Well, she can't be fired now because she's no longer employed as Secretary of State, so that part is about the same as anyone else. Revocation of clearance might matter, except that you don't need to have a clearance (or gain one) to become President or Vice President. The law essentially presumes that the voters will not elect someone who is unfit to hold those responsibilities, along with all the other responsibilities of the Presidency.
1) It's not uncommon at all. I personally knew many people that committed security violations during the time I served in the military. None of them were thrown in jail, and none of them lost their jobs. Most of these involved emailing classified information on a computer/network that was not accredited for it. The first time punishment was mandatory retraining and a reprimand. You'd only lose your clearance with multiple repeated ones, or if you tried to do a coverup, or you were trying to sell/leak that information.
People are human, and fallible, and they screw up all the time.
2) Please cite some of those specific cases, and please explain why they don't meet the additional criteria that Comey cited.
3) The problem with the other explanation, that Comey let Clinton off the hook just because she's Clinton/powerful/connected etc just doesn't hold water. There are too many reasons why it would be in keeping with his past character to call for an indictment if he truly believed it was warranted, never-mind advantageous for him to do so. Heck, his entire statement on the whole thing read like "Look, she was driving too fast and there were children in the van, she should have known better, and it was extremely poor judgment, but as much as I don't like the behavior I can't criminally cite her, because the case law just doesn't support it."
One, if someone claimed they didn't have any documents and then showed up with a full laptop, that sort of runs afoul of the "deliberately lied to investigators standard" - though I can't claim familiarity with the case since I'm not seeing any links here.
Second - Comey is a Republican. What does he really have to lose by recommending an indictment, even if he thinks the AG will refuse to follow up on it? Why would he decide to be the one to take the hit for "covering for Clinton" rather than doing what he feels is the right thing? This is the guy who as acting Attorney General stared down Bush and Cheney over the wiretap authorizations after all, so he's no stranger to putting his career on the line for doing what he thinks is just. If anything, he'd probably be doing himself a huge favor if he got himself fired by doing so (or even resigned claiming backlash), because he'd be a huge martyr for the entire Republican party and an instant cause celebre.
Again, this isn't to suggest that Clinton didn't do anything wrong by any means, but we shouldn't lose perspective and go off on a witch-hunt.
To use a car analogy, it's like speeding. Speeding is illegal, but people almost never get thrown in jail for it unless it was extremely excessive. Instead, they get a fine, or sometimes just a warning. For instance, yesterday, a teenager was thrown in jail in Maine for speeding. Why? Because he was clocked doing 146mph. (citation: http://jalopnik.com/dumbass-te... ) If a cop tried to throw someone in jail for doing, let's say, 4mph over the limit, it would be ludicrously unprecedented. In fact, most of the time you won't even be pulled over for driving 4 mph over the limit, and people regularly do so.
Similarly, what Clinton did (according to Comey) is not at all uncommon in the Federal Government/Intelligence Community, but it's usually punished by things like mandatory security training, letters of reprimand, revoking security clearance/firing (usually after repeat instances), but NOT jail time, UNLESS there were other factors involved, which according to Comey, there weren't.
So it's certainly fair to believe Clinton is an unsafe driver, and to decide that you don't want to vote to let her drive the bus - but to claim that Officer Comey should have thrown her in jail for speeding ignores the fact that he's being entirely consistent with how he's handled other cases of speeding involving people that weren't powerful politicians.
Well, you could launch the tanker and main ship from geographically separate sites, too, though then you wouldn't be able to immediately reuse the same booster (and would probably use two separate but reusable boosters instead). Overall though, given the time frame involved, the main ship would probably only make a single orbit around the earth prior to meeting up with the tanker. I've spent longer than that on airplanes after pulling away from the gate waiting for clearance to takeoff.
If a job requires a U.S. government security clearance, then it's trivially easy (and 100% legal) to make hiring decisions based on that requirement. You're legally allowed to put that in the job description and mandate it as a core requirement for employment. DoL and others won't even bat an eye if your response to the question of "why did these 100 Asian applicants get rejected" is "Job requires security clearance, these applicants couldn't obtain one" (assuming you can actually back that up, of course).
