All the hardcore authoritarian fascists want him dead, I wonder if they'll get their wish.
Then frustrate their wishes by forcing him and Assange to stand trial instead. There's no death penalty for this offense, and that way he gets to present his side in court.
Did Bradley Manning steal a whole bunch of military and government secrets and leak them? Yes: he's guilty.
Did Julian Assange then publish these secrets, knowing that he has zero way of predicting the consequences? Yes: he's guilty.
I know these are unpopular views.
However, for a society to work, we need to have rules. Just like it's bad logic to say, "I'm bigger than you, therefore I'm going to take your stuff," it's bad logic to say, "I know how to steal and publish these secrets, so I will."
I don't see any of Julian Assange's defenders stepping up to dox themselves on the internet, and reveal some of the stuff they've had on their hard drives over the years.
Hmm... what's in this folder labeled 'Windows CABs'? Looks like a bunch of pictures. Click. Wait a second... is that a goat?
Justifying this leak because we think all governments are bad is a foolish way of thinking. We don't know what government does and a lot of it we'd rather not know. Just get good people into office, make sure there are others in the system who can observe what they do, and we'll get the best results.
Trying to monitor our whole government by making it 'transparent' is going to result in a government that will be totally adversarial to us and will hide a lot of secrets. Those will be in places without any oversight. Think about this one.
I don't think Wikileaks solved a single problem, or advanced us at all. Most likely, it got some people killed for doing what they believed was right. It's time for Assange and Manning to face the consequences of their actions.
How many Hollywood plots are plausible on a real-world level? Especially given what we know about people?
Think about your average Romantic Comedy. Some movie-star hot girl, who's magically single and doesn't have any STDs, is just pining around her $2 million New York brownstone, waiting for Mr. Right, and then as if by magic she finds him in some awkward social situation and is able to lure him out of his shell, so they can go off and be rich and good looking together?
I give action movies a break. I don't think anyone expects those to be real because they're basically cartoons with machine guns.
Or what about the generic inspirational movie, where a lawyer or mercenary suddenly grows a heart and decides to help a village full of starving blind orphan amputees, and finds "meaning" (noble bankruptcy) as a result?
If you think the physics and CS in movies are unreal, compare movies to real life as a whole. They're not even trying anymore.
I was trying to think of something funny to say about this, which kind of bugs me as well:
But, Jobs' reality distortion field persists after his death... and now the idea will be embedded in the 'nets culture as Steve's.
But then it occurred to me that Jobs was basically not a new ideas guy. What he was good at was implementation. He didn't make the first audio player, but he made one where all the details were in line and it was easy to use and stylish, thus distinctive, as a result. Same thing with the Macintosh interface, Apple TV, and so on. He specialized in a certain way of doing things well, and this building is no different.
Can't wait for another stunning Hollywood interpretation of computer science. Maybe this time when he flies up to the spaceship and hacks it with his MacBook, it will show a virus check on screen and tell us that it's the Matrix.
Maybe we should recognize that virtual worlds are second homes to many people, and often are preferred to everyday life. Should we set up voting booths in virtual worlds, and let people transition entirely to the digital worlds? It's not like they're going to miss out on anything by not physically standing in line for seven hours.
We probably shouldn't forget how much of this idea originated in Christopher Alexander, who posited a "pattern language" for architecture based on the usage of spaces, not the intersection of structural needs. It turned architecture and even computer programming on their heads.
Without considering the winner, this election spells trouble for the USA.
First, the population is clearly split down the middle over values, which means constant infighting and that a large segment of the population will always be disappointed and possibly look to secede. We've had this problem before. The values of the hives (dense cities) seem to clash with the values of the suburbs and rural areas.
Second, the major issues of our time went un-addressed because they are too difficult to bring up in a campaign. There is still no plan to balance the budget, which will require cutting either entitlements (50% of budget; Dems stronghold) or the military (25% of budget; Republican stronghold). We still have problems with corruption, the economy and a hostile world that's getting more armed and dangerous by the day.
Third, non-issues dominated the campaign. The media makes a big deal of these "unjust wars," but from a broader foreign policy perspective they exist to check (1) rising middle eastern radicalism, generally by reducing the technological level of those nations to keep them neutered, and then bringing them into our global capitalist economy, a strategy that worked in Viet Nam and South Korea; and (2) Russian and Chinese designs on theater domination in Europe and the Middle East, using Russian oil as a carrot and new militarism as a stick. Further, while abortion and gay marriage are important in their own right, they're not the most important problems we face or anything close. They're flag-waving issues.
