Same story with (RIP) Sun Microsystems. I went to a top tier uni studied sci and comp, went to their "job fair" senior year and the recruiter wouldn't even TAKE our resumes, wouldn't even permit us to hand them to her, just gave us the old look-away. This is at a time when Sun was heavily advertising for "new and recent graduates" etc etc. What they wanted to say but couldn't was "people about to lose J1 status and who need an H1B".
Of course we had no idea what was going on. It made zero sense to us then.
Companies are essentially composed of criminals by other means. This has been true of virtually every company I have worked for whether I was happy there or not. Companies , if not started by, at least come to be run by people who are basically filled with the criminal impulse, the desire to advantage themselves not by contributing but rather at someone else's expense. They relish doing this, even when it's not necessary. It's just who they are.
Sorry. What other occupation has 1/4 of people interested in it? I know big contractors like Ratheon like to perpetuate the myth of a "desperate IT labor shortage"
with news releases, "polls" and made to order stories for the purpose of ginning up support for increasing H1B numbers, but really. Am I supposed to accept the premise without any thinking here and join the conversation about "why". Let's instead start with "and....?".
Exactly correct. Children are not adults, just smaller and with less knowledge. That was society's idea of children when we were total know-nothings. Their brains are not fully developed, specifically the evolutionarily late the part of their brains which can process real morality- your frontal cortex, which represses, transmutes, modifies and finally governs the other more primitive parts of your brain- the amygdala especially. The amygdala is well developed in children and is the center for aggression, sexual motivation and the perception of your place in a hierarchy. The frontal cortex processes consequences and when developed its functions include complex and sophisticated capacities such as having pity on your perceived enemies, understanding the consequences of an action, understanding what the phrase "long term consequences" actually means, what "permanent" actually means beyond its literal definition etc etc etc.
Sure, perhaps she'll become an adult sociopath, but we have no way of distinguishing her as such at this age and don't let anyone tell you we do. I was bullied to an extent when I was young so I took an interest in this when I was in school studying the brain; I am not making things up or inventing an excuse for this girl. Facts are facts, and prosecuting this child as an adult is a regressive step borne of outrage, anger and fear.
Law enforcement looks to solve problems with the tools it understands how to use. Those tools are not always the appropriate ones. That's why there are other disciplines in the world other than law enforcement. The DA and sherriff doing the prosecuting here are not bad people, but they need to be stopped. We are skeptical when people start claiming we need new laws "to protect the children". So should we be skeptical when the criminal justice industry looks to expand its reach - and revenue base- into our children based on an appeal to the the medieval notion that children are just little adults, or more coyly, that while they're NOT adults there are SOME things they can surely understand and THIS is one of them.
The fact is , they don't understand right from wrong the way we do. This is a chronic fact of childhood that is not going away or getting better because it's not a disease. Even the "good kids" who do what we want are not good for the reasons we project onto them using our adult imaginations.
Consider this also. The de-criminalization of marijuana is going to result in a projected drop in revenues for the prison industrial complex. Don't think they don't know that and aren't extremely worried After all, they were the ones who pushed the legislature for the radical "three strikes laws" -, which put people in prison for life because they stole a piece of pizza ("third strike ! ") that led to their "booming business" in California and other states. Those states had so many people in prison that SCOTUS told them they HAD to start letting some of them go or raise taxes for more prisons.
Don't think they aren't now casting around to for new populations and behaviors to criminalize , because they are. One reliable source of "customers" would be our children who can be counted out to act in what would otherwise be considered criminal and outrageous ways were they fully adult. What we want to see is statistically fewer people in prison and involved with the criminal justice system overall as a result of the new decriminalization laws, not a steady state of our population thus engaged. You would think that would be a universal value we all share, but you would be wrong.
Actually what I think is the court should take into account is the fact that this person's brain is not developed yet which might lead him to do... that.. and think 1) it's a fine thing to do and 2) he'd get away with it.
They do this in Europe- take the age and developmental stage of the defendant into account as it interacts with the defendants s crime.
We live in a world of humans. Some young humans spontaneously think up criminal acts to engage in. This is always a risk. We have no reliable way of making young humans be other than they are, no way to avoid developing brains doing bad , even outrageous things. Everyone involved really ought to consider that before they put him in the no-rehab hell-on-earth called American prisons for 20 years and turn him into a REAL criminal.
Tesla needs to be driven out of business by car companies like Nissan because Tesla has no showrooms or dealers but Nissan can sell cars off of Amazon and that's O.K.
The bill would require Senate confirmation of the NSA director.
So this Senator's solution to "reform" is to give more power to herself and that respected, august body of dispassionate reason and good judgement, the Senate.
Yet she has no problem with the FISA rubberstampers being the final overseer.
Why am I surprised?
I voted for Feinstein many times, but you know what? She needs to go. She needs to lose her job because she's nothing but an ossified and unoriginal thinker in times which call for a radical re-thinking of the relationship between privacy, security and liberty.
