I was just thinking that this is a privacy nightmare. However, if you make it so that each entity that needs to query the card gets its own id unique to the pair of queryer and card, instead of having one id for everything, then it can be just like having lots of different cards that just happen to inhabit the same physical space. So e.g. a hotel you check into can scan your card to know that they can track you down if you don't pay them. However, until they can show that you didn't pay, the government would not have to tell them who owns the card that was scanned. It could even be made so that you could check in twice with the same card and the hotel would get two different ids and so couldn't tell that you were the same person. Also, if the code the card gave was a once-off thing that was just generated from the card itself, the government also would not know that you checked into the hotel using your government id until the hotel comes asking for your identity because you didn't pay the bill. The same system could be used to prevent different government agencies from comparing notes on you, since they'd be working with different ids that can only be matched up if they can make a case to a judge or similar that this is necessary. That's much better privacy that you could potentially get with a card like that than you currently do with a credit card. Not that I have any illusion that this is what is happening in Russia.
You don't understand what motivates whistle-blowers. They are not spies paid by a foreign government - they are not paid at all. They are the people protecting your country from the likes of you. Hence you want them executed, though perhaps there is hope that the American populace will see who the true threat is. The scary part is that your ilk probably don't even understand that you are destroying that which you are seeking to defend.
Problem is they can insert questions that will make it possible for them to tell if you are trying to game the system. An obvious one of those would be "have you ever lied?" - anyone saying no to that is gaming the test. They can make it less obvious than that and put in more than one question like that. Think about it this way: if you and a team of geniuses were given 5 years to make a test to root out malcontents and detect if someone is trying to game the test, are you quite sure you would utterly fail in that task?
On your reason 1, I agree that that shouldn't be the case. In the same way wars shouldn't happen, but sometimes there isn't a choice. This is one of the repercussions of US torture: prosecution for past crimes must be a lesser concern than preventing future torture. If torturing someone to prove their guilt is not OK, then subjecting them to torture in order to be able to prosecute them is not OK either. It seems you disagree on that and so think that prosecution is more important than preventing torture. I guess if you view torture as not so serious then what I'm saying wouldn't make much sense to you.
There are ways around it. E.g. he could be handed over on the condition that he must not be transferred to the US, and if Sweden has never broken such a promise and it carries significant cost for Sweden to break such a promise then that may be sufficient. He could also be tried in Sweden while staying physically in England and then serve any judgment in an England prison.
On 2, the judge's responsibility is to determine if the prisoner may be subjected to torture if handed over and in that case he should deny the request. It is not his responsibility to determine if the prisoner is in danger where he is from the UK government itself. If the judge has the authority to deny a request like that on grounds like that then that builds confidence that he would not be handed over to the US from the UK. If both the UK and Sweden are susceptible to US pressure then the US only has to break one of them if the prisoner is in both countries while if he stays in just one country then that particular country must break for the US to apprehend the person. Sweden is also less powerful than the UK and so may be more easily threatened.
While I do acknowledge the need for an organization like Wikileaks, I have no particular opinion about whether it is prudent for England to transfer Assange to Sweden because I don't know enough facts to determine if it is reasonable that Sweden might transfer Assange to the US. I think you may not understand what I'm saying, so let's change the names here: Suppose Iran has close ties to and power over Russia, and Iran is known to torture political prisoners. Iran is very interested in apprehending a person named Ivan that helped the US gain intel on the Iranian nuclear program. Ivan is in the UK, and Russia is asking that Ivan be transferred to Russia so that he can be asked some questions about a possible rape charge. If the UK judge deems it reasonable that Russia might transfer Ivan to Iran, then he must deny the petition to have Ivan transferred to Russia, as otherwise he would play a part in making the torture of Ivan possible. Does it make sense to you now?
They want to encourage leaks and if Manning did what he is accused of then he helped them out a great deal in their mission. Wikileaks has no responsibility to refrain from taking action when it comes to helping whistle blowers or even just random people to get a fair trial.
If Wikileaks are a little smart, they make sure not to know who is leaking stuff to them so that there is no scenario where they can be compelled to give up the identities of their sources. So they should not be able to know if Manning did what he is suspected in any privileged way. They can still make the donation if they think he probably did it based on what is known to the public or maybe just because their actions got him in trouble and they'd like to help him out where they can even if he didn't do it.
