But this has nothing to do with individuals. This is a corporation rejecting a business deal with another corporation. A better analogy an AC posted in this thread, "7-11 won't sell the cookies I bake."
If every store was required to stock every item any random company wanted to sell in their store, then they wouldn't have the space to shelve all that crap. And even if they did, organization would be impossible and they'd lose money on many items that wouldn't sell. They may be discriminating, but discrimination isn't necessarily illegal.
Let's take the Wal-Mart analogy and try to work with it. If a group of black people walk into Wal-Mart and are being racy and offensive, Wal-Mart can kick them out. They can't kick them out because they're black, but they can kick them out for being racy and offensive because they will drive other customers out. If the group of kicked out individuals took it to court, they would have to have a good case that they were being discriminated against for being black. They cannot make the claim that they have the right to be racy and offensive in Wal-Mart. Evidence would have to be provided one way or another: testimonials from witnesses, video footage from the security cameras, ect. If the evidence showed that there's little reason to suspect they were actually being racy and offensive and were kicked out anyway, it's a civil rights violation. If the witnesses and video footage clearly show the individuals behaving in an offensive manner, then it's not a civl rights violation. It's legal to discriminate against offensive behavior, it's illegal to discriminate against race.
Using Wal-Mart as analogy further: Wal-Mart doesn't sell movies or music that is excessively vulgar. In the case of music they sell censored CDs. Are they discriminating against certain content providers? Yes. Do they have the right to do so? Until they have a monopoly on retail (which is pretty impossible, even for Wal-Mart), then yes.
If everything is so peachy when you "just use the browser," then why have apps (or an app store) in the first place? Could it be that iPad apps provide services or user experiences that web pages (with or without HTML5 or Flash) don't?
On the flip side, what happens in Wal-Mart banned all black people because they considered them racy and offensive? Even while you and/or me considered their behavour to be normal to that specific culture and tolerable?
That's the worst analogy I've ever seen. It doesn't even mention cars. But seriously, did you just compare Apple rejecting an Application for sale on their online store to a civil rights violation? What the fuck were you thinking?
Safari doesn't block their website so I don't buy it. If Apple was legally forced to accept every pornographic App/e-mag, then their store would turn into nothing but a huge hub for porn. The web is for openness, Apple's App Store and E-book stores are for the select items they wish to sell. This suit is pretty much like saying the iTunes store has to publish my crappy garage band because they're being anti-competitive for not doing so.
Which is why Assange and Bin Laden aren't dead. You can't kill the Emanuel Goldsteins of the world or else the public won't have anyone to be so outraged at it blinds them to common sense.
Yet somehow his claim that the women withdrew consent got modded 'informative.' That pretty much sums up this whole case against Assange. Hopefully Swedish law will allow Assange to file a counter suit for defamation of character and slander.
Not to mention that the richest, mightiest, most powerful and influential country in the world right now is China, the country that holds the majority of the United States' debt. Hell, some of the leaked cables actually confirm this. It's sad that so many American's actually believe the country is still the alpha dog of the world.
With the leaks about Putin, i have expect him to be killed with polonium.
I've seen a lot of people say this, but it think it's without merit. Revealing that Putin is corrupt doesn't damage him politically. It's well known and he doesn't seem to care. My general understanding of Russian politics is that the people want "strong" leaders. It's their history. When they have had soft-hearted, well-intentioned leaders, the country was in disarray. When they had headstrong, corrupt leaders, things have gone decently well (with the major exception of Stalin -- but he had doublethink to make people believe things were going well). And I'm not talking about Russia/USSR's recent history -- go back hundreds of years and this trend persists.
It's the Jimmy Carter problem. A politician who won't compromise his values (if he has any) cannot be successful. Most Russians don't care that Putin lies, murders, bribes and so on. There are more jobs than when Yeltsin was in charge, better infrastructure, and Putin doesn't back down internationally (Georgia conflict). Why would Putin really care if Assange "exposes" him. No one domestically will care (and the papers will spin it in Putin's favor), and internationally no one can do anything about it b/c Russia is a permanent member of the U.N. security counsel.
Those are the first things Google brought up. I know I didn't provide any sources, the information in that post I learned while taking a Business Ethics class and I'm too lazy to dig out the text book and find examples.
Exactly. What makes us human is our ability to make choices that override our animal impulses. Good examples include religious fasting, dying for a cause, and extreme sports. But don't tell that to a sociologist; according to them, our environment and genes mold us into what we are and there's nothing we can do about it. Leave it to the irrational to rationalize a theory that humans can't rationalize.
