Do exactly what the lawyers and industry wants you to do, because you're a web-based company with a lot of competition from other competing products, run on razor-thin margins because your product offering is free and supported only by advertising, and the prospect of a multi-million dollar loss to legal fees would probably end your company, and send all those hard-working employees to the unemployment office.
Slashdot readers often fail to understand that you can be right and still lose. You can even win... and still lose. In the copyright game, if you're a small to medium-sized business the only winning move is not to play.
The country to took in draft dodgers during Vietnam?
False. They only took people before they were drafted. Once the person here received a actual draft order by the military, Canada did not help them (not officially, anyway).
The country where "liberal" wasn't an insult?
It's an insult from anyone who's conservative. It just happens to be that, unlike here in the US, politics is not a professional sponsored sport, but a serious civil matter where citizens and politicians both give measured and well-reasoned responses to questions posed to them. But then, that's true almost anywhere in the first world, excepting the US and greece.
The country that wasn't afraid to zig when the U.S. zagged?
Canada has no real military power and relies heavily on the United States for its economic stability and well-being. Until recently, the United States was happy to let its neighbor do its own thing... but like in the past, they wanted them to keep an eye out for nazis, and after that communists, and after that terrorists, and after that.... music downloaders. The US has always influenced canadian government... but it's usually been over matters of actual national security or mutually-beneficial economic arrangements. But as I'm sure people have noticed... the US is no longer distinguishing between national security and corporate profit. Canada isn't exactly thrilled with the prospect of having an idiot cousin living next door that chews on the couch ends and goes frothing at the mouth whenever it sees a gay person walk by... but you know, still family. What can ya do, eh?
The other 54% must have realized that the offerings in this country are so third world they might as well just go with the cheapest, most basic offering because their peers expect them to have a cell phone. The other 46% think they're actually getting a good deal paying $80 or more a month for bandwidth caps, high latency, and cell phones with half their features turned off because America's mobile infrastructure is so crappy it can't handle what would, in the rest of the first world, be considered basic service.
There will always be more "badge-lickers" as you call them than citizens with critical thinking skills; That's just human nature. Ignore them, their definition of progress is having their leash handed to a new owner that only kicks them once a day instead of twice. And my recommendation wasn't strongly worded letters, it was waging a media campaign. Advertising and public awareness gets results. If you convince an extra 1% of people in a given city to, say, contest their speeding tickets... then even if all they do is show up, plead guilty, and walk back out the door, you've hammered the bureauacracy with thousands of extra man-hours over the course of a year that they didn't budget for.
When you play this game, you aren't playing to "win" per se. They won't admit fault, ever. That's not the goal. The goal is to cost them as much economically as possible. To make the miserable... to compel other people to be less helpful and cooperative with their organization. The game is one of statistics... you don't need to convince the majority, just a very small minority, to do something different than what they have been doing.
Slashdot is great at talking (and talking, and talking, and talking), but you don't need people to talk: You need people willing to act. If only people willing to act posted on this website, there'd be about 5-10 comments on each story. Many would have none. This... is not your audience.
I'd be looking around for a rifle if I saw that happening.
I hope you consider a camera first. Whether it is justified or not, shooting or threatening another person with a gun over a threat or use of violence doesn't make you any better than they are. You shoot that officer and your life is over, he's elevated to martyrdom by Homeland, and thousands more will suffer under 'enhanced' police powers to keep that from happening. If you want to make a difference, you take a good picture of him. You make sure that picture of what he's doing gets in front of every person in his community. Everyone he's supposed to be responsible for protecting. You make sure they know that man cannot be trusted. You make sure his personal, home mailbox is so choked with letters from concerned citizens he has to pay to keep a special PO box just so he can get mail. You make sure the police department is spending more than his salary paying off journalists to paint him in a good light, paying more to squelch the letters to the editor, and still more because every person in that community files a complaint for every single thing he does. You make him ineffective, gimp, useless -- a liability to the department he works for.
You make it so bad even his coworkers groan whenever they have to work with him. That's how you fight back: You don't pickup a damn weapon, you bury the bastards in their own bureauacracy. You make them beg to have everyone who sends a letter put on a special rectal exam at the airport list -- and each time they cross the line to protect this jerk, you're right there with a camera. You're right there with a letter, a pen, a microphone, a megaphone. You stay peaceful, you stay civil.
And after you've done all of this... Then you sit down with 3 other people who feel the same way you do and you say, "Okay, here's what we're going to do..."
There's so much I could say to this, but I'll try to be brief: There has never been a case of a political movement who's platform ended with "... and to achieve this, let's piss off a bunch of people with shotguns while we remain unarmed." The Occupy protests were creative and (when started) legal. They later had what they were doing declared illegal at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, who whispered "terrorist" into the ears of dozens of municipal leaders, who then closed and locked the doors to city hall and passed all manner of legislation in any way they could to give the DHS the ability to coordinate directly with local law enforcement, who then turned hostile. When the protests started, the police didn't interfere. They didn't really have much to say beyond making sure the protesters and the general public near them were safe and living in sanitary conditions... a few arrests here and there, but nobody was making a big deal about it. It was just "the cost of doing business" in a democratic society. Then the goddamned gustapo showed up, ordered them to roll in the tanks and start with the mass arrests and surveillance.
No, there was no provocation from the protesters... in fact, I've never once seen a historically accurate account of any protest who's stated goals were to get tangled with the police, who have a 1,500 win, 0 loss record against protest movements.
