Ah, but the central question is this: what is more likely, that bad guys will fuck me and my family over by using encryption to hide in the shadows, or that bad guys will fuck me and my family over by obtaining information that I am no longer able to protect via encryption?
Perhaps you think the former; I am certain the latter is the greater risk. It can't be mitigated by creating some kind of magic back door that's accessible only to good guys, and not bad guys. And there are plenty enough incidents today to know that bad guys really do seek out and abuse financial, health and identity data, among many other types, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Simple laws of nature dictate that the chances of my being shot or blown up by a bad guy remains vanishingly small. But a bad guy's virtual reach can extend to many millions of people whose information that person can steal and abuse.
Why would you need to have both the same range as a gas-powered car *and* fast recharge times? An electric car does something a gas-powered car doesn't: home charging. Do you routinely and frequently drive 500 miles, refill, and drive a further several hundred miles? What other circumstances require both long range and swift recharge when the car can be charged overnight and have its full range available in the morning? (Similar question applies to charging stations)
Did you fail to see that I was mocking your uncalled-for smugness? I am beginning to question your super-smart-guy credentials. What a disappointment.
Your mockery attempt is separate from the fact that your prior statement demonstrates you did not think I'd noticed you were being sarcastic. Your post hoc rationalisation is fairly undignified. But then, indignity is almost a defining trope for a modern Republican.
A patent? A non-self-published book, a peer-reviewed paper? A precedent-establishing legal argument? Anything which shows any original contribution to the collective knowledge of the civilization?
Patent -- yup Non-self published book -- yup Peer-revised paper -- yup
Nope. Not sarcasm. Genuinely super exciting to try to follow along. Genuinely a combination of a roller coaster and Alice Through the Looking Glass. It's an insight into someone else's weird thought processes. I was implying you were odd and irrational, but I wasn't being sarcastic. But that's OK, I wouldn't expect you to be able to distinguish sarcasm from other forms of snidery. You are, as you say, "just a dumb Republican".
(You're right about one thing, though -- I am super smart. Glad you noticed!)
I'm pretty sure the OP is suggesting that legislators may be being blackmailed because of information the agencies possess about their personal lives. Ourobouros ftw!
Tell you what, why don't you chop your own finger off and give it a try. You can come back and tell us. If it doesn't work, you can always shove your finger up your ass, and ask it to wave hello to all your opinions up there, where they cluster safe from the facts.
You don't really understand how Touch ID works, do you? 1. It would have been useless to the FBI in this case, as the finger needs to be alive. 2. A Touch ID unlock can only be attempted 5 times and then a passcode is required.
Erm, nope. Touch ID uses the steel capacitative sensor to sense the electrical charge in living tissue to begin the unlock process, and the process itself uses RF waves to scan living tissue and ignore dead tissue. Spoofing that is going to be quite tricky.
"With the cooperation of the host?" What, you think it's *easier* for a country to nab people *without* the cooperation of the host? I was actually talking about the latter, ie rendition. If you're talking about the former, well, that's any country that has an extradition treaty and conducts torture in its cells. Jordan, for example. The UK had to extract promises from Jordan that it wouldn't torture Abu Qatada before he was sent there because of its torture record. But that was a high profile case, and most are not. People are routinely shipped off by the courts to foreign countries where they undergo torture.
As for extraordinary rendition, what you think that Pakistan isn't capable of raiding across a barely existent border with Afghanistan and nabbing a wanted person and torturing them? With or without the blessing of the Afghan government? I'm sure such missions don't have anything like a 100% success record, but the notion that they don't happen... it's naive at best. Similarly the Saudis in Yemen, the Egyptians in Libya, etc etc. I'm sure that those other countries' use of their relatively limited power (cf US) isn't at all academic to the people affected.
Re this: "This insistence on seeing the US as uniquely powerful and uniquely evil is just... odd." You waddled and quacked and flapped your wings. I inferred you were a duck. Maybe, as you aver, my heuristic was inaccurate in your case. But it was hardly the biggest leap of logic.
The US is the only country with botht the record and ability to nab someone from other first world countries and ship them off for torture.
Do you really, truly believe this is the case? You genuinely think that Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, the UK, Australia, etc etc never nab people from other first world countries and ship them off for torture?
This insistence on seeing the US as uniquely powerful and uniquely evil is just... odd. It is more powerful than other countries, but it is not *uniquely* powerful, and other countries are every bit as capable of being assholes.