The kindest thing I can say about that position is that it's naive.
Just like in the movies:
ROOKIE COP: Don't we need a search warrant?
EXPERIENCE COP: Don't be naive, how could we do our job if we went around collecting search warrants for everyone? Are you saying we should just let this murdering bastard get away?
ROOKIE COP: Of course not.
EXPERIENCED COP: Yes, of course not. Ideals are wonderful when you're not the guy on the street dodging bullets. I know what's right and what's wrong, I don't need a judge's permission to uphold the law.
See the hypocrisy?
No, governments should not keep secrets. You may ask, then how does one conduct warfare without secrets? But I ask you, why should a government in this day and age be conducting warfare? The U.S. military hasn't defended the country from an invading army once in the last one hundred years, yet we've been at war multiple times. If the government wasn't able to keep secrets, we never would have invaded Iraq or Afghanistan in the first place.
I understand that there are small exceptions to this. When one is searching for a fugitive, it's best not to publish all the information the investigation has unfolded. But when that investigation is over there is no reason to keep the information secret. Files become declassified over time, but as of now there's no assurance that ALL files will become declassified over time. Classified status should not be given to a file for the sake of saving the government from embarrassment. We must err on the side of transparency rather than the side of security. There was a time in this country when "live free or die" was a common belief. Now people just want to live, and they'll sacrifice everything if you convince them doing so is necessary for their own survival.
If all classified material had a time-table for future release, then classified documents wouldn't contain dirty laundry.
Or just don't participate in corrupt activities. Whistleblowers almost always leak information because they feel morally obligated to do so (leaking information puts one's future and safety at risk, no one does it for kicks or b/c they hope to make money). Many whistleblowers (especially in the corporate world) fall victim to strange accidents or they find themselves blacklisted from employment. When people decide to leak information like this they've made a conscious decision that doing so is more important than their own life.
Whistleblowers aren't spies, they're just people with morals. If our government is concerned with protecting itself against the ethically conscious, then perhaps there's no hope. The government has become everything it was designed to prevent: a tyranny. The only reason I haven't reached this conclusion yet is b/c Obama has been so hands-off with this Wikileaks mess. It's been the usual band of psychos that have called for Assange's arrest/assassination: Lieberman, McConnell, ect.
The tech just wasn't there with the N-gage. It was a neat idea, but it came out at the wrong time. I don't see this Playstation phone becoming the next big thing with sales rivaling the iPhone, but I don't see any reason why it won't be able to find its niche, especially amongst teenagers.
Concerning Assange being "Person of the Year" (it's PC nowadays): duh. Who has had a greater impact on the world than Assange throughout the last year? The other top candidate is LeBron James.
The "Person of the Year" has been real stupid for the last decade. In 2006 it was "You," 2005 "The Good Samaritans" (represented by Bono and Bill Gates), in 2003 it was "The American Solider," and in 2002, ironically enough it was "The Whistleblowers" (the Enron mess). 2001's selection of Rudy Giuliani was pretty piss-poor as well. Person of New York, sure. Person of the Year? Please. That was Osama bin Laden. All in all the "Person of the Year" was accurate to Time's description (having the most impact globally) about 50% of the time the last decade. It would be just like them to select LeBron James (who, ironically, said it would be a "great honor," obviously not understanding that it's not necessarily an honor at all: Putin, Arafat, Hitler, Stalin, ect.).
Other past selections that reek of sentimentality/fail the basic criteria of being a person: "The American Fighting Man," "Scientists," "Baby Boomers," "Middle Americans," "American Women," "The Computer," and "The Endangered Earth." Some other media outlet should do the Man of the Year thing. Time has sucked at it for years.
Silverlight 1 was awful, but now Silverlight 4 is pretty good. I've been developing web applications for over ten years professionally. As I mentioned in a previous post there are a lot of things you can so in SL that you can't do very well in either Flash or HTML5. Your comment shows that you are pretty disconnected from reality and not privy to what corporate customers and end users are really looking to see in web applications these days.
It can do what? Lock you into Microsoft technologies? While I understand that, as a developer, you may see things that Silverlight can do that Flash or HTML 5 "can't do very well," what exactly does it do that those corporate customers and end users are "looking to see?" (btw -- I loved those examples you didn't provide) Those customers don't even know what Silverlight is. If they have it installed, they never meant to do it or it was just something they clicked while trying to watch the Olympics online.