The police are outnumbered by the citizens they protect a thousand to 1 at least and they can only be effective if the majority of those citizens trust them and cooperate with them. The social contract that all officers of the law have with its citizens is this: "We trust you, you protect us." It's a simple, straight-forward principle that depends on the officer's ethical conduct being at all times impeccable. Any unethical behavior observed and the officer should be quickly stripped of rank and authority to maintain public trust.
That isn't happening anymore. Our country now has mock trials where they declare the officers innocent, or that the protesters were engaged in vague-sounding crimes like "resisting without violence"... which in most of those cases can be rightly called, "speaking one's mind." Officers seize and destroy evidence of their own misconduct. They preferentially attack people on the basis of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity (perceived or actual), or on social class. These are not isolated cases: They are widespread issues that regularly receive attention in the press, though heavily edited, redacted, and spun to appear less severe than it is. It does not take anyone long on google to find a current, relevant case of significant police misconduct involving many officers, often an entire department or city of them.
The social contract of "We trust you, you protect us" is broken. And that's a problem. That's a big problem. That is in fact a super huge democracy-threatening problem... because if people don't assemble to protect out of fear, then that anger with the status quo isn't visible. We (as a society) don't know there's a problem, can't address it, and so the anger builds and builds until we start getting gunman in the bell towers, people marching into classrooms and blowing away everyone they see... We get sporatic acts of seemingly random violence because these individuals feel they cannot be heard. And then we have a society living in fear, more fear, terrible amounts of fear.
And protracted anxiety and fear destroys economies, governments, and institutions. Democracy depends on freedom, and freedom depends on the confidence to use those freedoms. I cannot find anyone above the age of 21 who thinks they have the freedom of speech they were told they had in school. I have trouble finding anyone who's willing to attend a protest for something they believe in and support out of fear of "getting a record" or "getting on a list". They well and truly believe their livelihoods would be threatened by engaging in activities protected by the highest law in the land, activities that our founding fathers and every reputable scholar on the subject of civil liberty and democracy says are essential for the functioning of this society.
F*ck terrorists: We've got a much bigger problem. We're rotting from the inside out.
They're coming up with ever-more creative ways to hurt peaceful protesters -- and let's be honest: Most of the time, they provoke, prod, cajoule, and taunt these people until one of them out of the dozen, hundred, or thousand there snaps, then they point and say "See! See! We're justified" and open up unholy horror on everyone nearby, including journalists, children, and anyone else, then seize or destroy the evidence of what went down, counting on their purchases media contacts to portray their victims as all manner of bad. But whether it's rubber bullets or real ones, the fact is this is a business of causing pain and misery... and it is because the people its being inflicted upon had the audacity to say "I think we can do better than this."
I am the last person to suggest violence as a response to improper government action: I live in a democracy, and one of our main pressure valves to prevent violence is peaceful protest. They're busy stuffing that up now, and just like every other country that has tried it in the past, eventually public sentiment is going to shift. It'll be fine one day, and the next shit will be on fire and they'll be declaring martial law, and the bought-off press will be busy with headlines like "How did this happen?"... Well, it happened because you stupid bastards didn't do your job and report the truth. It happened because people don't like being silenced.
It happened... because human nature isn't all that different from an animal: Keep poking it with a stick and eventually it will stop hiding in the corner and come sink its claws and teeth into you. And why? Because it didn't have a choice.
If something truly is a matter of life and death, then yes of course they should do whatever needs done and let the pundits bitch about their civil rights after. If I were a police officer, agent, or whatever and the only thing standing between me and saving one or more lives was some rule about people's "liberties", I'd tell them to go to hell and do what needed done. That's what any ethical human being should do.
That's not the problem: The problem is that the authority in this country can't be trusted. Decades of abuse of power has led the public to be generally mistrustful of authority -- and with good reason. And more often these abuses, along with their misconduct, mistakes, and every other bad thing gets swept under the rug. People who question it are outed as "terrorists", and put on watch lists for not being patriotic enough.
The question really being asked here isn't if they should have that power or not: It's how the hell can we trust them given how badly they've abused our trust in the past? The fact that this is even newsworthy is pretty telling: We've gotten to the point where we are willing to risk our lives and those of our fellow citizens to try to hold on to what pathetically few civil privileges we have left to us. They aren't even rights anymore: We just don't want to be the next poor bastard to make the evening news so our friends, family, and coworkers can give each other furtive glances at each other and wonder how it ever came to this.
That's the real story: That all levels of government have become so corrupt that the public no longer trusts it even in the face of a clear and present threat.
Horseshoe manufacturers no longer in business. Why?
Ovaltine sales down. Are newer sports drinks to blame?
Crossbows seeing sudden resurgence: Could unreliability of easy to make ammo be to blame?
If an act of killing has so little impact, there is theoretically so little mental resistance to performing the act. There are exceptional people out there who consider the ramifications, but they aren't likely to be the majority.
The overwhelming majority of people responsible for carrying out the final act of ending another human life know it. Whether it's at the end if a knife, or the end of a thousand miles of cable, they know exactly what they just did, and feel it intensely. Those are not the people I am concerned with.
It's the people who have spent their entire lives as upper/ruling class, and who are surrounded with others who provide complex rationalizations for killing, the people who eventually enact the legislation, framework, and power to compel the people at the end of the chain to commit those acts. People who commit those acts knowing that if they don't push the button they could spend the rest of their lives jailed, or be executed for disobeying the order... they aren't the problem. It's those at the top, who ceased viewing people as valuable and instead view them as a means to an end.
This technology means that fewer people will feel that emotional burden of having taken a life, while more will feel justified in having ordered those fewer people to do it. That's the problem: It's not the button pusher at the bottom but the mouth breather at the top. If he had to die for the interests he would send others to die for, then war would be much less common. People wouldn't kill others for trivial things. When we make the process of killing so automated that those outside the process are completely unaware of it, then the risk of one of those mouth breathers at the top using it to satisfy their own emotional needs at the expense of the lives of others becomes too high.
