Of course BSE is entirely natural, so the odds that the next BSE is in the food supply actually go down when you make the food supply less natural by genetically engineering it.
1. The way you insert a gene into a living thing is you use a virus. 2. See above 3. It was. The French scientists are lying when they say they "detected it." What they actually did was read research American scientists did.
The important question to me is has this gene actually done anything bad. The answer is I highly doubt it. I suspect Europe's equivalent of Monsanto has simply figured out it can make a lot of nasty-sounding press releases about it, and thereby keep Monsanto out of the market. This will also allows them to keep their African neighbors dependent on them for agricultural technology because if the European public won't buy GMO products then Africa's agriculture can't use sell American-derived crops in Europe, which makes it virtually impossible for them to use American agricultural techniques.
If you want to know why I'm so skeptical the answer is simple: We've been eating this shit in America for decades. Over-eating it. We're fucking fat. We didn't get that way eating Heritage tomatoes from the locally-grown food co-op. If this kind of thing actually has bad health effects they will show up in our numbers, yet instead of looking for said bad health effects in our numbers the Euros are going through our research line-by-line for things that cannot be disproven without years of studies.
No shit in a totally new technology you found something, that if weird things happen, could kill people., The question is do weird things happen? Europe is not willing to spend the money to find that out, but I have no doubt their researchers are going through these studies again trying to find another way GMO crops will clearly kill everyone.
You're asking how using the military to blow people up, in countries that have specifically asked you not to blow anyone up, is a left/right issue?
Granted the Obama position is currently the very definition of moderate (ie: only a handful actually oppose him), but it's still pretty much the only policy where he can be portrayed as right of Bush.
Like many people who only think about politics in terms of the sexy shit they talk about TV, you have no idea what I mean when I say "work within the party."
A guy who shows up to every party meeting has power because everyone has to talk to him. State Reps, State Senators, people on the Congressman's staff, etc. Everyone has to say something on copyright. In the Democratic party in the suburbs these meeting typically take place at a niceish restaurant where everyone eats. So for the price of eating out once a week you get the opportunity to force the next generation of Senators, Reps, etc. to defend their copyright maximalist position to you.
Let's say in addition to that you volunteer once or twice a month for an hour. You are now one of the top Democrats in your suburb. You can probably get an official position within the party (ie: Treasurer, Secretary, Endorsements Committee). Depending on how big your suburb is relative to the state the actual Congressman will probably meet with you. If you're a copyright minimalist, and you make sure he knows it he's going to have to consider the possibility that you'll endorse his opponent in the next primary unless he assuages your concerns re: copyright.
If I can manage to rise higher within the Party -- say District-level Treasurer -- then the actual US Senator is going to pay attention to what I think. More importantly I'll be very well-positioned to get the endorsement of the Party for a relatively low-level office (think State House, State Senate, County Commission, etc.) that could be used as a stepping-board to the US House or the Senate. And, obviously, if I'm the US Senator from Michigan I've got a whole lot of influence over Federal copyright policy.
The key to this strategy is I'm not trading my support in the General election for their vote. I'm trading it in the primary. I'm also offering volunteer time, my donations, etc. As such it's not really me persuading those people in the Democratic Party to stop being copyright maximalists, it's me becoming them and thus ensuring at least one of them is a copyright minimalist.
If every geek did this, even if it was solely on the level of going to the weekly party meetings for the party he despised least, there never would have been a SOPA.
I'm not really sure I'm disagreeing with you. My strategy to implement good policy is to become a Democratic insiders and work from there. In the mean-time I'll have more ability to get good policies considered as a party activist then I would as a guy who votes every two years for doomed candidates. The pro with my strategy is that it offers an actual solution to the problem, the con is that it (at best) takes forever.
Electoral reform would be somewhat helpful from a policy point of view. For example a US House elected by PR would be led by Pelosi, because the Dems won the popular vote; which means that Obama would actually have a lot more room to consider policy implications of his proposals rather then simply doing a Hard Count.