Just because Silverlight has some features that you find clever doesn't mean it's good for the internet. It wasn't designed to benefit the internet or small application developers, it was designed to broaden Microsoft's control over the internet, to make it another one of their platforms. Your comment shows that you are pretty disconnected from reality and not privy to what Microsoft's business strategy has been for decades.
You kind of prove his point, though. Being outraged is considered faux pas, and that's why people aren't more vocal about the reality of where our society is headed. I've been told, "Never discuss politics or religion at a bar" b/c people get too riled up over those topics. But that's complete cowardly bullshit. This country was founded by revolutionaries who discussed politics in taverns and weren't willing to sit by idly and allow their rights to be trampled all over. The corruption that Wikileaks is exposing reveals that our rights are be trampled on today, but ordinary people don't express their anger over the situation because people like you treat them like they've broken some rule of social conduct.
I agree, the technical and political aspects of this story are very important and I'd be interested in what you have to say about it. But to discourage someone from being critical of the social structure that has led to the government corruption that Wikileaks is fighting is just the same as encouraging complacency. It's like how in the mid-west it's faux pas to be an environmentalist b/c no one wants to be labeled as a hippie.
You really miss the point. It didn't even matter if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. So does Pakistan, but we're not invading them. Bush and his cronies repeatedly said not only that Iraq possessed WMDs, but also that they were an imminent threat to U.S. security. That's extremely naive to assume that a country our military could take over in a matter of weeks posed any serious threat to our national security. The Bush administration relied on American bigotry that wouldn't discern between the Muslims involved in the 9/11 terrorist plot and the Muslims who lived in Iraq and had nothing to do with it to sell that bogus war. And it incidentally made a lot of their friends very rich.
The claim that Iraq had WMDs may have been a "mistake" but the administrations insistence that, even if Iraq possessed these weapons, that they could possibly pose a threat to the U.S. is a flat out lie. The worst the Iraqi government could have done would be a large scale terrorist attack, and there's no indication that they had any interest in doing so because then they would have had like ten minutes before we bombed their entire country to a wasteland.
Not all conspiracy theories are absurd and related to aliens. As far as I'm concerned, there's more evidence to suggest that Julian Assange is the target of a conspiracy than there ever was evidence to suggest that Iraq ever posed a threat to U.S. security.
Dude, you totally think that Sweden and Switzerland are the same country (the Roman Polanski quip exposed you). Get a clue.
Furthermore, Assange isn't against personal privacy. Believing in government/corporate transparency doesn't mean one believes in personal transparency.
And it's pretty obvious that Assange didn't 'rape' anyone in the American legal sense of the word. The Swedes are fem-nazis and they have fem-nazi laws. Of course, you wouldn't know that, b/c you think Sweden is Switzerland.
The idea of non-profit organizations "competing" is strange. It's kind of like how, with tech products, journalists always want to say "product X is winning" even though product Y is profitable, just not as profitable as product X. I think it's a part of sensationalist journalism that's become the norm: everything is a conflict or it's not worth reporting.
Assange wasn't a public figure until all those Iraq/Afghanistan papers were released. He stated his reason for coming out in public was b/c Wikileaks had created a shitstorm and someone had to be their public voice. Assange doesn't seem like the type of person who is enamored with celebrity. He's putting his life at risk doing all of this, it's hard to believe that becoming a celebrity is what motivates him.
Way to exaggerate. I don't like how much power corporations have either, but that's no reason to throw the F-word around. In a fascist state the defendant probably wouldn't have a lawyer (and maybe not even a trial) and the judge wouldn't have berated this prosecutor. Corporate interests are far too ingrained in the U.S. gov't, but without a major restructuring (or neglect) of the constitution, this will never be a fascist state.
One point that's interesting: Republicans routinely throw around the term "socialist" to insult Democrats (and Tea Partiers, in their ignorance, use "fascist"). Why don't Democrats fight fire with fire and call Republican party members fascists? They could employ the exaggeration you just used: "If you're beholden to corporate interests, you're a fascist. No ifs, ands, or buts."
Slashdot Mirror
But this has nothing to do with individuals. This is a corporation rejecting a business deal with another corporation. A better analogy an AC posted in this thread, "7-11 won't sell the cookies I bake."
If every store was required to stock every item any random company wanted to sell in their store, then they wouldn't have the space to shelve all that crap. And even if they did, organization would be impossible and they'd lose money on many items that wouldn't sell. They may be discriminating, but discrimination isn't necessarily illegal.
