Iran's politics are more complex than most people outside the region realize. Iran's parliament has at least one seat set aside for a Jew (with others set aside for other religious minorities). Ahmadinejad has certain powers, but may always be overruled by either Ayatollah Khamenei or the council that sits between the elected government and Khamenei. He's been put in his place by both at various times, and his position as president is purely by their graces.
It's no utopia for the Persian Jews. One of my former supervisors was from there, having fled with the fall of the shah because there was a strong backlash against the Jews present in several parts of the country. However, she still has (or had a few years ago) a large family there that did quite well.
Exxon has insisted from the beginning that they weren't truly liable, despite long-running recommendations within the shipping industry to use double-hull vessels for tankers, their failure to properly maintain the ship's equipment, failure to ensure that the crew was knowledgeable about current Coast Guard procedures, and the presence of crew who were not adequately rested (and possibly understaffed), not to mention a skipper who, though he was sleeping in his cabin, was drunk at the time.
Even if something happens out of negligence, that doesn't mean that it's not an accident. BP didn't put the rig out there with the intention of having it explode. People do go to prison for accidents that arise from negligence, such as distracted driving leading them to barrel through an intersection on a red light. Blame should be placed, but despite your insistence that you're not calling for torches and pitchforks, you're still calling for the crushing of a company without bothering to let the experts find out where it should be placed. I've read stories from several sides, and there is still a lot to hash out and the evidence is still being gathered. I'm willing to wait for it and not let my emotions drag me into deciding ahead of it.
They've already started paying. They started setting aside money even before their inept CEO got fired for complaining that he couldn't take his vacation. BP's response is completely different from Exxon's, who has been fighting for two decades to keep its costs under a billion dollars, especially since BP has accepted that the costs may well go much higher than the initial $20 billion set aside for damages.
It's important as well to figure out who is at fault. Three companies were involved. One may have primary culpability, or two or all three may share blame. But this idea of just killing a company this big without even providing for a trial to figure things out is inane. Summary corporate execution puts companies in a state of near zero investment in anything that might even have a remote chance of going wrong -- which will do even more damage to the economy.
The click when you release the mic switch, and the fact that you've shut up, seem to work well enough.
ATC in the Southern Calfornia region appears to rely on patterns more than a click or silence, as they start talking the instant I've finished calling my tail number and a split second before I've released the mic switch. Then again, it does get pretty busy here: I've had to make six calls to SoCal Departure before I was acknowledged, and when I was, I was told to switch to another frequency because I'd already moved into another controller's area.:)
Different group? The album is by Christopher Tin, who is the same composer as was credited in the game. I haven't heard what was on the album, but I bet it isn't far from what was in the game, if it was different at all.
And that and the interview were done after the events that Keller alleges, after Amnesty International condemned the release of names.
I'm not sure about the idea that this does no damage, though. Israel and the Palestinian Authority have both appeared in Wikileaks documents saying that they are willing to concede certain things that they have publicly said are not on the table, where Israel's Netanyahu has reportedly supported land swaps and the PA's willingness to concede the right of return. Putting these things out in the public can damage standings and further delay what little there is of the peace process.
I don't have a lot of reason to trust Assange, either. I like the idea of Wikileaks. Properly done, it can help to keep governments in line. But that doesn't mean that Assange isn't a self-righteous bastard whose desire to see the US get its comeuppance means that he doesn't care if a few people get trampled along the way. Considering that Wikileaks did post unredacted material, what Keller said is believable. In any case, Keller isn't the only one claiming things like this. The Guardian has made similar public claims regarding their interactions, and other papers that have had contact with him have also expressed their frustration in getting him to comply with basic journalistic principles.
NYT Editor Bill Keller was on NPR's Fresh Air last week. Here's what he had to say about Assange and redaction:
GROSS: You say: We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator. But he was a man who clearly had his own agenda. What do you think his agenda was?
Mr. KELLER: Well, as I said earlier, I think it was a little murky. He professes a kind of ideology of transparency, that, you know, information should be free.
He, at the outset, even resisted the idea - when we and the other news organizations put it to him that we were going to redact the names of ordinary Afghans and Iraqis who had talked to the American military because it would put their lives at risk, he seemed quite indifferent to that. And over time, he, I think, came around to the view that at least, from a public relations point of view, it was maybe better to allow for a certain amount of editing out of things that could cost lives.
GROSS: Really? He seemed indifferent to the fact that publication with those names could cost lives?