I see another layer of avoiding responsibility for casualties emerging here. Ignoring the technology's effectiveness or benefits, the industrial-military complex has never been good at taking responsibility.
They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They were depriving us of their valuable resources.
Those people were [insert hate group here].
They allowed themselves to be used as human shields.
Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
I envision that in the future, innocent people will be killed and new excuses will be created and they will say it was because their biometrics matched that of the target, or that there was an error in the targeting system, or that they made a hostile gesture at the killing machine that was 'innocently' going about it's business above his house. But never do I expect to see them come straight out and say "We screwed up. Sorry."
No matter how great the technology is, what I want to here isn't about how efficient it is, but how human the people pushing the buttons are. If someone is hurt or killed that wasn't supposed to be, will they admit it? Will they compensate the victim? The families? The rest of the community that was deprived of the loss? Until that happens, all that this new technology will mean is more creative ways for bureuacracy to avoid responsibility, which is, afterall, its primary function.
If war was no more complicated than two societies who couldn't resolve their differences each sending a certain number of soldiers to be incinerated in some machine located on an island, and the country with the biggest number won, then I suspect war would be a lot less common. All these layers of technology and rationalization takes away from the fact that is all war is. Technology just means we have to sacrifice fewer to the machine than the other team does.
At least in the US, where our BAC limits are 25% of what actually impairs driving.
Lies. There's plenty of research to support that any alcohol in a person's system has a deletrious effect on driving ability. citation Mine is from the National Highway Traffic Administration. Yours... is from some attorney trying to make his clients feel better about having just been busted weaving through traffic after having crashed into two other cars, run over his girlfriend, and was still sucking down beers and singing "yankee doodle".
Mind you, I think that 'intoxication' needs to be matched against other driving behaviors that are legal and cause similar impairment in ability. Using a cell phone, having taken cold or pain medication, while having a migraine, or being physically exhausted. If you take that into consideration... 0.08 seems like a reasonable limit to be set, if we have to use a single absolute number as absolute proof.
All that said, it's not drunk driving that is really at issue, but irresponsible and/or inattentive driving. I'd argue that a guy who's just had two shots and climbed behind the wheel is going to outperform someone who has a serious sinus infection and has loaded up on the maximum recommended dosages of cold medication. Let's be honest: We've all driven when we shouldn't have, but we did it anyway because we could get away with it. We can't take the moral high ground and say we should punish just the drunks. That argument is hypocritical.
But the argument can be made that (from a statistical standpoint) people who are caught violating motor vehicle laws and are legally drunk (as it is presently defined) are responsible for the lion's share of vehicle accidents resulting in death or serious injury. It would be very pragmatic to simply remove those people from public roadways, and leave the arguments over why that particular subset of people are over-represented for another day.
All that's required is a $2 disposable breathalyzer.
$2 disposable breathalizer which has never undergone any testing prior to use to indicate it will function correctly has just given a false negative. You run over a dozen precious snowflakes.
Who's fault? You, the driver, or the manufacturer of a $2 breathalizer? How long do you think they're going to cost $2 when they start getting sued for the deaths of hundreds of people's snowflakes? And I don't know where you're from, but in any place who's currency uses the '$' and isn't printing trillion dollar bills because of hyperinflation... fines for not having mandatory equipment in the vehicle cost the driver a lot more than an hour or so's worth of wages.
Bold would be putting a cheap driver ID reader in place and not allowing the vehicle to start unless it matched, then adding some simple fingerprint hash to be stored on it as well... used together to make sure the driver doesn't just use a stolen ID. Then, when you're busted driving drunk, your license is taken away. You can't operate a vehicle now drunk or sober.
The problem here isn't liquor, it's the culture that allows drunks to run around mowing people down and then letting them get back in the car again after being prosecuted... like they somehow have a right to operate a motor vehicle. Adding expensive breathalizers that need constant recalibration and can fail rendering the vehicle completely inert to everyone who tries to use it is a poor substitute. People will figure out how to bypass them, and it'll become common knowledge. Use canned air, maybe, or have someone else blow in it, like a passenger, etc.
Take away their damn license and be done with it; use a simple card reader and decent finger print scanner... it'll work in any weather, and it won't break or need recalibration... and it'll be useful to apply to a broader range of legal enforcement... ALL motor violations that result in license revocation, not just one specific kind.
Ever seen those Faces of Meth advertisements? It's quite harmful to the user as well as the bystander. Alcohol on the other hand encourages severe lapses in judgement and reaction when operating heavy machinery, which usually kills people nearby but leaves the drunk unaffected, if only because liquor makes their body a doughy mass to be thrown about while sober people tense up and break bones and crap.
/. Headline: US Appeals Court Upholds Suspect's Right To Refuse Decryption Linked Headline: Ruling Stands: Defendant Must Decrypt Laptop
Yes, but the issue is not whether or not the government can force you to hand over the keys; It's when. In the first case, they already had evidence that the harddrive contained illegal information because an officer directly observed it with his own eyeballs.
At that point, it is entirely reasonable to say there is no 5th amendment protection -- you're no longer self-incriminating, you're already boned. In fact, decrypting the hard drive wouldn't be necessary to gain a conviction in that case -- the officer's testimony alone would be sufficient. They want the HDD to see what else you've been doing.
Unfortunately, because the Supreme Court threw out the 'poison apple' defense, an officer can now lie about what he saw, compel the defendant to produce the data, and then when it is discovered the HDD contains none of what the officer swore was there, but a bunch of other illegal things (and let's be honest: If you're an average person, you've already broken one EULA or another just by turning it on...) and still be able to prosecute you under that.
