Constitutional rights and freedoms aren't zero-sum absolute matters. There are reasonable limits, such as the classic "Yelling Fire in a crowded theater." Zoning is within that realm, at least to a reasonable point. Why might the city care what you're doing? It comes down to a matter of scale. If you're one person coding in your home, they won't have any reason to, but if you've got hundreds or thousands of people working out of your 'home', then there are quite a few things the city (or other local government) might care about, such as traffic, parking, power use, noise, etc. I can freely print out a newsletter on my home printer, but all of my neighbors would probably have a fit if I decided to turn my home into an industrial scale newspaper printing plant. No one is saying I can't run a newspaper printing plant, I just can't do it right in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
The "no software" angle to it is rather interesting though. I'd think that corporate entity of a particular size, whether it's pushing out software or doing other similar computer based non-industrial work, should all fall into the same bucket. Why is a software company bad, but an insurance company is fine, if they have the same number of employees? I'm not a lawyer, but I do wonder if some of those companies might have a case over being singled out specifically.
This is very, very true. If I'd stayed with my original position and company, I'd be making a fraction of what I am now.
At a minimum, getting an offer letter for a higher salary lets you negotiate more money than you'd otherwise get from simply going through a regular annual review.
Cox is generally the least shitty of the US cable ISPs. Admittedly, this is a terribly low bar, but most surveys have rated them somewhere around "adequate" which puts them light years ahead of Comcast/etc.
Also, as Churchill once said, "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
Cox was a halfway decent ISP when I had them. I would have gladly continued service with them had I not moved out of the area for work, because they're far better than any of the other large cable ISPs (coughComcastcough).
More importantly, they also tried to stand up against this extortionist crap, rather than just voluntarily roll over on their customers. They went to court to fight it, and sadly lost, but that effort counts for something in my book at least.
It's more that Assange is not exactly a disinterested party in this, he has an agenda and an incentive to not be truthful about the source of the information. We do have quite a bit of information from multiple sources, including several major security companies. Could they be getting bribed to cover for the DNC? I certainly won't say it's impossible, but given the fact that their business model primarily relies on them being good at what they do, and accurately identifying the threat actors behind the breaches they get paid to come assess, if they were ever caught acting as PR flacks for someone and putting up BS, their reputation would be utterly ruined. Were that the case, I'd hope they were getting paid utterly ridiculous sums of money by the DNC.
It would be nice if the media would 1. dig more into the content of the leaks and 2. investigate the source of the leaks and give us facts rather than try to spin some kind of "Trump is a Russian plant" conspiracy theory.
Disagree with the conclusions all you like, but there's certainly not a lack of facts or investigation going on. I also haven't seen any serious suggestions of Trump being a Russian plant (outside of biased partisan stuff at least). I have seen lots of speculation that Russia/Putin have a strong interest in backing Trump, or that Trump is favorable towards Russian interests, but that's hardly the same thing.
The only evidence the DNC was hacked as opposed to the target of a whistleblower is from the security firm the DNC hired themselves.
I keep seeing this quoted, but Crowdstrike's conclusions were also confirmed by Fidelis and Mandiant/FireEye, i.e. their competitors: https://www.washingtonpost.com...
The evidence that the hacks originated in Russia is circumstantial, and there is no evidence it was state sponsored.
Definitively and absolutely making an attribution call is very difficult, but this is hardly the case of using one indicator to state "Well it was Russia." The research, evidence, and conclusions are all clearly laid out, and while they didn't point to a smoking gun, there's a reasonably clear case that the majority of the signs point to Russian APT activity as being behind the intrusion: http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
Odd, because if anything, I see the exact opposite. From my experience, the (big/mainstream) media seems very keen on trying to achieve false balance, even to the point of ridiculousness, by giving "both sides" the opportunity to say whatever their position is, even if one of those is grossly factually incorrect. They get lambasted by both sides for it, albeit usually at different times.
