You are confusing its purpose with what it actually does to accomplish its purpose.
It's purpose is to ensure writers/musicians/artists are compensated for the value they add to society, so as to encourage more contributions to the nation's culture.
The way it accomplishes this is by explicitly limiting for a certain term every single citizen's right to reproduce anything they read, see, or hear, and giving the originator of the speech, art, text, or music a limited monopoly on the right to copy that work.
It is a very heavy restriction of the first amendment - just think about all the things you can't do because of copyright. That impact must remain balanced with the benefit artists, writers, and performers add to society. You must recognize that copyright takes away from the people at large and gives to only a small fraction of the population. It is not a bad thing, but it definitely can become a very bad thing if things get out of balance.
However, don't confuse a restriction on free speech with an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. The Constitution gives Congress the right to set copyright and patent law, but it must only be for the specific purpose of promoting the arts.
That's part of the framework you should have for every question of copyright that comes up. If you can ask that question and honestly say "yes", then it may be constitutional. If you have to say "no", then it should be unconstitutional.
The other part of the framework, which was used from 1776 until about the 1950's but has since fairly fallen out of fashion among law makers, is to approach each restriction of rights with care - to restrict the rights of the people only as much as is necessary to achieve the goal set forth in the Constitution: to promote the arts and sciences for the good of society as a whole.
If the only people who benefit are music industry moguls with large collections of copyright, then the law is probably unjust. If the people as a whole benefit because more artists are encouraged to produce new works, then go for it.
This particular law I don't see how you can argue that it does not stifle creativity. We have a whole host of new works that were created out of public domain works, and this ruling puts a stop to that. In what way does that benefit society?
Noone who thinks first swims in or eats fish from this river, because of the chemical plants upstream.
I don't understand this, it seems like you're leaving out some punctuation:
Noone, who thinks first, swims in or eats fish from this river, because of the chemical plants upstream.
But no one in their right mind would swim in or eat fish from a river because of upstream chemical plants. I think you should not listen to what this Noone guy tells you.;)
I had to use a captcha for work once, and the captcha itself was incorrect. I have no idea what key combination would have worked, but what the captcha said certainly did. It had an audio option, so I tried it, but the audio was so garbled I couldn't pick out a single word, let alone the three necessary to complete the captcha.
I like captcha as a basic form of protection from bots, but when it keeps me from accessing a website it is beyond worthless.
Nah, Obama is turning out to be a huge screwup. His international relations leave people with no confidence whatsoever in the US, which hurts us a lot internationally.
Domestically has already hit approval ratings lower than Bush's first term - granted, Bush had 9/11 and his decline from 90% to 50% was rapid, and it was punctuate by several highs that propped it up. Obama's decline is steady and quick, with no real swings back upward, and he's right now within about 15-20 points of Bush's all-time low (which took 8 years to reach). If he doesn't do something to stem the tide he'll have the lowest approval ratings in history before his first term is up - below even President Truman, and far below President Bush.
The guy has already been put into hiding. He'll either have an accident or be labeled a terrorist.
What are you talking about? Assange is known for disappearing for months on end, so much so that it's well known that it pisses off his Wikileaks staff every time he does it.
He isn't in hiding, he just likes to pretend like he is important enough to need it.
Trust me, if the government wanted to kill him, the story wouldn't be "Pentagon looking for Wikileaks founder for questioning". What you would have is an astute journalist asking a Pentagon official "What about Wikileaks founder Julianne Assange? Are you going to attempt to bring him in for questioning?" to which the official would respond "Who? We're only interested in the intelligence officer who leaked classified information."
It would be a complete non-story if they were actually trying to kill the guy, and the way it would go down is Assange would go on yet another extended disappearance, except this time he'd never come back. Poof, gone, nice and quiet, with little - if any media attention.
There is a reason for classification. Releasing classified documents knowingly is treason against the United States. It is written very clearly in laws.
Only if doing so puts American citizens at risk - either soldiers or civilians. Since in this case it's hard to argue it does either, it isn't treason for anybody involved. A breach of protocol and a career ending move for the soldier, absolutely, but it may not even be a crime according to the UCMJ.
In any case, Assange is not a US citizen, he cannot, by definition, commit treason against the US. The whistle-blower himself has not been charged with treason, so I'm not sure how you can come to such conclusions.
What this is is Assange trying to make this a much bigger deal than it actually is. It's like when someone gets arrested for someone, and the police bring people who were with him at the time in for questioning. It's really no different.
The truth is, there is very little, if any, value in killing him. The leaker would have just gone to one of a dozen different websites instead if not for Wikileaks. Also, if they were planning on killing him you wouldn't hear a word about the Pentagon trying to get in touch with him for questioning. They would be completely ignoring the issue. They'd be all over the officer and wouldn't even mention Wikileaks except to say that's where the info was sent. One day Assange would go on another of his multi-month disappearances, but this time he'd simply never come back. Poof, gone, crackpot conspiracy theories would abound (and they'd be right) but they'd never be taken seriously.
