Eventually, nobody will care about this because all communications will be encrypted end-to-end and wiretaps will be useless.
Unless Obama (or some future President) is more successful with the future incarnation of Clipper, than Bill Clinton was.
Attempts to outlaw that would result in only criminals having encryption...
Encryption really is so much like weaponry, that your statement — and its accuracy — are the same as "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Does not stop the politicians from trying, though...
it will be easier than ever to do lawful or unlawful surveillance
It is already easy... What protects us, is that the evidence thus obtained is often inadmissible in court.
if spies/criminals/terrorists/politicians are stupid enough to use plain language over the phone to plan their dastardly deeds, then they deserve to be put into prison.
I'd like to point out, that of the four groups you listed, the criminals and the terrorists deserve to be put into prison (or worse) regardless of whether they use plain language. Same applies to spies, unless they work for our side.
Politicians planning dastardly deeds get little sympathy too...
reach into my home, and disable features on a device which I own
They would only do this, if you allow them. If you wish to watch a movie, that they produced, they get to set the rules. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the relationship is voluntary: "By pressing 'Continue' you allow us to disable the analog outputs of your electronics for the duration of the feature presentation. Press 'Cancel' to return to the menu."
I will then use multiple computers/servers spread around the globe to pirate every fucking thing I can get my grubby ex-consumer neo-pirate hands on, even if it means going to jail.
And that really will be, where you'll belong, because while refusing a deal you don't like is perfectly just, piracy really is illegal and ought to remain so. You feel so strongly about content-makers messing up with your equipment (even if with your own permission), but don't mind robbing them of their profits (against their will)...
Some causes require martyrdom to see the goals come to fruition.
I can think of some better causes for martyrdom, than entertainment...
if Bob living 10 miles from down had his license suspended for reckless operation, then the answer is simple.
Whether or not Bob really is a danger on the road, is not relevant to the right vs. privilege problem...
Who gets to determine, whether he really is reckless — that's the question. If access to public roads is a privilege, then the Executive can deny access to Bob on its own determination. If it is a right, on the other hand, then the Executive needs to convince the independent Judiciary, that Bob needs to be denied that right.
By claiming more and more things to be a privilege (even gun-owning, definitely a right, requires a very hard to get license), the Executive government gains expediency — it makes their job of everyday governing easier. That's not, in itself, a bad thing. What is bad, is that our protections — rooted in the checks and balances, that different branches of government impose on each other — deteriorate.
We started on this slippery slope long ago, and we slipped to the point, where a driving license may be withdrawn over such a matter as non-payment of child support! Bob could be the safest driver in the world, but if he is not paying child support (which, however despicable, is not driving-related at all), he could be barred from driving...
Rivals working for the same boss who hate each other is terribly new and interesting...
Why are cops and judges rivals?.. FBI and local police are rivals, yes. Fire and Police Departments could be competing (both have ambulances, for example). But police and traffic judges? Their duties don't overlap at all... Maybe, they belong to the same union (though that's unlikely) and have a conflict there, or something... But otherwise, I don't think, they are rivals at all.
Good question - not like we have a transit system worth a damn.
That's an off-topic flamebait. Because where we do have a vast transit system — like NYC — the use of it is also a privilege, not a right. Even though you don't need a license to enter subway, the government can stop you at their whim. Most people only realized this recently, when the city started randomly searching riders' belongings: you can refuse to be searched, but then they can refuse to let you into the subway... Because subway is "theirs"...
Thus, covering the entire country with highly sophisticated transit system would only make the right vs. privilege situation worse. The government spends our money to build the roads (or the transit) and then asserts, that it is only our privilege to use it...
That use of sidewalk (also government-maintained) is still a right, must be an oversight...
The government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have. Various "right wing lunatics."
Considering most of the major telecos went along with wholesale spying on the American public
Only the calls with one of the ends outside America were ever "spied" on. Whether that's legal or not, it is hardly a "wholesale" spying on a public, the majority of whom have never been abroad nor personally know a foreigner. For domestic calls, the only things captured were the fact of the calls — not the conversation itself.
This, I believe, was always legal — the government never needed a warrant to look at your envelops at the Post Office, for example — as long as they weren't opening them. On the other hand, foreign mail was always subject to check by the government, and expanding that power of the Executive to phone calls is not entirely illogical...
