Why anyone using/working on Wikileaks thinks they are above the law, I have never understood.
I'm not saying they are correct, but typically they think that because they are the ones bringing the law to the government officials who both broke laws and thinks they are still above the law too.
One of the cardinal rules of survey design is that it should be quick and easy for people to fill out. Do the hard work for them, and let them just tick boxes. If you don't, they won't take it and all you'll get is data skewed toward people who--like you--actually care enough to type up a bunch of thoughts. I care about broadband, but even I am not interested in blathering away into a text box.
Is it not possible to sign a waiver that says "This animal was once treated with a new kind of doggie aspirin. It is completely safe as far as we know, but if somehow it turns the dog into Kujo in five years, you've been warned."
Where do I sign up? I wouldn't mind a Kujo either, No one would ever break into more than the doorway of my house! I can teach him the way to my enemies and let him do his thing
In all honesty, it really made my heart sink to realize our legal system has made that situation exist:{
Look on the bottom of the computer your typed that on, and let me know its country of origin.
Just to be snotty, I have an i7 920 (Manufactured in America, at the Washington plant specifically), with an Intel motherboard made in Taiwan.
The only part I am unsure on (and probably has China produced parts on it) is my geforce GTX 275. It's an nvidia, but branded as a "Zotac" It seems Zotac itself is based out of California, but of course that means little as to its components.
Is there even a video card produced with parts sourced/manufactured outside of China?
I Fully agree with your point in that it is very hard to do either way.
*NOTHING* short of educating a user, or massively restricting their privileges on a computer can protect from this kind of problem.
Exactly!
My standard answer to that question is "fire". And for those of you in a work environment right now, I am not speaking of terminating their employment... I am speaking of terminating their lack of being on fire.
This however falls under user education as you said;}
Google has taken substantial hits to their goodwill lately with their stance on privacy and an ever-growing concern that they've become stewards of vast stores of personal data without any guarantees that it will never be misused.
Google already gave us a legal guarantee that they won't misuse the data, which is the only kind of guarantee that really matters from a corporation in most peoples eyes.
These are legally binding, at least in the USA. What more would you prefer? Eric Schmidt to stop by with a personal word of honor?;}
Unfortunately, there are many other people whom also feel the only guarantee Google could make that would satisfy them, is to shut down business operations and have a massive hard drive burning and shredding party:{
If you want to rate the SuperBowl TV-MA, go ahead, but I think viewership and advertising revenues would plummet.
If you want to rate it TV-G and get the massive viewership, then you can't put nudity on it.
Why is this difficult for people to understand?
You are basically saying, parent is wrong, Christians don't control other peoples lives regarding to sex! and to prove that, we must keep the Superbowl at one christian invented rating or another christian invented rating and deal with the coincidence of that choice...
There shouldn't need to be a law for this, though. Telcos should enforce it on their own.
Any customer with a phone switch or PBX is now in violation of this law.
If I had to guess, that would be pretty much all corporations with 25 or more phones, since using T1 channels becomes cost effective at that point.
I suppose the largest corporations aren't breaking that law, assuming each and every last handset in the company has an external phone number and DID tied to it. But just ONE internal only phone line, and they are in violation of this law every time someone lifts it and hits 9, as the phone number is 'spoofed' to the main company number.
Where I work for example, we have about 60 DIDs (outside phone numbers) yet over 100 phone extensions. The internal 40 can make outside calls, but the phone system will spoof in our main reception phone number, so if someone actually called the number on caller ID, they will still get to us (And through the receptionist, to the extension they wanted to reach)
Pretty much every phone switch has the ability to not assign an external phone number, so any caller ID data will be spoofed. The only other option is to send the private or unavailable codes, which brings all the undesirable non-answering of calls such things typically bring.
Think of this feature as a form of NAT for phone lines. In fact, for the short time the California law was in place that made IP spoofing illegal, everyone in the state using NAT was breaking the law. (Though to be totally fair, Cali also outlawed possession of water for a week or two as well...)
I don't buy the more bandwidth equals more piracy angle at all. We already have enough bandwidth to destroy Hollywood if we wanted or if that was even possible.
You are incorrectly assuming that the MPAA/RIAA want to shutdown *only* illegal downloads of their media.
