Trump and his associates may have dodged a bullet with the Mueller probe, but I say again, he is nowhere near being in the clear yet. He is facing other legal challenges, including investigations into his organization and his charity, his alleged participation in the Stormy Daniels hush payments, and allegations of sexual assault.
37 indictments, 6 guilty please, and one conviction. That doesn't sound like a fail to me.
"please"?
Typo. I didn't proof-read carefully enough. (I almost did it again while writing this reply.)
And on the subject of corrections, I'll clarify that the Mueller probe made 199 criminal counts on 37 individuals, with 7 guilty pleas, 1 conviction at trial, and 5 people heading to jail (so far.)
So a detective, driving to a murder scene, stops and writes someone a speeding ticket. The Detective never closes the murder case - that's a fail. Mueller was investigating collusion and obstruction of justice, he found none of either - so yes, fail.
He was also investigating Russian interference in the election. He indicted 26 Russians. The charges against the other individuals may not have involved conspiracy, but they were not speeding tickets. They were felonies.
So why is he in prison? "No convictionâ means no sentence, yet he's doing time.
Well, I checked, and you appear to be right. I was misled by another post on this.
It appears that a conviction is what happens after you have been found guilty. You can be found guilty after a trial by a jury or judge, or you can plead guilty before the trial is over (or even starts.) In either case, you're convicted. Some online comments say the difference is that you can't appeal a guilty plea.
You are a bit on the dim side, my little Repugnican shite.
If you took the time to look at my other posts, you'd see I am definitely not a Republican. And please, let's not mock the names of parties, no matter what side you're on. It's needless provocation.
It's pretty clear from the summary, nobody in Trump's campaign was colluding with the Russians. This clearly includes the Trump Tower meeting.
Then why did Trump and his associates keep lying about it? That certainly didn't help him look innocent.
I'll accept what Mueller found out. But we need to see the full report.
I suppose you could invent a wild conspiracy theory to explain Mueller's report... After all it seems this whole thing was based on a conspiracy theory, so why not go whole hog?
Trump has himself to blame for the conspiracy theories. See above.
You asked rhetorically whether hiring a foreigner to do research was collusion. It is not. And the FEC link you provided is silent on this matter. There is a mention of volunteer work by foreigners, but the context pertains to unsolicited volunteer work by a foreigner that might otherwise be considered a contribution. When a foreigner's activities cross the threshold of participating in the decision-making of the campaign, then it's a violation.
As for your original comment on both campaigns meeting with a foreign diplomat, there's nothing wrong with that either, unless of course you are engaging them in the strategizing or decision-making of the campaign.
You mean, the report that all the Democrats have been wetting themselves over, did not contain what they wanted it to, so you'll just imagine it does anyways?
You should seek counseling and/or medication for your trump derangement syndrome.
We haven't seen the report yet. Just sentence fragments hand-picked by Trump's AG.
All campaigns gather information about their opponents, and they pay for the research. There's nothing wrong with that, even if the person hired to collect the information is a foreigner. That's not collusion or conspiracy.
On the other hand, if a campaign co-ordinates with foreigners to engage in activities aimed at influencing an election (such as, oh say, hacking your opponent's email servers) then that is collusion. And if a foreign government handed a campaign unsolicited information about its opponent, then that would be an illegal campaign contribution.
All we have at this point is sentence fragments from Mueller's report. Fragments selected by Trump's new Attorney General and faithful heat-shield William Barr. (Just take a look at how obsequious he was to Trump at the recent veto "ceremony" in the Oval Office.)
I suspect we will know more -- much more -- if and when the full report is released.
The market didn't give a toss about Bill Clinton's impeachment. I doubt it will care about the Mueller report. (As I write this, the market futures are up only modestly.) Besides, Trump is nowhere near being in the clear yet.
Signs are pointing to a global economic slowdown. That's why the market tanked on Friday. It may rally again (it often does before a recession) but don't be too sure it will last, no matter what happens in the UK or in 2020.
The real question is why did our president just have a Twitter fight with a dead man?
Because it's only now that they're intellectual equals?
Listen, he spends his weekend obsessing over great men because he knows it, and I know it, and all of you know it: he will never be a great man [...] My father was his kryptonite in life, he was his kryptonite in death. On a personal level, I agree with you, all of us have love and families, and when my father was alive, up until adulthood, we would spend our time together cooking, hiking, fishing, really celebrating life, and I think it's because he almost died [...] And I just thought, 'your life is spent on the weekend not with your family, not with your friends, but you're obsessing, obsessing over great men you could never live up to.' That tells you everything you need to know about his pathetic life right now. -- Meghan McCain
37 indictments, 6 guilty please, and one conviction. That doesn't sound like a fail to me.