The fact is that OSS organizations can't just pay for a patent once and be in the clear because then it ceases being open source in that other people can't legally redistribute their own versions of the software without them themselves paying the enormous patent fees. However, It's not just about the money. It's the fact that someone else owns you if you use anything covered by their patents - at any point they can withdraw the offer to license their patents to any more people, and then suddenly your software stops being open no matter how much money you have because other people can't obtain the license necessary to redistribute. Patent afflicted software is not open because patents prevent redistribution, and so patents are opposed to OSS. The free-as-in-freedom software crowd have even more problems with patents than just that.
You're basically saying that they can't send him to any country for any crime if that country has a legal relationship allowing the transfer of prisoners over to the Untied states to face charges on an unrelated crime?
Exactly - people should not be handed over to a third country when there is a possibility of further transfer to the US on the kind of grounds that might motivate US torture or placement in a facility like Guantanamo Bay. The US has become a rogue nation on the topic of dealing with prisoners. At the same time the US has power over and close relations with many nations. That combination makes for difficult situations for countries that uphold human rights. It's a very sad thing.
That's right, prisoners should not be given over to someone who may torture them even if their crimes are grievous. So in some cases extradition to the United States should not occur even in the situation you suggest.
It happens to suspects. Suspects are ordinary people who are suspected by someone of something. That something probably won't happen to you is a piss poor argument that it is OK.
The whole damn purpose of Gitmo is that people can be sent there without being convicted of anything and then tortured on the mere speculation that they might know or have done something someone in power doesn't like. It is not necessary for a crime to have been committed.
You got it backwards. They want people who will follow illegal and unconscionable orders while keeping their mouth shut. Those are the people who will best pass a test for not being a whistle blower.
Problem is, the kind of people who will pass such a test with flying colors are exactly the people who should not be given any kind of power - they are the people who do whatever is ordered. Give a psychopath money to do a dirty job and keep her mouth shut and she'll do it. Those are precisely the people that the public has an interest in keeping away from positions of power and authority. Eliminating the whistle blowers is eliminating the non-psychopaths.
The way to go about it isn't to make up crazy shit and then go see if you can find it. That is the job of your crazy friends. If they say a house is haunted, they probably have some crazy reason to say that. Get them to state that crazy reason and go from there. If they say they feel a chill down their spine, get them to state if it is a physical chill that a thermometer might measure, or if it's rather a feeling inside of them. If they hear voices, get out a microphone. If they see dead people, get a camera. In the likely event that you pick up something that may or may not be what they were talking about, they'll probably own it as evidence of what they were saying, and you now have something you can actually act on - the puzzle of finding out what whatever you recorded actually was. Prepare to be laughed at if you don't solve the puzzle and for them to be strengthened in their crazy. If you explain the phenomena they'll likely conclude that what you recorded wasn't what they originally experienced. If you fail to record anything interesting, they'll probably say that that's not how these things work and that you just don't get it. You will not find satisfaction down this route. If you must proceed, look at the work of James Randi, though probably you shouldn't copy his inflammatory style.
True. My problem is that people can tell that I'm doing this and get insulted because it casts doubt on their competence. Haven't figured out a better solution yet.
Except what will probably happen is that you're going to have to continue with the team you've got and then with that attitude you'll be telling them that they are all morons. Disaster ensues.
I haven't been to Silverpine Forest in Cataclysm yet, but I have played through many of the areas, including the Goblin and Worgen starter areas and all the new Cataclysm zones. I think we agree that Cataclysm is a big improvement in many areas and certainly including the storytelling. I'm not belittling that, and I don't see any reason that Blizzard should have worse writers for WoW than Bioware does for TOR. That wouldn't make any sense. It's just that TOR is built to support story at every level and WoW just isn't - even in Cataclysm. As an example, in the Goblin starter zone you are given a background, friends, a girl-friend and a non-generic role to play. Did you notice how that disappears when you step out of the starter zone? That was Blizzard trying to do a tiny bit of what TOR will do, but they had to give it up the moment you step out of the new starter areas because WoW's story is not the player character's story and trying to change that would require WoW to change so fundamentally that they'd have to make a new MMO to do it. Incidentally Blizzard is making a new mmo (no details announced).
Story has been a weak point of all MMOs and WoW is no exception, even if WoW is ahead of the pack now with Cataclysm. Forget the story itself and imagine the cinematic character interactions in Mass Effect. Expand that to every quest in TOR. Now contrast that with the text boxes WoW gives you for 95% of its quests. WoW's foundation for telling stories is a hippo that Blizzard has made dance extremely well, but it can't ever be made to dance ballet. It just seems very skillful because all the other MMO's are worse. It's not that WoW has bad writers, it's that those writers don't have the tools they need to tell better stories. TOR's writers do have those tools. What remains to be seen is if TOR does the million other things that are important in an MMO well enough to make us want to play the game for something other than the story.