She's 80 years old and she doesn't "get" the modern world anymore. The times she';s legislating for are now officially over and the post 9-11, post apocalyptic global terrorism, post-Snowden times are what we have now have to sort out. She's doddering around commanding her staffers to tweak things here and there and move a few chairs around .
She is part of the go-along-to-get-along business as usual crows that has failed us and brought us to this point. Time to go. Enjoy your gold-plated Senate healthcare retirement benefits.
The War on Drugs is costing the US it's cash, it's citizens' freedom and now our privacy. I am not for making drugs legal because drugs actually have the power to subvert the human will. In that sense, they're like an infectious virus that spreads amongst people in close contact and ultimately kills them. People on coke and meth have little to distinguish them from rabid dogs.
But OTOH the cost of criminalizing drugs instead of treating them as a disease is now threatening other values and priorities.
Enough is enough Let's deflate the prison population, retrain the people who work in prisons as counselors and social workers, re-purpose the money we now spend on prisons to rehabilitation, recovery, support and job training.
Rarely does a court decide that a company is a sham company. If this precedent were to take hold, then Google and Apple and Microsoft et al would be fucked since they have all kinds of sham companies set up in Ireland and and elsewhere to which they locate the profits from their American business activities. You can do almost anything and still not be called a "sham" corporation by a court so this must be a (good) judge who really has it in for patent trolls. May he be fruitful and multiply.
Yeah but this is done already. Banks, utilities, manufacturing, telcoms, ISPs, food processors everyone gets informed of threats or BOLO type situations.. they've always done this, it's absolutely nothing new.
Do you know for a fact, you can site cases that anything you said is true? It sounds to me like this is your fear, but where is the case of the person prosecuted in the manner and for the reason you describe? Not saying it's not true, just asking for real facts.
How is this guy a whistle blower? What illegal activity or wasteful on the government's part did he reveal? Because that's the definition of a whistle blower in the law. an you substantiate you claim that he's a whistle blower?
On your other point, the production of universal guilt coupled with selective enforcement is the functional equivalent to 8no law at all*, since the only thing keeping your head of f the block is the will of the government of the king, i.e. a nation of men and not a nation of laws.
But where is the evidence that this is now the case? I agree that we are overcriminalizing speech or at least over reacting to vague online cries of angst or anger , but how is law enforcement supposed to know how seriously to take any of those? Because they WILL be blamed if the person goes on to DO something. In this case, It's not my impression that they relish going after the errant Twitterer , much less they're trying to produce a kind of universal intimidation, but that they're in a no win situation if they don't act.
Looked at in this way, law enforcement can't LEAD us to, we need to set the boundaries we find acceptable. We need to more explicitly lay out what is and what is not OK to say . Then they can be guided in their actions by those parameters.
A significant shift has taken place in our culture with respect to speech. What was once beers-in-the-kitchen talk amongst like minded people who knew each other well is now posted for everyone in the world to hear. Different communities of listeners will *hear* what's said differently. Specifically adolescent male bravado and adult hyperbole is shocking to a lot of people who don't *get* it. One of those people complain and now what are the cops supposed to do? They HAVE to err on the side of caution because it what we've told them to do implicitly by punishing them for not acting.
It's just one of the many places our previously unconscious mores are being challenged as insufficient for the internet age. We need to make the boundaries more explicit. It's up to us, because the NSA and law enforcement won't and can't lead.
I actually had sympathy for Hayden when he said wherever you put the box, I am am going to go right to that boxes boundaries. That is honest speech. 30k people die by gunshot every year int he US and another 30k in auto accidents. While we think these things are tragedies, we don't feel like these things represent paralyzing mortal dangers. So if you think that law enforcement or the NSA is overachieving in trying to keep us safe, then say that to your Congresscritter. Talk about what is not acceptable even given severe consequences. Is losing a city to suitcase nuke something you're willing to take the chance on if it means no one is sotring your emails?
I am not being snarky here in the least, I am being completely serious.It's up to the people of a nation to decide what their collective value system is. Before the internet ate all forms of human communication, before the widespread knowledge of how to *do* stuff, including bad stuff, before the world was such a small place, our unconscious notion that law enforcement should work as hard as technically possible to prevent any and all bad things from happening wasn't a problem. Now perhaps we need to consciously look at that unconscious value system that has served us pretty well. But if all we do is throw around accusations at each other and officialdom , making some of us Good Guys and others of us Bad Guys we're not going to really get anywhere.
The government is not out to just willy nilly repress and destroy you because it's filled with Stalin-esque mad men. That's a possible world, it is, but it is not our current world, not the in the US.
When was the last time you sat down and read a book on national security and made an effort to make explicit what your own value system is in this regard? People viscerally react to what rubs them the wrong with without regard to what other very real forces are at play.
I have to agree. he did it because he could do it and for no other reason. This is not about whistle blowing. It's about making yourself the center of attention, making yourself *somebody* and possibly, we don't know, getting back at your employer.