OTOH it probably requires a Constitutional Amendment (IL and TX ain't giving the ability to be dicks to the out-party without a fight), and if you're gonna do that you might as well get rid of the entire concept of Separation of Powers. In policy terms it just doesn't seem to be very useful. In the early 19th it was useful for keeping Jackson from establishing a dictatorship, but in the context of modern diversified economies it just seems like a recipe for arguing about stupid shit.
You for example are claiming that Obama is a statist for not using state power to close the border, while simultaneously claiming he's a statist for paying the troops that would allow him to close the border.
As for the rest, you do realize that 90% of the state's job is to prevent other, more tyrannical, states from taking over? And that Anarchism has yet to demonstrate an ability to replace this very important function of the state?
Always remember: Jim Crow did not happen because Washington DC imposed it on a bunch of white people who really did not want to be racist. It happened because Washington DC decided that opposing the oppression of blacks was not a valid use of state power. In most of the country (ie: outside the South) state-power had nothing to do with segregation. Detroit was actually more segregated then the South simply by virtue of having all the Real Estate Agents conspire to not sell black people houses in certain neighborhoods/suburbs.
State powere = freedom for anyone who does not have military training, but does have militarily-trained neighbors who want to oppress his ass.
He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC.
And, that pretty much sums up why the US won't solve its problems unless they elect someone from a 3rd party, as none of those issues can be "solved" without major changes.
For example, one party would like more military spending, while the other wants more spending on health care. Yet, neither want to raise taxes enough to finance their desired spending, nor could they do so even if they wanted to, so instead we see devastating cuts to things like NASA, when a couple of days worth of war budget could pay for NASA for a year.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but no President can actually solve America's problems the way you're saying.
The reason none of this will change is that Congress won't agree to significantly change any of it. The President can't force Congress to do anything.
We have a state with more then locus of power. The power-loci are designed to fight each-other. They aren't allowed to change things much unless they all agree. Putting a third party leader will make the situation worse. With no ties to the other loci of power he doesn't get 45 Senate votes, and 190-odd House votes for free. He has to earn them all, on every issue. A Third-Party President would get nothing done. Ever.
If we had a Parliamentary system with no Separation of Powers, and Checks and Balances were limited to Judicial Review then we'd have policy that makes sense at a Macro level. As is we have small-c conservative policy that only changes when somebody really pushes for a change. NASA's budget was set back when Reagen really pushed for it, and it can't grow unless Obama (or the Speaker, or a key Senator) decides to give up a lot of other stuff for it. However it can shrink, because the right-wing power locus believes that Non-Defense Discretionary Spending cuts are not a big deal and nobody else has the energy to prove them wrong.
Now if Obama had gotten the House along with the Senate we'd be in a different situation. NASA is stimulative so it wouldn't get cut, and taxes (at least on the top 2%) would go up to partially pay for it. But he didn't.
BTW your math is wrong. ObamaCare was paid for by a combination of tax hikes and Medicare cuts. Those tax hikes/cuts are now part of the small-c conservative Federal Budget, and cannot be gotten around without the agreement of Obama and both Houses of Congress. Obama is not likely to let the GOP gut his signature achievement, so they will happen until at least 2016.
Elections are unique in that you need nothing for 729 days. On the 730th you need a system that is so robust it can handle the entire country, so easy to use 1 million volunteers with 30 minutes training and virtually no experience can run it, so fast that people who literally only have 10 minutes to talk to you can get done in 5, etc.
This is not necessarily harder then anything the private sector does, but it's just so different. You can't just put out an ad and expect everything to work. You not only need programmers, you need programmers who have walked walk-lists, called call-sheets, dealt with Octogenarian political volunteers, etc.
Obama's advantages seem to be two-fold. First as an Organizer he understood how hard this is. He got his guys making a system like this during the primaries, whereas Mitt and McCain waited until they were officially nominated. Second Obamans from Silicon Valley seem a lot more common then Romneyites. If you're a campaign you don't really have the tech budget to compete with Facebook or Twitter. You need people who are happy to work for no money, and no stock options. And most of those people are pro-gay-marriage Democrats.
In a lot of ways that's probably why the campaign team doesn't want this to be Open Source.
