The pretense under which this software is expected to be used is immaterial. If I'm a landlord I can't install hidden cameras in my apartments just because I spin it with some bullshit pretense that 'I'll only turn them on when they don't pay the rent, honest!'
In the first place, a camera doesn't generally help with retrieval or the exaction of payment (outside of blackmail). It's not like people are going to set up their laptops outside where the camera can see street signs and house numbers. When someone is responsible for a system that spies on private persons in their own domiciles, if that system isn't a prima facie violation of anti-voyeurism laws, they are at a minimum responsible to be transparent about controls in place to prevent abuse, and they must get express consent from those they are 'observing', even in most states where single party recording is legal, since they are not physically present.
I am not a lawyer and the above should not be construed as legal advice.
Just because a political movement is not coherent does not negate that it is still a political movement. It's a product of two things: the attention span of the internet generation(s) and the decentralized nature of Anon. Anon is whatever a majority of persons invoking its name want it to be at any given time. So yeah, obviously it's not coherent, but that doesn't matter. The continuity of the organization is irrelevant, as the internet generation(s) realize that arbitrary structures don't matter, actions and results matter, and even you concede that they have influence.
The problem with a thing that nobody runs and is loosely defined is that its easy to change that over time. Yeah, when Anon started on 4chan by doing things like troll Habbo Hotel etc. it was strictly a lulz only organization. When they took down that one chick who killed animals with her high heels, that was still for the lulz and coincidentally was a morally positive thing. There was a time when Anon was a truly chaotic neutral sort of organization that would just as soon be a jerk as be a force for any kind of justice.
This changed with Operation Chanology. Do you think that the thousands of people who protested all day world wide, multiple times, were to a man *just* doing it for the lulz? Were they highlighting the criminal behavior of Scientology merely for lulz? Some were, some weren't, and it actually caused a schism (pretty easy in a movement without real leaders) where the classic Anons attacked the crusader Anons as not being true to the purpose/spirit of Anon. While true, who is to stop them?
There are, at a minimum, two Anons today. The classic which trolls for lulz, and the idealistic political crusaders who use the {{{power of the internet}}} (that should be said with an echo) to strike at whomever they think is an oppressor. Yeah, they might not be true to the 4chan Anon spirit, but that doesn't change shit. They still exist, and they still act.
You know what would be hilarious? If a legal fund to get him disbarred was set up and it took bitcoin donations. If it were to be successful he would be defeated by the very thing he sought to control.
What would be the point? You obviously believe you know everything about them already, and they must have the motivations you assign to them ipse dixit. I have better things to do with my time than punch your brick wall of bias.
Wow, and you accuse me of making bad analogies? The mafia was and is founded on loyalty. The early mafia was virtually impenetrable for this very reason, and it wasn't just the dons and the capos and soldati, it was the communities they operated in. Whether you're talking about the depressed, corrupt, and unstable home country that was Italy and Sicily at the turn of the century through beginning of the Cold War, or the socially outcast Italian and Sicilian immigrant communities in the US during the same period, persons not operationally within the mafia still felt some ties of loyalty, whether out of fear or common culture or the perception of an effective extrajudicial actor/arbiter (the early mafia was in many cases where people in the community would take disputes because they trusted them to settle things either more fairly than the government or in their favor if they had demonstrated their loyalty over time in some way).
The mafia began to fall apart when it lost the respect of the community, both through its own internal corruption of standards that had previously kept it in balance as well as the evolution of the community it served and the environment that community experienced, namely conditions improved for both Italians in Italy (the government became relatively more stable and less corrupt, and more importantly the economy improved) and Italian immigrants in the US (Italian immigrants became more assimilated in American society, came to trust the American justice system more, and were more accepted by mainstream American society, etc.).
I swear being a historian is hard work... so much stupid, so little time and less patience.
If you think that the coups in Eastern Europe were events that sprang out of nowhere, or that something else would not have occurred subsequently had they failed, you need to refresh both your history and sociology. Relevantexamples.
As for the US, I remember the DNC protests of a different time,1968 in Chicago, which were in many regards a capstone upon the Civil Rights Movement and the turning point of the Democratic Party from its association with Southern racism to a more progressive liberal movement. You can bet anybody with an arrest on their record from that moment in history wears it as a badge of honor, and I doubt too many employers are turning them down.