Mr. KELLER: You know, the Guardian is also publishing its own book on the WikiLeaks episode, mostly a profile of Julian Assange based on their considerably more detailed and extensive interactions with him. And what they report in that book was that - in one of the early conversations, when they said, well, you know, the Times and the Guardian would want to edit out the names of, you know, ordinary Afghans, Assange's reaction was essentially: Well, they're informants. You know, there's no reason for protecting them.
GROSS: Do you think it was you and the editors - like, you and your people and the staff of the Guardian that convinced him that he needed to edit out some names?
Mr. KELLER: I think probably not. I mean, I think we may have played some role, but I think two other factors eventually convinced him to try and redact the documents in that way.
One was there were a number of people within WikiLeaks who felt very strongly that you should not just put this raw material out, that it would get people killed, and they had some raging fights within WikiLeaks over that issue.
Another was that when WikiLeaks posted its first batch of documents, which were the Afghanistan war logs, they did, in fact, include a number of un-redacted names of ordinary Afghans who had spoken to the military. And there was quite an outcry about that - not just from the United States government, which I think Julian Assange could not have cared less about, but from organizations like Amnesty International, which I think he did care about.
Essentially, until it looked like certain organizations were going to start considering it a bad idea, he resisted the idea of editing out names. He didn't care if people got killed if they were working with the US or NATO.
The Federal Reserve is a quasi-governmental organization -- much like the post office -- that functions as a central bank. Its directors are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, is subject to government oversight, and operates at the pleasure of the Congress, giving it a public aspect. Its decisions are not directly subject to approval by the three branches, giving it a private aspect. A central bank's primary role is controlling the money supply and handling interest rates, and the Fed does this. Central banks do loan money to other banks to help them maintain liquidity, as preserving the stability of the banking system is another of a central bank's core roles. Whether other central banks may loan money to their own governments, I'm not sure, but that doesn't seem to me to be too far a reach when a government allows its own public agencies to borrow from others.
You may disagree, but there have been numerous cases filed about the Fed over the decades since it was created, and the Supreme Court has never found it to violate the Constitution. Perhaps you have a different argument than those that came before that you would like to explain.
The ownership rate is lower, yes, but there are still a lot of cars there. People carpool there on a basis that makes California politicians green with envy. The number of bus lines available makes those five-minute walks few and far between; my friends there knew what trains and subways to use to which stops that had lines departing from just up/down the stairs to drop them off almost in front of the destinations. The only exception to this was in residential areas, and even that's not much of a walk.
And I maintain that the average New York City resident is no healthier than most of the rest of the nation.
There are a few who have suggested that the Cold War be considered World War III. In the proxy wars fought around the world, millions died in a fight for ideological control (or at least influence) over large swaths of territory, often hiding it by calling it an intervention for the good of the citizenry. It's not the best argument, but it's understandable.
It's also possible that TaoPhoenix figures that we'll survive a third hot war with civilization intact, but not so much for the fourth.
Personally I think it time to replace the dollar and take control of monetary policy away from the FED returning it to Congress as the constitution dictates.
The Constitution also states that only Congress has the power to coin money, but that doesn't mean that members of Congress were expected to spend time at the mint themselves. That's where the Necessary and Proper Clause comes into play. The Supreme Court ruled in McCulloch v. Maryland that the Congress can create a central bank to help handle fiduciary policy.
It costs the same to build a mile of interstate as it does to lay a mile of high speed track.
Freeways in Southern California cost $1 billion per mile for a new build. That's much more expensive than HSR track.
That doesn't mean that high speed rail is so great. California's HSR boondoggle is expected to cost $40 billion for the original path from LA to San Francisco, a distance of only about 350 miles, and that's refurbish and reusing existing rail lines in some cases. Most of that is also through flat land. Even at half of that cost per mile, an HSR link from DFW to DC would be around around $68.5 billion. At $100 per ticket devoted to covering construction costs and not factoring in inflation, interest, or the like, it would need 34,250,000 riders per year for 20 years (almost 94,000 per day) to cover that cost in 20 years, and that doesn't count the cost of the trains, maintenance, or personnel.
see people in cities who walk, like NYC, are healthier then suburbanites who drive
Have you ever been to NYC? I spent a week there visiting three of the five boroughs, and the average person in NYC is no healthier than in most other cities in the US. Yes, they have a better public transportation system than most large cities, but that tends to mean that you don't have to walk as far between public transit points.
As for being a city that walks, there are still a LOT of cars there.