Let's take the Wal-Mart analogy and try to work with it. If a group of black people walk into Wal-Mart and are being racy and offensive, Wal-Mart can kick them out. They can't kick them out because they're black, but they can kick them out for being racy and offensive because they will drive other customers out. If the group of kicked out individuals took it to court, they would have to have a good case that they were being discriminated against for being black. They cannot make the claim that they have the right to be racy and offensive in Wal-Mart. Evidence would have to be provided one way or another: testimonials from witnesses, video footage from the security cameras, ect. If the evidence showed that there's little reason to suspect they were actually being racy and offensive and were kicked out anyway, it's a civil rights violation. If the witnesses and video footage clearly show the individuals behaving in an offensive manner, then it's not a civl rights violation. It's legal to discriminate against offensive behavior, it's illegal to discriminate against race.
Using Wal-Mart as analogy further: Wal-Mart doesn't sell movies or music that is excessively vulgar. In the case of music they sell censored CDs. Are they discriminating against certain content providers? Yes. Do they have the right to do so? Until they have a monopoly on retail (which is pretty impossible, even for Wal-Mart), then yes.
If everything is so peachy when you "just use the browser," then why have apps (or an app store) in the first place? Could it be that iPad apps provide services or user experiences that web pages (with or without HTML5 or Flash) don't?
Maybe, but porn's not one of them.
On the flip side, what happens in Wal-Mart banned all black people because they considered them racy and offensive? Even while you and/or me considered their behavour to be normal to that specific culture and tolerable?
That's the worst analogy I've ever seen. It doesn't even mention cars. But seriously, did you just compare Apple rejecting an Application for sale on their online store to a civil rights violation? What the fuck were you thinking?
Safari doesn't block their website so I don't buy it. If Apple was legally forced to accept every pornographic App/e-mag, then their store would turn into nothing but a huge hub for porn. The web is for openness, Apple's App Store and E-book stores are for the select items they wish to sell. This suit is pretty much like saying the iTunes store has to publish my crappy garage band because they're being anti-competitive for not doing so.
Which is why Assange and Bin Laden aren't dead. You can't kill the Emanuel Goldsteins of the world or else the public won't have anyone to be so outraged at it blinds them to common sense.
Yet somehow his claim that the women withdrew consent got modded 'informative.' That pretty much sums up this whole case against Assange. Hopefully Swedish law will allow Assange to file a counter suit for defamation of character and slander.
Strange, I always thought that Senator Stupid Asshat was Lieberman.
Not to mention that the richest, mightiest, most powerful and influential country in the world right now is China, the country that holds the majority of the United States' debt. Hell, some of the leaked cables actually confirm this. It's sad that so many American's actually believe the country is still the alpha dog of the world.
if, anyone does something against him, it will be 'springtime with agents in middle east' or something .... if you get the 'producers' reference.
Great, you just had to Godwin the thread :P
With the leaks about Putin, i have expect him to be killed with polonium.
I've seen a lot of people say this, but it think it's without merit. Revealing that Putin is corrupt doesn't damage him politically. It's well known and he doesn't seem to care. My general understanding of Russian politics is that the people want "strong" leaders. It's their history. When they have had soft-hearted, well-intentioned leaders, the country was in disarray. When they had headstrong, corrupt leaders, things have gone decently well (with the major exception of Stalin -- but he had doublethink to make people believe things were going well). And I'm not talking about Russia/USSR's recent history -- go back hundreds of years and this trend persists.
It's the Jimmy Carter problem. A politician who won't compromise his values (if he has any) cannot be successful. Most Russians don't care that Putin lies, murders, bribes and so on. There are more jobs than when Yeltsin was in charge, better infrastructure, and Putin doesn't back down internationally (Georgia conflict). Why would Putin really care if Assange "exposes" him. No one domestically will care (and the papers will spin it in Putin's favor), and internationally no one can do anything about it b/c Russia is a permanent member of the U.N. security counsel.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread556388/pg1
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-488662/Iraq-whistleblower-Dr-Kelly-WAS-murdered-silence-says-MP.html
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/46616/whistleblower-rti-activist-satish-shetty.html
http://hollyonthehill.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/bp-whistleblower-found-dead/
Those are the first things Google brought up. I know I didn't provide any sources, the information in that post I learned while taking a Business Ethics class and I'm too lazy to dig out the text book and find examples.
Posts like this are what "Post Anonymously" are for. . .