The US is no more immune to revolution than any other state. Things just aren't consistently bad enough here that enough people care. Compared to the states and causes wrapped up in Arab Spring, the US is a paradise of justice and peace. It's all about thresholds, and things have to be pretty bad for enough people to want to risk their lives and the lives of their friends and families.
When you look at the targets like Arizona law enforcement, and the reasons including specifically retribution for Arizona Senate Bill 1070, and say it's not a political movement, I have to question the rationale of your perspective. Just because you don't like it or don't agree with it and want to malign or dismiss those who are part of it does not negate objective facts about acts and actors.
Political Targets + Political Reasons = Political Movement, like it or not.
How many people executed did it take before the various resistance movements in the Second World War gave up? Why are there still dissidents in China, Cuba, Iran, etc. when they keep being imprisoned?
If you really believe in a cause it doesn't matter how many "examples" are made, in fact as Syria is finding out, the more "examples" you make the more martyrs the people have to avenge.
While the stakes of Anon as a political movement are not as high as the suppression of dissidents in totalitarian states, Anon has become undeniably a political movement, and there are idealists willing to sacrifice themselves for political ends born every minute. Let me tell you something as a former young idealist: it isn't real until it happens to you. You imagine that the purity of your principles makes you invincible until the establishment turns its gaze on you and actually does something.
However once an idea gains enough momentum and there enough people involved, actually acting against them becomes politically more difficult in Western democracies generally. At a certain threshold law breaking becomes civil disobedience, and if you end up fighting masses of people in the streets you've already lost. It will be only a few election cycles before those chickens come home to roost.
I'm not saying this is necessarily going to happen, but I do challenge your interpretation of the situation as overly simplistic and in denial of historical scenarios of similar sociological pressures.
I would be surprised if these raids stopped that release. In fact I'll bet most of these guys raided are just dumb script kiddies who front in IRC, or ordinary people who have helped with LOIC and similar ops, and/or people who have had their systems compromised are being used a proxies/bots by real Anon/Lulz people.
That they are even tangentially related gives the feds an opportunity to make big headlines about raids to show that they are 'doing something' (TM) and they aren't incompetent and/or impotent by skill or distance/jurisdiction respectively.
This is the problem, you think that just because stars are so massive that it makes all the other smaller masses irrelevant. Yeah, 0.1% doesn't seem like much in one instance, but if there are a thousand you can't see then you have, albeit distributed, a solar mass that you can't see. And then multiply that how many times? Billions? Trillions?
The fact that we can't even prove or disprove that a brown dwarf orbits our own star demonstrates that our 'accuracy' about our local neighborhood can't be all that good. If we can't see something that massive when it is relatively right in front of our face, there could be an innumerable amount of them floating outside of any obvious gravitational influence on other bodies.
Smaller masses in the universe almost certainly outnumber the larger masses exponentially. Just look at the contrast between giants and dwarfs in the stellar catalogs. Would you discount dwarfs because they are so relatively less massive than supergiants? Of course not, there are too few supergiants and too many dwarfs to do that. So why do you discount all the unseen sub-stellar material? When you see these patterns of scale, failure to extrapolate is irrational.
I know I'm a layperson, but I think astrophysics really needs to move beyond the assumption that if we can't see it it isn't there. The more closely we're able to study space the more we find that it's full of stuff of every size at every conceivable distance. I honestly thing it's safe at this point to assume that nearly every star has planets as a simple matter of the nature of stellar accretion processes, and further that for every star that's bright enough to see there are probably a dozen too dim. This is why we can't figure out dark matter/energy.
You're basically trying to justify the continuance of behavior that was acceptable before laws changed because there weren't laws before there were laws. It's a ridiculous sort of argument that doesn't work in any Western civil society. There was a time when you didn't need pilot licenses to fly or ships' masters licenses to operate heavy commercial vessels, that doesn't mean the same holds true forever. You do either one now and you'll end up on the losing side of a court battle and fast. The same is true of drivers licenses, vehicle registration, etc. You want to fight those battles based on some anachronism, you're welcome to do it.
