Bull, even Holder had to choose his word wisely and talked about "filling the holes" in our present laws. The problem is that the "holes" he's talking about are there for a reason, it's called freedom of speech. Sure, they can go after the people that gave the documents to Wikileaks, assuming they can catch them, and those people have, most definitely, broken the law. However, Wikileaks is acting as a journalistic organization. You may not like their judgement (i.e. you may not agree with their politics) in what to publish or the quality of their attempts to redact sensitive information, but that doesn't make it a crime. You'll note, that the NY Times is helping Wikileaks release these documents and I believe I've heard that they are, also, helping to redact sensitive info from them. Where is all the political outcry to put a bullet in the heads of the Time's editorial staff? Hell, THEY'RE AMERICAN CITIZENS LIVING AND WORKING IN THE US! Holder could take a short car ride from DC to NYC and arrest them personally. He won't, because he knows that what their doing is legitimate expression of their freedom of speech rights as journalists and that they are a powerful enough organization to effectively defend themselves in court. Assange, on the other hand, is a much easier target to get away with smearing. THAT DOESN'T MAKE DOING SO RIGHT.
Of course, the other "holes" he's talking about are the fact that Assange is a foreign citizen who has been living in a non-extradition treaty country. Even if Holder and the rest of the government can rush absurd law changes into effect to cover their bruised egos it doesn't mean they have any legal jurisdiction over the man.
A side note to all of this, and one of the reasons I think they are going after him so hard to distract away from it, is that at least one of the documents he released may, actually, constitute evidence of Hillary Clinton commiting a serious federal crime. The understanding I've been given from some of the news reports is that, when we got together with the rest of the world to create the UN, we signed treaties that, explicitely, said diplomats assigned to the UN would never be used for espionage. IANAL, but my understanding is that according to US law (which I believe is, actually, in the body of the Constitution) when we sign a treaty with a foreign country(s) it become legally binding US law. If she really did, as the news reports have said, order UN diplomats to spy on foreign dignitaries (and, yes, only an idiot would think that telling them to steal credit card numbers is anything other than bald faced espionage) then that would seem to be an open-and-shut case of a crime being commited. I'm not saying this as a Republican/Conservative (in truth, while I'm not a huge fan of the Democrats, I tend to skew liberal in my beliefs and I HATE the Republican party). I'm pointing this out because, if it's true, I consider this kind of abuse of the law by a high ranking official a crime that should land them in Levenworth.
Nah, I don't think they're anywhere near that emotionally invested. Remember, we're talking about the lawyers here, not the RIAA/MPAA themselves. For the lawyers, all they're probably interested in is the money. They're not pissed off because it gets in the way of their "holy crusade" because, the truth is, they'll probably still win most of these cases in the end. What they're so pissed off about is that he threw a wrench in their get rich quick scheme. Instead of being able to bully people into paying $2500 a pop with very little bill-able lawyer time, now they'll have to file their claims in a huge number of different courts across the country and will, likely, have to actually fight some of the cases. With all that interference, they might not be able to make the huge profit they were drooling over initially.
Ok, IANAL and I hate copyright trolls like this company but I'm going to have to play devil's advocate here for a bit. I don't see your point about the third claim. Sure, newpapers are for-profit but you still can't just copy a story from a newspaper into your computer and post it, in it's entirety, onto your blog and not claim that I'm not, potentially, costing them sales.
I understand that I can share the newpaper I purchased with other people but that only works so far. In reality, most people don't have a large enough social network for that to be practical on a scale that would impact the newpaper's sales significantly. Even if you did have enough friends who were interested in passing the same paper around, the physical nature of a newpaper would ensure that, eventually, it would break down and become unreadable from physical abuse. In the end, from a practical standpoint, people will have to, eventually, buy more copies of the newspaper (assuming it's an interesting enough article to attract attention but, if it weren't, you wouldn't be reading/sharing it in the first place)..
On the other hand, by placing the full paper on their website, this non-profit has, in a very practical way, eliminated most of the need of people looking to read that article to pay for a copy. I've seen this very thing work out myself. There have been many times when I'm looking for research papers on a specific topic. Often, I will find the name of a paper that matched what I'm looking for. Sometimes, that paper will be behind a pay-wall and sometimes it will have been posted online free of charge as well (usually in a slightly updated form by the professor who originally wrote it). If there's a free copy available, you can bet that I'm not going to shell out the money to the journal for access to the copy hidden behind the paywall. Bare in mind, while we aren't talking about something with the same potential readership as a newspaper article (since it's a specialized research paper), research journal articles cost much much more per copy when buying access through a pay-wall than even a whole copy of a newspaper. This means that while the potential number of sales they may have eliminated for that single research paper may be much lower than even what one person could do by sharing their morning paper, the actual amount of money they have cost the copyright holder may be much higher.
