Yeah the only people who are off their meds are the deniers who are , if that thing we call science is to believed, are preventing the political action needed to prevent the worst calamity human kind has ever faced, bar none, with all the attendant consequences that that implies.
Read history. Read what happen to people who take seriously that their imaginary ideology can prevail over reality. Read what happens to people whose thinking permits a shared, deeply felt delusion to guide their actions .
Believe me, it's not all our fault. It's not a societal sin, or human nature or anything else *collective8 that brought this on. It's conservatives plain and simple. Glad you believe so strongly in the assignment of individual responsibility because this isn't going to be chalked up to "society" or "our greed" or "our shortsightedness" or any other collective noun phrase.
The record couldn't be clearer . Conservatives were the ones who systematically lied about and prevented society from taking corrective action while we still could.
You're consigning hundreds of millions of millions of people to death and murdering the ecological basis of basis of civilization itself and when you encounter someone who is processing reality what do you think? Wow that person is nuts!
Reality is one thing, one way. It's not a Rovian poitical construct. It's not a post modern masturbation fantasy. It is what it is and it doesn't give a fuck about what you think about it. Your exercise in magical thinking, that reality can be made different by just believing very strongly is going to doom you and all the rest of the subhuman psychopathic conservative filth into what history calls "losers".
It doesn't matter what it takes. It doesn't matter what level of barbarity we need to sink to... ion the end, when it comes down to action or your *rights* guess what? Society will fuck your civil rights and fuck your freedoms, we're going to survive and we're going to do that by neutralizing the threat.
You and the republican party and the bankers and the heads of the environmental-raping corporations need to read history Feast your motherfucking eyes on how the powerful and well connected, the people who thought it couldn't never work against them ended up when they overreached
Yeah it's s not illegal to be a conservative today and you can believe whatever reality-defying thing you want to and teach your kids to do the same. But that is now, before the climactic feedback events that devastated 3/4 of the world's food supply over the course of half a decade have kicked in. or similar event.
When this is over, we will be pitiless with respect to anything that led is to this point. Conservative forms of religion? Forget about it. Free market? Forget about it. Freedom to assert anything you want pm matters of scientific fact without reserve? Forget about it.. It's going to be a different , sort of hellish world and your kind, the people who brought it down on the heads of billions of innocent people will live through it in chains , if you live through it at all.
Not even the worst part of this one article, of which there are many more and worse. Here Taibbi is talking about the systematic destruction of records of evidence generated by the SEC during MUIs (matters under investigation... including Madoff etc... ) , such destruction being highly illegal.
Read it and weep..no criminal wrong doing? Nothing provable? Remeber this is the LEAST of what went on and only speaks to the criminality within the SEC. itself..The supervisor from the SEC described by Taibbi who is now at Deutsche Bank should be arrested, diapered, blindfolded, immobilized and put in restraints, and flown down to GITMO or perhaps to Poland or Saudi so we can be sure to get the full measure of truth including names, contacts, co-conspirators etc out of him.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, no. One of the criticisms of my article, after it came out, was, well, you know, all of these cases, these MUIs that got destroyed, they were insignificant cases, thatâ(TM)s why they didnâ(TM)t proceed to full-blown investigations in the first place. Well, we know that this isnâ(TM)t true. We know that at least a couple of these cases involved Bernie Madoff in the years before the Madoff story came out.
Also, Darcy Flynn, this whistleblower, he also came forward with revelations about his own experience as an investigator. One of the first cases that he talked about was one where he was trying to pursue a case involving Deutsche Bank, a very promising securities fraud case, but it was rejected by the chief of the enforcement division, who shortly thereafter took a job as the general counsel of Deutsche Bank. So we know that this is part of the culture at the SEC
So please, let's stop saying that no crimes were commited or that it's too hard to prove a crime on the part of high powered bankers and their cohorts.
These results are from a poll of Muslim students: â" 33% claim that killing is justified if done to protect religion. â" 40 percent support the introduction of sharia for British Muslims. â" 33 percent support a worldwide Islamic caliphate based on sharia.
Yeah but those numbers are similar to the numbers Christian post in our well developed, secular democracy_
You can pretty much rest assured that they would answer the first two questions in the affirmative if they were ever permitted to come to the kind of power they seek.
Radical Islam is no joke, but it's not that different from the 33% of Americans who are merely held in check by the fact of being embedded within the context of a civil, secular society...
It's never advertiser's emails and contracts and deals that get exposed, although one can assume these things are held electronically and have a great deal of value to someone, certainly more value than the 0.25 -$1.00 lifetime value Average FB User's email is worth .
Not saying companies deliberately release their users emails so that when that information later figures as evidence in a crime / scam / scandal FB has plausible deniability.
get ev\eryone's email and personal info. pretend to "lose" some . ??? profit.
I completely agree and would take it further and say that a lot of what gets into great universities in the first place are just exemplars people who are just personally ambitious with a drive to succeed (as opposed to curious or broadminded or interested in contributing to society in a constructive way) and rather cut throat. Which explains the behavior of a lot of academic departments.
This is far far bigger news than Cheney's "deficits don't matter' . For one, it's true. For another, someone credible with some skin in the game and a need to be right is saying it. It should get more airplay. The news is focusing in on the retiring of Google Brainteasers. That's not the headline. Here's the headline:
GPAs don't matter.
GPAs don't matter.
and for the curious (and my enemies) I had an A minus GPA.
Here's Ayn Rand in her own words on the child rapist and mass murderer Hickman who was the model of Roark in her novels:
is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness â" [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ⦠Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should. (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the âvirtuousâ(TM) indignation and mass-hatred of the âmajority.â(TM)⦠It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminalâ¦
This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.
And when we look at the other side of it â" there is a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. By whom? By what? Is it not by that very society that is now yelling so virtuously in its role of innocent victim? He had a brilliant mind, a romantic, adventurous, impatient soul and a straight, uncompromising, proud character. What had society to offer him? A wretched, insane family as the ideal home, a Y.M.C.A. club as social honor, and a bank-page job as ambition and careerâ¦
If he had any desires and ambitions â" what was the way before him? A long, slow, soul-eating, heart-wrecking toil and struggle; the degrading, ignoble road of silent pain and loud compromisesâ¦.
A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy was not strong enough. But is that his crime? Is it his crime that he was too impatient, fiery and proud to go that slow way? That he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule; to obey, when he wanted to command?â¦
He was given [nothing with which] to fill his life. What was he offered to fill his soul? The petty, narrow, inconsistent, hypocritical ideology of present-day humanity. All the criminal, ludicrous, tragic nonsense of Christianity and its morals, virtues, and consequences. Is it any wonder that he didnâ(TM)t accept it?
Remember this readers, all Ayn Rand "supermen" are also all liars. They feel justified stepping outside the bounds of morality because to them morality is a the concern of dupes and "little people". Lying to you is just another technique for them to get what they want and nothing more.
So they'll claim to "not be that into Ayn Rand" when in fact their hardcore Ranites whose entire political and social philosophy is drawn from here. For instance, Paul Ryan is disavowing her, but in reality he finds admitting to being a Randite just inconvenient and he's perfectly willing to lie to the "little people" whom he considers to be nothing more than "mud".
