If a mobster did the same thing and you robbed a bank, stole a car, or killed someone- you'd do the time all the same or some lessened sentence and you'd be found guilty of the crime.
And more: the mobster would do time as well. So, why isn't the president?
I agree with most of what you say, I just take a small exception to:
[...] certain features which are not in Google's interest like easy encryption support will likely never get implemented [...]
It's actually quite easy to use encryption while reading your email. Go to https://gmail.com/ to log in, and the entire session will be https. If you go to http://gmail.com/ then only the login page is encrypted.
"Go buy another copy of me and tell everyone I printed it. And if you think you can come back here with the police instead - keep in mind that I can also print sex toys and drug paraphernalia. So... do we understand each other?"
Well, really I would expect the exchange to go more like:
"Go buy another copy of me and tell everyone I printed it. And if you think you can come back here with the police instead - keep in mind that I can also force you to purchase sex toys and drug paraphernalia. So... do we understand each other?"
I love synchronicity. I read "real" news at the Excite portal, and "tech" news here. Lately Excite has put interstitial ads in their pages, so you have to "Click here to skip this ad." Once you do so, though, the Back button is still disabled so you can't get back to the ad (which I sometimes want to, so pity for the idiot who architected this).
The issue is that sometimes due to this, a page will sit there spinning and no more pages will load. To "fix" this I need to open a command prompt, "ping google.com", and wait for it to start responding (usually by the second or third attempt; rarely do I need to run the ping twice -- this is on Windows XP SP2, Seamonkey 1.1.8).
Then I need to reload all the pages that failed (I open news stories in separate tabs by middle-clicking the headlines, so then I can read and close the tabs at my leisure). This was taking too long today, and I noticed "adbright.com" in the status bar, so I added that to my hosts file: "127.0.0.1 adbright.com" -- and, that is the only other entry than localhost, so this was a significant pain point to push me to this.
Now, Excite pages loads rather quickly. Those interstitial ads are still there, but at least my connection isn't getting clogged up by their turds.
However much we wish or strongly think that that should happen, does anyone realistically think that anything alike would ever happen to him?
Take heart! The mighty are slain with the weirdest of arrows. Al Capone was put away for tax evasion, not murder or any of his other numerous crimes. Nixon was brought down by a wiretap, which is now getting exceedingly common. So that's one path.
Another more realistic one is the destroyed emails, in violation of the Presidential Records Act which Bush himself signed. "I am immune to laws I pen!" That's the raving of a lunatic. Seriously -- I'm being serious when I say that, I'm not laughing!
There are so many laws this administration has broken, and such an obvious link between the wars and their monetary gains, that it's amazing We The People are letting them get away with this treasonous co-opting of the military machine. As they say, "hanging's too good for em." Let them rot in jail.
... they will treat you like a criminal who happens not to have been convicted of a crime yet.
There's a quote from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" that fits here perfectly:
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We *want* them broken. You'd better get it straight That it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
-- Ayn Rand, _Atlas Shrugged , Ch. III, "White Blackmail"
She understood what the government was beginning to do, back in the 1940s and 50s. Which makes me wonder, have there been any governments that didn't encroach? There was a reason Jefferson wrote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants" -- he was not promoting war, he was understanding human nature, and humans run the governments.
Now, in the new old days, there's a suggestion that you can be arbitrarily stripped of your rights by an accusation that you are a terrorist.
I think it's always been that way deliberately. The witches, the Jews (hi Godwin!), the Red Scare, and now the terrorists. There's always a "thought crime" that governments choose to enforce, because it's the one that requires the least amount of evidence to prosecute. "If she floats she's a witch and we kill her; if she sinks, well it's too bad that she drowned but at least her soul's in Heaven." Scary, but keep the population religious and they'll believe anything.
I completely agree with you about protecting your rights through encryption. I was just saying that I saw a hole in the argument.
If they were selling your identity, if they were selling your medical records, if they were selling your company's trade secrets, there is no one who 1) would even know it, or 2) would be able to stop them even if they did.
There is someone: the employee in the know who later leaves the corporation that purchased the illegally-gained information.
He then has some serious blackmail capability against his former employer. And, he could also go for a whistle-blower reward.
You are absolutely correct that "everyone is corruptible," so it's great to know that there's "someone" on the other end of the deal you mentioned. It may take a while, but eventually that (or those) individual(s) will get greedy for more than they were most likely handsomely paid, and will try to coerce funds with their information.
