May as well ask why they don't just wire a ZPM or three into the gate and gate back home.
No, that's actually a much better question. When they gated to Atlantis, they brought along Naquadah generators. They rushed to plan the Atlantis trip in a couple of days. They had been planning this mission to wherever the eighth chevron led for years, apparently---long enough to develop a computer game send it out to the population, have someone solve it, then bring that person out there and have him figure out how to solve the real thing. You mean to tell me that the Atlantis mission, planned in two days, was planned better than this mission, which had been planned for years? Sure the decision to go through the gate at the end was rushed, but they hauled tons of equipment through. Why no Mark II naquadah generators or ZPMs? They might not be able to gate home with them, but it certainly could have solved a fair number of their more serious problems. They're either all Too Dumb to Live or it's a really bad case of Plot Induced Stupidity. Either way, it's painful.
Whoah. Stop right there. Rodney was a non-regular recurring character in SG-1 for at least two seasons before Atlantis. Calling him a stand-in for Sam is a stretch. If anything, he was the complete opposite of Sam. She was a cool, calm, rarely cocky scientist/soldier. He was a smartass, arrogant character that doesn't really parallel anybody in SG-1. If anything, Teyla was closer to a stand-in for Sam than McKay, both in personality and gender. I do agree about Sheppard and Ronon, to some degree, though Jack was never that sarcastic.
Weir was an awesome character, though, nothing at all like any SG-1 character. Ditto for Woolsey. I particularly liked how that character evolved over the course of the show. And both doctors were good characters in very different ways.
The problem with Universe is that there are exactly zero strong characters.
Their fearless leader broke down under the stress and resigned from the world, one little bit at a time. "A sharper, tougher Jack O'Neill?" Hardly. He's no Jack O'Neill. He's at best a General Landry, if that.
Chloe is an okay character, even showing potential for leadership in the early episodes, but in spite of her potential, they haven't really done much with her---it's like they forgot who she was and suddenly replaced her with a fragile little flower that needs to be protected. Totally lame.
Chloe's boyfriend is the most irritating character in the world. He's completely uninteresting---a very flat character with minimal backstory, minimal personality, and he nearly dies in almost every episode, but never actually dies and stays dead, to such a degree that I've started referring to him as Kenny.
Ronald Greer feels like basically a rehash of Aiden Ford---your standard military stereotype. There should probably be more characters like this, but such characters demand at least one strong foil with more common sense and restraint, which this show very much lacks.
The main scientist is a sociopath. He is completely unlikable.
Camile is okay. She's not very likable, but at least she is interesting in an early Woolsey sort of way. Her character desperately needs to develop, though.
Lt. Johansen is... well, she seems like she is usually relegated to the background, and the plots where she is in the foreground are all painful.
The gamer boy is pretty much the only really likable one of the bunch, but too much of what he does is completely implausible; there's no way a civilian would get sent into harm's way a tenth as often as he does.
And none of the characters have a history. In Atlantis, the main characters got an interesting backstory fairly early on. Many of them had an interesting backstory before the show even started. The backstory continued to grow throughout the show. About all we know about any of the characters is that the colonel had an affair with Johansen, that the gamer boy's mother has AIDS, and that the sociopath scientist had a girlfriend on Earth who is now dead. So after almost two seasons, the characters are all remarkably flat. That's not to say that characters have to have a backstory, but it is a quick way to do character development, and I guess the real point is that there's not much character development going on in Universe at all. Everything they do is pretty much predictable based on stereotypes and very shallow understandings of the characters' nature.
And the plots aren't all that interesting. In previous shows, they interacted with some other race or group of people in nearly every episode. In Universe, they mostly interact with planets full of plants. Each episode, I felt like I got maybe 15 minutes of story packed into 45 minutes of show. They can't kill off very many characters because they would run out too quickly. They can't add new characters very easily, either. And half the plots lately seem to be pure fantasy, with things happening th
although i'm sad they are pulling it i'm still more annoyed by them yanking Atlantis in two episodes with zero warning - and leaving a huge story line just sitting out there.
