Right now, there are people who will throw acid on girls for going to school or kill their sisters for dancing in the rain
There are also people who will fabricate grounds for a war that kills half a million people (iraq). Those who will overthrow democratically elected regimes in favor of friendly dictators (iran). Those who will ally with the worst of the wahabists (saudi arabia) while overthrowing a much more progressive secular government.
These are not people who will sit down at the breakfast table and discuss their problems calmly over a croissant. They're going to kill people for what we consider no reason at all, and the only thing they can understand is force
You could say the same about the hawks in the US government.
WE ARE the kinds of people who will sit down and discuss our problems over a croissant.
Apparently we're not. It's been, what, 50 years now and Kissinger has never as much been indicted for war crimes? Can we expect Bush to be?
Right, and you know who ratified the Constitution? The People. If the authority isn't specifically listed in the Constitution, the people have not consented, and the authority is not legitimate.
For example, the person who suddenly brakes when there's no good reason to do so, simply in the hopes of making a car behind them bump them?
It's your responsibilty to ensure that this cannot happen. Whether it's a malicious driver, or a child darting into the street, it's your responsibility to be able to stop.
Not all vehicles have identically stopping distances either....
That's why you leave enough space for your car to stop. You know how far it takes to stop your car, you are in control of the distance between your car and the one in front of you. Again, your responsibility.
Not really. US government authority is granted by the Constitution. Outside those bounds there is no authority at all. Therefore any claims of authority are illegitimate.
If it's not specifically authorized in the Constitution, it's not legitimate authority. Generalized surveillance is prohibited by the 4th amendment, no matter how many representatives or judges have oversight. Congressional oversight of an unconstitutional law does not make that law legitimate, it makes those congress people traitors to their oath to defend the Constitution. The only way to make this legal is to amend the Constitution.
The problem isn't as much voting either R or D, but that those are the only two choices.
No, the problem is that R or D is not a choice at all. They are the same party. If you choose R, the rich authoritarians win. If you choose D, the rich authoritarians win. Voting for either D or R is a wasted vote.
He's a man with principles. There's nothing more dangerous to illegitimate authority. They are sending a message to every individual who cares about liberty and the rule of law: "If you stick your neck out, we will stomp on your face".
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance.
You might prefer that, but what about your coworkers with health problems? Who is going to sell them insurance at a price they can afford if you're not helping with the cost?
The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me
Right, and if you don't help pay for the things that don't apply to you, the burden is entirely on those who need them. That defeats the entire purpose of insurance, spreading risk by sharing costs.
This is a technical challenge that the IRS (the Tax Man) has determined they won't have ready in time for the Jan 1, 2014 deadline. Businesses, too, have complained that their duty and mechanism for reporting who they are covering with insurance is difficult and onerous. So the decision has been made to push back the deadline.
Bullshit. They knew this deadline was coming since 2010, they had plenty of time to implement the required software and chose to delay. They should all be hit with the full force of penalties under the law. I don't get excused if I'm too lazy to obey the law, why should they?
For those, both outside and inside the U.S., who are wondering why health insurance is a benefit attached to a person's job, rather than a social benefit from the government (like in most other countries) or something each person seeks on the open market (like automobile insurance), the answer is: "it's complicated."
No, it's not complicated. It's completely explainable by the simplest explanation, corruption.
The Affordable Care Act follows the path of having health insurance as a workplace benefit mostly because that is how most people in the U.S. already get it.
The ACA follows that path because that is how the rich who control politics and economics in this country want it.
1984 reflects a society that willingly wanted the conditions told in the book to occur. That is no way the case in modern society
What world do you live in? By far the vast majority of the populace wants this to happen. They elected Obama knowing he was in favor of immunity for telcos that illegally tapped our phones in 2008. At every step the public has supported security theatre, e.g. 2 out of 3 Americans think the TSA is doing a good job. By far the popular sentiment is "If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear".
You don't want this to happen. I don't want this to happen. But the vast majority of our countrymen are cowards who are too damn stupid to figure out what they need to be afraid of.
Encryption algorithms may be secure, but how sure are you that your implementation is? Debian was generating entirely insecure SSL keys for a couple years before anyone noticed. Couldn't the NSA do something like that, but perhaps a bit more clever, and remain unnoticed?
There are plenty of useful web applications around, and I develop one of them.
I've never used a web app that was better than the native alternatives. Chances are if you built a native networked app with portable code your app would be a lot better.
your browser is more than capable of rendering the interface. Even IE6 could handle this thing (slowly).
Speed wasn't my complaint. Security is. But it is worth noticing that browsing gets a lot faster when javascript is turned off.