I actually really like that, the idea that the other side is corruptible as well. We could even start a campaign to help corrupt them. Well, actually I guess that's what wikileaks is.
However, if Congress has written laws which are full of loopholes or are permissive, it is not the fault of Executive overstepping that those loopholes exist since, if written into law, it is perfectly legal (if nor moral) for the Executive to use them.
I have an observation: the three front-runners are Senators. Writing laws that give the President additional powers seems to be in their best interests...
And, the evidence shows that it is assured not in the best interests of the country.
Catching someone moving between point a and point b in 5.5 minutes, where point a and point b are 10km apart, equating to an average speed of ~110kph is much smarter - there is no doubt that the car in question was traveling over the speed limit for a sustained period of time.
You are assuming that there are no discontinuities in the space-time continuum. I never leave home without my wormhole generator.
I realize that you were joking, but I'd like to add: whenever I'm on a turnpike (the kind where you take a ticket at the beginning, and then pay at the end based on the exit number you entered at), I always stop at a rest stop. That way my average speed won't ever be an issue.
You need a counterweight only if you don't want your cable to be 44,600 miles long. In that case, geosynchronous orbit would be right at the middle of the cable, so you wouldn't need a weight on the far end to balance it.
Strictly speaking, the extra length of the cable is the counterweight...
I mention this because, cutting the cable at any point below geosynchronous orbit will have the same net result -- the "weight" at the other end will fly off into space. Cutting it above geosynchronous orbit would have a different effect; and, it can probably be easily argued that using a weight rather than an extra-long cable would reduce the possibility of a collision.
Many S3 tools, like Jungle Disk, support encryption before you upload the files. So what you're storing on Amazon's servers they couldn't give to the government even if they wanted to.
In general, it's far better to do no wrong, rather than dream up ways to avoid getting caught.
In this specific case, your VMs "automatically" read the data back in when you start them up, don't they?
So, the warrant includes the VMs. You're not safe using EC2 for criminal activity...
Didn't we already go through this when Clinton was impeached? Didn't we hear all kinds of people claiming it was a
witch hunt and that no good would come of it. Is that not the same situation here?
In a word, "no".
To quote a bumper sticker, "No one died when Clinton lied."
There is absolutely no way to compare "a cock-sucking" with "causing the deaths of 4,000 America heroes."
But, since we're a perverted little Puritanical society, the former is ever-so-much worse...
[...] major companies like Verizon or Comcast with land line service [...]
For a split second (and also perhaps because I am a customer of both of them), I read that as "land mine service", and wondered, "oh great, what's gonna blow up next?"
As a general rule that is almost infallible, there is nothing on God's Green Earth that "can't get worse." Maybe the sun exploding and wiping out the planet....that might qualify. Anything short of that, though.....
For me, it's the heat death of the universe. That ruins my day; I can't think of a way around it short of finding a way to make a hole to another universe -- if there are any.
Doesn't really keep me up at night though; we'll have a lot of time to find it, what with wrapping Dyson spheres around every star so we can make the universe last longer, so we can carry on more experiments.
Replying instead of moderating: I think it shows a cunning understanding of the target market, actually. My brother has kids, they watch Bob the Builder all the time so I'm sure both he and his wife hear the phrase a lot; for a politician to then use it, well it makes them subconsciously think "this is something similar" and we like similar things. (Unless of course the parents are sick of the show...)
There's a lot of money in oil. But there's little margin.
For the retailer, perhaps; a friend owns a gas station and told me they make 1-3 cents per gallon. That's a razor-thin margin of 0.3% to 1%, at current prices.
However, there's a ton of margin for the oil companies. Just look at their record profits for 2007 to tell the real story: yes, the price is going up due to conflicts and reduction in supply and other factors; but their profitability tells a different story, and profits tend to tell a real story (except in unsustainable cases like Enron).
I think eliminating subsidies to the oil companies is a smart move; I read today that the House is passing it, and Democrats are trying to avoid a filibuster in the senate. Only for the top 5 oil companies, though; I'd rather see all oil subsidies eliminated, in favor of "renewable energy" subsidies (it's not really renewable, the sun will burn out someday and take the Earth with it we recently re-learned, but it's "essentially renewable").
Piracy is ethically no different from a mob looting a store whose locks were broken.
Actually, "piracy" (by which I understand you to mean "copyright violations" and not "theft and murder on the high seas"), to fit into your analogy, is really more like "a mob entering a bookstore (without breaking), photocopying all the books (using their own photocopier and electricity), and then replacing them on their original shelves, in their original conditions, and locking up when they leave."