No, what they want is to get information from him about the intelligence officer who turned in the information, and they want to see if they can convince him - by threat or bribery - to not release whatever else he may have that this guy leaked.
Movies are more entertaining and more likely to be factual than what is presented in a congressional hearing.
I don't know, I've seen enough Mythbusters to know that nearly everything that happens is exaggerated to the extreme for dramatic effect. Congressmen tend to preen a lot, but there's usually quite a bit of truth in there.
This article demonstrates that not only do 'hit orders' exist, but they are not prohibited from using such orders against citizens who are constitutionally guaranteed to stand trial.
God damn, did you even read the link you posted?
The director of national intelligence affirmed rather bluntly today that the U.S. intelligence community has authority to target American citizens for assassination if they present a direct terrorist threat to the United States.... "Whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American has -- is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved." Blair explained. "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans."
According to U.S. officials, only a handful of Americans would be eligible for targeting by U.S. intelligence or military operations. The legal guidance is determined by the National Security Council and the Justice Department.
The emphasis is mine, obviously.
According to the article, the only people eligible for targeting by the CIA are people who are actively plotting to commit terrorism on US soil. Frankly, I'm all in favor of it. This would allow them to take out guys like Timothy Mcveigh before he could kill hundreds of Americans. Ostensibly they would attempt to bring him in first, and assassinate as a last resort, but the police and courts are not set up to prevent terrorism, only react to it, making this sort of thing necessary in extreme cases.
It's kind of like the cases where the cops have to shoot a guy to prevent him from killing a hostage. They bring the guy in if they can, but if not, he dies instead of innocent citizens.
More than likely, Assange is having his lawyers try to get some kind of amnesty deal in turn for testimony and/or returning the materials.
That's more than likely, but from what I've read Pentagon officials don't think they have any grounds to demand the leaked information from him. What he has done is no crime in the US, and he is not a US citizen, so they can't pursue any kind of extradition. If he comes to the US the best they can do, as I see it, is haul him in for questioning (without arresting him) and then let him go within 24 hours. That's it. In fact that's all the Pentagon has said they want from him - to question him about his source (who is in US custody).
They already have the guy who leaked the information, who did commit a crime (depending how the trial goes, a potentially serious one).
What they really want is to be sure no more info gets out, and if they can't do it with legal pressure, I'm sure they'll beg and plead as well.
Despite what some dumbasses may think, this is nowhere near worth the risk of an illegal assassination (all forms are illegal in the US), especially for a momentarily high profile, low value target.
While the CIA is known to have secret assassination programs (one was just shut down about a year ago), they are rare, small and they must pick their targets extremely carefully or everyone involved could all go to jail for a very long time. The CIA does not on anything resembling a regular basis assassinate people. A simple risk vs reward estimate will tell you why. The risks are huge, so the reward must also be huge. What exactly is the reward for killing Assange? A few documents related to killing civilians are released? Yeah, that won't look bad - assassinating a civilian for releasing information about murdered civilians. Hmmm...
I have a feeling that the US CIA operations portrayed in movies is about the same as they way movies portray cars blowing up on impact. In reality, it doesn't happen that way at all. In fact, to reproduce a movie-style car crash, you have to load a car up with a couple dozen gallon jugs full of gas and set it off with explosives. The worst it will do on its own is start a fire.
I'm guessing movie-style CIA operations are a lot like that - it looks really cool and intense and clandestine in the movies, but the reality is more likely a hell of a lot of paper pushing and careful observation.
The 2006 Lebanon War photographs controversies refers to instances of photojournalism from the 2006 Lebanon War that misrepresented scenes of death and destruction in Lebanon caused by Israeli air attacks. As a result of the scandal, Reuters fired freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, and the AP disciplined several others.[citation needed] Reuters also fired a photo editor, and implementing stricter controls on its photo-gathering process.
The controversy began as an investigation of documents by individual bloggers, and spread to print and television media sources.
I suppose you think bloggers can't dig up news too eh? All hail the "impartial" media, eh?
Indeed, there is nobody on earth who does anything because they believe it is wrong, or bad, or evil. Doing so is a blatant internal contradiction.
Take serial killers. They are almost always sociopaths, which makes a hell of a lot of sense. Sociopaths cannot distinguish between right and wrong. To them, helping someone fix a flat tire and killing them are like choosing between an apple and an orange. At that point it's just a matter of looking at what gives them the most reward, and if the rush of killing is greater than the satisfaction of helping, they will often kill. We see them as the most evil people on the planet, but they certainly don't see themselves that way. To them it's the right thing to do.