They also desire all legal downloads to stop, and competition to drop to zero. Piracy is just their excuse to make the rest not look as horrible as it is.
Compuserve and AOL were doing a pretty good job of making their closed networks the defining online experience years before the Internet started eating their lunch. M$ wasn't even in the picture.
Okay that all sounds pretty reasonable, but explain the What In The Name of Jeebus Is That Nebula, or the I Couldn't Even Begin To Explain What's Going On Here Quasar.
Sorry to come down so hard, I just can't believe this is modded up +3, Insightful.:(
That's OK. It is actually a good argument.
But the fact remains, more and more people are being convicted on hearsay and DNA evidence *ONLY*
This isn't very well known yet, since right now most cases are as you describe. There is more evidence to rule out most of those people, and simple physics for the rest.
I just can't bring myself to believe the problem will get better instead of worse with such a database in existence and mandated by law.
Dammit. Actually that was for someone else. Honest mistake there.
Some day you should actually try reading what you reply to, and just importantly reading the context of the post, thus making it less likely that you end up looking like a retarded prick.
Well good to see you are understanding about such things.:P
Never fear, you won't have to deal with any replies from this retarded prick again...
Where teh fuck do you get put to death for smoking weed??
America's prison system.
The scam works like this:
1) You smoke some weed and get caught. 2) You are given a month in jail (Well, maybe not on your first conviction, but still..) 3) While in jail, actions fully outside your control will be blamed on you, and the punishment will be more jail or even prison time. Typically this comes with not wanting to be beaten for your lunch, or raped in your cell at night, and attempting to defend yourself.
4) After doing nothing more than defending yourself (This is not allowed in jail), you are now a danger to others, and your sentence is added onto to reflect that fact. Your month in jail just became many months if not a year or more.
5) Eventually the beatings and rape will force you to act in a way to stop such actions, which will result in bodily harm or death to another inmate.
6) You are now charged with assault and attempted murder (or actual murder if they die), and your sentence is adjusted to life.
7) Depending what state you are imprisoned in, and the current head count in the prison you are in, you can be moved over to death row.
Now I am not implying this happens in 100% of cases, but it does happen very frequently. A few hundred times a year is a few hundred and one times too many.
Considering with the current DNA sampling methods, my DNA will match one or two million other people on the planet, a good few thousand of them being in my own country...
No thanks, I have no desire to admit and take the blame for the crimes those other people did and were caught at.
Someone should direct this so called law student to our constitutional amendments. He only has to get through the first 5 or so:P
Newsflash: torture doesn't prevent and hasn't prevented any terrorist attacks since 9/11.
Moreover, torture only weakens image of USA in the world, probably provoking MORE attacks.
What's more, torture doesn't really help in most cases of interrogation. It really depends on the goals.
If your goal is to get the truth, then torture will not get you any results at all. Why would someone tell a torturer the truth, when that will only result in more torture? Unless by pure coincidence the truth and the statements the torturer want you to say happen to match of course.
If your goal is to get someone to repeat what you tell them to repeat, for purposes of recording, faking confessions, or to be used as fake evidence against the person being tortured, then it works great.
Just depends on your goals.
We have both their stated goal, proof it is a lie, and on top of that there is only one use for torture, thus we can extrapolate the real reason they want to torture from their actions.
The public is under the incorrect impression that interrogation is to get the truth, because A) that is what is stated, and B) that is what interrogation is typically used for, so that excuse is fully believable.
It's not at all different from "If you weigh more than a duck, you are obviously guilty" type methods used in the past.
I'm pretty sure giving out the travel times of people carrying launch codes is a lot different then someone trying to cover up tailhook.
Again, has wikileaks EVER done that? Have they actually posted an article relevant to our national security in any way, and I just missed it?
Seems to me people are complaining that whistleblowers and wikileaks together ARE constantly doing something that never happened.
I personally have never seen a single posting to wikileaks that had anything even remotely close to do with national security. Either the whistleblowers ARE using their common sense correctly and only leaking what should be, or wikileaks is filtering such content and only publishing material that should be. (Or again, 3rd option is I just missed it)
Of course we should always concern ourselves with the future. But is this really a problem? Or has it been one?