They lie about being Randites and they lie about lying about it. They lie about what she said, what she believed what she wrote and what she did. They lie about their own intentions. The whole point of Ayn Rand was to conquer and to grind under your heel people who are so stupid and self limiting as to abide by things such as "altruism" and "caring about anyone other than yourself" and "morality" and such like. To Rand lying to people to get your way, to grind down th
Espionage is an over charging, clearly. You've committed espionage when you've divulged state secrets FOR ANOTHER COUNTRY. So even though Israel is a friendly nation, we still kick their spies out and or jail them.
But Snowden didn't release state secrets to and for a foreign country. He did it for Americans.
It's prosecutorial overreach and worse for the prosecution, is likely to be perceived as such by potential juries. I feel an acquittal on the espionage charge forthcoming, even in absentia.
So the question arises at least in my mind- is this a dog and pony show, with Snowden perhaps unwittingly playing the role of a dog?
Is the government using Snowden to leak this information and if so, why?
To acclimate citizens to this level of scrutiny? To see if we'll swallow it? Maybe.
Or is it a bid on the part of , possibly some subset of, the intelligence community to get the program revised and toned down because they're afraid of the corrupting power unlimited access to the most personal secrets of lawmakers and other power players could put into the hands of a Cheney or a set of true believers like the neocons?
It's not that far fetched. Consider that the neocons twice now have attempted, once successfully, to foment wars based on false intelligence they produced through Team B efforts, efforts which the intelligence community deeply resented and still resent especially since many Americans wrongly cite the CIA as the producer of faulty intelligence in the run up to the war in Iraq.
What this means is they're liars who will play WAY out of bounds to get their way, where WAY out of bounds includes LYING and DISTORTING intelligence and using intelligence to destroy domestic political opponents including exposing the identities of covert operators working for the CIA:
Historically, that didn't and can't now sit well with people at the CIA who consider accurate, unbiased intelligence assessments to be the crown jewel of nation's defense capability.
So is has the level of invasiveness which this program makes possible been gamed out somewhere at Langley, with one side playing the neocons and Cheney and using the techniques of deception, lying, distortion of information and targeting of dissenters through any means, legal or illegal, short (we think) of murder and the other side the CIA and other intelligence agencies upholding the letter and spirit of the law?
Perhaps such games revealed a gaping strategic disadvantage through which a coup by a Cheney and the neocons would be successful 100% of the time.
After all, we game out scenarios against all enemies foreign and domestic, if it's a threat to the US, it gets considered.
Perhaps one of the conclusions was- this intelligence program is a serious, mortal threat to the Republic.
Perhaps they took the result of this gaming to the President, who agreed with their conclusions. Perhaps a plan was hatched to subvert it, all the while making it look like they're only and intensely interested in doing the opposite.
I know it sounds too weird to be true, but this IS how intelligence agencies and covert missions work on a good day. This is the games they play.
If Obama tried to unilaterally quietly retire the program, it would just come back for the next administration who wanted it, and we know what admin would want it. Without the p
Nice try. For one, NOTHING in that report- which was NOT a Presidential directive to do anything and had not the power of law- said
"make bad loans to people who won't pay them back",
much less
"go out in force and persuade as many people as you can who you know know nothing about real estate, variable interest rates, or real-estate appreciation to take on loans you know for a fact they will never be able to service and do so by directly lying to them about the long term implications of what they're signing ".
What it WAS was an acknowledgment that many working people do NOT NOT NOT buy things on credit (unlike say, bankers) but instead have a pay as you go philosophy towards making purchases.Thanks to the bankers and frothing greedheads in the credit industry that was the ONLY criteria use to loan people money. The result was that poor people who didn't use credit were not considered for home mortgage loans although their incomes and employment histories justified receiving loans.
For 15 years - since 1993 - that system was observed by some banks and there was no melt down.
Meanwhile the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street cooked up that successively more risky forms of derivatives and CDOs unwittingly linking into one gigantic causal chain the entire banking industry insurance while lobbying to prevent CDOs from being regulated like insurance.
Of course Alan Greenspan, a direct Ayn Rand apostle who *literally sat at her feet* at her NY apartment (this was before she became a professional Social Security recipient... sponging off the state...) approved this all asserting that markets are "sophisticated" and "know what they're doing" and don't need government and unsophisticated people to oversee their activities (just to bail them out ) .
So what do we have? We have an edifice of masked causality and interconnected dependencies created by "superstar quants" who apparently don't understand that probability models based on an arbitrarily limited historical window of previous events actually DON'T and CAN'T be properly applied to the real world because none of the outcomes of the sample space can be definitively said to be independent in the first place, which is a mother fucking AXIOM of probability, and therefore any "events" composed of such outcomes are entirely fictional and any probability assigned to those events are both entirely fictional.
Any models which derive "risk" from said models are apriori known to be invalid (except by bankers and their quants! ) since as any 10th grader knows if the axioms of a system are not upheld , none of the conclusions are valid.
Which is exactly what the 2008 meltdown proved, as if it needed proving again.
So 2008 was a 16 trillion dollar lesson http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealth/index.htm in 10th grade math inflicted on the country by the nations financial elite who treat your savings as their piggybank to backstop incredibly stupid financial theories they and their quants cook up at stripper clubs over lines of blow.
And you blame it on some poor car mechanic / elementary school teacher couple who've never had a home loan in their life, who think the loan officer is prevented by law and conscious from lying to them .
Yeah, your kind can never each too far or dream too big when it comes to excusing the depravity of the wealthy elite and blame everything on poor folks.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the loan officers who systematically lied to people in order to induce them to assume levels of debt and then walked away from what they had done.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the bankers who systematically sold securities they knew would crash to people in order to induce them and then walked away from what they had done.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the coke snorting analysts and traders who cooked up a complicated system of CDO and derivatives and pretended to understand same, all the while demanding to be free from regulation and which later took the whole economy down , the only repercussion that they got bailed out, doubled down on their bonuses and walked away from what they had done.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the degenerate economists and lobbyists whose "free market" deregulatory theories of non-reality paved the grounds for the entire meltdown but who took no responsibility and walked away from what they had done.
FTFY
Ayn Rand was a amphetamine addicted speed freak who was sexually aroused by stories of rapists, child molesters and murders.
Right now the developed nations are THIS CLOSE to an irreversible tipping point beyond which civilization collapses and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Before that happens , people will begin to realize that it's going to happen. At that point, far before it actually happens, people will begin to act as if it's already happening.
Mass uncontrollable immigration as millions of desperate people ignore international law, barbed wire and guns in a desperate bid for potable water and food under the pressure of world-wide crop failures.
Total economic breakdown as every penny is spent in either desperate remediation, law enforcement or moon-shoot attempts to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
World wide wars destabilizing Western-friendly nations as radical Islam hitches itself to global warming and the virulent most anti-social forms of fundamentalism becomes a majority viewpoint .
Focusing their angst against the West, they topple Pakistan, get hold of their nukes and do not miss a beat in using them against India and the US, adding fallout and mass panic to the witches brew of the hell life on earth has become.
The President of the United States , the CIA and all other government agencies and agents don't just have the legal right to prevent that scenario from ever materializing, they have a sworn duty to do so.
If that means silencing the psychopaths like Koch and Ailes and Murdoch and Hannity and Forbes and Limbaugh and Watts and all of the other engineers of denialism, then that's what that means. Their lives and greed and sociopathic lifestyles are not more important than the lives of the billions of people thew world over they have chosen to exterminate.