Really? They pulled it at the last minute? You'd never know it from the way the show ended. I sort of expected it to end after the standard 5 seasons, just as it did. They didn't do a season-by-season contract extension for five more years like they did with SG-1, but it was pretty clear from watching the finale that they at least somewhat expected the show to end. The season 5 finale wasn't a cliffhanger like most or all the previous seasons. It ended with the wraith attack stopped and Atlantis sitting safely in the San Francisco Bay. They even wrapped up most of the minor plot lines---whether McKay would get together with Keller, who Ronan's love interest would be, etc. All in all, it felt like a really solid way to wrap up the show.
Well how about we create a bill banning all private internet service providers and transferring that service to a socialist government organization, per clause in the US Constitution establishing a government-run mail (communications) service?
You're half right. The government should own the last mile wire infrastructure, and should lease access to ISPs that want to provide service. Those ISPs can then lease backbone services from long haul wire providers, provide routing infrastructure, etc. By doing that, instead of it costing millions of dollars to add a new ISP in a city, it only costs thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs. That huge difference in cost of entry means that there will be more competition in internet service, and fewer communities will have to live with a monopoly or duopoly, thus eliminating the problems that make government regulation of things like net neutrality necessary.
If there were competition in the ISP space, the market would decide, and companies pulling dirty tricks with bandwidth would eventually lose out to companies that don't. The only reason the market can't solve the problem now is that the cost of adding a new ISP to most areas exceeds what you could possibly earn in any reasonable period of time, and that will continue to be the case as long as every single ISP has to run all of its own lines to every house that it wants to serve (with the exception of DSL CLECs, but DSL is probably not viable in the long term).
Corporations do not do infrastructure well, just as government does not do services well. Government does infrastructure well, and corporations compete to offer services well, but only when they don't have to provide infrastructure. BTW, I'm strongly in favor of the same approach being used for cellular towers, and for precisely the same reason.
To call those against Net Neutrality as "pro-corporate" is a terrible mistake, because a lot of large companies back net neutrality - including Google and Amazon.
It's more accurately "pro-big-corporate". Sure, Google and Amazon kvetch about net neutrality, but the reality of the matter is that they are big enough that they aren't really affected. Comcast would never make YouTube unusable because their customers would burn the place down. And even in the worst case, YouTube et al are forced to mirror high bandwidth content using services like Akamai, which they can readily afford to do.
The folks who are penalized by lack of net neutrality are the small businesses---the next Facebook or Amazon or Google or YouTube. By limiting access to the free and open internet and essentially mandating the much more expensive distributed delivery of content, the entrenched big businesses become nearly unstoppable. Thus, although those big companies may complain about net neutrality, they're unlikely to do all that much to try to enforce it. After all, the anti-net-neutrality crowd is working in their best interests, too, at least when it comes to long-term profitability.
Don't get me wrong, in principle, Akamai is a good thing, particularly for multimedia content, as it reduces load on the backbones, reduces latency, and reduces jitter in data delivery. However, if non-Akamaized services are not merely less then ideal, but rather unusable, that tips the balance in a way that is completely unacceptable, and Comcast and cronies should be rightfully spanked with fines or, if the government is unwilling to do so, lawsuits.
Such a notion is absurd. Are you trying to tell me that:
A person being judged for computer crimes can reasonably be tried by people who think a "bootstrap loader" is somebody who carries parts of shoes around at a factory, that triple DES is the abbreviation for some government agency in Arizona, or that a computer is "one of those new things those young people use"?
Someone being tried for stealing to feed his family can adequately be judged by someone who thinks the poor are a "problem to be dealt with"?
Someone being tried for securities fraud can get a fair trial from someone who thinks that securities are those people who walk around buildings to make sure nobody steals anything?
A man being tried for rape can be adequately tried by an all-female jury full of rape victims?
Someone being tried for drug use can be adequately tried by folks who are too old to have ever used them?
Someone being tried for dissemination of classified information can be tried by someone who thinks that the term "press" only applies to Fox news?
I'm sorry, but people who do not come from similar walks of life and who do not have similar backgrounds are not your peers. That was not what the founding fathers intended. A peer is someone of similar age, education, social class (and yes, there most certainly are economic classes in the United States), and from the same geographical region. Randomly selected people are seldom your peers in any meaningful sense of the word.