The touchpoint for Tunisia was not Wikileaks, but a young, college-educated man trying to earn a meager living for his family through selling vegetables from a cart because he could find no other job. He didn't have the money to pay the bribes necessary to get a permit, and the police took away his only means of earning a living. On top of the confiscation, and because he refused to pay a bribe to get the cart back, the police assaulted him and insulted his family. When he went to protest, he was ignored, so he went and got some flammable liquid, doused himself with it, and ignited it. Demonstrations started shortly after this, and the police cracked down on them, escalating the demonstration to riots. It spiraled from there.
It depends on what you're doing. Our firewalls run on a hardened BSD platform, are application proxy firewalls (rejecting anything that doesn't match the protocol), and can handle 5Gbps or more. Our external pipe isn't that big, peaking at 1Gbps for bursts (subscribed is well below that), so we run out of pipe before we cap the firewall's raw throughput.
Placing the servers behind the firewall, though, gives you other aspects of security, including logging (some better than others), single-point alerts, and a second restriction from another vendor. Your servers may run Windows or Linux and despite running a firewall be vulnerable to an attack against their network stack, but your firewall may reject the malformed packet because its (often hardened) Linux or BSD stack doesn't allow it through.
I still have a couple of USR external modems at home. I need to get a USB-DB9 converter to use them on my current systems, but there's something about having the old tech around that I find comforting.
Then again, it's not terribly useful for me, as my landline is VOIP through Vonage. If my cablemodem goes down, so does my ability to use a POTS modem. Maybe the old lady a few doors down will let me use hers.:\
There are legal obligations regarding the protection of that material. It's covered under federal HIPAA regulations and state personal records regulations.
I work in a government office. We don't worry about redacting things as we create them. They are redacted if and when necessary for a filed records request; records that have personal information, health records, etc., are not released without a subpoena, and even then, it may be fought if there is a reasonable belief that it violates privacy laws. We've never taken as long as Alaska has in this case, but we have missed our window due to the volume of records, particularly if it's e-mail. The courts have generally been forgiving in these cases, though firm in their directives to come up with the records as quickly as possible.
There are exceptions for when e-mail may have sensitive records. Not everything that goes into e-mail is a record accessible to the public. For example, e-mail regarding personnel issues, health records, or ongoing litigation may be subject to redaction or withholding. That can provide a reasonable reason to extend beyond ten days. However, anything much beyond a month, even for many thousands of records, is not generally considered acceptable. (I'm not saying that this kind of information is the case here, just that there are situations that can delay such releases.)
California is not allowed by its own constitution from having a budget deficit. It means a lot of numbers games like holding tax refunds until July (the budget year is July-June) or moving the last paycheck for employees in June to July 1, but that just buys a little bit of time and pushes the obligation to the next year. It doesn't prevent bonds, but bonds have to be approved by the voters. Unfortunately, voters have been willing to pass most of them over the past few years, adding tens of billions in long-term obligations.
I make plenty of money to pay for a second cell phone even though I'm not in management. That doesn't mean that I will do that, though.
Besides, if I'm paying for it, there is an issue with the data thereon. Suppose I pay for my Blackberry. The employer then has far less say over what I can or cannot do with it, including inappropriate web use, export of sensitive data, or policy compliance. If they own the cell phone and issue it, there is much less leeway over such issues.
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Iran's politics are more complex than most people outside the region realize. Iran's parliament has at least one seat set aside for a Jew (with others set aside for other religious minorities). Ahmadinejad has certain powers, but may always be overruled by either Ayatollah Khamenei or the council that sits between the elected government and Khamenei. He's been put in his place by both at various times, and his position as president is purely by their graces.
It's no utopia for the Persian Jews. One of my former supervisors was from there, having fled with the fall of the shah because there was a strong backlash against the Jews present in several parts of the country. However, she still has (or had a few years ago) a large family there that did quite well.
Exxon has insisted from the beginning that they weren't truly liable, despite long-running recommendations within the shipping industry to use double-hull vessels for tankers, their failure to properly maintain the ship's equipment, failure to ensure that the crew was knowledgeable about current Coast Guard procedures, and the presence of crew who were not adequately rested (and possibly understaffed), not to mention a skipper who, though he was sleeping in his cabin, was drunk at the time.
Even if something happens out of negligence, that doesn't mean that it's not an accident. BP didn't put the rig out there with the intention of having it explode. People do go to prison for accidents that arise from negligence, such as distracted driving leading them to barrel through an intersection on a red light. Blame should be placed, but despite your insistence that you're not calling for torches and pitchforks, you're still calling for the crushing of a company without bothering to let the experts find out where it should be placed. I've read stories from several sides, and there is still a lot to hash out and the evidence is still being gathered. I'm willing to wait for it and not let my emotions drag me into deciding ahead of it.
