You have to pretty much double your salary to be equivlent to working in NY. The cost of living is twice as much.
So $37/hr is more like $18.5/hr here in the midwest. Which is still pretty damn good pay for the sort of work involved, but not what I'm making as an engineer.
computer user support specialist customer services representatives telecom line installer sales representatives (With new york city wages)
So what you're saying is that people working in the shit-end of the industry don't need the same credentials as the people working the high-paying end of the industry?
Golly gosh-darn! It's like manager at the local McDonalds doesn't need to have the same pedigree as the CEO of McDonalds corporate.
And maybe... just maybe... that night-shift manager has just about the same chances of rising to CEO of McDonalds as the help-desk wage-slave has of becoming the lead software architect.
If only there were some sort of pipe we could feed into their house at a reasonable rate that delivered to them the grand sum of human knowledge and gave them the tools to educate themselves, learn meaningful skills, and become valuable.
I'm really sorry for the snark. It's gotta suck-ass being born poor in East Bumfuck. For a while I stayed in State Center, IA, that had about 10 city blocks to it's name, and 2 restaurants. I paid this neighbor kid to mow my grass, and his whole family just didn't have too many options. Friendly, but a habitual liar. His brother was nice, but full of piercing and tats that I know had to put him at odds with the majority of the town.
The Internet is there, and it's a great and wonderful thing, but you know what? The biggest barrier I see to it penetrating into the lives of people who otherwise have no options is their culture. Try as I might, that kid just would not believe that he could do meaningful stuff. It's not that he didn't want to be code monkey like me, or didn't want to have a higher paying job. He just didn't think it was going to happen. I couldn't get him to try. That sort of resistance is weird, and I'm not sure I have a solid grasp of it's root cause. But if I had to call it something, I'd say it's the culture of the poor.
Never before have I found a more appropriate use for this:
Some people say a man is made outta mud A code monkey's got Mountain Dew for his blood Dew in the blood and Cheeto bones One bad back n' carpal tunnel syndrome
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine I picked up my laptop and I coded a line I coded PHP and some Javascript And off to Menlo Park then I was shipped
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
If you see me comin', better step aside The Dew and Cheetos made-me a little too wide A little too wide and a little too old But for Facebook's perks my soul I've sold
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
Tweaks by by cold fjord (826450) (yeah, something useful came outta the NSA sock puppet, go figure) Original parody by cervesaebraciator (2352888) Original lyrics by Merle Travis, maybe.
We have no idea if someone exploited before it was finally fixed.
hmmmm. So this sort of phenomena only cropped up in the 80's right? That's ~30 years ago. Shouldn't we start getting a bunch of retired end-stagers willing to divulge who was doing what with the zero-days in their pocket?
Death beds are a great place to learn the truth about what happened 30-40 years ago. For some matters, it's the only place you'll learn the truth. The field of computer security is reaching the end-life of their first generation. Where are the memoirs?
It already IS outlawed. Lying to congress is illegal. Really illegal. The sort of illegal that rich and famous people get thrown in jail for because they're breaking a law that pisses off other rich and famous people.
You tried pulling out the "well, I mean, there's this statistics thing, [blahblahblah]
What the fuck are you smoking?...oh. Hey, would you look at that. Other people can't believe you're actually arguing this point and you're getting confused about who is saying what. Yeah, no, that wasn't me. I'm also not the one harping on the fact that people got murdered by this program. I spent my time just trying to show you the really bloody obvious double-think you have going on when it comes to cops selling guns to drug lords.
Who have we got here? sjames, Zynder, lgw, quila, firethorn. And me, I guess. Damn son, you've got a knack for some high quality bait. If this is just some massive trolling attempt you have won GOLD.
Seriously though, try reading the arguments made against your position before you spout out some random shit in your head. It helps sway the crowd.
If they repeated [Fast&Furious] a hundred thousand times, the most likely, near-certain result would be...
...that they get tried by the ICJ for supplying arms to an anti-government militant force in another sovereign nation like they did with Contras in Nicaragua. Seriously, at that point it's no longer a criminal investigation, it's unsanctioned military aid.