They're not depriving anyone of any property. Their act does no harm; it merely enriches their own lives.
The only perception of harm comes from the thermodynamically-challenged laws we have on our books. (In other words, the laws attempt to reverse entropy; tag goodluckwiththat.)
Your AC responder also had a good comment. I've seen you before, but this is the first time I've seen the new sig. Can't say I approve; your ethics don't seem to tell the difference between "depriving of income" and "depriving of property". There's a big difference; one is a potential future event, the other has immediate effects.
The day they decide to outlaw guns is the day I become a outlaw and they can come pry my gun from my cold dead fingers.
Well, after shooting you dead your fingers will take a while to cool off. I'll just pry the gun from your slowly cooling dead fingers, rather than waiting.:)
And I completely agree with the sentiment; our 1968 gun laws were authored by someone who, very recently before proposing the law, had checked out the 1938 Nazi gun laws from the government public records. (This is verifiable, but I don't have a link.)
Slashdot Mirror
And more: the mobster would do time as well. So, why isn't the president?
Now it makes sense, and you're right that's something Google would have to code (perhaps this Summer?).
I agree with most of what you say, I just take a small exception to:
It's actually quite easy to use encryption while reading your email. Go to https://gmail.com/ to log in, and the entire session will be https. If you go to http://gmail.com/ then only the login page is encrypted.
Hope this helps your experience!
Well, really I would expect the exchange to go more like:
"Go buy another copy of me and tell everyone I printed it. And if you think you can come back here with the police instead - keep in mind that I can also force you to purchase sex toys and drug paraphernalia. So... do we understand each other?"
Most people who drink mother's milk are not going to kill real people.
There, fixed that for you. There have been a few notable exceptions.
I love synchronicity. I read "real" news at the Excite portal, and "tech" news here. Lately Excite has put interstitial ads in their pages, so you have to "Click here to skip this ad." Once you do so, though, the Back button is still disabled so you can't get back to the ad (which I sometimes want to, so pity for the idiot who architected this).
The issue is that sometimes due to this, a page will sit there spinning and no more pages will load. To "fix" this I need to open a command prompt, "ping google.com", and wait for it to start responding (usually by the second or third attempt; rarely do I need to run the ping twice -- this is on Windows XP SP2, Seamonkey 1.1.8).
Then I need to reload all the pages that failed (I open news stories in separate tabs by middle-clicking the headlines, so then I can read and close the tabs at my leisure). This was taking too long today, and I noticed "adbright.com" in the status bar, so I added that to my hosts file: "127.0.0.1 adbright.com" -- and, that is the only other entry than localhost, so this was a significant pain point to push me to this.
Now, Excite pages loads rather quickly. Those interstitial ads are still there, but at least my connection isn't getting clogged up by their turds.
Take heart! The mighty are slain with the weirdest of arrows. Al Capone was put away for tax evasion, not murder or any of his other numerous crimes. Nixon was brought down by a wiretap, which is now getting exceedingly common. So that's one path.
Another more realistic one is the destroyed emails, in violation of the Presidential Records Act which Bush himself signed. "I am immune to laws I pen!" That's the raving of a lunatic. Seriously -- I'm being serious when I say that, I'm not laughing!
There are so many laws this administration has broken, and such an obvious link between the wars and their monetary gains, that it's amazing We The People are letting them get away with this treasonous co-opting of the military machine. As they say, "hanging's too good for em." Let them rot in jail.
Sorry, you're barking up the wrong tree here. It was a comparison, not a fawning.
So, you agree that a law was broken -- the records were not kept. Why are you defending Bush?
There's a quote from Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" that fits here perfectly:
She understood what the government was beginning to do, back in the 1940s and 50s. Which makes me wonder, have there been any governments that didn't encroach? There was a reason Jefferson wrote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants" -- he was not promoting war, he was understanding human nature, and humans run the governments.
I think it's always been that way deliberately. The witches, the Jews (hi Godwin!), the Red Scare, and now the terrorists. There's always a "thought crime" that governments choose to enforce, because it's the one that requires the least amount of evidence to prosecute. "If she floats she's a witch and we kill her; if she sinks, well it's too bad that she drowned but at least her soul's in Heaven." Scary, but keep the population religious and they'll believe anything.
I completely agree with you about protecting your rights through encryption. I was just saying that I saw a hole in the argument.
There is someone: the employee in the know who later leaves the corporation that purchased the illegally-gained information.
He then has some serious blackmail capability against his former employer. And, he could also go for a whistle-blower reward.