While you certainly shouldn't expect companies to hire unqualified people (and if they can demonstrate that's the reason, they're in the clear), you can't simply say "Companies should have the right to pick whoever they want whatever method they please" because that's going to equate to "(Ethnic/Protected Group) Need Not Apply" in many cases. Will they outright say that? No, probably not - but you can be sure that some people will, and it's going to disproportionately hurt vulnerable groups.
Don't forget, too, that Equal Employment Opportunity impacts more than just racial/ethnic minorities. If nothing else, age discrimination is something that everyone in tech is going to face at some point, and it can get pretty pervasive, not the least of which because older workers tend to have higher salary expectations.
And how do you determine that someone is discriminating? It can be very hard to prove that in the case of deciding between two equally qualified applicants that discrimination was the deciding factor. That said, when you have a repeated and consistent pattern, there's probably something going on there. At the very least, it's the job of the Department of Labor to go after those cases, let the company defend itself, and let the Courts determine the facts.
It's so the person will be willing to tell you everything. Even if you don't have anything illegal to hide, it is almost often is in your best interest NOT to talk to the police/FBI/etc. It's why you should at minimum consult your lawyer before you do so, and only do so in conjunction with them/their legal advice. If you can negotiate a grant of immunity prior to doing so, that's your absolute best guarantee that the police/FBI/etc won't take something you said and misconstrue it, and wind up charging you over it.
And knowing this, the FBI/police/etc will often use such grants of immunity to induce people to tell them everything and not hold anything back. After all, if they're not interested in prosecuting some low-ranking peon, why not?
"Clinton screwed up on email and arguably Benghazi"
I'm sorry -- but there is a very long history of her "screw ups and lies". Whitewater ring a bell? I don't want to list them all out as I dont want to type a "mile long" worth of dirt.
Oh, but please do - because it's not so much a "mile long list" of dirt, so much as it is a mile long list of overhyped nothingburgers that Republicans repeatedly tried to turn into major scandals in an ongoing effort to destroy the Clintons politically. About the only respite from it was when Hillary was seen as a rival to Obama after she lost the primary to him in 2008. Once she became part of his cabinet though, it was "game on" again.
It's actually somewhat more telling that despite all the relentless scrutiny, investigating, and endless parade of hearings, over 24 years now, there still has yet to be a single indictment or criminal charge against her. Either she's the canniest most effective schemer ever (yet simultaneously incompetent enough for all the rest of these minor screwups), or there's really not a lot to any of it.
Of course not - an actual deployment schedule in the US would depend on the existence of actual competition driving incumbent companies to actually upgrade their infrastructure, and we can't have that because too many politicians are in the pocket of those incumbents.
Of course they didn't conspire to block Linux installs - it was all about providing security to the user, by preventing anyone from attacking the BIOS and the operating system. The fact that this includes the user, and prevents them from "attacking" the operating system by replacing it, is entirely unintentional - or so they'd have you believe.
Sarcasm aside, there is a lot of security-related motivation in attempts to lock down the BIOS, UEFI, etc. The problem is that much of this also has consequences, and we clearly can't rely on companies to simply keep our best interests at heart on their own - but that should come as a surprise to no one here.
A better comparison would be what the situation would be like if the cars didn't have easy network connectivity that allowed OTA patches. You'd have to bring them in to a service center to get patched. How many people would do it right away? How many would just be lazy and not bother at all?
There's certainly something to be said for having an air gap, but even air gaps aren't foolproof, and they're becoming increasingly unrealistic in the world of interconnected systems we live in.
At least NASA planned to, and attempted to, deorbit Skylab into the southern Indian Ocean. That they screwed up and it hit Australia was certainly a giant screw-up on their part, sure. However, having a plan but failing to execute the plan properly, and not giving a rat's backside about where it lands in the first place, are pretty far apart.
Oh, but they would never let someone else's cellphone use count towards your bandwidth cap - not that you could ever check it of course. You just have to take their word for it.
What's best of all is that they can then charge the guy using the cellphone for going over HIS data cap, too.
We all know very well that the democratic process is lost to us - as anyone who voted for Bernie Sanders found out.
I voted for Sanders, and I'm sorry, your citation doesn't support what you claim. If anything, I would argue that Sanders's success proves it is possible to achieve change democratically, even if it won't be as easy as some hoped. Success? Yes, he did far better than anyone imagined he would, and he forced Clinton to address a number of his and his supporters' policies and priorities. Did we get everything we wanted? Of course not, but that's not how the real world works. Politics is almost never about sudden magic revolutionary things happening, it's slow and incremental - and when the sudden magic happens it doesn't come out of thin air, it comes because people spent a long hard time working on it, and put in blood, sweat, and tears, year after year.
