The NDAA has to be signed into law. It funds the entire military. If he vetoed it, we'd spend the rest of the year watching non-stop ads about how he took away healthcare from wounded veterans and refused to give guns to troops on the front lines. He'd lose reelection in the biggest landslide in history, because frankly, the average voter is woefully uninformed. So to say he "willingly" signed it into law is a vast oversimplification.
SOPA isn't a big omnibus bill. If he opposes provisions in it, he can veto it without all the collateral damage. And it's not like there were specific things he opposed that could be taken out. It was a pretty broad statement: "we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet." You'd basically need a complete rewrite to avoid doing any of those things.
That will likely depend on whether or not its passed by a veto proof majority. Frankly, I'm starting to think it won't pass at all, given the momentum the opposition has been building lately. Of course, that means that we need to keep up the pressure. Calling your senators and representative once a week to see where they stand is a good start. They'll likely be wishy-washy at first, but that's why you make your desires clear, and then call the next week to follow up and see if they've cemented an opinion yet. Keep going until they commit to opposing it. And if they're dead set on supporting it, remember that primary season is just around the corner, and has lower turnout -- meaning that a smaller, well-motivated group of voters can make a change. (Unless they're a senator elected in 2010, in which case they can do whatever the hell they want, and you'll forget about it by 2016.)
Only this time, it's being spun in the opposite direction. Yesterday's was spun to make it sound like Obama supports SOPA, which was odd because every other site I read inferred that he opposed it.
No one's "falling to grief". We're discussing ways to deal with a problem.
In the real world, assholes get ostracized. If a coworker made fun of a dead girl around the water cooler, he would be shunned by most of the people in the office, and that would teach him to be more civil in the future. Applying that same social pressure on the internet is a good idea. Otherwise we end up with trolling communities that strive to harm others for their own amusement, simply because the (man-)children have never had to face consequences for their actions, and instead receive positive reinforcement from other sociopaths. The trick is finding a way to do it without totally removing the anonymity that makes the internet so useful for things like the Arab Spring.
Did you read my entire post, or stop at the second sentence? I'm in no way suggesting we do away with anonymity. People would still use whatever username they like on the site, without any public link to who they actually are. But in the background, that username would be linked to their actual ID, and they'd be prevented from making tons of disposable accounts. Maybe one new account every six months or so would be a good starting point.
It's not so different from linking account names to IP addresses, except that it (a) allows multiple people in the same house to have their own accounts and (b) can't be easy defeated by proxies and dynamic IPs.
It's pretty special that you consider the phrase "not as gifted as Mozart" to be synonymous with "not impressive". I hope your kids grow up to be Oscar-winning astronaut quarterbacks, or else you're in for quite a disappointment.
Forcing them to make accounts would just result in an inundation of new accounts that get used until they accrue bad karma, and then replaced. The only way to keep people from acting like assholes online is to attach usernames to real life IDs. You can keep the real life IDs secret to maintain anonymity, but the IDs need to be available to the server so that people can't just make a new account every time they make an ass of themselves. Given the demographic of this site, I doubt that would be a popular policy.
Depends what the goal is. If the goal is to stop piracy, no, it won't work and never would have. If the goal is for politicians to throw a bone to the content owners in exchange for big time donations, then I suspect it will work quite well.
Believe it or not, it is possible for a phrase to have multiple meanings. Begging the question, or circular reasoning, is one thing. Begging [for] the question is another. You, as a thinking human being, are capable of discerning which is meant from the context.
The Republicans passed a law forbidding any money from being spent on relocating the prisoners there. So it's illegal to keep them, but it's also illegal to move them. Catch-22.
If you're so sure, here's the full text. Point to the section supporting your claim. I've challenged several people to do so since the bill was signed, and not one of them has.
I'm getting tired of copy-pasting this for people, but fine:
SEC. 1021. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.
(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
Either the law doesn't allow anyone from the US to be detained, or else it already did allow it and this law didn't change it. Considering that the Supreme Court already ruled that detainees in Gitmo have habeas corpus rights, there's no way a law taking those rights from citizens could stand.