All of this is why, even though I hate copyright trolls and don't like to see non-profit groups dragged through the courts, I think the non-profit is, legally at least, in the wrong.
Hell, at that point you don't even have to worry about orbiting or atmospheric re-entry when you get there. Just line up the shot and let them go splat when they get there.
Because it's a demonstration to the Chinese military, not the Chinese people. Unlike the people, the Chinese military has high powered radar system and satellites that can, probably, see ICBM launches all over the world. You, specifically, wouldn't want to launch the missile closer to them because you wouldn't want them to confuse it with a real attack.
Ironically, even BSG had projectile weapons. It was one of the things I liked about it because its, relatively, realistic. It doesn't look like anything is likely to surpass projectile weapons in efficiency for a long time, if ever, in the real world. That said, there were plenty of other things in Caprica that sucked such as the slow pacing and the horrible angsty drama.
The problem is that is WAS targeted at a different audience. I can remember seeing interviews with Moore, when they first announced it, where it came right out and admitted that they were aiming it at a different demographic because they wanted to pull in more women viewers. I think they were aiming for a sci-fi themed soap opera. All they ended up doing was alienating their fans.
Also, the more time we spend improving human habitation equipment and propulsion in LEO and on the moon, the faster and safer a trip to Mars will be. One of the biggest issues with going to Mars (or anywhere else that far away) is long term radiation exposure. More time spent developing human space habitation tech means better radiation shielding and anti-radiation medicine. Faster travel times (from better propulsion methods) means less time for the crew to be exposed. If we tried to go with today's tech, it would require a much more massive ship to shield the crew adequately for the much longer trip which would, obviously, be massively more expensive.
I, like most people, think that idea was absurd. That said, I will worry about it when they announce their intention to revive it. I'm not going to whine about something that they've shelved, there are too many other scummy practices going on in the game industry that are, actually, being actively implemented.
It depends, entirely, on where you live. There are, at the very least, some isolated locations in the US where electric heat is, actually, cheaper than gas/oil/etc. Specifically, there is at least one area in Upstate New York where a co-op generates all of the electricity locally. Because it's a co-op, they're not trying to maximize profits and sell the power at cost.
Trickle-down economics (which is what you describe) doesn't work. Modern capitalists (like Bezos and Ballmer) don't limit themselves to hiring Americans and, certainly, don't pay them more than they can get away with. Most money given back to the large companies goes to hiring, mostly, overseas and does nothing to help Americans. This is why Bush's tax cuts were useless at creating jobs. Of course, none of this conversation really matters. You showed yourself to be an irrational wing-nut when you started shooting your mouth off without even having a clue that this had nothing to do with Obama.
The problem is that once you have it applying to things like books, it will be much easier for the software/music lobbyists to pitch a bill that limits the practice to just digital stuff as a "compromise". We call it politics for a reason. Rarely does any one party in a contentious issue get everything they want from new legislation and the only way for the whole system to work is for the people writing and voting on the bills to agree to concessions. The further you let them push it before clamping down in it, the further in their favor the final law is likely to be.
Sometimes, strategies that might otherwise be the optimal path to success are discarded because they violate your core principles. I'm sure that there are times and places where complete eradication of an opposing ethnic group/national population might be the way to gain dominance in a situation, but that doesn't mean that we should let ourselves devolve into that kind of animal.
Our country is founded on the concept of being a Representative Democracy. In order for that system to work, it requires the population to be fully informed of what is going on. Hiding operational details such as the actual count of civilian casualties works to keep American voters in the dark in a manner that ensures that they can't make a truly informed decision. "Just trust us" is only, ever, supposed to work until the end of a single term in office.
Just because it's not a new stance doesn't make it wrong. The Vietnam War showed that operational details can, radically, change public opinion of a conflict. Never forget that we, the voters of the US, are the boss here. We don't get to micro-manage our leaders, but every few years we get to express our right by deciding whether the current leaders stay in place or get replaced. We have a right to be able to make a fully informed decision when we get into the voting booth. Anything less (assuming that we have chosen to stay up-to-date) ceases to be democracy. Of course, specific details (such as the names of sources) should be kept secret, but if the Pentagon had been doing their job in the first place it wouldn't have fallen to an understaffed/inexperienced group like Wikileaks to stumble through it.