I don't know what this guy is smoking. That quests have you kill mobs and then getting a reward is part of what defines an mmo, and 95% of quests in WoW are like that. The writer seems to be just having the problem that he doesn't like RPGs in general and wouldn't like WoW either. When WoW came out it did exactly what the writer is complaining about - it followed everyone else by taking the best features of other MMOs and improved them all slightly. The result was a game that was superior to the other MMOs that came before it. This is exactly the formula Bioware is attempting to follow with TOR, except they are adding story as a central device which just hasn't been done very well in an mmo before - the story in mmo's has always played second fiddle to combat, exploration and progression.
More importantly, if you followed TOR closely (spoilers to follow), you'd know that the story of the jedi starter area centers around you retrieving and using the hilt of the first light saber ever made, and in the process you discover an ancient Sith holocron imprinted with the personality of a Sith lord of old. You can now follow your jedi master in a path to the light side, or make shocking evil choices to become the Sith lord's apprentice while deceiving your fellow jedi about it all. That's the starter area before level 10 - all presented in full Bioware cinematic style. I've got more than 1000 hours in on WoW, including the latest improvements in the expansion Cataclysm, and I can tell you, that blows anything in WoW out of the water story-wise, including the big-ticket year-long overarching story lines in that game. And that's just the starter area of the jedi. WoW has got nothing on TOR story-wise based on what has been revealed about the game. What remains to be seen is if TOR can reach WoW's level of quality on its mechanics, it's combat, exploration and progression, which is going to be a tall order seeing as WoW has been working on those things for a long time.
Sleep mode leaves the ram powered but powers down most other things, is what I think he is saying. So ram may be the most significant power consumer for sleep mode.
If you (speaking to the larger audience, rather than the parent poster) can't bring yourself to pay for a service that you use on a regular basis and have direct benefit from, then I have only two words: grow up.
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I was just thinking that this is a privacy nightmare. However, if you make it so that each entity that needs to query the card gets its own id unique to the pair of queryer and card, instead of having one id for everything, then it can be just like having lots of different cards that just happen to inhabit the same physical space. So e.g. a hotel you check into can scan your card to know that they can track you down if you don't pay them. However, until they can show that you didn't pay, the government would not have to tell them who owns the card that was scanned. It could even be made so that you could check in twice with the same card and the hotel would get two different ids and so couldn't tell that you were the same person. Also, if the code the card gave was a once-off thing that was just generated from the card itself, the government also would not know that you checked into the hotel using your government id until the hotel comes asking for your identity because you didn't pay the bill. The same system could be used to prevent different government agencies from comparing notes on you, since they'd be working with different ids that can only be matched up if they can make a case to a judge or similar that this is necessary. That's much better privacy that you could potentially get with a card like that than you currently do with a credit card. Not that I have any illusion that this is what is happening in Russia.
You don't understand what motivates whistle-blowers. They are not spies paid by a foreign government - they are not paid at all. They are the people protecting your country from the likes of you. Hence you want them executed, though perhaps there is hope that the American populace will see who the true threat is. The scary part is that your ilk probably don't even understand that you are destroying that which you are seeking to defend.
Problem is they can insert questions that will make it possible for them to tell if you are trying to game the system. An obvious one of those would be "have you ever lied?" - anyone saying no to that is gaming the test. They can make it less obvious than that and put in more than one question like that. Think about it this way: if you and a team of geniuses were given 5 years to make a test to root out malcontents and detect if someone is trying to game the test, are you quite sure you would utterly fail in that task?
On your reason 1, I agree that that shouldn't be the case. In the same way wars shouldn't happen, but sometimes there isn't a choice. This is one of the repercussions of US torture: prosecution for past crimes must be a lesser concern than preventing future torture. If torturing someone to prove their guilt is not OK, then subjecting them to torture in order to be able to prosecute them is not OK either. It seems you disagree on that and so think that prosecution is more important than preventing torture. I guess if you view torture as not so serious then what I'm saying wouldn't make much sense to you.
There are ways around it. E.g. he could be handed over on the condition that he must not be transferred to the US, and if Sweden has never broken such a promise and it carries significant cost for Sweden to break such a promise then that may be sufficient. He could also be tried in Sweden while staying physically in England and then serve any judgment in an England prison.