Your point is a good one. Tumblr will *give* you 100 small images, most of which you never look at or are even aware of . Yet the internet being what it is, they are somehow "on"your computer. What if one of them is illegal ? Is everyone who stumbles on that Tumblr somehow guilty of something? Ditto Pinterest and all of the other photo-blog sites. That can't possibly be the criteria because then everyone who lands one those sites is insta-guilty. Given the internet and the content and linked in-ness of Tumblr that could come to include a high percentage of males under age 60. Porn is the single biggest driver of web traffic and it's not just the current "corrupted" generation with porn on it's mind - porn absolutely and overwhelmingly drove the uptake of the earliest photography.
They didn't release the details but one *assumes* that these are hard core nasty images of clearly underage individuals in what is clearly a sexual act and that these images were specifically sought after by the guy and consciously transmitted by the guy to another party who knew what they were also. People doing that should expect what they get.
Here's another thing. This is the second case in memory where a national security case was linked to a child porn case, the first one being the case of Scott Ridder. You would think that people involved in national security would understand that you're never anonymous online in any real sense ever if you try to disguise your IP or use a pseudonym or Tor or whatever. Most people you see arrested on TV for this crime appear to be low life ignoramuses. So how can these sophisticates possibly involve themselves with something they know they are definitely going to get caught doing ? In this case this guy got more time for the child porn than the leak.
Because we're in for a sustained campaign of "all documents in the cloud" opinion pieces driven courtesy of cloud providers and companies that make money off of sniffing your panties, like Google.
HTML 5 as of now represents a regressive step in page layout and rendering relative to what can be done by other word processing technologies. It's good for making web pages but as a universal lingua for all written communication it's lacking a lot. Also the really interesting things around the evolution of written documents and writing itself are outside of the scope of HTML5 and as such represent non-standardized efforts by privater groups and individuals. We're talking things like novel representations of information and collaborative editing.
Those things will may be open sourced or closed source efforts. Even if they're open sourced, that's still not a standard and are not going to be standards since the process of creating standards is always (over) run by competing commercial interests who attempt to define those standards to advantage themselves and disadvantage their competitors . This is why the standards process proceeds at a glacial pace,, if it ever concludes at all, why the *real* people quit such committees in disgust.
Everything in the cloud is the Next Big Thing according to the people with Big Money who spend their time trying to discover / create / profit from The Next Big Thing. That doesn't mean it serves any real need. The play here is to "get as many people using it as possible, like Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest, then through the magic of network effects, everyone WILL use it. Then - profit.
The thing is, is doesn't solve any problem but it creates lots of new ones around security and privacy .
Sure, sharing group oriented documents at some points in their creation implies they're living on a server somewhere. And there are models of group authorship which are superior to lone efforts- Wikipedia is of course the best known.
But the death of custom word processors and the death of private storage and the death of general purpose computing CPUs ? I mean, I am sure there are forces in society who not only earnestly hope for such outcomes, but campaign for them using all their considerable resources, it's just one of those things people are smart enough to reject.
It's a feel-good story, but that's all. Just like the stories of Linux devs fighting patents before they're approved, it doesn't represent a formula to solve the problem.
The only solution is to do as NZ has done and ban software patents.
The problem is that the ideas in software patents are exactly like the ideas in novels plots. They're abstract, although made concrete within the context of a novel. They represent ideas which, if not merely derivative certainly do nothing more than draw on a literal ocean of unrealized possibilities composed of well known facts about the world. Then they put them together in surprising and useful ways.
\What software patents do is assert that since not every possibility in that sea has been realized (how could they ever be? We'd run out of time merely trying to enumerate them so merely to save them from being patented..) , everything in it still "uncaught" is another patent waiting to happen.
Novelists think up new plot ideas by recombining old ones and inventing surprising twists or somehow re-contextualizing them. The result is something great, that no one has really seen before, although in retrospect it was always there waiting to be plucked out. But this is exactly what software is also.
Every day, any decent software dev has 10 new "patentable" ideas, just the way novelists have new thoughts about plot and characters and character descriptions and all the rest of what goes into writing.
The bottom line is software patents are patents on thoughts, on ideas. The real "contribution" of software patents is to introduce into the law a definition of "patentable thing" which is so abstract as to accommodate absolutely any human activity whatsoever.
If patents attorneys and their hopefuls had been around when the modern novel was taking form, they would have applied patent law to fiction writing itself.
Yeah don't participate in sites that force you to real your actual identity gender etc. That will solve the problem pretty quickly. Don't see at Huffpo anymore , do ya? Don't see me at Salon anymore , do ya? No, ya don't.
Forbes WSJ FoxNews and of course all of wright wing talk/hate radio, and others , consistently misrepresent the facts of climate science, what climate scientists are saying and how climate modeling is done.
Either they're, for reasons unknown, persistent and unlucky victims of poor reporting, poor analysis and mistaken inference or there is a persistent and deliberate determination on their parts to knowingly and with malice of forethought lie about climate science to the American , British Australian and European public.