You also seem very confused as to the division between the federal government and the states. The federal government primarily funds only interstate highways. Almost all regulation of roads falls on the states, as does licensing itself, which is only interstate by way of the 'full faith and credit' clause (which should really apply to licenses to carry concealed weapons, but national reciprocity keeps getting shut down in both congress and courts).
And as a historian I understand that it took more than US casualties to achieve the end result. You think that the British, ANZAC, Chinese, etc. soldiers didn't matter? In this context, what it took to make the Japanese surrender, those casualties very much matter. So STFU.
Too bad everything is basically the opposite of what you say. You do not (necessarily) need licenses for private roads, especially not from the government. If there were restrictions on a private road they would necessarily be *private* and you'd need whatever authorization the road's owner required. Licenses are a requirement to operate a vehicle on public roads in the US at a state level, and they are also only half of the picture. "Street legal" refers not to licenses at all but to vehicle registration. Vehicles must meet safety, emissions, and other standards determined by each state before they can be registered. While some vehicles are exempt from these standards it is usually because they have been grandfathered in from earlier periods of vehicle manufacture before given standards were implemented.
The doctrine of open roads is not that anybody can drive anything, but rather that other persons/agencies cannot impede others on public roads for reasons in excess of legal frameworks such as licensing, registration, and traffic laws. It's meant to prevent discrimination or attempts at passive harassment such as trying to block roads or certain persons or classes of persons. Your legal interpretation is not borne out in any case law I assure you.
I am not a lawyer and the above should not be construed as legal advice.
It probably could go faster, but it would require a closed course and/or special permits. It's not like he's magically immune from all traffic laws on public roads like Batman.
Hur dur it only took two nukes to stop Japan! Sorry, as a historian when I see things like this I want to retch. It took four years of hard fighting and millions of casualties on both sides to get Japan to a point where only two nukes were necessary, not to mention that Japan wasn't even in range of nuclear attack in the first years of the war assuming that we could have had the bombs and planes earlier than we did. If both weapons were dropped on Japan in 1942 or 43, it's unlikely that they would have surrendered at that point. It was a combination of the effects of the nuclear attacks with the reality of the imminent invasion of the Japanese mainland after the fall of Okinawa as well as the fire bombings of major Japanese cities in 1945 that in total were enough to tip the Japanese emperor and the military over the edge of surrender (in fact it was the fire bombings, not the nuclear bombings, which were the initial catalyst that started Emperor Hirohito working against the military toward a peace process, see F. J. Bradley's No Strategic Targets Left. "Contribution of Major Fire Raids Toward Ending WWII" p. 38.). It was NOT the nukes alone, nor could it have been.
Actually we have theories on quantum mechanics because they are knowable. Unlike multi universe theories, which I assure you have provided no technology whatsoever, quantum mechanics is a real, testable science that provides real benefits including emerging technologies.
What you're conflating is the unknowable of the present with the unknowable of the future. It's not as though some African hunter gather ancestor from tens of thousands of years ago could have one day just said 'hey guys, how about quantum mechanics?' It was unknowable without the prerequisite disciplines. So for him it would be useless. He wouldn't be able to know anything about it, or apply it in any way, assuming falsely that he could even have conceived of it in the first place.
Quantum mechanics became knowable through the advancement of other knowable things first. It took generations of mathematicians of all types to get from the basic counting of prehistory to algebra, calculus, etc. The unknown is not the same as the unknowable. When you can ask a question and work toward the answer that answer may be initially unknown but the capacity to make it known precludes it from being unknowable. A lot of context must advance before things previously unknowable become knowable, but always the work is done on the knowable, even if tenuously.
(Quite frankly I'm surprised I haven't been criticized about my generalization about the unchangeable. Once I had written that I realized that the unchangeable could be useful IF it could also be knowable.)
The dichotomy of reality is simple: the knowable and the changable are useful, the unknowable and unchangable are not useful. Any time or effort spent on the latter is also not useful.
Even if our reality were artificial, it is the only one we have, and with no guarantees regarding the future it's better to make full use of it than waste time worrying about what could be possible but can never be known or changed.
Slashdot Mirror
The pretense under which this software is expected to be used is immaterial. If I'm a landlord I can't install hidden cameras in my apartments just because I spin it with some bullshit pretense that 'I'll only turn them on when they don't pay the rent, honest!'