Take also tyrannical leaders. Pretty much all of them believe their power is a right, and it is their privelege to exercise it regardless of what happens to others. As such, oppressing the people to assure his power is not evil, it's what is right and wholesom because he must remain in power.
No doubt the soldiers in the video had rationalized away their actions. Perhaps they blamed all Iraqi's for the actions of the terrorists. Perhaps they felt the citizens supported the enemy, and by proxy they were enemies as well. Who knows? Perhaps they just made a bad judgement call, and thought the journalists actually were enemy combatants (they were apparently carrying guns out in the open - not usually something you expect of a journalist or non-combatant), and then thought the people who went to help them actually were going for their guns? In that case, it's nothing malicious, just a very, very bad judgment call on a battlefield - where, by the way, a slow decision can mean your death.
What you can be certain of, is that the soldiers didn't kill anybody because they believed it was wrong to do so. If they believed it were wrong, they would not have done it. In light of that, you must look into the soldiers side of the story, or story is incomplete.
The same is true with all stories that appear to only need one viewpoint. That is never the case.
I think you highly over-estimate what it takes to get top secret clearance. Many military guards in sensitive positions have Top Secret security clearance.
My brother did four years as a Marine infantry grunt and he had top secret clearance. Granted, most infantry grunts never have a need for top secret clearance, but my brother had it because he was on a special guard detail. It helped him quite a bit getting a decent security gig when his tour was up.
So yes, the guy with top secret clearance definitely could have been a "low level intel guy". I would expect all intel guys to have at least secret clearance, and a few of them would probably need a top secret clearance. I myself worked in an IT post on an army guard base for about six months (I'm non-military), and due to the fact that I had access to every hard drive on the network I was required to have confidential level clearance (one below secret). Also note that those with secret level clearance can be given top secret clearance by department heads on a case by case basis.
It's well within the realm of possibility that a low level intel guy (or even more likely, a non-intel related staff member of someone with top secret clearance) could seize an opportunity to grab some top secret videos - that's actually the most likely scenario, as top secret candidates are very well screened, and are highly unlikely to breach protocol.
What is politics but a PR play and Canada's current prime minister is way to image conscious to go anywhere near a Donny Crane.
Wow, I don't mean to be a douche and a pedant, but I had a really hard time parsing that sentence. Let me help you:
"What is politics but a PR play? Canada's current prime minister is way too image conscious to go anywhere near a Donny Crane."
It really doesn't work as one sentence; the two statements are not related. Trying to combine them makes the idea clumsy and confusing. You can add a comma before the "and" before Canada to make it grammatically correct, but it doesn't really help. The ideas clash when combined.
Splitting them up makes the statement far more eloquent and much easier to read.
The strike against him is that he doesn't speak French. Though I really wonder how he could maintain his ability to speak Esperanto, given that it was a dead language as soon as it was imagined.
It's like learning to speak Latin - yeah you can do it, but why? All you really want is to be able to read it, and even then there isn't a whole lot of a point to it.
My god, you're right! Quick! We must dispose of all table salt! It's made of highly reactive sodium and extremely toxic chlorine!
What's that? The ocean is contaminated with trillions of tons of sodium chloride? Heaven help us, we're doomed!
In case you aren't getting it, I'm making fun of you. In case you didn't catch exactly how stupid I think you are, I'm guessing borderline retarded. At the very least you couldn't possibly have scored more than a 10 on the chemistry portion of your SAT.
One of the magical properties of nature is that when two parent atoms combine, they form a molecule that is in no way, shape, or form similar to either atom in its elemental state. To take a very related and familiar example (which I also used while mocking you) - the soft, silvery, and highly reactive metal sodium (it literally explodes on contact with water) and the incredibly toxic gas chlorine (a small breath of which can kill you) combine to form a very hard, non-reactive, non-toxic rock commonly known as white salt. Salts are very stable, and very non-reactive. They do separate out into ions in solution, but neither the sodium nor the chlorine are able leave the solution without pairing with its partner element, they are far, far too reactive - as soon as it is about to happen, the sodium will grab a loose chlorine ion or vice-versa. As ions they have interesting properties, like facilitating electron transfers (that's what makes salt water both conductive and allows it to oxidize iron).
Another neat property of atoms, especially those with either one or two valence electrons or six or seven valence electrons, is that they must always be bonded to other atoms (themselves, other atoms, it doesn't matter, they MUST be bonded). This is handy, because it keeps solid objects - a table, for example - from simply crumbling away into its individual atoms, like carbon. So while it seems that the Li and the CL have separated in the salt solution, in fact they remain bonded - there is no way to pull out the lithium from the solution without getting the Chlorine with it, and together they are non-toxic. It also happens to be significantly more difficult to form a lithium molecule, since it requires a half dozen lithium atoms, than it is to form lithium chloride, which requires only one lithium and one chlorine atom. The net effect is that lithium never, ever forms into lithium molecules if chlorine is anywhere nearby. Since they are in solution together, chlorine is available in perfectly balanced quantities.
