What, Mr. "Whichever Way The Wind Blows" Romney isn't dangerous? Not through innate evilness, but through sheer amoral used car salesman "I'll say whatever it takes to become prez, and I'll do whatever benefits me and my friends if I do become prez"?
Some people call that compromising and reaching across the aisle. His governance of NH with an 80% democratic majority shows that not only can he be a moderate (rather than an extreme neocon), but he can work with the other side. That alone makes him a zillion times better than Obama, of whom we can only guarantee 4 more years of "i won, fuck you" ideological obstructionism.
Ideological obstructionism? Surely you are thinking about John Boehner and the Republican-controlled do-nothing Congress? The Republican Princes of Filibuster in the Senate? Obama spent much of his first term begging for compromises with the Republicans, conceding issue after issue, only to have them repeatedly yank the rug out from under.
It is true Romney doesn't seem to have much of an ideology, other than whatever is best for himself personally and his friends, since on any given day he is likely to take at least three mutually exclusive positions. I don't know if that's due to a reckless disregard for the facts, or just that he doesn't have much of a grasp of them, combined with a bad memory. But Rmoney didn't do squat governing NH, since AFAIK he has never held any political office in that state. I expect the rest of your knowledge is equally accurate.
Not necessarily true. In the US, the Green Party has something like 135 local elected officials. About the same number of Libertarians. Two US senators (Sanders-VT and Lieberman-CT) are 3rd party, and after the November elections there will likely still be two.
Whether any of these parties can marshal the effort to escalate their victories to higher percentages (or offices) is not clear. But they might.
Normally no, and not this year, but four years ago there was a special exception. You could say that Palin was too scary to be that close to the Presidency, or you could say that picking her was an indication of McCain's terrible judgement. Either way, 2008 was an outlier. This year Ryan and Biden are both reasonably capable and highly informed individuals. Neither of them are terrible or dangerous.
What, Mr. "Whichever Way The Wind Blows" Romney isn't dangerous? Not through innate evilness, but through sheer amoral used car salesman "I'll say whatever it takes to become prez, and I'll do whatever benefits me and my friends if I do become prez"?
Ryan, he's more honest. But way to the right of what the American people want. Most Americans (even Catholics) don't want to throw the advances women had out the window.
You would still have to prove that they are responsible for the hack. The fact that their legitimate (if silly) business benefits from some hacked code does not prove they are responsible for the hack.
Mebbe. But in the US, much property is seized without any proof of a crime. Google "asset seizure". Once that happens, it's "guilty until proven innocent", or sometimes "guilty even if you are proven innocent." Of course it's abuse, but law enforcement agencies do it all the time (for one thing, it's very lucrative for the agencies). Why should this be any different?
Of course, I'm now going to have to go on the run from Google's lawyers, for using the word as a generic verb.
Premium messaging services. Like those "text "joke" to 55555 for a joke of the day" ads on TV or donate-via-text things. The carrier pays them, and tacks that charge onto your bill.
Hmm.. The malware dials a premium number, and the carrier charges you and sends the money to the holder of that premium number. If we could just track down who that is, we could find out just how much ill-gotten gains they've received. If there was just a way to identify them.
You can't outright block access to an account after a certain number of tries because that creates an easy way to denial of service (someone can lock you out of your account just by entering a few bogus passwords).
You can't? Somebody better tell my bank, and at least one of my credit card companies, and a mutual fund or two. "We're sorry, but someone has attempted to access your account with a wrong password, and access has been disabled. Please call Customer Service between 9 and 9 Eastern to have access restored."
We have a very expensive crowd control weapon that likely could be rendered ineffective as long as enough of the protesters brought 99-cent spray bottles full of water along with them.
But it's the very first weapon that a tinfoil hat is actually documented to protect against.
The spray bottles are good. But arty foil-backed protest signs that just happen to be shaped like corner reflectors would be fun for the people in the front.