Google's services are the obvious screaming example of useful Javascript
Google works just fine without javascript. The rest of google's stuff would be better implemented by a traditional client server model.
The folly is in writing pages that cannot be viewed without javascript. If you want to run software, run it on your computer, not mine, because I don't trust your code.
And anyway, there's very little that actually uses javascript for anything useful. Most sites that are unusable without javascript could have easily been coded to be usable. Are drop down menus really so critical? If anything there needs to be more pushback against sites that don't degrade gracefully, not less.
So WTF is GCHQ doing, giving NSA a tap on 300 lines into Britain, which almost certainly contains information on British people, companies and politics?
The GCHQ gives NSA the ability to spy on British citizens, so that the NSA will give the GCHQ the ability to spy on US citizens. Then they exchange the data. Since no one was spying on their own citizens, no laws were broken, right?
You can't see any reason to distrust self-signed certificates? They aren't trusted because the browser has no way to verify their authenticity, which makes them dangerous.
You could say the same thing about CA certs. The browser has no way to verify that the CAs haven't shared the certs with the government. This false sense of security is as dangerous as blindly trusting self-signed certs.
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from using self-signed certificates in a secure way.
Exactly, and this is the only way to be secure. If you haven't met the person who signed the certificate and checked the fingerprint, then you're not secure.
It's incredibly insecure to trust _ANY_ self-signed certificate
It's incredibly insecure to trust any CA cert as well.
If the courts agreed with you they wouldn't accept plea bargains. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and an extorted confession is never proof of guilt.
As a geek, I've always associated properly placed priorities with hotness. Beauty pagent contestants? Not hot at all. Jeri Ellsworth, Amy Mainzer, or Bettany Hughes, now that's hot.
The people with real problems will only have their anxiety reinforced by such a system. If you can see yourself being awkward and anxious in real time, that's going to make you feel even more awkward and anxious.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, there are people who will throw acid on girls for going to school or kill their sisters for dancing in the rain
There are also people who will fabricate grounds for a war that kills half a million people (iraq). Those who will overthrow democratically elected regimes in favor of friendly dictators (iran). Those who will ally with the worst of the wahabists (saudi arabia) while overthrowing a much more progressive secular government.
These are not people who will sit down at the breakfast table and discuss their problems calmly over a croissant. They're going to kill people for what we consider no reason at all, and the only thing they can understand is force
You could say the same about the hawks in the US government.
WE ARE the kinds of people who will sit down and discuss our problems over a croissant.
Apparently we're not. It's been, what, 50 years now and Kissinger has never as much been indicted for war crimes? Can we expect Bush to be?
Legitimacy is given by the people
Right, and you know who ratified the Constitution? The People. If the authority isn't specifically listed in the Constitution, the people have not consented, and the authority is not legitimate.
For example, the person who suddenly brakes when there's no good reason to do so, simply in the hopes of making a car behind them bump them?
It's your responsibilty to ensure that this cannot happen. Whether it's a malicious driver, or a child darting into the street, it's your responsibility to be able to stop.
Not all vehicles have identically stopping distances either....
That's why you leave enough space for your car to stop. You know how far it takes to stop your car, you are in control of the distance between your car and the one in front of you. Again, your responsibility.
There are several reasons you could rear-end someone and not be at fault (most involve someone merging without sufficient space).
That's why you brake and give them more space. It's still your fault if you don't.
Not really. US government authority is granted by the Constitution. Outside those bounds there is no authority at all. Therefore any claims of authority are illegitimate.
What a stupid nitpick.
If it's not specifically authorized in the Constitution, it's not legitimate authority. Generalized surveillance is prohibited by the 4th amendment, no matter how many representatives or judges have oversight. Congressional oversight of an unconstitutional law does not make that law legitimate, it makes those congress people traitors to their oath to defend the Constitution. The only way to make this legal is to amend the Constitution.
If he honestly didn't know, the only honest answer is "I don't know".
The problem isn't as much voting either R or D, but that those are the only two choices.
No, the problem is that R or D is not a choice at all. They are the same party. If you choose R, the rich authoritarians win. If you choose D, the rich authoritarians win. Voting for either D or R is a wasted vote.
So why, then, did he choose to go into exile rather than accept the consequences and justify his actions in court?
Because he knows there's no chance of a fair trial. Those whose crimes he exposed won't see a courtroom, why should he?
He's a man with principles. There's nothing more dangerous to illegitimate authority. They are sending a message to every individual who cares about liberty and the rule of law: "If you stick your neck out, we will stomp on your face".
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance.