Even for the future, I've always gotten the feeling that the wikileaks operators wanted to be seen as 'robin hoods' and not 'wacko nut job conspiracy seeing freaks', which I think it is safe to say people would conciser them as if they actually did release anything that is important like that, especially so with peoples lives on the line. Not that my opinion of them matters of course.
I don't think anyone could argue that there isn't a need for secrecy in some things. To be sure, there is information that, if revealed, could do great harm to national security. The problem is that self-serving individuals and groups will often try to hide their own misconduct under the guise of national security. Once you've put that cork in the bottle, it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to uncork it. In effect, these people undermine the notion of national security.
Please do tell, even just one single example will do, what information posted on wikileaks actually had any bearing to national security.
Just one.
Didn't think so.
However there are thousands of cases where the person fighting the posting of material was proven by said material to have committed crimes against our country. Some have even been convicted.
Those are the true people trying to undermine our notion of national security. And this process is successfully weeding them out of our system.
Why are you trying to fight that? You are arguing for the amount of good they do to drop from some high number to zero, yet to lower the bad they do from zero down to zero.
Any "leakers" inside the government usurp that decision-making to themselves and to the Wikileaks. Instead of relying on the judgment of people charged with making it, we will depend on the judgment of the "leaker" and of the Wikileaks editors. Personally, I'd prefer the government officials...
So you only trust the criminals to make law to stop the actions they desire to get away with.
Well, I suppose it's good we know where you stand on the subject. But that is a pretty immoral stance.
This is why the fact America tortures people and have gotten away with it for so long. People like you who want to see the torturers and murderers make up silly excuses why they should be allowed to do so, and then make the choice that it is a crime punishable by death if you rat out their illegal crimes.
There are billions of people against such practices, and only at most a million people still desiring it. Best part is, there was maybe 20 people in charge of deciding we should do this.
Fuck those 20, and fuck you for stating they are more right than the other billions.
You atheists seem to be a very hostile and angry group yourselves!
What ever happened to "live and let live"?
Purely due to survival reasons, that had to stop when the religious started using weapons and murder to not allow us atheists to live and let live.
It's been a tiny bit better in some countries where such things are outlawed, but not in say the USA where the government is run by these people and legalized murder is written into the legal system.
It's one thing to put a murderer to death, as I think both sides can agree murder is wrong, even if it is for different reasons. Atheists just prefer not to harm others in ways they wouldn't want to be harmed in. Religious seem to want to avoid punishment in the afterlife. Both have the same effect in the here and now for the most part, and thus have been OK.
But putting a person to death for smoking weed is something only a totally detached from reality sick fuck can do. Unfortunately the sick fucks that do that need to be religious to even get hired into such a position, so we really don't have any examples to point to showing how bad it would be with atheists in charge.
I'm sure it would be just as bad, but not having the chance to show it, we can still be safe in the fact it has all be self-defense so far.
I share the GPs opinion, just for different reasons.
The Arduino is a good decade behind the times as far as all the features you list. It's hard to get excited about a product that does what a lot of us in the micro controller field have been doing back in the early 90s using PIC and basic stamps and SX chips and the like.
Full micro controller hardware on one chip (CPU, ram, flash, timers and clocks, interrupts, and external hardware modules made just for the chips packaging)
While the PIC is a poor example (Many shortcomings that are addressed by devices like the basic stamp, SX, and arduino products), all can be programmed in a high level compiled language (typically more than one language to choose from), or even directly in assembly, depending on your project needs.
To me it isn't a big deal, but not because of lack of interest or dislike of the concepts it brings, just that we've been doing all this for over 10 years already and there are almost no improvements that Arduino brings to the table right at the moment, although it seems cost will be a major selling point soon, as they are already price competitive and still dropping.
Slashdot Mirror
Why anyone using/working on Wikileaks thinks they are above the law, I have never understood.
I'm not saying they are correct, but typically they think that because they are the ones bringing the law to the government officials who both broke laws and thinks they are still above the law too.
One of the cardinal rules of survey design is that it should be quick and easy for people to fill out. Do the hard work for them, and let them just tick boxes. If you don't, they won't take it and all you'll get is data skewed toward people who--like you--actually care enough to type up a bunch of thoughts. I care about broadband, but even I am not interested in blathering away into a text box.