And if anything, the push to replace fact-based media with opinion-based hasn't come from journalism schools, it's come from the rise of explicitly partisan media, first on the right, and then followed by the left. The cry of "biased mainstream media" has been a largely self-serving one, both from politicians whose interest it was to push back on evidence-based yet unfavorable stories, never-mind from the purveyors of alternate media who have it in their direct interest to attack their competition. And it's not going away, either - the internet enables everyone to access any number of sources, right or wrong, evidence or opinion based.
Ultimately, it's not possible anymore to simply rely on someone else to do your critical thinking for you. You, the reader, have to assess things like the bias of the source, their past record, the evidence presented, et cetera. Don't trust it just because website X or news commentator Y said so. This goes for everyone, not just right or left or center.
Basically, we can either choose to believe that:
A) The Clintons are merciless killers whose cunning conspiracy knows no bounds, but are also so cluelessly inept as to get caught for stupid stuff that would be much more easily hidden than a string of murders, OR
B) This is a bunch of conspiracy BS.
I've been hearing this same crap for almost 24 years now. No amount of investigations by any number of conservative lawmakers has made anything stick, nor has the right-wing media been able to do anything more than rumormonger about fringe innuendo and conspiracy schlock. Cry wolf enough times, I stop believing you after I keep not seeing any wolves. Sorry, I'm just not buying it.
The State is already choosing the winner though - to protect the incumbent monopolist (Comcast/AT&T/etc as varies by which region). We're also not talking about a lean efficient private company being defended from a government competitor that runs at a loss thanks to tax money, but rather, a bloated monopoly incumbent providing poor service at usurious rates to the point that the citizens of those cities are so fed up that they're ready to vote for anything that might be better.
And in the case of Chattanooga, they already know it is, because EPB (the power company there) has been providing Gigabit internet for years. It's the people just outside Chattanooga that want to get in on that, but thanks to Tennessee state law (and Georgia on the other side of the city) passed at the explicit behest of Comcast/etc, they can't get it.
This is what they want to sell you as "capitalism" - a natural monopoly, reinforced by the State by preventing competition of any sort.
...that Providers enjoy a monopoly, they do so because the elected officials provided it.
The proper solution is through electing officials that will revoke the monopolies, not allow the Federal Government to intrude in State Business because once you allow that, you are likely to see i in other things that you decidedly don't want.
So why is it bad when the Federal Government tells a State what to do, but it's a-okay when the State tells a City what to do?
You do realize that the Federal Government is perfectly authorized to regulate interstate commerce, right?
By the way, it's also not so easy to simply elect officials based on a single issue, on any level except the local, unless you manage to make that issue a single hot-button, which really only occurs for a very few number of sparing things. Furthermore, it's not always simply the case of "enforced monopoly", because in many cases the amount of investment needed to wire a city in competition with an established provider is very large, and the expected rate of return just doesn't justify a second private company making it, so passing a community bond issue is really your only option short of praying to Google to come to your town.
It's an interesting chicken/egg question. Are they failing because they refuse adblockers, or are they failing already, with that being just a symptom? I know my anecdotal experience has been to stop visiting those two sites ever, but I'm possibly an outlier.
Now, it's a reasonable argument that anyone using an adblocker wasn't helping their revenue stream to begin with, but that may be too simple an answer. Even adblocked pageviews have value to a site, because people don't simply read web pages in a vacuum. They share stories with their friends, that might not otherwise see them. Cut off the adblocked portion of the internet audience, and you're reaching a lot less people, and that's where you lose the pageviews that pay you. I would also posit that internet users that employ adblock are more likely to be active/heavy users of the internet, but that's conjecture on my part.
The USA has a pretty good track record with naval warfare in the East Asia/Pacific region in the past century or so - 2W-0L (Spanish-American War, WW2). Land wars, not so much (0W-0L-2T).
Black Hat really isn't about hackers at all, anymore. It's become overtaken by corporate functions, and lots of the talks given are little more than thinly veiled sales pitches. It's a networking event, at most.