In the first place, a camera doesn't generally help with retrieval or the exaction of payment (outside of blackmail). It's not like people are going to set up their laptops outside where the camera can see street signs and house numbers. When someone is responsible for a system that spies on private persons in their own domiciles, if that system isn't a prima facie violation of anti-voyeurism laws, they are at a minimum responsible to be transparent about controls in place to prevent abuse, and they must get express consent from those they are 'observing', even in most states where single party recording is legal, since they are not physically present.
I am not a lawyer and the above should not be construed as legal advice.
Just because a political movement is not coherent does not negate that it is still a political movement. It's a product of two things: the attention span of the internet generation(s) and the decentralized nature of Anon. Anon is whatever a majority of persons invoking its name want it to be at any given time. So yeah, obviously it's not coherent, but that doesn't matter. The continuity of the organization is irrelevant, as the internet generation(s) realize that arbitrary structures don't matter, actions and results matter, and even you concede that they have influence.
The problem with a thing that nobody runs and is loosely defined is that its easy to change that over time. Yeah, when Anon started on 4chan by doing things like troll Habbo Hotel etc. it was strictly a lulz only organization. When they took down that one chick who killed animals with her high heels, that was still for the lulz and coincidentally was a morally positive thing. There was a time when Anon was a truly chaotic neutral sort of organization that would just as soon be a jerk as be a force for any kind of justice.
This changed with Operation Chanology. Do you think that the thousands of people who protested all day world wide, multiple times, were to a man *just* doing it for the lulz? Were they highlighting the criminal behavior of Scientology merely for lulz? Some were, some weren't, and it actually caused a schism (pretty easy in a movement without real leaders) where the classic Anons attacked the crusader Anons as not being true to the purpose/spirit of Anon. While true, who is to stop them?
There are, at a minimum, two Anons today. The classic which trolls for lulz, and the idealistic political crusaders who use the {{{power of the internet}}} (that should be said with an echo) to strike at whomever they think is an oppressor. Yeah, they might not be true to the 4chan Anon spirit, but that doesn't change shit. They still exist, and they still act.
You know what would be hilarious? If a legal fund to get him disbarred was set up and it took bitcoin donations. If it were to be successful he would be defeated by the very thing he sought to control.
What would be the point? You obviously believe you know everything about them already, and they must have the motivations you assign to them ipse dixit. I have better things to do with my time than punch your brick wall of bias.
Wow, and you accuse me of making bad analogies? The mafia was and is founded on loyalty. The early mafia was virtually impenetrable for this very reason, and it wasn't just the dons and the capos and soldati, it was the communities they operated in. Whether you're talking about the depressed, corrupt, and unstable home country that was Italy and Sicily at the turn of the century through beginning of the Cold War, or the socially outcast Italian and Sicilian immigrant communities in the US during the same period, persons not operationally within the mafia still felt some ties of loyalty, whether out of fear or common culture or the perception of an effective extrajudicial actor/arbiter (the early mafia was in many cases where people in the community would take disputes because they trusted them to settle things either more fairly than the government or in their favor if they had demonstrated their loyalty over time in some way).
The mafia began to fall apart when it lost the respect of the community, both through its own internal corruption of standards that had previously kept it in balance as well as the evolution of the community it served and the environment that community experienced, namely conditions improved for both Italians in Italy (the government became relatively more stable and less corrupt, and more importantly the economy improved) and Italian immigrants in the US (Italian immigrants became more assimilated in American society, came to trust the American justice system more, and were more accepted by mainstream American society, etc.).
I swear being a historian is hard work... so much stupid, so little time and less patience.
If you think that the coups in Eastern Europe were events that sprang out of nowhere, or that something else would not have occurred subsequently had they failed, you need to refresh both your history and sociology. Relevant examples.
As for the US, I remember the DNC protests of a different time,1968 in Chicago, which were in many regards a capstone upon the Civil Rights Movement and the turning point of the Democratic Party from its association with Southern racism to a more progressive liberal movement. You can bet anybody with an arrest on their record from that moment in history wears it as a badge of honor, and I doubt too many employers are turning them down.
The US is no more immune to revolution than any other state. Things just aren't consistently bad enough here that enough people care. Compared to the states and causes wrapped up in Arab Spring, the US is a paradise of justice and peace. It's all about thresholds, and things have to be pretty bad for enough people to want to risk their lives and the lives of their friends and families.