If you want to talk about failure, look at the R's obsessive investigations of Hillary before the 2016 election. E-mails? zero indictments. Benghazi? zero indictments. But of course, indictments really weren't the objective. They just wanted to tarnish her because she was the presumptive 2016 nominee for the Ds.
it's always a gamble. but prosecutors aren't in the business of not prosecuting people. so saying there's not enough evidence is a pretty good indication of innocence.
No, it just means the prosecutor doesn't think there is enough evidence to obtain a conviction. Prosecutors are not in the business of prosecuting when it appears unlikely they will win.
As you say yourself, when was creating GNU, he had to rely on proprietary hardware and closed source software. That is, he made a deal with the devil, because it was the only practical option. Now, we wish to follow in his footsteps by making our deal with the devil, for exactly the same reason, and he tells us it is unjust. It's just straight hypocrisy.
Well not quite. I think you missed his point which is that we no longer need to shake hands with the devil, although he admitted he once had to. It requires some compromises, but it is possible now to use a computer with entirely free software. It was not possible when he was building Gnu.
Keep in mind that as Gnu grew, RMS was pragmatic about evolving the stature of free software in a world of proprietary software. For example, consider the LGPL (aka the Library GPL or the Lesser GPL) which allowed proprietary software to use GPL libraries as long as the libraries could remain GPL without breaking the proprietary software. He saw the need for free software to gain mindset and wider adoption in a world that was still dominated by proprietary software. But he thinks the days of those compromises are over. And he may have a point.
My point is that we may never eliminate proprietary software, but the merits of open software are compelling and should be emphasized.
You'll be blocked for certain comments. Certain common troll posts won't be allowed. I've tried to do a few parody troll posts where I'm calling out to old trolls and gotten blocked until I modified the post substantially and added a bit more content than just a call out to the old post.
You have intrigued me. What do you mean by "blocked?"
I'll start by saying I respect RMS highly. Anything he says on free software is worth considering. But that doesn't mean you have to agree with it.
It should be noted that RMS, when he was creating GNU, had to rely on proprietary commercial unix hardware and closed-source software (Sun Microsystems, IIRC.) As he said in his own essays, this was a necessary means to an end. He and his associates had to start with a working system and replace it bit-by-bit (pardon the pun) with free-as-in-freedom components. By the early 90s, all he had left to create was Hurd, the planned kernel for the Gnu system.
Then Linus Torvalds came along with his Linux kernel, and Gnu/Linux was born. In the early days, no hardware vendors were supporting Linux officially, so the only drivers were available as source, and therefore free. There was no "devil" to shake hands with. As Linux grew in popularity, hardware vendors began contributing drivers -- some as source, some as binary-only. The licensing of the kernel allowed this to happen. And this situation persisted to this day.
I think the point RMS is making is that the free-software revolution is stalled (again, pardon the pun) at best, or going backwards at worst, when it allows binary blobs to be part of an OS. Unlike in the early days of Gnu, it is now possible to run a system with entirely free software with few compromises. I think he's trying to encourage people to adopt this practice in order to encourage more hardware vendors to contribute open-source drivers.
to help put food on the table of someone who writes software. Free software will always be mediocre and decades behind commercial solutions. Yes, ostentatiously [sic] the word free doesn't necessarily mean no cost, according to RMS, but let's get real, if there is no hindrance to simply copying it, then there is no motivation to pay for more than the cost of the copy. Unfortunately, copying 1s and 0s hardly covers creating them in the first place, and if there is no motivation to create them, then the choices will be mostly limited to hobbyist and hardware manufacturer written software.
Anonymity did not solve any problem. If you can't put your name on it, it's not worth fighting for, and not worthy of respect.
(Said the AC, ironically.)
There are many problems that anonymity can help to solve. For example:
- it allows whistle-blowers to report crimes without fear of reprisal - it can encourage candor when people express concerns or opinions - it allows someone to share non-identifying personal information (health issues, etc.) - and so on.