The real difference is that when we vote, all we vote for is the local representative. Unlike the US, we actually allow the politicians to govern, for better or worse. What we don't have is a gazillion citizens initiatives demanding that the government spend money on new projects while preventing the government from raising taxes to support these projects.
It's not just initiatives. In the last (2010) general election, my ballot had races for: Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Auditor, Supreme Court Justice, Appeals Court Judge, US Representative, State Representative, State Senator, County Soil and Water Supervisor, County Commissioner, Parks Commissioner, 2 School Board members. One (city) Charter Amendment. A bunch of lesser races (mostly judgeships) for which there was a) only one name on the ballot (they were running unopposed) and b) nobody had ever heard of that person anyhow. And that was in an "off" year when there was no contest for either President or Senator, nor any city offices. I'm not sure how one would hand count all that, unless you give each voter a sheaf of ballots the size of a small book.
I don't think you can easily show that the libel even was there. You don't have the guilty mind - the algorithms in question have no mind. You would have to accept that the defense will claim an accident (which it was) and that no sentient, sapient human was involved with the libel.
Mistake or buggy software, yes. Accident, no. If I have a bot that scrapes the web for random names, and accuses them of being rapists, and posts the results on a public website, it's not gonna make any difference that I didn't personally have a "guilty mind" if it "accidently" accuses someone who's not a rapist. They knew, or should have known, that their filter would make false positives. They should have taken that into account before permitting their bot to make public accusations of copyright infringement.
When a company has a strong, obvious case of breach of contract - that can bring them millions, easily - they don't need to try a minor claim of libel that had no human involved.
True. But we don't know what the contract said, and it almost certainly had a "hold harmless" clause. I'm thinking that libel is something that would likely trump anything the contract said. And the Hugo Awards aren't gonna get millions for a contract violation even in the unlikely case that they do have a good contracts lawyer.
The main case, however, has humans everywhere - humans that signed up to do what they couldn't do; humans that misconfigured the broadcast so that it went through the DRM AI bots; humans that neglected to rein those bots in; humans that ignored the problem and singlehandedly decided that fulfillment of the contract is something "optional" and "not important" because it was a holiday.
Of course. And it's not just Ustream, it's the bots that make false DMCA claims and probably a lot of other perpetrators that don't come to me at the moment. The problem is, people think that just because they automated something, that absolves them of responsibility for results that are entirely predictable. Of course, Ustream would probably "solve" the problem by just blacking out the targets of their bot without any explanation, rather than by making the bot more accurate or having a human check its results.
So would Worldcon have standing to sue UStream for libel? False (and public) accusations in writing should qualify.
Libel - unlikely.
I didn't see it so I don't know, but I'm assuming they actually did put up a title that said "Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement". If they actually claimed in writing that Worldcon infringed copyright (I didn't see it myself), it seems to me that they should be vulnerable to that charge. What more do you need? It's false, it's defamatory, and it's in writing.
...will let us know all about the analysts, and their owners. Who drinks with the bigots, who is lying about their own lives. Who... is turning up to protest queer people being treated as humans... WHO is treating women as mere sex cattle as opposed to humans. They will know all about us... including what each of us knows about each of them.
Don't be silly. First, they'll never give you uncensored access to the database. Second, you'd never know who the analysts and owners were, they'd just have "names" that they assumed when they sat down at their desk, like you see now when the Indian help-desk person says his name is "Fred" or a cop who says he's "Badge Number 1001". And third, the people who really have power will be able to keep their own personal data masked "for security reasons".
What stops you from not having a membership card, and paying in cache ?
I tried that once, I dug a hole behind the tree at the intersection, put my money in, and left a square rock on top to identify the place. But the seller claimed they never got it.
As for My Lai, one person was convicted, William Calley. Apparently he served 3.5 years under house arrest. So, non-zero number! Gotcha.