Yes because you know everybody involved so intimately. It is a prima facie political movement at the barest minimum.
When you look at the targets like Arizona law enforcement, and the reasons including specifically retribution for Arizona Senate Bill 1070, and say it's not a political movement, I have to question the rationale of your perspective. Just because you don't like it or don't agree with it and want to malign or dismiss those who are part of it does not negate objective facts about acts and actors.
Political Targets + Political Reasons = Political Movement, like it or not.
How many people executed did it take before the various resistance movements in the Second World War gave up? Why are there still dissidents in China, Cuba, Iran, etc. when they keep being imprisoned?
If you really believe in a cause it doesn't matter how many "examples" are made, in fact as Syria is finding out, the more "examples" you make the more martyrs the people have to avenge.
While the stakes of Anon as a political movement are not as high as the suppression of dissidents in totalitarian states, Anon has become undeniably a political movement, and there are idealists willing to sacrifice themselves for political ends born every minute. Let me tell you something as a former young idealist: it isn't real until it happens to you. You imagine that the purity of your principles makes you invincible until the establishment turns its gaze on you and actually does something.
However once an idea gains enough momentum and there enough people involved, actually acting against them becomes politically more difficult in Western democracies generally. At a certain threshold law breaking becomes civil disobedience, and if you end up fighting masses of people in the streets you've already lost. It will be only a few election cycles before those chickens come home to roost.
I'm not saying this is necessarily going to happen, but I do challenge your interpretation of the situation as overly simplistic and in denial of historical scenarios of similar sociological pressures.
I would be surprised if these raids stopped that release. In fact I'll bet most of these guys raided are just dumb script kiddies who front in IRC, or ordinary people who have helped with LOIC and similar ops, and/or people who have had their systems compromised are being used a proxies/bots by real Anon/Lulz people.
That they are even tangentially related gives the feds an opportunity to make big headlines about raids to show that they are 'doing something' (TM) and they aren't incompetent and/or impotent by skill or distance/jurisdiction respectively.
From what I understand paleontologists love balling each other ...
*snicker* *giggle*
It's 'bawling out' dude.
This is the problem, you think that just because stars are so massive that it makes all the other smaller masses irrelevant. Yeah, 0.1% doesn't seem like much in one instance, but if there are a thousand you can't see then you have, albeit distributed, a solar mass that you can't see. And then multiply that how many times? Billions? Trillions?
The fact that we can't even prove or disprove that a brown dwarf orbits our own star demonstrates that our 'accuracy' about our local neighborhood can't be all that good. If we can't see something that massive when it is relatively right in front of our face, there could be an innumerable amount of them floating outside of any obvious gravitational influence on other bodies.
Smaller masses in the universe almost certainly outnumber the larger masses exponentially. Just look at the contrast between giants and dwarfs in the stellar catalogs. Would you discount dwarfs because they are so relatively less massive than supergiants? Of course not, there are too few supergiants and too many dwarfs to do that. So why do you discount all the unseen sub-stellar material? When you see these patterns of scale, failure to extrapolate is irrational.
I know I'm a layperson, but I think astrophysics really needs to move beyond the assumption that if we can't see it it isn't there. The more closely we're able to study space the more we find that it's full of stuff of every size at every conceivable distance. I honestly thing it's safe at this point to assume that nearly every star has planets as a simple matter of the nature of stellar accretion processes, and further that for every star that's bright enough to see there are probably a dozen too dim. This is why we can't figure out dark matter/energy.
You're basically trying to justify the continuance of behavior that was acceptable before laws changed because there weren't laws before there were laws. It's a ridiculous sort of argument that doesn't work in any Western civil society. There was a time when you didn't need pilot licenses to fly or ships' masters licenses to operate heavy commercial vessels, that doesn't mean the same holds true forever. You do either one now and you'll end up on the losing side of a court battle and fast. The same is true of drivers licenses, vehicle registration, etc. You want to fight those battles based on some anachronism, you're welcome to do it.