Defcon on the other hand, which takes place immediately following (in a different hotel in Vegas), is very much about hacking, security, and has grown into so much more. In addition to the usual talks, panels, and parties, there's all sorts of hands on things to do. It's a lot of fun, and it costs roughly a tenth of what Black Hat or any similar corporate conferences do. About the only negative thing I have to say about it is that it's terribly crowded (but for good reasons).
I think it's more that Warner Bros. and DC have been utterly desperate to capture the same sort of lightning in a bottle that Marvel's got, but they're trying so damn hard that they keep managing to shoot themselves in the foot. Reading the articles about how the reshoots went, and the testing of the different cuts of the movie, it really seems they just have no idea how to do it, and are trying to hard as a result, and failing miserably.
This sort of thing was part of why I naively thought Obama would be the better choice in 2008. I thought Clinton meant another 8 years of this crap. I foolishly thought that it actually had something to do with the Clinton, and not the need/drive of the modern right wing to relentlessly demonize and delegitimize any president from the Democratic Party. Pretty much the -only- time they had anything nice to say about Clinton was when they were trying to drive a wedge between her and Obama in the lead up to 2008, after it became clear she wasn't going to win.
Oh, come on, you can do better than that. The relentless scandal factory has been at work since, what, 1992? You're only citing things back maybe 8 years at most. I mean, sure, usually you want to focus on the latest shiny model, but if you're going to list all the models, you need to include the classics. What about Whitewater, the White House Travel Office, Vince Foster, and all that jazz?
So really, you want to know why Hillary supporters don't give a sh*t about your list of scandals?
It's because they stopped treating the people screaming about them as if they had any shred of credibility. I've heard people crying "Wolf!" for 24 fscking years. Where? Where's the wolf? The entire right wing has yet, in 24 fscking years, to actually nail her on anything, no matter how minor. Either she's the slipperyest smoothest super-criminal the world has ever seen, or maybe, just maybe, it's a bunch of politically motivated trumped-up (pun intended) BS.
And hey, maybe there's some actual dirt in there, but when the conservatives are so busy trying fling mud by the ton, you'll just have to forgive me if I find it a little difficult to see.
Never-mind that in many cases, the "sex offender" label is handed out for a wide array of crimes. Most people hear it, and they think of pedophiles and rapists, but it can cover far more than that. For instance, a drunk peeing in an alleyway can be prosecuted for indecent exposure, which is an offense requiring sex offender registration in many (if not most) states. In other states, two teenagers having otherwise consensual sex that their parents disapprove of can lead to statutory rape charges, which come with mandatory sex offender registration.
Crowdstrike, FireEye, and a few other higher profile security companies have also implicated named Russian APT groups. You are however correct that no US intelligence agency has made any public statement about attribution, nor any private ones that have been made public.
All the government/intelligence community has said officially is that "they're investigating it."
No, because they have different underlying beliefs and goals.
There are basically 4 reasons that people leak information/commit espionage/etc - Money, Ideology, Conscience, and/or Ego.
Snowden (based on his statements) did not release classified information simply to release it, or because he thought 'information should be free', or because he was trying to strike a blow against the Elites/"The Man"/etc, or any of that. He believed that there was lots of activity going on that ranged from questionable to illegal/unconstitutional, that he felt the public was being kept in the dark on, and that it needed to be made public for the good society as a whole. He was very clearly motivated based on his Conscience. He's also stated that he never intended for some of the other information to get out, and he relied on the journalists he gave the files to for help with that. Perhaps it was foolish, and perhaps he's not truthful about that, but it's what he's claimed at least.
Contrast this with Assange, who has a much more specific stated intent of going after certain governments, corporations, and powerful figures. He believes that they need to be torn down, basically - pretty much an Ideology based motivation. He's stated outright that his intent with the DNC leaks was to hurt Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, based on the timing, I'd even question if his intent isn't just to go after the Democrats more generally, because he has stated he'd had it for some time, and if he'd released the information sooner, it might have helped Sanders win the primaries.