Part of caring about policy is caring about what can get through Congress.
If we were a Westminster-system Democracy I'd have a lot more respect for potential third-party candidates as policy-makers. But we aren't. We've got a bicameral Legislature, and an independent Executive. To actually get your ideas implemented you need a majority of both houses (and probably 60% of the Senate), and no US Third Party has a plan like that. Most don't even have warm bodies in a majority of Congressional districts and Senate seats, and it's very rare for those candidates to be qualified for the job. Note that I'm including Ron Paul in this, because he doesn't seem to understand that being doctrinaire Libertarian dooms you in Congress despite having years of experience getting jack done in Congress due to his excessively doctrinaire Libertarianism. Their plan tends to be:
1) I, Ron Paul/Ralph Nader/etc., will make the speech that energized the neckbeards/hippies/etc. a bunch more times. 2) ??? 3) Victory!
They really honestly have no idea how they're gonna win a) Congressional seats where they don't have candidates (aka: most of them), or b) how they'll convince Boehner/Cantor/Pelosi/etc. to support their agenda.
In the UK or Canada this would be fine. By winning the top job, or even getting a significant proportion of the vote, you'd get seats in Parliament and the big parties would have to pay attention to you. At a minimum you'd be able to give the actual Prime Minister the third degree come Question Period. But in America you get a footnote in the history books. Just ask Debs.
Ron Paul is not a candidate for people who care about policy because he will never make policy. He's a candidate for people who care about looking good on Slashdot.
You care about your team winning because you think your team has the best policy. Either the tax burden on the wealthy is a drag to economic growth; or it needs to go up so we can pay for the troops who protect the economy that makes those people wealthy. Either the health system is choking economic growth because people pay too much for care (ie: they delay care until it gets really expensive, and then they can't successfully negotiate a good price because they're fucking dying), or it's choking economic growth because people pay too little (ie: they have no reason to negotiate a good price). Either the military is the perfect size, but could probably use some more toys, or it's too big and needs to get smaller. Either deficits are terrible and will destroy America, or they're not a big deal and we should continue them until the economy picks up some more.
I'm not sure why they are worried about that. Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in at least 30 years. If the next democratic nominee runs on the notion of continuing what he has done so far the GOP won't be able to field a candidate who is more conservative.
"Most conservative?"
You have avery limited definition of Conservative. He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC. And we still haven't gotten to the #1 Conservative project: re-making the Supreme Court in their image.
Pretty much the only area he could be considered right of Bush is his use of drones, and that's only because Bush didn't have this many drones to play with.
They wouldn't stab you anywhere. As a Westerner you could be banned from the country, but the Turks aren't suicidal enough to call down the USAF on their heads.
As far as Islamic places you'd be welcome, I think the Balkans and former Soviet states would surprise you. Albania is so anti-religious they actually banned Church in the Constitution at one point. Religion is very important in Bosnia, but it's the "Are you a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist?" Kind of religion, not the kind where people actually care what anyone believes.
Unfortunately for him the way he tested the system screwed it up for thousands of other people: “The attack made the College Portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College Portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
As an atheist with a few Wiccan friends, could you direct me to the Islamic country that would welcome us with open arms?
Be fair.
The reason you're welcome in most Christian countries isn't that Christian Government is inherently more moral then Islam, or that Christianity is inherently less evil. It's that Christianity is so bad we had to invent the "freedom of religion," and give the state enough power to protect it.
Islam's actually a lot better then Christianity on a lot of fronts. There's a reason that several modern Christian states were mostly Islamic in the 1300s, but very few Islamic states totally de-Christianized. Until the Jews started actually fighting for Jerusalem anti-Semitism did not exist in Islamic countries, and even after 1948 organized pogroms by governments simply did not happen.
Or are you seriously arguing that Fred Phelps would not be leading a lynch mob to your exact house in the absence of a) the First Amendment and b) the United States Judicial System?
Islam isn't actually worse then most religions. In a lot of ways it's better.