Your straw man arguments fail to make us fall for it. We did not talk about lithium chloride vapor to get into the atmosphere, but only lithium. We did also not talk about it having to be vapor. “Dust” suffices.
The only way to get lithium into the atmosphere from a lithium-chloride solution is as lithium chloride. It's not physically possible without some serious, serious heat and a lot of electricity.
Want to know how it's done? First, you have to melt the salt. Not an easy task - lithium chloride melts at 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. Once melted, all you have to do is pass a large electric current through it and the gas separates out, leaving solid lithium! Easy! Oh wait...
Now, what natural conditions in your neighborhood are heating things up to 1200 degrees and passing an electric current through them, I wonder? I can't think of any, and if you can, tell me, so I can stay the hell away. Anyway, find one, and dump the desiccant on it, and you'll have something to be concerned about. Otherwise it is not physically or chemically possible.
Now, who was it with the straw-man argument again?
Minerals coming out of solution tend to form a hard crust, not a dust. It's where hard water stains come from - they definitely don't just rub off.
If it's powder, it's almost certainly mold, which is not surprising in the slightest since the whole purpose of a swamp cooler is to pump warm air at dew point through the house in order for it to condense out and thereby cool the air.
Homes in high-humidity areas have serious problems with mold for the exact same reason.
This is a very old concept, the trick that these guys have managed is to make it simple and cheap to build. The complexity of previous designs is the reason refrigeration was chosen instead of desiccation for AC units.
It is essentially the exact opposite of a swamp cooler. Where a swamp cooler relies on saturating dry air with water and pushing it through the house to absorb and carry away excess heat, the desiccant cooler dries humid air to drop its temperature and then pumps the dry, cool air throughout the house.
A swamp cooler is most effective in very dry areas, and virtually useless in humid areas.
A desiccant cooler is most effective in humid areas, and virtually useless in dry areas.
In both cases, you can combine the two to get a double-whammy effect - in dry areas, put the swamp cooler in front to pre-cool and moisten the air, and follow it with a desiccant cooler to further cool and dry the air before pumping it into the house. In humid areas, you put the desiccant cooler in front to cool and dry the air, and follow it with the swamp cooler to carry away even more heat.
From the way they are talking though, the system should be just as effective as a standard AC unit, meaning an additional swamp cooler attached to the dry output for humid areas would be completely unnecessary (and would reduce the efficiency). The only reason a swamp cooler would then be necessary for dry areas is to humidify the air, and it's entirely possible to devise a closed system for that purpose, wasting little to no water at all.
"Swamp coolers" just don't work well in this climate, so I don't know how useful this will be to us.
You misunderstood, the desiccant-based system is specifically designed for very humid environments. It extracts heat by extracting the humidity out of the air, so you end up with cool, dry air. The desiccant is then heated to release the excess water outside the home. It absolutely must have a humid air source or it won't cool anything.
Where it doesn't work well is in dry climates. That's why in Tucson they paired it with a swamp cooler - the swamp cooler humidifies and pre-cools the air, the desiccant then extracts the moisture, which cools the air the rest of the way.
In a humid climate the desiccant can just cool and cool to its heart's content.
It's designed for humid climates. If you want to use it in an arid climate you would need something to hydrate the air, like a swamp cooler. That would also boost your cooling power though, which is an added bonus and would probably bring over-all water consumption down, as these things are very efficient.
You could probably also build an elaborate swamp-cooler + condensor system for it to make it a closed system. That would be tricky.
Traditional AC's use refrigerants, which are just plain nasty and very expensive, so you'd have to be in an extreme water-shortage area to find them preferable.
Yet we have oil spewing into our Gulf right now thanks to private sector & capitalistic brilliance.
I hate to break it to you, but everything BP did (including the testing and installation of that failed BOP) was signed off on by the appropriate federal agency. Trust me, you can't even sneeze in the oil industry without federal approval. I frankly can't think of a more heavily regulated industry in the US. That worked out real well, eh?*
It's a horrible accident, and lots of people definitely screwed up (which is true in all accidents, by definition), but all the bullshit in congress is just a witch-hunt to cover the fed's ass. And every congressman/woman needs his/her 15 minutes of fame, of course.
*Note that I'm not suggesting less regulation would have been better. The system failed, it had nothing to do with the rules, and everything to do with the people enforcing them.
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You are confusing its purpose with what it actually does to accomplish its purpose.
It's purpose is to ensure writers/musicians/artists are compensated for the value they add to society, so as to encourage more contributions to the nation's culture.
The way it accomplishes this is by explicitly limiting for a certain term every single citizen's right to reproduce anything they read, see, or hear, and giving the originator of the speech, art, text, or music a limited monopoly on the right to copy that work.