This country right now is arguably in a slow motion civil war with rational people who base their actions on empirical evidence and science on one side and Ayn Randian societal rapists, apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists and sociopaths on the other.
The fact that it's a slow motion bomb the other side is determined to set off means nothing. They will, if they're not stopped, exterminate not just us, but all future generations for all time. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb and a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower.
Every nation on this earth should treat deniers and polluters as the clear and present danger to their national security that they are.
If you shout "no fire" in a burning theater and work to make people believe there is no fire when any reasonable person working in good conscience would conclude form the same evidence that there is , then that's murder.
If you think the government isn't going to take the accumulated evidence of what you said, what you posted what you tried to get others to believe and use it to prosecute you as an agent of denial in a near future Crimes Against Humanity trial. then you haven't read history very carefully.
The legitimate government of any sovereign nation has a right to stop the actions of terrorists whose actions are provably a threat to their national security and the security of their people.
This has been affirmed even in the United States, which itself has unilaterally sought and killed people it deems terrorists in foreign nations.
By this reasoning, citizens of the United States whose actions threaten the national security of other nations can legally be subject to executive action on the part of those nations.
In fact, every nation has a right to ensure the national security of its peoples against terrorists, wherever those terrorist may reside and whatever device those terrorists may chose as a weapon.
This. Mod parent up. It's not just true of sysadmin, but of anyone who accumulates power through specialized knowledge. It happens in open source also- someone has specialized knowledge accumulated over years and not easily duplicated. To a significant percentage of people, it occurs to them that this gives them power and the effect of this realization on their personality is nothing less than transformative.
They discover that by being an asshole to questioners, questions and therefore work drops off quickly. They can effectively get their workload down to level-->leisure by acting like a prick , typically the kind of prick that implies question askers are idiots, or lazy.
Sysadmins are the lungs of an organization. How long can you go without breathing? Someone I know deals with a lazy asshole sysadmin from time to time and I hear about it. He does nothing, plays games, studies for another job, watches videos and makes anyone who comes his way for support feel like an asshole for even showing up.
I am dealing (was dealing, no more) with an OS guru of this kind. Punishes knowledge seekers. Answers questions to HIS satisfaction. Implies comprehensible and rasonable questions are incomprehensible and unreasonable All the passive-aggressive games.
Fire early and often. Go all undercover boss early on and see how Joe Nobody / Jill Idiot gets treated so you can dump these types off before they know too much and are dug in. It's a real problem.
OK so it's not everything we want or a solution for all abuses but if your elected representatives are going to do something this constructive and which directly addresses a specific outrageous abuse , then it's incumbent upon us to say *thanks for listening* and show some love, however uncool or simple that may strike some people.
So, thanks for listening and taking action Representative Lofgren, and Senator Wyden.
Not only is limited in that way- which itself is an interesting fact, but it's limited in a lot of other ways also.
For one, source code is often bad, as in impenetrable, just off the top of my head-
* Realms of private, non-API / SPI code which is effectively *how the program actually works* which is also completely undocumented.
* Grotesque architectural errors made by (affordable) beginners which have nevertheless been cast in stone by exposing them publicly (God classes filled with global variables, etc. )
* Telegraphic and or misleading method and variable names, e.g..VariablesWithMissingVowels, also known as Varwmvwls which nevertheless often serve as the ONLY documentation for that variable or method,
* Unfortunate architectural decisions made early on by experienced programmers who may be proud of those decisions. (tunneling package private methods out to "friend classes") and thus subverting the purpose of package private classes and making the source code scope modifiers an effectively an unreliable indicator of source code scope, for instance)
*500 -1000 line methods with some or all of the above characteristics.
* Just massive code bases- I am facing one with literally half a million classes right now...That's right almost 450,000 classes, in a code base that is deliberately architected to defy built-in scoping rules of the language, so virtually anything could call anything...
And on and on.
All of these things will never be fixed for reasons we all understand, I presume, but reflect on of what this implies for open source. It implies that the much vaulted idea that more developers will iteratively make the code base better over time is a fiction with respect to the actual quality of the code base itself.
No team is going to stop adding features and create more work for itself in the form of resolving conflicts for the sake of enabling their program to do what it already can do.
This doesn't even get into the whole ego thing.
Worse still, anything exposed as public in any way may have a million clients depending on it and change effectively becomes impossible, open source or not. All things public, or even more precisely all things reachable in the code base by "outsiders" through any device found in the host language whatsoever, intended or otherwise, are effectively unchangeable.
In lieu of a successful campaign to stop development and do a rewrite, only a fork will make any of the above better. Forks are becoming more common, but they fail to sustain their branching a high percentage of the time (57%) and anyways presume the power TO fork and on large project this is harder to achieve.
The net effect is, open source code bases fail to live up to one of the major the promises of open source, iterative improvement of the code base.
It's true that some people may fix bugs that they are motivated for external reasons to correct and it's helpful to look at the code base if you're writing a plugin through a public API, but the code itself is often awful and this awfulness , often produced because of limited time and resources has the ironic effect of driving away many times those resources in the form of all the would-be developers who are just turned off. For those who do partake, the existing code has the effect wasting many multiples of the time originally *saved* as each new developer struggles to make sense of the impenetrable code base.
In my experience there is no easy fix or even pricey one. Original authors are quick to fix on the (self serving) idea that whatever documentation which exists *ought* to be enough and anyone who still has questions must be an *idiot*. Wasting time incrementally slogging around this code becomes some sort of test that the dev is *serious* and *smart* when the reality is more like smart, serious devs came, saw and left without saying a word.
Code quality is only subjective at the edges. Undocumented code should not exist. F
Think I am going to have my info exclusively on your server? Really? Think I am going to let you be the intermediary to every keystroke I make? Really? Think I want to share a cpu, graphics , RAM and storage with everyone else in a multi-family building?
Here's the real computing problems I have - my CPU is not fast enough, my programs are I/O bound and I don't have enough RAM to never have to go to disk.
All this is a shitty solution in search of a problem so this guy can get rich.
Sun tried this (sunray!) 15 20 years ago now. It tanked then. Then oracle tried it. It tanked, It's not what people want. It serves no purpose. It's the opposite of personal computing.
Here's what these types don't get. My computer and it's contents are semantic in nature. They MEAN something to me. They're more personal to me than any diary; they're as personal to me as anything has ever been.
So no, I actually don't want to be reliant upon your shared disk. No, not at all.
I spray you with guilty DNA. Stage a robbery. Call the cops.
just replace "I" with whoever it is you least trust.. the government, the government when dealing with Julian Assange or like case, businesses dealing with employees they think might become whistleblowers... just use you imagination. We all know what people are capable of...
It's time for us all to become a lot more skeptical of the seemingly "definitive" information made available to us via technology. Basically, be highly skeptical of any technology used to convict that seems iron clad IF ONLY everyone is being truthful. You don't need proof to suspect manipulation, it should be the default assumption which needs to be overcome.
Only in this way will society develop systems that don't rely for their veracity on the presence of zero people of ill will somewhere in the chain of events.
OK I am not being combative nor was I in my first post. I meant just what I said- I dint' see it.
The excerpt you quote is ambiguous to me. I am not sure what is meant by that. I don't see any indication of commercial gain through spying, I only see information being collected (through spying) and made available. I am not sure what information and I am not sure how it's of commercial use. They're concerned with "outcomes for it's presidency of the g20" . That itself is ambiguous (to me).