Keep your exaggerations in line, in other words... Even if it were illegal, calling it "wholesale" is a flamebait...
What's interesting is that the judges work for "Traffic Courts". If in Chicago that is anything like in New York City, then the two groups (cops and judges) are the same — both work for and report to the Executive Branch. The traffic judges aren't real judges — from the Judiciary branch. New York (and some other locales) get away with this, because driving is not a right, but a privilege, and thus the Executive can simply withdraw it — and need not bother convicting the accused in front of an independent judge (much less the jury of one's peers).
Can anyone confirm, what the situation is in Chicago? Because, if the "Traffic Courts" there are also presided over by the Executive's employees, then it is interesting, because they and the cops are working for the same boss (the mayor)...
It will appear competitive, because the government's bottomless pockets will allow it to undercut the private competitors. Seriously, look up the history of Standard Oil — which resulted in our existing anti-monopoly laws. Their standard practice was setting up a shop next to competition's to undercut them. Once the competitor went out of business, their prices would go back up... Way up...
Government is a monopoly, thus keeping its activities to what simply can not be done privately (like law enforcement and military) — the things, you know, enumerated in the Constitution — is the only way to protect the citizenry from abuse.
Medicare is an example — it destroyed the private coverage plans for the old age, because nobody can compete with the government. And it is now a major fraud-prone money sink, that's only sustainable, because it does not cover everyone. Oh, yes, Medicare's own investigation claims, they have the least overhead of the medical plans. But if you trust an organization to audit itself, I may have some Enron stocks to sell you...
do you have greasemonkey and other memory hog addons?
Ad-Block Plus, and AccuWeather. But the i-user does not use either, and her sessions are even bigger than mine (lots of windows open), including Yahoo! Mail.
And you should stop visiting websites that are a memory hog (i would count slashdot among them)
What? Why should I stop visiting them? Will that fix memory leaks in Firefox?
And could you also mention the platform you are in, iirc flash is available on x86-64
I did mention the platform I'm in: FreeBSD/amd64. Last I heard, 64-bit support for Flash was alpha-quality at best (not even on Windows), and certainly not available for FreeBSD...
And coming back to the point, i am not so sure a few more visits to google maps
Whatever it is, I think, I'm already close enough to justify a) clean up of memory leaks in the app (4Gb is the hard ceiling, even if RAM were free); and b) looking into stable and official port to 64-bit. Currently, I believe, all such builds are "local" — supported by the platform-specific maintainers (such as FreeBSD's ports-team). This will involve fixing an awful lot of bugs and buglets in various parts of the code — starting at the bottom with NSPR... Here is but one example...
Do you seriously believe firefox will test the 4GB limit?
Of course... Here is from my home system — the two instances belong to my (very) significant other and myself:
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
4954 i 10 47 0 1798M 637M ucond 2 0:00 9.47% firefox-bi
48498 mi 11 45 0 1150M 810M ucond 3 0:00 13.09% firefox-bi ...
Three times more windows/tabs — or simply more visits to something "heavy" (like Google Maps), and she is done... And that's without Flash, which is not available for our platform...
Now, the actual memory consumption is smaller, than the total size, but on a 32-bit system, that does not matter — you are limited by 4Gb per process, because 2^32 is 4Gb... My system is, actually, a 64-bit one (FreeBSD/amd64), so I am "prepared" for Firefox to exceed 4Gb. My Firefox at work (RHEL-5.4, 32-bit) is currently under 1Gb, but that's because it crashes about daily (probably, due to Flash — or because some of the bugs that the FreeBSD ports fix, that are present in the "official" builds, don't know), and thus has less time to leak...
Another note, of course, is that simply by building in 64-bit mode, you significantly increase the sizes of many internal data structures (which hold pointers to other structs — each pointer is now twice bigger). Still, I don't think, that overhead is more than 10-15% of the total memory consumption...
So, yes, the 4Gb ceiling is within reach, even if most people don't yet hit it often...
If the government insurance is as good as the private insurance but cheaper, what's the problem?
Your point is valid, and applies to everything and anything — not just health insurance: "If the government X is as good as the private X but cheaper, what's the problem?"
The obvious problem is, it can not. It can only be "cheaper" if the taxpayer subsidizes it — our Medicare and Medicade spending (which only covers the old and the poor), for example, exceed the entire Department of Defense expenditures already.