Jesus Christ dude, you're treating the scenario like a hard bedrock of immovable fact. That X guns will be bought by the Mexican cartels and if more than X guns are sold by anyone then nothing changes. Sorry, reality just doesn't work that way. If you flood or starve a market it has an effect. Not always the most obvious.
One of the previous times that Raspberry Pis came up in conversation around here I heard of a guy who set up a Hadoop cluster running on a number of Pis. It's possible, and educational, but the throughput is simply not significant to justify.
Sure, they're cheap. But putting a bunch next to each other won't give you all the processing power you've ever dreamed of.
that information wasn't really obtained at any expense
It's not a drop in the ocean; it's a non-impact
And now you're onto:
If you say, "People died because the mexicans got these particular guns", you are almost certainly wrong.
That's at least... you know... something.
Along the way there, you tried to veer off onto side topics like the nature of deterrents, and how cops are above the law. You also had a couple of shitty examples. Hookers, hackers, and gang-bangs? Dude.
But ultimately, you've got a contradiction in your argument that you just can't seem to fathom. I don't think I'm going to have any luck showing it to you. Good luck with that.
Except you're confused about the negative impact of the two examples.
In your hacking example, the negative aspect to it is "damaging service, stealing sensitive information,". Which doesn't happen in scenario #3 because it's done by "professionals" who are presumably above that sort of thing.
In the selling arms to mexican cartels example, the negative aspect is selling arms to Mexican cartels. Who then go and shoot people. And that is happening whether nor not it's cops doing the selling.
Here, lemme show you. Let's say we were to take your hacking example and apply it to the issue at hand:
Scenario 1: Selling arms to mexican cartels isn't illegal. Result: Prices bottom out on weapons, the mexican cartels are well armed, and lots of people are shot
Scenario 2: Selling arms to mexican cartels is illegal. Result: What we have now. People that sell arms to mexican cartels are put in prison. When we find them. Presumably this drives up the cost of arming the cartels and makes life harder for them and in turn makes illegal drugs more expensive and less prevalent. If you believe in that whole free market thing at least, and believe the war on drugs has a prayer of working.
Scenario 3: Like scenario #2, but cops have an exception. Result: Just like #2, but quantifiably worse for every weapon that the cops sell. Because each one is going directly towards the negative impact.
Unlike your hacking example, where the negative aspect is a side-effect of people learning about network security, the negative aspect is EXACTLY what the police were doing. They are DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTING TO THE PROBLEM.
No, that's how it USED to be. "They want a degree, any degree, it shows that you can learn" is why we have so many liberal arts majors and why
These days companies don't want to teach you anything. They don't care if you can learn. They want to hire you, use you, and them dump you the moment that it's convenient. Teaching costs money. And there are plenty of educated workers overseas wanting in.
And hey, I think it's a reasonable request that the university that you just paid tens of thousands of dollars to give you some marketable skills. If you ask them to at least.
But if he already has the capabilities to crank out some code then he has value that companies want. Maybe a bullshit degree will open a couple doors that wouldn't otherwise be closed to him. But don't lend credit to the lie of the liberal arts degree.
30. Thirty generations. And they're worried about inbreeding. Because of the population cap that a closed environment like a colony ship would impose.
As for needing diversity when you get there. No. That's not quite right. Once there you can develop diversity. Or, you WILL develop diversity unless everyone stays in the same place for some reason. Do you think "staying healthy" is the same as "staying homo sapian"? Because that ain't gonna happen. Place humans on different planets and I guarantee that we will experience our species splitting in two, assuming we live long enough.
Five hundred people picked at random today from the human population would not probably represent all of human genetic diversity . . . If you're going to seed a planet for its entire future, you want to have as much genetic diversity as possible, because that diversity is your insurance policy for adaptation to new conditions
when it comes to preserving genetic variation
Except that's not the goal. If you're talking about colonizing another star system (presumably this is way the fuck after we colonize mars, the moon, IO, Titan, Venus, Murcury, and whatever else we feel like) then little things like genetic diversity upon reaching the target are of little concern.