Bacteria don't have babies, either.
They've already started paying. They started setting aside money even before their inept CEO got fired for complaining that he couldn't take his vacation. BP's response is completely different from Exxon's, who has been fighting for two decades to keep its costs under a billion dollars, especially since BP has accepted that the costs may well go much higher than the initial $20 billion set aside for damages.
It's important as well to figure out who is at fault. Three companies were involved. One may have primary culpability, or two or all three may share blame. But this idea of just killing a company this big without even providing for a trial to figure things out is inane. Summary corporate execution puts companies in a state of near zero investment in anything that might even have a remote chance of going wrong -- which will do even more damage to the economy.
Because it's an AC, and ACs start at zero.
ATC in the Southern Calfornia region appears to rely on patterns more than a click or silence, as they start talking the instant I've finished calling my tail number and a split second before I've released the mic switch. Then again, it does get pretty busy here: I've had to make six calls to SoCal Departure before I was acknowledged, and when I was, I was told to switch to another frequency because I'd already moved into another controller's area. :)
Different group? The album is by Christopher Tin, who is the same composer as was credited in the game. I haven't heard what was on the album, but I bet it isn't far from what was in the game, if it was different at all.
And that and the interview were done after the events that Keller alleges, after Amnesty International condemned the release of names.
I'm not sure about the idea that this does no damage, though. Israel and the Palestinian Authority have both appeared in Wikileaks documents saying that they are willing to concede certain things that they have publicly said are not on the table, where Israel's Netanyahu has reportedly supported land swaps and the PA's willingness to concede the right of return. Putting these things out in the public can damage standings and further delay what little there is of the peace process.
I don't have a lot of reason to trust Assange, either. I like the idea of Wikileaks. Properly done, it can help to keep governments in line. But that doesn't mean that Assange isn't a self-righteous bastard whose desire to see the US get its comeuppance means that he doesn't care if a few people get trampled along the way. Considering that Wikileaks did post unredacted material, what Keller said is believable. In any case, Keller isn't the only one claiming things like this. The Guardian has made similar public claims regarding their interactions, and other papers that have had contact with him have also expressed their frustration in getting him to comply with basic journalistic principles.
NYT Editor Bill Keller was on NPR's Fresh Air last week. Here's what he had to say about Assange and redaction:
Essentially, until it looked like certain organizations were going to start considering it a bad idea, he resisted the idea of editing out names. He didn't care if people got killed if they were working with the US or NATO.
The Federal Reserve is a quasi-governmental organization -- much like the post office -- that functions as a central bank. Its directors are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, is subject to government oversight, and operates at the pleasure of the Congress, giving it a public aspect. Its decisions are not directly subject to approval by the three branches, giving it a private aspect. A central bank's primary role is controlling the money supply and handling interest rates, and the Fed does this. Central banks do loan money to other banks to help them maintain liquidity, as preserving the stability of the banking system is another of a central bank's core roles. Whether other central banks may loan money to their own governments, I'm not sure, but that doesn't seem to me to be too far a reach when a government allows its own public agencies to borrow from others.
You may disagree, but there have been numerous cases filed about the Fed over the decades since it was created, and the Supreme Court has never found it to violate the Constitution. Perhaps you have a different argument than those that came before that you would like to explain.
The ownership rate is lower, yes, but there are still a lot of cars there. People carpool there on a basis that makes California politicians green with envy. The number of bus lines available makes those five-minute walks few and far between; my friends there knew what trains and subways to use to which stops that had lines departing from just up/down the stairs to drop them off almost in front of the destinations. The only exception to this was in residential areas, and even that's not much of a walk.
And I maintain that the average New York City resident is no healthier than most of the rest of the nation.
There are a few who have suggested that the Cold War be considered World War III. In the proxy wars fought around the world, millions died in a fight for ideological control (or at least influence) over large swaths of territory, often hiding it by calling it an intervention for the good of the citizenry. It's not the best argument, but it's understandable.
It's also possible that TaoPhoenix figures that we'll survive a third hot war with civilization intact, but not so much for the fourth.
The Constitution also states that only Congress has the power to coin money, but that doesn't mean that members of Congress were expected to spend time at the mint themselves. That's where the Necessary and Proper Clause comes into play. The Supreme Court ruled in McCulloch v. Maryland that the Congress can create a central bank to help handle fiduciary policy.