No gotcha, I just asked how many were convicted. "Between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians" were murdered (the number I quoted from memory turned out to be low), and the officer was convicted for killing 22 of them, and did 3.5 years for it. None of the other gunmen were convicted of anything. (Actually, I thought the captain had been convicted too, but turns out he was acquitted, though later he admitted having lied about what happened.)
In general governments don't convict (or even charge) their own. Rather, they engage in verbal flim-flam to deny responsibility (as in redefining the word "torture" to exclude whatever atrocity they've just committed)). In war, the vanquished side stands trial for war crimes, but never the winners.
Yes, you can have freedom without net neutrality. We've had net freedom since forever, and no-one started talking about net neutrality until a couple of years ago.
Things were very different when we were all on dialup, and there were a zillion ISPs competing for our business. Back in the day when I called about a problem, and got the owner out of the shower.
You want to see what internet freedom is about? Wait until Google Fiber destroys the business model of existing ISPs, and watch as they clamor to adopt the new one lest they be left in the dust.
But more likely is that they will hop on the net neutrality bandwagon in exchange for protection of their current market share from threats like Google.
I fail to see how "hopping on the net neutrality bandwagon" will protect their market share. Most customers don't even know what net neutrality is, so that's not likely to be much of a factor in their selecting which service to use. Maintaining a monopoly/duopoly is what's important to maintaining market share for existing ISPs, along with bundling with other services.
And the end result of that would most assuredly be status quo for the US, except that everyone else continues to advance.
For internet speeds and prices, the US is already far behind. And we've done that without net neutrality!
Are you implying that the Democrats, in any way, shape, or form, are any different from the Republicans? I see an immense division over trivial issues. It's like having a world war over 'what color barns should be painted, pink or orange?'
They're the same, if you don't consider the issue of women controlling their own bodies. They're the same, if you want to get rid of social security and medicare and go back to the 1930s. They're the same, if you want to reduce the taxes that vulture capitalists like Romney pay, at the expense of the 99%.
Yes, they serve many of the same corporate masters. It's true that we'd like so much more. But they're not the same, unless those issues are no more important than the color of a barn.
They might even just say the contractors aren't responsible for government abuses of it simply because they've been paid.
That would be an iffy defense for the contractor to make. The "But I was just following orders", doesn't seem to work that well, but maybe it'd fly in a courtroom.
It works fine, just so long as you're working for the (US) government side. (How many of the guys who murdered 250 people at My Lai did time for it?)
And we've already got precedent, with the law that was passed saying that whatever ATT had done, it was ok even if it was illegal, because it was for the government.
Wouldn't the federal government trump state law here? Why would they care that it was illegal on the state level if they were doing Official Federal Government Snooping?
I dunno. Are federal personnel allowed to violate state laws? ALL state laws? Let's say, for instance, that there's a state law that prohibits sex with chickens, but no such federal law. Can an FBI agent get amorous with chickens with impunity? And if not, what exactly makes snooping GPS records different?
It's not real clear from the article exactly what the bill provides for. Can a cell company voluntarily hand over the data? Would the cell company be liable if it turned over the data without a warrant? I suppose that if the feds did it without entering the State of California, it would be hard to get them extradited to stand trial in Sacramento, but the cell company has to have a local presence to maintain the towers.
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Some people call that compromising and reaching across the aisle. His governance of NH with an 80% democratic majority shows that not only can he be a moderate (rather than an extreme neocon), but he can work with the other side. That alone makes him a zillion times better than Obama, of whom we can only guarantee 4 more years of "i won, fuck you" ideological obstructionism.
Ideological obstructionism? Surely you are thinking about John Boehner and the Republican-controlled do-nothing Congress? The Republican Princes of Filibuster in the Senate? Obama spent much of his first term begging for compromises with the Republicans, conceding issue after issue, only to have them repeatedly yank the rug out from under.