No, you care about GETTING THERE with enough wits about you that you can continue to function, and set up something to expand your capabilities. The fight is not to keep the diversity we see on earth circa 2000, but rather the fight is against inbreeding from making everyone retarded to the point where they can no longer function.
Once you get there, and establish colonies, food supply, and your ecosphere can expand past the mothership, you can breed like rabbits and let nature take it's course to overcome whatever detrimental effects that being cooped up in a closed space for 30 generations might have had.
Or every generation could be a fucking clone while on the way there. Seriously, this is colonizing ANOTHER SOLAR SYSTEM. This is WAY OUT THERE. It's science fiction. Just what the hell were you planning of propelling this ship with for 30 years?
Hell, taking the long view, just spreading ANY form of sustainable life is a viable goal for this sort of project. At this scale, "humans" are transient things.
Yo. I run Xubuntu. Could never swallow Unity. If I wasn't so lazy I'd try Arch.
Could probably dual boot if I wanted to. It's been years since I bothered with that.
Don't get me wrong, I also have a laptop running Win7. Gotta game on something. And I'm too damn lazy to putz about with WINE constantly. But Xubuntu does everything I want it to other than run Starcraft.
You need to protect yourself from enemies foreign and domestic.
Well, sure, but that's what the army and police are for. That's a really big umbrella that intelligence agencies happen to fall under.
You need to be able to be able to spy on other governments to find out their ulterior motives,
What? No, not really. First off, it's illegal. A dickish move that would turn those "other governments" into enemies rather than allies. Second, not everyone has ulterior motives. Third, you can usually figure out a nation's motives by plain old research. No need for spying. Lastly, there's a long history of spy networks being subverted and feeding false information up the chain. The spies can hurt your intelligence capabilities.
and you need to be able to conduct covert operations instead of engaging in full out wars.
So it's one or the other eh? No actually, how about we don't do either? Covert missions aren't all that bad. It's the clandestine missions that are just plain wrong. It's an open secret that the CIA routinely breaks laws. Murder, assasinations, drug trade, blackmail, and... shit dude, have you looked at their influence with the Contras? a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Alleged_CIA_involvement">Afghanistan mujhideen? They trained a bunch of people how to be terrorists, funded them, and armed them.
Intelligence agencies are important, but they can get the job done without doing this sort of shit. And if they can't? Those aren't the sort of jobs our nation should be doing.
You named your ship what? "She's one of ours, sir!" You're flying around on the SS She's one of ours, sir!... "Yeah, we figure it'll give us a couple rounds of confusion on their bridge."
Players. Never underestimate the amount of sheer crazy brilliance that players will occasionally pull off.
Yes, they can be owned by people in China. People who solely have access to said bitcoins. The Bitcoins can be considered "in China".
And yes, they need to be smuggled out. If China decrees that anyone trading Bitcoins for money is a criminal, then you can't simply exchange your bitcoins for Renminbi. If China comes down really hard, ASKING for someone to trade money for Bitcoins could be illegal. This would, presumably, convince normal people to simply no longer deal with Bitcoins.
Maybe. Just maybe, someone outside of China would want those Bitcoins because we don't live in such a tyrannical state (yet). But since trading them is illegal, they have to be smuggled. ie, exchanged to someone outside of China hopefully without the authorities noticing/caring, because doing so is illegal.
The internet is, was, and hopefully will operate with network neutrality in place. The networks interacted in a (mostly) neutral way when it came to exchanging data.
What you're talking about is legislature, rules, or regulation enforcing network neutrality.
It's far more accurate to say that if every home had a choice of a dozen ISPs, there would be no ISP that didn't operate under NN principles or else they would simply go out of business.
There have been a few examples of corporations trying to break network neutrality. ESPN360.com trying to hustle ISPs for money is one. ISPs trying to hustle Netflix for money is another. And they're rat bastards for doing so. But by and far we HAVE network neutrality. And we sure as shit want to keep it. Without it the Internet becomes significantly less awesome than it is today.