Whoo boy, I think you done broke my snickerer!
That's nothing! I run a game where you just have to put quarters in a box and you win!
Is it not possible to sign a waiver that says "This animal was once treated with a new kind of doggie aspirin. It is completely safe as far as we know, but if somehow it turns the dog into Kujo in five years, you've been warned."
Where do I sign up? I wouldn't mind a Kujo either, No one would ever break into more than the doorway of my house!
I can teach him the way to my enemies and let him do his thing
In all honesty, it really made my heart sink to realize our legal system has made that situation exist :{
Look on the bottom of the computer your typed that on, and let me know its country of origin.
Just to be snotty, I have an i7 920 (Manufactured in America, at the Washington plant specifically), with an Intel motherboard made in Taiwan.
The only part I am unsure on (and probably has China produced parts on it) is my geforce GTX 275.
It's an nvidia, but branded as a "Zotac"
It seems Zotac itself is based out of California, but of course that means little as to its components.
Is there even a video card produced with parts sourced/manufactured outside of China?
I Fully agree with your point in that it is very hard to do either way.
*NOTHING* short of educating a user, or massively restricting their privileges on a computer can protect from this kind of problem.
Exactly!
My standard answer to that question is "fire".
And for those of you in a work environment right now, I am not speaking of terminating their employment... I am speaking of terminating their lack of being on fire.
This however falls under user education as you said ;}
Too often we use the term "he got off" when we should really be saying "the police are incompetent".
Especially so in child porn related cases...
Google has taken substantial hits to their goodwill lately with their stance on privacy and an ever-growing concern that they've become stewards of vast stores of personal data without any guarantees that it will never be misused.
Google already gave us a legal guarantee that they won't misuse the data, which is the only kind of guarantee that really matters from a corporation in most peoples eyes.
The 'privacy' link at the bottom of the main page links to their current policy and all archived copies.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html
These are legally binding, at least in the USA. ;}
What more would you prefer? Eric Schmidt to stop by with a personal word of honor?
Unfortunately, there are many other people whom also feel the only guarantee Google could make that would satisfy them, is to shut down business operations and have a massive hard drive burning and shredding party :{
If you want to rate the SuperBowl TV-MA, go ahead, but I think viewership and advertising revenues would plummet.
If you want to rate it TV-G and get the massive viewership, then you can't put nudity on it.
Why is this difficult for people to understand?
You are basically saying, parent is wrong, Christians don't control other peoples lives regarding to sex! and to prove that, we must keep the Superbowl at one christian invented rating or another christian invented rating and deal with the coincidence of that choice...
Way to spell "I agree with the parent poster" :P
There shouldn't need to be a law for this, though. Telcos should enforce it on their own.
Any customer with a phone switch or PBX is now in violation of this law.
If I had to guess, that would be pretty much all corporations with 25 or more phones, since using T1 channels becomes cost effective at that point.
I suppose the largest corporations aren't breaking that law, assuming each and every last handset in the company has an external phone number and DID tied to it. But just ONE internal only phone line, and they are in violation of this law every time someone lifts it and hits 9, as the phone number is 'spoofed' to the main company number.
Where I work for example, we have about 60 DIDs (outside phone numbers) yet over 100 phone extensions.
The internal 40 can make outside calls, but the phone system will spoof in our main reception phone number, so if someone actually called the number on caller ID, they will still get to us (And through the receptionist, to the extension they wanted to reach)
Pretty much every phone switch has the ability to not assign an external phone number, so any caller ID data will be spoofed. The only other option is to send the private or unavailable codes, which brings all the undesirable non-answering of calls such things typically bring.
Think of this feature as a form of NAT for phone lines.
In fact, for the short time the California law was in place that made IP spoofing illegal, everyone in the state using NAT was breaking the law. (Though to be totally fair, Cali also outlawed possession of water for a week or two as well...)
I don't buy the more bandwidth equals more piracy angle at all. We already have enough bandwidth to destroy Hollywood if we wanted or if that was even possible.
You are incorrectly assuming that the MPAA/RIAA want to shutdown *only* illegal downloads of their media.
They also desire all legal downloads to stop, and competition to drop to zero.
Piracy is just their excuse to make the rest not look as horrible as it is.
