Politicians say what people want to hear. And Americans want to hear about jobs, about throwing out emmigrants, about how the mighty US will crush the rebellion... erm, terrorists and so on.
And, in this respect, Trump is more of a politician than anyone else in the race. (All the while claiming he's not a politician.)
Have you looked at Politifact's ratings of the statements made by politicians? Trump has the worst rating of anyone in the race now. He says the most lies and never cares enough to retract them. Often, he'll even double-down on the lie if told it's a lie. I'm not "creating lies", Trump is. He's being called on it by multiple people, but he just keeps going because he knows that enough of his supporters don't care what is a lie and what is fact. They lap up his statements, call for more, and he provides them.
I meant mostly in his support for policies that appeal to right-wing voters when (as some have pointed out), he's been a supporter of the Democratic Party in the past. In the end, though, I don't think Trump supports Democrat or Republican. Trump supports Trump. He's in favor of things that benefit Trump and against things that hurt Trump. If saying "Mexicans are rapists! We need to build a wall!" gets Trump more poll numbers, then Trump will say that.
Which, of course, means that if he makes it into the White House, his supporters shouldn't expect that Trump will do anything he says he should do. Even less than you'd expect a normal politician to do what he says he'll do. Trump could decide that the complete opposite will benefit him more now and head in that direction.
Speech is never 100% free. If I were a TV reporter and I claimed on air that the CEO of Coca Cola personally killed 50 kids a year, I'd be brought up on charges of libel. If I had evidence supporting this, I could get off but if I just didn't like the guy, I can't just say anything I want and then say "Free Speech" to get off.
Similarly, there's no protection against incitement to violence. If I whip a group into a frenzy about "those evil Muslims" and then shout out the addresses of Muslims saying "someone should put bullets through their heads", then I can't shrug my shoulders and claim "Free Speech" when one of my followers shoots someone I mentioned.
Free Speech is a right, but all rights have limits. As the saying goes: Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
Actually, I'd rate Andrew Dice Clay above Trump. The Daily Show recently had a bit where they showed portions of a Trump speech and for much of it he meanders aimlessly. However, when he gets to certain key talking points ("Ban those Muslims!" "Mexicans are rapists!") the crowd suddenly comes alive and cheers. That's more a knock on the people who support Trump than evidence of Trump being a great speaker.
What he is good at, though, is media manipulation. He knows how to get everyone talking about him (yes, including what I'm doing now) and thus he gets free advertising everywhere. Nobody asks him for details and he doesn't give any because his campaign isn't about deep political discussions. It's about making the 2016 Presidential Election into one big reality TV show because in that arena Trump wins.
Actually, I think this comparison is better than "Trump = Hitler": http://qz.com/624065/a-tip-to-americans-from-an-italian-who-saw-berlusconi-get-elected-again-and-again-and-again/
Trump seems like the American version of Italy's Berlusconi - a buffoon who nobody took seriously, who won the election, and who ruined his country.
The difference is that politicians in the past would stretch, spin, and skew the truth, but tried to stop short of outright breaking it. It was like a game. Who could come closest to breaking the truth without actually doing it? If you lost and were caught in a lie, you would retract your statement, make a mea culpa, and then try to find a new way to spin the truth so as not to break it again.
Trump, on the other hand, doesn't shy away from lies and doesn't bother admitting he's wrong when caught making lies. According to Politifact, 20% of his statements are Pants on Fire lies. Another 39% are false. That's 59% of stuff coming out of Trump's mouth that are completely untrue. For comparison, Cruz has an 8% Pants on Fire rating and 31% false for a 39% total. Trump only scores 7% on True or Mostly-True statements. (Cruz is at 21%.)
No other candidate does so poorly on this rating, but Trump simply doesn't care about truth at all. If he says that John Pershing shot 49 Muslim rebels with bullets covered in pig's blood and it kept terrorism at bay for 25 years, he gets his message across. Who cares if the story is a complete fabrication? He got people to cheer him on and that's all that matters to Trump. He claims to be an outsider and not a politician but he's more of a politician than anyone else in the race.