Frankly, I'd much rather be judged by trained judges than by a jury of randomly selected pseudo-peers. At least they are guaranteed to be reasonably well educated. There's a reason that (legitimate) corporate civil suits rarely involve a jury hearing the case, and it's not because it isn't an option.
Yeah, that's really the fundamental problem with these sorts of filters. Advanced vocabulary rarely occurs on simple sites, so the presence of such words should definitely mean a higher reading level, but the absence of them does not necessarily indicate a lower reading level. For example, Slashdot talks about relatively advanced topics, but mostly does so in simple language, with only a limited amount of jargon, so it gets misreported as "simple" when the average person still won't be able to make heads or tails of it.
That and their algorithms for deciding what words are basic also suck. For example, this is definitely not what I would call basic. Helpful hint: when normal people see the word "programmatically", their eyes glaze over and they begin to drool uncontrollably.
Yeah, but this decision hurts American companies, granting special rights to foreign companies. I'd expect Congress to practically trample each other rushing into their chambers to pass a law that overturns this. Of course, it could go either way whether they pass a law to give back the right of first sale or to similarly take it away for American-made goods. Just depends on which greedy dirtbag companies get their lobbyists in the door first.
The critical point you're missing, at least for deployed military personnel, is that even though they are not on duty 24x7, all of their network access is likely to go through the military. It's like if your company mandated that you could only get home Internet service through them and then blocked sites not relevant to your work from being reachable from your home.
It's also particularly problematic because the government has a fundamental responsibility to not interfere with the freedom of the press that random employers do not. That goes triply when the government is also the sole provider of information, as is the case for deployed military personnel.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no, it isn't within their legitimate power to dictate such things. To do so certainly violates the spirit of the Constitution, if not the letter.
Your analogy falls flat because it's not about the jelly beans, but rather the workers. Ensuring that the military never leak secrets obtained through other means is relatively straightforward. You tell them not to talk about it. Ensuring that the military never consumes secrets obtained through other means, however, is infeasible.
It would be like mandating that your workers cannot have any trace of red jelly beans in their bloodstream (*), and insisting on a blood test every week to make certain of it, and using that to determine whether your assembly line is putting out only green jelly beans. After all, your workers eat only your brand of jelly beans while at work, and similarly don't ever consume other brands of jelly beans while at home. Right?
The problem with your logic, simply put, is that military folks are exposed to this information indirectly anyway. One person hears his/her wife/husband/friend talk about it in a phone conversation or email, and later, that person talks about it with another person, and eventually the information spreads. In short, you are assuming a closed system with no unfiltered inputs, whereas in reality, the military can feasibly filter only a small percentage of the inputs to that system. The real world just doesn't work that way.
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(*) Yes, I know it's almost certainly not feasible to determine whether someone has consumed red jelly beans using a blood test. It's just an analogy, and a bad one at that.
You inherently can't steal knowledge. Therefore your entire argument is moot. This isn't about stolen physical goods (where the original is lost). This isn't even about exact copies of documents (which can be protected by copyright). This is in large part about paraphrased descriptions of documents that contain information of historical relevance. The only reasonable comparison would be with corporate trade secrets, and even that is a stretch given the compelling argument that the public has an inherent right to know much of this information.
More to the point, the argument is not about whether it is acceptable to possess a copy of the information. The argument is about whether it is useful to continue to pretend that classifying information is still useful when the information is readily available. When it comes to corporate secrets, as I understand it, once published, that information is no longer secret, so republication cannot typically result in civil or criminal charges; only the first act of publication is illegal.
Based on that, I would say that any expectation that our government's secrets should be somehow taboo under similar circumstances is prima facie absurd. Once published, it is no longer secret by any useful definition, and any notion that the material is somehow classified is pretty much bureaucratic pedantry.
Nah. I'd imagine they have him in solitary because of what happens to accused rapists in prison.... They have a tendency to end up dead. That would be particularly awkward in this case because everybody would immediately accuse the British government of being behind it.
Except that the military isn't a closed ecosystem. That becomes useless when the answer to the question can be as simple as "My [wife, brother, friend, preacher,...] told me in a phone conversation last week."