If it turns out it's the latter, we can ask some interesting questions., Since persuading people that climate change is not as the scientists represent it -a ticking time bomb we are running out of time to defuse and one whose consequences include the mass death of humans, is lying about climate science not the equivalent to shouting (no) fire in a crowded (and burning) theater?
If it is, then are they not already criminals and are they not already responsible for those deaths? I think this is called "manslaughter" and when the number of people you caused to die numbers into the millions, I think that's elevated to "crimes against humanity".
Of course the US will never go there, but what about other nations? Hasn't the US demonstrated that people who threaten Americans are subject to executive action irrespective of where they are or whether the host nation is inclined to turn them over?
Could China or Japan or Germany or Russia or any other country just legally and unilaterally decide that say, David and Charles Koch represent too much of a threat to human civilization to permit them to go on living? Would they be within their legal right to quietly see to it that the perps are silently and quietly and discretely brought to final justice?
And what about the money these organization make from their climate denialism? Isn't that money, even if it's been dispersed to their heirs and partners actually. ill-gotten gains and subject to something like international civil forfeiture? The money to cover the catastrophically high cost of attempting to turn back climate change at the last possible moment has to be extracted from someone.
Obviously this is all beyond the pale for the current times, but time change and when they change, attitudes change, often suddenly and dramatically. What was just an amusing thought experiment one day becomes harsh reality another.
Laws exist to make society livable. They are defined according and in reaction to the environment. If that environment changes dramatically, then we can expect that near future generations of people will look back see the times we are living in now quite differently than we do, just the way we look back on slavery as an abomination or the post WWII generation of Germans were completely appalled at what their parents had done.
It's a tactical mistake borne of hubris. When the RFID chips came out, people were paranoid they'd be use to track instead of ease on off congestion in toll roads as advertised. Officialdom trotted out the usual assurances. Now they're using them to track cars.. (as if they can't already do that through other means).
The long term effect is to breed distrust of government and technology. To induce a cynical turn of mind .
Seeing as 99% of security relies on public buy in , cooperation, the feeling of a shared purpose and identity and absent those things or if those things are greatly degraded, we have no effective security, this has to be seen as a big security blunder.
Tricking, coercing, forcing, sneaking by people what's needed for security is a bad idea. It was a bad idea when the NSA started doing it whether they were getting away with it or not. It's a bad idea wherever it goes. It works against security in a million ways none of which anyone can control.
The way to security buy in is through more openness, more sharing of the problems and threats we face and above all the verifiable protection of our civil liberties against the abuses which inevitably occur when identity and details of people's private lives are exposed for examination by the state.
You have to firewall international (or national) terrorism from all other concerns. You cannot use this information to, say catch drug dealers or common murders. Neither can you over-define what terrorism IS. Copyright violations aren't terrorism and neither are the activities of organized crime. Mainstream , even violent political protestors aren't terrorists and neither are the Tea Party or anarchists. That's called- regular life, normal criminal deviance that is NOT terroristic; the goal is not to undo Western civilization.
Deniers are of course not terrorists, despite my hyperbolic moniker.
Because that IS a slippery slope and what will happen is there will grow widespread, covert, person to person rebellion ande non-cooperation, subversion and ultimate undermining of security.
People don't want to live in Stasiland, whatever benefits there are to living in Stasiland and it' takes not very much to get people to thinking that they are living in Stasiland.
I am to the right of most people on this forum, (yesterday's rating drubbing) which is to say in the middle of the political spectrum. Even I am creeped out by some of the things that have been going on. It's human nature to abuse power in ways that lead to undue influence by the power wielders and then on to a kind of defacto fascism. That's not a political perspective, that's a historical and psychological fact and moreover instinctive knowledge. It is not possible to talk your way around instinctive knowledge.
From CNN. People who CARE about other people are enraged. Everyone else is waiting for the next Breaking Bad episode (as am I)
"How many more times do we have to say that weapons of mass destruction were used?" she said. "And as bad as it is to decapitate somebody, it is by no means equal. We can't use this false moral equivalence about what's going on right now. They tried to do it in the Second World War. They tried to do it in Bosnia. They tried to do it in Rwanda and they're trying to do it now. There is no moral equivalence."
As her panelists tried to interject, Amanpour snapped, "Wait just a second!" Once she had the floor, she continued, "The president of the United States and the most moral country in the world based on the most moral principles in the world, at least that's the fundamental principle that the United States rests on, cannot allow this to go unchecked, cannot allow this to go unchecked...I'm so emotional about this."
Later, Amanpour tweeted that she was trying to recall "America's proud history" of liberal interventionism:
Slashdot Mirror
Same story with (RIP) Sun Microsystems. I went to a top tier uni studied sci and comp, went to their "job fair" senior year and the recruiter wouldn't even TAKE our resumes, wouldn't even permit us to hand them to her, just gave us the old look-away. This is at a time when Sun was heavily advertising for "new and recent graduates" etc etc. What they wanted to say but couldn't was "people about to lose J1 status and who need an H1B".