A small part of me hopes that this is all a "Stephen Colbert" act. That he's pretending to be a crazy, ultra-right wing candidate but, once in office, he'll turn out to be an extremely liberal President. Of course, this chances of him being sincere are large enough that I wouldn't vote for him no matter who his opponent was.
My favorite thing is that Pluto is so cold, that it has water ice "rocks" that are harder than rocks on Earth. Just when we think we've figured out everything, we find something else in the Universe that completely blows away our expectations (in the best possible way).
And, it is important to note, that what Apple is saying is that they don't have control in this case. It's not like they have some super-key that would unlock the phone and they are refusing to give it. They have no access to the phone. The government is requiring Apple to assert control over the phone while simultaneously try to assert their control over Apple. If the government wins, it will be Government > Apple > Users. If Apple wins, it will be Users > [Apple | Government]. There will still be cases where Apple is above the government or vice versa, but a ruling in Apple's favor will only serve to show that it's the users who are in charge.
And you still have the problem of other law enforcement agencies wanting their own "just for a single phone" releases. The FBI has already admitted to having hundreds of requests lined up and ready for when this precedent is set. Other police departments have their own lists. Other countries doubtlessly are waiting to see if Apple caves. If you think that this will end with this one phone then you are hopelessly naive. If Apple complies with "this one phone", they'll be flooded with requests for additional unlockings.
But as I discussed in my comment, we don't see any radio waves nor do we see any signs of megastructures or other large-scale use of the large amount of available energy.
Let's say there's an alien civilization out there with technological progress. First of all, they would have to be advanced enough to use radio waves. An "Earth at the 1600's" would be invisible to us. However, they would also need to not have progressed past blanket radio wave bursts. As we communicate more and more via wires or direct satellite communications, less of our chatter will be audible to space. Let's say that the alien race proceeds about how we do. They would have about a 300 span (being generous) from "first visible via radio waves" to "went silent."
This 300 year span would need to occur while we were able to look for them. If the last of their radio waves passed us in the 1200's, we wouldn't have detected them. It would also have to occur in a portion of the sky we were looking at. They would also need to be close enough for the radio wave strength to be detectable. If they are five galaxies over, we'd be hard pressed to detect the signal even if they aimed it right for us.
Let's say we were lucky enough to be looking in the right spot at the right time and they were the right distance away. Would we recognize a signal? The signal would be in an alien language, using an alien encoding algorithm, perhaps compressed using an alien compression routine. It wouldn't be a video in English encoded using MP4 and zipped using gzip. Given all the alien-ness of the signal, there's a strong possibility that we could discount it as mere noise and move on.
Just because we haven't detected a signal (and recognized it as one) doesn't mean intelligent alien life doesn't exist out there somewhere.
As far as megastructures go, space is huge (insert Hitchhiker's Guide quote here) and we're just now approaching being able to detect Earth-sized objects. Why does the lack of "We found a super-Jupiter sized thing that's not a planet" announcements mean that there can't possibly be five hundred alien mega-structures the size of our moon in the Andromeda galaxy.
Not only that, but the advanced civilizations are spread out so far apart that detecting each other is difficult at best. Direct communications is nearly impossible and physical contact would be out of the question. Of course, all of this could go out the window if advanced civilizations discover some "magical to us" technology that lets them go above the speed of light. (Perhaps discovering FTL drives is the initiation rite that gets you into the galactic fraternity.) Going by our understanding of physics, though, there could be dozens of intelligent species out there all looking to their stars and wondering if anyone else was out there.
If I recall correctly, we don't yet have the capability to detect Earth sized planets. They are just barely out of our detection range. However, when we were able to detect super-Jupiter sized planets, we found a lot of them. As our detection size shrinks, the number of planets found keeps growing. If this holds up, then in when we finally get down to being able to detect Earth-sized planets, things could get interesting.
Of course, then there are moons. Imagine a solar system like our own, but with Jupiter where we are. Jupiter wouldn't be habitable, but Europa might be. A large moon orbiting a gas giant might be able to sustain life and all we'd see from here (at the moment) is "gas giant in the habitable zone, move on."