It's the same sort of thinking that led to people being disappointed in Obama, as if he was going to sweep in and fix everything. That's not how it works. You build, and you push. Want more people like Sanders in office? Work to elect them, at all levels of government, not just the Presidency. Don't like politicians like Clinton? Then organize against and vote against them in the primary. Even if you don't beat them, most politicians are astute enough that they're going to shift their policies to cover intra-party blocs. Look at what happened to the Republicans with the Tea Party - there's no moderates left in Congress, and any that are basically terrified of being primary'd out, so they support all the ultraconservative positions.
And in the end, if your guy doesn't win, don't take your ball and go home - you vote for Clinton even if you don't like her, because 80% is better than 20% or 0%. We can complain that the system is bad (it is, in my opinion), but that doesn't change what the rules of the game are right now. We can also work to change those rules even while we continue to play by them.
If you asked the English, they'd probably give you a funny look, then perhaps explain that a "quid" is one pound sterling, i.e. a colloquial reference to the British Pound, much as someone in the United States might refer to the U.S. Dollar as a "Buck." It is a reasonably common term (in Britain), and certainly 'grown up' enough that most English speakers of the English language would clearly recognize and understand it.
Income tax was initially ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But that's why the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, explicitly authorizing Congress to pass an income tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What seems to be the common thread is less the salary level of H1Bs, and more how it's being used. The worst offenses by far aren't from a regular US company filling an individual job slot with an H1B - it's the elimination of an entire department, replacing it with contracted services. Those contracted services then go to a company that primarily employs H1B workers. It's this loophole that needs eliminating, along with the contract service providers that are relying on H1B workers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, she can't be fired now because she's no longer employed as Secretary of State, so that part is about the same as anyone else. Revocation of clearance might matter, except that you don't need to have a clearance (or gain one) to become President or Vice President. The law essentially presumes that the voters will not elect someone who is unfit to hold those responsibilities, along with all the other responsibilities of the Presidency.
1) It's not uncommon at all. I personally knew many people that committed security violations during the time I served in the military. None of them were thrown in jail, and none of them lost their jobs. Most of these involved emailing classified information on a computer/network that was not accredited for it. The first time punishment was mandatory retraining and a reprimand. You'd only lose your clearance with multiple repeated ones, or if you tried to do a coverup, or you were trying to sell/leak that information.
People are human, and fallible, and they screw up all the time.
2) Please cite some of those specific cases, and please explain why they don't meet the additional criteria that Comey cited.
3) The problem with the other explanation, that Comey let Clinton off the hook just because she's Clinton/powerful/connected etc just doesn't hold water. There are too many reasons why it would be in keeping with his past character to call for an indictment if he truly believed it was warranted, never-mind advantageous for him to do so. Heck, his entire statement on the whole thing read like "Look, she was driving too fast and there were children in the van, she should have known better, and it was extremely poor judgment, but as much as I don't like the behavior I can't criminally cite her, because the case law just doesn't support it."
One, if someone claimed they didn't have any documents and then showed up with a full laptop, that sort of runs afoul of the "deliberately lied to investigators standard" - though I can't claim familiarity with the case since I'm not seeing any links here.
Second - Comey is a Republican. What does he really have to lose by recommending an indictment, even if he thinks the AG will refuse to follow up on it? Why would he decide to be the one to take the hit for "covering for Clinton" rather than doing what he feels is the right thing? This is the guy who as acting Attorney General stared down Bush and Cheney over the wiretap authorizations after all, so he's no stranger to putting his career on the line for doing what he thinks is just. If anything, he'd probably be doing himself a huge favor if he got himself fired by doing so (or even resigned claiming backlash), because he'd be a huge martyr for the entire Republican party and an instant cause celebre.
Again, this isn't to suggest that Clinton didn't do anything wrong by any means, but we shouldn't lose perspective and go off on a witch-hunt.