Indeed! Dizzy with success of our:
government schools — where we pay at the top of the world per pupil, but produce highschoolers unabled to compete with those of the Third World;
government highways, which cost a fortune, but still cause an American — average, including those who don't drive at all — to spend 38 hours per year waiting in traffic (double that in busy places like LA)
government postal service — which needs billions of bailouts every fewyears — despite having a monopoly on First Class Mail service
who wouldn't be anxious to switch to government-provided health insurance? What could possibly go wrong? Next up — government provided food (can't be healthy without good nutrition, can you?), shelter (same), clothes — you name it... I grew up in a country, where the government claimed to provide everything — and it sucked. I move to the US, and what do I find? A bunch of idiots wishing to make the mistake, someone has already made for them!
And it is not like you haven't been warned by your own:
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
Driving has been a privilege rather than a right for as long as you've needed a government-issued license to drive on the government-built roads.
Actually, no, it is worse than that — all traffic laws customarily apply to "public roads, and other roads, which public has a legal right to access." So even if you build your very own road some place, by allowing other people to drive there, you surrender your right and get back a privilege...
Our sidewalks are also maintained by the government, but, fortunately, walking outside is still a right. Similarly, our Internet can be argued to be the Government's creation — but you don't need a license to connect to it. And then come all the various business licenses — for which the excuse of the government paying for something does not apply at all. Why, for example, does a business owner need a "liquor license" to be able to sell alcohol? At the same time, universal health care is going to be a huge expense for the government (dwarfing the costs of the roads, for example), but — according to its backers — such care is every citizen's right already and can not be denied...
In other words, the government's paying for something or not and its claims to control it are not strongly correlated. You need some other excuse for its hold on the access to public roads.
failure to fund decent mass transit in most areas, have made that privilege a practical necessity.
Whether driving is a practical necessity or not is not really relevant to my point. If doing so is how I choose to Pursue Happiness, the Executive has to persuade the Judiciary, that I ought to be forbidden from doing so.
I don't see, how funding mass transit would help the problem at all — clearly it will be paid for by the government and thus access to it — according to your own view — a privilege... It is already happening — in New York's vast mass transit, you have to agree to police searching you on their whim. You can refuse, but then you can't enter the subway — because that's a privilege, in exchange for which the government is now asking for your privacy...
Really, lay off the teabagger rhetoric, it's seriously distorting your perceptions.
Your point of view is self-inconsistent and thus automatically wrong, regardless of whether or not I've ever tried teabagging. Although the feeling is, indeed, sublime (with the right partner), the practice does not affect one's political views at all...
I'm going off-tangent here, but to me, the whole thing is just another reminder, that our driving — a very important part of life for many — is often not judged by judges. You don't even need to read the article — the/. write-up says: "Last week, Commissioner [emphasis mine -mi] Carla Bonilla ruled [...]"
At some point decades ago, when no one was paying attention, driving on a public road was deemed to be privilege, that the state may grant or take away, rather than a right, to limit which the state has to prove its case to a judge (forget jury).
In many locales, traffic cases are handled by the Judiciary anyway — because the Executive does not want to bother with its own system for hearings and appeals. But in some places — like NYC and, evidently, in Sonoma County, the cases are decided by the Executive branch itself — by people reporting to the same bosses (such as mayors) as the ticket-issuing cops...
And this is just a tip of the legal iceberg, that ACLU and other purported guardians of liberties ignore... In addition to driving, a mind-numbing number of activities require a license. In July two people were arrested on Times Square for "performing in costumes without a license" — they weren't charged with anything else...
This licensing is a terrific way for the Executive to punish anyone they don't like without the trouble of convicting them of any wrongdoing — instead of going to the Judiciary to prove its case, an Executive Branch bureaucrat can simply withdraw the license, or, even simpler — not renew it. At best, you may be able to appeal the action in front of the Judiciary yourself and — presumption of innocence be damned — prove, that the Government erred.
From driving, to selling liquor, to broadcasting — we have to rely on the government's benevolence in order to Pursue our Happiness... How did we get this far along this terrible road? How do we stop marching forward on it?
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
Well, if that's done by the people, who are advising us on what they believe to be a life-and-death decisions, their improper use of technology is noteworthy, even if not, indeed, "new".