Christianity doesn't typically grow under Islamic rule, but it doesn't disappear either. Same for Juadaism. OTOH to stop Christianity from destroying Islam and Judaism we needed separate, secular legal doctrines such as America's First Amendment.
Without that legal doctrine, and strong central governments capable of crushing the Christian equivalent of Boko Harem (ie: Tim McVeigh) Christianity would actually probably be worse then Islam because Christianity only tolerates Jews as kinda-right-even-if-mistaken whereas Islam will tolerate all Abrahamic faiths.
The CBC story has a much more complete explanation of the problems his test caused: “The attack made the College Portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College Portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
Apparently his attempt to test Skytech's system really screwed things up: “The attack made the College Portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College Portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
Since the portal serves 250,000 students at numerous schools, this was kinda a big deal.
Much less one-sided. It makes it clear that even if this kid meant well he also brought a system 250,000 students use to a halt.
It also makes the company involved a lot more sympathetic. They're offering him a scholarship, and it's clear the NDA is a tool they used to convince the student to stop breaking their shit.
Given that a) their site is now down, and b) google's results fot Skytech Omnivox return French-language results I'm gonna guess it's a Canadian company based in Quebec, probably Montreal. Probably quite small, because this story (which is pretty big in Canada) has brought their entire web presence down.
This is not true of Quebec. private contracts are governed by Civil Law, and Consideration is not required.
Now if he can bring some other jurisdiction in he might have a case.The Federal government and all other provinces uses Common Law, which requires Consideration. But that's a long shot.
Under Civil Law, which governs private contracts in Quebec, no Consideration is necessary to make a contract valid. Which means the company didn't actually have to offer hm anything of value in exchange for it's NDA.
If the chance a good kid got screwed is some non-trivial number, then the rest of us have a pretty good reason to look into the story. Whether the number is 20% or 80% doesn't really matter.
I'll agree that he's probably leaving something out. I'm just not sure what that something could be that would make expulsion justified. Maybe the entire faculty had told him not to try this or he'd be expelled? Or his scan was specifically looking for information on some girl who'd already reported him for stalking?
There's a lot of things that rub me wrong about this post.
1) He's 20. He's supposed to be an idiot. The rest of us are supposed to politely correct him when he does something stupid; rather then trying to convince everyone we're geniuses by calling him stupid.
2) A couple hundred is a lot of money to someone who does not have a professional job. It is my entire life savings. It is my entire cushion. If my car breaks it is what will allow me to continue my shitty-ass job.
It's very easy for someone who makes $30k to think they're superior because they can afford to talk to a lawyer for three hours on no notice. That doesn't mean they are actually superior.
Moreover it's not clear he'd be better-off doing that then doing what he is doing. He's not being prosecuted. His college is going to be forced to explain exactly why they thought what he was doing was profesional misconduct so heinous he had to be expelled. The guys who made him sign the NDA have apparently been scared off due to the publicity.
Granted there's almost certainly more to it then he's saying. I don't know many compsci profs who would vote to expel a kid on the basis that he'd been too curious as to whether a security hole he'd found (and told the company about) had been patched, but according to the article 14 of the 15 members of the faculty did precisely that. Which implies there's more to it.
Quebec doesn't use Common Law for private matters such as contracts.
It uses a version of French Law. Consideration doesn't seem to be a factor.
Now if he can get the Feds involved, or another province, he can probably gut the NDA.
BTW, this is not the Napoleonic Code because Quebec separated from France in the mid-18th-century and Napoleon did not write his code until the early 19th-century.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course BSE is entirely natural, so the odds that the next BSE is in the food supply actually go down when you make the food supply less natural by genetically engineering it.
Read the article more carefully.
The way you genetically engineer a plant is you use a virus to put DNA in it's cells. This leaves Virus DNA in the plant cells.
There is no actual evidence this particular bit of virus DNA does anything to you when you eat it.
1. The way you insert a gene into a living thing is you use a virus.
2. See above
3. It was. The French scientists are lying when they say they "detected it." What they actually did was read research American scientists did.