Of course, it's a two-sided coin. Anonymity has disadvantages. I leave a listing of them as an exercise. But it's not true that "Anonymity did not solve any problem."
the only reason anyone can read your post but you is that/. is censoring the "Natalie Portman Hot Grits / Greased up Yoda Doll / GNAA" trolls. I can't be the only one old enough to remember the time before when/. was rendered useless by trolling efforts.
It is still often rendered useless by the apk, "die in prison" and 'treason' crapflooding.
I have not seen any sign that Nataliel Portman, greased Yoda doll, apk, "die in prison" or "treason" posts are being censored. However, I do know of an extremely offensive GNAA first-post that was removed in a discussion recently. I know because I responded (critically) to it, and now my comment no longer points to a thread. I certainly wasn't upset.
For the most part, I can live with crapflooding. But I draw the line at offensive ASCII art, like GNAA and swastikas, that are visible to your co-workers from a distance when you browse slashdot at work. There's a filter that prevents you from posting all-caps. Surely it's time for a filter that prevents multiple posts of near-identical ASCII art.
For an alcoholic, alcohol is not the solution. But neither is prohibition.
People who cloister themselves in the toxic world-views of sites like 8chan may be heavily conditioned against considering facts from other sites. Free and anonymous connectivity probably will not help such people. But I don't think ISPs banning 8chan will help either. Some other site will take its place, or the 8channer can switch ISPs.
Another topic is whether ISPs should be able to do this in the first place. I think they should not. IMHO, ISPs are common carriers. They provide a connection service, not a content service (like cable or satellite TV, that choose which content to provide.)
I think the solution is to teach young people how to spot false arguments and misinformation, as well as the history of the world, and the harm that extremist groups have caused.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump and his associates may have dodged a bullet with the Mueller probe, but I say again, he is nowhere near being in the clear yet. He is facing other legal challenges, including investigations into his organization and his charity, his alleged participation in the Stormy Daniels hush payments, and allegations of sexual assault.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
37 indictments, 6 guilty please, and one conviction. That doesn't sound like a fail to me.
"please"?
Typo. I didn't proof-read carefully enough. (I almost did it again while writing this reply.)
And on the subject of corrections, I'll clarify that the Mueller probe made 199 criminal counts on 37 individuals, with 7 guilty pleas, 1 conviction at trial, and 5 people heading to jail (so far.)
So a detective, driving to a murder scene, stops and writes someone a speeding ticket. The Detective never closes the murder case - that's a fail. Mueller was investigating collusion and obstruction of justice, he found none of either - so yes, fail.
He was also investigating Russian interference in the election. He indicted 26 Russians. The charges against the other individuals may not have involved conspiracy, but they were not speeding tickets. They were felonies.
So why is he in prison? "No convictionâ means no sentence, yet he's doing time.
Well, I checked, and you appear to be right. I was misled by another post on this.
It appears that a conviction is what happens after you have been found guilty. You can be found guilty after a trial by a jury or judge, or you can plead guilty before the trial is over (or even starts.) In either case, you're convicted. Some online comments say the difference is that you can't appeal a guilty plea.
You are a bit on the dim side, my little Repugnican shite.
If you took the time to look at my other posts, you'd see I am definitely not a Republican. And please, let's not mock the names of parties, no matter what side you're on. It's needless provocation.
But we have the AG's summary.
Which is inadequate. We need to see the full report. And congress agreed unanimously.
It's pretty clear from the summary, nobody in Trump's campaign was colluding with the Russians. This clearly includes the Trump Tower meeting.
Then why did Trump and his associates keep lying about it? That certainly didn't help him look innocent.
I'll accept what Mueller found out. But we need to see the full report.
I suppose you could invent a wild conspiracy theory to explain Mueller's report... After all it seems this whole thing was based on a conspiracy theory, so why not go whole hog?
Trump has himself to blame for the conspiracy theories. See above.
You asked rhetorically whether hiring a foreigner to do research was collusion. It is not. And the FEC link you provided is silent on this matter. There is a mention of volunteer work by foreigners, but the context pertains to unsolicited volunteer work by a foreigner that might otherwise be considered a contribution. When a foreigner's activities cross the threshold of participating in the decision-making of the campaign, then it's a violation.
As for your original comment on both campaigns meeting with a foreign diplomat, there's nothing wrong with that either, unless of course you are engaging them in the strategizing or decision-making of the campaign.
You mean, the report that all the Democrats have been wetting themselves over, did not contain what they wanted it to, so you'll just imagine it does anyways?
You should seek counseling and/or medication for your trump derangement syndrome.