So they definitely have very different stated set of motivations for what they do, and goals they're pursuing by it - at least according to what they've said.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/670/
Constitutional rights and freedoms aren't zero-sum absolute matters. There are reasonable limits, such as the classic "Yelling Fire in a crowded theater." Zoning is within that realm, at least to a reasonable point. Why might the city care what you're doing? It comes down to a matter of scale. If you're one person coding in your home, they won't have any reason to, but if you've got hundreds or thousands of people working out of your 'home', then there are quite a few things the city (or other local government) might care about, such as traffic, parking, power use, noise, etc. I can freely print out a newsletter on my home printer, but all of my neighbors would probably have a fit if I decided to turn my home into an industrial scale newspaper printing plant. No one is saying I can't run a newspaper printing plant, I just can't do it right in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
The "no software" angle to it is rather interesting though. I'd think that corporate entity of a particular size, whether it's pushing out software or doing other similar computer based non-industrial work, should all fall into the same bucket. Why is a software company bad, but an insurance company is fine, if they have the same number of employees? I'm not a lawyer, but I do wonder if some of those companies might have a case over being singled out specifically.
There's nothing that stops you from doing both:
Gingerbread 2.3 – 2.3.7
Honeycomb 3.0 – 3.2.6
Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 – 4.0.4
Jelly Bean 4.1 – 4.3.1
KitKat 4.4 – 4.4.4
Lollipop 5.0 – 5.1.1
Marshmallow 6.0 – 6.0.1
Nougat 7.0
It already has a Starbucks.
This is very, very true. If I'd stayed with my original position and company, I'd be making a fraction of what I am now.
At a minimum, getting an offer letter for a higher salary lets you negotiate more money than you'd otherwise get from simply going through a regular annual review.
Cox is generally the least shitty of the US cable ISPs. Admittedly, this is a terribly low bar, but most surveys have rated them somewhere around "adequate" which puts them light years ahead of Comcast/etc.
Also, as Churchill once said, "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
Seriously. Just how horrible does your current service have to be for Comcast to look like a better alternative?
Cox was a halfway decent ISP when I had them. I would have gladly continued service with them had I not moved out of the area for work, because they're far better than any of the other large cable ISPs (coughComcastcough).
More importantly, they also tried to stand up against this extortionist crap, rather than just voluntarily roll over on their customers. They went to court to fight it, and sadly lost, but that effort counts for something in my book at least.
I tried this but then facebook didn't work. So your code is quite useless for 1/7th of the population.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Of course he's real. He does a fantastic job taking care of my lawn, too.
It would be nice if the media would 1. dig more into the content of the leaks and 2. investigate the source of the leaks and give us facts rather than try to spin some kind of "Trump is a Russian plant" conspiracy theory.
Like these? http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
http://arstechnica.com/securit...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Disagree with the conclusions all you like, but there's certainly not a lack of facts or investigation going on. I also haven't seen any serious suggestions of Trump being a Russian plant (outside of biased partisan stuff at least). I have seen lots of speculation that Russia/Putin have a strong interest in backing Trump, or that Trump is favorable towards Russian interests, but that's hardly the same thing.
The only evidence the DNC was hacked as opposed to the target of a whistleblower is from the security firm the DNC hired themselves.
I keep seeing this quoted, but Crowdstrike's conclusions were also confirmed by Fidelis and Mandiant/FireEye, i.e. their competitors:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
The evidence that the hacks originated in Russia is circumstantial, and there is no evidence it was state sponsored.
Definitively and absolutely making an attribution call is very difficult, but this is hardly the case of using one indicator to state "Well it was Russia." The research, evidence, and conclusions are all clearly laid out, and while they didn't point to a smoking gun, there's a reasonably clear case that the majority of the signs point to Russian APT activity as being behind the intrusion:
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
Odd, because if anything, I see the exact opposite. From my experience, the (big/mainstream) media seems very keen on trying to achieve false balance, even to the point of ridiculousness, by giving "both sides" the opportunity to say whatever their position is, even if one of those is grossly factually incorrect. They get lambasted by both sides for it, albeit usually at different times.
