As cynical as I can be about such things myself, I know there are plenty of watchdog groups out there that keep an eye open for abuses of First Amendment and civil rights like that, and they'll make a big stink when someone does.
I'd much rather we continue to show people what these cavemen consider normal in graphic detail.
Yes, and then troll them and harass them like they're on 4chan/b/ every time they post something. Make them look as stupid as possible to as many people as possible. That's why I was OK with Anonymous deciding to harass them on Twitter. Not sure how that's going though. In my opinion the best way to defeat these Sunni extremists that laughingly call themselves the 'islamic state' is to discredit them and make them a laughingstock online as much as possible, which might also have the added extra benefit of making them angry; angry people tend to make more impulsive mistakes.
This should be called 'The Russian Plan to Make Global Warming Worse, Faster'. Of course what do they care? Anyone living in Vladivostok or Siberia probably welcomes global warming.
This piece of shit is about as Un-American as you can get for saying something like that. It tramples all over the First Amendment. Anyone want to sign a petition to get this bastard fired?
There are other ways to communicate securely other than via voice and there are techniques that spies and organized criminals have used for decades to communicate under the expectation of a phone tap.
See, that's the point I've been making all along whenever this 'backdoor' subject comes up with regards to here in the U.S.: They'd compromise encryption for their so-called 'backdoors', essentially destroying it's usefulness, but the very people they're trying to catch (criminals and terrorists) won't be affected at all because they'll use their own encryption (which they won't be able to break any more than they can break what we have now that isn't compromised), or they'll use more traditional methods of obfuscation and evasion. Meanwhile, criminals and terrorists will very shortly thereafter be able to vicitimize everyone else with vastly improved efficiency because they'll get access to the 'backdoor' themselves, it's inevitable. I'm reaching the point where I must conclude that even politicians can't be this stupid, there must be an ulterior motive, namely just another power-grab.
Is this what U.S. politicians want? Not 'backdoors' in encryption, but being the keyholders? You'd have to go through a government-run server to get encyption keys when setting up and secure connection, so that later (or in realtime) they can decrypt and listen in on the entire data stream? This would be as bad or worse than having a 'backdoor' because all you'd have to do is compromise the keyserver and you'd have all of the keys for everything -- or if you can destroy the keyserver, completely cripple communications for everyone all at once. All of these ideas are just disaster waiting to happen, and there's no damned good reason for it other than anal-retentive power-seeking-more-power politicians and their bullshit.
He is not actually going to build that wall on the Mexican border, and whatnot.
It's more than that. He won't be allowed to do much of what he's saying.
I live in California. Remember when Schwarzenegger was 'governator'? It was a disaster. He thought he could just bully everyone into doing what he wanted them to do, which of course wasn't going to work. He was blocked at every turn. That's how it would go with Trump as POTUS. You think Congress is hostile to Obama? It would be like a teddy-bear tea-party in comparison to how Congress would respond to Trump. He's an outsider, he's extreme, he's a blowhard, and he'd be blocked at every turn. He seems to think that he can just say 'jump!' and everyone will say 'how high, Sir?' because that's what he's used to, but it won't work that way. Trump as POTUS would probably be the least productive and positive Presidency this country has ever seen, assuming he didn't get impeached.
Oh yeah? Let me tell you about you: I don't have to read many of your other comments at all to come to the conclusion that you're just another one of those jackholes that exists to argue and argue only, and as such you have exactly zero credibilty. I have exactly zero use for people like you, you're a waste of time, and I am done with you.
Oh, and one more thing? Shove it up your substantial ass, you fucking jerk.
I don't have to prove anything or give examples of anything, as if I'm omniscent and can know what lives in the hearts and minds of the people who are in power in this country; do YOU? Nobody does. IN MY OPINION they are acting in a way that is counter to preserving what we've been led to believe our entire lives is the American way of life, gradually eroding it away in favor of them having more power; power seeks power until it has absolute power, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It happens again and again and again all through Human history, and IN MY OPINION it is happening again.
The government will never accept a backdoor-free industry. Never.
Then ironically enough they will be the authors of their own destruction -- and all of us along with them!