It is a very heavy restriction of the first amendment - just think about all the things you can't do because of copyright. That impact must remain balanced with the benefit artists, writers, and performers add to society. You must recognize that copyright takes away from the people at large and gives to only a small fraction of the population. It is not a bad thing, but it definitely can become a very bad thing if things get out of balance.
However, don't confuse a restriction on free speech with an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. The Constitution gives Congress the right to set copyright and patent law, but it must only be for the specific purpose of promoting the arts.
That's part of the framework you should have for every question of copyright that comes up. If you can ask that question and honestly say "yes", then it may be constitutional. If you have to say "no", then it should be unconstitutional.
The other part of the framework, which was used from 1776 until about the 1950's but has since fairly fallen out of fashion among law makers, is to approach each restriction of rights with care - to restrict the rights of the people only as much as is necessary to achieve the goal set forth in the Constitution: to promote the arts and sciences for the good of society as a whole.
If the only people who benefit are music industry moguls with large collections of copyright, then the law is probably unjust. If the people as a whole benefit because more artists are encouraged to produce new works, then go for it.
This particular law I don't see how you can argue that it does not stifle creativity. We have a whole host of new works that were created out of public domain works, and this ruling puts a stop to that. In what way does that benefit society?
Noone who thinks first swims in or eats fish from this river, because of the chemical plants upstream.
I don't understand this, it seems like you're leaving out some punctuation:
Noone, who thinks first, swims in or eats fish from this river, because of the chemical plants upstream.
But no one in their right mind would swim in or eat fish from a river because of upstream chemical plants. I think you should not listen to what this Noone guy tells you. ;)
I had to use a captcha for work once, and the captcha itself was incorrect. I have no idea what key combination would have worked, but what the captcha said certainly did. It had an audio option, so I tried it, but the audio was so garbled I couldn't pick out a single word, let alone the three necessary to complete the captcha.
I like captcha as a basic form of protection from bots, but when it keeps me from accessing a website it is beyond worthless.
Nah, Obama is turning out to be a huge screwup. His international relations leave people with no confidence whatsoever in the US, which hurts us a lot internationally.
Domestically has already hit approval ratings lower than Bush's first term - granted, Bush had 9/11 and his decline from 90% to 50% was rapid, and it was punctuate by several highs that propped it up. Obama's decline is steady and quick, with no real swings back upward, and he's right now within about 15-20 points of Bush's all-time low (which took 8 years to reach). If he doesn't do something to stem the tide he'll have the lowest approval ratings in history before his first term is up - below even President Truman, and far below President Bush.
The guy has already been put into hiding. He'll either have an accident or be labeled a terrorist.
What are you talking about? Assange is known for disappearing for months on end, so much so that it's well known that it pisses off his Wikileaks staff every time he does it.
He isn't in hiding, he just likes to pretend like he is important enough to need it.
Trust me, if the government wanted to kill him, the story wouldn't be "Pentagon looking for Wikileaks founder for questioning". What you would have is an astute journalist asking a Pentagon official "What about Wikileaks founder Julianne Assange? Are you going to attempt to bring him in for questioning?" to which the official would respond "Who? We're only interested in the intelligence officer who leaked classified information."
It would be a complete non-story if they were actually trying to kill the guy, and the way it would go down is Assange would go on yet another extended disappearance, except this time he'd never come back. Poof, gone, nice and quiet, with little - if any media attention.
Seriously you people watch way, way too much TV.
There is a reason for classification. Releasing classified documents knowingly is treason against the United States. It is written very clearly in laws.
Only if doing so puts American citizens at risk - either soldiers or civilians. Since in this case it's hard to argue it does either, it isn't treason for anybody involved. A breach of protocol and a career ending move for the soldier, absolutely, but it may not even be a crime according to the UCMJ.
In any case, Assange is not a US citizen, he cannot, by definition, commit treason against the US. The whistle-blower himself has not been charged with treason, so I'm not sure how you can come to such conclusions.
What this is is Assange trying to make this a much bigger deal than it actually is. It's like when someone gets arrested for someone, and the police bring people who were with him at the time in for questioning. It's really no different.
The truth is, there is very little, if any, value in killing him. The leaker would have just gone to one of a dozen different websites instead if not for Wikileaks. Also, if they were planning on killing him you wouldn't hear a word about the Pentagon trying to get in touch with him for questioning. They would be completely ignoring the issue. They'd be all over the officer and wouldn't even mention Wikileaks except to say that's where the info was sent. One day Assange would go on another of his multi-month disappearances, but this time he'd simply never come back. Poof, gone, crackpot conspiracy theories would abound (and they'd be right) but they'd never be taken seriously.
No, what they want is to get information from him about the intelligence officer who turned in the information, and they want to see if they can convince him - by threat or bribery - to not release whatever else he may have that this guy leaked.