And if anything, the push to replace fact-based media with opinion-based hasn't come from journalism schools, it's come from the rise of explicitly partisan media, first on the right, and then followed by the left. The cry of "biased mainstream media" has been a largely self-serving one, both from politicians whose interest it was to push back on evidence-based yet unfavorable stories, never-mind from the purveyors of alternate media who have it in their direct interest to attack their competition. And it's not going away, either - the internet enables everyone to access any number of sources, right or wrong, evidence or opinion based.
Ultimately, it's not possible anymore to simply rely on someone else to do your critical thinking for you. You, the reader, have to assess things like the bias of the source, their past record, the evidence presented, et cetera. Don't trust it just because website X or news commentator Y said so. This goes for everyone, not just right or left or center.
Basically, we can either choose to believe that:
A) The Clintons are merciless killers whose cunning conspiracy knows no bounds, but are also so cluelessly inept as to get caught for stupid stuff that would be much more easily hidden than a string of murders, OR
B) This is a bunch of conspiracy BS.
I've been hearing this same crap for almost 24 years now. No amount of investigations by any number of conservative lawmakers has made anything stick, nor has the right-wing media been able to do anything more than rumormonger about fringe innuendo and conspiracy schlock. Cry wolf enough times, I stop believing you after I keep not seeing any wolves. Sorry, I'm just not buying it.
The State is already choosing the winner though - to protect the incumbent monopolist (Comcast/AT&T/etc as varies by which region). We're also not talking about a lean efficient private company being defended from a government competitor that runs at a loss thanks to tax money, but rather, a bloated monopoly incumbent providing poor service at usurious rates to the point that the citizens of those cities are so fed up that they're ready to vote for anything that might be better.
And in the case of Chattanooga, they already know it is, because EPB (the power company there) has been providing Gigabit internet for years. It's the people just outside Chattanooga that want to get in on that, but thanks to Tennessee state law (and Georgia on the other side of the city) passed at the explicit behest of Comcast/etc, they can't get it.
This is what they want to sell you as "capitalism" - a natural monopoly, reinforced by the State by preventing competition of any sort.
...that Providers enjoy a monopoly, they do so because the elected officials provided it.
The proper solution is through electing officials that will revoke the monopolies, not allow the Federal Government to intrude in State Business because once you allow that, you are likely to see i in other things that you decidedly don't want.
So why is it bad when the Federal Government tells a State what to do, but it's a-okay when the State tells a City what to do?
You do realize that the Federal Government is perfectly authorized to regulate interstate commerce, right?
By the way, it's also not so easy to simply elect officials based on a single issue, on any level except the local, unless you manage to make that issue a single hot-button, which really only occurs for a very few number of sparing things. Furthermore, it's not always simply the case of "enforced monopoly", because in many cases the amount of investment needed to wire a city in competition with an established provider is very large, and the expected rate of return just doesn't justify a second private company making it, so passing a community bond issue is really your only option short of praying to Google to come to your town.
It's an interesting chicken/egg question. Are they failing because they refuse adblockers, or are they failing already, with that being just a symptom? I know my anecdotal experience has been to stop visiting those two sites ever, but I'm possibly an outlier.
Now, it's a reasonable argument that anyone using an adblocker wasn't helping their revenue stream to begin with, but that may be too simple an answer. Even adblocked pageviews have value to a site, because people don't simply read web pages in a vacuum. They share stories with their friends, that might not otherwise see them. Cut off the adblocked portion of the internet audience, and you're reaching a lot less people, and that's where you lose the pageviews that pay you. I would also posit that internet users that employ adblock are more likely to be active/heavy users of the internet, but that's conjecture on my part.
The USA has a pretty good track record with naval warfare in the East Asia/Pacific region in the past century or so - 2W-0L (Spanish-American War, WW2). Land wars, not so much (0W-0L-2T).
Black Hat really isn't about hackers at all, anymore. It's become overtaken by corporate functions, and lots of the talks given are little more than thinly veiled sales pitches. It's a networking event, at most.