Of course we had no idea what was going on. It made zero sense to us then.
Companies are essentially composed of criminals by other means. This has been true of virtually every company I have worked for whether I was happy there or not. Companies , if not started by, at least come to be run by people who are basically filled with the criminal impulse, the desire to advantage themselves not by contributing but rather at someone else's expense. They relish doing this, even when it's not necessary. It's just who they are.
Sorry. What other occupation has 1/4 of people interested in it? I know big contractors like Ratheon like to perpetuate the myth of a "desperate IT labor shortage"
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
with news releases, "polls" and made to order stories for the purpose of ginning up support for increasing H1B numbers, but really. Am I supposed to accept the premise without any thinking here and join the conversation about "why". Let's instead start with "and....?".
No, he is saying that frontal lobe development is not complete at this age- a well known biological fact that has nothing to do with retardation.
As far as the folk concept of "age of reason" goes- citation please that this has any substantive scientific meaning.
Exactly correct. Children are not adults, just smaller and with less knowledge. That was society's idea of children when we were total know-nothings. Their brains are not fully developed, specifically the evolutionarily late the part of their brains which can process real morality- your frontal cortex, which represses, transmutes, modifies and finally governs the other more primitive parts of your brain- the amygdala especially. The amygdala is well developed in children and is the center for aggression, sexual motivation and the perception of your place in a hierarchy. The frontal cortex processes consequences and when developed its functions include complex and sophisticated capacities such as having pity on your perceived enemies, understanding the consequences of an action, understanding what the phrase "long term consequences" actually means, what "permanent" actually means beyond its literal definition etc etc etc.
Sure, perhaps she'll become an adult sociopath, but we have no way of distinguishing her as such at this age and don't let anyone tell you we do. I was bullied to an extent when I was young so I took an interest in this when I was in school studying the brain; I am not making things up or inventing an excuse for this girl. Facts are facts, and prosecuting this child as an adult is a regressive step borne of outrage, anger and fear.
Law enforcement looks to solve problems with the tools it understands how to use. Those tools are not always the appropriate ones. That's why there are other disciplines in the world other than law enforcement. The DA and sherriff doing the prosecuting here are not bad people, but they need to be stopped. We are skeptical when people start claiming we need new laws "to protect the children". So should we be skeptical when the criminal justice industry looks to expand its reach - and revenue base- into our children based on an appeal to the the medieval notion that children are just little adults, or more coyly, that while they're NOT adults there are SOME things they can surely understand and THIS is one of them.
The fact is , they don't understand right from wrong the way we do. This is a chronic fact of childhood that is not going away or getting better because it's not a disease. Even the "good kids" who do what we want are not good for the reasons we project onto them using our adult imaginations.
Consider this also. The de-criminalization of marijuana is going to result in a projected drop in revenues for the prison industrial complex. Don't think they don't know that and aren't extremely worried After all, they were the ones who pushed the legislature for the radical "three strikes laws" -, which put people in prison for life because they stole a piece of pizza ("third strike ! ") that led to their "booming business" in California and other states. Those states had so many people in prison that SCOTUS told them they HAD to start letting some of them go or raise taxes for more prisons.
Don't think they aren't now casting around to for new populations and behaviors to criminalize , because they are. One reliable source of "customers" would be our children who can be counted out to act in what would otherwise be considered criminal and outrageous ways were they fully adult. What we want to see is statistically fewer people in prison and involved with the criminal justice system overall as a result of the new decriminalization laws, not a steady state of our population thus engaged. You would think that would be a universal value we all share, but you would be wrong.
Another criminal genius bites the dust!
Actually what I think is the court should take into account is the fact that this person's brain is not developed yet which might lead him to do... that.. and think 1) it's a fine thing to do and 2) he'd get away with it.
They do this in Europe- take the age and developmental stage of the defendant into account as it interacts with the defendants s crime.
We live in a world of humans. Some young humans spontaneously think up criminal acts to engage in. This is always a risk. We have no reliable way of making young humans be other than they are, no way to avoid developing brains doing bad , even outrageous things. Everyone involved really ought to consider that before they put him in the no-rehab hell-on-earth called American prisons for 20 years and turn him into a REAL criminal.
My liberal bleeding heart at work overtime.
Let me see if I can understand this.
Tesla needs to be driven out of business by car companies like Nissan because Tesla has no showrooms or dealers but Nissan can sell cars off of Amazon and that's O.K.
Yeah, that makes sense.
This is taken from a top secret paper titled-
"Advances In The Arbitrary Production of Guilt in Innocent Individuals- On The Way To Jury-Proof Convictions.
I'd link you you to it, but that would make me a leaker.
The bill would require Senate confirmation of the NSA director.
So this Senator's solution to "reform" is to give more power to herself and that respected, august body of dispassionate reason and good judgement, the Senate.
Yet she has no problem with the FISA rubberstampers being the final overseer.
Why am I surprised?