No no no you blithering idiot!
Compuserve and AOL were doing a pretty good job of making their closed networks the defining online experience years before the Internet started eating their lunch. M$ wasn't even in the picture.
How wrong could you possibly be?!?
Okay that all sounds pretty reasonable, but explain the What In The Name of Jeebus Is That Nebula, or the I Couldn't Even Begin To Explain What's Going On Here Quasar.
Alcohol? Possibly some form of hallucinogenic?
Sorry to come down so hard, I just can't believe this is modded up +3, Insightful. :(
That's OK.
It is actually a good argument.
But the fact remains, more and more people are being convicted on hearsay and DNA evidence *ONLY*
This isn't very well known yet, since right now most cases are as you describe. There is more evidence to rule out most of those people, and simple physics for the rest.
I just can't bring myself to believe the problem will get better instead of worse with such a database in existence and mandated by law.
You must be responding to someone else.
Dammit. Actually that was for someone else. Honest mistake there.
Some day you should actually try reading what you reply to, and just importantly reading the context of the post, thus making it less likely that you end up looking like a retarded prick.
Well good to see you are understanding about such things. :P
Never fear, you won't have to deal with any replies from this retarded prick again...
Where teh fuck do you get put to death for smoking weed??
America's prison system.
The scam works like this:
1) You smoke some weed and get caught.
2) You are given a month in jail (Well, maybe not on your first conviction, but still..)
3) While in jail, actions fully outside your control will be blamed on you, and the punishment will be more jail or even prison time.
Typically this comes with not wanting to be beaten for your lunch, or raped in your cell at night, and attempting to defend yourself.
4) After doing nothing more than defending yourself (This is not allowed in jail), you are now a danger to others, and your sentence is added onto to reflect that fact. Your month in jail just became many months if not a year or more.
5) Eventually the beatings and rape will force you to act in a way to stop such actions, which will result in bodily harm or death to another inmate.
6) You are now charged with assault and attempted murder (or actual murder if they die), and your sentence is adjusted to life.
7) Depending what state you are imprisoned in, and the current head count in the prison you are in, you can be moved over to death row.
Now I am not implying this happens in 100% of cases, but it does happen very frequently. A few hundred times a year is a few hundred and one times too many.
Wow.
Considering with the current DNA sampling methods, my DNA will match one or two million other people on the planet, a good few thousand of them being in my own country...
No thanks, I have no desire to admit and take the blame for the crimes those other people did and were caught at.
Someone should direct this so called law student to our constitutional amendments. He only has to get through the first 5 or so :P
Newsflash: torture doesn't prevent and hasn't prevented any terrorist attacks since 9/11.
Moreover, torture only weakens image of USA in the world, probably provoking MORE attacks.
What's more, torture doesn't really help in most cases of interrogation.
It really depends on the goals.
If your goal is to get the truth, then torture will not get you any results at all.
Why would someone tell a torturer the truth, when that will only result in more torture?
Unless by pure coincidence the truth and the statements the torturer want you to say happen to match of course.
If your goal is to get someone to repeat what you tell them to repeat, for purposes of recording, faking confessions, or to be used as fake evidence against the person being tortured, then it works great.
Just depends on your goals.
We have both their stated goal, proof it is a lie, and on top of that there is only one use for torture, thus we can extrapolate the real reason they want to torture from their actions.
The public is under the incorrect impression that interrogation is to get the truth, because A) that is what is stated, and B) that is what interrogation is typically used for, so that excuse is fully believable.
It's not at all different from "If you weigh more than a duck, you are obviously guilty" type methods used in the past.
I'm pretty sure giving out the travel times of people carrying launch codes is a lot different then someone trying to cover up tailhook.
Again, has wikileaks EVER done that?
Have they actually posted an article relevant to our national security in any way, and I just missed it?
Seems to me people are complaining that whistleblowers and wikileaks together ARE constantly doing something that never happened.
I personally have never seen a single posting to wikileaks that had anything even remotely close to do with national security. Either the whistleblowers ARE using their common sense correctly and only leaking what should be, or wikileaks is filtering such content and only publishing material that should be. (Or again, 3rd option is I just missed it)
Of course we should always concern ourselves with the future.