I know it's popular around here to pretend the US government is some dystopic comic book empire, but open your eyes. It's simply not true.
Umm... I'm not sure what your point is. That looks like they were just testing the security at a government building. That's roughly on par with 2 AM fire drills in the annoyance factor, but they're not harassing people for complaining about the government.
Yup, and that's a terrible thing. But does it have anything to do with this story? The abuses of protestors are being carried out by cops, frequently at the behest of mayors and other local leaders. Leaders who, as local politicians, are extremely vulnerable to local movements to force them out of office. And yet no one seems to talk or care about local politics, preferring to focus their outrage on groups like the TSA and DHS. Groups which really aren't doing all that much harm... lots of expensive, ineffective, and obnoxious security theatre, but not the beatings and free speech zones that really do a number on civil liberties.
Every time you lie and claim that the US is just like Nazi Germany, you send a clear signal to everyone listening that you're a crazy person who should be ignored, or maybe even locked up to prevent you from harming yourself or others. You can oppose bad policy without lying about it.
No, by posting an equivalency between Nazi Germany and the United States, you're declaring yourself to be a myopic twit. By then repeating that popular lie that the NDAA allows for military detainment of citizens (read the goddamn thing), you are providing supporting evidence.
Actually, it is possible (and indeed quite easy!) to be overly paranoid. For example, when you start comparing the DHS to an organization that routinely executed dissidents, that's being too paranoid.
I'd expect them to read postings and keep an eye out for people threatening violence. That's a good thing. If someone stands up in a town square and yells that they're going to go shoot the mayor, I'd expect cops to take note. Where it becomes bad is if they harass or in any way mistreat people who aren't threatening violence. Is there any evidence that they're doing that?
Memorization is important. Childhood innovations are generally moronic, because the kids haven't yet learned the basic facts of the universe. I recall some of my childhood "inventions"... thinking that I could make a laser by pointing a couple mirrors at each other and shining a flashlight inside. Or that I could generate unlimited electricity with a series of transformers (arbitrarily high voltage!). Or that I could design a programming language that compiled plain English instead of (what seemed to be) needlessly arcane languages we were forced to learn. Or that I could make a perfect cooler by having a layer of ice contained within an airtight seal, the idea being that the ice shrinks when it melts, but since there's nothing to fill the gap, it wouldn't be able to melt. I could go on.
Learning basic facts is essential. It only dampens creativity in the sense that kids no longer waste time thinking about inventions that are logically impossible, and instead can focus their talents on ideas that have a chance of working.
I recall being told the exact same thing about real estate in 2006.
FYI, I'm in the upper class myself. Around the 94th percentile if Wikipedia's stats are accurate. And I've done quite well for myself by investing in gold, Amazon, Netflix, Sirius radio, and a whole lot of companies you've never heard of. Graham Corp was my favorite.... see that peak on its chart in '08? That's when Cramer was screaming on Mad Money for people to buy it. A sure sell signal if ever I saw one, and I bailed out immediately.
But unlike a lot of upper class people, I wasn't born into it, and I'm nowhere near wealthy enough to support friends and family. So I get to see childhood friends lose their jobs and homes. And I get to see my siblings and cousins struggle to make ends meet. And I get to reminisce about waking up one morning and finding my dad literally weeping because he had been laid off and we were going to lose our home, back when I was too young to understand any of that. And I'm literate enough to look at statistics and see that the bottom 80% has been in decline for over thirty years, while the top 1% has seen their incomes quadruple over the same period. And I'm good enough at arithmetic to figure out that if this nation's "rising tide" had indeed "lifted all ships", then the average individual would be making an additional $8k a year, which would mean a hell of a lot to people, considering that the median income is $24k. But instead, all of that money ($8k per person times 155 million workers = $1.24 TRILLION per year) went to the top 1%, who use it to bribe politicians into giving them even more advantages.