Right now, I'm stuck with Time Warner Cable at 15/1. ("Up to" 15Mbps which sometimes means 17Mbps and sometimes means 8Mbps.) There's no FIOS or anything else where I live. Faster speeds - up to 50mbps - are available, but cost a ton. I'd love if Google could light up some dark fiber in my neighborhood (Capital Region of New York). I'm not going to hold my breath, though.
This isn't "Hey, I want to download HOT NEW MOVIE for free instead of paying for it." It's "Hey, I bought a Blu-Ray of HOT NEW MOVIE but would like to view it on my computer, my tablet, my phone, etc. Why can't I rip the file and use it for my own use?"
Yes, some people will use the rips to upload them for others (totally illegal), but we shouldn't ban technology based on "some people will use it for illegal stuff." If we did that, then all computers would be banned on the premise that some people use them to commit crimes.
The commercials say "own it on Blu-Ray today" but the laws (bought and paid for by the entertainment industry) say "pay for a limited license to view the material as defined by the large entertainment companies and which can be revoked if they feel like it... today!"
And then the media companies will counter with a big pile of campaign donation cash and a request for even more stringent DRM, high per-stream royalty rates, mandatory anti-piracy payments, and other pro-industry policies. Do you think your local politician will listen to you or that big bag of cash?
So one in five studies might contain false data. Essentially what they are saying is that there's a 20% chance that they are lying about there being a 20% chance of them lying.
It isn't specifically about cracking the encryption, but it might as well be about that.
iPhones will let you try the PIN 10 times before wiping the device. The FBI wants Apple to 1) disable this (remotely while the device is locked) and 2) allow them to try PIN combinations via a simulated USB keyboard so they don't have to type out all the combinations manually. If they do this, they can brute force the PIN pretty quickly and get into the device. All the encryption in the world won't protect you if your access credentials are easy to guess and the FBI is demanding that Apple lower defenses against a brute force attack on the access credentials.
Also valid translation: All people are to be considered terrorists, especially if they use things like encryption to prevent us from seeing everything they do at every moment. Because "security."
And after you've done it one time, precedent is against you. If Apple wants to fight this fight (and it looks like they do), then now is the time to fight it. Not fifty phones down the line.
That's a perfect analogy. The government wants to build a series of tunnels that let them enter everyone's basement anytime they want. They promise they'll only use them for severe crimes and when they have a warrant, but a look at their track record doesn't give hope that they'd keep their promise. Apple has made their basement walls out of an unbreakable compound. The house would crumble to the ground before the government could install their tunnel. So the government is ordering Apple to install a tunnel for them (the government) "just this one time" (and completely without compensation. Of course, once this one tunnel is built, another will be requested and then another and so on. Apple shouldn't be required to compromise the security of everyone's house just because one guy might possibly have evidence of a crime in his house.
There is no way to make firmware that would only work on this particular phone in such a way that the code could not be expanded to be used on other phones in the future. If Apple complies with this request, there will be other requests which will be justified as "you did it last time, why not one more time?" If Apple makes future phones immune to this, then the government will frame it as Apple purposefully taking away a tool that law enforcement previously had. In no way is this going to be a "one and done" request.
McConnell keeps calling Obama a "lame duck President", but I don't think he knows what that term means. Traditionally, the "lame duck" portion of a President's term begins when the next President is elected. McConnell seems to want it to be from when the election cycle begins. Since our election cycles seem to begin earlier and earlier, it would mean that a President would be a lame duck after only two years in office. How long until a President would only get a year of actually doing stuff before the opposing party said "It's too close to the election, we need to wait for the people to decide"? And lest anyone think that I'm just blaming the Republicans, I'm under no illusions that the Democrats wouldn't use this themselves if this goes through.
Right now, McConnell and the Republicans are acting like Obama is on his way out, but we still don't even have final nominees for the next President. We're nowhere close to the election and Obama should be allowed to do his job until then - not be blocked because the opposing party thinks they might win the Presidency next. What if Sanders or Clinton is nominated? Will they insist that there will be no nomination hearings until "the people decide again... and this time make the right decision"?