Movies are more entertaining and more likely to be factual than what is presented in a congressional hearing.
I don't know, I've seen enough Mythbusters to know that nearly everything that happens is exaggerated to the extreme for dramatic effect. Congressmen tend to preen a lot, but there's usually quite a bit of truth in there.
This article demonstrates that not only do 'hit orders' exist, but they are not prohibited from using such orders against citizens who are constitutionally guaranteed to stand trial.
God damn, did you even read the link you posted?
The director of national intelligence affirmed rather bluntly today that the U.S. intelligence community has authority to target American citizens for assassination if they present a direct terrorist threat to the United States. ...
"Whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American has -- is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved." Blair explained. "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans."
According to U.S. officials, only a handful of Americans would be eligible for targeting by U.S. intelligence or military operations. The legal guidance is determined by the National Security Council and the Justice Department.
The emphasis is mine, obviously.
According to the article, the only people eligible for targeting by the CIA are people who are actively plotting to commit terrorism on US soil. Frankly, I'm all in favor of it. This would allow them to take out guys like Timothy Mcveigh before he could kill hundreds of Americans. Ostensibly they would attempt to bring him in first, and assassinate as a last resort, but the police and courts are not set up to prevent terrorism, only react to it, making this sort of thing necessary in extreme cases.
It's kind of like the cases where the cops have to shoot a guy to prevent him from killing a hostage. They bring the guy in if they can, but if not, he dies instead of innocent citizens.
More than likely, Assange is having his lawyers try to get some kind of amnesty deal in turn for testimony and/or returning the materials.
That's more than likely, but from what I've read Pentagon officials don't think they have any grounds to demand the leaked information from him. What he has done is no crime in the US, and he is not a US citizen, so they can't pursue any kind of extradition. If he comes to the US the best they can do, as I see it, is haul him in for questioning (without arresting him) and then let him go within 24 hours. That's it. In fact that's all the Pentagon has said they want from him - to question him about his source (who is in US custody).
They already have the guy who leaked the information, who did commit a crime (depending how the trial goes, a potentially serious one).
What they really want is to be sure no more info gets out, and if they can't do it with legal pressure, I'm sure they'll beg and plead as well.
Despite what some dumbasses may think, this is nowhere near worth the risk of an illegal assassination (all forms are illegal in the US), especially for a momentarily high profile, low value target.
While the CIA is known to have secret assassination programs (one was just shut down about a year ago), they are rare, small and they must pick their targets extremely carefully or everyone involved could all go to jail for a very long time. The CIA does not on anything resembling a regular basis assassinate people. A simple risk vs reward estimate will tell you why. The risks are huge, so the reward must also be huge. What exactly is the reward for killing Assange? A few documents related to killing civilians are released? Yeah, that won't look bad - assassinating a civilian for releasing information about murdered civilians. Hmmm...
I have a feeling that the US CIA operations portrayed in movies is about the same as they way movies portray cars blowing up on impact. In reality, it doesn't happen that way at all. In fact, to reproduce a movie-style car crash, you have to load a car up with a couple dozen gallon jugs full of gas and set it off with explosives. The worst it will do on its own is start a fire.
I'm guessing movie-style CIA operations are a lot like that - it looks really cool and intense and clandestine in the movies, but the reality is more likely a hell of a lot of paper pushing and careful observation.
A half second on Google produced this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controversy
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War_photographs_controversies
From Wikipedia:
The 2006 Lebanon War photographs controversies refers to instances of photojournalism from the 2006 Lebanon War that misrepresented scenes of death and destruction in Lebanon caused by Israeli air attacks. As a result of the scandal, Reuters fired freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, and the AP disciplined several others.[citation needed] Reuters also fired a photo editor, and implementing stricter controls on its photo-gathering process.
The controversy began as an investigation of documents by individual bloggers, and spread to print and television media sources.
I suppose you think bloggers can't dig up news too eh? All hail the "impartial" media, eh?
Indeed, there is nobody on earth who does anything because they believe it is wrong, or bad, or evil. Doing so is a blatant internal contradiction.
Take serial killers. They are almost always sociopaths, which makes a hell of a lot of sense. Sociopaths cannot distinguish between right and wrong. To them, helping someone fix a flat tire and killing them are like choosing between an apple and an orange. At that point it's just a matter of looking at what gives them the most reward, and if the rush of killing is greater than the satisfaction of helping, they will often kill. We see them as the most evil people on the planet, but they certainly don't see themselves that way. To them it's the right thing to do.
Take also tyrannical leaders. Pretty much all of them believe their power is a right, and it is their privelege to exercise it regardless of what happens to others. As such, oppressing the people to assure his power is not evil, it's what is right and wholesom because he must remain in power.