You might prefer that, but what about your coworkers with health problems? Who is going to sell them insurance at a price they can afford if you're not helping with the cost?
The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me
Right, and if you don't help pay for the things that don't apply to you, the burden is entirely on those who need them. That defeats the entire purpose of insurance, spreading risk by sharing costs.
This is a technical challenge that the IRS (the Tax Man) has determined they won't have ready in time for the Jan 1, 2014 deadline. Businesses, too, have complained that their duty and mechanism for reporting who they are covering with insurance is difficult and onerous. So the decision has been made to push back the deadline.
Bullshit. They knew this deadline was coming since 2010, they had plenty of time to implement the required software and chose to delay. They should all be hit with the full force of penalties under the law. I don't get excused if I'm too lazy to obey the law, why should they?
For those, both outside and inside the U.S., who are wondering why health insurance is a benefit attached to a person's job, rather than a social benefit from the government (like in most other countries) or something each person seeks on the open market (like automobile insurance), the answer is: "it's complicated."
No, it's not complicated. It's completely explainable by the simplest explanation, corruption.
The Affordable Care Act follows the path of having health insurance as a workplace benefit mostly because that is how most people in the U.S. already get it.
The ACA follows that path because that is how the rich who control politics and economics in this country want it.
1984 reflects a society that willingly wanted the conditions told in the book to occur. That is no way the case in modern society
What world do you live in? By far the vast majority of the populace wants this to happen. They elected Obama knowing he was in favor of immunity for telcos that illegally tapped our phones in 2008. At every step the public has supported security theatre, e.g. 2 out of 3 Americans think the TSA is doing a good job. By far the popular sentiment is "If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear".
You don't want this to happen. I don't want this to happen. But the vast majority of our countrymen are cowards who are too damn stupid to figure out what they need to be afraid of.
Encryption algorithms may be secure, but how sure are you that your implementation is? Debian was generating entirely insecure SSL keys for a couple years before anyone noticed. Couldn't the NSA do something like that, but perhaps a bit more clever, and remain unnoticed?
There are plenty of useful web applications around, and I develop one of them.
I've never used a web app that was better than the native alternatives. Chances are if you built a native networked app with portable code your app would be a lot better.
your browser is more than capable of rendering the interface. Even IE6 could handle this thing (slowly).
Speed wasn't my complaint. Security is. But it is worth noticing that browsing gets a lot faster when javascript is turned off.
Google's services are the obvious screaming example of useful Javascript
Google works just fine without javascript. The rest of google's stuff would be better implemented by a traditional client server model.
The folly is in writing pages that cannot be viewed without javascript. If you want to run software, run it on your computer, not mine, because I don't trust your code.
And anyway, there's very little that actually uses javascript for anything useful. Most sites that are unusable without javascript could have easily been coded to be usable. Are drop down menus really so critical? If anything there needs to be more pushback against sites that don't degrade gracefully, not less.
So WTF is GCHQ doing, giving NSA a tap on 300 lines into Britain, which almost certainly contains information on British people, companies and politics?
The GCHQ gives NSA the ability to spy on British citizens, so that the NSA will give the GCHQ the ability to spy on US citizens. Then they exchange the data. Since no one was spying on their own citizens, no laws were broken, right?
You can't see any reason to distrust self-signed certificates? They aren't trusted because the browser has no way to verify their authenticity, which makes them dangerous.
You could say the same thing about CA certs. The browser has no way to verify that the CAs haven't shared the certs with the government. This false sense of security is as dangerous as blindly trusting self-signed certs.
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from using self-signed certificates in a secure way.
Exactly, and this is the only way to be secure. If you haven't met the person who signed the certificate and checked the fingerprint, then you're not secure.
It's incredibly insecure to trust _ANY_ self-signed certificate
It's incredibly insecure to trust any CA cert as well.
If the courts agreed with you they wouldn't accept plea bargains. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and an extorted confession is never proof of guilt.
We invaded Iraq because they supposedly had WMDs. If the US has WMDs, they should be invaded as well, right?
Ah, so one rule for the common folk, and one rule for the elites. And you're OK with that?
If that's the case, every bomb the US has ever dropped counts as a WMD.
Using a weapon of mass destruction is a pretty serious violation of the law of conservation of mass. Where did he get the anti-matter?
As a geek, I've always associated properly placed priorities with hotness. Beauty pagent contestants? Not hot at all. Jeri Ellsworth, Amy Mainzer, or Bettany Hughes, now that's hot.
The people with real problems will only have their anxiety reinforced by such a system. If you can see yourself being awkward and anxious in real time, that's going to make you feel even more awkward and anxious.