So while I'm not opposed to them compelling someone who's been observed with incriminating data to release their decryption keys, it's still bypassing the 5th amendment if law enforcement is allowed to lie to do so and that evidence is then allowed to be used against them.
I guess then the only solution is harddrives that self-destruct if the correct key isn't input in a certain amount of time, where 'certain amount of time' is less than the time it takes you to crack while being tortured. God Bless America...:(
In this country, that's progress. However, we are still woefully lacking compared to the EU, where privacy is taken very seriously and most industries are required to disclose any and all personal data held and delete it upon request. And I'm not talking the "We just hid it from our homepage" delete either, but a bona fide "We don't have it anymore, anywhere, and if we do we could be sued for a very large amount of money."
It's stuff like this that has firmly convinced me that while the US might have been the origination point of the internet, it is no longer a leader, or even in the race, when it comes to either innovation or culture. My country's only political agenda is its GDP. It will do so even if it means feeding its own citizens to the wolves in the process... Anything to make a buck.
Well, technically we can, and that's their preferred option... make all technology subservient to copyright.
Even if every browser maker on the planet suddenly co-opted to every demand by the entertainment industry, people would simply stop using newer web browsers. The demands of the industry and market are such that any initiative like that would insta-fail. That's why they've been slowly increasing the penalties, throwing up road blocks here and there, feigning here and there about what they're up to, negotiating backroom deals with other governments, and making high profile arrests all over the place. They can't win the war by swaying public opinion -- the public is stupid. Very stupid. Monumentally stupid... but not that stupid. And I say this knowing full well that whenever I say "Nobody can be that stupid" in this industry, an example comes along to prove me wrong. Every average everyday thing that even the lobotomized flatworms of the IT world use depends on the internet being a two-way communications medium. They can restrict, throttle, beat, manipulate, and mutilate it to the point that it barely resembles the internet you and I know... but they can't fundamentally erase what it is right now without segmenting the network off from the rest of the world, and spending a ludicrious amount of money to keep it "pure" according to their standards.
As long as two-way packet-based communication is possible on the chunk of wires, routers, and "tubes" known as the internet, Big Copyright will never have a complete victory. I mean, even if they run around with portable execution squads and electric chairs and are given full reign to do whatever they want, ala the Spanish Inquisition... they won't be able to get what they want.. and they'll be utterly oblitherated by the first person who creates a system of communication they can't control.
Call it the Hacker's Law -- there will always be a place for the free exchange of information. Somewhere.
Solution: If you don't want your content on the internet, it's not like anyone's forcing you to put it there. You can keep it hidden in vaults deep within the mountains, only accessible with an armed guard who takes everything resembling technology from you, leads you down a long corridor, where you can watch Teh Valued Contentz.
Browser makers have no obligation to help them perpetuate their broken business model. I think the standards committee should just say "No. In fact, let me think about that for a minute... Hell No." Because the internet's very raisin de etre is to share information even when the network is badly damaged, under hostile control, etc. We can't simply redesign it into a read only medium to serve ONE industry's interests, nor should we.
Browser makers: Just say no. Walk away. Let their content rot behind their own walls.
Seriously? I need to leave because I laid out what was going to happen without giving any agreement or disagreement with it?
Your statement was that "Because nobody is going to do anything, nothing is going to change."
It was strongly implied that you were okay with this state of affairs, which in turn strongly implies that you were apparently not paying attention in every social studies and civics class ever taken. Had you not been flirting with the girl next to you, doodling, sleeping, or skipping class, you might have learned that one of the responsibilities of citizenship is government participation.
Since you seem to be averse to participating in the democratic process, I do feel fully justified in asking you to get the hell out and make room for someone who has a less defeatist attitude.
Yes, well, we wouldn't want a state to get in a pissing contest with the federal government because they won't respect fundamental civil liberties that the state's citizens expect to be upheld. We all know what happens when people stand up for their rights. Far better to just quietly pray for things to change, surrender at every opportunity, and accept misery and injustice because fighting against it is just too. damn. hard.
Sir, please leave my country. Make room for an immigrant who is willing to participate in the democratic process, instead of just giving in to any authority that presents itself.
So if we make the mine operational and then China starts providing us with cheap metal, I don't see the problem. Keep the mine maintained, and ready for use, and let China load us up with cheap minerals. Oh, of course making this situation of allowing many hundreds of businesses and hundreds of millions of consumers to thrive in an atmosphere of reduced costs would depend on the government buying out or subsidizing one...
Naturally, this will have conservatives crawling out of the woodwork to declare that capitalism is being subverted and to let the market decide. I will quietly pray that the other business leaders wait for those conservatives to go home, and then beat them until all the stupid has leaked out...
The Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution states that, when there is a conflict, Federal law always trumps State law.
The federal government doesn't own the airports or airlines. "The State of Texas hereby withdraws all licensing, support, and allowances for any airport or airline within its borders."
So while yes, the fed may be able to say the TSA must exist in all airports, the state can say no airports may exist within its borders. If the fed really wants to push this, the state can make a constitutional amendment. Little known fact: State constitutions override federal law. Only treaties and the like can go above that then. So there are ways for states to fight back against unwanted federal interference if the will of the people is strong enough.
Frankly, I'd love to see Texas go toe to toe with the TSA on this issue. Whether it passed or failed, it would generate a ton of negative publicity for the feds and put them on the defensive for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
A perfectly reasonable response would be to
Do exactly what the lawyers and industry wants you to do, because you're a web-based company with a lot of competition from other competing products, run on razor-thin margins because your product offering is free and supported only by advertising, and the prospect of a multi-million dollar loss to legal fees would probably end your company, and send all those hard-working employees to the unemployment office.