How about kidnapping someone from Ellingham Hall? I mean, Vaughan Smith was in the army, but I'm preemuch sure he wouldn't be able to fight even a teeny-tiny war against the UK or US governments, so if they really wanted to abduct him, they could have done it with a lot less hassle at that point, no?
So you're now claiming that the reason Sweden should be required to question Assange in its embassy rather than back in Sweden where the crimes are alleged to have taken place, is that the precedent has been established by the US questioning captives at Gitmo? Kafka would be proud.
You have got to be shitting me. The BBC is the same as the VoA? Sure, apart from funding mechanism, founding charter and governance, history and practice of actual reporting, public reputation, target audience, journalistic integrity, etc etc. I'd like to see one of you platitudinous cretins get just a couple of minutes of questioning by Paxo on camera. The skewering of your complacent fact-free confirmation bias narratives would be a pleasure to behold.
Um, because a fundamental tenet of the Swedish legal system is that questioning of the suspect occurs in Sweden. Not in a Swedish embassy. In Sweden itself.
This is not exactly unusual. In fact, I'd be astonished if you can name a single country that would be content to conduct questioning of a suspect in a serious crime overseas.
This is rhetoric, not reality. Science is perfectly well able to "stand scrutiny". But talking repeatedly about how evolution isn't actually anything like a whirlwind in a junkyard creating a jumbo jet is a waste of valuable teaching time and energy. We don't spend time in science lessons debating whether the atomic theory is actually correct ("have you ever seen an atom with your own eyes??") or whether the heart does actually pump blood round the body, etc etc, and we shouldn't spend time debating other well-settled science.
It's absolutely fine for the science that's taught in the classroom to not fully reflect the complexity and uncertainty of the actual state of scientific knowledge. We can teach Newtonian mechanics without continually qualifying every statement with reference to quantum mechanics or relativity.
In the UK, there's an arrangement called PCP (personal car purchase). It's perfect: you pay a deposit and small monthly charges, and you hand the keys back after two or three years. (If you wanted to keep the car, you'd have to pay a large balloon payment, but why would you do that when you can get a new model that will be much better?)
The monthly costs can be really low. For our shiny new Renault Zoe, we're paying £180 (~$250) per month. Upfront payment was about £2k (~$3k). It's a small car, and the range is only ~80miles, but we don't commute by car nor do many long journeys, so this is very rarely going to be an issue for us.
I've lived in London since 1995, and minicab drivers have never lied to me, and I've taken a shit-load of them in that time.
For a start, in London you don't agree the price with the driver, you agree it on the phone with the head office or you agree it in the local office if you're a walk-in. So what's to discuss with the driver? And how does a lie like that even work? "Oooh, tricked you, I said it was a tenner and it's actually fifteen quid!" "Er, well I agreed to a tenner, not 15 quid, so I'm paying a tenner".
As for your other complaints: the vast majority of cab firms now allow you to pay online with a card, so you don't have to argue about cabbies not having enough change.
I notice you only picked out one aspect of what I wrote about in the passage you quoted, by the way. I also highlighted that minicabs are required to be pre-bookable. Uber chooses to ignore this requirement, which was by itself the reason I gave up on using them. When I need to get my son to a football match at 9.30 on a Sunday morning from our house in the London suburbs, I want to be sure the cab will be there at 9.15. Uber are completely unreliable for this, because funnily enough, there's not much liquidity of supply at 9am on a Sunday in zone 3.
I stand by what I said: Uber don't offer firm pricing, they don't offer regulated metered pricing, they don't offer pre-bookability, they don't meet the behavioural regulations that benefit passengers (e.g. cab-rank obligation to carry regardless of destination, public liability insurance), nor the vehicle requirements (e.g. turning circle), nor the driver requirements (e.g. enhanced DBS check, the Knowledge). They are a crap mix of the least beneficial aspects of minicabs and taxis, operating in the interests of their investors much more than their passengers. But they are -- for now, and when surge pricing isn't switched on -- cheap, and they are reasonably plentiful. So they're reasonably popular.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but the central question is this: what is more likely, that bad guys will fuck me and my family over by using encryption to hide in the shadows, or that bad guys will fuck me and my family over by obtaining information that I am no longer able to protect via encryption?