The important question to me is has this gene actually done anything bad. The answer is I highly doubt it. I suspect Europe's equivalent of Monsanto has simply figured out it can make a lot of nasty-sounding press releases about it, and thereby keep Monsanto out of the market. This will also allows them to keep their African neighbors dependent on them for agricultural technology because if the European public won't buy GMO products then Africa's agriculture can't use sell American-derived crops in Europe, which makes it virtually impossible for them to use American agricultural techniques.
If you want to know why I'm so skeptical the answer is simple:
We've been eating this shit in America for decades. Over-eating it. We're fucking fat. We didn't get that way eating Heritage tomatoes from the locally-grown food co-op. If this kind of thing actually has bad health effects they will show up in our numbers, yet instead of looking for said bad health effects in our numbers the Euros are going through our research line-by-line for things that cannot be disproven without years of studies.
No shit in a totally new technology you found something, that if weird things happen, could kill people., The question is do weird things happen? Europe is not willing to spend the money to find that out, but I have no doubt their researchers are going through these studies again trying to find another way GMO crops will clearly kill everyone.
You're asking how using the military to blow people up, in countries that have specifically asked you not to blow anyone up, is a left/right issue?
Granted the Obama position is currently the very definition of moderate (ie: only a handful actually oppose him), but it's still pretty much the only policy where he can be portrayed as right of Bush.
Like many people who only think about politics in terms of the sexy shit they talk about TV, you have no idea what I mean when I say "work within the party."
A guy who shows up to every party meeting has power because everyone has to talk to him. State Reps, State Senators, people on the Congressman's staff, etc. Everyone has to say something on copyright. In the Democratic party in the suburbs these meeting typically take place at a niceish restaurant where everyone eats. So for the price of eating out once a week you get the opportunity to force the next generation of Senators, Reps, etc. to defend their copyright maximalist position to you.
Let's say in addition to that you volunteer once or twice a month for an hour. You are now one of the top Democrats in your suburb. You can probably get an official position within the party (ie: Treasurer, Secretary, Endorsements Committee). Depending on how big your suburb is relative to the state the actual Congressman will probably meet with you. If you're a copyright minimalist, and you make sure he knows it he's going to have to consider the possibility that you'll endorse his opponent in the next primary unless he assuages your concerns re: copyright.
If I can manage to rise higher within the Party -- say District-level Treasurer -- then the actual US Senator is going to pay attention to what I think. More importantly I'll be very well-positioned to get the endorsement of the Party for a relatively low-level office (think State House, State Senate, County Commission, etc.) that could be used as a stepping-board to the US House or the Senate. And, obviously, if I'm the US Senator from Michigan I've got a whole lot of influence over Federal copyright policy.
The key to this strategy is I'm not trading my support in the General election for their vote. I'm trading it in the primary. I'm also offering volunteer time, my donations, etc. As such it's not really me persuading those people in the Democratic Party to stop being copyright maximalists, it's me becoming them and thus ensuring at least one of them is a copyright minimalist.
If every geek did this, even if it was solely on the level of going to the weekly party meetings for the party he despised least, there never would have been a SOPA.
I'm not really sure I'm disagreeing with you. My strategy to implement good policy is to become a Democratic insiders and work from there. In the mean-time I'll have more ability to get good policies considered as a party activist then I would as a guy who votes every two years for doomed candidates. The pro with my strategy is that it offers an actual solution to the problem, the con is that it (at best) takes forever.
Electoral reform would be somewhat helpful from a policy point of view. For example a US House elected by PR would be led by Pelosi, because the Dems won the popular vote; which means that Obama would actually have a lot more room to consider policy implications of his proposals rather then simply doing a Hard Count.
OTOH it probably requires a Constitutional Amendment (IL and TX ain't giving the ability to be dicks to the out-party without a fight), and if you're gonna do that you might as well get rid of the entire concept of Separation of Powers. In policy terms it just doesn't seem to be very useful. In the early 19th it was useful for keeping Jackson from establishing a dictatorship, but in the context of modern diversified economies it just seems like a recipe for arguing about stupid shit.
Anarchists really try too hard.
You for example are claiming that Obama is a statist for not using state power to close the border, while simultaneously claiming he's a statist for paying the troops that would allow him to close the border.