We haven't seen the report yet. Just sentence fragments hand-picked by Trump's AG.
All campaigns gather information about their opponents, and they pay for the research. There's nothing wrong with that, even if the person hired to collect the information is a foreigner. That's not collusion or conspiracy.
On the other hand, if a campaign co-ordinates with foreigners to engage in activities aimed at influencing an election (such as, oh say, hacking your opponent's email servers) then that is collusion. And if a foreign government handed a campaign unsolicited information about its opponent, then that would be an illegal campaign contribution.
All we have at this point is sentence fragments from Mueller's report. Fragments selected by Trump's new Attorney General and faithful heat-shield William Barr. (Just take a look at how obsequious he was to Trump at the recent veto "ceremony" in the Oval Office.)
I suspect we will know more -- much more -- if and when the full report is released.
The market is not that simple.
The market didn't give a toss about Bill Clinton's impeachment. I doubt it will care about the Mueller report. (As I write this, the market futures are up only modestly.) Besides, Trump is nowhere near being in the clear yet.
Signs are pointing to a global economic slowdown. That's why the market tanked on Friday. It may rally again (it often does before a recession) but don't be too sure it will last, no matter what happens in the UK or in 2020.
The real question is why did our president just have a Twitter fight with a dead man?
Because it's only now that they're intellectual equals?
Listen, he spends his weekend obsessing over great men because he knows it, and I know it, and all of you know it: he will never be a great man [...] My father was his kryptonite in life, he was his kryptonite in death. On a personal level, I agree with you, all of us have love and families, and when my father was alive, up until adulthood, we would spend our time together cooking, hiking, fishing, really celebrating life, and I think it's because he almost died [...] And I just thought, 'your life is spent on the weekend not with your family, not with your friends, but you're obsessing, obsessing over great men you could never live up to.' That tells you everything you need to know about his pathetic life right now. -- Meghan McCain
Correction: Cohen was not convicted -- he pleaded guilty. Thanks to others in this thread who pointed that out.
Muller had two years and achieved a come FAIL!!!
37 indictments, 6 guilty please, and one conviction. That doesn't sound like a fail to me.
If you want to talk about failure, look at the R's obsessive investigations of Hillary before the 2016 election. E-mails? zero indictments. Benghazi? zero indictments. But of course, indictments really weren't the objective. They just wanted to tarnish her because she was the presumptive 2016 nominee for the Ds.
it's always a gamble. but prosecutors aren't in the business of not prosecuting people. so saying there's not enough evidence is a pretty good indication of innocence.
No, it just means the prosecutor doesn't think there is enough evidence to obtain a conviction. Prosecutors are not in the business of prosecuting when it appears unlikely they will win.
Actually, Manafort and Cohen both been convicted of cheating on their taxes in cases unconnected to Trump and his campaign.
Cohen was also convicted of violating campaign finance laws. (Hush payments to Stormy Daniels.) Cohen says he did this "for the benefit of, at the direction of, and in coordination with Individual Number 1. And for the record, Individual Number 1 is President Donald J. Trump."
The Mueller report is just the end of the beginning. Grab your popcorn, folks.
Just run emacs in vi emulation mode. Everybody's happy?
... vi or emacs?
As you say yourself, when was creating GNU, he had to rely on proprietary hardware and closed source software. That is, he made a deal with the devil, because it was the only practical option.
Now, we wish to follow in his footsteps by making our deal with the devil, for exactly the same reason, and he tells us it is unjust. It's just straight hypocrisy.
Well not quite. I think you missed his point which is that we no longer need to shake hands with the devil, although he admitted he once had to. It requires some compromises, but it is possible now to use a computer with entirely free software. It was not possible when he was building Gnu.
Keep in mind that as Gnu grew, RMS was pragmatic about evolving the stature of free software in a world of proprietary software. For example, consider the LGPL (aka the Library GPL or the Lesser GPL) which allowed proprietary software to use GPL libraries as long as the libraries could remain GPL without breaking the proprietary software. He saw the need for free software to gain mindset and wider adoption in a world that was still dominated by proprietary software. But he thinks the days of those compromises are over. And he may have a point.
My point is that we may never eliminate proprietary software, but the merits of open software are compelling and should be emphasized.
You'll be blocked for certain comments. Certain common troll posts won't be allowed. I've tried to do a few parody troll posts where I'm calling out to old trolls and gotten blocked until I modified the post substantially and added a bit more content than just a call out to the old post.