It costs the same to build a mile of interstate as it does to lay a mile of high speed track.
Freeways in Southern California cost $1 billion per mile for a new build. That's much more expensive than HSR track.
That doesn't mean that high speed rail is so great. California's HSR boondoggle is expected to cost $40 billion for the original path from LA to San Francisco, a distance of only about 350 miles, and that's refurbish and reusing existing rail lines in some cases. Most of that is also through flat land. Even at half of that cost per mile, an HSR link from DFW to DC would be around around $68.5 billion. At $100 per ticket devoted to covering construction costs and not factoring in inflation, interest, or the like, it would need 34,250,000 riders per year for 20 years (almost 94,000 per day) to cover that cost in 20 years, and that doesn't count the cost of the trains, maintenance, or personnel.
Have you ever been to NYC? I spent a week there visiting three of the five boroughs, and the average person in NYC is no healthier than in most other cities in the US. Yes, they have a better public transportation system than most large cities, but that tends to mean that you don't have to walk as far between public transit points.
As for being a city that walks, there are still a LOT of cars there.
Nobel Prize candidates must be living. The young man died of his burns in early January.
The touchpoint for Tunisia was not Wikileaks, but a young, college-educated man trying to earn a meager living for his family through selling vegetables from a cart because he could find no other job. He didn't have the money to pay the bribes necessary to get a permit, and the police took away his only means of earning a living. On top of the confiscation, and because he refused to pay a bribe to get the cart back, the police assaulted him and insulted his family. When he went to protest, he was ignored, so he went and got some flammable liquid, doused himself with it, and ignited it. Demonstrations started shortly after this, and the police cracked down on them, escalating the demonstration to riots. It spiraled from there.
It depends on what you're doing. Our firewalls run on a hardened BSD platform, are application proxy firewalls (rejecting anything that doesn't match the protocol), and can handle 5Gbps or more. Our external pipe isn't that big, peaking at 1Gbps for bursts (subscribed is well below that), so we run out of pipe before we cap the firewall's raw throughput.
Placing the servers behind the firewall, though, gives you other aspects of security, including logging (some better than others), single-point alerts, and a second restriction from another vendor. Your servers may run Windows or Linux and despite running a firewall be vulnerable to an attack against their network stack, but your firewall may reject the malformed packet because its (often hardened) Linux or BSD stack doesn't allow it through.
I still have a couple of USR external modems at home. I need to get a USB-DB9 converter to use them on my current systems, but there's something about having the old tech around that I find comforting.
Then again, it's not terribly useful for me, as my landline is VOIP through Vonage. If my cablemodem goes down, so does my ability to use a POTS modem. Maybe the old lady a few doors down will let me use hers. :\
There are legal obligations regarding the protection of that material. It's covered under federal HIPAA regulations and state personal records regulations.
I work in a government office. We don't worry about redacting things as we create them. They are redacted if and when necessary for a filed records request; records that have personal information, health records, etc., are not released without a subpoena, and even then, it may be fought if there is a reasonable belief that it violates privacy laws. We've never taken as long as Alaska has in this case, but we have missed our window due to the volume of records, particularly if it's e-mail. The courts have generally been forgiving in these cases, though firm in their directives to come up with the records as quickly as possible.
There are exceptions for when e-mail may have sensitive records. Not everything that goes into e-mail is a record accessible to the public. For example, e-mail regarding personnel issues, health records, or ongoing litigation may be subject to redaction or withholding. That can provide a reasonable reason to extend beyond ten days. However, anything much beyond a month, even for many thousands of records, is not generally considered acceptable. (I'm not saying that this kind of information is the case here, just that there are situations that can delay such releases.)
Too long and drawn out. I got bored half-way through. Good concept, but they tried to do too much with it.
California is not allowed by its own constitution from having a budget deficit. It means a lot of numbers games like holding tax refunds until July (the budget year is July-June) or moving the last paycheck for employees in June to July 1, but that just buys a little bit of time and pushes the obligation to the next year. It doesn't prevent bonds, but bonds have to be approved by the voters. Unfortunately, voters have been willing to pass most of them over the past few years, adding tens of billions in long-term obligations.
I make plenty of money to pay for a second cell phone even though I'm not in management. That doesn't mean that I will do that, though.
Besides, if I'm paying for it, there is an issue with the data thereon. Suppose I pay for my Blackberry. The employer then has far less say over what I can or cannot do with it, including inappropriate web use, export of sensitive data, or policy compliance. If they own the cell phone and issue it, there is much less leeway over such issues.