Slashdot readers often fail to understand that you can be right and still lose. You can even win... and still lose. In the copyright game, if you're a small to medium-sized business the only winning move is not to play.
The country to took in draft dodgers during Vietnam?
False. They only took people before they were drafted. Once the person here received a actual draft order by the military, Canada did not help them (not officially, anyway).
The country where "liberal" wasn't an insult?
It's an insult from anyone who's conservative. It just happens to be that, unlike here in the US, politics is not a professional sponsored sport, but a serious civil matter where citizens and politicians both give measured and well-reasoned responses to questions posed to them. But then, that's true almost anywhere in the first world, excepting the US and greece.
The country that wasn't afraid to zig when the U.S. zagged?
Canada has no real military power and relies heavily on the United States for its economic stability and well-being. Until recently, the United States was happy to let its neighbor do its own thing... but like in the past, they wanted them to keep an eye out for nazis, and after that communists, and after that terrorists, and after that.... music downloaders. The US has always influenced canadian government... but it's usually been over matters of actual national security or mutually-beneficial economic arrangements. But as I'm sure people have noticed... the US is no longer distinguishing between national security and corporate profit. Canada isn't exactly thrilled with the prospect of having an idiot cousin living next door that chews on the couch ends and goes frothing at the mouth whenever it sees a gay person walk by... but you know, still family. What can ya do, eh?
The other 54% must have realized that the offerings in this country are so third world they might as well just go with the cheapest, most basic offering because their peers expect them to have a cell phone. The other 46% think they're actually getting a good deal paying $80 or more a month for bandwidth caps, high latency, and cell phones with half their features turned off because America's mobile infrastructure is so crappy it can't handle what would, in the rest of the first world, be considered basic service.
There will always be more "badge-lickers" as you call them than citizens with critical thinking skills; That's just human nature. Ignore them, their definition of progress is having their leash handed to a new owner that only kicks them once a day instead of twice. And my recommendation wasn't strongly worded letters, it was waging a media campaign. Advertising and public awareness gets results. If you convince an extra 1% of people in a given city to, say, contest their speeding tickets... then even if all they do is show up, plead guilty, and walk back out the door, you've hammered the bureauacracy with thousands of extra man-hours over the course of a year that they didn't budget for.
When you play this game, you aren't playing to "win" per se. They won't admit fault, ever. That's not the goal. The goal is to cost them as much economically as possible. To make the miserable... to compel other people to be less helpful and cooperative with their organization. The game is one of statistics... you don't need to convince the majority, just a very small minority, to do something different than what they have been doing.
Slashdot is great at talking (and talking, and talking, and talking), but you don't need people to talk: You need people willing to act. If only people willing to act posted on this website, there'd be about 5-10 comments on each story. Many would have none. This... is not your audience.
I'd be looking around for a rifle if I saw that happening.
I hope you consider a camera first. Whether it is justified or not, shooting or threatening another person with a gun over a threat or use of violence doesn't make you any better than they are. You shoot that officer and your life is over, he's elevated to martyrdom by Homeland, and thousands more will suffer under 'enhanced' police powers to keep that from happening. If you want to make a difference, you take a good picture of him. You make sure that picture of what he's doing gets in front of every person in his community. Everyone he's supposed to be responsible for protecting. You make sure they know that man cannot be trusted. You make sure his personal, home mailbox is so choked with letters from concerned citizens he has to pay to keep a special PO box just so he can get mail. You make sure the police department is spending more than his salary paying off journalists to paint him in a good light, paying more to squelch the letters to the editor, and still more because every person in that community files a complaint for every single thing he does. You make him ineffective, gimp, useless -- a liability to the department he works for.
You make it so bad even his coworkers groan whenever they have to work with him. That's how you fight back: You don't pickup a damn weapon, you bury the bastards in their own bureauacracy. You make them beg to have everyone who sends a letter put on a special rectal exam at the airport list -- and each time they cross the line to protect this jerk, you're right there with a camera. You're right there with a letter, a pen, a microphone, a megaphone. You stay peaceful, you stay civil.
And after you've done all of this... Then you sit down with 3 other people who feel the same way you do and you say, "Okay, here's what we're going to do..."
There's so much I could say to this, but I'll try to be brief: There has never been a case of a political movement who's platform ended with "... and to achieve this, let's piss off a bunch of people with shotguns while we remain unarmed." The Occupy protests were creative and (when started) legal. They later had what they were doing declared illegal at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, who whispered "terrorist" into the ears of dozens of municipal leaders, who then closed and locked the doors to city hall and passed all manner of legislation in any way they could to give the DHS the ability to coordinate directly with local law enforcement, who then turned hostile. When the protests started, the police didn't interfere. They didn't really have much to say beyond making sure the protesters and the general public near them were safe and living in sanitary conditions... a few arrests here and there, but nobody was making a big deal about it. It was just "the cost of doing business" in a democratic society. Then the goddamned gustapo showed up, ordered them to roll in the tanks and start with the mass arrests and surveillance.
No, there was no provocation from the protesters... in fact, I've never once seen a historically accurate account of any protest who's stated goals were to get tangled with the police, who have a 1,500 win, 0 loss record against protest movements.
The police are outnumbered by the citizens they protect a thousand to 1 at least and they can only be effective if the majority of those citizens trust them and cooperate with them. The social contract that all officers of the law have with its citizens is this: "We trust you, you protect us." It's a simple, straight-forward principle that depends on the officer's ethical conduct being at all times impeccable. Any unethical behavior observed and the officer should be quickly stripped of rank and authority to maintain public trust.