I voted for Feinstein many times, but you know what? She needs to go. She needs to lose her job because she's nothing but an ossified and unoriginal thinker in times which call for a radical re-thinking of the relationship between privacy, security and liberty.
She's 80 years old and she doesn't "get" the modern world anymore. The times she';s legislating for are now officially over and the post 9-11, post apocalyptic global terrorism, post-Snowden times are what we have now have to sort out. She's doddering around commanding her staffers to tweak things here and there and move a few chairs around .
She is part of the go-along-to-get-along business as usual crows that has failed us and brought us to this point. Time to go. Enjoy your gold-plated Senate healthcare retirement benefits.
This:
\http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/why-scandinavian-prisons-are-superior/279949/
The War on Drugs is costing the US it's cash, it's citizens' freedom and now our privacy. I am not for making drugs legal because drugs actually have the power to subvert the human will. In that sense, they're like an infectious virus that spreads amongst people in close contact and ultimately kills them. People on coke and meth have little to distinguish them from rabid dogs.
But OTOH the cost of criminalizing drugs instead of treating them as a disease is now threatening other values and priorities.
Enough is enough Let's deflate the prison population, retrain the people who work in prisons as counselors and social workers, re-purpose the money we now spend on prisons to rehabilitation, recovery, support and job training.
Rarely does a court decide that a company is a sham company. If this precedent were to take hold, then Google and Apple and Microsoft et al would be fucked since they have all kinds of sham companies set up in Ireland and and elsewhere to which they locate the profits from their American business activities. You can do almost anything and still not be called a "sham" corporation by a court so this must be a (good) judge who really has it in for patent trolls. May he be fruitful and multiply.
Yeah but this is done already. Banks, utilities, manufacturing, telcoms, ISPs, food processors everyone gets informed of threats or BOLO type situations .. they've always done this, it's absolutely nothing new.
nothing mysterious here except why this submission was accepted but mine never are.
Grunt.
Do you know for a fact, you can site cases that anything you said is true? It sounds to me like this is your fear, but where is the case of the person prosecuted in the manner and for the reason you describe? Not saying it's not true, just asking for real facts.
How is this guy a whistle blower? What illegal activity or wasteful on the government's part did he reveal? Because that's the definition of a whistle blower in the law. an you substantiate you claim that he's a whistle blower?
On your other point, the production of universal guilt coupled with selective enforcement is the functional equivalent to 8no law at all*, since the only thing keeping your head of f the block is the will of the government of the king, i.e. a nation of men and not a nation of laws.
But where is the evidence that this is now the case? I agree that we are overcriminalizing speech or at least over reacting to vague online cries of angst or anger , but how is law enforcement supposed to know how seriously to take any of those? Because they WILL be blamed if the person goes on to DO something. In this case, It's not my impression that they relish going after the errant Twitterer , much less they're trying to produce a kind of universal intimidation, but that they're in a no win situation if they don't act.
Looked at in this way, law enforcement can't LEAD us to, we need to set the boundaries we find acceptable. We need to more explicitly lay out what is and what is not OK to say . Then they can be guided in their actions by those parameters.
A significant shift has taken place in our culture with respect to speech. What was once beers-in-the-kitchen talk amongst like minded people who knew each other well is now posted for everyone in the world to hear. Different communities of listeners will *hear* what's said differently. Specifically adolescent male bravado and adult hyperbole is shocking to a lot of people who don't *get* it. One of those people complain and now what are the cops supposed to do? They HAVE to err on the side of caution because it what we've told them to do implicitly by punishing them for not acting.
It's just one of the many places our previously unconscious mores are being challenged as insufficient for the internet age. We need to make the boundaries more explicit. It's up to us, because the NSA and law enforcement won't and can't lead.
I actually had sympathy for Hayden when he said wherever you put the box, I am am going to go right to that boxes boundaries. That is honest speech. 30k people die by gunshot every year int he US and another 30k in auto accidents. While we think these things are tragedies, we don't feel like these things represent paralyzing mortal dangers. So if you think that law enforcement or the NSA is overachieving in trying to keep us safe, then say that to your Congresscritter. Talk about what is not acceptable even given severe consequences. Is losing a city to suitcase nuke something you're willing to take the chance on if it means no one is sotring your emails?
I am not being snarky here in the least, I am being completely serious.It's up to the people of a nation to decide what their collective value system is. Before the internet ate all forms of human communication, before the widespread knowledge of how to *do* stuff, including bad stuff, before the world was such a small place, our unconscious notion that law enforcement should work as hard as technically possible to prevent any and all bad things from happening wasn't a problem. Now perhaps we need to consciously look at that unconscious value system that has served us pretty well. But if all we do is throw around accusations at each other and officialdom , making some of us Good Guys and others of us Bad Guys we're not going to really get anywhere.
The government is not out to just willy nilly repress and destroy you because it's filled with Stalin-esque mad men. That's a possible world, it is, but it is not our current world, not the in the US.
When was the last time you sat down and read a book on national security and made an effort to make explicit what your own value system is in this regard? People viscerally react to what rubs them the wrong with without regard to what other very real forces are at play.