Finally, what makes me queasy is that this ultimately came down to a contest between identities. Some people "see themselves" as one side or the other, and it's usually from a self of class standing or social and cultural identity. This makes these elections more of a battle of demographics than anything else, which is going to ensure class conflict, ethnic conflict, gender conflict and other forms of highly divisive politics.
I don't need to look at the election results to see that these pervasive problems are cracking the USA and Europe. The USA is trending toward where it was in 1861, a nation divided. The EU is falling apart in much of a similar way, with the central states wanting a more federal union and others wanting to break away.
It seems to me that our inability to talk honestly about our political motivations ensures demagoguery and therefore continued fracturing of the electorate and ongoing internal hostility. This means that we do not act as nations, but as large committees that can never take decision action, and it leaves us wide open for these empires to be replaced by rising powers in the East.
However, I was thinking of a descending or ascending flight leaving an airport, many of which are at the water's edge. We have enough problems with people shining laser pointers at these planes.
You're probably right that this is duct tape for a leaky political mess.
Our military probably doesn't care because they are maybe rolling out stealth and drone tech left and right that can avoid these stingers.
I'm less concerned about them shooting down our drones than smuggling them into New Jersey and shooting down commuter flights, or waiting on boats offshore to shoot down international flights. When a few 747s explode into the Pacific, we might find ourselves reconsidering these giveaways.
That being said, courts have usually said that the 4th Amendment only applies where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Typically that means nothing done outdoors is considered private.
This makes sense to me, because if someone could see it in the course of their normal activities, it wouldn't be private anyway. The courts seem to think that what you do inside your own home with shades pulled is private, and that once you go out into the world, you are in public.
I'm not so concerned about this particular issue, because with the low cost and small size of cameras, it's inevitable they will proliferate, especially as wireless access improves. I'm waiting for the first pot field busted because the cops used an algorithm to search YouTube videos for accidental shots of other people's property where suspicious activity or plants could be seen.
My source is ars technica (which I quoted above, but got distracted and didn't paste in the URL):
Our original story incorrectly suggested that Mendoza or Malaga owned the property in question. As the magistrate judge explained in a footnote:
The government also briefly argues that there was no Fourth Amendment search because neither Mendoza nor Magana owned or leased the Property. The court need not address this argument because: (1) it is arguably underdeveloped; (2) the record does not disclose whether Mendoza or Magana leased the Property; and (3) as set forth below, the motion can be denied on other grounds
Everything can be hacked, given time and effort, and what this plan will do is to encourage the crazies of the world to get a better understanding of how to make even more lethal weapons. Please don't.
It seems that the US and Russia are fighting a proxy war over middle east oil by alternately propping up and destabilizing the already unstable Islamic regimes there. There is probably legitimacy to this. Without the middle east, Russia will become Europe's oil supply, and thus Europe will lean toward supporting the least stable major power and probably involve itself in another exciting world war.
A better answer here might be to heat up this cold war, as Reagan did in the 1980s and Mitt Romney suggests he may do, by talking tough to the Russians and the Europeans both, and making it clear what's on the table here. International politics is a purely Machiavellian matter because as cruel as Machiavellianism can be, it saves lives and empires from the dustbin of history.
There's a lot of pushback against bullet points, with people talking about "The Power Point effect," where somehow reading a lot of bullet points turn ordinary people into morons. I'm with you -- I think whatever works to make the simplest and clearest communication is best. Going to the level of memes might be taking it too far, but no one's suggest that yet thankfully.
This is a legal document, probably differing for every case, and the point in requiring it is to make developers take a hard look at what information they access and how they use it.
I disagree that it's going to be that different. If they need to list different data fields that will be retained, or change a length of time, they can edit the open-source document for their specific needs. But this gives them a template to work from which has all of the lawyerese perfected.
I can't agree that the document will differ in every case. In my experience, the differences will be slight, and thus having an open source document would encourage programmers to adopt a general standard (like a community rule) for how they're going to approach privacy issues.
The result would be a raising of the overall standard to that of the proposed document, which is why it's a good idea to have professionals write it and "promulgate" it.