It is true Romney doesn't seem to have much of an ideology, other than whatever is best for himself personally and his friends, since on any given day he is likely to take at least three mutually exclusive positions. I don't know if that's due to a reckless disregard for the facts, or just that he doesn't have much of a grasp of them, combined with a bad memory. But Rmoney didn't do squat governing NH, since AFAIK he has never held any political office in that state. I expect the rest of your knowledge is equally accurate.
That means running for, and voting 3rd party at the city, county, or even state level.
without proportional representation they won't get in there either.
Not necessarily true. In the US, the Green Party has something like 135 local elected officials. About the same number of Libertarians. Two US senators (Sanders-VT and Lieberman-CT) are 3rd party, and after the November elections there will likely still be two.
Whether any of these parties can marshal the effort to escalate their victories to higher percentages (or offices) is not clear. But they might.
Normally no, and not this year, but four years ago there was a special exception. You could say that Palin was too scary to be that close to the Presidency, or you could say that picking her was an indication of McCain's terrible judgement. Either way, 2008 was an outlier. This year Ryan and Biden are both reasonably capable and highly informed individuals. Neither of them are terrible or dangerous.
What, Mr. "Whichever Way The Wind Blows" Romney isn't dangerous? Not through innate evilness, but through sheer amoral used car salesman "I'll say whatever it takes to become prez, and I'll do whatever benefits me and my friends if I do become prez"?
Ryan, he's more honest. But way to the right of what the American people want. Most Americans (even Catholics) don't want to throw the advances women had out the window.
Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Huh? trillion dollar deficits EVERY year in office
No worse than Shrub.
drone "kill list"
Yeah, that sucks. But I think that's a temptation of power. And that Rmoney would be even worse.
assassinated ambassador
Shit happens.
muslim extremists taking over EVERYWHERE
Well, here the Christian extremists are trying. In China the communist ones have the power. In Russia, who knows, but it's sure not muslims.
extending patriot act, DOMESTIC use of surveillance drones, etc.
Yeah, those suck too. Another temptation of power, nobody ever wants to give up power. But Rmoney and the rightwingers will be even worse.
Birds do not demonstrate mens rea.
Neither do lasers. Idiots may, though.
Since when were you granted a right to own a laser?
I have had it forever, it was given to me by God.
By God, eh? You should probably have the signature authenticated, there are a lot of fakes out there.
IIt is a regular occurrence for containers to be washed overboard or to simply be "lost" (before or after customs).
Yes. 10000 containers per year lost at sea. Probably not yours, but it could be.
You would still have to prove that they are responsible for the hack. The fact that their legitimate (if silly) business benefits from some hacked code does not prove they are responsible for the hack.
Mebbe. But in the US, much property is seized without any proof of a crime. Google "asset seizure". Once that happens, it's "guilty until proven innocent", or sometimes "guilty even if you are proven innocent." Of course it's abuse, but law enforcement agencies do it all the time (for one thing, it's very lucrative for the agencies). Why should this be any different?
Of course, I'm now going to have to go on the run from Google's lawyers, for using the word as a generic verb.
Premium messaging services. Like those "text "joke" to 55555 for a joke of the day" ads on TV or donate-via-text things. The carrier pays them, and tacks that charge onto your bill.
Hmm.. The malware dials a premium number, and the carrier charges you and sends the money to the holder of that premium number. If we could just track down who that is, we could find out just how much ill-gotten gains they've received. If there was just a way to identify them.
It's kind of a back and forth game..
You can't outright block access to an account after a certain number of tries because that creates an easy way to denial of service (someone can lock you out of your account just by entering a few bogus passwords).
You can't? Somebody better tell my bank, and at least one of my credit card companies, and a mutual fund or two. "We're sorry, but someone has attempted to access your account with a wrong password, and access has been disabled. Please call Customer Service between 9 and 9 Eastern to have access restored."
We have a very expensive crowd control weapon that likely could be rendered ineffective as long as enough of the protesters brought 99-cent spray bottles full of water along with them.
But it's the very first weapon that a tinfoil hat is actually documented to protect against.
