarded, use emotion".
Youre acting like I have an interest in not knowing these things. Why couldnt someone have come out 10 posts ago and just linked to an article like that or simply said "Ishaqi incident"?
Thank you for providing the link.
He released tens (hundreds?) of thousands of documents for basically one or two issues that might have been significant. Presumably he leaked them because he knew what some of them said, and was horrified by them, yes? Why not release those?
Or are you REALLY arguing that someone leaking a company's illegal dumping practices has latitude to also leak their short and long term strategies, their financials, their lobbying plans, their acquisition plans, and all R&D that they do? Because I dont think any court in the world would find that to be protected.
You can't counter emotive appeals with facts. While it may be logically sound and correct, people don't care about logic and correctness.
The only proper way to expose half-truths and emotional BS is to clearly show why theyre half-truths and BS. Responding with your own BS just makes people realize that noone is capable of rational discussion anymore, and causes both sides to lose credibility.
o the fake dora's are 10 times cheaper than the original ones, that are actually the same ones (made in the same country, by the same labor, with the same production cost...)
Yea, that doesnt follow. The knockoffs can be made with different materials (read: lead paint), no QA, etc. Having been there and been burned on knockoff products, I know that to assume what youre assuming is a recipe for disappointment (im still holding out hope on my "North Face" jacket tho).
It kind of gets on my nerves that noone seems to get what censorship is. HINT: A book publisher trying to stop people printing unauthorized copies of their book is NOT censorship, full stop.
You want to criticize a bad plan for being a bad plan, act like an adult and focus on the issue rather than bringing in unrelated words like censorship just for the emotional effect.
I think the problem is that the strongest opposition to these type of acts seems unfortunately to come not from a sincere desire to reform the copyright system, spur the economy, or protect free speech, but simply because people want to use bittorrent.
There are good reasons to change the copyright system, but if youre looking to college students to argue for those when its easier to pull out the good old satire "you wouldnt download a car would you", you will be disappointed.
Same mostly applies to infecting grub. It's not a read-only FS, but it is in an area that shouldn't be writable by regular users and regular users are all you should ever have.
SOMEONE has permissions to install packages such as grub2. Once you have that, you can install "grub2+" and youre golden. Im not seeing how you will stop that.
Fair enough, but at the end of the day it amounted to the same thing, sans martial law / habeus corpus.
What the hell did you think the press would do?
Answer: Anything that will sell papers.
Trying to act like their irresponsibility somehow excuses manning just doesnt cut it.
1) Manning DID NOT release the documents, as you keep asserting. He transmitted them to Wikileaks, a trusted organization that kept secret whistleblowers secret.
Yea, see, that right there is releasing sensitive information. He is the one who had the original access to it, and he is the source of the leak. You might as well claim that, had he put it on bittorrent, it wasnt HIS fault that it was broken up into a zillion pieces and spread all over the internet.
If you have a problem, take it up with the newspapers, not Manning, not Wikileaks.
The newspapers arent being charged, last I checked, since they didnt break any agreements or violate any military codes.
Manning and Wikileaks exercise due diligence and made sure that they released nothing harmful to the troops by giving control of the release to responsible reporters who were supposed to know what they are doing. That is precisely how responsible leakers have always done it.
That might have held some water if he hadnt realeased such an incredible amount of stuff which amounted to basically however much he could get his hands on.
This is not about oaths and laws.
See, thats where youre wrong-- laws and oaths are precisely why Manning is on trial, and would have been at any point in US history. What he did has never been acceptable, and never will be. As for right and wrong, for him to take the moral high ground he would have had to exercise a great deal more restraint and specificity on what he leaked than he did.
Regardless of whatever else he found, he released 24,000 unrelated diplomatic wires that had nothing to do with any atrocities and basically just served to piss a ton of countries off and hurt relations with most of them.
Specifically, Im still wondering why he released cables about Tsvingarai's discussions with the US. What atrocities were going on there that needed released?
As for that mass murder, are you speaking of "collateral murder"? Because that wasnt a "mass murder", it was 2 reporters that were mis-identified (as can be confirmed by the soldier's chatter). If its NOT "collateral murder", then I have no idea what youre talking about, as noone seems to want to give a link, a date, a location, or anything else, and the wikipedia article on "mass murders" has nothing.
So please, enlighten me.
Just so you can understand why Im having such a hard time believing anyone here, here are the responses ive gotten to "what were the atrocities?"
*Mis-classifying data as sensitive that was not (really, an atrocity?)
*Murdering a group of black people because they were black people
*Killing a bunch of women and children, and then burying them in a mass grave (would have thought that would have gotten a UN censure or something, but oh well)
*A crowd of soldiers murdering a crowd
And all of these in reply to a request for citation-- without anyone actually giving a citation. Somehow, I suspect that most of these posters havent even looked at the source material. And they wonder why I think they have 0 credibility.
You know, myself, I would have reserved the word "atrocity" for "jewish holocaust" or "rape of nanking"; Im not really sure that "classifying data that Nursie thinks should be public" really fits that category.
If that is really all people were accusing the gov't of, they could have said so, and I simply would never have posted-- because I agree.
Rather than railing about modding conspiracies and whatnot, can someone please give a specific, google-able example of what we were supposed to see in the leaks?
Thats really all I was asking for. I have no vested interest in government corruption being hidden; I simply think that 90% of the people on slashdot are unable to simply let facts speak for themselves and instead have to resort to hyperbole, massive spin, and tenuous accusations to prove their point, reality be damned.
Just a heads up, since this seems to bug you so much-- every time someone leaps to accuse the US government of something, and then it turns out their claim was 90% bullshit, all further such claims have their credibilty hurt. Years of seeing this crap on slashdot have made me realize that as messed up as the government might be, its still a sure thing that most of the accusations leveled against it are bogus and perpetrated by people who have an axe to grind and dont really care if reality is more nuanced than "government is bad" or "leaks are good".
Or option C, if someone intends to present a statement as facts, they should either source it or be specific enough that someone can tell if theyre just full of crap, as is far too common on slashdot?
Why is it, in most slashdot threads, when someone is called on uncited, vague, un-backed up claims, their response is inevitably NOT to provide a source or citation, but to lash out as if its everyone elses fault that they cant provide some token of credibility? Good gracious if the poster had a specific instance in mind, he could have given SOMETHING that could have been googled or looked up rather than pouting and acting like a 3 year old about it.
As for why I dont accept such claims without a source, years of hearing Bush attacked for "2 unauthorized wars", only to find out upon researching it that every one of the Bushs' wars were authorized by congress (In the case of Bush jr, by landslide votes), as well as other similar lies, have made me incredibly cynical of any "fact" posted on slashdot without citation. Until someone gives me some reason to trust them as credible, I assume everything they say is at LEAST out of context or heavily spun, if not a complete fabrication.
One other thing-- single user mode is (unless im mistaken) just runlevel 1, and (again, unless im mistaken) could be subverted by modifying the rc1.d scripts so that your virus loads before the shell prompt drops.