Defcon on the other hand, which takes place immediately following (in a different hotel in Vegas), is very much about hacking, security, and has grown into so much more. In addition to the usual talks, panels, and parties, there's all sorts of hands on things to do. It's a lot of fun, and it costs roughly a tenth of what Black Hat or any similar corporate conferences do. About the only negative thing I have to say about it is that it's terribly crowded (but for good reasons).
I think it's more that Warner Bros. and DC have been utterly desperate to capture the same sort of lightning in a bottle that Marvel's got, but they're trying so damn hard that they keep managing to shoot themselves in the foot. Reading the articles about how the reshoots went, and the testing of the different cuts of the movie, it really seems they just have no idea how to do it, and are trying to hard as a result, and failing miserably.
This sort of thing was part of why I naively thought Obama would be the better choice in 2008. I thought Clinton meant another 8 years of this crap. I foolishly thought that it actually had something to do with the Clinton, and not the need/drive of the modern right wing to relentlessly demonize and delegitimize any president from the Democratic Party. Pretty much the -only- time they had anything nice to say about Clinton was when they were trying to drive a wedge between her and Obama in the lead up to 2008, after it became clear she wasn't going to win.
Oh, come on, you can do better than that. The relentless scandal factory has been at work since, what, 1992? You're only citing things back maybe 8 years at most. I mean, sure, usually you want to focus on the latest shiny model, but if you're going to list all the models, you need to include the classics. What about Whitewater, the White House Travel Office, Vince Foster, and all that jazz?
So really, you want to know why Hillary supporters don't give a sh*t about your list of scandals?
It's because they stopped treating the people screaming about them as if they had any shred of credibility. I've heard people crying "Wolf!" for 24 fscking years. Where? Where's the wolf? The entire right wing has yet, in 24 fscking years, to actually nail her on anything, no matter how minor. Either she's the slipperyest smoothest super-criminal the world has ever seen, or maybe, just maybe, it's a bunch of politically motivated trumped-up (pun intended) BS.
And hey, maybe there's some actual dirt in there, but when the conservatives are so busy trying fling mud by the ton, you'll just have to forgive me if I find it a little difficult to see.
Never-mind that in many cases, the "sex offender" label is handed out for a wide array of crimes. Most people hear it, and they think of pedophiles and rapists, but it can cover far more than that. For instance, a drunk peeing in an alleyway can be prosecuted for indecent exposure, which is an offense requiring sex offender registration in many (if not most) states. In other states, two teenagers having otherwise consensual sex that their parents disapprove of can lead to statutory rape charges, which come with mandatory sex offender registration.
Crowdstrike, FireEye, and a few other higher profile security companies have also implicated named Russian APT groups. You are however correct that no US intelligence agency has made any public statement about attribution, nor any private ones that have been made public.
All the government/intelligence community has said officially is that "they're investigating it."
No, because they have different underlying beliefs and goals.
There are basically 4 reasons that people leak information/commit espionage/etc - Money, Ideology, Conscience, and/or Ego.
Snowden (based on his statements) did not release classified information simply to release it, or because he thought 'information should be free', or because he was trying to strike a blow against the Elites/"The Man"/etc, or any of that. He believed that there was lots of activity going on that ranged from questionable to illegal/unconstitutional, that he felt the public was being kept in the dark on, and that it needed to be made public for the good society as a whole. He was very clearly motivated based on his Conscience. He's also stated that he never intended for some of the other information to get out, and he relied on the journalists he gave the files to for help with that. Perhaps it was foolish, and perhaps he's not truthful about that, but it's what he's claimed at least.
Contrast this with Assange, who has a much more specific stated intent of going after certain governments, corporations, and powerful figures. He believes that they need to be torn down, basically - pretty much an Ideology based motivation. He's stated outright that his intent with the DNC leaks was to hurt Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, based on the timing, I'd even question if his intent isn't just to go after the Democrats more generally, because he has stated he'd had it for some time, and if he'd released the information sooner, it might have helped Sanders win the primaries.
So they definitely have very different stated set of motivations for what they do, and goals they're pursuing by it - at least according to what they've said.