To use a car analogy, it's like speeding. Speeding is illegal, but people almost never get thrown in jail for it unless it was extremely excessive. Instead, they get a fine, or sometimes just a warning. For instance, yesterday, a teenager was thrown in jail in Maine for speeding. Why? Because he was clocked doing 146mph. (citation: http://jalopnik.com/dumbass-te... ) If a cop tried to throw someone in jail for doing, let's say, 4mph over the limit, it would be ludicrously unprecedented. In fact, most of the time you won't even be pulled over for driving 4 mph over the limit, and people regularly do so.
Similarly, what Clinton did (according to Comey) is not at all uncommon in the Federal Government/Intelligence Community, but it's usually punished by things like mandatory security training, letters of reprimand, revoking security clearance/firing (usually after repeat instances), but NOT jail time, UNLESS there were other factors involved, which according to Comey, there weren't.
So it's certainly fair to believe Clinton is an unsafe driver, and to decide that you don't want to vote to let her drive the bus - but to claim that Officer Comey should have thrown her in jail for speeding ignores the fact that he's being entirely consistent with how he's handled other cases of speeding involving people that weren't powerful politicians.
They're great for reenactments of Office Space, at least.
Well, you could launch the tanker and main ship from geographically separate sites, too, though then you wouldn't be able to immediately reuse the same booster (and would probably use two separate but reusable boosters instead). Overall though, given the time frame involved, the main ship would probably only make a single orbit around the earth prior to meeting up with the tanker. I've spent longer than that on airplanes after pulling away from the gate waiting for clearance to takeoff.
If a job requires a U.S. government security clearance, then it's trivially easy (and 100% legal) to make hiring decisions based on that requirement. You're legally allowed to put that in the job description and mandate it as a core requirement for employment. DoL and others won't even bat an eye if your response to the question of "why did these 100 Asian applicants get rejected" is "Job requires security clearance, these applicants couldn't obtain one" (assuming you can actually back that up, of course).
While you certainly shouldn't expect companies to hire unqualified people (and if they can demonstrate that's the reason, they're in the clear), you can't simply say "Companies should have the right to pick whoever they want whatever method they please" because that's going to equate to "(Ethnic/Protected Group) Need Not Apply" in many cases. Will they outright say that? No, probably not - but you can be sure that some people will, and it's going to disproportionately hurt vulnerable groups.
Don't forget, too, that Equal Employment Opportunity impacts more than just racial/ethnic minorities. If nothing else, age discrimination is something that everyone in tech is going to face at some point, and it can get pretty pervasive, not the least of which because older workers tend to have higher salary expectations.
And how do you determine that someone is discriminating? It can be very hard to prove that in the case of deciding between two equally qualified applicants that discrimination was the deciding factor. That said, when you have a repeated and consistent pattern, there's probably something going on there. At the very least, it's the job of the Department of Labor to go after those cases, let the company defend itself, and let the Courts determine the facts.
It's so the person will be willing to tell you everything. Even if you don't have anything illegal to hide, it is almost often is in your best interest NOT to talk to the police/FBI/etc. It's why you should at minimum consult your lawyer before you do so, and only do so in conjunction with them/their legal advice. If you can negotiate a grant of immunity prior to doing so, that's your absolute best guarantee that the police/FBI/etc won't take something you said and misconstrue it, and wind up charging you over it.
And knowing this, the FBI/police/etc will often use such grants of immunity to induce people to tell them everything and not hold anything back. After all, if they're not interested in prosecuting some low-ranking peon, why not?
"Clinton screwed up on email and arguably Benghazi"
I'm sorry -- but there is a very long history of her "screw ups and lies". Whitewater ring a bell? I don't want to list them all out as I dont want to type a "mile long" worth of dirt.
Oh, but please do - because it's not so much a "mile long list" of dirt, so much as it is a mile long list of overhyped nothingburgers that Republicans repeatedly tried to turn into major scandals in an ongoing effort to destroy the Clintons politically. About the only respite from it was when Hillary was seen as a rival to Obama after she lost the primary to him in 2008. Once she became part of his cabinet though, it was "game on" again.
It's actually somewhat more telling that despite all the relentless scrutiny, investigating, and endless parade of hearings, over 24 years now, there still has yet to be a single indictment or criminal charge against her. Either she's the canniest most effective schemer ever (yet simultaneously incompetent enough for all the rest of these minor screwups), or there's really not a lot to any of it.
Of course not - an actual deployment schedule in the US would depend on the existence of actual competition driving incumbent companies to actually upgrade their infrastructure, and we can't have that because too many politicians are in the pocket of those incumbents.