You also seem very confused as to the division between the federal government and the states. The federal government primarily funds only interstate highways. Almost all regulation of roads falls on the states, as does licensing itself, which is only interstate by way of the 'full faith and credit' clause (which should really apply to licenses to carry concealed weapons, but national reciprocity keeps getting shut down in both congress and courts).
WOLVERIIIIINES!!!!!1!
Well of course, they're the designers and testers of this obvious false flag operation. I must go so far as to say obvious trap is obvious.
And as a historian I understand that it took more than US casualties to achieve the end result. You think that the British, ANZAC, Chinese, etc. soldiers didn't matter? In this context, what it took to make the Japanese surrender, those casualties very much matter. So STFU.
Too bad everything is basically the opposite of what you say. You do not (necessarily) need licenses for private roads, especially not from the government. If there were restrictions on a private road they would necessarily be *private* and you'd need whatever authorization the road's owner required. Licenses are a requirement to operate a vehicle on public roads in the US at a state level, and they are also only half of the picture. "Street legal" refers not to licenses at all but to vehicle registration. Vehicles must meet safety, emissions, and other standards determined by each state before they can be registered. While some vehicles are exempt from these standards it is usually because they have been grandfathered in from earlier periods of vehicle manufacture before given standards were implemented.
The doctrine of open roads is not that anybody can drive anything, but rather that other persons/agencies cannot impede others on public roads for reasons in excess of legal frameworks such as licensing, registration, and traffic laws. It's meant to prevent discrimination or attempts at passive harassment such as trying to block roads or certain persons or classes of persons. Your legal interpretation is not borne out in any case law I assure you.
I am not a lawyer and the above should not be construed as legal advice.
It probably could go faster, but it would require a closed course and/or special permits. It's not like he's magically immune from all traffic laws on public roads like Batman.
Hur dur it only took two nukes to stop Japan! Sorry, as a historian when I see things like this I want to retch. It took four years of hard fighting and millions of casualties on both sides to get Japan to a point where only two nukes were necessary, not to mention that Japan wasn't even in range of nuclear attack in the first years of the war assuming that we could have had the bombs and planes earlier than we did. If both weapons were dropped on Japan in 1942 or 43, it's unlikely that they would have surrendered at that point. It was a combination of the effects of the nuclear attacks with the reality of the imminent invasion of the Japanese mainland after the fall of Okinawa as well as the fire bombings of major Japanese cities in 1945 that in total were enough to tip the Japanese emperor and the military over the edge of surrender (in fact it was the fire bombings, not the nuclear bombings, which were the initial catalyst that started Emperor Hirohito working against the military toward a peace process, see F. J. Bradley's No Strategic Targets Left. "Contribution of Major Fire Raids Toward Ending WWII" p. 38.). It was NOT the nukes alone, nor could it have been.
You do realize that a significant number of /. stories are trolls themselves right?
They should have named it Puyallup. Nobody but locals ever pronounces that right.
Actually we have theories on quantum mechanics because they are knowable. Unlike multi universe theories, which I assure you have provided no technology whatsoever, quantum mechanics is a real, testable science that provides real benefits including emerging technologies.
What you're conflating is the unknowable of the present with the unknowable of the future. It's not as though some African hunter gather ancestor from tens of thousands of years ago could have one day just said 'hey guys, how about quantum mechanics?' It was unknowable without the prerequisite disciplines. So for him it would be useless. He wouldn't be able to know anything about it, or apply it in any way, assuming falsely that he could even have conceived of it in the first place.
Quantum mechanics became knowable through the advancement of other knowable things first. It took generations of mathematicians of all types to get from the basic counting of prehistory to algebra, calculus, etc. The unknown is not the same as the unknowable. When you can ask a question and work toward the answer that answer may be initially unknown but the capacity to make it known precludes it from being unknowable. A lot of context must advance before things previously unknowable become knowable, but always the work is done on the knowable, even if tenuously.
(Quite frankly I'm surprised I haven't been criticized about my generalization about the unchangeable. Once I had written that I realized that the unchangeable could be useful IF it could also be knowable.)
The dichotomy of reality is simple: the knowable and the changable are useful, the unknowable and unchangable are not useful. Any time or effort spent on the latter is also not useful.
Even if our reality were artificial, it is the only one we have, and with no guarantees regarding the future it's better to make full use of it than waste time worrying about what could be possible but can never be known or changed.