Exactly. What makes us human is our ability to make choices that override our animal impulses. Good examples include religious fasting, dying for a cause, and extreme sports. But don't tell that to a sociologist; according to them, our environment and genes mold us into what we are and there's nothing we can do about it. Leave it to the irrational to rationalize a theory that humans can't rationalize.
The kindest thing I can say about that position is that it's naive.
Just like in the movies:
ROOKIE COP: Don't we need a search warrant?
EXPERIENCE COP: Don't be naive, how could we do our job if we went around collecting search warrants for everyone? Are you saying we should just let this murdering bastard get away?
ROOKIE COP: Of course not.
EXPERIENCED COP: Yes, of course not. Ideals are wonderful when you're not the guy on the street dodging bullets. I know what's right and what's wrong, I don't need a judge's permission to uphold the law.
See the hypocrisy?
No, governments should not keep secrets. You may ask, then how does one conduct warfare without secrets? But I ask you, why should a government in this day and age be conducting warfare? The U.S. military hasn't defended the country from an invading army once in the last one hundred years, yet we've been at war multiple times. If the government wasn't able to keep secrets, we never would have invaded Iraq or Afghanistan in the first place.
I understand that there are small exceptions to this. When one is searching for a fugitive, it's best not to publish all the information the investigation has unfolded. But when that investigation is over there is no reason to keep the information secret. Files become declassified over time, but as of now there's no assurance that ALL files will become declassified over time. Classified status should not be given to a file for the sake of saving the government from embarrassment. We must err on the side of transparency rather than the side of security. There was a time in this country when "live free or die" was a common belief. Now people just want to live, and they'll sacrifice everything if you convince them doing so is necessary for their own survival.
If all classified material had a time-table for future release, then classified documents wouldn't contain dirty laundry.
Or just don't participate in corrupt activities. Whistleblowers almost always leak information because they feel morally obligated to do so (leaking information puts one's future and safety at risk, no one does it for kicks or b/c they hope to make money). Many whistleblowers (especially in the corporate world) fall victim to strange accidents or they find themselves blacklisted from employment. When people decide to leak information like this they've made a conscious decision that doing so is more important than their own life.
Whistleblowers aren't spies, they're just people with morals. If our government is concerned with protecting itself against the ethically conscious, then perhaps there's no hope. The government has become everything it was designed to prevent: a tyranny. The only reason I haven't reached this conclusion yet is b/c Obama has been so hands-off with this Wikileaks mess. It's been the usual band of psychos that have called for Assange's arrest/assassination: Lieberman, McConnell, ect.
Anyone remembers the Nokia N-gage? 'nuff said.
The tech just wasn't there with the N-gage. It was a neat idea, but it came out at the wrong time. I don't see this Playstation phone becoming the next big thing with sales rivaling the iPhone, but I don't see any reason why it won't be able to find its niche, especially amongst teenagers.
Concerning Assange being "Person of the Year" (it's PC nowadays): duh. Who has had a greater impact on the world than Assange throughout the last year? The other top candidate is LeBron James.
The "Person of the Year" has been real stupid for the last decade. In 2006 it was "You," 2005 "The Good Samaritans" (represented by Bono and Bill Gates), in 2003 it was "The American Solider," and in 2002, ironically enough it was "The Whistleblowers" (the Enron mess). 2001's selection of Rudy Giuliani was pretty piss-poor as well. Person of New York, sure. Person of the Year? Please. That was Osama bin Laden. All in all the "Person of the Year" was accurate to Time's description (having the most impact globally) about 50% of the time the last decade. It would be just like them to select LeBron James (who, ironically, said it would be a "great honor," obviously not understanding that it's not necessarily an honor at all: Putin, Arafat, Hitler, Stalin, ect.).
Other past selections that reek of sentimentality/fail the basic criteria of being a person: "The American Fighting Man," "Scientists," "Baby Boomers," "Middle Americans," "American Women," "The Computer," and "The Endangered Earth." Some other media outlet should do the Man of the Year thing. Time has sucked at it for years.
Yeah, that kind of went off-topic. Oops.
Silverlight 1 was awful, but now Silverlight 4 is pretty good. I've been developing web applications for over ten years professionally. As I mentioned in a previous post there are a lot of things you can so in SL that you can't do very well in either Flash or HTML5. Your comment shows that you are pretty disconnected from reality and not privy to what corporate customers and end users are really looking to see in web applications these days.