As for the rest, you do realize that 90% of the state's job is to prevent other, more tyrannical, states from taking over? And that Anarchism has yet to demonstrate an ability to replace this very important function of the state?
Always remember: Jim Crow did not happen because Washington DC imposed it on a bunch of white people who really did not want to be racist. It happened because Washington DC decided that opposing the oppression of blacks was not a valid use of state power. In most of the country (ie: outside the South) state-power had nothing to do with segregation. Detroit was actually more segregated then the South simply by virtue of having all the Real Estate Agents conspire to not sell black people houses in certain neighborhoods/suburbs.
State powere = freedom for anyone who does not have military training, but does have militarily-trained neighbors who want to oppress his ass.
He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC.
And, that pretty much sums up why the US won't solve its problems unless they elect someone from a 3rd party, as none of those issues can be "solved" without major changes.
For example, one party would like more military spending, while the other wants more spending on health care. Yet, neither want to raise taxes enough to finance their desired spending, nor could they do so even if they wanted to, so instead we see devastating cuts to things like NASA, when a couple of days worth of war budget could pay for NASA for a year.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but no President can actually solve America's problems the way you're saying.
The reason none of this will change is that Congress won't agree to significantly change any of it. The President can't force Congress to do anything.
We have a state with more then locus of power. The power-loci are designed to fight each-other. They aren't allowed to change things much unless they all agree. Putting a third party leader will make the situation worse. With no ties to the other loci of power he doesn't get 45 Senate votes, and 190-odd House votes for free. He has to earn them all, on every issue. A Third-Party President would get nothing done. Ever.
If we had a Parliamentary system with no Separation of Powers, and Checks and Balances were limited to Judicial Review then we'd have policy that makes sense at a Macro level. As is we have small-c conservative policy that only changes when somebody really pushes for a change. NASA's budget was set back when Reagen really pushed for it, and it can't grow unless Obama (or the Speaker, or a key Senator) decides to give up a lot of other stuff for it. However it can shrink, because the right-wing power locus believes that Non-Defense Discretionary Spending cuts are not a big deal and nobody else has the energy to prove them wrong.
Now if Obama had gotten the House along with the Senate we'd be in a different situation. NASA is stimulative so it wouldn't get cut, and taxes (at least on the top 2%) would go up to partially pay for it. But he didn't.
BTW your math is wrong. ObamaCare was paid for by a combination of tax hikes and Medicare cuts. Those tax hikes/cuts are now part of the small-c conservative Federal Budget, and cannot be gotten around without the agreement of Obama and both Houses of Congress. Obama is not likely to let the GOP gut his signature achievement, so they will happen until at least 2016.
It's not that simple.
Elections are unique in that you need nothing for 729 days. On the 730th you need a system that is so robust it can handle the entire country, so easy to use 1 million volunteers with 30 minutes training and virtually no experience can run it, so fast that people who literally only have 10 minutes to talk to you can get done in 5, etc.
This is not necessarily harder then anything the private sector does, but it's just so different. You can't just put out an ad and expect everything to work. You not only need programmers, you need programmers who have walked walk-lists, called call-sheets, dealt with Octogenarian political volunteers, etc.
Obama's advantages seem to be two-fold. First as an Organizer he understood how hard this is. He got his guys making a system like this during the primaries, whereas Mitt and McCain waited until they were officially nominated. Second Obamans from Silicon Valley seem a lot more common then Romneyites. If you're a campaign you don't really have the tech budget to compete with Facebook or Twitter. You need people who are happy to work for no money, and no stock options. And most of those people are pro-gay-marriage Democrats.
In a lot of ways that's probably why the campaign team doesn't want this to be Open Source.
Part of caring about policy is caring about what can get through Congress.