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And, in this respect, Trump is more of a politician than anyone else in the race. (All the while claiming he's not a politician.)
Have you looked at Politifact's ratings of the statements made by politicians? Trump has the worst rating of anyone in the race now. He says the most lies and never cares enough to retract them. Often, he'll even double-down on the lie if told it's a lie. I'm not "creating lies", Trump is. He's being called on it by multiple people, but he just keeps going because he knows that enough of his supporters don't care what is a lie and what is fact. They lap up his statements, call for more, and he provides them.
I meant mostly in his support for policies that appeal to right-wing voters when (as some have pointed out), he's been a supporter of the Democratic Party in the past. In the end, though, I don't think Trump supports Democrat or Republican. Trump supports Trump. He's in favor of things that benefit Trump and against things that hurt Trump. If saying "Mexicans are rapists! We need to build a wall!" gets Trump more poll numbers, then Trump will say that.
Which, of course, means that if he makes it into the White House, his supporters shouldn't expect that Trump will do anything he says he should do. Even less than you'd expect a normal politician to do what he says he'll do. Trump could decide that the complete opposite will benefit him more now and head in that direction.
Speech is never 100% free. If I were a TV reporter and I claimed on air that the CEO of Coca Cola personally killed 50 kids a year, I'd be brought up on charges of libel. If I had evidence supporting this, I could get off but if I just didn't like the guy, I can't just say anything I want and then say "Free Speech" to get off.
Similarly, there's no protection against incitement to violence. If I whip a group into a frenzy about "those evil Muslims" and then shout out the addresses of Muslims saying "someone should put bullets through their heads", then I can't shrug my shoulders and claim "Free Speech" when one of my followers shoots someone I mentioned.
Free Speech is a right, but all rights have limits. As the saying goes: Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
Actually, I'd rate Andrew Dice Clay above Trump. The Daily Show recently had a bit where they showed portions of a Trump speech and for much of it he meanders aimlessly. However, when he gets to certain key talking points ("Ban those Muslims!" "Mexicans are rapists!") the crowd suddenly comes alive and cheers. That's more a knock on the people who support Trump than evidence of Trump being a great speaker.
What he is good at, though, is media manipulation. He knows how to get everyone talking about him (yes, including what I'm doing now) and thus he gets free advertising everywhere. Nobody asks him for details and he doesn't give any because his campaign isn't about deep political discussions. It's about making the 2016 Presidential Election into one big reality TV show because in that arena Trump wins.
Actually, I think this comparison is better than "Trump = Hitler": http://qz.com/624065/a-tip-to-americans-from-an-italian-who-saw-berlusconi-get-elected-again-and-again-and-again/
Trump seems like the American version of Italy's Berlusconi - a buffoon who nobody took seriously, who won the election, and who ruined his country.
The difference is that politicians in the past would stretch, spin, and skew the truth, but tried to stop short of outright breaking it. It was like a game. Who could come closest to breaking the truth without actually doing it? If you lost and were caught in a lie, you would retract your statement, make a mea culpa, and then try to find a new way to spin the truth so as not to break it again.
Trump, on the other hand, doesn't shy away from lies and doesn't bother admitting he's wrong when caught making lies. According to Politifact, 20% of his statements are Pants on Fire lies. Another 39% are false. That's 59% of stuff coming out of Trump's mouth that are completely untrue. For comparison, Cruz has an 8% Pants on Fire rating and 31% false for a 39% total. Trump only scores 7% on True or Mostly-True statements. (Cruz is at 21%.)
No other candidate does so poorly on this rating, but Trump simply doesn't care about truth at all. If he says that John Pershing shot 49 Muslim rebels with bullets covered in pig's blood and it kept terrorism at bay for 25 years, he gets his message across. Who cares if the story is a complete fabrication? He got people to cheer him on and that's all that matters to Trump. He claims to be an outsider and not a politician but he's more of a politician than anyone else in the race.