Ok, you gotta help me with this... They're sending people to jail for selling weapons to Mexican cartels "so EVERYONE doesn't [do it], since the situation could be worse. Maybe because you have to cull down the supply". And yet, when the police add to the supply, since there's so much supply "it's a non-impact".
When people do it, it's illegal because they're making the situation worse. When the cops do it, it's not illegal because it's not making the situation worse.... I'm sorry dude, you have to pick one. Your last post is completely at odds with your rest of your justification for why the police's actions aren't illegal.
Also: there's a distinct difference between arms trafficking and government-sanctioned espionage that involves arms trafficking.
. . . Really? "It's not illegal when we do it?" You're actually trying to use that argument legitly? Now, you're partly right. You ARE onto something. There IS a difference between arms trafficking and espionage. The two are completely different things. BUT, in this case the espionage includes illegal arms trafficking.
Arms trafficking is being compared to arms trafficking that involves government-sanctioned espionage. And that's a perfectly legitimate comparison. It's DOES NOT MATTER what the fuck their justification is. The rule of law means that an illegal action is illegal no matter who you are. Now, a lot of such laws have exceptions and waivers and such for EXACTLY this sort of thing. You can pretty much measure how corrupt and abused the legal system is by how many such exceptions there are and how often they are used. But there are no waivers here. They straight up performed an illegal activity and let the guns walk in an effort to fight a hopeless war.
What do you think about the CIA dealing drugs in foreign countries? Do you think it's not illegal? Why do you think such actions are "clandestine" in the first place. Why do you think we're not openly admitting that the CIA deals drugs abroad? Because it is balls to the walls illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Double.
You have to pretty much double your salary to be equivlent to working in NY. The cost of living is twice as much.
So $37/hr is more like $18.5/hr here in the midwest. Which is still pretty damn good pay for the sort of work involved, but not what I'm making as an engineer.
What jobs are they looking at here?
computer user support specialist
customer services representatives
telecom line installer
sales representatives
(With new york city wages)
So what you're saying is that people working in the shit-end of the industry don't need the same credentials as the people working the high-paying end of the industry?
Golly gosh-darn!
It's like manager at the local McDonalds doesn't need to have the same pedigree as the CEO of McDonalds corporate.
And maybe... just maybe... that night-shift manager has just about the same chances of rising to CEO of McDonalds as the help-desk wage-slave has of becoming the lead software architect.
If only there were some sort of pipe we could feed into their house at a reasonable rate that delivered to them the grand sum of human knowledge and gave them the tools to educate themselves, learn meaningful skills, and become valuable.
I'm really sorry for the snark. It's gotta suck-ass being born poor in East Bumfuck. For a while I stayed in State Center, IA, that had about 10 city blocks to it's name, and 2 restaurants. I paid this neighbor kid to mow my grass, and his whole family just didn't have too many options. Friendly, but a habitual liar. His brother was nice, but full of piercing and tats that I know had to put him at odds with the majority of the town.
The Internet is there, and it's a great and wonderful thing, but you know what? The biggest barrier I see to it penetrating into the lives of people who otherwise have no options is their culture. Try as I might, that kid just would not believe that he could do meaningful stuff. It's not that he didn't want to be code monkey like me, or didn't want to have a higher paying job. He just didn't think it was going to happen. I couldn't get him to try. That sort of resistance is weird, and I'm not sure I have a solid grasp of it's root cause. But if I had to call it something, I'd say it's the culture of the poor.
Never before have I found a more appropriate use for this:
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A code monkey's got Mountain Dew for his blood
Dew in the blood and Cheeto bones
One bad back n' carpal tunnel syndrome
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my laptop and I coded a line
I coded PHP and some Javascript
And off to Menlo Park then I was shipped
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
If you see me comin', better step aside
The Dew and Cheetos made-me a little too wide
A little too wide and a little too old
But for Facebook's perks my soul I've sold
Ya code 16 lines and whaddya get
Another bug report and technical debt
PM just told me vacations a no
We got no life till we're shipping code
Tweaks by by cold fjord (826450) (yeah, something useful came outta the NSA sock puppet, go figure)
Original parody by cervesaebraciator (2352888)
Original lyrics by Merle Travis, maybe.