They want to see if Turkey is going to go along with the rest of the g20. On what specifically? It's not clear to me.
The danger overall is the following equivalency becomes structural in the minds of the NSA and the national security apparatus in general.
National Security == America remains powerful == American companies are winners == NSA spies for commercial gain of American companies == NSA et. al. undermines anyone who opposes what American companies want (think Ralph Nader , Common Cause etc. you cannot believe tha amount of hyperventilating that went on in the e 60s when he first took on GM. He was a Communist plant, for sure! A certain brand of conservative still hate him in just that way.. they're still recycling business think-tank blow back as truth 45 years later. )
So all opposition, any undermining of established players, or ways of doing business, or business models,. or anything from specific business opportunities to the existence and status quo of particular industries gets hyperventilated and puffed up into a threat to national security. Then we have Mussolini's definition of fascism- when (and the Chamber of Commerce's wet dream) the national security apparatus and industry are one and exist to support each other
This could happen through blackmail of key officials. Remember when you helped us spy on corporation X? You wouldn't want THAT to get out would you? We need this....
The ease with which this could become SOP is frightening even to me.
People cannot be trusted to police themselves. It's not like we've evolved since , say the 1200s , to a more enlightened species . Evolution hasn't selected for "trustworthiness, consciousness and egalitarianism". far from it. You wouldn't want effectively unlimited, unilateral power over *the perception of reality* to fall into anyone's hands. But this is just what the read/ write access to a reference database that can be used as the basis for, and serve as evidence for, kill / no kill, guilty / not guilty decisions, is. The power to create , distort and manipulate reality all in the service of the current power holders- both governmental and commercial- in society.
If anyone knows of a specific proved case of this I am interested. The more i think about it, the less inclined I am to permit this kind of power to just be kept around on trust. It's too easy to target political enemies while enduring no damage to yourself. There is no MAD holding everyone in check.
I think we need this power; my reason tells me that the loss of privacy is something that has to go on because smaller and smaller groups of individuals will come to wield ever greater amounts of destructive power. At the same time, the potential for abuse is equally as frightening given what people are, what they evolved to be.
We need to work on this as a society, we need to work through this need to know and the nefarious use the technology could be put to and not shout people who are worried about that abuse down as paranoids , traitors , narcissists or lunatics.
So allegedly if the govt. ever wanted to prosecute him for lying to Congress, he'd have that to fall back on. Seems very very very very far fetched. Very.
The govt and it's agents should stop pulling plays from old playbooks like "stonewalling " and "legal weasel words" and just let us have this much needed national conversation in full light of all the facts.
This is partly an "old man problem", or the effect of having old men in positions of power.
Old men are 1) in charge 2) incapable of changing anymore 3) viewing the world through a Prism whose time is well past. 4) subject only to the review of other old men.
They both need to be removed from their positions. Their conduct demonstrates such a gross lack of proportionality and such a funhouse mirror-like distortion of the relative importance and societal significance of Aaron's crimes that their continued employment represents an ongoing threat to the respect we need society to have for its laws and for the judicial system generally.
If we want people to respect laws, we need prosecutors who at the very least have good judgement .
We would actually prefer prosecutors who had wisdom.
>> Material goods are given away freely, including to those who make no contributions to society, in part because, if someone is "poor" (not contributing, so socially disrespected), why heap additional problems on them by not letting them have material goods?
Logically, intellectually, lots of things are possible reactions.
But my understanding of sociobiology is, the innate reaction, which is to say the strongest one, is not cooperative and certainly not to give wealth away.
In fact, that is the opposite of all known historical reality and probably represents an purely imaginary degree of transmutation of the basic human impulse.
\Why? Because we evolved under pressures to acquire limited natural resources.
We evolved in a resource constrained competitive environment.
Anyone who "gave it away" - and that could have been a genetically mediated impulse, a genotype (loosely speaking) - would not have had the reproductive success a greedy gene (the selfish gene it's called) had.
Fewer copies of selfless gene, more copies of greedy gene and so on for each generation , with selfless gene essentially extinguishing itself over time.
Sure we're not automatons driven by genes and cooperative even selfless behavior exists and may even be genetically advantageous. I do think people rise above selfishness. But read human history. What's the basic impulse? What's the go-to assumption made by despots?
Look at how North Korea is structured. That was pretty much how it went for most of humanity for most of history, minus a lot of efficiency that modern technology delivers Kim Jong Un.
Look at what happened to the hippie communes. There are great documentaries on this interviewing the participants.
Basically, leaders emerged, monopolized sexual access to females (who went along with it, a per their genetically mediated impulse) and the whole thing broke down on account of the power struggles.
Rent borrow buy or steal some Adam Curtis BBC documentaries. Highly entertaining - time flies watching them, and highly informative.
These were all fantastic- I watched them all:
The Century of the Self. It Felt Like A Kiss The Trap- what happened to our dream of freedom? All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace. The Living Dead The Power of Nightmares.
Re; Freud,
I used to hate him because of his weirdness etc. but really if you think about it, he was well and truly right on the mark with the major outline of the human condition and what motivates people.
Unconscious, sexual and aggressive (which remember is just another form of sex, or resource capturing) motivation drives humans.
This is more refined in sociobiology but Freud always claimed that his theories were biological in nature.. he assumed a material substrate. You have to put his theories in perspective.
More overwhelming right than wrong on the great basic insights. He really was a genius.
His love and work formulation of the good life are the three greatest words civilization has ever generated for itself. The That fact that he was weird , and somewhat mean at times is neither here nor there.
People think they can dismantle his insights by attacking him. We all know that's a logical flaw.
Sex as motivation more true of young people? Great except we didn't evolve with the assumption that we'd live past age 25.
Everything we have in us is designed to be of service for those first 25 years. Any gene that waited to unfurl it's adaptive greatness at age 40 in the individual didn't propagate itself many generations.
Here's an idea I have had- civilization is generally not a product of youth and vigor but of middle age and the *right* amount of decay and loss of vigor.
The innate impulses are waning, on the way to death, and that space, that not dead yet laxity creates a gap or a distance an entropic space that tips the balance of power in conscious thought and reason's favor and thy create civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah the only people who are off their meds are the deniers who are , if that thing we call science is to believed, are preventing the political action needed to prevent the worst calamity human kind has ever faced, bar none, with all the attendant consequences that that implies.
Read history. Read what happen to people who take seriously that their imaginary ideology can prevail over reality. Read what happens to people whose thinking permits a shared, deeply felt delusion to guide their actions .
Believe me, it's not all our fault. It's not a societal sin, or human nature or anything else *collective8 that brought this on. It's conservatives plain and simple. Glad you believe so strongly in the assignment of individual responsibility because this isn't going to be chalked up to "society" or "our greed" or "our shortsightedness" or any other collective noun phrase.
The record couldn't be clearer . Conservatives were the ones who systematically lied about and prevented society from taking corrective action while we still could.
You're consigning hundreds of millions of millions of people to death and murdering the ecological basis of basis of civilization itself and when you encounter someone who is processing reality what do you think? Wow that person is nuts!
Reality is one thing, one way. It's not a Rovian poitical construct. It's not a post modern masturbation fantasy. It is what it is and it doesn't give a fuck about what you think about it. Your exercise in magical thinking, that reality can be made different by just believing very strongly is going to doom you and all the rest of the subhuman psychopathic conservative filth into what history calls "losers".