A small part of me hopes that this is all a "Stephen Colbert" act. That he's pretending to be a crazy, ultra-right wing candidate but, once in office, he'll turn out to be an extremely liberal President. Of course, this chances of him being sincere are large enough that I wouldn't vote for him no matter who his opponent was.
My favorite thing is that Pluto is so cold, that it has water ice "rocks" that are harder than rocks on Earth. Just when we think we've figured out everything, we find something else in the Universe that completely blows away our expectations (in the best possible way).
And, it is important to note, that what Apple is saying is that they don't have control in this case. It's not like they have some super-key that would unlock the phone and they are refusing to give it. They have no access to the phone. The government is requiring Apple to assert control over the phone while simultaneously try to assert their control over Apple. If the government wins, it will be Government > Apple > Users. If Apple wins, it will be Users > [Apple | Government]. There will still be cases where Apple is above the government or vice versa, but a ruling in Apple's favor will only serve to show that it's the users who are in charge.
And you still have the problem of other law enforcement agencies wanting their own "just for a single phone" releases. The FBI has already admitted to having hundreds of requests lined up and ready for when this precedent is set. Other police departments have their own lists. Other countries doubtlessly are waiting to see if Apple caves. If you think that this will end with this one phone then you are hopelessly naive. If Apple complies with "this one phone", they'll be flooded with requests for additional unlockings.
Let's say there's an alien civilization out there with technological progress. First of all, they would have to be advanced enough to use radio waves. An "Earth at the 1600's" would be invisible to us. However, they would also need to not have progressed past blanket radio wave bursts. As we communicate more and more via wires or direct satellite communications, less of our chatter will be audible to space. Let's say that the alien race proceeds about how we do. They would have about a 300 span (being generous) from "first visible via radio waves" to "went silent."
This 300 year span would need to occur while we were able to look for them. If the last of their radio waves passed us in the 1200's, we wouldn't have detected them. It would also have to occur in a portion of the sky we were looking at. They would also need to be close enough for the radio wave strength to be detectable. If they are five galaxies over, we'd be hard pressed to detect the signal even if they aimed it right for us.
Let's say we were lucky enough to be looking in the right spot at the right time and they were the right distance away. Would we recognize a signal? The signal would be in an alien language, using an alien encoding algorithm, perhaps compressed using an alien compression routine. It wouldn't be a video in English encoded using MP4 and zipped using gzip. Given all the alien-ness of the signal, there's a strong possibility that we could discount it as mere noise and move on.
Just because we haven't detected a signal (and recognized it as one) doesn't mean intelligent alien life doesn't exist out there somewhere.
As far as megastructures go, space is huge (insert Hitchhiker's Guide quote here) and we're just now approaching being able to detect Earth-sized objects. Why does the lack of "We found a super-Jupiter sized thing that's not a planet" announcements mean that there can't possibly be five hundred alien mega-structures the size of our moon in the Andromeda galaxy.
Not only that, but the advanced civilizations are spread out so far apart that detecting each other is difficult at best. Direct communications is nearly impossible and physical contact would be out of the question. Of course, all of this could go out the window if advanced civilizations discover some "magical to us" technology that lets them go above the speed of light. (Perhaps discovering FTL drives is the initiation rite that gets you into the galactic fraternity.) Going by our understanding of physics, though, there could be dozens of intelligent species out there all looking to their stars and wondering if anyone else was out there.
If I recall correctly, we don't yet have the capability to detect Earth sized planets. They are just barely out of our detection range. However, when we were able to detect super-Jupiter sized planets, we found a lot of them. As our detection size shrinks, the number of planets found keeps growing. If this holds up, then in when we finally get down to being able to detect Earth-sized planets, things could get interesting.
Of course, then there are moons. Imagine a solar system like our own, but with Jupiter where we are. Jupiter wouldn't be habitable, but Europa might be. A large moon orbiting a gas giant might be able to sustain life and all we'd see from here (at the moment) is "gas giant in the habitable zone, move on."