You are absolutely correct that "everyone is corruptible," so it's great to know that there's "someone" on the other end of the deal you mentioned. It may take a while, but eventually that (or those) individual(s) will get greedy for more than they were most likely handsomely paid, and will try to coerce funds with their information.
I actually really like that, the idea that the other side is corruptible as well. We could even start a campaign to help corrupt them. Well, actually I guess that's what wikileaks is.
I have an observation: the three front-runners are Senators. Writing laws that give the President additional powers seems to be in their best interests...
And, the evidence shows that it is assured not in the best interests of the country.
I realize that you were joking, but I'd like to add: whenever I'm on a turnpike (the kind where you take a ticket at the beginning, and then pay at the end based on the exit number you entered at), I always stop at a rest stop. That way my average speed won't ever be an issue.
"I've got pretty nice arms, but I hate my beak."
(I love when Jonathan Coulton is topical. :)
Strictly speaking, the extra length of the cable is the counterweight...
I mention this because, cutting the cable at any point below geosynchronous orbit will have the same net result -- the "weight" at the other end will fly off into space. Cutting it above geosynchronous orbit would have a different effect; and, it can probably be easily argued that using a weight rather than an extra-long cable would reduce the possibility of a collision.
In general, it's far better to do no wrong, rather than dream up ways to avoid getting caught.
In this specific case, your VMs "automatically" read the data back in when you start them up, don't they?
So, the warrant includes the VMs. You're not safe using EC2 for criminal activity...
In a word, "no".
To quote a bumper sticker, "No one died when Clinton lied."
There is absolutely no way to compare "a cock-sucking" with "causing the deaths of 4,000 America heroes."
But, since we're a perverted little Puritanical society, the former is ever-so-much worse...
Oops.
For a split second (and also perhaps because I am a customer of both of them), I read that as "land mine service", and wondered, "oh great, what's gonna blow up next?"
For me, it's the heat death of the universe. That ruins my day; I can't think of a way around it short of finding a way to make a hole to another universe -- if there are any.
Doesn't really keep me up at night though; we'll have a lot of time to find it, what with wrapping Dyson spheres around every star so we can make the universe last longer, so we can carry on more experiments.
Replying instead of moderating: I think it shows a cunning understanding of the target market, actually. My brother has kids, they watch Bob the Builder all the time so I'm sure both he and his wife hear the phrase a lot; for a politician to then use it, well it makes them subconsciously think "this is something similar" and we like similar things. (Unless of course the parents are sick of the show...)
For the retailer, perhaps; a friend owns a gas station and told me they make 1-3 cents per gallon. That's a razor-thin margin of 0.3% to 1%, at current prices.
However, there's a ton of margin for the oil companies. Just look at their record profits for 2007 to tell the real story: yes, the price is going up due to conflicts and reduction in supply and other factors; but their profitability tells a different story, and profits tend to tell a real story (except in unsustainable cases like Enron).
I think eliminating subsidies to the oil companies is a smart move; I read today that the House is passing it, and Democrats are trying to avoid a filibuster in the senate. Only for the top 5 oil companies, though; I'd rather see all oil subsidies eliminated, in favor of "renewable energy" subsidies (it's not really renewable, the sun will burn out someday and take the Earth with it we recently re-learned, but it's "essentially renewable").
Actually, "piracy" (by which I understand you to mean "copyright violations" and not "theft and murder on the high seas"), to fit into your analogy, is really more like "a mob entering a bookstore (without breaking), photocopying all the books (using their own photocopier and electricity), and then replacing them on their original shelves, in their original conditions, and locking up when they leave."
They're not depriving anyone of any property. Their act does no harm; it merely enriches their own lives.
The only perception of harm comes from the thermodynamically-challenged laws we have on our books. (In other words, the laws attempt to reverse entropy; tag goodluckwiththat.)
Your AC responder also had a good comment. I've seen you before, but this is the first time I've seen the new sig. Can't say I approve; your ethics don't seem to tell the difference between "depriving of income" and "depriving of property". There's a big difference; one is a potential future event, the other has immediate effects.
Don't you mean "Coming in Australia soon"?
Well, after shooting you dead your fingers will take a while to cool off. I'll just pry the gun from your slowly cooling dead fingers, rather than waiting. :)
And I completely agree with the sentiment; our 1968 gun laws were authored by someone who, very recently before proposing the law, had checked out the 1938 Nazi gun laws from the government public records. (This is verifiable, but I don't have a link.)