It can do what? Lock you into Microsoft technologies? While I understand that, as a developer, you may see things that Silverlight can do that Flash or HTML 5 "can't do very well," what exactly does it do that those corporate customers and end users are "looking to see?" (btw -- I loved those examples you didn't provide) Those customers don't even know what Silverlight is. If they have it installed, they never meant to do it or it was just something they clicked while trying to watch the Olympics online.
Just because Silverlight has some features that you find clever doesn't mean it's good for the internet. It wasn't designed to benefit the internet or small application developers, it was designed to broaden Microsoft's control over the internet, to make it another one of their platforms. Your comment shows that you are pretty disconnected from reality and not privy to what Microsoft's business strategy has been for decades.
You kind of prove his point, though. Being outraged is considered faux pas, and that's why people aren't more vocal about the reality of where our society is headed. I've been told, "Never discuss politics or religion at a bar" b/c people get too riled up over those topics. But that's complete cowardly bullshit. This country was founded by revolutionaries who discussed politics in taverns and weren't willing to sit by idly and allow their rights to be trampled all over. The corruption that Wikileaks is exposing reveals that our rights are be trampled on today, but ordinary people don't express their anger over the situation because people like you treat them like they've broken some rule of social conduct.
I agree, the technical and political aspects of this story are very important and I'd be interested in what you have to say about it. But to discourage someone from being critical of the social structure that has led to the government corruption that Wikileaks is fighting is just the same as encouraging complacency. It's like how in the mid-west it's faux pas to be an environmentalist b/c no one wants to be labeled as a hippie.
You really miss the point. It didn't even matter if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. So does Pakistan, but we're not invading them. Bush and his cronies repeatedly said not only that Iraq possessed WMDs, but also that they were an imminent threat to U.S. security. That's extremely naive to assume that a country our military could take over in a matter of weeks posed any serious threat to our national security. The Bush administration relied on American bigotry that wouldn't discern between the Muslims involved in the 9/11 terrorist plot and the Muslims who lived in Iraq and had nothing to do with it to sell that bogus war. And it incidentally made a lot of their friends very rich.
The claim that Iraq had WMDs may have been a "mistake" but the administrations insistence that, even if Iraq possessed these weapons, that they could possibly pose a threat to the U.S. is a flat out lie. The worst the Iraqi government could have done would be a large scale terrorist attack, and there's no indication that they had any interest in doing so because then they would have had like ten minutes before we bombed their entire country to a wasteland.
Not all conspiracy theories are absurd and related to aliens. As far as I'm concerned, there's more evidence to suggest that Julian Assange is the target of a conspiracy than there ever was evidence to suggest that Iraq ever posed a threat to U.S. security.
Dude, you totally think that Sweden and Switzerland are the same country (the Roman Polanski quip exposed you). Get a clue.
Furthermore, Assange isn't against personal privacy. Believing in government/corporate transparency doesn't mean one believes in personal transparency.
And it's pretty obvious that Assange didn't 'rape' anyone in the American legal sense of the word. The Swedes are fem-nazis and they have fem-nazi laws. Of course, you wouldn't know that, b/c you think Sweden is Switzerland.
The idea of non-profit organizations "competing" is strange. It's kind of like how, with tech products, journalists always want to say "product X is winning" even though product Y is profitable, just not as profitable as product X. I think it's a part of sensationalist journalism that's become the norm: everything is a conflict or it's not worth reporting.
Assange wasn't a public figure until all those Iraq/Afghanistan papers were released. He stated his reason for coming out in public was b/c Wikileaks had created a shitstorm and someone had to be their public voice. Assange doesn't seem like the type of person who is enamored with celebrity. He's putting his life at risk doing all of this, it's hard to believe that becoming a celebrity is what motivates him.
Way to exaggerate. I don't like how much power corporations have either, but that's no reason to throw the F-word around. In a fascist state the defendant probably wouldn't have a lawyer (and maybe not even a trial) and the judge wouldn't have berated this prosecutor. Corporate interests are far too ingrained in the U.S. gov't, but without a major restructuring (or neglect) of the constitution, this will never be a fascist state.
One point that's interesting: Republicans routinely throw around the term "socialist" to insult Democrats (and Tea Partiers, in their ignorance, use "fascist"). Why don't Democrats fight fire with fire and call Republican party members fascists? They could employ the exaggeration you just used: "If you're beholden to corporate interests, you're a fascist. No ifs, ands, or buts."
Exactly. If I had an account and mod points, I'd give them to you.
I don't know why he'd want your account. . .