The spray bottles are good. But arty foil-backed protest signs that just happen to be shaped like corner reflectors would be fun for the people in the front.
But both Thrun and Khan are generally bright people who know their subject, and good speakers, so they are pretty good teachers.
Does not follow, any more than it means that they would be good managers.
The real difference is that when we vote, all we vote for is the local representative. Unlike the US, we actually allow the politicians to govern, for better or worse. What we don't have is a gazillion citizens initiatives demanding that the government spend money on new projects while preventing the government from raising taxes to support these projects.
It's not just initiatives. In the last (2010) general election, my ballot had races for: Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Auditor, Supreme Court Justice, Appeals Court Judge, US Representative, State Representative, State Senator, County Soil and Water Supervisor, County Commissioner, Parks Commissioner, 2 School Board members. One (city) Charter Amendment. A bunch of lesser races (mostly judgeships) for which there was a) only one name on the ballot (they were running unopposed) and b) nobody had ever heard of that person anyhow. And that was in an "off" year when there was no contest for either President or Senator, nor any city offices. I'm not sure how one would hand count all that, unless you give each voter a sheaf of ballots the size of a small book.
I don't think you can easily show that the libel even was there. You don't have the guilty mind - the algorithms in question have no mind. You would have to accept that the defense will claim an accident (which it was) and that no sentient, sapient human was involved with the libel.
Mistake or buggy software, yes. Accident, no. If I have a bot that scrapes the web for random names, and accuses them of being rapists, and posts the results on a public website, it's not gonna make any difference that I didn't personally have a "guilty mind" if it "accidently" accuses someone who's not a rapist. They knew, or should have known, that their filter would make false positives. They should have taken that into account before permitting their bot to make public accusations of copyright infringement.
When a company has a strong, obvious case of breach of contract - that can bring them millions, easily - they don't need to try a minor claim of libel that had no human involved.
True. But we don't know what the contract said, and it almost certainly had a "hold harmless" clause. I'm thinking that libel is something that would likely trump anything the contract said. And the Hugo Awards aren't gonna get millions for a contract violation even in the unlikely case that they do have a good contracts lawyer.
The main case, however, has humans everywhere - humans that signed up to do what they couldn't do; humans that misconfigured the broadcast so that it went through the DRM AI bots; humans that neglected to rein those bots in; humans that ignored the problem and singlehandedly decided that fulfillment of the contract is something "optional" and "not important" because it was a holiday.
Of course. And it's not just Ustream, it's the bots that make false DMCA claims and probably a lot of other perpetrators that don't come to me at the moment. The problem is, people think that just because they automated something, that absolves them of responsibility for results that are entirely predictable. Of course, Ustream would probably "solve" the problem by just blacking out the targets of their bot without any explanation, rather than by making the bot more accurate or having a human check its results.
So would Worldcon have standing to sue UStream for libel? False (and public) accusations in writing should qualify.
Libel - unlikely.
I didn't see it so I don't know, but I'm assuming they actually did put up a title that said "Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement". If they actually claimed in writing that Worldcon infringed copyright (I didn't see it myself), it seems to me that they should be vulnerable to that charge. What more do you need? It's false, it's defamatory, and it's in writing.
UStream did not falsely claim to own the rights, they just claimed that infringement occurred. It's wrong, but it's not fraud.
Right. It's not fraud, it's libel.
UStream aren't even bothering to respond to complaints.
So would Worldcon have standing to sue UStream for libel? False (and public) accusations in writing should qualify.
...will let us know all about the analysts, and their owners. Who drinks with the bigots, who is lying about their own lives. Who... is turning up to protest queer people being treated as humans... WHO is treating women as mere sex cattle as opposed to humans. They will know all about us... including what each of us knows about each of them.