That isn't happening anymore. Our country now has mock trials where they declare the officers innocent, or that the protesters were engaged in vague-sounding crimes like "resisting without violence"... which in most of those cases can be rightly called, "speaking one's mind." Officers seize and destroy evidence of their own misconduct. They preferentially attack people on the basis of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity (perceived or actual), or on social class. These are not isolated cases: They are widespread issues that regularly receive attention in the press, though heavily edited, redacted, and spun to appear less severe than it is. It does not take anyone long on google to find a current, relevant case of significant police misconduct involving many officers, often an entire department or city of them.
The social contract of "We trust you, you protect us" is broken. And that's a problem. That's a big problem. That is in fact a super huge democracy-threatening problem... because if people don't assemble to protect out of fear, then that anger with the status quo isn't visible. We (as a society) don't know there's a problem, can't address it, and so the anger builds and builds until we start getting gunman in the bell towers, people marching into classrooms and blowing away everyone they see... We get sporatic acts of seemingly random violence because these individuals feel they cannot be heard. And then we have a society living in fear, more fear, terrible amounts of fear.
And protracted anxiety and fear destroys economies, governments, and institutions. Democracy depends on freedom, and freedom depends on the confidence to use those freedoms. I cannot find anyone above the age of 21 who thinks they have the freedom of speech they were told they had in school. I have trouble finding anyone who's willing to attend a protest for something they believe in and support out of fear of "getting a record" or "getting on a list". They well and truly believe their livelihoods would be threatened by engaging in activities protected by the highest law in the land, activities that our founding fathers and every reputable scholar on the subject of civil liberty and democracy says are essential for the functioning of this society.
F*ck terrorists: We've got a much bigger problem. We're rotting from the inside out.
They're coming up with ever-more creative ways to hurt peaceful protesters -- and let's be honest: Most of the time, they provoke, prod, cajoule, and taunt these people until one of them out of the dozen, hundred, or thousand there snaps, then they point and say "See! See! We're justified" and open up unholy horror on everyone nearby, including journalists, children, and anyone else, then seize or destroy the evidence of what went down, counting on their purchases media contacts to portray their victims as all manner of bad. But whether it's rubber bullets or real ones, the fact is this is a business of causing pain and misery... and it is because the people its being inflicted upon had the audacity to say "I think we can do better than this."
... Well, it happened because you stupid bastards didn't do your job and report the truth. It happened because people don't like being silenced.
I am the last person to suggest violence as a response to improper government action: I live in a democracy, and one of our main pressure valves to prevent violence is peaceful protest. They're busy stuffing that up now, and just like every other country that has tried it in the past, eventually public sentiment is going to shift. It'll be fine one day, and the next shit will be on fire and they'll be declaring martial law, and the bought-off press will be busy with headlines like "How did this happen?"
It happened... because human nature isn't all that different from an animal: Keep poking it with a stick and eventually it will stop hiding in the corner and come sink its claws and teeth into you. And why? Because it didn't have a choice.
If something truly is a matter of life and death, then yes of course they should do whatever needs done and let the pundits bitch about their civil rights after. If I were a police officer, agent, or whatever and the only thing standing between me and saving one or more lives was some rule about people's "liberties", I'd tell them to go to hell and do what needed done. That's what any ethical human being should do.
That's not the problem: The problem is that the authority in this country can't be trusted. Decades of abuse of power has led the public to be generally mistrustful of authority -- and with good reason. And more often these abuses, along with their misconduct, mistakes, and every other bad thing gets swept under the rug. People who question it are outed as "terrorists", and put on watch lists for not being patriotic enough.
The question really being asked here isn't if they should have that power or not: It's how the hell can we trust them given how badly they've abused our trust in the past? The fact that this is even newsworthy is pretty telling: We've gotten to the point where we are willing to risk our lives and those of our fellow citizens to try to hold on to what pathetically few civil privileges we have left to us. They aren't even rights anymore: We just don't want to be the next poor bastard to make the evening news so our friends, family, and coworkers can give each other furtive glances at each other and wonder how it ever came to this.
That's the real story: That all levels of government have become so corrupt that the public no longer trusts it even in the face of a clear and present threat.
Other news-worthy stories:
Horseshoe manufacturers no longer in business. Why?
Ovaltine sales down. Are newer sports drinks to blame?
Crossbows seeing sudden resurgence: Could unreliability of easy to make ammo be to blame?
If an act of killing has so little impact, there is theoretically so little mental resistance to performing the act. There are exceptional people out there who consider the ramifications, but they aren't likely to be the majority.
The overwhelming majority of people responsible for carrying out the final act of ending another human life know it. Whether it's at the end if a knife, or the end of a thousand miles of cable, they know exactly what they just did, and feel it intensely. Those are not the people I am concerned with.
It's the people who have spent their entire lives as upper/ruling class, and who are surrounded with others who provide complex rationalizations for killing, the people who eventually enact the legislation, framework, and power to compel the people at the end of the chain to commit those acts. People who commit those acts knowing that if they don't push the button they could spend the rest of their lives jailed, or be executed for disobeying the order... they aren't the problem. It's those at the top, who ceased viewing people as valuable and instead view them as a means to an end.
This technology means that fewer people will feel that emotional burden of having taken a life, while more will feel justified in having ordered those fewer people to do it. That's the problem: It's not the button pusher at the bottom but the mouth breather at the top. If he had to die for the interests he would send others to die for, then war would be much less common. People wouldn't kill others for trivial things. When we make the process of killing so automated that those outside the process are completely unaware of it, then the risk of one of those mouth breathers at the top using it to satisfy their own emotional needs at the expense of the lives of others becomes too high.