But is this really a problem? Or has it been one?
Even for the future, I've always gotten the feeling that the wikileaks operators wanted to be seen as 'robin hoods' and not 'wacko nut job conspiracy seeing freaks', which I think it is safe to say people would conciser them as if they actually did release anything that is important like that, especially so with peoples lives on the line.
Not that my opinion of them matters of course.
I don't think anyone could argue that there isn't a need for secrecy in some things. To be sure, there is information that, if revealed, could do great harm to national security. The problem is that self-serving individuals and groups will often try to hide their own misconduct under the guise of national security. Once you've put that cork in the bottle, it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to uncork it. In effect, these people undermine the notion of national security.
Please do tell, even just one single example will do, what information posted on wikileaks actually had any bearing to national security.
Just one.
Didn't think so.
However there are thousands of cases where the person fighting the posting of material was proven by said material to have committed crimes against our country. Some have even been convicted.
Those are the true people trying to undermine our notion of national security. And this process is successfully weeding them out of our system.
Why are you trying to fight that?
You are arguing for the amount of good they do to drop from some high number to zero, yet to lower the bad they do from zero down to zero.
Any "leakers" inside the government usurp that decision-making to themselves and to the Wikileaks. Instead of relying on the judgment of people charged with making it, we will depend on the judgment of the "leaker" and of the Wikileaks editors. Personally, I'd prefer the government officials...
So you only trust the criminals to make law to stop the actions they desire to get away with.
Well, I suppose it's good we know where you stand on the subject. But that is a pretty immoral stance.
This is why the fact America tortures people and have gotten away with it for so long. People like you who want to see the torturers and murderers make up silly excuses why they should be allowed to do so, and then make the choice that it is a crime punishable by death if you rat out their illegal crimes.
There are billions of people against such practices, and only at most a million people still desiring it.
Best part is, there was maybe 20 people in charge of deciding we should do this.
Fuck those 20, and fuck you for stating they are more right than the other billions.
The hard part is actually finding it.
That reminds me of a signature I've seen around here (Sorry, I don't remember who was using it)
cat /dev/ram | strings | grep llama
OMG, my RAM is full of llamas!
...might want to think about wearing a helmet on a regular basis.
What kind of conclusion do you think they would come to?
Well, it would at least not be the conclusion of "Oww, windows makes my brain hurt! Oh and I fell over too, but am sure that is unrelated"
You atheists seem to be a very hostile and angry group yourselves!
What ever happened to "live and let live"?
Purely due to survival reasons, that had to stop when the religious started using weapons and murder to not allow us atheists to live and let live.
It's been a tiny bit better in some countries where such things are outlawed, but not in say the USA where the government is run by these people and legalized murder is written into the legal system.
It's one thing to put a murderer to death, as I think both sides can agree murder is wrong, even if it is for different reasons.
Atheists just prefer not to harm others in ways they wouldn't want to be harmed in.
Religious seem to want to avoid punishment in the afterlife.
Both have the same effect in the here and now for the most part, and thus have been OK.
But putting a person to death for smoking weed is something only a totally detached from reality sick fuck can do.
Unfortunately the sick fucks that do that need to be religious to even get hired into such a position, so we really don't have any examples to point to showing how bad it would be with atheists in charge.
I'm sure it would be just as bad, but not having the chance to show it, we can still be safe in the fact it has all be self-defense so far.
I share the GPs opinion, just for different reasons.
The Arduino is a good decade behind the times as far as all the features you list.
It's hard to get excited about a product that does what a lot of us in the micro controller field have been doing back in the early 90s using PIC and basic stamps and SX chips and the like.
Full micro controller hardware on one chip (CPU, ram, flash, timers and clocks, interrupts, and external hardware modules made just for the chips packaging)
While the PIC is a poor example (Many shortcomings that are addressed by devices like the basic stamp, SX, and arduino products), all can be programmed in a high level compiled language (typically more than one language to choose from), or even directly in assembly, depending on your project needs.
To me it isn't a big deal, but not because of lack of interest or dislike of the concepts it brings, just that we've been doing all this for over 10 years already and there are almost no improvements that Arduino brings to the table right at the moment, although it seems cost will be a major selling point soon, as they are already price competitive and still dropping.