No, this has nothing to do with any of the altruistic purposes that folks have suggested. The reason is pure and simple. The government wants to punish the news media for its role in distributing the information. Expect other federal organizations to add similar blocks in the next few days. I'm actually surprised it didn't happen sooner. It's just like how the previous administration punished the media for being too critical of Bush by throwing their folks out of the White House press corps. The Obama administration likes to use the word "transparency", but in truth, like all governments, they only want transparency when it doesn't cast them or their cronies in a bad light.
If the federal government costs those news organizations enough eyes, they'll think twice before crossing them again, and more to the point, so will all the other news organizations. This is why freedom of the press must be near-absolute, and why the government should be disallowed from any direct action to block websites for any reason. (By "direct action", I'm leaving a loophole for K-12 public schools to pay a non-government vendor to maintain a block list.) The government has shown time and time again that it cannot be trusted to sit back and allow the free press to criticize it and air its dirty laundry---that it cannot be trusted to allow the free press to do its job as a watchdog and as a check and balance against government abuse. Because it cannot resist the temptation to interfere inappropriately, it must not be allowed to interfere at all.
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down. That, of course, would be unhealthy for the workforce. There's a reason we have more demand during the day, and that's because people are and rightfully should be awake and doing their work during those hours. Any attempt to force usage to be more spread out through such ridiculous tactics is only going to cause economic, psychological, and physiological harm.
And I'm smack in the middle of the silicon valley, and my only choices are DSL, U-Verse, or wireless. The wireless costs a small fortune for lousy service. With DSL, the best I can get is 3 Mbit down, 768 kbit up. With the U-verse service, as I understand it, I lose my ability to ever go back to DSL if it doesn't work correctly, which is simply too big a risk. (If I could get U-Verse on the dry second pair, I'd be all over that.) That's pretty sad.
I basically agree with you, but I'd go one step farther.
It's highly questionable whether the machines are even capable of identifying "suspicious areas of the image." But suppose for a moment that they are.
Suppose we live in a world of fluffy pink unicorns and candy canes. The fact that we're even posing such a hypothetical scenario is part of the problem; we shouldn't even give them the benefit of the doubt. These pieces of garbage should never have been ordered at taxpayer expense until there was consistent, demonstrable proof of their effectiveness. The safety debate shouldn't even be happening now. The safety, privacy, and medical records debates should be happening ten years from now when they finally build a machine that is effective (read "full body CT scan or MRI scan"), and these worthless, overpriced toys shouldn't even be here.
The fact of the matter is that people described in great detail a number of fairly straightforward attack vectors for circumventing these things before the government even ordered them. The whole "body cavity" problem is so obvious that our government buying these things verges on pure comedy. And before anyone makes the irrelevant claim that you can't hide enough explosives in a body cavity to bring down a plane, I would point out that 9/11 involved 19 people. How much explosive material could you fit in 19 body cavities? If the answer is, as I suspect, "plenty", then these scanners are worthless even if they can detect explosives on the outside of your body.
The only way to reliably detect such things is by knowing your passengers. Even enhanced patdowns are useless against organized terrorist attacks. Profiling really is the only effective means of combatting terrorism, and those who say otherwise are kidding themselves.
Likewise. I'm pretty sure Apple has never had any product with less than a year warranty on hardware, or at least not since I started using their hardware in the mid 90s. Maybe the original poster is thinking of the three month warranty for random (non-hardware) user problems?
Ah, so the rapist is not liable for his crime at this point, then, and the woman who was raped should be put on trial instead? Is that what you're saying?
No. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the rapist is wrong for doing what he did, but the woman is also wrong for not taking the slightest bit of personal responsibility for her well being. It is possible for more than one person to be at fault, you know.:-)
In my opinion, both parties should go through legal hell---the perpetrator for attacking the company, and the company for being grossly negligent. In particular, if there was any HIPAA data involved, that company should be spanked with a major fine. There are laws requiring health care providers to secure their systems in specific ways for good reason. This isn't just some random firm we're talking about here.
And, in case you didn't know it, the warranty on those Apple devices is 9 months (at least for the iPhone). That's shorter than most in the electronics field.
Uh, last I checked, the iPhone warranty is one year.
"But your honor, she could have prevented this by wearing a locking chastity belt and carrying a gun. It's HER FAULT that she got raped!"