We have no idea if someone exploited before it was finally fixed.
hmmmm. So this sort of phenomena only cropped up in the 80's right?
That's ~30 years ago. Shouldn't we start getting a bunch of retired end-stagers willing to divulge who was doing what with the zero-days in their pocket?
Death beds are a great place to learn the truth about what happened 30-40 years ago. For some matters, it's the only place you'll learn the truth. The field of computer security is reaching the end-life of their first generation. Where are the memoirs?
It already IS outlawed. Lying to congress is illegal. Really illegal. The sort of illegal that rich and famous people get thrown in jail for because they're breaking a law that pisses off other rich and famous people.
And yet Clapper isn't in jail yet.
While some people are trying. It doesn't look like it's going to happen. It doesn't even look like he's going to get fired.
So I'm going to have to go with "No, that won't stop it".
Is this feeling the same one that non-americans get when a major economic issue has to go to the US supreame court, or FCC, or FAA, or ICANN?
Because as an American, this feeling is weird.
You tried pulling out the "well, I mean, there's this statistics thing, [blahblahblah]
What the fuck are you smoking? ...oh. Hey, would you look at that. Other people can't believe you're actually arguing this point and you're getting confused about who is saying what. Yeah, no, that wasn't me. I'm also not the one harping on the fact that people got murdered by this program. I spent my time just trying to show you the really bloody obvious double-think you have going on when it comes to cops selling guns to drug lords.
Who have we got here? sjames, Zynder, lgw, quila, firethorn. And me, I guess. Damn son, you've got a knack for some high quality bait. If this is just some massive trolling attempt you have won GOLD.
Seriously though, try reading the arguments made against your position before you spout out some random shit in your head. It helps sway the crowd.
If they repeated [Fast&Furious] a hundred thousand times, the most likely, near-certain result would be...
...that they get tried by the ICJ for supplying arms to an anti-government militant force in another sovereign nation like they did with Contras in Nicaragua. Seriously, at that point it's no longer a criminal investigation, it's unsanctioned military aid.
Jesus Christ dude, you're treating the scenario like a hard bedrock of immovable fact. That X guns will be bought by the Mexican cartels and if more than X guns are sold by anyone then nothing changes. Sorry, reality just doesn't work that way. If you flood or starve a market it has an effect. Not always the most obvious.
One of the previous times that Raspberry Pis came up in conversation around here I heard of a guy who set up a Hadoop cluster running on a number of Pis.
It's possible, and educational, but the throughput is simply not significant to justify.
Sure, they're cheap. But putting a bunch next to each other won't give you all the processing power you've ever dreamed of.
So you think they'll evolve a little and then their evolution will just stop?
Well you're getting better, I guess.
You started out saying that:
that information wasn't really obtained at any expense
It's not a drop in the ocean; it's a non-impact
And now you're onto:
If you say, "People died because the mexicans got these particular guns", you are almost certainly wrong.
That's at least... you know... something.
Along the way there, you tried to veer off onto side topics like the nature of deterrents, and how cops are above the law. You also had a couple of shitty examples. Hookers, hackers, and gang-bangs? Dude.
But ultimately, you've got a contradiction in your argument that you just can't seem to fathom. I don't think I'm going to have any luck showing it to you. Good luck with that.
Except you're confused about the negative impact of the two examples.
In your hacking example, the negative aspect to it is "damaging service, stealing sensitive information,". Which doesn't happen in scenario #3 because it's done by "professionals" who are presumably above that sort of thing.
In the selling arms to mexican cartels example, the negative aspect is selling arms to Mexican cartels. Who then go and shoot people. And that is happening whether nor not it's cops doing the selling.
Here, lemme show you. Let's say we were to take your hacking example and apply it to the issue at hand:
Scenario 1: Selling arms to mexican cartels isn't illegal. Result: Prices bottom out on weapons, the mexican cartels are well armed, and lots of people are shot
Scenario 2: Selling arms to mexican cartels is illegal. Result: What we have now. People that sell arms to mexican cartels are put in prison. When we find them. Presumably this drives up the cost of arming the cartels and makes life harder for them and in turn makes illegal drugs more expensive and less prevalent. If you believe in that whole free market thing at least, and believe the war on drugs has a prayer of working.