No doubt the soldiers in the video had rationalized away their actions. Perhaps they blamed all Iraqi's for the actions of the terrorists. Perhaps they felt the citizens supported the enemy, and by proxy they were enemies as well. Who knows? Perhaps they just made a bad judgement call, and thought the journalists actually were enemy combatants (they were apparently carrying guns out in the open - not usually something you expect of a journalist or non-combatant), and then thought the people who went to help them actually were going for their guns? In that case, it's nothing malicious, just a very, very bad judgment call on a battlefield - where, by the way, a slow decision can mean your death.
What you can be certain of, is that the soldiers didn't kill anybody because they believed it was wrong to do so. If they believed it were wrong, they would not have done it. In light of that, you must look into the soldiers side of the story, or story is incomplete.
The same is true with all stories that appear to only need one viewpoint. That is never the case.
I think you highly over-estimate what it takes to get top secret clearance. Many military guards in sensitive positions have Top Secret security clearance.
My brother did four years as a Marine infantry grunt and he had top secret clearance. Granted, most infantry grunts never have a need for top secret clearance, but my brother had it because he was on a special guard detail. It helped him quite a bit getting a decent security gig when his tour was up.
So yes, the guy with top secret clearance definitely could have been a "low level intel guy". I would expect all intel guys to have at least secret clearance, and a few of them would probably need a top secret clearance. I myself worked in an IT post on an army guard base for about six months (I'm non-military), and due to the fact that I had access to every hard drive on the network I was required to have confidential level clearance (one below secret). Also note that those with secret level clearance can be given top secret clearance by department heads on a case by case basis.
It's well within the realm of possibility that a low level intel guy (or even more likely, a non-intel related staff member of someone with top secret clearance) could seize an opportunity to grab some top secret videos - that's actually the most likely scenario, as top secret candidates are very well screened, and are highly unlikely to breach protocol.
What is politics but a PR play and Canada's current prime minister is way to image conscious to go anywhere near a Donny Crane.
Wow, I don't mean to be a douche and a pedant, but I had a really hard time parsing that sentence. Let me help you:
"What is politics but a PR play? Canada's current prime minister is way too image conscious to go anywhere near a Donny Crane."
It really doesn't work as one sentence; the two statements are not related. Trying to combine them makes the idea clumsy and confusing. You can add a comma before the "and" before Canada to make it grammatically correct, but it doesn't really help. The ideas clash when combined.
Splitting them up makes the statement far more eloquent and much easier to read.
Yeah, but that was like, a billion years ago.
We need relevance man, relevance!
What's funny about this story though, is Shatner isn't actually on any short list for GG. There is a facebook movement to put him there.
In other words, the whole summary is a complete fucking lie. Gotta love Slashdot!
Well, shat is the past tense of shit, so to "Shatner" is a nice pun, and clearly conveys the rules of the game without having to state them at all.
That's what I was going to say.
The strike against him is that he doesn't speak French. Though I really wonder how he could maintain his ability to speak Esperanto, given that it was a dead language as soon as it was imagined.
It's like learning to speak Latin - yeah you can do it, but why? All you really want is to be able to read it, and even then there isn't a whole lot of a point to it.
My god, you're right! Quick! We must dispose of all table salt! It's made of highly reactive sodium and extremely toxic chlorine!
What's that? The ocean is contaminated with trillions of tons of sodium chloride? Heaven help us, we're doomed!
In case you aren't getting it, I'm making fun of you. In case you didn't catch exactly how stupid I think you are, I'm guessing borderline retarded. At the very least you couldn't possibly have scored more than a 10 on the chemistry portion of your SAT.
One of the magical properties of nature is that when two parent atoms combine, they form a molecule that is in no way, shape, or form similar to either atom in its elemental state. To take a very related and familiar example (which I also used while mocking you) - the soft, silvery, and highly reactive metal sodium (it literally explodes on contact with water) and the incredibly toxic gas chlorine (a small breath of which can kill you) combine to form a very hard, non-reactive, non-toxic rock commonly known as white salt. Salts are very stable, and very non-reactive. They do separate out into ions in solution, but neither the sodium nor the chlorine are able leave the solution without pairing with its partner element, they are far, far too reactive - as soon as it is about to happen, the sodium will grab a loose chlorine ion or vice-versa. As ions they have interesting properties, like facilitating electron transfers (that's what makes salt water both conductive and allows it to oxidize iron).
Another neat property of atoms, especially those with either one or two valence electrons or six or seven valence electrons, is that they must always be bonded to other atoms (themselves, other atoms, it doesn't matter, they MUST be bonded). This is handy, because it keeps solid objects - a table, for example - from simply crumbling away into its individual atoms, like carbon. So while it seems that the Li and the CL have separated in the salt solution, in fact they remain bonded - there is no way to pull out the lithium from the solution without getting the Chlorine with it, and together they are non-toxic. It also happens to be significantly more difficult to form a lithium molecule, since it requires a half dozen lithium atoms, than it is to form lithium chloride, which requires only one lithium and one chlorine atom. The net effect is that lithium never, ever forms into lithium molecules if chlorine is anywhere nearby. Since they are in solution together, chlorine is available in perfectly balanced quantities.