It doesn't matter what it takes. It doesn't matter what level of barbarity we need to sink to... ion the end, when it comes down to action or your *rights* guess what? Society will fuck your civil rights and fuck your freedoms, we're going to survive and we're going to do that by neutralizing the threat.
You and the republican party and the bankers and the heads of the environmental-raping corporations need to read history Feast your motherfucking eyes on how the powerful and well connected, the people who thought it couldn't never work against them ended up when they overreached
Yeah it's s not illegal to be a conservative today and you can believe whatever reality-defying thing you want to and teach your kids to do the same. But that is now, before the climactic feedback events that devastated 3/4 of the world's food supply over the course of half a decade have kicked in. or similar event.
When this is over, we will be pitiless with respect to anything that led is to this point. Conservative forms of religion? Forget about it. Free market? Forget about it. Freedom to assert anything you want pm matters of scientific fact without reserve? Forget about it.. It's going to be a different , sort of hellish world and your kind, the people who brought it down on the heads of billions of innocent people will live through it in chains , if you live through it at all.
The smoking gun:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/23/covering_up_wall_street_crimes_matt
Not even the worst part of this one article, of which there are many more and worse. Here Taibbi is talking about the systematic destruction of records of evidence generated by the SEC during MUIs (matters under investigation... including Madoff etc... ) , such destruction being highly illegal.
Read it and weep..no criminal wrong doing? Nothing provable? Remeber this is the LEAST of what went on and only speaks to the criminality within the SEC. itself ..The supervisor from the SEC described by Taibbi who is now at Deutsche Bank should be arrested, diapered, blindfolded, immobilized and put in restraints, and flown down to GITMO or perhaps to Poland or Saudi so we can be sure to get the full measure of truth including names, contacts, co-conspirators etc out of him.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/23/covering_up_wall_street_crimes_matt
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, no. One of the criticisms of my article, after it came out, was, well, you know, all of these cases, these MUIs that got destroyed, they were insignificant cases, thatâ(TM)s why they didnâ(TM)t proceed to full-blown investigations in the first place. Well, we know that this isnâ(TM)t true. We know that at least a couple of these cases involved Bernie Madoff in the years before the Madoff story came out.
Also, Darcy Flynn, this whistleblower, he also came forward with revelations about his own experience as an investigator. One of the first cases that he talked about was one where he was trying to pursue a case involving Deutsche Bank, a very promising securities fraud case, but it was rejected by the chief of the enforcement division, who shortly thereafter took a job as the general counsel of Deutsche Bank. So we know that this is part of the culture at the SEC
You are underinformed on this matter
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216
So please, let's stop saying that no crimes were commited or that it's too hard to prove a crime on the part of high powered bankers and their cohorts.
Your missing OP's sarcasm I believe..
He was just really into Ayn Rand:
http://jezebel.com/5490207/a-welcomed-rape-sex-and-ayn-rand
http://politicalfilm.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/atlas-shat-ayn-rands-manifesto-of-rape-and-terrorism/
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2012/08/23812/
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/03/10/internal-affairs-how-ayn-rand-followers-rationalize-welcomed-rape/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021259973
So please. Your oppressing him because of his philosophical belies.
Fucking libs !
These results are from a poll of Muslim students:
â" 33% claim that killing is justified if done to protect religion.
â" 40 percent support the introduction of sharia for British Muslims.
â" 33 percent support a worldwide Islamic caliphate based on sharia.
Yeah but those numbers are similar to the numbers Christian post in our well developed, secular democracy_
- 33% believe Christianity should be the state religion:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/06/christianity-state-religion_n_3022255.html
oh, and about those 33%....
http://www.theocracywatch.org/
You can pretty much rest assured that they would answer the first two questions in the affirmative if they were ever permitted to come to the kind of power they seek.
Radical Islam is no joke, but it's not that different from the 33% of Americans who are merely held in check by the fact of being embedded within the context of a civil, secular society ...
It's never advertiser's emails and contracts and deals that get exposed, although one can assume these things are held electronically and have a great deal of value to someone, certainly more value than the 0.25 -$1.00 lifetime value Average FB User's email is worth .
Not saying companies deliberately release their users emails so that when that information later figures as evidence in a crime / scam / scandal FB has plausible deniability.
get ev\eryone's email and personal info.
pretend to "lose" some .
???
profit.
I completely agree and would take it further and say that a lot of what gets into great universities in the first place are just exemplars people who are just personally ambitious with a drive to succeed (as opposed to curious or broadminded or interested in contributing to society in a constructive way) and rather cut throat. Which explains the behavior of a lot of academic departments.
This is far far bigger news than Cheney's "deficits don't matter' . For one, it's true. For another, someone credible with some skin in the game and a need to be right is saying it. It should get more airplay. The news is focusing in on the retiring of Google Brainteasers. That's not the headline. Here's the headline:
GPAs don't matter.
GPAs don't matter.
and for the curious (and my enemies) I had an A minus GPA.
Ayn Rand was a psychopath: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/03/10/internal-affairs-how-ayn-rand-followers-rationalize-welcomed-rape/ Ayn Rand was a psychopath: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2012/08/23812/ Ayn Rand was a psychopath:
Here's Ayn Rand in her own words on the child rapist and mass murderer Hickman who was the model of Roark in her novels:
is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness â" [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ⦠Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should. (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the âvirtuousâ(TM) indignation and mass-hatred of the âmajority.â(TM)⦠It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminalâ¦
This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.
And when we look at the other side of it â" there is a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy turned into a purposeless monster. By whom? By what? Is it not by that very society that is now yelling so virtuously in its role of innocent victim? He had a brilliant mind, a romantic, adventurous, impatient soul and a straight, uncompromising, proud character. What had society to offer him? A wretched, insane family as the ideal home, a Y.M.C.A. club as social honor, and a bank-page job as ambition and careerâ¦
If he had any desires and ambitions â" what was the way before him? A long, slow, soul-eating, heart-wrecking toil and struggle; the degrading, ignoble road of silent pain and loud compromisesâ¦.
A strong man can eventually trample society under his feet. That boy was not strong enough. But is that his crime? Is it his crime that he was too impatient, fiery and proud to go that slow way? That he was not able to serve, when he felt worthy to rule; to obey, when he wanted to command?â¦
He was given [nothing with which] to fill his life. What was he offered to fill his soul? The petty, narrow, inconsistent, hypocritical ideology of present-day humanity. All the criminal, ludicrous, tragic nonsense of Christianity and its morals, virtues, and consequences. Is it any wonder that he didnâ(TM)t accept it?
Remember this readers, all Ayn Rand "supermen" are also all liars. They feel justified stepping outside the bounds of morality because to them morality is a the concern of dupes and "little people". Lying to you is just another technique for them to get what they want and nothing more.
So they'll claim to "not be that into Ayn Rand" when in fact their hardcore Ranites whose entire political and social philosophy is drawn from here. For instance, Paul Ryan is disavowing her, but in reality he finds admitting to being a Randite just inconvenient and he's perfectly willing to lie to the "little people" whom he considers to be nothing more than "mud".