I see another layer of avoiding responsibility for casualties emerging here. Ignoring the technology's effectiveness or benefits, the industrial-military complex has never been good at taking responsibility.
They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They were depriving us of their valuable resources.
Those people were [insert hate group here].
They allowed themselves to be used as human shields.
Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
I envision that in the future, innocent people will be killed and new excuses will be created and they will say it was because their biometrics matched that of the target, or that there was an error in the targeting system, or that they made a hostile gesture at the killing machine that was 'innocently' going about it's business above his house. But never do I expect to see them come straight out and say "We screwed up. Sorry."
No matter how great the technology is, what I want to here isn't about how efficient it is, but how human the people pushing the buttons are. If someone is hurt or killed that wasn't supposed to be, will they admit it? Will they compensate the victim? The families? The rest of the community that was deprived of the loss? Until that happens, all that this new technology will mean is more creative ways for bureuacracy to avoid responsibility, which is, afterall, its primary function.
If war was no more complicated than two societies who couldn't resolve their differences each sending a certain number of soldiers to be incinerated in some machine located on an island, and the country with the biggest number won, then I suspect war would be a lot less common. All these layers of technology and rationalization takes away from the fact that is all war is. Technology just means we have to sacrifice fewer to the machine than the other team does.
At least in the US, where our BAC limits are 25% of what actually impairs driving.
Lies. There's plenty of research to support that any alcohol in a person's system has a deletrious effect on driving ability. citation Mine is from the National Highway Traffic Administration. Yours... is from some attorney trying to make his clients feel better about having just been busted weaving through traffic after having crashed into two other cars, run over his girlfriend, and was still sucking down beers and singing "yankee doodle".
Mind you, I think that 'intoxication' needs to be matched against other driving behaviors that are legal and cause similar impairment in ability. Using a cell phone, having taken cold or pain medication, while having a migraine, or being physically exhausted. If you take that into consideration... 0.08 seems like a reasonable limit to be set, if we have to use a single absolute number as absolute proof.
All that said, it's not drunk driving that is really at issue, but irresponsible and/or inattentive driving. I'd argue that a guy who's just had two shots and climbed behind the wheel is going to outperform someone who has a serious sinus infection and has loaded up on the maximum recommended dosages of cold medication. Let's be honest: We've all driven when we shouldn't have, but we did it anyway because we could get away with it. We can't take the moral high ground and say we should punish just the drunks. That argument is hypocritical.
But the argument can be made that (from a statistical standpoint) people who are caught violating motor vehicle laws and are legally drunk (as it is presently defined) are responsible for the lion's share of vehicle accidents resulting in death or serious injury. It would be very pragmatic to simply remove those people from public roadways, and leave the arguments over why that particular subset of people are over-represented for another day.
All that's required is a $2 disposable breathalyzer.
$2 disposable breathalizer which has never undergone any testing prior to use to indicate it will function correctly has just given a false negative. You run over a dozen precious snowflakes.
Who's fault? You, the driver, or the manufacturer of a $2 breathalizer? How long do you think they're going to cost $2 when they start getting sued for the deaths of hundreds of people's snowflakes? And I don't know where you're from, but in any place who's currency uses the '$' and isn't printing trillion dollar bills because of hyperinflation... fines for not having mandatory equipment in the vehicle cost the driver a lot more than an hour or so's worth of wages.
Bold would be putting a cheap driver ID reader in place and not allowing the vehicle to start unless it matched, then adding some simple fingerprint hash to be stored on it as well... used together to make sure the driver doesn't just use a stolen ID. Then, when you're busted driving drunk, your license is taken away. You can't operate a vehicle now drunk or sober.
The problem here isn't liquor, it's the culture that allows drunks to run around mowing people down and then letting them get back in the car again after being prosecuted... like they somehow have a right to operate a motor vehicle. Adding expensive breathalizers that need constant recalibration and can fail rendering the vehicle completely inert to everyone who tries to use it is a poor substitute. People will figure out how to bypass them, and it'll become common knowledge. Use canned air, maybe, or have someone else blow in it, like a passenger, etc.
Take away their damn license and be done with it; use a simple card reader and decent finger print scanner... it'll work in any weather, and it won't break or need recalibration... and it'll be useful to apply to a broader range of legal enforcement... ALL motor violations that result in license revocation, not just one specific kind.
Meth has fueled an awful lot of violent crime.
Ever seen those Faces of Meth advertisements? It's quite harmful to the user as well as the bystander. Alcohol on the other hand encourages severe lapses in judgement and reaction when operating heavy machinery, which usually kills people nearby but leaves the drunk unaffected, if only because liquor makes their body a doughy mass to be thrown about while sober people tense up and break bones and crap.
Well... this is ironic. A company in China is suing one in the US for copyright infringement.
/. Headline: US Appeals Court Upholds Suspect's Right To Refuse Decryption Linked
Headline: Ruling Stands: Defendant Must Decrypt Laptop
Yes, but the issue is not whether or not the government can force you to hand over the keys; It's when. In the first case, they already had evidence that the harddrive contained illegal information because an officer directly observed it with his own eyeballs.
:(
At that point, it is entirely reasonable to say there is no 5th amendment protection -- you're no longer self-incriminating, you're already boned. In fact, decrypting the hard drive wouldn't be necessary to gain a conviction in that case -- the officer's testimony alone would be sufficient. They want the HDD to see what else you've been doing.