Organizations like Daesh (I refuse to call them a 'State' because that's a bad joke), while complete assholes and utter animals, have proven that they have some tech savvy people in their ranks; what makes the U.S. Government think for a even a second that they won't have their own backdoor-less encryption? Of course the obvious answer here is that this isn't at all about stopping 'terrorists', it's about having complete and utter authoritarian, nigh-unto dictatorial control over the U.S. citizenry. I don't want to believe it but what else are we to believe? These idiotic politicians we elect must have tech advisors, they must be screaming in their ears that 'backdoors' in encrytion renders it as useless as using duct-tape to secure the front door of your house against burglars, and I'm supposed to believe that they're just shining these advisors on as 'alarmist' or something? LOL, no, it's corruption plain and simple I'm afraid. The Tree of Liberty has been rotting from the inside out for many many decades now, and we're seeing the end-stages of the disease that is killing Liberty and Justice in this country. At this rate it won't be long before we're considered just as bad if not worse than the Russian Federation, mainland China, or for all I know, Syria under the Assad regime. Meanwhile the Bread and Circuses are used to mollify and distract 99% of the U.S. population, they're clueless, and will look at you with a confused look on their faces, and fearful that you're just some crazed person -- then they go post on Facebook about it, like good little robots.
That's my opinion on the matter, yes. If it was 100% up to the religious leadership, they would never have even considered negotiating in the first place. Also, teaching schoolchildren to chant 'Death to America' has a certain influence on my opinions.
The agreement with Iran is about as polarizing a subject as any can be; our own nation is thoroughly divided on it, and Israel, one of the U.S.'s allies and bitter enemy of Iran, is very much violently opposed to it, to the point of perhaps being irrational in their response.
For myself, as I suspect it is for many others, I am internally divided on it, as I am both a cynic and hopeful at the same time.
On the one hand, continued hostilities towards Iran serves to maintain and promote tensions between Iran, the U.S., and many other nations, so finding a diplomatic solution that is mutually agreeable could be a good thing for everyone all around. However on the other hand I am aware that the subtext of the entire effort to come to an agreement with Iran, may be just a way to 'give them enough rope to hang themselves'; we put forth a show of trust, in the outward hope that they play it straight with us and the rest of the world, but at the same time knowing that we might have just driven their ill intent so far underground (in the literal as well as figurative sense of the word) that we can't detect it, and are biding their time until they can launch doomsday upon Israel and the U.S. and whoever else is at the top of their hit-list -- at which time, once they've been caught red-handed violating the agreement, the U.S. and it's involved allies can say "Hey, we tried! But they betrayed our trust!" and then nobody that matters will blame us for going balls-out to neutralize them once and for all.
But at the same time that my cynicism reads the potential subtext, I'm hopeful that while Irans' secular leadership is (excuse the turn of phrase here) hell-bent on destroying Israel and the U.S. and (likely) our other allies and anything that doesn't fit into their limited, rigid world-view, it's non-secular leadership is more open-minded and far-thinking, realizing that the World of today has become too small and all Irans' neighbors too close, in the literal as well as figurative sense, to allow the leadership decisions of an entire country to be guided by misguided tradition, narrow-mindedness, and hate.
The worst part of all of this, of course, is the waiting; it will take decades of waiting and watching to determine which direction this will take -- and humans, I've noted, very often do not excel at waiting.
First and foremost: You think the 'bad guys' haven't already thought of something like this? You really think they're sending out their most secret plans out in the clear, or even sending them out at all? Anyone with half a brain would either encrypt them somehow (either digitally or by more traditional methods), or use stegonography, or hand-carry them, or commit them to memory, not leave a trail of breadcrumbs that any armchair detective could follow.
Second: This would set the precedent to bring about the absolute and total end of even a pretense of privacy for everyone. It would become leveraged for seaches of anything and everything; everyone's lives would in essence be laid bare for any government agency with a half-assed reason for a search. Not much longer after that the private sector would find a way in, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if not long after that, it would be used outright for marketing datamining.
This is a dangerous, stupid idea, and no way in Hell should it ever be allowed to even be so much as discussed as actual legislation.
Seriously, how much longer are you Microsoft holdouts going to put up with this imperialistic, authoritarian bullshit from Microsoft? They are doing everything they can to jam their spyware/malware OS down your throat whether you asked for it or not: as you well know if you have 7, Vista, 8, or 8.1, you're getting it shoved in your face, installed whether you ask for it or not, and if somehow you manage to dodge all that, they're still trying to sneak in their 'telemetery' (read as: spyware/malware) updates onto your systems so they can collect your personal data, steal your files, and whatever else it is they're doing that qualifies as cybercrime. When is someone who has the power to do so going to step in and stop them?