If we were a Westminster-system Democracy I'd have a lot more respect for potential third-party candidates as policy-makers. But we aren't. We've got a bicameral Legislature, and an independent Executive. To actually get your ideas implemented you need a majority of both houses (and probably 60% of the Senate), and no US Third Party has a plan like that. Most don't even have warm bodies in a majority of Congressional districts and Senate seats, and it's very rare for those candidates to be qualified for the job. Note that I'm including Ron Paul in this, because he doesn't seem to understand that being doctrinaire Libertarian dooms you in Congress despite having years of experience getting jack done in Congress due to his excessively doctrinaire Libertarianism. Their plan tends to be:
1) I, Ron Paul/Ralph Nader/etc., will make the speech that energized the neckbeards/hippies/etc. a bunch more times.
2) ???
3) Victory!
They really honestly have no idea how they're gonna win a) Congressional seats where they don't have candidates (aka: most of them), or b) how they'll convince Boehner/Cantor/Pelosi/etc. to support their agenda.
In the UK or Canada this would be fine. By winning the top job, or even getting a significant proportion of the vote, you'd get seats in Parliament and the big parties would have to pay attention to you. At a minimum you'd be able to give the actual Prime Minister the third degree come Question Period. But in America you get a footnote in the history books. Just ask Debs.
Ron Paul is not a candidate for people who care about policy because he will never make policy. He's a candidate for people who care about looking good on Slashdot.
You care about your team winning because you think your team has the best policy. Either the tax burden on the wealthy is a drag to economic growth; or it needs to go up so we can pay for the troops who protect the economy that makes those people wealthy. Either the health system is choking economic growth because people pay too much for care (ie: they delay care until it gets really expensive, and then they can't successfully negotiate a good price because they're fucking dying), or it's choking economic growth because people pay too little (ie: they have no reason to negotiate a good price). Either the military is the perfect size, but could probably use some more toys, or it's too big and needs to get smaller. Either deficits are terrible and will destroy America, or they're not a big deal and we should continue them until the economy picks up some more.
There really isn't a lot of middle ground here.
I'm not sure why they are worried about that. Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in at least 30 years. If the next democratic nominee runs on the notion of continuing what he has done so far the GOP won't be able to field a candidate who is more conservative.
"Most conservative?"
You have avery limited definition of Conservative. He's the left-most President in history on gay rights. He's left of Bush on health care, taxes, military spending, Immigration Reform (he supports a path-to-citizenship for all illegals, not just DREAMers), and regulating Wall Street. That encompasses pretty much everything in most Americans top 10 issues facing DC. And we still haven't gotten to the #1 Conservative project: re-making the Supreme Court in their image.
Pretty much the only area he could be considered right of Bush is his use of drones, and that's only because Bush didn't have this many drones to play with.
They wouldn't stab you anywhere. As a Westerner you could be banned from the country, but the Turks aren't suicidal enough to call down the USAF on their heads.
As far as Islamic places you'd be welcome, I think the Balkans and former Soviet states would surprise you. Albania is so anti-religious they actually banned Church in the Constitution at one point. Religion is very important in Bosnia, but it's the "Are you a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist?" Kind of religion, not the kind where people actually care what anyone believes.
Unfortunately for him the way he tested the system screwed it up for thousands of other people:
“The attack made the College Portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College Portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/01/21/montreal-dawson-college-hack-hamed-al-khabaz.html
So he basically launched a DDOS attack accidentally. It's really hard to relate that to a property crime metaphorically, so I won't try.
As an atheist with a few Wiccan friends, could you direct me to the Islamic country that would welcome us with open arms?
Be fair.
The reason you're welcome in most Christian countries isn't that Christian Government is inherently more moral then Islam, or that Christianity is inherently less evil. It's that Christianity is so bad we had to invent the "freedom of religion," and give the state enough power to protect it.
Islam's actually a lot better then Christianity on a lot of fronts. There's a reason that several modern Christian states were mostly Islamic in the 1300s, but very few Islamic states totally de-Christianized. Until the Jews started actually fighting for Jerusalem anti-Semitism did not exist in Islamic countries, and even after 1948 organized pogroms by governments simply did not happen.
Or are you seriously arguing that Fred Phelps would not be leading a lynch mob to your exact house in the absence of a) the First Amendment and b) the United States Judicial System?
Islam isn't actually worse then most religions. In a lot of ways it's better.