Right now, I'm stuck with Time Warner Cable at 15/1. ("Up to" 15Mbps which sometimes means 17Mbps and sometimes means 8Mbps.) There's no FIOS or anything else where I live. Faster speeds - up to 50mbps - are available, but cost a ton. I'd love if Google could light up some dark fiber in my neighborhood (Capital Region of New York). I'm not going to hold my breath, though.
This isn't "Hey, I want to download HOT NEW MOVIE for free instead of paying for it." It's "Hey, I bought a Blu-Ray of HOT NEW MOVIE but would like to view it on my computer, my tablet, my phone, etc. Why can't I rip the file and use it for my own use?"
Yes, some people will use the rips to upload them for others (totally illegal), but we shouldn't ban technology based on "some people will use it for illegal stuff." If we did that, then all computers would be banned on the premise that some people use them to commit crimes.
The commercials say "own it on Blu-Ray today" but the laws (bought and paid for by the entertainment industry) say "pay for a limited license to view the material as defined by the large entertainment companies and which can be revoked if they feel like it... today!"
And then the media companies will counter with a big pile of campaign donation cash and a request for even more stringent DRM, high per-stream royalty rates, mandatory anti-piracy payments, and other pro-industry policies. Do you think your local politician will listen to you or that big bag of cash?
So one in five studies might contain false data. Essentially what they are saying is that there's a 20% chance that they are lying about there being a 20% chance of them lying.
It isn't specifically about cracking the encryption, but it might as well be about that.
iPhones will let you try the PIN 10 times before wiping the device. The FBI wants Apple to 1) disable this (remotely while the device is locked) and 2) allow them to try PIN combinations via a simulated USB keyboard so they don't have to type out all the combinations manually. If they do this, they can brute force the PIN pretty quickly and get into the device. All the encryption in the world won't protect you if your access credentials are easy to guess and the FBI is demanding that Apple lower defenses against a brute force attack on the access credentials.
Also valid translation: All people are to be considered terrorists, especially if they use things like encryption to prevent us from seeing everything they do at every moment. Because "security."
And after you've done it one time, precedent is against you. If Apple wants to fight this fight (and it looks like they do), then now is the time to fight it. Not fifty phones down the line.
That's a perfect analogy. The government wants to build a series of tunnels that let them enter everyone's basement anytime they want. They promise they'll only use them for severe crimes and when they have a warrant, but a look at their track record doesn't give hope that they'd keep their promise. Apple has made their basement walls out of an unbreakable compound. The house would crumble to the ground before the government could install their tunnel. So the government is ordering Apple to install a tunnel for them (the government) "just this one time" (and completely without compensation. Of course, once this one tunnel is built, another will be requested and then another and so on. Apple shouldn't be required to compromise the security of everyone's house just because one guy might possibly have evidence of a crime in his house.
There is no way to make firmware that would only work on this particular phone in such a way that the code could not be expanded to be used on other phones in the future. If Apple complies with this request, there will be other requests which will be justified as "you did it last time, why not one more time?" If Apple makes future phones immune to this, then the government will frame it as Apple purposefully taking away a tool that law enforcement previously had. In no way is this going to be a "one and done" request.
McConnell keeps calling Obama a "lame duck President", but I don't think he knows what that term means. Traditionally, the "lame duck" portion of a President's term begins when the next President is elected. McConnell seems to want it to be from when the election cycle begins. Since our election cycles seem to begin earlier and earlier, it would mean that a President would be a lame duck after only two years in office. How long until a President would only get a year of actually doing stuff before the opposing party said "It's too close to the election, we need to wait for the people to decide"? And lest anyone think that I'm just blaming the Republicans, I'm under no illusions that the Democrats wouldn't use this themselves if this goes through.
Right now, McConnell and the Republicans are acting like Obama is on his way out, but we still don't even have final nominees for the next President. We're nowhere close to the election and Obama should be allowed to do his job until then - not be blocked because the opposing party thinks they might win the Presidency next. What if Sanders or Clinton is nominated? Will they insist that there will be no nomination hearings until "the people decide again... and this time make the right decision"?