To expand on your example of chips, they typically have a large amount of area devoted to self-test and tuning systems which get used exactly once, in the factory (okay, maybe a few times e.g. to make sure you didn't break anything during packaging), and then never touched again. Scan chains in particular can add a lot of transistors.
It strikes me as a close analog to test code in software... that is, unless test code gets taken out of the final product with compiler directives. I don't really know how all that software black magic gets done.
So we must allow the 1% to continue robbing us until we are literally starving to death. Only then can we raise a (feeble, emaciated) fist against them.
Has it occurred to you that the longer we wait to solve the erosion of the middle class, the harder it will be?
He could just be an upper-middle class young adult who still believes that if he works hard enough, he'll one day get to join the 1%. Just wait until he or someone he cares about gets sick and loses their home, or until Bain Capital or similar buys out his business and decides his job could be better done by a coworker working unpaid overtime, or until his life savings get wiped out by some Wall Streeters run amok and leave him with nothing to retire on.
Sadly, for some people it takes experiencing bad luck themselves to realize that the poor aren't poor out of laziness.
This guy created a new account purely to post in this thread, and based on the timestamps, he apparently had his post typed up ahead of time, just waiting for a Microsoft security related story to come along. That definitely sets off my shill-dar.
It's pretty well established that companies do hire shills. They aren't directly on the companies payroll, but are instead subcons of marketing companies hired by the company that wants the astroturfing done. I've read "exposés" by such shills in the past, talking about how they juggle a few accounts on a few different forums, and how the best ones first work to build up a rapport in the community before casually praising the business that hired them. Of course, those shills are more expensive (since there was more of a time investment).
It's not a conspiracy, it's just something companies do as a form of marketing. A lot of Slashdot readers are sysadmins, which makes this site a logical target for people advertising IT-related products (includes the ones sold by MS), just as people watching sitcoms at 1 AM on a Saturday are logical targets for those "dating" phone lines.
Slashdot Mirror
The NDAA has to be signed into law. It funds the entire military. If he vetoed it, we'd spend the rest of the year watching non-stop ads about how he took away healthcare from wounded veterans and refused to give guns to troops on the front lines. He'd lose reelection in the biggest landslide in history, because frankly, the average voter is woefully uninformed. So to say he "willingly" signed it into law is a vast oversimplification.
SOPA isn't a big omnibus bill. If he opposes provisions in it, he can veto it without all the collateral damage. And it's not like there were specific things he opposed that could be taken out. It was a pretty broad statement: "we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet." You'd basically need a complete rewrite to avoid doing any of those things.
That will likely depend on whether or not its passed by a veto proof majority. Frankly, I'm starting to think it won't pass at all, given the momentum the opposition has been building lately. Of course, that means that we need to keep up the pressure. Calling your senators and representative once a week to see where they stand is a good start. They'll likely be wishy-washy at first, but that's why you make your desires clear, and then call the next week to follow up and see if they've cemented an opinion yet. Keep going until they commit to opposing it. And if they're dead set on supporting it, remember that primary season is just around the corner, and has lower turnout -- meaning that a smaller, well-motivated group of voters can make a change. (Unless they're a senator elected in 2010, in which case they can do whatever the hell they want, and you'll forget about it by 2016.)
Only this time, it's being spun in the opposite direction. Yesterday's was spun to make it sound like Obama supports SOPA, which was odd because every other site I read inferred that he opposed it.
No one's "falling to grief". We're discussing ways to deal with a problem.
In the real world, assholes get ostracized. If a coworker made fun of a dead girl around the water cooler, he would be shunned by most of the people in the office, and that would teach him to be more civil in the future. Applying that same social pressure on the internet is a good idea. Otherwise we end up with trolling communities that strive to harm others for their own amusement, simply because the (man-)children have never had to face consequences for their actions, and instead receive positive reinforcement from other sociopaths. The trick is finding a way to do it without totally removing the anonymity that makes the internet so useful for things like the Arab Spring.