No, more like "But your honor, she strolled drunk through Central Park at night completely naked and shouted "TAKE ME!" at every man she saw. It is in large part her fault that she got raped. There's definitely a line between reasonably intelligent behavior and pure idiocy that simply should not be crossed, beyond which you are just setting yourself up for getting screwed.
When you give someone access to a machine, you can reasonably expect them to do whatever they're allowed to do. It's not unauthorized access if you haven't taken away that person's access. Sure, you might have a civil case if they get in there and destroy things, but at least some portion of the fault does lie with the victim for choosing its employees poorly, for giving access that they should not have given, and for failing to take it away when they realized it could be abused.
Actually, a better analogy would be someone who consents to sex regularly for months, then dumps his/her partner, but gets a little tipsy and allows that former partner into his/her room anyway, and then accuses the partner of rape because even though he/she didn't say know, he/she didn't explicitly say yes. It's not that the act wasn't wrong, just that there is more than enough blame on both sides to go around, so it's not nearly as clear-cut.
No one should have root passwords. The mere existence of a root password is a fundamental security hole. If everyone has a user account and certain people have sudo privileges, you have:
An audit log
A trivial way to cut off that person's admin access (with or without cutting off all access)
Combine this with a proper centralized authentication/directory services system, and you're done.
Slashdot Mirror
That was supposed to be a CSI spoof? I thought it was a spoof of Las Vegas.
No, that's actually a much better question. When they gated to Atlantis, they brought along Naquadah generators. They rushed to plan the Atlantis trip in a couple of days. They had been planning this mission to wherever the eighth chevron led for years, apparently---long enough to develop a computer game send it out to the population, have someone solve it, then bring that person out there and have him figure out how to solve the real thing. You mean to tell me that the Atlantis mission, planned in two days, was planned better than this mission, which had been planned for years? Sure the decision to go through the gate at the end was rushed, but they hauled tons of equipment through. Why no Mark II naquadah generators or ZPMs? They might not be able to gate home with them, but it certainly could have solved a fair number of their more serious problems. They're either all Too Dumb to Live or it's a really bad case of Plot Induced Stupidity. Either way, it's painful.
Begging your pardon, but Daedalus survived that long sitting still and Destiny can't travel for more than a few hours at a time without cooling down.
Whoah. Stop right there. Rodney was a non-regular recurring character in SG-1 for at least two seasons before Atlantis. Calling him a stand-in for Sam is a stretch. If anything, he was the complete opposite of Sam. She was a cool, calm, rarely cocky scientist/soldier. He was a smartass, arrogant character that doesn't really parallel anybody in SG-1. If anything, Teyla was closer to a stand-in for Sam than McKay, both in personality and gender. I do agree about Sheppard and Ronon, to some degree, though Jack was never that sarcastic.
Weir was an awesome character, though, nothing at all like any SG-1 character. Ditto for Woolsey. I particularly liked how that character evolved over the course of the show. And both doctors were good characters in very different ways.
The problem with Universe is that there are exactly zero strong characters.
And none of the characters have a history. In Atlantis, the main characters got an interesting backstory fairly early on. Many of them had an interesting backstory before the show even started. The backstory continued to grow throughout the show. About all we know about any of the characters is that the colonel had an affair with Johansen, that the gamer boy's mother has AIDS, and that the sociopath scientist had a girlfriend on Earth who is now dead. So after almost two seasons, the characters are all remarkably flat. That's not to say that characters have to have a backstory, but it is a quick way to do character development, and I guess the real point is that there's not much character development going on in Universe at all. Everything they do is pretty much predictable based on stereotypes and very shallow understandings of the characters' nature.
And the plots aren't all that interesting. In previous shows, they interacted with some other race or group of people in nearly every episode. In Universe, they mostly interact with planets full of plants. Each episode, I felt like I got maybe 15 minutes of story packed into 45 minutes of show. They can't kill off very many characters because they would run out too quickly. They can't add new characters very easily, either. And half the plots lately seem to be pure fantasy, with things happening th
Really? They pulled it at the last minute? You'd never know it from the way the show ended. I sort of expected it to end after the standard 5 seasons, just as it did. They didn't do a season-by-season contract extension for five more years like they did with SG-1, but it was pretty clear from watching the finale that they at least somewhat expected the show to end. The season 5 finale wasn't a cliffhanger like most or all the previous seasons. It ended with the wraith attack stopped and Atlantis sitting safely in the San Francisco Bay. They even wrapped up most of the minor plot lines---whether McKay would get together with Keller, who Ronan's love interest would be, etc. All in all, it felt like a really solid way to wrap up the show.
You're half right. The government should own the last mile wire infrastructure, and should lease access to ISPs that want to provide service. Those ISPs can then lease backbone services from long haul wire providers, provide routing infrastructure, etc. By doing that, instead of it costing millions of dollars to add a new ISP in a city, it only costs thousands of dollars in infrastructure costs. That huge difference in cost of entry means that there will be more competition in internet service, and fewer communities will have to live with a monopoly or duopoly, thus eliminating the problems that make government regulation of things like net neutrality necessary.
If there were competition in the ISP space, the market would decide, and companies pulling dirty tricks with bandwidth would eventually lose out to companies that don't. The only reason the market can't solve the problem now is that the cost of adding a new ISP to most areas exceeds what you could possibly earn in any reasonable period of time, and that will continue to be the case as long as every single ISP has to run all of its own lines to every house that it wants to serve (with the exception of DSL CLECs, but DSL is probably not viable in the long term).
Corporations do not do infrastructure well, just as government does not do services well. Government does infrastructure well, and corporations compete to offer services well, but only when they don't have to provide infrastructure. BTW, I'm strongly in favor of the same approach being used for cellular towers, and for precisely the same reason.
It's more accurately "pro-big-corporate". Sure, Google and Amazon kvetch about net neutrality, but the reality of the matter is that they are big enough that they aren't really affected. Comcast would never make YouTube unusable because their customers would burn the place down. And even in the worst case, YouTube et al are forced to mirror high bandwidth content using services like Akamai, which they can readily afford to do.
The folks who are penalized by lack of net neutrality are the small businesses---the next Facebook or Amazon or Google or YouTube. By limiting access to the free and open internet and essentially mandating the much more expensive distributed delivery of content, the entrenched big businesses become nearly unstoppable. Thus, although those big companies may complain about net neutrality, they're unlikely to do all that much to try to enforce it. After all, the anti-net-neutrality crowd is working in their best interests, too, at least when it comes to long-term profitability.
Don't get me wrong, in principle, Akamai is a good thing, particularly for multimedia content, as it reduces load on the backbones, reduces latency, and reduces jitter in data delivery. However, if non-Akamaized services are not merely less then ideal, but rather unusable, that tips the balance in a way that is completely unacceptable, and Comcast and cronies should be rightfully spanked with fines or, if the government is unwilling to do so, lawsuits.
Such a notion is absurd. Are you trying to tell me that:
I'm sorry, but people who do not come from similar walks of life and who do not have similar backgrounds are not your peers. That was not what the founding fathers intended. A peer is someone of similar age, education, social class (and yes, there most certainly are economic classes in the United States), and from the same geographical region. Randomly selected people are seldom your peers in any meaningful sense of the word.
Frankly, I'd much rather be judged by trained judges than by a jury of randomly selected pseudo-peers. At least they are guaranteed to be reasonably well educated. There's a reason that (legitimate) corporate civil suits rarely involve a jury hearing the case, and it's not because it isn't an option.
Yeah, that's really the fundamental problem with these sorts of filters. Advanced vocabulary rarely occurs on simple sites, so the presence of such words should definitely mean a higher reading level, but the absence of them does not necessarily indicate a lower reading level. For example, Slashdot talks about relatively advanced topics, but mostly does so in simple language, with only a limited amount of jargon, so it gets misreported as "simple" when the average person still won't be able to make heads or tails of it.
That and their algorithms for deciding what words are basic also suck. For example, this is definitely not what I would call basic. Helpful hint: when normal people see the word "programmatically", their eyes glaze over and they begin to drool uncontrollably.
Yeah, but this decision hurts American companies, granting special rights to foreign companies. I'd expect Congress to practically trample each other rushing into their chambers to pass a law that overturns this. Of course, it could go either way whether they pass a law to give back the right of first sale or to similarly take it away for American-made goods. Just depends on which greedy dirtbag companies get their lobbyists in the door first.