Dead members can't cancel their accounts. They are very convenient for padding your membership numbers, which makes you look better to the market analysts/investors. The motivation for them to do the honest thing and remove the accounts is that now, finally, someone pointed it out publicly so the charade is blown and the dishonestly is bad PR.
You may complain about government bloat, but I would rather see them hire the number of people needed to get the job done right. An informed public is the bedrock of a qualified electorate. If that's what it takes to make sure that people can make an informed vote and not be manipulated by the people in power, then do what needs to be done and stop scrimping.
Nothing you mentioned changes that fact that posting isolated "coldest day on record" stories as a way to advocate that global warming is fake constitutes idiocy. As for the other things you mentioned, the roundness of the Earth has been accepted by scientists for about as long as there was such a thing as science. For the most part, only the ignorant/uneducated believe that the world was flat (which, until we developed much better communication technology like the printing press, constituted much of the population).
While many scientists were willing to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, there, most likely, would have been an orderly conversion of scientific consensus were it not for the Roman Catholic Church codifying it as canon and persecuting anyone that disagreed. That kind of blind of blind, ignorant, denial is much closer to the behavior of anti-climate change zealots than to that of scientists.
I believe that it's, actually, a quote often taken out of context. My understanding is that the quote goes something like "Information wants to be free but, at the same time, information wants to be private". I don't think the original writer intended it to be a total endorsement of all information being free.
The correct answer, and ideal situation, would be for the Pentagon to be redacting the personal information and releasing these documents themselves in the first place. Instead, they choose to classify documents in order to manipulate public opinion. Manipulating public opinion blinds voters to the reality of the situation. If voters don't have the complete picture, they can't make an informed vote and we have a de-facto totalitarian state. Military personnel intentionally trying to manipulate public opinion by hiding information (as they've admitted that they do) should be considered an act of treason. Wikileaks is doing what they can because the Pentagon refuses to do their job.
Some of that can be explained by Drudgereport.com posting links to it. He's a huge anti-global warming loony (every time a state/city has a record low temperature, he posts it as "proof" that global warming is a sham). His readers are as crazy as anything out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Bull, even Holder had to choose his word wisely and talked about "filling the holes" in our present laws. The problem is that the "holes" he's talking about are there for a reason, it's called freedom of speech. Sure, they can go after the people that gave the documents to Wikileaks, assuming they can catch them, and those people have, most definitely, broken the law. However, Wikileaks is acting as a journalistic organization. You may not like their judgement (i.e. you may not agree with their politics) in what to publish or the quality of their attempts to redact sensitive information, but that doesn't make it a crime. You'll note, that the NY Times is helping Wikileaks release these documents and I believe I've heard that they are, also, helping to redact sensitive info from them. Where is all the political outcry to put a bullet in the heads of the Time's editorial staff? Hell, THEY'RE AMERICAN CITIZENS LIVING AND WORKING IN THE US! Holder could take a short car ride from DC to NYC and arrest them personally. He won't, because he knows that what their doing is legitimate expression of their freedom of speech rights as journalists and that they are a powerful enough organization to effectively defend themselves in court. Assange, on the other hand, is a much easier target to get away with smearing. THAT DOESN'T MAKE DOING SO RIGHT.
Of course, the other "holes" he's talking about are the fact that Assange is a foreign citizen who has been living in a non-extradition treaty country. Even if Holder and the rest of the government can rush absurd law changes into effect to cover their bruised egos it doesn't mean they have any legal jurisdiction over the man.
A side note to all of this, and one of the reasons I think they are going after him so hard to distract away from it, is that at least one of the documents he released may, actually, constitute evidence of Hillary Clinton commiting a serious federal crime. The understanding I've been given from some of the news reports is that, when we got together with the rest of the world to create the UN, we signed treaties that, explicitely, said diplomats assigned to the UN would never be used for espionage. IANAL, but my understanding is that according to US law (which I believe is, actually, in the body of the Constitution) when we sign a treaty with a foreign country(s) it become legally binding US law. If she really did, as the news reports have said, order UN diplomats to spy on foreign dignitaries (and, yes, only an idiot would think that telling them to steal credit card numbers is anything other than bald faced espionage) then that would seem to be an open-and-shut case of a crime being commited. I'm not saying this as a Republican/Conservative (in truth, while I'm not a huge fan of the Democrats, I tend to skew liberal in my beliefs and I HATE the Republican party). I'm pointing this out because, if it's true, I consider this kind of abuse of the law by a high ranking official a crime that should land them in Levenworth.