They lie about being Randites and they lie about lying about it. They lie about what she said, what she believed what she wrote and what she did. They lie about their own intentions. The whole point of Ayn Rand was to conquer and to grind under your heel people who are so stupid and self limiting as to abide by things such as "altruism" and "caring about anyone other than yourself" and "morality" and such like. To Rand lying to people to get your way, to grind down th
Espionage is an over charging, clearly. You've committed espionage when you've divulged state secrets FOR ANOTHER COUNTRY. So even though Israel is a friendly nation, we still kick their spies out and or jail them.
http://definitions.uslegal.com/e/espionage/
But Snowden didn't release state secrets to and for a foreign country. He did it for Americans.
It's prosecutorial overreach and worse for the prosecution, is likely to be perceived as such by potential juries. I feel an acquittal on the espionage charge forthcoming, even in absentia.
So the question arises at least in my mind- is this a dog and pony show, with Snowden perhaps unwittingly playing the role of a dog?
Is the government using Snowden to leak this information and if so, why?
To acclimate citizens to this level of scrutiny? To see if we'll swallow it? Maybe.
Or is it a bid on the part of , possibly some subset of, the intelligence community to get the program revised and toned down because they're afraid of the corrupting power unlimited access to the most personal secrets of lawmakers and other power players could put into the hands of a Cheney or a set of true believers like the neocons?
It's not that far fetched. Consider that the neocons twice now have attempted, once successfully, to foment wars based on false intelligence they produced through Team B efforts, efforts which the intelligence community deeply resented and still resent especially since many Americans wrongly cite the CIA as the producer of faulty intelligence in the run up to the war in Iraq.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/military/news/2004/08/18/988/its-time-to-bench-team-b/
http://www.proudprimate.com/Placards/teamb-cahn.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B
What this means is they're liars who will play WAY out of bounds to get their way, where WAY out of bounds includes LYING and DISTORTING intelligence and using intelligence to destroy domestic political opponents including exposing the identities of covert operators working for the CIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame
see: Plamegate.
Historically, that didn't and can't now sit well with people at the CIA who consider accurate, unbiased intelligence assessments to be the crown jewel of nation's defense capability.
So is has the level of invasiveness which this program makes possible been gamed out somewhere at Langley, with one side playing the neocons and Cheney and using the techniques of deception, lying, distortion of information and targeting of dissenters through any means, legal or illegal, short (we think) of murder and the other side the CIA and other intelligence agencies upholding the letter and spirit of the law?
Perhaps such games revealed a gaping strategic disadvantage through which a coup by a Cheney and the neocons would be successful 100% of the time.
After all, we game out scenarios against all enemies foreign and domestic, if it's a threat to the US, it gets considered.
Perhaps one of the conclusions was- this intelligence program is a serious, mortal threat to the Republic.
Perhaps they took the result of this gaming to the President, who agreed with their conclusions. Perhaps a plan was hatched to subvert it, all the while making it look like they're only and intensely interested in doing the opposite.
I know it sounds too weird to be true, but this IS how intelligence agencies and covert missions work on a good day. This is the games they play.
If Obama tried to unilaterally quietly retire the program, it would just come back for the next administration who wanted it, and we know what admin would want it. Without the p
Nice try. For one, NOTHING in that report- which was NOT a Presidential directive to do anything and had not the power of law- said
"make bad loans to people who won't pay them back",
much less
"go out in force and persuade as many people as you can who you know know nothing about real estate, variable interest rates, or real-estate appreciation to take on loans you know for a fact they will never be able to service and do so by directly lying to them about the long term implications of what they're signing ".
What it WAS was an acknowledgment that many working people do NOT NOT NOT buy things on credit (unlike say, bankers) but instead have a pay as you go philosophy towards making purchases.Thanks to the bankers and frothing greedheads in the credit industry that was the ONLY criteria use to loan people money. The result was that poor people who didn't use credit were not considered for home mortgage loans although their incomes and employment histories justified receiving loans.
For 15 years - since 1993 - that system was observed by some banks and there was no melt down.
Meanwhile the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street cooked up that successively more risky forms of derivatives and CDOs unwittingly linking into one gigantic causal chain the entire banking industry insurance while lobbying to prevent CDOs from being regulated like insurance.
Of course Alan Greenspan, a direct Ayn Rand apostle who *literally sat at her feet* at her NY apartment (this was before she became a professional Social Security recipient... sponging off the state...) approved this all asserting that markets are "sophisticated" and "know what they're doing" and don't need government and unsophisticated people to oversee their activities (just to bail them out ) .
So what do we have? We have an edifice of masked causality and interconnected dependencies created by "superstar quants" who apparently don't understand that probability models based on an arbitrarily limited historical window of previous events actually DON'T and CAN'T be properly applied to the real world because none of the outcomes of the sample space can be definitively said to be independent in the first place, which is a mother fucking AXIOM of probability, and therefore any "events" composed of such outcomes are entirely fictional and any probability assigned to those events are both entirely fictional.
Any models which derive "risk" from said models are apriori known to be invalid (except by bankers and their quants! ) since as any 10th grader knows if the axioms of a system are not upheld , none of the conclusions are valid.
Which is exactly what the 2008 meltdown proved, as if it needed proving again.
So 2008 was a 16 trillion dollar lesson
http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealth/index.htm in 10th grade math inflicted on the country by the nations financial elite who treat your savings as their piggybank to backstop incredibly stupid financial theories they and their quants cook up at stripper clubs over lines of blow.
And you blame it on some poor car mechanic / elementary school teacher couple who've never had a home loan in their life, who think the loan officer is prevented by law and conscious from lying to them .
Yeah, your kind can never each too far or dream too big when it comes to excusing the depravity of the wealthy elite and blame everything on poor folks.
Filth.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the loan officers who systematically lied to people in order to induce them to assume levels of debt and then walked away from what they had done.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the bankers who systematically sold securities they knew would crash to people in order to induce them and then walked away from what they had done.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the coke snorting analysts and traders who cooked up a complicated system of CDO and derivatives and pretended to understand same, all the while demanding to be free from regulation and which later took the whole economy down , the only repercussion that they got bailed out, doubled down on their bonuses and walked away from what they had done.
No. Our court system doesn't have the capacity to individually prosecute all the degenerate economists and lobbyists whose "free market" deregulatory theories of non-reality paved the grounds for the entire meltdown but who took no responsibility and walked away from what they had done.
FTFY
Ayn Rand was a amphetamine addicted speed freak who was sexually aroused by stories of rapists, child molesters and murders.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/08/02/ayn-rand%E2%80%99s-superman-a-serial-killer-and-rapist/
http://www.athenstalks.com/ayn-rands-role-model-her-new-society-child-rapist-and-murderer
And those who fo9llow her are more of the same- antisocial personality disorders dressing themselves up as "philosophers"
Right now the developed nations are THIS CLOSE to an irreversible tipping point beyond which civilization collapses and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/temperaturevariations-in-past-centuries-and-the-so-called-hockey-stick/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/23/scienceandnature.climatechange
Before that happens , people will begin to realize that it's going to happen. At that point, far before it actually happens, people will begin to act as if it's already happening.
Mass uncontrollable immigration as millions of desperate people ignore international law, barbed wire and guns in a desperate bid for potable water and food under the pressure of world-wide crop failures.
Total economic breakdown as every penny is spent in either desperate remediation, law enforcement or moon-shoot attempts to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
World wide wars destabilizing Western-friendly nations as radical Islam hitches itself to global warming and the virulent most anti-social forms of fundamentalism becomes a majority viewpoint .