Maybe you know exac
I have to agree. he did it because he could do it and for no other reason. This is not about whistle blowing. It's about making yourself the center of attention, making yourself *somebody* and possibly, we don't know, getting back at your employer.
Your point is a good one. Tumblr will *give* you 100 small images, most of which you never look at or are even aware of . Yet the internet being what it is, they are somehow "on"your computer. What if one of them is illegal ? Is everyone who stumbles on that Tumblr somehow guilty of something? Ditto Pinterest and all of the other photo-blog sites. That can't possibly be the criteria because then everyone who lands one those sites is insta-guilty. Given the internet and the content and linked in-ness of Tumblr that could come to include a high percentage of males under age 60. Porn is the single biggest driver of web traffic and it's not just the current "corrupted" generation with porn on it's mind - porn absolutely and overwhelmingly drove the uptake of the earliest photography.
They didn't release the details but one *assumes* that these are hard core nasty images of clearly underage individuals in what is clearly a sexual act and that these images were specifically sought after by the guy and consciously transmitted by the guy to another party who knew what they were also. People doing that should expect what they get.
Here's another thing. This is the second case in memory where a national security case was linked to a child porn case, the first one being the case of Scott Ridder. You would think that people involved in national security would understand that you're never anonymous online in any real sense ever if you try to disguise your IP or use a pseudonym or Tor or whatever. Most people you see arrested on TV for this crime appear to be low life ignoramuses. So how can these sophisticates possibly involve themselves with something they know they are definitely going to get caught doing ? In this case this guy got more time for the child porn than the leak.
Because we're in for a sustained campaign of "all documents in the cloud" opinion pieces driven courtesy of cloud providers and companies that make money off of sniffing your panties, like Google.
HTML 5 as of now represents a regressive step in page layout and rendering relative to what can be done by other word processing technologies. It's good for making web pages but as a universal lingua for all written communication it's lacking a lot. Also the really interesting things around the evolution of written documents and writing itself are outside of the scope of HTML5 and as such represent non-standardized efforts by privater groups and individuals. We're talking things like novel representations of information and collaborative editing.
Those things will may be open sourced or closed source efforts. Even if they're open sourced, that's still not a standard and are not going to be standards since the process of creating standards is always (over) run by competing commercial interests who attempt to define those standards to advantage themselves and disadvantage their competitors . This is why the standards process proceeds at a glacial pace,, if it ever concludes at all, why the *real* people quit such committees in disgust.
Everything in the cloud is the Next Big Thing according to the people with Big Money who spend their time trying to discover / create / profit from The Next Big Thing. That doesn't mean it serves any real need. The play here is to "get as many people using it as possible, like Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest, then through the magic of network effects, everyone WILL use it. Then - profit.
The thing is, is doesn't solve any problem but it creates lots of new ones around security and privacy .
Sure, sharing group oriented documents at some points in their creation implies they're living on a server somewhere. And there are models of group authorship which are superior to lone efforts- Wikipedia is of course the best known.
But the death of custom word processors and the death of private storage and the death of general purpose computing CPUs ? I mean, I am sure there are forces in society who not only earnestly hope for such outcomes, but campaign for them using all their considerable resources, it's just one of those things people are smart enough to reject.
It's a feel-good story, but that's all. Just like the stories of Linux devs fighting patents before they're approved, it doesn't represent a formula to solve the problem.
The only solution is to do as NZ has done and ban software patents.
The problem is that the ideas in software patents are exactly like the ideas in novels plots. They're abstract, although made concrete within the context of a novel. They represent ideas which, if not merely derivative certainly do nothing more than draw on a literal ocean of unrealized possibilities composed of well known facts about the world. Then they put them together in surprising and useful ways.
\What software patents do is assert that since not every possibility in that sea has been realized (how could they ever be? We'd run out of time merely trying to enumerate them so merely to save them from being patented..) , everything in it still "uncaught" is another patent waiting to happen.
Novelists think up new plot ideas by recombining old ones and inventing surprising twists or somehow re-contextualizing them. The result is something great, that no one has really seen before, although in retrospect it was always there waiting to be plucked out. But this is exactly what software is also.
Every day, any decent software dev has 10 new "patentable" ideas, just the way novelists have new thoughts about plot and characters and character descriptions and all the rest of what goes into writing.
The bottom line is software patents are patents on thoughts, on ideas. The real "contribution" of software patents is to introduce into the law a definition of "patentable thing" which is so abstract as to accommodate absolutely any human activity whatsoever.
If patents attorneys and their hopefuls had been around when the modern novel was taking form, they would have applied patent law to fiction writing itself.
Yeah don't participate in sites that force you to real your actual identity gender etc. That will solve the problem pretty quickly. Don't see at Huffpo anymore , do ya? Don't see me at Salon anymore , do ya? No, ya don't.
Software patents are a fraud designed to line the pockets of lawyers.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
>> So they Hollywood it up a bit.