You are aware that in order for ping to work at all, it needs raw sockets so that it can write ICMP packets? Those are restricted because they allow you to spoof all sorts of network traffic (e.g., the ethernet address to IP address mapping) Which Would Be Bad.
It could be threatening to the network (which should not trust individual nodes much anyway, but many do), but not to the system itself... At least, I don't see how...
Are you saying Republicans are blameless in this mess?
The only thing, that Republicans can be blamed for is not fighting the Democrats hard enough on this issue. Creating the problem in the first place, and resisting the (too-weak) attempts to solve it earlier is all the fault of Democrats. Enjoy.
They [banks] just don't have any voice in the government, right? Nobody ever listens to them or gives them what they want, right? They certainly weren't making ridiculous profits for years and lobbying for the ability to take even more crazy risks, right? Right?
Wrong. Banks did have a voice in the government, and they kept complaining — since CRA's inception — that we can't be expected to give mortgages to those, whom federal (that is Fannie Mae's) regulations would not approve. The government's reaction, in 1999 was to change the federal regulations — instead of making it easier for the banks to fight off the undue pressures.
When it became possible to off-load the bad securities to Fannie Mae, the banks did make tons of money. So what? The point was, the mortgage crisis was the fault of the Federal Government — Clinton's, not the evil Bush's...
Ask any mortgage broker about being forced to lend. the exact opposite was happening. Banks were falling all over themselves to make these loans. This is pure bullshit.
The pressure to lend existed for decades, and, indeed, the banks successfully resisted it, because caving in would've been suicidal.
Until 1999, when it became possible to off-load the crappy mortgages to the Fannie Mae (and Freddi Mac). That's when the banks caved in, because it stopped being suicidal for them to do so — they no longer had to keep the bad mortgage on their own books. Indeed, it became quite profitable — because Capitalism works...
So, no, I'm not blaming Community Reinvestment Act — it was a stupid and unfair peace of legislation, but it was not devastating. The 1999 change of Fannie Mae's policy was what did us all in.
infection rate -- as defined by the number of computers cleaned for each 1,000 executions of the MSRT
Wouldn't the rates of infections be severely affected by how long the machine stays online? Because that increases both — the opportunity to infect the machine, and its value for the hijacker (as a spam-relay)?
With many organizations simply blocking the entire A- and B-class networks from China, even an always-connected server in China is not as hot a target as the one in US.
Also, one would expect, the machine owners' expected wealth to be a factor — some viruses blackmail the owner by threatening to delete their files... The poor Chinese may not even have a Paypal account to pay off the scumbags, so why go after them?
Accounting for all this may change the published statistics quite a bit...
It is a rant, and — as I suspected — it was not worth reading. It has few facts and does nothing, but knocking the idea, that lending to poor is risky and to the rich is safe. This was never anyone's assertion — but do keep beating the straw out of the knocked-down doll, it will keep you busy.
Now, this probably only means the client (the underlying protocol will probably be handled by a binary-only library), but even if that's the case, it seems like there is still reason to celebrate
The source is not open, until I can build and use it on FreeBSD/amd64 or some other "exotic" platform like that...
Interestingly, the oft-criticized Java has always been more "open-sourced" (even before going GPL), than what the excited write-up is preparing to "celebrate"... Must all be about managing expectations...
Slashdot Mirror
It is called inline replying — and used to be the only "approved" style online (unlike, say, the top-posting).
Unless Obama (or some future President) is more successful with the future incarnation of Clipper, than Bill Clinton was.
Encryption really is so much like weaponry, that your statement — and its accuracy — are the same as "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Does not stop the politicians from trying, though...
It is already easy... What protects us, is that the evidence thus obtained is often inadmissible in court.
I'd like to point out, that of the four groups you listed, the criminals and the terrorists deserve to be put into prison (or worse) regardless of whether they use plain language. Same applies to spies, unless they work for our side.
Politicians planning dastardly deeds get little sympathy too...
They would only do this, if you allow them. If you wish to watch a movie, that they produced, they get to set the rules. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the relationship is voluntary: "By pressing 'Continue' you allow us to disable the analog outputs of your electronics for the duration of the feature presentation. Press 'Cancel' to return to the menu."