Perhaps you think the former; I am certain the latter is the greater risk. It can't be mitigated by creating some kind of magic back door that's accessible only to good guys, and not bad guys. And there are plenty enough incidents today to know that bad guys really do seek out and abuse financial, health and identity data, among many other types, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. Simple laws of nature dictate that the chances of my being shot or blown up by a bad guy remains vanishingly small. But a bad guy's virtual reach can extend to many millions of people whose information that person can steal and abuse.
Mod parent up -- this is both insightful and informative.
Why would you need to have both the same range as a gas-powered car *and* fast recharge times? An electric car does something a gas-powered car doesn't: home charging. Do you routinely and frequently drive 500 miles, refill, and drive a further several hundred miles? What other circumstances require both long range and swift recharge when the car can be charged overnight and have its full range available in the morning? (Similar question applies to charging stations)
Eh? Compensation was the distinction between slavery and servitude. The compensation was a benefit in kind: free passage to the New World.
Did you fail to see that I was mocking your uncalled-for smugness? I am beginning to question your super-smart-guy credentials. What a disappointment.
Your mockery attempt is separate from the fact that your prior statement demonstrates you did not think I'd noticed you were being sarcastic. Your post hoc rationalisation is fairly undignified. But then, indignity is almost a defining trope for a modern Republican.
A patent? A non-self-published book, a peer-reviewed paper? A precedent-establishing legal argument? Anything which shows any original contribution to the collective knowledge of the civilization?
Patent -- yup
Non-self published book -- yup
Peer-revised paper -- yup
Did you really think I hadn't noticed you were being sarcastic? You're dumber than you give yourself credit for!
(A PhD is not what I have that shows I'm super-smart)
Nope. Not sarcasm. Genuinely super exciting to try to follow along. Genuinely a combination of a roller coaster and Alice Through the Looking Glass. It's an insight into someone else's weird thought processes. I was implying you were odd and irrational, but I wasn't being sarcastic. But that's OK, I wouldn't expect you to be able to distinguish sarcasm from other forms of snidery. You are, as you say, "just a dumb Republican".
(You're right about one thing, though -- I am super smart. Glad you noticed!)
I'm pretty sure the OP is suggesting that legislators may be being blackmailed because of information the agencies possess about their personal lives. Ourobouros ftw!
Thanks for sharing your reasoning. It's super exciting to try to follow along. A combination of a roller coaster and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Tell you what, why don't you chop your own finger off and give it a try. You can come back and tell us. If it doesn't work, you can always shove your finger up your ass, and ask it to wave hello to all your opinions up there, where they cluster safe from the facts.
You don't really understand how Touch ID works, do you?
1. It would have been useless to the FBI in this case, as the finger needs to be alive.
2. A Touch ID unlock can only be attempted 5 times and then a passcode is required.
Erm, nope. Touch ID uses the steel capacitative sensor to sense the electrical charge in living tissue to begin the unlock process, and the process itself uses RF waves to scan living tissue and ignore dead tissue. Spoofing that is going to be quite tricky.
"With the cooperation of the host?"
What, you think it's *easier* for a country to nab people *without* the cooperation of the host? I was actually talking about the latter, ie rendition. If you're talking about the former, well, that's any country that has an extradition treaty and conducts torture in its cells. Jordan, for example. The UK had to extract promises from Jordan that it wouldn't torture Abu Qatada before he was sent there because of its torture record. But that was a high profile case, and most are not. People are routinely shipped off by the courts to foreign countries where they undergo torture.
As for extraordinary rendition, what you think that Pakistan isn't capable of raiding across a barely existent border with Afghanistan and nabbing a wanted person and torturing them? With or without the blessing of the Afghan government? I'm sure such missions don't have anything like a 100% success record, but the notion that they don't happen... it's naive at best. Similarly the Saudis in Yemen, the Egyptians in Libya, etc etc. I'm sure that those other countries' use of their relatively limited power (cf US) isn't at all academic to the people affected.
Re this: "This insistence on seeing the US as uniquely powerful and uniquely evil is just ... odd."
You waddled and quacked and flapped your wings. I inferred you were a duck. Maybe, as you aver, my heuristic was inaccurate in your case. But it was hardly the biggest leap of logic.
You do realise mine was a rhetorical question, right?
Um, when you've jailed all these parents whose kids looked at porn...who's going to be looking after the kids then?
The US is the only country with botht the record and ability to nab someone from other first world countries and ship them off for torture.
Do you really, truly believe this is the case? You genuinely think that Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, the UK, Australia, etc etc never nab people from other first world countries and ship them off for torture?