The critical point you're missing, at least for deployed military personnel, is that even though they are not on duty 24x7, all of their network access is likely to go through the military. It's like if your company mandated that you could only get home Internet service through them and then blocked sites not relevant to your work from being reachable from your home.
It's also particularly problematic because the government has a fundamental responsibility to not interfere with the freedom of the press that random employers do not. That goes triply when the government is also the sole provider of information, as is the case for deployed military personnel.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no, it isn't within their legitimate power to dictate such things. To do so certainly violates the spirit of the Constitution, if not the letter.
Your analogy falls flat because it's not about the jelly beans, but rather the workers. Ensuring that the military never leak secrets obtained through other means is relatively straightforward. You tell them not to talk about it. Ensuring that the military never consumes secrets obtained through other means, however, is infeasible.
It would be like mandating that your workers cannot have any trace of red jelly beans in their bloodstream (*), and insisting on a blood test every week to make certain of it, and using that to determine whether your assembly line is putting out only green jelly beans. After all, your workers eat only your brand of jelly beans while at work, and similarly don't ever consume other brands of jelly beans while at home. Right?
The problem with your logic, simply put, is that military folks are exposed to this information indirectly anyway. One person hears his/her wife/husband/friend talk about it in a phone conversation or email, and later, that person talks about it with another person, and eventually the information spreads. In short, you are assuming a closed system with no unfiltered inputs, whereas in reality, the military can feasibly filter only a small percentage of the inputs to that system. The real world just doesn't work that way.
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(*) Yes, I know it's almost certainly not feasible to determine whether someone has consumed red jelly beans using a blood test. It's just an analogy, and a bad one at that.
You inherently can't steal knowledge. Therefore your entire argument is moot. This isn't about stolen physical goods (where the original is lost). This isn't even about exact copies of documents (which can be protected by copyright). This is in large part about paraphrased descriptions of documents that contain information of historical relevance. The only reasonable comparison would be with corporate trade secrets, and even that is a stretch given the compelling argument that the public has an inherent right to know much of this information.
More to the point, the argument is not about whether it is acceptable to possess a copy of the information. The argument is about whether it is useful to continue to pretend that classifying information is still useful when the information is readily available. When it comes to corporate secrets, as I understand it, once published, that information is no longer secret, so republication cannot typically result in civil or criminal charges; only the first act of publication is illegal.
Based on that, I would say that any expectation that our government's secrets should be somehow taboo under similar circumstances is prima facie absurd. Once published, it is no longer secret by any useful definition, and any notion that the material is somehow classified is pretty much bureaucratic pedantry.
Nah. I'd imagine they have him in solitary because of what happens to accused rapists in prison.... They have a tendency to end up dead. That would be particularly awkward in this case because everybody would immediately accuse the British government of being behind it.
Except that the military isn't a closed ecosystem. That becomes useless when the answer to the question can be as simple as "My [wife, brother, friend, preacher, ...] told me in a phone conversation last week."
No, this has nothing to do with any of the altruistic purposes that folks have suggested. The reason is pure and simple. The government wants to punish the news media for its role in distributing the information. Expect other federal organizations to add similar blocks in the next few days. I'm actually surprised it didn't happen sooner. It's just like how the previous administration punished the media for being too critical of Bush by throwing their folks out of the White House press corps. The Obama administration likes to use the word "transparency", but in truth, like all governments, they only want transparency when it doesn't cast them or their cronies in a bad light.
If the federal government costs those news organizations enough eyes, they'll think twice before crossing them again, and more to the point, so will all the other news organizations. This is why freedom of the press must be near-absolute, and why the government should be disallowed from any direct action to block websites for any reason. (By "direct action", I'm leaving a loophole for K-12 public schools to pay a non-government vendor to maintain a block list.) The government has shown time and time again that it cannot be trusted to sit back and allow the free press to criticize it and air its dirty laundry---that it cannot be trusted to allow the free press to do its job as a watchdog and as a check and balance against government abuse. Because it cannot resist the temptation to interfere inappropriately, it must not be allowed to interfere at all.