You have intrigued me. What do you mean by "blocked?"
you're not seeing them because the Mods shut them down before you do. Both the human ones and the automated ones.
I'm not aware of "automated" moderators. When did Slashdot start using them?
But IMHO, moderating is not the same as censoring. And I do often read at -1, whether I'm modding or not.
I'll start by saying I respect RMS highly. Anything he says on free software is worth considering. But that doesn't mean you have to agree with it.
It should be noted that RMS, when he was creating GNU, had to rely on proprietary commercial unix hardware and closed-source software (Sun Microsystems, IIRC.) As he said in his own essays, this was a necessary means to an end. He and his associates had to start with a working system and replace it bit-by-bit (pardon the pun) with free-as-in-freedom components. By the early 90s, all he had left to create was Hurd, the planned kernel for the Gnu system.
Then Linus Torvalds came along with his Linux kernel, and Gnu/Linux was born. In the early days, no hardware vendors were supporting Linux officially, so the only drivers were available as source, and therefore free. There was no "devil" to shake hands with. As Linux grew in popularity, hardware vendors began contributing drivers -- some as source, some as binary-only. The licensing of the kernel allowed this to happen. And this situation persisted to this day.
I think the point RMS is making is that the free-software revolution is stalled (again, pardon the pun) at best, or going backwards at worst, when it allows binary blobs to be part of an OS. Unlike in the early days of Gnu, it is now possible to run a system with entirely free software with few compromises. I think he's trying to encourage people to adopt this practice in order to encourage more hardware vendors to contribute open-source drivers.
to help put food on the table of someone who writes software. Free software will always be mediocre and decades behind commercial solutions. Yes, ostentatiously [sic] the word free doesn't necessarily mean no cost, according to RMS, but let's get real, if there is no hindrance to simply copying it, then there is no motivation to pay for more than the cost of the copy. Unfortunately, copying 1s and 0s hardly covers creating them in the first place, and if there is no motivation to create them, then the choices will be mostly limited to hobbyist and hardware manufacturer written software.
And yet people do make a living writing free software. In many cases quite a comfortable one.
It is the solution...
Anonymity did not solve any problem. If you can't put your name on it, it's not worth fighting for, and not worthy of respect.
(Said the AC, ironically.)
There are many problems that anonymity can help to solve. For example:
- it allows whistle-blowers to report crimes without fear of reprisal
- it can encourage candor when people express concerns or opinions
- it allows someone to share non-identifying personal information (health issues, etc.)
- and so on.
Of course, it's a two-sided coin. Anonymity has disadvantages. I leave a listing of them as an exercise. But it's not true that "Anonymity did not solve any problem."
the only reason anyone can read your post but you is that /. is censoring the "Natalie Portman Hot Grits / Greased up Yoda Doll / GNAA" trolls. I can't be the only one old enough to remember the time before when /. was rendered useless by trolling efforts.
It is still often rendered useless by the apk, "die in prison" and 'treason' crapflooding.
I have not seen any sign that Nataliel Portman, greased Yoda doll, apk, "die in prison" or "treason" posts are being censored. However, I do know of an extremely offensive GNAA first-post that was removed in a discussion recently. I know because I responded (critically) to it, and now my comment no longer points to a thread. I certainly wasn't upset.
For the most part, I can live with crapflooding. But I draw the line at offensive ASCII art, like GNAA and swastikas, that are visible to your co-workers from a distance when you browse slashdot at work. There's a filter that prevents you from posting all-caps. Surely it's time for a filter that prevents multiple posts of near-identical ASCII art.
It is the solution...
I reluctantly agree, but only to a point.
For an alcoholic, alcohol is not the solution. But neither is prohibition.
People who cloister themselves in the toxic world-views of sites like 8chan may be heavily conditioned against considering facts from other sites. Free and anonymous connectivity probably will not help such people. But I don't think ISPs banning 8chan will help either. Some other site will take its place, or the 8channer can switch ISPs.
Another topic is whether ISPs should be able to do this in the first place. I think they should not. IMHO, ISPs are common carriers. They provide a connection service, not a content service (like cable or satellite TV, that choose which content to provide.)
I think the solution is to teach young people how to spot false arguments and misinformation, as well as the history of the world, and the harm that extremist groups have caused.
You could speed up the process immensely by storing a smaller word like SOL instead of HELLO
Hang on. I see where you're going. You fiend!