This insistence on seeing the US as uniquely powerful and uniquely evil is just ... odd. It is more powerful than other countries, but it is not *uniquely* powerful, and other countries are every bit as capable of being assholes.
How I pine for the GWB days and their rigid adherence to the rule of law, especially re international affairs.
How about kidnapping someone from Ellingham Hall? I mean, Vaughan Smith was in the army, but I'm preemuch sure he wouldn't be able to fight even a teeny-tiny war against the UK or US governments, so if they really wanted to abduct him, they could have done it with a lot less hassle at that point, no?
So you're now claiming that the reason Sweden should be required to question Assange in its embassy rather than back in Sweden where the crimes are alleged to have taken place, is that the precedent has been established by the US questioning captives at Gitmo? Kafka would be proud.
You have got to be shitting me. The BBC is the same as the VoA? Sure, apart from funding mechanism, founding charter and governance, history and practice of actual reporting, public reputation, target audience, journalistic integrity, etc etc. I'd like to see one of you platitudinous cretins get just a couple of minutes of questioning by Paxo on camera. The skewering of your complacent fact-free confirmation bias narratives would be a pleasure to behold.
Um, because a fundamental tenet of the Swedish legal system is that questioning of the suspect occurs in Sweden. Not in a Swedish embassy. In Sweden itself.
This is not exactly unusual. In fact, I'd be astonished if you can name a single country that would be content to conduct questioning of a suspect in a serious crime overseas.
This is rhetoric, not reality. Science is perfectly well able to "stand scrutiny". But talking repeatedly about how evolution isn't actually anything like a whirlwind in a junkyard creating a jumbo jet is a waste of valuable teaching time and energy. We don't spend time in science lessons debating whether the atomic theory is actually correct ("have you ever seen an atom with your own eyes??") or whether the heart does actually pump blood round the body, etc etc, and we shouldn't spend time debating other well-settled science.
It's absolutely fine for the science that's taught in the classroom to not fully reflect the complexity and uncertainty of the actual state of scientific knowledge. We can teach Newtonian mechanics without continually qualifying every statement with reference to quantum mechanics or relativity.
In the UK, there's an arrangement called PCP (personal car purchase). It's perfect: you pay a deposit and small monthly charges, and you hand the keys back after two or three years. (If you wanted to keep the car, you'd have to pay a large balloon payment, but why would you do that when you can get a new model that will be much better?)
The monthly costs can be really low. For our shiny new Renault Zoe, we're paying £180 (~$250) per month. Upfront payment was about £2k (~$3k). It's a small car, and the range is only ~80miles, but we don't commute by car nor do many long journeys, so this is very rarely going to be an issue for us.
I've lived in London since 1995, and minicab drivers have never lied to me, and I've taken a shit-load of them in that time.
For a start, in London you don't agree the price with the driver, you agree it on the phone with the head office or you agree it in the local office if you're a walk-in. So what's to discuss with the driver? And how does a lie like that even work? "Oooh, tricked you, I said it was a tenner and it's actually fifteen quid!" "Er, well I agreed to a tenner, not 15 quid, so I'm paying a tenner".
As for your other complaints: the vast majority of cab firms now allow you to pay online with a card, so you don't have to argue about cabbies not having enough change.
I notice you only picked out one aspect of what I wrote about in the passage you quoted, by the way. I also highlighted that minicabs are required to be pre-bookable. Uber chooses to ignore this requirement, which was by itself the reason I gave up on using them. When I need to get my son to a football match at 9.30 on a Sunday morning from our house in the London suburbs, I want to be sure the cab will be there at 9.15. Uber are completely unreliable for this, because funnily enough, there's not much liquidity of supply at 9am on a Sunday in zone 3.
I stand by what I said: Uber don't offer firm pricing, they don't offer regulated metered pricing, they don't offer pre-bookability, they don't meet the behavioural regulations that benefit passengers (e.g. cab-rank obligation to carry regardless of destination, public liability insurance), nor the vehicle requirements (e.g. turning circle), nor the driver requirements (e.g. enhanced DBS check, the Knowledge). They are a crap mix of the least beneficial aspects of minicabs and taxis, operating in the interests of their investors much more than their passengers. But they are -- for now, and when surge pricing isn't switched on -- cheap, and they are reasonably plentiful. So they're reasonably popular.
Spot on!