Proof or it didn't happen
Forbes WSJ FoxNews and of course all of wright wing talk/hate radio, and others , consistently misrepresent the facts of climate science, what climate scientists are saying and how climate modeling is done.
Either they're, for reasons unknown, persistent and unlucky victims of poor reporting, poor analysis and mistaken inference or there is a persistent and deliberate determination on their parts to knowingly and with malice of forethought lie about climate science to the American , British Australian and European public.
If it turns out it's the latter, we can ask some interesting questions., Since persuading people that climate change is not as the scientists represent it -a ticking time bomb we are running out of time to defuse and one whose consequences include the mass death of humans, is lying about climate science not the equivalent to shouting (no) fire in a crowded (and burning) theater?
If it is, then are they not already criminals and are they not already responsible for those deaths? I think this is called "manslaughter" and when the number of people you caused to die numbers into the millions, I think that's elevated to "crimes against humanity".
Of course the US will never go there, but what about other nations? Hasn't the US demonstrated that people who threaten Americans are subject to executive action irrespective of where they are or whether the host nation is inclined to turn them over?
Could China or Japan or Germany or Russia or any other country just legally and unilaterally decide that say, David and Charles Koch represent too much of a threat to human civilization to permit them to go on living? Would they be within their legal right to quietly see to it that the perps are silently and quietly and discretely brought to final justice?
And what about the money these organization make from their climate denialism? Isn't that money, even if it's been dispersed to their heirs and partners actually. ill-gotten gains and subject to something like international civil forfeiture? The money to cover the catastrophically high cost of attempting to turn back climate change at the last possible moment has to be extracted from someone.
Obviously this is all beyond the pale for the current times, but time change and when they change, attitudes change, often suddenly and dramatically. What was just an amusing thought experiment one day becomes harsh reality another.
Laws exist to make society livable. They are defined according and in reaction to the environment. If that environment changes dramatically, then we can expect that near future generations of people will look back see the times we are living in now quite differently than we do, just the way we look back on slavery as an abomination or the post WWII generation of Germans were completely appalled at what their parents had done.
It's a tactical mistake borne of hubris. When the RFID chips came out, people were paranoid they'd be use to track instead of ease on off congestion in toll roads as advertised. Officialdom trotted out the usual assurances. Now they're using them to track cars.. (as if they can't already do that through other means).
The long term effect is to breed distrust of government and technology. To induce a cynical turn of mind .
Seeing as 99% of security relies on public buy in , cooperation, the feeling of a shared purpose and identity and absent those things or if those things are greatly degraded, we have no effective security, this has to be seen as a big security blunder.
Tricking, coercing, forcing, sneaking by people what's needed for security is a bad idea. It was a bad idea when the NSA started doing it whether they were getting away with it or not. It's a bad idea wherever it goes. It works against security in a million ways none of which anyone can control.
The way to security buy in is through more openness, more sharing of the problems and threats we face and above all the verifiable protection of our civil liberties against the abuses which inevitably occur when identity and details of people's private lives are exposed for examination by the state.
You have to firewall international (or national) terrorism from all other concerns. You cannot use this information to, say catch drug dealers or common murders. Neither can you over-define what terrorism IS. Copyright violations aren't terrorism and neither are the activities of organized crime. Mainstream , even violent political protestors aren't terrorists and neither are the Tea Party or anarchists. That's called- regular life, normal criminal deviance that is NOT terroristic; the goal is not to undo Western civilization.
Deniers are of course not terrorists, despite my hyperbolic moniker.
Because that IS a slippery slope and what will happen is there will grow widespread, covert, person to person rebellion ande non-cooperation, subversion and ultimate undermining of security.
People don't want to live in Stasiland, whatever benefits there are to living in Stasiland and it' takes not very much to get people to thinking that they are living in Stasiland.
I am to the right of most people on this forum, (yesterday's rating drubbing) which is to say in the middle of the political spectrum. Even I am creeped out by some of the things that have been going on. It's human nature to abuse power in ways that lead to undue influence by the power wielders and then on to a kind of defacto fascism. That's not a political perspective, that's a historical and psychological fact and moreover instinctive knowledge. It is not possible to talk your way around instinctive knowledge.
From CNN. People who CARE about other people are enraged. Everyone else is waiting for the next Breaking Bad episode (as am I)
"How many more times do we have to say that weapons of mass destruction were used?" she said. "And as bad as it is to decapitate somebody, it is by no means equal. We can't use this false moral equivalence about what's going on right now. They tried to do it in the Second World War. They tried to do it in Bosnia. They tried to do it in Rwanda and they're trying to do it now. There is no moral equivalence."
As her panelists tried to interject, Amanpour snapped, "Wait just a second!" Once she had the floor, she continued, "The president of the United States and the most moral country in the world based on the most moral principles in the world, at least that's the fundamental principle that the United States rests on, cannot allow this to go unchecked, cannot allow this to go unchecked...I'm so emotional about this."
Later, Amanpour tweeted that she was trying to recall "America's proud history" of liberal interventionism: