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User: Fire_Wraith

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  1. Re:It's amazing she still has defenders on Assange: Wikileaks Will Publish 'Enough Evidence' To Indict Hillary Clinton (rt.com) · · Score: 1

    Cthulhu for President 2016 - Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?

  2. No, that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about taking a classified document that was marked as such which she or her staffers put in an email. We're talking about things like them writing an email, about subjects that State didn't think was classified, and sending it, and then someone else (FBI, CIA, whomever) coming in later and going "Hey, the stuff in this is classified, it needs to be protected as such."

    You may ask "well, how can that be? Isn't something classified or not?" No, it's not. Someone needs to say "This is classified." Government agencies prepare guidelines for that*, and they don't always agree. Sometimes they agree it should be classified, but not at what level. Once it has been marked, though, they're all required to handle it as such. You can even have things that are classified by sheer aggregation, where if you assemble enough unclassified information together, it becomes classified simply because of the damage it could cause if a foreign adversary gained access to it.

    *Furthermore, guess who sets the guidelines for what the State Department considers classified? The Secretary of State. If she says "I didn't think X was classified", she has a pretty strong legal defense unless you can prove she knew otherwise at the time. I'm not saying it's impossible, merely that it's not the way so many people seem to think.

    And I'm sure there are a lot of people who really want to see her fry for this, but honestly, they're the same people who've been after her for over 20 years. There are people whose entire careers is based around promoting the latest Clinton scandal du jour. I'm sorry, but if you cry wolf enough times, other people stop listening, and I no longer take anything that right-wing media says about the Clintons seriously (nor have I for some time).

  3. Re:Traffic lanes designated to buses or bicycles n on Tom Wheeler Defeats the Broadband Industry: Net Neutrality Wins In Court (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're confusing traffic shaping with prioritization.

    Doing something like prioritizing VOIP packets over FTP, for instance, is perfectly acceptable, because the reason for doing it is that VOIP traffic is much more affected by latency than FTP. If I'm trying to talk via VOIP at the same time I'm FTPing a large file, and the network hits congestion, I'm generally much better off having the FTP transfer slow down than I am having my VOIP throughput degrade. It's still a neutral network because it doesn't care what VOIP service I use, as long as it's standard VOIP traffic. This is a "Cars with 4 people/buses/etc can use the left lane during rush hour, everyone else has to use the right 3 lanes" situation.

    What we're talking about is something like Comcast or AT&T trying to make _their_ Streaming Video/VOIP/FTP service work better than Netflix or whomever, by deliberately making Netflix worse, or forcing Netflix to pay extra to not get degraded. They can do this in a variety of ways, including throttling any Netflix connection, while exempting their own, or putting in Data Caps that apply to Netflix traffic, but not to their own streaming service. This is a "GM owns this toll road, so the charge for GM vehicles is $1.00, but the charge for Ford vehicles is $10.00" situation, and that's what you can't do according to Net Neutrality.

  4. Great News on Tom Wheeler Defeats the Broadband Industry: Net Neutrality Wins In Court (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This effectively means it's settled. Comcast et al could still request an en banc hearing from the full Court of Appeals, but that's unlikely to succeed. They could appeal to the US Supreme Court, but with the current 4-4 split on the court, the best they could hope for is that the USSC would split and leave the Appeals Court ruling standing as is, at the same time they'd risk a 5-3 decision affirming net neutrality depending on how Kennedy swings.

    Of course, this could still be overturned if Trump wins and gets to override the pick for the next Justice, nevermind that a GOP congress plus Trump would be free to pass whatever anti-net neutrality legislation they want, or to replace the pro-neutrality majority of the FCC commissioners with a Republican one.

  5. Re:He wants Trump? on Assange: Wikileaks Will Publish 'Enough Evidence' To Indict Hillary Clinton (rt.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It hasn't. However, changing that and nominating someone else requires deliberately overriding the popular will of the voters. It's the same for the Republicans, many of whom are privately cringing at the prospect of Trump. The fact that they _could_ do it doesn't mean that the price is far too high, because overriding the will of those voters is going to cause a MASSIVE rift in whichever party that does so, and possibly even fatally weaken their legitimacy in the eyes of their supporters. They're not going to run that risk unless there's a clear and massive demand for it from those voters to begin with. For the Democrats to dump Hillary now would require one of three things - her suddenly dropping dead of a massive heart attack (or similar), announcing her outright withdrawal from the race, or some kind of black swan event, like if she shot a bunch of kindergartners with an AR-15 on national TV while laughing gleefully.

  6. Re:He wants Trump? on Assange: Wikileaks Will Publish 'Enough Evidence' To Indict Hillary Clinton (rt.com) · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, no, it's too late. Trying to dump Hillary now would tear the Democratic party in half, and all but insure that Trump gets in. If he didn't win outright, he'd win due to Republican control of Congress. While I'm sure it's not impossible that some event could still occur that causes the Democrats to abandon Hillary en masse, by now we'd be talking a massive black swan event, like her shooting a bunch of kids with an AR-15 on live national television.

    The window for this sort of thing would have been around December-January, before the primaries started - maybe as late as February or March. You need to get the information out before people start voting, and furthermore, give time for other media to pick it up and spread it further.

  7. That's basically part of the problem with all this. It's not to say that it wasn't a terrible idea that was horribly insecure, but none of it was per se illegal at the time. Really the only thing that she could possibly be indicted/convicted on related to this is an attempt to cover up or destroy evidence - and even then, you'd pretty much have to get a smoking gun in this day and age, like catching her emailing her staffers with direct instructions to violate the law. Good luck finding anything like that.

  8. Re:Sources of Support on Assange: Wikileaks Will Publish 'Enough Evidence' To Indict Hillary Clinton (rt.com) · · Score: 2

    Perhaps that's what he means, but that didn't appear to be what he said. Furthermore, if he really wanted to release information to weaken her as a candidate, the window for doing that in any sort of constructive manner (i.e., in time to help someone else such as Sanders win the primary) has closed. Does he think Donald "I want to make it easier to go after the press for publishing things I don't like" Trump is going to be better?

    Maybe he thinks that the only way to make things better is by making them absolutely terrible first in order to get people to be less complacent? If so, that's utterly idiotic and counterproductive. Things can get much, much worse.

  9. Re:Sources of Support on Assange: Wikileaks Will Publish 'Enough Evidence' To Indict Hillary Clinton (rt.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's even crazier is what he suggests will happen. He wants to give the FBI leverage over what is probably the next president, and he thinks that's a GOOD thing? Just what does he think they're going to do with that? In what world does he think they're not going to use that to make damn sure she doesn't do anything to rein in their abuses?

    Hey, while we're at it, why not give the CIA information they can blackmail her on, too, so they can force her to authorize torture again. Give it to the NSA, too, so they can make her mandate sticking espionage chips in every orifice for everyone at birth.

  10. Re: First it was the NSA ... on DEA Wants Access To Medical Records Without Warrant (thedailybeast.com) · · Score: 2

    They didn't have it - they wanted it though. They already had their wishlist of new powers and access ready prior to 9/11 - Terrorism was just a convenient excuse post 9/11 to push for the wish list of powers they wanted before, but couldn't get because of the public's resistance.

    The DEA, and the War on Drugs in general, has had such a caustic effect on our society, from turning police into a paramilitary force with the power to seize property or money on suspicion alone, with an unquenchable thirst for all of our information - nevermind how many lives have been ruined for nothing more than choosing a socially unacceptable way to get fucked up.

  11. Re:Copyrighting APIs on Judge Blasts Oracle's Attempt To Overturn Pro-Google Jury Verdict (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    It's also interesting to note that in the interest of getting a better understanding of the issues involved in the case, the judge (William Alsup) took the time to learn to program in Java. If only more judges (or politicians for that matter) could be bothered to be this tech savvy!

    http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/...

  12. What surprises me more is that we're not using the legitimate peaceful tools we have at hand to make our government respond and stop doing this shit - i.e., vote enough of the politicians out of office, and they become surprisingly responsive to your concerns. If we can't even be arsed to do that, what makes you think anyone is going to turn to more violent means?

  13. Re:What exactly ... on PayPal Denies Twitch Troll $50,000 Worth In Refunds (ubergizmo.com) · · Score: 2

    He's the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, in U.S. professional football. I tried to pick someone that was both "good", and also not known for being a jerk/disliked by various people.

    Maybe I should have gone with a car analogy, and cited a Nascar driver, but I'm not as familiar to make a choice there. :)

  14. Re:What exactly ... on PayPal Denies Twitch Troll $50,000 Worth In Refunds (ubergizmo.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, no. Twitch has been very quick to crack down on anything remotely sexual. At most you'll find attractive female streamers wearing low cut tops while playing games, but not much beyond that. The donations bit tends to come more from the fact that the best streamers are entertaining, because not only are they good at the game, but they're good at narrating what they're doing, and making it more interesting to watch.

    To try and explain it better, imagine if instead of just watching Aaron Rodgers play football (or any other pro athlete in their sport), but instead of maybe having a couple of outside commentators, you're watching him play, from his point of view, while he tells you what he's doing and why, chatting and interacting with you, and giving you tips on how to do better in your own games. How cool would that be? Nevermind that you can also chat with everyone else watching, too. And while most of the gamers on Twitch aren't on quite that level, even some of those with a smaller following can do alright, with people chipping in to buy pizza for them. Some of them will also run promotions, give away codes for free games, etc. It's probably not for everyone, but it can be very entertaining.

  15. Re:Backwards nation that is dying on Uber Raises $3.5 Billion From Saudi Arabia (fortune.com) · · Score: 2

    You're missing the country they want to hit most of all - Iran.

  16. Re:It works only if it can answer questions like on Bill Gates: AI Is The 'Holy Grail' (mashable.com) · · Score: 1

    It only works if it understands and comprehends the structure of the joke, why it's funny, and when and how it's appropriate to interject references to the movie into an otherwise unrelated discussion. Besides, strange tech moguls pontificating in conferences distributing code is no basis for a system of intelligence. Supreme artificial intelligence will derive from a mandate from masses of coders, not from some farcical technorati ceremony.

  17. Re:Why not freeze growth? on We Need To Build Industrial Zones In Space In Order To Save Earth, Says Jeff Bezos (cnbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Population growth has already gone negative in most advanced countries. The only ones who still have growing populations, such as the USA, do so because of immigration, and would be negative if there was no immigration, because deaths would outpace births. It's even slowing in less developed countries, too. Even India's population will probably peak sometime in the next half century, and probably at a lower point than current estimates expect, because population estimates have tended to be way too high - go ask China about how their estimates wound up. They overestimated how much they'd need to slow population growth, and now have gone significantly negative (albeit not as much so as South Korea or Japan). Why is it slowing? Because of a number of factors, but mostly access to birth control and lack of a need to have tons of children in a moderately advanced society.

    So bottom line, we won't NEED to do anything to freeze population growth, other than to provide people with family planning access, and let them make their own choices. If anything, you're going to see governments trying to encourage people to have more kids, in order to keep the population level stable.

  18. Re:The enemy of my enemy is my friend on Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Secretly Bankrolled Hulk Hogan's Lawsuit Against Gawker: Reports (gawker.com) · · Score: 1

    Many libertarians are very concerned about privacy, especially in the digital rights category. Whether or not they agree with the government being the ones to enforce a right to privacy is another question, though.

  19. Re:Someone explain the Gawker mentality to me on Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Secretly Bankrolled Hulk Hogan's Lawsuit Against Gawker: Reports (gawker.com) · · Score: 1

    From what I've seen and heard, the general operating tone of Gawker and its sub-sites is snark. It varies a lot between some of the writers and editors, as well as some of the sites themselves (some are far more interesting/tolerable/what have you than others), and many of the writers I liked that used to work there have moved on to better things.