Go ahead, Microsoft shills, mod me down to neg one troll, go right ahead, you're just proving that what I'm saying is true by trying to silence me -- but you can't, and you can't silence everyone else out there who is saying the exact same things!
The noise is annoying, yes, and the exhaust emissions are nasty, yes, those things could be addressed technologically. But those issues aren't the real problem with leaf blowers at all. In the debris on the ground, there are all sorts of things that should stay on the ground and not be stirred up by the equivalent of hurricane-force winds that come out of a leaf blower. This includes all sorts of microorganisms, mold spores, allergens, and toxins. Also they should not properly even be called 'leaf blowers', they should be referred to as 'debris blowers', because they're as often as not used to blow trash and dirt and everything but plant material around. They should be banned, they're a public health nuisance, far and away worse than they are noisome or noisy.
Her grief and desire to fight back somehow is understandable and she has my sympathy, but sueing Twitter is utterly pointless and as misdirected as you can get. Twitter doesn't really have any effective control over user-generated content; herding a thousand ferrets on amphetamines would be an easier task than that.
I don't believe in an 'afterlife' or 'gods' or any of that nonsense so as far as I'm concerned once I'm dead (and you'd better be damned sure I'm completely dead first!) so far as I'm concerned you can put me through a woodchipper or a giant Blendtec blender on 'Liquify' for all I care.
The real problem with an idea like this is all the religious types. Some of them will literally become homicidal over something like this because of their beliefs. Since we can't seem to shake off the whole 'religion' thing to start with, that makes an idea like this a total non-starter. Meanwhile I guess they can encourage cremation.
What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked 'systemically important institutions' and 'too big to fail' has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.
So, in other words, it's just like the World economy, which is in reality controlled by a tiny fraction of the World population?
Even better: so-called 'virtual currency' isn't backed by anything physically real, just like most all paper money today. Even our coins aren't worth the metals they're made of.
..and even better than all that: We literally kill ourselves to acquire it.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump is a chump!
Dump the Trump!
It's not happening where I live therefore it must not be happening anywhere!
As cynical as I can be about such things myself, I know there are plenty of watchdog groups out there that keep an eye open for abuses of First Amendment and civil rights like that, and they'll make a big stink when someone does.
I'd much rather we continue to show people what these cavemen consider normal in graphic detail.
Yes, and then troll them and harass them like they're on 4chan/b/ every time they post something. Make them look as stupid as possible to as many people as possible. That's why I was OK with Anonymous deciding to harass them on Twitter. Not sure how that's going though. In my opinion the best way to defeat these Sunni extremists that laughingly call themselves the 'islamic state' is to discredit them and make them a laughingstock online as much as possible, which might also have the added extra benefit of making them angry; angry people tend to make more impulsive mistakes.
This should be called 'The Russian Plan to Make Global Warming Worse, Faster'. Of course what do they care? Anyone living in Vladivostok or Siberia probably welcomes global warming.
This piece of shit is about as Un-American as you can get for saying something like that. It tramples all over the First Amendment. Anyone want to sign a petition to get this bastard fired?
There are other ways to communicate securely other than via voice and there are techniques that spies and organized criminals have used for decades to communicate under the expectation of a phone tap.
See, that's the point I've been making all along whenever this 'backdoor' subject comes up with regards to here in the U.S.: They'd compromise encryption for their so-called 'backdoors', essentially destroying it's usefulness, but the very people they're trying to catch (criminals and terrorists) won't be affected at all because they'll use their own encryption (which they won't be able to break any more than they can break what we have now that isn't compromised), or they'll use more traditional methods of obfuscation and evasion. Meanwhile, criminals and terrorists will very shortly thereafter be able to vicitimize everyone else with vastly improved efficiency because they'll get access to the 'backdoor' themselves, it's inevitable. I'm reaching the point where I must conclude that even politicians can't be this stupid, there must be an ulterior motive, namely just another power-grab.
Friend, I specifically said U.S. Politicians; I see in this story a possible way that they could get what they want, disaster-in-the-making or not.
Is this what U.S. politicians want? Not 'backdoors' in encryption, but being the keyholders? You'd have to go through a government-run server to get encyption keys when setting up and secure connection, so that later (or in realtime) they can decrypt and listen in on the entire data stream? This would be as bad or worse than having a 'backdoor' because all you'd have to do is compromise the keyserver and you'd have all of the keys for everything -- or if you can destroy the keyserver, completely cripple communications for everyone all at once. All of these ideas are just disaster waiting to happen, and there's no damned good reason for it other than anal-retentive power-seeking-more-power politicians and their bullshit.