On 2, the judge's responsibility is to determine if the prisoner may be subjected to torture if handed over and in that case he should deny the request. It is not his responsibility to determine if the prisoner is in danger where he is from the UK government itself. If the judge has the authority to deny a request like that on grounds like that then that builds confidence that he would not be handed over to the US from the UK. If both the UK and Sweden are susceptible to US pressure then the US only has to break one of them if the prisoner is in both countries while if he stays in just one country then that particular country must break for the US to apprehend the person. Sweden is also less powerful than the UK and so may be more easily threatened.
While I do acknowledge the need for an organization like Wikileaks, I have no particular opinion about whether it is prudent for England to transfer Assange to Sweden because I don't know enough facts to determine if it is reasonable that Sweden might transfer Assange to the US. I think you may not understand what I'm saying, so let's change the names here: Suppose Iran has close ties to and power over Russia, and Iran is known to torture political prisoners. Iran is very interested in apprehending a person named Ivan that helped the US gain intel on the Iranian nuclear program. Ivan is in the UK, and Russia is asking that Ivan be transferred to Russia so that he can be asked some questions about a possible rape charge. If the UK judge deems it reasonable that Russia might transfer Ivan to Iran, then he must deny the petition to have Ivan transferred to Russia, as otherwise he would play a part in making the torture of Ivan possible. Does it make sense to you now?
They want to encourage leaks and if Manning did what he is accused of then he helped them out a great deal in their mission. Wikileaks has no responsibility to refrain from taking action when it comes to helping whistle blowers or even just random people to get a fair trial.
If Wikileaks are a little smart, they make sure not to know who is leaking stuff to them so that there is no scenario where they can be compelled to give up the identities of their sources. So they should not be able to know if Manning did what he is suspected in any privileged way. They can still make the donation if they think he probably did it based on what is known to the public or maybe just because their actions got him in trouble and they'd like to help him out where they can even if he didn't do it.
The fact is that OSS organizations can't just pay for a patent once and be in the clear because then it ceases being open source in that other people can't legally redistribute their own versions of the software without them themselves paying the enormous patent fees. However, It's not just about the money. It's the fact that someone else owns you if you use anything covered by their patents - at any point they can withdraw the offer to license their patents to any more people, and then suddenly your software stops being open no matter how much money you have because other people can't obtain the license necessary to redistribute. Patent afflicted software is not open because patents prevent redistribution, and so patents are opposed to OSS. The free-as-in-freedom software crowd have even more problems with patents than just that.
You're basically saying that they can't send him to any country for any crime if that country has a legal relationship allowing the transfer of prisoners over to the Untied states to face charges on an unrelated crime?
Exactly - people should not be handed over to a third country when there is a possibility of further transfer to the US on the kind of grounds that might motivate US torture or placement in a facility like Guantanamo Bay. The US has become a rogue nation on the topic of dealing with prisoners. At the same time the US has power over and close relations with many nations. That combination makes for difficult situations for countries that uphold human rights. It's a very sad thing.
That's right, prisoners should not be given over to someone who may torture them even if their crimes are grievous. So in some cases extradition to the United States should not occur even in the situation you suggest.
Sadly, wishing doesn't make it so.
That certainly doesn't happen to ordinary people.
It happens to suspects. Suspects are ordinary people who are suspected by someone of something. That something probably won't happen to you is a piss poor argument that it is OK.
That was sarcasm.
The whole damn purpose of Gitmo is that people can be sent there without being convicted of anything and then tortured on the mere speculation that they might know or have done something someone in power doesn't like. It is not necessary for a crime to have been committed.
Where did you get that from?
While I think Islam is a vile practice too sick to be called a religion
Nothing is too vile to be called a religion.
You got it backwards. They want people who will follow illegal and unconscionable orders while keeping their mouth shut. Those are the people who will best pass a test for not being a whistle blower.
Problem is, the kind of people who will pass such a test with flying colors are exactly the people who should not be given any kind of power - they are the people who do whatever is ordered. Give a psychopath money to do a dirty job and keep her mouth shut and she'll do it. Those are precisely the people that the public has an interest in keeping away from positions of power and authority. Eliminating the whistle blowers is eliminating the non-psychopaths.