Christianity doesn't typically grow under Islamic rule, but it doesn't disappear either. Same for Juadaism. OTOH to stop Christianity from destroying Islam and Judaism we needed separate, secular legal doctrines such as America's First Amendment.
Without that legal doctrine, and strong central governments capable of crushing the Christian equivalent of Boko Harem (ie: Tim McVeigh) Christianity would actually probably be worse then Islam because Christianity only tolerates Jews as kinda-right-even-if-mistaken whereas Islam will tolerate all Abrahamic faiths.
It was not harmless.
The CBC story has a much more complete explanation of the problems his test caused:
“The attack made the College Portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College Portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/01/21/montreal-dawson-college-hack-hamed-al-khabaz.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/01/21/montreal-dawson-college-hack-hamed-al-khabaz.html
Apparently his attempt to test Skytech's system really screwed things up:
“The attack made the College Portal extremely unresponsive for its thousands of users. Had it not been countered, it would have put the College Portal out of order for the entire students and teachers population of Dawson. The attack was traced, and it turns out that it came from one of the students who participated, earlier that week, in the discovery of the security flaw. We therefore decided to be clement, and not to report the attack to the authorities.”
Since the portal serves 250,000 students at numerous schools, this was kinda a big deal.
Much less one-sided. It makes it clear that even if this kid meant well he also brought a system 250,000 students use to a halt.
It also makes the company involved a lot more sympathetic. They're offering him a scholarship, and it's clear the NDA is a tool they used to convince the student to stop breaking their shit.
Given that a) their site is now down, and b) google's results fot Skytech Omnivox return French-language results I'm gonna guess it's a Canadian company based in Quebec, probably Montreal. Probably quite small, because this story (which is pretty big in Canada) has brought their entire web presence down.
But due to a) I can't be positive.
This is not true of Quebec. private contracts are governed by Civil Law, and Consideration is not required.
Now if he can bring some other jurisdiction in he might have a case.The Federal government and all other provinces uses Common Law, which requires Consideration. But that's a long shot.
Under Civil Law, which governs private contracts in Quebec, no Consideration is necessary to make a contract valid. Which means the company didn't actually have to offer hm anything of value in exchange for it's NDA.
I'm not sure more likely is really relevant.
If the chance a good kid got screwed is some non-trivial number, then the rest of us have a pretty good reason to look into the story. Whether the number is 20% or 80% doesn't really matter.
I'll agree that he's probably leaving something out. I'm just not sure what that something could be that would make expulsion justified. Maybe the entire faculty had told him not to try this or he'd be expelled? Or his scan was specifically looking for information on some girl who'd already reported him for stalking?
There's a lot of things that rub me wrong about this post.
1) He's 20. He's supposed to be an idiot. The rest of us are supposed to politely correct him when he does something stupid; rather then trying to convince everyone we're geniuses by calling him stupid.
2) A couple hundred is a lot of money to someone who does not have a professional job. It is my entire life savings. It is my entire cushion. If my car breaks it is what will allow me to continue my shitty-ass job.
It's very easy for someone who makes $30k to think they're superior because they can afford to talk to a lawyer for three hours on no notice. That doesn't mean they are actually superior.
Moreover it's not clear he'd be better-off doing that then doing what he is doing. He's not being prosecuted. His college is going to be forced to explain exactly why they thought what he was doing was profesional misconduct so heinous he had to be expelled. The guys who made him sign the NDA have apparently been scared off due to the publicity.
Granted there's almost certainly more to it then he's saying. I don't know many compsci profs who would vote to expel a kid on the basis that he'd been too curious as to whether a security hole he'd found (and told the company about) had been patched, but according to the article 14 of the 15 members of the faculty did precisely that. Which implies there's more to it.
Quebec doesn't use Common Law for private matters such as contracts.
It uses a version of French Law. Consideration doesn't seem to be a factor.
Now if he can get the Feds involved, or another province, he can probably gut the NDA.
BTW, this is not the Napoleonic Code because Quebec separated from France in the mid-18th-century and Napoleon did not write his code until the early 19th-century.