Nah, I don't think they're anywhere near that emotionally invested. Remember, we're talking about the lawyers here, not the RIAA/MPAA themselves. For the lawyers, all they're probably interested in is the money. They're not pissed off because it gets in the way of their "holy crusade" because, the truth is, they'll probably still win most of these cases in the end. What they're so pissed off about is that he threw a wrench in their get rich quick scheme. Instead of being able to bully people into paying $2500 a pop with very little bill-able lawyer time, now they'll have to file their claims in a huge number of different courts across the country and will, likely, have to actually fight some of the cases. With all that interference, they might not be able to make the huge profit they were drooling over initially.
Ok, IANAL and I hate copyright trolls like this company but I'm going to have to play devil's advocate here for a bit. I don't see your point about the third claim. Sure, newpapers are for-profit but you still can't just copy a story from a newspaper into your computer and post it, in it's entirety, onto your blog and not claim that I'm not, potentially, costing them sales.
I understand that I can share the newpaper I purchased with other people but that only works so far. In reality, most people don't have a large enough social network for that to be practical on a scale that would impact the newpaper's sales significantly. Even if you did have enough friends who were interested in passing the same paper around, the physical nature of a newpaper would ensure that, eventually, it would break down and become unreadable from physical abuse. In the end, from a practical standpoint, people will have to, eventually, buy more copies of the newspaper (assuming it's an interesting enough article to attract attention but, if it weren't, you wouldn't be reading/sharing it in the first place)..
On the other hand, by placing the full paper on their website, this non-profit has, in a very practical way, eliminated most of the need of people looking to read that article to pay for a copy. I've seen this very thing work out myself. There have been many times when I'm looking for research papers on a specific topic. Often, I will find the name of a paper that matched what I'm looking for. Sometimes, that paper will be behind a pay-wall and sometimes it will have been posted online free of charge as well (usually in a slightly updated form by the professor who originally wrote it). If there's a free copy available, you can bet that I'm not going to shell out the money to the journal for access to the copy hidden behind the paywall. Bare in mind, while we aren't talking about something with the same potential readership as a newspaper article (since it's a specialized research paper), research journal articles cost much much more per copy when buying access through a pay-wall than even a whole copy of a newspaper. This means that while the potential number of sales they may have eliminated for that single research paper may be much lower than even what one person could do by sharing their morning paper, the actual amount of money they have cost the copyright holder may be much higher.
All of this is why, even though I hate copyright trolls and don't like to see non-profit groups dragged through the courts, I think the non-profit is, legally at least, in the wrong.
Hell, at that point you don't even have to worry about orbiting or atmospheric re-entry when you get there. Just line up the shot and let them go splat when they get there.
Because it's a demonstration to the Chinese military, not the Chinese people. Unlike the people, the Chinese military has high powered radar system and satellites that can, probably, see ICBM launches all over the world. You, specifically, wouldn't want to launch the missile closer to them because you wouldn't want them to confuse it with a real attack.
Yes, that PA pretty much sums it up.
Ironically, even BSG had projectile weapons. It was one of the things I liked about it because its, relatively, realistic. It doesn't look like anything is likely to surpass projectile weapons in efficiency for a long time, if ever, in the real world. That said, there were plenty of other things in Caprica that sucked such as the slow pacing and the horrible angsty drama.
The problem is that is WAS targeted at a different audience. I can remember seeing interviews with Moore, when they first announced it, where it came right out and admitted that they were aiming it at a different demographic because they wanted to pull in more women viewers. I think they were aiming for a sci-fi themed soap opera. All they ended up doing was alienating their fans.
Also, the more time we spend improving human habitation equipment and propulsion in LEO and on the moon, the faster and safer a trip to Mars will be. One of the biggest issues with going to Mars (or anywhere else that far away) is long term radiation exposure. More time spent developing human space habitation tech means better radiation shielding and anti-radiation medicine. Faster travel times (from better propulsion methods) means less time for the crew to be exposed. If we tried to go with today's tech, it would require a much more massive ship to shield the crew adequately for the much longer trip which would, obviously, be massively more expensive.
I, like most people, think that idea was absurd. That said, I will worry about it when they announce their intention to revive it. I'm not going to whine about something that they've shelved, there are too many other scummy practices going on in the game industry that are, actually, being actively implemented.
It depends, entirely, on where you live. There are, at the very least, some isolated locations in the US where electric heat is, actually, cheaper than gas/oil/etc. Specifically, there is at least one area in Upstate New York where a co-op generates all of the electricity locally. Because it's a co-op, they're not trying to maximize profits and sell the power at cost.