Scenario 3: Like scenario #2, but cops have an exception. Result: Just like #2, but quantifiably worse for every weapon that the cops sell. Because each one is going directly towards the negative impact.
Unlike your hacking example, where the negative aspect is a side-effect of people learning about network security, the negative aspect is EXACTLY what the police were doing. They are DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTING TO THE PROBLEM.
No, that's how it USED to be. "They want a degree, any degree, it shows that you can learn" is why we have so many liberal arts majors and why
These days companies don't want to teach you anything. They don't care if you can learn. They want to hire you, use you, and them dump you the moment that it's convenient. Teaching costs money. And there are plenty of educated workers overseas wanting in.
And hey, I think it's a reasonable request that the university that you just paid tens of thousands of dollars to give you some marketable skills. If you ask them to at least.
But if he already has the capabilities to crank out some code then he has value that companies want. Maybe a bullshit degree will open a couple doors that wouldn't otherwise be closed to him. But don't lend credit to the lie of the liberal arts degree.
Until then we can focus on colonizing our own bloody solar system.
30. Thirty generations. And they're worried about inbreeding. Because of the population cap that a closed environment like a colony ship would impose.
As for needing diversity when you get there. No. That's not quite right. Once there you can develop diversity. Or, you WILL develop diversity unless everyone stays in the same place for some reason. Do you think "staying healthy" is the same as "staying homo sapian"? Because that ain't gonna happen. Place humans on different planets and I guarantee that we will experience our species splitting in two, assuming we live long enough.
uuuuuugggghhhh, "heat death". Yep. That there's a good show of my thinkatude.
The acceptable time span roughly goes from now until the head death of the universe.
Five hundred people picked at random today from the human population would not probably represent all of human genetic diversity . . . If you're going to seed a planet for its entire future, you want to have as much genetic diversity as possible, because that diversity is your insurance policy for adaptation to new conditions
when it comes to preserving genetic variation
Except that's not the goal.
If you're talking about colonizing another star system (presumably this is way the fuck after we colonize mars, the moon, IO, Titan, Venus, Murcury, and whatever else we feel like) then little things like genetic diversity upon reaching the target are of little concern.
No, you care about GETTING THERE with enough wits about you that you can continue to function, and set up something to expand your capabilities.
The fight is not to keep the diversity we see on earth circa 2000, but rather the fight is against inbreeding from making everyone retarded to the point where they can no longer function.
Once you get there, and establish colonies, food supply, and your ecosphere can expand past the mothership, you can breed like rabbits and let nature take it's course to overcome whatever detrimental effects that being cooped up in a closed space for 30 generations might have had.
Or every generation could be a fucking clone while on the way there. Seriously, this is colonizing ANOTHER SOLAR SYSTEM. This is WAY OUT THERE. It's science fiction. Just what the hell were you planning of propelling this ship with for 30 years?
Hell, taking the long view, just spreading ANY form of sustainable life is a viable goal for this sort of project. At this scale, "humans" are transient things.
Yo. I run Xubuntu. Could never swallow Unity. If I wasn't so lazy I'd try Arch.
Could probably dual boot if I wanted to. It's been years since I bothered with that.
Don't get me wrong, I also have a laptop running Win7. Gotta game on something. And I'm too damn lazy to putz about with WINE constantly. But Xubuntu does everything I want it to other than run Starcraft.
you need intelligence agencies.
That's reasonable.
You need to protect yourself from enemies foreign and domestic.
Well, sure, but that's what the army and police are for. That's a really big umbrella that intelligence agencies happen to fall under.
You need to be able to be able to spy on other governments to find out their ulterior motives,
What? No, not really. First off, it's illegal. A dickish move that would turn those "other governments" into enemies rather than allies. Second, not everyone has ulterior motives. Third, you can usually figure out a nation's motives by plain old research. No need for spying. Lastly, there's a long history of spy networks being subverted and feeding false information up the chain. The spies can hurt your intelligence capabilities.
and you need to be able to conduct covert operations instead of engaging in full out wars.