Focusing their angst against the West, they topple Pakistan, get hold of their nukes and do not miss a beat in using them against India and the US, adding fallout and mass panic to the witches brew of the hell life on earth has become.
The President of the United States , the CIA and all other government agencies and agents don't just have the legal right to prevent that scenario from ever materializing, they have a sworn duty to do so.
If that means silencing the psychopaths like Koch and Ailes and Murdoch and Hannity and Forbes and Limbaugh and Watts and all of the other engineers of denialism, then that's what that means. Their lives and greed and sociopathic lifestyles are not more important than the lives of the billions of people thew world over they have chosen to exterminate.
This country right now is arguably in a slow motion civil war with rational people who base their actions on empirical evidence and science on one side and Ayn Randian societal rapists, apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists and sociopaths on the other.
The fact that it's a slow motion bomb the other side is determined to set off means nothing. They will, if they're not stopped, exterminate not just us, but all future generations for all time. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb and a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower is a bomb thrower.
Every nation on this earth should treat deniers and polluters as the clear and present danger to their national security that they are.
If you shout "no fire" in a burning theater and work to make people believe there is no fire when any reasonable person working in good conscience would conclude form the same evidence that there is , then that's murder.
If you think the government isn't going to take the accumulated evidence of what you said, what you posted what you tried to get others to believe and use it to prosecute you as an agent of denial in a near future Crimes Against Humanity trial. then you haven't read history very carefully.
The legitimate government of any sovereign nation has a right to stop the actions of terrorists whose actions are provably a threat to their national security and the security of their people.
This has been affirmed even in the United States, which itself has unilaterally sought and killed people it deems terrorists in foreign nations.
By this reasoning, citizens of the United States whose actions threaten the national security of other nations can legally be subject to executive action on the part of those nations.
In fact, every nation has a right to ensure the national security of its peoples against terrorists, wherever those terrorist may reside and whatever device those terrorists may chose as a weapon.
Denier = terrorist.
This. Mod parent up. It's not just true of sysadmin, but of anyone who accumulates power through specialized knowledge. It happens in open source also- someone has specialized knowledge accumulated over years and not easily duplicated. To a significant percentage of people, it occurs to them that this gives them power and the effect of this realization on their personality is nothing less than transformative.
They discover that by being an asshole to questioners, questions and therefore work drops off quickly. They can effectively get their workload down to level-->leisure by acting like a prick , typically the kind of prick that implies question askers are idiots, or lazy.
Sysadmins are the lungs of an organization. How long can you go without breathing? Someone I know deals with a lazy asshole sysadmin from time to time and I hear about it. He does nothing, plays games, studies for another job, watches videos and makes anyone who comes his way for support feel like an asshole for even showing up.
I am dealing (was dealing, no more) with an OS guru of this kind. Punishes knowledge seekers. Answers questions to HIS satisfaction. Implies comprehensible and rasonable questions are incomprehensible and unreasonable All the passive-aggressive games.
More organizations should abide by this:
The No Asshole Rule
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446698202
Fire early and often. Go all undercover boss early on and see how Joe Nobody / Jill Idiot gets treated so you can dump these types off before they know too much and are dug in. It's a real problem.
Should have this wrapped up in a few centuries.
OK so it's not everything we want or a solution for all abuses but if your elected representatives are going to do something this constructive and which directly addresses a specific outrageous abuse , then it's incumbent upon us to say *thanks for listening* and show some love, however uncool or simple that may strike some people.
So, thanks for listening and taking action Representative Lofgren, and Senator Wyden.
Not only is limited in that way- which itself is an interesting fact, but it's limited in a lot of other ways also.
For one, source code is often bad, as in impenetrable, just off the top of my head-
* Realms of private, non-API / SPI code which is effectively *how the program actually works* which is also completely undocumented.
* Grotesque architectural errors made by (affordable) beginners which have nevertheless been cast in stone by exposing them publicly (God classes filled with global variables, etc. )
* Telegraphic and or misleading method and variable names, e.g. .VariablesWithMissingVowels, also known as Varwmvwls which nevertheless often serve as the ONLY documentation for that variable or method,
* Unfortunate architectural decisions made early on by experienced programmers who may be proud of those decisions. (tunneling package private methods out to "friend classes") and thus subverting the purpose of package private classes and making the source code scope modifiers an effectively an unreliable indicator of source code scope, for instance)
*500 -1000 line methods with some or all of the above characteristics.
* Just massive code bases- I am facing one with literally half a million classes right now...That's right almost 450,000 classes, in a code base that is deliberately architected to defy built-in scoping rules of the language, so virtually anything could call anything ...
And on and on.
All of these things will never be fixed for reasons we all understand, I presume, but reflect on of what this implies for open source. It implies that the much vaulted idea that more developers will iteratively make the code base better over time is a fiction with respect to the actual quality of the code base itself.
No team is going to stop adding features and create more work for itself in the form of resolving conflicts for the sake of enabling their program to do what it already can do.
This doesn't even get into the whole ego thing.
Worse still, anything exposed as public in any way may have a million clients depending on it and change effectively becomes impossible, open source or not. All things public, or even more precisely all things reachable in the code base by "outsiders" through any device found in the host language whatsoever, intended or otherwise, are effectively unchangeable.
In lieu of a successful campaign to stop development and do a rewrite, only a fork will make any of the above better. Forks are becoming more common, but they fail to sustain their branching a high percentage of the time (57%) and anyways presume the power TO fork and on large project this is harder to achieve.
The net effect is, open source code bases fail to live up to one of the major the promises of open source, iterative improvement of the code base.
It's true that some people may fix bugs that they are motivated for external reasons to correct and it's helpful to look at the code base if you're writing a plugin through a public API, but the code itself is often awful and this awfulness , often produced because of limited time and resources has the ironic effect of driving away many times those resources in the form of all the would-be developers who are just turned off. For those who do partake, the existing code has the effect wasting many multiples of the time originally *saved* as each new developer struggles to make sense of the impenetrable code base.
In my experience there is no easy fix or even pricey one. Original authors are quick to fix on the (self serving) idea that whatever documentation which exists *ought* to be enough and anyone who still has questions must be an *idiot*. Wasting time incrementally slogging around this code becomes some sort of test that the dev is *serious* and *smart* when the reality is more like smart, serious devs came, saw and left without saying a word.
Code quality is only subjective at the edges. Undocumented code should not exist. F
Think I am going to have my info exclusively on your server? Really? Think I am going to let you be the intermediary to every keystroke I make? Really? Think I want to share a cpu, graphics , RAM and storage with everyone else in a multi-family building?
Here's the real computing problems I have - my CPU is not fast enough, my programs are I/O bound and I don't have enough RAM to never have to go to disk.
All this is a shitty solution in search of a problem so this guy can get rich.
Sun tried this (sunray!) 15 20 years ago now. It tanked then. Then oracle tried it. It tanked, It's not what people want. It serves no purpose. It's the opposite of personal computing.
Here's what these types don't get. My computer and it's contents are semantic in nature. They MEAN something to me. They're more personal to me than any diary; they're as personal to me as anything has ever been.
So no, I actually don't want to be reliant upon your shared disk. No, not at all.