Trickle-down economics (which is what you describe) doesn't work. Modern capitalists (like Bezos and Ballmer) don't limit themselves to hiring Americans and, certainly, don't pay them more than they can get away with. Most money given back to the large companies goes to hiring, mostly, overseas and does nothing to help Americans. This is why Bush's tax cuts were useless at creating jobs. Of course, none of this conversation really matters. You showed yourself to be an irrational wing-nut when you started shooting your mouth off without even having a clue that this had nothing to do with Obama.
Actually, having open alcohol in a moving vehicle is illegal in most places I know of, regardless of whether you are driving or not.
The problem is that once you have it applying to things like books, it will be much easier for the software/music lobbyists to pitch a bill that limits the practice to just digital stuff as a "compromise". We call it politics for a reason. Rarely does any one party in a contentious issue get everything they want from new legislation and the only way for the whole system to work is for the people writing and voting on the bills to agree to concessions. The further you let them push it before clamping down in it, the further in their favor the final law is likely to be.
Specifically, it's shitty rocket science.
Sometimes, strategies that might otherwise be the optimal path to success are discarded because they violate your core principles. I'm sure that there are times and places where complete eradication of an opposing ethnic group/national population might be the way to gain dominance in a situation, but that doesn't mean that we should let ourselves devolve into that kind of animal.
Our country is founded on the concept of being a Representative Democracy. In order for that system to work, it requires the population to be fully informed of what is going on. Hiding operational details such as the actual count of civilian casualties works to keep American voters in the dark in a manner that ensures that they can't make a truly informed decision. "Just trust us" is only, ever, supposed to work until the end of a single term in office.
Just because it's not a new stance doesn't make it wrong. The Vietnam War showed that operational details can, radically, change public opinion of a conflict. Never forget that we, the voters of the US, are the boss here. We don't get to micro-manage our leaders, but every few years we get to express our right by deciding whether the current leaders stay in place or get replaced. We have a right to be able to make a fully informed decision when we get into the voting booth. Anything less (assuming that we have chosen to stay up-to-date) ceases to be democracy. Of course, specific details (such as the names of sources) should be kept secret, but if the Pentagon had been doing their job in the first place it wouldn't have fallen to an understaffed/inexperienced group like Wikileaks to stumble through it.
Dead members can't cancel their accounts. They are very convenient for padding your membership numbers, which makes you look better to the market analysts/investors. The motivation for them to do the honest thing and remove the accounts is that now, finally, someone pointed it out publicly so the charade is blown and the dishonestly is bad PR.
"You need to re-read 1984."
I'm sure he would, but reading is doubleplusungood.
You may complain about government bloat, but I would rather see them hire the number of people needed to get the job done right. An informed public is the bedrock of a qualified electorate. If that's what it takes to make sure that people can make an informed vote and not be manipulated by the people in power, then do what needs to be done and stop scrimping.
Nothing you mentioned changes that fact that posting isolated "coldest day on record" stories as a way to advocate that global warming is fake constitutes idiocy. As for the other things you mentioned, the roundness of the Earth has been accepted by scientists for about as long as there was such a thing as science. For the most part, only the ignorant/uneducated believe that the world was flat (which, until we developed much better communication technology like the printing press, constituted much of the population).
While many scientists were willing to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, there, most likely, would have been an orderly conversion of scientific consensus were it not for the Roman Catholic Church codifying it as canon and persecuting anyone that disagreed. That kind of blind of blind, ignorant, denial is much closer to the behavior of anti-climate change zealots than to that of scientists.
I believe that it's, actually, a quote often taken out of context. My understanding is that the quote goes something like "Information wants to be free but, at the same time, information wants to be private". I don't think the original writer intended it to be a total endorsement of all information being free.
The correct answer, and ideal situation, would be for the Pentagon to be redacting the personal information and releasing these documents themselves in the first place. Instead, they choose to classify documents in order to manipulate public opinion. Manipulating public opinion blinds voters to the reality of the situation. If voters don't have the complete picture, they can't make an informed vote and we have a de-facto totalitarian state. Military personnel intentionally trying to manipulate public opinion by hiding information (as they've admitted that they do) should be considered an act of treason. Wikileaks is doing what they can because the Pentagon refuses to do their job.
Someone please mod this up if it's true.
Some of that can be explained by Drudgereport.com posting links to it. He's a huge anti-global warming loony (every time a state/city has a record low temperature, he posts it as "proof" that global warming is a sham). His readers are as crazy as anything out there.