And that really will be, where you'll belong, because while refusing a deal you don't like is perfectly just, piracy really is illegal and ought to remain so. You feel so strongly about content-makers messing up with your equipment (even if with your own permission), but don't mind robbing them of their profits (against their will)...
I can think of some better causes for martyrdom, than entertainment...
Whether or not Bob really is a danger on the road, is not relevant to the right vs. privilege problem...
Who gets to determine, whether he really is reckless — that's the question. If access to public roads is a privilege, then the Executive can deny access to Bob on its own determination. If it is a right, on the other hand, then the Executive needs to convince the independent Judiciary, that Bob needs to be denied that right.
By claiming more and more things to be a privilege (even gun-owning, definitely a right, requires a very hard to get license), the Executive government gains expediency — it makes their job of everyday governing easier. That's not, in itself, a bad thing. What is bad, is that our protections — rooted in the checks and balances, that different branches of government impose on each other — deteriorate.
We started on this slippery slope long ago, and we slipped to the point, where a driving license may be withdrawn over such a matter as non-payment of child support! Bob could be the safest driver in the world, but if he is not paying child support (which, however despicable, is not driving-related at all), he could be barred from driving...
Why are cops and judges rivals?.. FBI and local police are rivals, yes. Fire and Police Departments could be competing (both have ambulances, for example). But police and traffic judges? Their duties don't overlap at all... Maybe, they belong to the same union (though that's unlikely) and have a conflict there, or something... But otherwise, I don't think, they are rivals at all.
Then it is certainly legal for them to do, and, consequently, nothing to blame telcos for...
Federal Reserve, at least, is kinda-sorta independent. I had in mind Public Schools, USPS, insurance for old age, and now — Obamacare...
That's an off-topic flamebait. Because where we do have a vast transit system — like NYC — the use of it is also a privilege, not a right. Even though you don't need a license to enter subway, the government can stop you at their whim. Most people only realized this recently, when the city started randomly searching riders' belongings: you can refuse to be searched, but then they can refuse to let you into the subway... Because subway is "theirs"...
Thus, covering the entire country with highly sophisticated transit system would only make the right vs. privilege situation worse. The government spends our money to build the roads (or the transit) and then asserts, that it is only our privilege to use it...
That use of sidewalk (also government-maintained) is still a right, must be an oversight...
Only the calls with one of the ends outside America were ever "spied" on. Whether that's legal or not, it is hardly a "wholesale" spying on a public, the majority of whom have never been abroad nor personally know a foreigner. For domestic calls, the only things captured were the fact of the calls — not the conversation itself.
This, I believe, was always legal — the government never needed a warrant to look at your envelops at the Post Office, for example — as long as they weren't opening them. On the other hand, foreign mail was always subject to check by the government, and expanding that power of the Executive to phone calls is not entirely illogical...
Keep your exaggerations in line, in other words... Even if it were illegal, calling it "wholesale" is a flamebait...
What's interesting is that the judges work for "Traffic Courts". If in Chicago that is anything like in New York City, then the two groups (cops and judges) are the same — both work for and report to the Executive Branch. The traffic judges aren't real judges — from the Judiciary branch. New York (and some other locales) get away with this, because driving is not a right, but a privilege, and thus the Executive can simply withdraw it — and need not bother convicting the accused in front of an independent judge (much less the jury of one's peers).
Can anyone confirm, what the situation is in Chicago? Because, if the "Traffic Courts" there are also presided over by the Executive's employees, then it is interesting, because they and the cops are working for the same boss (the mayor)...
Don't put into kernel, what can be done in user space.
It will appear competitive, because the government's bottomless pockets will allow it to undercut the private competitors. Seriously, look up the history of Standard Oil — which resulted in our existing anti-monopoly laws. Their standard practice was setting up a shop next to competition's to undercut them. Once the competitor went out of business, their prices would go back up... Way up...
Government is a monopoly, thus keeping its activities to what simply can not be done privately (like law enforcement and military) — the things, you know, enumerated in the Constitution — is the only way to protect the citizenry from abuse.
Medicare is an example — it destroyed the private coverage plans for the old age, because nobody can compete with the government. And it is now a major fraud-prone money sink, that's only sustainable, because it does not cover everyone. Oh, yes, Medicare's own investigation claims, they have the least overhead of the medical plans. But if you trust an organization to audit itself, I may have some Enron stocks to sell you...
Ad-Block Plus, and AccuWeather. But the i-user does not use either, and her sessions are even bigger than mine (lots of windows open), including Yahoo! Mail.
What? Why should I stop visiting them? Will that fix memory leaks in Firefox?
I did mention the platform I'm in: FreeBSD/amd64. Last I heard, 64-bit support for Flash was alpha-quality at best (not even on Windows), and certainly not available for FreeBSD...
Whatever it is, I think, I'm already close enough to justify a) clean up of memory leaks in the app (4Gb is the hard ceiling, even if RAM were free); and b) looking into stable and official port to 64-bit. Currently, I believe, all such builds are "local" — supported by the platform-specific maintainers (such as FreeBSD's ports-team). This will involve fixing an awful lot of bugs and buglets in various parts of the code — starting at the bottom with NSPR... Here is but one example...
Of course... Here is from my home system — the two instances belong to my (very) significant other and myself:
...
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
4954 i 10 47 0 1798M 637M ucond 2 0:00 9.47% firefox-bi
48498 mi 11 45 0 1150M 810M ucond 3 0:00 13.09% firefox-bi
Three times more windows/tabs — or simply more visits to something "heavy" (like Google Maps), and she is done... And that's without Flash, which is not available for our platform...
Now, the actual memory consumption is smaller, than the total size, but on a 32-bit system, that does not matter — you are limited by 4Gb per process, because 2^32 is 4Gb... My system is, actually, a 64-bit one (FreeBSD/amd64), so I am "prepared" for Firefox to exceed 4Gb. My Firefox at work (RHEL-5.4, 32-bit) is currently under 1Gb, but that's because it crashes about daily (probably, due to Flash — or because some of the bugs that the FreeBSD ports fix, that are present in the "official" builds, don't know), and thus has less time to leak...
Another note, of course, is that simply by building in 64-bit mode, you significantly increase the sizes of many internal data structures (which hold pointers to other structs — each pointer is now twice bigger). Still, I don't think, that overhead is more than 10-15% of the total memory consumption...
So, yes, the 4Gb ceiling is within reach, even if most people don't yet hit it often...
Your point is valid, and applies to everything and anything — not just health insurance: "If the government X is as good as the private X but cheaper, what's the problem?"
The obvious problem is, it can not. It can only be "cheaper" if the taxpayer subsidizes it — our Medicare and Medicade spending (which only covers the old and the poor), for example, exceed the entire Department of Defense expenditures already.
Indeed! Dizzy with success of our:
who wouldn't be anxious to switch to government-provided health insurance? What could possibly go wrong? Next up — government provided food (can't be healthy without good nutrition, can you?), shelter (same), clothes — you name it... I grew up in a country, where the government claimed to provide everything — and it sucked. I move to the US, and what do I find? A bunch of idiots wishing to make the mistake, someone has already made for them!
And it is not like you haven't been warned by your own:
Actually, no, it is worse than that — all traffic laws customarily apply to "public roads, and other roads, which public has a legal right to access." So even if you build your very own road some place, by allowing other people to drive there, you surrender your right and get back a privilege...
Our sidewalks are also maintained by the government, but, fortunately, walking outside is still a right. Similarly, our Internet can be argued to be the Government's creation — but you don't need a license to connect to it. And then come all the various business licenses — for which the excuse of the government paying for something does not apply at all. Why, for example, does a business owner need a "liquor license" to be able to sell alcohol? At the same time, universal health care is going to be a huge expense for the government (dwarfing the costs of the roads, for example), but — according to its backers — such care is every citizen's right already and can not be denied...
In other words, the government's paying for something or not and its claims to control it are not strongly correlated. You need some other excuse for its hold on the access to public roads.
Whether driving is a practical necessity or not is not really relevant to my point. If doing so is how I choose to Pursue Happiness, the Executive has to persuade the Judiciary, that I ought to be forbidden from doing so.
I don't see, how funding mass transit would help the problem at all — clearly it will be paid for by the government and thus access to it — according to your own view — a privilege... It is already happening — in New York's vast mass transit, you have to agree to police searching you on their whim. You can refuse, but then you can't enter the subway — because that's a privilege, in exchange for which the government is now asking for your privacy...