Don't be silly. First, they'll never give you uncensored access to the database. Second, you'd never know who the analysts and owners were, they'd just have "names" that they assumed when they sat down at their desk, like you see now when the Indian help-desk person says his name is "Fred" or a cop who says he's "Badge Number 1001". And third, the people who really have power will be able to keep their own personal data masked "for security reasons".
What stops you from not having a membership card, and paying in cache ?
I tried that once, I dug a hole behind the tree at the intersection, put my money in, and left a square rock on top to identify the place. But the seller claimed they never got it.
To install you need to check "agree with the terms and conditions". Which link doesn't work to view.
I suppose that means I'm agreeing to NO terms or conditions.
As for My Lai, one person was convicted, William Calley. Apparently he served 3.5 years under house arrest. So, non-zero number! Gotcha.
No gotcha, I just asked how many were convicted. "Between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians" were murdered (the number I quoted from memory turned out to be low), and the officer was convicted for killing 22 of them, and did 3.5 years for it. None of the other gunmen were convicted of anything. (Actually, I thought the captain had been convicted too, but turns out he was acquitted, though later he admitted having lied about what happened.)
In general governments don't convict (or even charge) their own. Rather, they engage in verbal flim-flam to deny responsibility (as in redefining the word "torture" to exclude whatever atrocity they've just committed)). In war, the vanquished side stands trial for war crimes, but never the winners.
Yes, you can have freedom without net neutrality. We've had net freedom since forever, and no-one started talking about net neutrality until a couple of years ago.
Things were very different when we were all on dialup, and there were a zillion ISPs competing for our business. Back in the day when I called about a problem, and got the owner out of the shower.
You want to see what internet freedom is about? Wait until Google Fiber destroys the business model of existing ISPs, and watch as they clamor to adopt the new one lest they be left in the dust.
But more likely is that they will hop on the net neutrality bandwagon in exchange for protection of their current market share from threats like Google.
I fail to see how "hopping on the net neutrality bandwagon" will protect their market share. Most customers don't even know what net neutrality is, so that's not likely to be much of a factor in their selecting which service to use. Maintaining a monopoly/duopoly is what's important to maintaining market share for existing ISPs, along with bundling with other services.
And the end result of that would most assuredly be status quo for the US, except that everyone else continues to advance.
For internet speeds and prices, the US is already far behind. And we've done that without net neutrality!
Are you implying that the Democrats, in any way, shape, or form, are any different from the Republicans? I see an immense division over trivial issues. It's like having a world war over 'what color barns should be painted, pink or orange?'
They're the same, if you don't consider the issue of women controlling their own bodies. They're the same, if you want to get rid of social security and medicare and go back to the 1930s. They're the same, if you want to reduce the taxes that vulture capitalists like Romney pay, at the expense of the 99%.
Yes, they serve many of the same corporate masters. It's true that we'd like so much more. But they're not the same, unless those issues are no more important than the color of a barn.
They might even just say the contractors aren't responsible for government abuses of it simply because they've been paid.
That would be an iffy defense for the contractor to make. The "But I was just following orders", doesn't seem to work that well, but maybe it'd fly in a courtroom.
It works fine, just so long as you're working for the (US) government side. (How many of the guys who murdered 250 people at My Lai did time for it?)
And we've already got precedent, with the law that was passed saying that whatever ATT had done, it was ok even if it was illegal, because it was for the government.
Wouldn't the federal government trump state law here? Why would they care that it was illegal on the state level if they were doing Official Federal Government Snooping?
I dunno. Are federal personnel allowed to violate state laws? ALL state laws? Let's say, for instance, that there's a state law that prohibits sex with chickens, but no such federal law. Can an FBI agent get amorous with chickens with impunity? And if not, what exactly makes snooping GPS records different?
It's not real clear from the article exactly what the bill provides for. Can a cell company voluntarily hand over the data? Would the cell company be liable if it turned over the data without a warrant? I suppose that if the feds did it without entering the State of California, it would be hard to get them extradited to stand trial in Sacramento, but the cell company has to have a local presence to maintain the towers.