And their spouse, and children, and parents, and grandparents.
Of course they didn't conspire to block Linux installs - it was all about providing security to the user, by preventing anyone from attacking the BIOS and the operating system. The fact that this includes the user, and prevents them from "attacking" the operating system by replacing it, is entirely unintentional - or so they'd have you believe.
Sarcasm aside, there is a lot of security-related motivation in attempts to lock down the BIOS, UEFI, etc. The problem is that much of this also has consequences, and we clearly can't rely on companies to simply keep our best interests at heart on their own - but that should come as a surprise to no one here.
That's not nearly as effective at getting Computer Scientists to listen to whatever boring story you have to tell, though:
http://xkcd.com/1323/
A better comparison would be what the situation would be like if the cars didn't have easy network connectivity that allowed OTA patches. You'd have to bring them in to a service center to get patched. How many people would do it right away? How many would just be lazy and not bother at all?
There's certainly something to be said for having an air gap, but even air gaps aren't foolproof, and they're becoming increasingly unrealistic in the world of interconnected systems we live in.
At least NASA planned to, and attempted to, deorbit Skylab into the southern Indian Ocean. That they screwed up and it hit Australia was certainly a giant screw-up on their part, sure. However, having a plan but failing to execute the plan properly, and not giving a rat's backside about where it lands in the first place, are pretty far apart.
Comcast certainly competes with Verizon and AT&T. Not in the marketplace, of course - just in the competition to see who can be the most evil.
Oh, but they would never let someone else's cellphone use count towards your bandwidth cap - not that you could ever check it of course. You just have to take their word for it.
What's best of all is that they can then charge the guy using the cellphone for going over HIS data cap, too.
We all know very well that the democratic process is lost to us - as anyone who voted for Bernie Sanders found out.
I voted for Sanders, and I'm sorry, your citation doesn't support what you claim. If anything, I would argue that Sanders's success proves it is possible to achieve change democratically, even if it won't be as easy as some hoped. Success? Yes, he did far better than anyone imagined he would, and he forced Clinton to address a number of his and his supporters' policies and priorities. Did we get everything we wanted? Of course not, but that's not how the real world works. Politics is almost never about sudden magic revolutionary things happening, it's slow and incremental - and when the sudden magic happens it doesn't come out of thin air, it comes because people spent a long hard time working on it, and put in blood, sweat, and tears, year after year.
It's the same sort of thinking that led to people being disappointed in Obama, as if he was going to sweep in and fix everything. That's not how it works. You build, and you push. Want more people like Sanders in office? Work to elect them, at all levels of government, not just the Presidency. Don't like politicians like Clinton? Then organize against and vote against them in the primary. Even if you don't beat them, most politicians are astute enough that they're going to shift their policies to cover intra-party blocs. Look at what happened to the Republicans with the Tea Party - there's no moderates left in Congress, and any that are basically terrified of being primary'd out, so they support all the ultraconservative positions.
And in the end, if your guy doesn't win, don't take your ball and go home - you vote for Clinton even if you don't like her, because 80% is better than 20% or 0%. We can complain that the system is bad (it is, in my opinion), but that doesn't change what the rules of the game are right now. We can also work to change those rules even while we continue to play by them.
If you asked the English, they'd probably give you a funny look, then perhaps explain that a "quid" is one pound sterling, i.e. a colloquial reference to the British Pound, much as someone in the United States might refer to the U.S. Dollar as a "Buck." It is a reasonably common term (in Britain), and certainly 'grown up' enough that most English speakers of the English language would clearly recognize and understand it.
It would probably be considered an act of piracy in international legal terms.
:)
Of course, it might just be worth it for that alone, to go down in history as the first Space Pirate.
That's a good thing though, right? I mean, what else are you supposed to do if you run into a virtual Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal?
Income tax was initially ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But that's why the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, explicitly authorizing Congress to pass an income tax:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What seems to be the common thread is less the salary level of H1Bs, and more how it's being used. The worst offenses by far aren't from a regular US company filling an individual job slot with an H1B - it's the elimination of an entire department, replacing it with contracted services. Those contracted services then go to a company that primarily employs H1B workers. It's this loophole that needs eliminating, along with the contract service providers that are relying on H1B workers.
In most cases though, the average applicant does not have nearly the leverage in such a negotiation that the company has.