I spray you with guilty DNA. Stage a robbery. Call the cops.
just replace "I" with whoever it is you least trust.. the government, the government when dealing with Julian Assange or like case, businesses dealing with employees they think might become whistleblowers ... just use you imagination. We all know what people are capable of...
It's time for us all to become a lot more skeptical of the seemingly "definitive" information made available to us via technology. Basically, be highly skeptical of any technology used to convict that seems iron clad IF ONLY everyone is being truthful. You don't need proof to suspect manipulation, it should be the default assumption which needs to be overcome.
Only in this way will society develop systems that don't rely for their veracity on the presence of zero people of ill will somewhere in the chain of events.
OK I am not being combative nor was I in my first post. I meant just what I said- I dint' see it.
The excerpt you quote is ambiguous to me. I am not sure what is meant by that. I don't see any indication of commercial gain through spying, I only see information being collected (through spying) and made available. I am not sure what information and I am not sure how it's of commercial use. They're concerned with "outcomes for it's presidency of the g20" . That itself is ambiguous (to me).
They want to see if Turkey is going to go along with the rest of the g20. On what specifically? It's not clear to me.
The danger overall is the following equivalency becomes structural in the minds of the NSA and the national security apparatus in general.
National Security == America remains powerful == American companies are winners == NSA spies for commercial gain of American companies == NSA et. al. undermines anyone who opposes what American companies want (think Ralph Nader , Common Cause etc. you cannot believe tha amount of hyperventilating that went on in the e 60s when he first took on GM. He was a Communist plant, for sure! A certain brand of conservative still hate him in just that way.. they're still recycling business think-tank blow back as truth 45 years later. )
So all opposition, any undermining of established players, or ways of doing business, or business models,. or anything from specific business opportunities to the existence and status quo of particular industries gets hyperventilated and puffed up into a threat to national security. Then we have Mussolini's definition of fascism- when (and the Chamber of Commerce's wet dream) the national security apparatus and industry are one and exist to support each other
This could happen through blackmail of key officials. Remember when you helped us spy on corporation X? You wouldn't want THAT to get out would you? We need this....
The ease with which this could become SOP is frightening even to me.
People cannot be trusted to police themselves. It's not like we've evolved since , say the 1200s , to a more enlightened species . Evolution hasn't selected for "trustworthiness, consciousness and egalitarianism". far from it. You wouldn't want effectively unlimited, unilateral power over *the perception of reality* to fall into anyone's hands. But this is just what the read/ write access to a reference database that can be used as the basis for, and serve as evidence for, kill / no kill, guilty / not guilty decisions, is. The power to create , distort and manipulate reality all in the service of the current power holders- both governmental and commercial- in society.
If anyone knows of a specific proved case of this I am interested. The more i think about it, the less inclined I am to permit this kind of power to just be kept around on trust. It's too easy to target political enemies while enduring no damage to yourself. There is no MAD holding everyone in check.
I think we need this power; my reason tells me that the loss of privacy is something that has to go on because smaller and smaller groups of individuals will come to wield ever greater amounts of destructive power. At the same time, the potential for abuse is equally as frightening given what people are, what they evolved to be.
This:
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/06/14/government-accountability-project-issues-statement-on-edward-snowden-nsa-domestic-surveillance/
I agree.
We need to work on this as a society, we need to work through this need to know and the nefarious use the technology could be put to and not shout people who are worried about that abuse down as paranoids , traitors , narcissists or lunatics.
I missed the part where this was done for commercial gain. Please find the excerpt. I looked for it, but didn't see it. Perhaps I missed something?
Note the weasel words: "I know no way of..."
So allegedly if the govt. ever wanted to prosecute him for lying to Congress, he'd have that to fall back on. Seems very very very very far fetched. Very.
The govt and it's agents should stop pulling plays from old playbooks like "stonewalling " and "legal weasel words" and just let us have this much needed national conversation in full light of all the facts.
This is partly an "old man problem", or the effect of having old men in positions of power.
Old men are
1) in charge
2) incapable of changing anymore
3) viewing the world through a Prism whose time is well past.
4) subject only to the review of other old men.
They both need to be removed from their positions. Their conduct demonstrates such a gross lack of proportionality and such a funhouse mirror-like distortion of the relative importance and societal significance of Aaron's crimes that their continued employment represents an ongoing threat to the respect we need society to have for its laws and for the judicial system generally.
If we want people to respect laws, we need prosecutors who at the very least have good judgement .
We would actually prefer prosecutors who had wisdom.
>> Material goods are given away freely, including to those who make no contributions to society, in part because, if someone is "poor" (not contributing, so socially disrespected), why heap additional problems on them by not letting them have material goods?
Logically, intellectually, lots of things are possible reactions.
But my understanding of sociobiology is, the innate reaction, which is to say the strongest one, is not cooperative and certainly not to give wealth away.
In fact, that is the opposite of all known historical reality and probably represents an purely imaginary degree of transmutation of the basic human impulse.
\Why? Because we evolved under pressures to acquire limited natural resources.
We evolved in a resource constrained competitive environment .
Anyone who "gave it away" - and that could have been a genetically mediated impulse, a genotype (loosely speaking) - would not have had the reproductive success a greedy gene (the selfish gene it's called) had.
Fewer copies of selfless gene, more copies of greedy gene and so on for each generation , with selfless gene essentially extinguishing itself over time.
Sure we're not automatons driven by genes and cooperative even selfless behavior exists and may even be genetically advantageous. I do think people rise above selfishness. But read human history. What's the basic impulse? What's the go-to assumption made by despots?
Look at how North Korea is structured. That was pretty much how it went for most of humanity for most of history, minus a lot of efficiency that modern technology delivers Kim Jong Un.
Look at what happened to the hippie communes. There are great documentaries on this interviewing the participants.
Basically, leaders emerged, monopolized sexual access to females (who went along with it, a per their genetically mediated impulse) and the whole thing broke down on account of the power struggles.
Rent borrow buy or steal some Adam Curtis BBC documentaries. Highly entertaining - time flies watching them, and highly informative.
These were all fantastic- I watched them all:
The Century of the Self.
It Felt Like A Kiss
The Trap- what happened to our dream of freedom?
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.
The Living Dead
The Power of Nightmares.
Re; Freud,
I used to hate him because of his weirdness etc. but really if you think about it, he was well and truly right on the mark with the major outline of the human condition and what motivates people.
Unconscious, sexual and aggressive (which remember is just another form of sex, or resource capturing) motivation drives humans.
This is more refined in sociobiology but Freud always claimed that his theories were biological in nature.. he assumed a material substrate. You have to put his theories in perspective.
More overwhelming right than wrong on the great basic insights. He really was a genius.
His love and work formulation of the good life are the three greatest words civilization has ever generated for itself. The That fact that he was weird , and somewhat mean at times is neither here nor there.
People think they can dismantle his insights by attacking him. We all know that's a logical flaw.
Sex as motivation more true of young people? Great except we didn't evolve with the assumption that we'd live past age 25.
Everything we have in us is designed to be of service for those first 25 years. Any gene that waited to unfurl it's adaptive greatness at age 40 in the individual didn't propagate itself many generations.
Here's an idea I have had- civilization is generally not a product of youth and vigor but of middle age and the *right* amount of decay and loss of vigor.
The innate impulses are waning, on the way to death, and that space, that not dead yet laxity creates a gap or a distance an entropic space that tips the balance of power in conscious thought and reason's favor and thy create civilization.