Unfortunately, because the Supreme Court threw out the 'poison apple' defense, an officer can now lie about what he saw, compel the defendant to produce the data, and then when it is discovered the HDD contains none of what the officer swore was there, but a bunch of other illegal things (and let's be honest: If you're an average person, you've already broken one EULA or another just by turning it on...) and still be able to prosecute you under that.
So while I'm not opposed to them compelling someone who's been observed with incriminating data to release their decryption keys, it's still bypassing the 5th amendment if law enforcement is allowed to lie to do so and that evidence is then allowed to be used against them.
I guess then the only solution is harddrives that self-destruct if the correct key isn't input in a certain amount of time, where 'certain amount of time' is less than the time it takes you to crack while being tortured. God Bless America...
Privacy Bill of Suggestions
In this country, that's progress. However, we are still woefully lacking compared to the EU, where privacy is taken very seriously and most industries are required to disclose any and all personal data held and delete it upon request. And I'm not talking the "We just hid it from our homepage" delete either, but a bona fide "We don't have it anymore, anywhere, and if we do we could be sued for a very large amount of money."
It's stuff like this that has firmly convinced me that while the US might have been the origination point of the internet, it is no longer a leader, or even in the race, when it comes to either innovation or culture. My country's only political agenda is its GDP. It will do so even if it means feeding its own citizens to the wolves in the process... Anything to make a buck.
Well, technically we can, and that's their preferred option ... make all technology subservient to copyright.
Even if every browser maker on the planet suddenly co-opted to every demand by the entertainment industry, people would simply stop using newer web browsers. The demands of the industry and market are such that any initiative like that would insta-fail. That's why they've been slowly increasing the penalties, throwing up road blocks here and there, feigning here and there about what they're up to, negotiating backroom deals with other governments, and making high profile arrests all over the place. They can't win the war by swaying public opinion -- the public is stupid. Very stupid. Monumentally stupid... but not that stupid. And I say this knowing full well that whenever I say "Nobody can be that stupid" in this industry, an example comes along to prove me wrong. Every average everyday thing that even the lobotomized flatworms of the IT world use depends on the internet being a two-way communications medium. They can restrict, throttle, beat, manipulate, and mutilate it to the point that it barely resembles the internet you and I know... but they can't fundamentally erase what it is right now without segmenting the network off from the rest of the world, and spending a ludicrious amount of money to keep it "pure" according to their standards.
As long as two-way packet-based communication is possible on the chunk of wires, routers, and "tubes" known as the internet, Big Copyright will never have a complete victory. I mean, even if they run around with portable execution squads and electric chairs and are given full reign to do whatever they want, ala the Spanish Inquisition... they won't be able to get what they want.. and they'll be utterly oblitherated by the first person who creates a system of communication they can't control.
Call it the Hacker's Law -- there will always be a place for the free exchange of information. Somewhere.
Solution: If you don't want your content on the internet, it's not like anyone's forcing you to put it there. You can keep it hidden in vaults deep within the mountains, only accessible with an armed guard who takes everything resembling technology from you, leads you down a long corridor, where you can watch Teh Valued Contentz.
Browser makers have no obligation to help them perpetuate their broken business model. I think the standards committee should just say "No. In fact, let me think about that for a minute... Hell No." Because the internet's very raisin de etre is to share information even when the network is badly damaged, under hostile control, etc. We can't simply redesign it into a read only medium to serve ONE industry's interests, nor should we.
Browser makers: Just say no. Walk away. Let their content rot behind their own walls.
Seriously? I need to leave because I laid out what was going to happen without giving any agreement or disagreement with it?
Your statement was that "Because nobody is going to do anything, nothing is going to change."
It was strongly implied that you were okay with this state of affairs, which in turn strongly implies that you were apparently not paying attention in every social studies and civics class ever taken. Had you not been flirting with the girl next to you, doodling, sleeping, or skipping class, you might have learned that one of the responsibilities of citizenship is government participation.
Since you seem to be averse to participating in the democratic process, I do feel fully justified in asking you to get the hell out and make room for someone who has a less defeatist attitude.
Then it just becomes a circular pissing contest.
Yes, well, we wouldn't want a state to get in a pissing contest with the federal government because they won't respect fundamental civil liberties that the state's citizens expect to be upheld. We all know what happens when people stand up for their rights. Far better to just quietly pray for things to change, surrender at every opportunity, and accept misery and injustice because fighting against it is just too. damn. hard.
Sir, please leave my country. Make room for an immigrant who is willing to participate in the democratic process, instead of just giving in to any authority that presents itself.
So if we make the mine operational and then China starts providing us with cheap metal, I don't see the problem. Keep the mine maintained, and ready for use, and let China load us up with cheap minerals. Oh, of course making this situation of allowing many hundreds of businesses and hundreds of millions of consumers to thrive in an atmosphere of reduced costs would depend on the government buying out or subsidizing one...
Naturally, this will have conservatives crawling out of the woodwork to declare that capitalism is being subverted and to let the market decide. I will quietly pray that the other business leaders wait for those conservatives to go home, and then beat them until all the stupid has leaked out...
The Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution states that, when there is a conflict, Federal law always trumps State law.
The federal government doesn't own the airports or airlines. "The State of Texas hereby withdraws all licensing, support, and allowances for any airport or airline within its borders."
So while yes, the fed may be able to say the TSA must exist in all airports, the state can say no airports may exist within its borders. If the fed really wants to push this, the state can make a constitutional amendment. Little known fact: State constitutions override federal law. Only treaties and the like can go above that then. So there are ways for states to fight back against unwanted federal interference if the will of the people is strong enough.
Frankly, I'd love to see Texas go toe to toe with the TSA on this issue. Whether it passed or failed, it would generate a ton of negative publicity for the feds and put them on the defensive for a long time.