Your straw man arguments fail to make us fall for it.
We did not talk about lithium chloride vapor to get into the atmosphere, but only lithium. We did also not talk about it having to be vapor. “Dust” suffices.
The only way to get lithium into the atmosphere from a lithium-chloride solution is as lithium chloride. It's not physically possible without some serious, serious heat and a lot of electricity.
Want to know how it's done? First, you have to melt the salt. Not an easy task - lithium chloride melts at 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. Once melted, all you have to do is pass a large electric current through it and the gas separates out, leaving solid lithium! Easy! Oh wait...
Now, what natural conditions in your neighborhood are heating things up to 1200 degrees and passing an electric current through them, I wonder? I can't think of any, and if you can, tell me, so I can stay the hell away. Anyway, find one, and dump the desiccant on it, and you'll have something to be concerned about. Otherwise it is not physically or chemically possible.
Now, who was it with the straw-man argument again?
Minerals coming out of solution tend to form a hard crust, not a dust. It's where hard water stains come from - they definitely don't just rub off.
If it's powder, it's almost certainly mold, which is not surprising in the slightest since the whole purpose of a swamp cooler is to pump warm air at dew point through the house in order for it to condense out and thereby cool the air.
Homes in high-humidity areas have serious problems with mold for the exact same reason.
This is a very old concept, the trick that these guys have managed is to make it simple and cheap to build. The complexity of previous designs is the reason refrigeration was chosen instead of desiccation for AC units.
It is essentially the exact opposite of a swamp cooler. Where a swamp cooler relies on saturating dry air with water and pushing it through the house to absorb and carry away excess heat, the desiccant cooler dries humid air to drop its temperature and then pumps the dry, cool air throughout the house.
A swamp cooler is most effective in very dry areas, and virtually useless in humid areas.
A desiccant cooler is most effective in humid areas, and virtually useless in dry areas.
In both cases, you can combine the two to get a double-whammy effect - in dry areas, put the swamp cooler in front to pre-cool and moisten the air, and follow it with a desiccant cooler to further cool and dry the air before pumping it into the house. In humid areas, you put the desiccant cooler in front to cool and dry the air, and follow it with the swamp cooler to carry away even more heat.
From the way they are talking though, the system should be just as effective as a standard AC unit, meaning an additional swamp cooler attached to the dry output for humid areas would be completely unnecessary (and would reduce the efficiency). The only reason a swamp cooler would then be necessary for dry areas is to humidify the air, and it's entirely possible to devise a closed system for that purpose, wasting little to no water at all.
"Swamp coolers" just don't work well in this climate, so I don't know how useful this will be to us.
You misunderstood, the desiccant-based system is specifically designed for very humid environments. It extracts heat by extracting the humidity out of the air, so you end up with cool, dry air. The desiccant is then heated to release the excess water outside the home. It absolutely must have a humid air source or it won't cool anything.
Where it doesn't work well is in dry climates. That's why in Tucson they paired it with a swamp cooler - the swamp cooler humidifies and pre-cools the air, the desiccant then extracts the moisture, which cools the air the rest of the way.
In a humid climate the desiccant can just cool and cool to its heart's content.
It's designed for humid climates. If you want to use it in an arid climate you would need something to hydrate the air, like a swamp cooler. That would also boost your cooling power though, which is an added bonus and would probably bring over-all water consumption down, as these things are very efficient.
You could probably also build an elaborate swamp-cooler + condensor system for it to make it a closed system. That would be tricky.
Traditional AC's use refrigerants, which are just plain nasty and very expensive, so you'd have to be in an extreme water-shortage area to find them preferable.
At least you can admit it.
I prefer to come up with elaborate posts that mock the general idiocy of pedants.
It's fun, and I'm hoping it catches on.
Yet we have oil spewing into our Gulf right now thanks to private sector & capitalistic brilliance.
I hate to break it to you, but everything BP did (including the testing and installation of that failed BOP) was signed off on by the appropriate federal agency. Trust me, you can't even sneeze in the oil industry without federal approval. I frankly can't think of a more heavily regulated industry in the US. That worked out real well, eh?*
It's a horrible accident, and lots of people definitely screwed up (which is true in all accidents, by definition), but all the bullshit in congress is just a witch-hunt to cover the fed's ass. And every congressman/woman needs his/her 15 minutes of fame, of course.
*Note that I'm not suggesting less regulation would have been better. The system failed, it had nothing to do with the rules, and everything to do with the people enforcing them.
'Cause.
It's not a text box.