He is not actually going to build that wall on the Mexican border, and whatnot.
It's more than that. He won't be allowed to do much of what he's saying.
I live in California. Remember when Schwarzenegger was 'governator'? It was a disaster. He thought he could just bully everyone into doing what he wanted them to do, which of course wasn't going to work. He was blocked at every turn. That's how it would go with Trump as POTUS. You think Congress is hostile to Obama? It would be like a teddy-bear tea-party in comparison to how Congress would respond to Trump. He's an outsider, he's extreme, he's a blowhard, and he'd be blocked at every turn. He seems to think that he can just say 'jump!' and everyone will say 'how high, Sir?' because that's what he's used to, but it won't work that way. Trump as POTUS would probably be the least productive and positive Presidency this country has ever seen, assuming he didn't get impeached.
Oh yeah? Let me tell you about you: I don't have to read many of your other comments at all to come to the conclusion that you're just another one of those jackholes that exists to argue and argue only, and as such you have exactly zero credibilty. I have exactly zero use for people like you, you're a waste of time, and I am done with you.
Oh, and one more thing? Shove it up your substantial ass, you fucking jerk.
Damnit, didn't close a quote tag and a boldface tag properly so the formatting is all screwed up; sorry about that.
The preceding is my opinion
I don't have to prove anything or give examples of anything, as if I'm omniscent and can know what lives in the hearts and minds of the people who are in power in this country; do YOU? Nobody does. IN MY OPINION they are acting in a way that is counter to preserving what we've been led to believe our entire lives is the American way of life, gradually eroding it away in favor of them having more power; power seeks power until it has absolute power, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It happens again and again and again all through Human history, and IN MY OPINION it is happening again.
The government will never accept a backdoor-free industry. Never.
Then ironically enough they will be the authors of their own destruction -- and all of us along with them!
Organizations like Daesh (I refuse to call them a 'State' because that's a bad joke), while complete assholes and utter animals, have proven that they have some tech savvy people in their ranks; what makes the U.S. Government think for a even a second that they won't have their own backdoor-less encryption? Of course the obvious answer here is that this isn't at all about stopping 'terrorists', it's about having complete and utter authoritarian, nigh-unto dictatorial control over the U.S. citizenry. I don't want to believe it but what else are we to believe? These idiotic politicians we elect must have tech advisors, they must be screaming in their ears that 'backdoors' in encrytion renders it as useless as using duct-tape to secure the front door of your house against burglars, and I'm supposed to believe that they're just shining these advisors on as 'alarmist' or something? LOL, no, it's corruption plain and simple I'm afraid. The Tree of Liberty has been rotting from the inside out for many many decades now, and we're seeing the end-stages of the disease that is killing Liberty and Justice in this country. At this rate it won't be long before we're considered just as bad if not worse than the Russian Federation, mainland China, or for all I know, Syria under the Assad regime. Meanwhile the Bread and Circuses are used to mollify and distract 99% of the U.S. population, they're clueless, and will look at you with a confused look on their faces, and fearful that you're just some crazed person -- then they go post on Facebook about it, like good little robots.
Whoops! :-)
Sorry, switched secular and non-secular in the original post; that sure made it confusing, didn't it!
That's my opinion on the matter, yes. If it was 100% up to the religious leadership, they would never have even considered negotiating in the first place. Also, teaching schoolchildren to chant 'Death to America' has a certain influence on my opinions.
The agreement with Iran is about as polarizing a subject as any can be; our own nation is thoroughly divided on it, and Israel, one of the U.S.'s allies and bitter enemy of Iran, is very much violently opposed to it, to the point of perhaps being irrational in their response.
For myself, as I suspect it is for many others, I am internally divided on it, as I am both a cynic and hopeful at the same time.
On the one hand, continued hostilities towards Iran serves to maintain and promote tensions between Iran, the U.S., and many other nations, so finding a diplomatic solution that is mutually agreeable could be a good thing for everyone all around. However on the other hand I am aware that the subtext of the entire effort to come to an agreement with Iran, may be just a way to 'give them enough rope to hang themselves'; we put forth a show of trust, in the outward hope that they play it straight with us and the rest of the world, but at the same time knowing that we might have just driven their ill intent so far underground (in the literal as well as figurative sense of the word) that we can't detect it, and are biding their time until they can launch doomsday upon Israel and the U.S. and whoever else is at the top of their hit-list -- at which time, once they've been caught red-handed violating the agreement, the U.S. and it's involved allies can say "Hey, we tried! But they betrayed our trust!" and then nobody that matters will blame us for going balls-out to neutralize them once and for all.