The way to go about it isn't to make up crazy shit and then go see if you can find it. That is the job of your crazy friends. If they say a house is haunted, they probably have some crazy reason to say that. Get them to state that crazy reason and go from there. If they say they feel a chill down their spine, get them to state if it is a physical chill that a thermometer might measure, or if it's rather a feeling inside of them. If they hear voices, get out a microphone. If they see dead people, get a camera. In the likely event that you pick up something that may or may not be what they were talking about, they'll probably own it as evidence of what they were saying, and you now have something you can actually act on - the puzzle of finding out what whatever you recorded actually was. Prepare to be laughed at if you don't solve the puzzle and for them to be strengthened in their crazy. If you explain the phenomena they'll likely conclude that what you recorded wasn't what they originally experienced. If you fail to record anything interesting, they'll probably say that that's not how these things work and that you just don't get it. You will not find satisfaction down this route. If you must proceed, look at the work of James Randi, though probably you shouldn't copy his inflammatory style.
True. My problem is that people can tell that I'm doing this and get insulted because it casts doubt on their competence. Haven't figured out a better solution yet.
Except what will probably happen is that you're going to have to continue with the team you've got and then with that attitude you'll be telling them that they are all morons. Disaster ensues.
I haven't been to Silverpine Forest in Cataclysm yet, but I have played through many of the areas, including the Goblin and Worgen starter areas and all the new Cataclysm zones. I think we agree that Cataclysm is a big improvement in many areas and certainly including the storytelling. I'm not belittling that, and I don't see any reason that Blizzard should have worse writers for WoW than Bioware does for TOR. That wouldn't make any sense. It's just that TOR is built to support story at every level and WoW just isn't - even in Cataclysm. As an example, in the Goblin starter zone you are given a background, friends, a girl-friend and a non-generic role to play. Did you notice how that disappears when you step out of the starter zone? That was Blizzard trying to do a tiny bit of what TOR will do, but they had to give it up the moment you step out of the new starter areas because WoW's story is not the player character's story and trying to change that would require WoW to change so fundamentally that they'd have to make a new MMO to do it. Incidentally Blizzard is making a new mmo (no details announced).
Story has been a weak point of all MMOs and WoW is no exception, even if WoW is ahead of the pack now with Cataclysm. Forget the story itself and imagine the cinematic character interactions in Mass Effect. Expand that to every quest in TOR. Now contrast that with the text boxes WoW gives you for 95% of its quests. WoW's foundation for telling stories is a hippo that Blizzard has made dance extremely well, but it can't ever be made to dance ballet. It just seems very skillful because all the other MMO's are worse. It's not that WoW has bad writers, it's that those writers don't have the tools they need to tell better stories. TOR's writers do have those tools. What remains to be seen is if TOR does the million other things that are important in an MMO well enough to make us want to play the game for something other than the story.
I don't know what this guy is smoking. That quests have you kill mobs and then getting a reward is part of what defines an mmo, and 95% of quests in WoW are like that. The writer seems to be just having the problem that he doesn't like RPGs in general and wouldn't like WoW either. When WoW came out it did exactly what the writer is complaining about - it followed everyone else by taking the best features of other MMOs and improved them all slightly. The result was a game that was superior to the other MMOs that came before it. This is exactly the formula Bioware is attempting to follow with TOR, except they are adding story as a central device which just hasn't been done very well in an mmo before - the story in mmo's has always played second fiddle to combat, exploration and progression.
More importantly, if you followed TOR closely (spoilers to follow), you'd know that the story of the jedi starter area centers around you retrieving and using the hilt of the first light saber ever made, and in the process you discover an ancient Sith holocron imprinted with the personality of a Sith lord of old. You can now follow your jedi master in a path to the light side, or make shocking evil choices to become the Sith lord's apprentice while deceiving your fellow jedi about it all. That's the starter area before level 10 - all presented in full Bioware cinematic style. I've got more than 1000 hours in on WoW, including the latest improvements in the expansion Cataclysm, and I can tell you, that blows anything in WoW out of the water story-wise, including the big-ticket year-long overarching story lines in that game. And that's just the starter area of the jedi. WoW has got nothing on TOR story-wise based on what has been revealed about the game. What remains to be seen is if TOR can reach WoW's level of quality on its mechanics, it's combat, exploration and progression, which is going to be a tall order seeing as WoW has been working on those things for a long time.
Sleep mode leaves the ram powered but powers down most other things, is what I think he is saying. So ram may be the most significant power consumer for sleep mode.
If you (speaking to the larger audience, rather than the parent poster) can't bring yourself to pay for a service that you use on a regular basis and have direct benefit from, then I have only two words: grow up .
Does not compute.