    Some of it may have more to do with the subject matter, though. Things like politics, entertainment, and sports play a lot more into the personalities involved, whereas I tend to notice less of it on, say, jalopnik (which focuses on cars/etc).

  20. Re:The enemy of my enemy is my friend on Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Secretly Bankrolled Hulk Hogan's Lawsuit Against Gawker: Reports (gawker.com) · · Score: 3

    If you read through to some of the reporting on this, you'll find that it wasn't just the Hulk Hogan lawsuit - he's arranged for many more. What's more, the lawyers in the case were pursuing tactics that wouldn't make sense if they were actually trying to maximize the award to their client, but would absolutely make sense if they were simply trying to attack Gawker without care as to whether Hogan actually gets any money out of it.

    So, in short, they're not trying to make Gawker pay for their crimes, they're trying to make Gawker go bankrupt any way they can. That's a huge distinction.

  21. Re:The enemy of my enemy is my friend on Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Secretly Bankrolled Hulk Hogan's Lawsuit Against Gawker: Reports (gawker.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So if he decides he doesn't like you, he can sue the crap out of you on multiple fronts, without his own name getting dragged into it? You're fine with trying to fight off all those lawsuits, where you'll go bankrupt even if you win?

    The ability of the rich to try and sue someone into compliance, or at least silence, is nothing new, and is troubling on its own, but at least when they're suing directly they open themselves to discovery. Donald Trump once sued a journalist for claiming he was worth less than $250 million, but that led to him being forced to release tax documents to the court as part of it, so everyone could see what the truth actually was. This is different, because he's not even a first party to it, he's just recruiting and bankrolling people to sue them.

    And while Gawker isn't exactly a pure and noble martyr that we should feel bad about, to put it mildly, the notion that someone rich enough can use the court system in this manner to destroy a news organization, even a terrible tabloid one, just because he doesn't like what it says, should scare us. It's a chilling effect that may have significant repercussions on reporting on the activities of the rich and powerful in general.

  22. Re:In other news... on Sorry, There's Nothing Magical About Breakfast (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    In addition to his explanation that it's only about 50-60 minutes, "express" in this case likely refers to the number of stops it makes, not how fast it goes. A non-express bus likely hits every stop, whereas the express one may skip several, or just go straight from starting point A to end point B.

  23. Re:The big question? on How Copyright Law Is Being Misused To Remove Material From the Internet (theguardian.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because Google is a U.S. company. As I understand it, foreign entities can submit DMCA requests to Google for anything related to Google (USA).

    It does raise some interesting questions, though, as many companies such as Google really are transnational in scope and activity, yet are subject to specific operating laws in various countries which have ramifications even for people not living in those countries, whether it's a DMCA request in the USA taking down content from people in Europe, or a Right to be Forgotten request removing links to US news stories about someone in France, even for US residents making web searches in the USA. It's really kind of screwed up.

  24. Re:A minute too late on Real-Life RoboCop Guards Shopping Centers In California (metro.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Just going to say, it's not like we've never tried having places where everyone was carrying guns. It's called the Wild West.

    And maybe you think that works better, but some of the rest of us don't. I do think that you can't just put up a sign that says "No guns here!" and pretend like that's going to solve all of our problems with shootings, but blithely suggesting that everyone walk around armed all the time isn't exactly a good solution, either.

  25. Both of those questions are important, and really, the answers will likely be the same - it's just that one is going to get asked first. Some jobs will get automated early, others will take more time, but will eventually go too.

    Some stuff is already looking to be on the early chopping block - anyone who operates a vehicle, for one, from taxis to delivery drivers to long haul truckers. It's not all going to be the menial stuff right away, because anything that requires some significant degree of human judgment, especially combined with manual dexterity, may be harder to replace, but eventually we'll probably get multipurpose robots that will start to do those too.

    Probably one of the last things that will go is those things that we hesitate to take humans entirely out of the loop on, whether that be law, medicine, IT security, warfare, or whatnot, even if we have the technical capability to do so.