Did you read my entire post, or stop at the second sentence? I'm in no way suggesting we do away with anonymity. People would still use whatever username they like on the site, without any public link to who they actually are. But in the background, that username would be linked to their actual ID, and they'd be prevented from making tons of disposable accounts. Maybe one new account every six months or so would be a good starting point.
It's not so different from linking account names to IP addresses, except that it (a) allows multiple people in the same house to have their own accounts and (b) can't be easy defeated by proxies and dynamic IPs.
It's pretty special that you consider the phrase "not as gifted as Mozart" to be synonymous with "not impressive". I hope your kids grow up to be Oscar-winning astronaut quarterbacks, or else you're in for quite a disappointment.
Forcing them to make accounts would just result in an inundation of new accounts that get used until they accrue bad karma, and then replaced. The only way to keep people from acting like assholes online is to attach usernames to real life IDs. You can keep the real life IDs secret to maintain anonymity, but the IDs need to be available to the server so that people can't just make a new account every time they make an ass of themselves. Given the demographic of this site, I doubt that would be a popular policy.
Come on, that's not fair. I'm sure a random yokel off the streets could have done much better than Bush.
Depends what the goal is. If the goal is to stop piracy, no, it won't work and never would have. If the goal is for politicians to throw a bone to the content owners in exchange for big time donations, then I suspect it will work quite well.
Believe it or not, it is possible for a phrase to have multiple meanings. Begging the question, or circular reasoning, is one thing. Begging [for] the question is another. You, as a thinking human being, are capable of discerning which is meant from the context.
The Republicans passed a law forbidding any money from being spent on relocating the prisoners there. So it's illegal to keep them, but it's also illegal to move them. Catch-22.
If you're so sure, here's the full text. Point to the section supporting your claim. I've challenged several people to do so since the bill was signed, and not one of them has.
I'm getting tired of copy-pasting this for people, but fine:
SEC. 1021. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.
(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
Source.
Either the law doesn't allow anyone from the US to be detained, or else it already did allow it and this law didn't change it. Considering that the Supreme Court already ruled that detainees in Gitmo have habeas corpus rights, there's no way a law taking those rights from citizens could stand.
I know it's popular around here to pretend the US government is some dystopic comic book empire, but open your eyes. It's simply not true.
Umm... I'm not sure what your point is. That looks like they were just testing the security at a government building. That's roughly on par with 2 AM fire drills in the annoyance factor, but they're not harassing people for complaining about the government.
Yup, and that's a terrible thing. But does it have anything to do with this story? The abuses of protestors are being carried out by cops, frequently at the behest of mayors and other local leaders. Leaders who, as local politicians, are extremely vulnerable to local movements to force them out of office. And yet no one seems to talk or care about local politics, preferring to focus their outrage on groups like the TSA and DHS. Groups which really aren't doing all that much harm... lots of expensive, ineffective, and obnoxious security theatre, but not the beatings and free speech zones that really do a number on civil liberties.
Every time you lie and claim that the US is just like Nazi Germany, you send a clear signal to everyone listening that you're a crazy person who should be ignored, or maybe even locked up to prevent you from harming yourself or others. You can oppose bad policy without lying about it.
No, by posting an equivalency between Nazi Germany and the United States, you're declaring yourself to be a myopic twit. By then repeating that popular lie that the NDAA allows for military detainment of citizens (read the goddamn thing), you are providing supporting evidence.
Actually, it is possible (and indeed quite easy!) to be overly paranoid. For example, when you start comparing the DHS to an organization that routinely executed dissidents, that's being too paranoid.
I'd expect them to read postings and keep an eye out for people threatening violence. That's a good thing. If someone stands up in a town square and yells that they're going to go shoot the mayor, I'd expect cops to take note. Where it becomes bad is if they harass or in any way mistreat people who aren't threatening violence. Is there any evidence that they're doing that?