There's nothing rational about time-of-day metering. Taken to the extreme, it can only lead to an absurd dystopia in which one third of your workforce operates during each of the three eight-hour shifts so that you keep your power and Internet bills down. That, of course, would be unhealthy for the workforce. There's a reason we have more demand during the day, and that's because people are and rightfully should be awake and doing their work during those hours. Any attempt to force usage to be more spread out through such ridiculous tactics is only going to cause economic, psychological, and physiological harm.
And I'm smack in the middle of the silicon valley, and my only choices are DSL, U-Verse, or wireless. The wireless costs a small fortune for lousy service. With DSL, the best I can get is 3 Mbit down, 768 kbit up. With the U-verse service, as I understand it, I lose my ability to ever go back to DSL if it doesn't work correctly, which is simply too big a risk. (If I could get U-Verse on the dry second pair, I'd be all over that.) That's pretty sad.
I basically agree with you, but I'd go one step farther.
Suppose we live in a world of fluffy pink unicorns and candy canes. The fact that we're even posing such a hypothetical scenario is part of the problem; we shouldn't even give them the benefit of the doubt. These pieces of garbage should never have been ordered at taxpayer expense until there was consistent, demonstrable proof of their effectiveness. The safety debate shouldn't even be happening now. The safety, privacy, and medical records debates should be happening ten years from now when they finally build a machine that is effective (read "full body CT scan or MRI scan"), and these worthless, overpriced toys shouldn't even be here.
The fact of the matter is that people described in great detail a number of fairly straightforward attack vectors for circumventing these things before the government even ordered them. The whole "body cavity" problem is so obvious that our government buying these things verges on pure comedy. And before anyone makes the irrelevant claim that you can't hide enough explosives in a body cavity to bring down a plane, I would point out that 9/11 involved 19 people. How much explosive material could you fit in 19 body cavities? If the answer is, as I suspect, "plenty", then these scanners are worthless even if they can detect explosives on the outside of your body.
The only way to reliably detect such things is by knowing your passengers. Even enhanced patdowns are useless against organized terrorist attacks. Profiling really is the only effective means of combatting terrorism, and those who say otherwise are kidding themselves.
LOL.
Cats.
Likewise. I'm pretty sure Apple has never had any product with less than a year warranty on hardware, or at least not since I started using their hardware in the mid 90s. Maybe the original poster is thinking of the three month warranty for random (non-hardware) user problems?
No. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the rapist is wrong for doing what he did, but the woman is also wrong for not taking the slightest bit of personal responsibility for her well being. It is possible for more than one person to be at fault, you know. :-)
In my opinion, both parties should go through legal hell---the perpetrator for attacking the company, and the company for being grossly negligent. In particular, if there was any HIPAA data involved, that company should be spanked with a major fine. There are laws requiring health care providers to secure their systems in specific ways for good reason. This isn't just some random firm we're talking about here.
Don't forget CNN.
Ah!!! Throw it back! Throw it back! :-D
Uh, last I checked, the iPhone warranty is one year.
No, more like "But your honor, she strolled drunk through Central Park at night completely naked and shouted "TAKE ME!" at every man she saw. It is in large part her fault that she got raped. There's definitely a line between reasonably intelligent behavior and pure idiocy that simply should not be crossed, beyond which you are just setting yourself up for getting screwed.
When you give someone access to a machine, you can reasonably expect them to do whatever they're allowed to do. It's not unauthorized access if you haven't taken away that person's access. Sure, you might have a civil case if they get in there and destroy things, but at least some portion of the fault does lie with the victim for choosing its employees poorly, for giving access that they should not have given, and for failing to take it away when they realized it could be abused.
Actually, a better analogy would be someone who consents to sex regularly for months, then dumps his/her partner, but gets a little tipsy and allows that former partner into his/her room anyway, and then accuses the partner of rape because even though he/she didn't say know, he/she didn't explicitly say yes. It's not that the act wasn't wrong, just that there is more than enough blame on both sides to go around, so it's not nearly as clear-cut.
No one should have root passwords. The mere existence of a root password is a fundamental security hole. If everyone has a user account and certain people have sudo privileges, you have:
Combine this with a proper centralized authentication/directory services system, and you're done.