So it's one or the other eh? No actually, how about we don't do either?
Covert missions aren't all that bad. It's the clandestine missions that are just plain wrong. It's an open secret that the CIA routinely breaks laws. Murder, assasinations, drug trade, blackmail, and... shit dude, have you looked at their influence with the Contras? a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Alleged_CIA_involvement">Afghanistan mujhideen? They trained a bunch of people how to be terrorists, funded them, and armed them.
Intelligence agencies are important, but they can get the job done without doing this sort of shit.
And if they can't? Those aren't the sort of jobs our nation should be doing.
You named your ship what?
"She's one of ours, sir!"
You're flying around on the SS She's one of ours, sir!...
"Yeah, we figure it'll give us a couple rounds of confusion on their bridge."
Players. Never underestimate the amount of sheer crazy brilliance that players will occasionally pull off.
Yes, they can be owned by people in China. People who solely have access to said bitcoins. The Bitcoins can be considered "in China".
And yes, they need to be smuggled out. If China decrees that anyone trading Bitcoins for money is a criminal, then you can't simply exchange your bitcoins for Renminbi. If China comes down really hard, ASKING for someone to trade money for Bitcoins could be illegal. This would, presumably, convince normal people to simply no longer deal with Bitcoins.
Maybe. Just maybe, someone outside of China would want those Bitcoins because we don't live in such a tyrannical state (yet). But since trading them is illegal, they have to be smuggled. ie, exchanged to someone outside of China hopefully without the authorities noticing/caring, because doing so is illegal.
Whoa there. Important nuance you're missing.
The internet is, was, and hopefully will operate with network neutrality in place. The networks interacted in a (mostly) neutral way when it came to exchanging data.
What you're talking about is legislature, rules, or regulation enforcing network neutrality.
It's far more accurate to say that if every home had a choice of a dozen ISPs, there would be no ISP that didn't operate under NN principles or else they would simply go out of business.
There have been a few examples of corporations trying to break network neutrality. ESPN360.com trying to hustle ISPs for money is one. ISPs trying to hustle Netflix for money is another. And they're rat bastards for doing so. But by and far we HAVE network neutrality. And we sure as shit want to keep it. Without it the Internet becomes significantly less awesome than it is today.
A little depressing, but it's getting hard to tell.
Ok, you gotta help me with this... They're sending people to jail for selling weapons to Mexican cartels "so EVERYONE doesn't [do it], since the situation could be worse. Maybe because you have to cull down the supply". And yet, when the police add to the supply, since there's so much supply "it's a non-impact".
When people do it, it's illegal because they're making the situation worse. ... I'm sorry dude, you have to pick one. Your last post is completely at odds with your rest of your justification for why the police's actions aren't illegal.
When the cops do it, it's not illegal because it's not making the situation worse.
Also: there's a distinct difference between arms trafficking and government-sanctioned espionage that involves arms trafficking.
. . . Really? "It's not illegal when we do it?" You're actually trying to use that argument legitly?
Now, you're partly right. You ARE onto something. There IS a difference between arms trafficking and espionage. The two are completely different things. BUT, in this case the espionage includes illegal arms trafficking.
Arms trafficking is being compared to arms trafficking that involves government-sanctioned espionage. And that's a perfectly legitimate comparison. It's DOES NOT MATTER what the fuck their justification is. The rule of law means that an illegal action is illegal no matter who you are. Now, a lot of such laws have exceptions and waivers and such for EXACTLY this sort of thing. You can pretty much measure how corrupt and abused the legal system is by how many such exceptions there are and how often they are used. But there are no waivers here. They straight up performed an illegal activity and let the guns walk in an effort to fight a hopeless war.
What do you think about the CIA dealing drugs in foreign countries?
Do you think it's not illegal? Why do you think such actions are "clandestine" in the first place. Why do you think we're not openly admitting that the CIA deals drugs abroad? Because it is balls to the walls illegal.