But at the same time that my cynicism reads the potential subtext, I'm hopeful that while Irans' secular leadership is (excuse the turn of phrase here) hell-bent on destroying Israel and the U.S. and (likely) our other allies and anything that doesn't fit into their limited, rigid world-view, it's non-secular leadership is more open-minded and far-thinking, realizing that the World of today has become too small and all Irans' neighbors too close, in the literal as well as figurative sense, to allow the leadership decisions of an entire country to be guided by misguided tradition, narrow-mindedness, and hate.
The worst part of all of this, of course, is the waiting; it will take decades of waiting and watching to determine which direction this will take -- and humans, I've noted, very often do not excel at waiting.
First and foremost: You think the 'bad guys' haven't already thought of something like this? You really think they're sending out their most secret plans out in the clear, or even sending them out at all? Anyone with half a brain would either encrypt them somehow (either digitally or by more traditional methods), or use stegonography, or hand-carry them, or commit them to memory, not leave a trail of breadcrumbs that any armchair detective could follow.
Second: This would set the precedent to bring about the absolute and total end of even a pretense of privacy for everyone. It would become leveraged for seaches of anything and everything; everyone's lives would in essence be laid bare for any government agency with a half-assed reason for a search. Not much longer after that the private sector would find a way in, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if not long after that, it would be used outright for marketing datamining.
This is a dangerous, stupid idea, and no way in Hell should it ever be allowed to even be so much as discussed as actual legislation.
Seriously, how much longer are you Microsoft holdouts going to put up with this imperialistic, authoritarian bullshit from Microsoft? They are doing everything they can to jam their spyware/malware OS down your throat whether you asked for it or not: as you well know if you have 7, Vista, 8, or 8.1, you're getting it shoved in your face, installed whether you ask for it or not, and if somehow you manage to dodge all that, they're still trying to sneak in their 'telemetery' (read as: spyware/malware) updates onto your systems so they can collect your personal data, steal your files, and whatever else it is they're doing that qualifies as cybercrime. When is someone who has the power to do so going to step in and stop them?
Go ahead, Microsoft shills, mod me down to neg one troll, go right ahead, you're just proving that what I'm saying is true by trying to silence me -- but you can't, and you can't silence everyone else out there who is saying the exact same things!
The noise is annoying, yes, and the exhaust emissions are nasty, yes, those things could be addressed technologically. But those issues aren't the real problem with leaf blowers at all. In the debris on the ground, there are all sorts of things that should stay on the ground and not be stirred up by the equivalent of hurricane-force winds that come out of a leaf blower. This includes all sorts of microorganisms, mold spores, allergens, and toxins. Also they should not properly even be called 'leaf blowers', they should be referred to as 'debris blowers', because they're as often as not used to blow trash and dirt and everything but plant material around. They should be banned, they're a public health nuisance, far and away worse than they are noisome or noisy.
Her grief and desire to fight back somehow is understandable and she has my sympathy, but sueing Twitter is utterly pointless and as misdirected as you can get. Twitter doesn't really have any effective control over user-generated content; herding a thousand ferrets on amphetamines would be an easier task than that.
I don't believe in an 'afterlife' or 'gods' or any of that nonsense so as far as I'm concerned once I'm dead (and you'd better be damned sure I'm completely dead first!) so far as I'm concerned you can put me through a woodchipper or a giant Blendtec blender on 'Liquify' for all I care.
The real problem with an idea like this is all the religious types. Some of them will literally become homicidal over something like this because of their beliefs. Since we can't seem to shake off the whole 'religion' thing to start with, that makes an idea like this a total non-starter. Meanwhile I guess they can encourage cremation.
What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked 'systemically important institutions' and 'too big to fail' has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.
So, in other words, it's just like the World economy, which is in reality controlled by a tiny fraction of the World population?
Even better: so-called 'virtual currency' isn't backed by anything physically real, just like most all paper money today. Even our coins aren't worth the metals they're made of.
..and even better than all that: We literally kill ourselves to acquire it.
Let's put it this way: I don't want to take any chances, so let's not elect Trump, ok?
and how long before the next Hitler comes to stop that?
I dunno about any other country, but here in the U.S., our 'Hitler' goes by the name of 'Donald Trump'.
DO NOT VOTE FOR TRUMP!