Memorization is important. Childhood innovations are generally moronic, because the kids haven't yet learned the basic facts of the universe. I recall some of my childhood "inventions"... thinking that I could make a laser by pointing a couple mirrors at each other and shining a flashlight inside. Or that I could generate unlimited electricity with a series of transformers (arbitrarily high voltage!). Or that I could design a programming language that compiled plain English instead of (what seemed to be) needlessly arcane languages we were forced to learn. Or that I could make a perfect cooler by having a layer of ice contained within an airtight seal, the idea being that the ice shrinks when it melts, but since there's nothing to fill the gap, it wouldn't be able to melt. I could go on.
Learning basic facts is essential. It only dampens creativity in the sense that kids no longer waste time thinking about inventions that are logically impossible, and instead can focus their talents on ideas that have a chance of working.
I recall being told the exact same thing about real estate in 2006.
FYI, I'm in the upper class myself. Around the 94th percentile if Wikipedia's stats are accurate. And I've done quite well for myself by investing in gold, Amazon, Netflix, Sirius radio, and a whole lot of companies you've never heard of. Graham Corp was my favorite.... see that peak on its chart in '08? That's when Cramer was screaming on Mad Money for people to buy it. A sure sell signal if ever I saw one, and I bailed out immediately.
But unlike a lot of upper class people, I wasn't born into it, and I'm nowhere near wealthy enough to support friends and family. So I get to see childhood friends lose their jobs and homes. And I get to see my siblings and cousins struggle to make ends meet. And I get to reminisce about waking up one morning and finding my dad literally weeping because he had been laid off and we were going to lose our home, back when I was too young to understand any of that. And I'm literate enough to look at statistics and see that the bottom 80% has been in decline for over thirty years, while the top 1% has seen their incomes quadruple over the same period. And I'm good enough at arithmetic to figure out that if this nation's "rising tide" had indeed "lifted all ships", then the average individual would be making an additional $8k a year, which would mean a hell of a lot to people, considering that the median income is $24k. But instead, all of that money ($8k per person times 155 million workers = $1.24 TRILLION per year) went to the top 1%, who use it to bribe politicians into giving them even more advantages.
To expand on your example of chips, they typically have a large amount of area devoted to self-test and tuning systems which get used exactly once, in the factory (okay, maybe a few times e.g. to make sure you didn't break anything during packaging), and then never touched again. Scan chains in particular can add a lot of transistors.
It strikes me as a close analog to test code in software... that is, unless test code gets taken out of the final product with compiler directives. I don't really know how all that software black magic gets done.
So we must allow the 1% to continue robbing us until we are literally starving to death. Only then can we raise a (feeble, emaciated) fist against them.
Has it occurred to you that the longer we wait to solve the erosion of the middle class, the harder it will be?
He could just be an upper-middle class young adult who still believes that if he works hard enough, he'll one day get to join the 1%. Just wait until he or someone he cares about gets sick and loses their home, or until Bain Capital or similar buys out his business and decides his job could be better done by a coworker working unpaid overtime, or until his life savings get wiped out by some Wall Streeters run amok and leave him with nothing to retire on.
Sadly, for some people it takes experiencing bad luck themselves to realize that the poor aren't poor out of laziness.
This guy created a new account purely to post in this thread, and based on the timestamps, he apparently had his post typed up ahead of time, just waiting for a Microsoft security related story to come along. That definitely sets off my shill-dar.
It's pretty well established that companies do hire shills. They aren't directly on the companies payroll, but are instead subcons of marketing companies hired by the company that wants the astroturfing done. I've read "exposés" by such shills in the past, talking about how they juggle a few accounts on a few different forums, and how the best ones first work to build up a rapport in the community before casually praising the business that hired them. Of course, those shills are more expensive (since there was more of a time investment).
It's not a conspiracy, it's just something companies do as a form of marketing. A lot of Slashdot readers are sysadmins, which makes this site a logical target for people advertising IT-related products (includes the ones sold by MS), just as people watching sitcoms at 1 AM on a Saturday are logical targets for those "dating" phone lines.