Your point of view is self-inconsistent and thus automatically wrong, regardless of whether or not I've ever tried teabagging. Although the feeling is, indeed, sublime (with the right partner), the practice does not affect one's political views at all...
I'm going off-tangent here, but to me, the whole thing is just another reminder, that our driving — a very important part of life for many — is often not judged by judges. You don't even need to read the article — the /. write-up says: "Last week, Commissioner [emphasis mine -mi] Carla Bonilla ruled [...]"
At some point decades ago, when no one was paying attention, driving on a public road was deemed to be privilege, that the state may grant or take away, rather than a right, to limit which the state has to prove its case to a judge (forget jury).
In many locales, traffic cases are handled by the Judiciary anyway — because the Executive does not want to bother with its own system for hearings and appeals. But in some places — like NYC and, evidently, in Sonoma County, the cases are decided by the Executive branch itself — by people reporting to the same bosses (such as mayors) as the ticket-issuing cops...
And this is just a tip of the legal iceberg, that ACLU and other purported guardians of liberties ignore... In addition to driving, a mind-numbing number of activities require a license. In July two people were arrested on Times Square for "performing in costumes without a license" — they weren't charged with anything else...
This licensing is a terrific way for the Executive to punish anyone they don't like without the trouble of convicting them of any wrongdoing — instead of going to the Judiciary to prove its case, an Executive Branch bureaucrat can simply withdraw the license, or, even simpler — not renew it. At best, you may be able to appeal the action in front of the Judiciary yourself and — presumption of innocence be damned — prove, that the Government erred.
From driving, to selling liquor, to broadcasting — we have to rely on the government's benevolence in order to Pursue our Happiness... How did we get this far along this terrible road? How do we stop marching forward on it?
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
Well, if that's done by the people, who are advising us on what they believe to be a life-and-death decisions, their improper use of technology is noteworthy, even if not, indeed, "new".
It could be threatening to the network (which should not trust individual nodes much anyway, but many do), but not to the system itself... At least, I don't see how...
How? Thanks.
The only thing, that Republicans can be blamed for is not fighting the Democrats hard enough on this issue. Creating the problem in the first place, and resisting the (too-weak) attempts to solve it earlier is all the fault of Democrats. Enjoy.
Wrong. Banks did have a voice in the government, and they kept complaining — since CRA's inception — that we can't be expected to give mortgages to those, whom federal (that is Fannie Mae's) regulations would not approve. The government's reaction, in 1999 was to change the federal regulations — instead of making it easier for the banks to fight off the undue pressures.
When it became possible to off-load the bad securities to Fannie Mae, the banks did make tons of money. So what? The point was, the mortgage crisis was the fault of the Federal Government — Clinton's, not the evil Bush's...
The pressure to lend existed for decades, and, indeed, the banks successfully resisted it, because caving in would've been suicidal.
Until 1999, when it became possible to off-load the crappy mortgages to the Fannie Mae (and Freddi Mac). That's when the banks caved in, because it stopped being suicidal for them to do so — they no longer had to keep the bad mortgage on their own books. Indeed, it became quite profitable — because Capitalism works...
So, no, I'm not blaming Community Reinvestment Act — it was a stupid and unfair peace of legislation, but it was not devastating. The 1999 change of Fannie Mae's policy was what did us all in.
Wouldn't the rates of infections be severely affected by how long the machine stays online? Because that increases both — the opportunity to infect the machine, and its value for the hijacker (as a spam-relay)?
With many organizations simply blocking the entire A- and B-class networks from China, even an always-connected server in China is not as hot a target as the one in US.
Also, one would expect, the machine owners' expected wealth to be a factor — some viruses blackmail the owner by threatening to delete their files... The poor Chinese may not even have a Paypal account to pay off the scumbags, so why go after them?
Accounting for all this may change the published statistics quite a bit...
It is a rant, and — as I suspected — it was not worth reading. It has few facts and does nothing, but knocking the idea, that lending to poor is risky and to the rich is safe. This was never anyone's assertion — but do keep beating the straw out of the knocked-down doll, it will keep you busy.
The source is not open, until I can build and use it on FreeBSD/amd64 or some other "exotic" platform like that...
Interestingly, the oft-criticized Java has always been more "open-sourced" (even before going GPL), than what the excited write-up is preparing to "celebrate"... Must all be about managing expectations...