Instead of attaching a sample compliance letter, why didn't the AG attach a sample privacy policy and open source it so that developers can use it?
Pasting in a generic document is much more likely to happen than all those app developers running out and hiring lawyers, so she will either get lower compliance or shoddier privacy policies.
Is it too much to ask that government take the lead in this case? I can't imagine it costs the AG anything, since that office hires a staff of lawyers.
Do we want to incentivize the flu to mutate into something more vicious and fast-acting?
Sometimes, mother nature represents a balance between extremes. Somewhere between no-flu and a flu that resembles airborne superfast Ebola is the current balance.
I am not saying we should not explore this technology, but with our current record, we should move cautiously.
That's a really excellent point. People have been complaining for decades or centuries that the news is either contentless, or yellow journalism, or salacious.
There should be a news source for people who really don't care about Honey Boo-Boo. Usually, that's a high-quality newspaper like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times.
I wouldn't mind if we lost all the "news" that was contentless, yellow or salacious (gossip). The perception is that many more people "want" that news than not.
It could be that as newspapers go bankrupt, we see another part of the equation: more people are willing to pay for real news than for the Honey Boo-Boo, or rather, that people who like Honey Boo-Boo "news" aren't willing to pay for it.
Readers are often satisfied by reading the headline and summary published by Google News, and don't feel the need to click through to the news site, the publishers say.
I'm certainly from this group.
However this view avoids the real question: How is online content going to be paid for?
Newspapers already cannot make enough money off of online advertising to pay for the creation of their content.
I don't see internet users lining up for (a) micropayments or (b) some kind of universal subscription, and they're definitely not thinking about (c) maintain subscriptions to each of the 50 newspapers and magazines who post articles they want to read.
Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
Your average newspaper's website would have to improve in navigability and reliability too.
There's a lot more to this question than one lawsuit can answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Then frustrate their wishes by forcing him and Assange to stand trial instead. There's no death penalty for this offense, and that way he gets to present his side in court.
Did Bradley Manning steal a whole bunch of military and government secrets and leak them? Yes: he's guilty.
Did Julian Assange then publish these secrets, knowing that he has zero way of predicting the consequences? Yes: he's guilty.
I know these are unpopular views.
However, for a society to work, we need to have rules. Just like it's bad logic to say, "I'm bigger than you, therefore I'm going to take your stuff," it's bad logic to say, "I know how to steal and publish these secrets, so I will."
I don't see any of Julian Assange's defenders stepping up to dox themselves on the internet, and reveal some of the stuff they've had on their hard drives over the years.
Hmm... what's in this folder labeled 'Windows CABs'? Looks like a bunch of pictures. Click. Wait a second... is that a goat?
Justifying this leak because we think all governments are bad is a foolish way of thinking. We don't know what government does and a lot of it we'd rather not know. Just get good people into office, make sure there are others in the system who can observe what they do, and we'll get the best results.
Trying to monitor our whole government by making it 'transparent' is going to result in a government that will be totally adversarial to us and will hide a lot of secrets. Those will be in places without any oversight. Think about this one.
I don't think Wikileaks solved a single problem, or advanced us at all. Most likely, it got some people killed for doing what they believed was right. It's time for Assange and Manning to face the consequences of their actions.
How many Hollywood plots are plausible on a real-world level? Especially given what we know about people?
Think about your average Romantic Comedy. Some movie-star hot girl, who's magically single and doesn't have any STDs, is just pining around her $2 million New York brownstone, waiting for Mr. Right, and then as if by magic she finds him in some awkward social situation and is able to lure him out of his shell, so they can go off and be rich and good looking together?
I give action movies a break. I don't think anyone expects those to be real because they're basically cartoons with machine guns.
Or what about the generic inspirational movie, where a lawyer or mercenary suddenly grows a heart and decides to help a village full of starving blind orphan amputees, and finds "meaning" (noble bankruptcy) as a result?
If you think the physics and CS in movies are unreal, compare movies to real life as a whole. They're not even trying anymore.
If you tell Peter Jackson, we'll get that Jurassic-Park-with-Hobbits tie-in movie we always wanted.
Insightful comment; sorry, no mod points. :(
I was trying to think of something funny to say about this, which kind of bugs me as well:
But then it occurred to me that Jobs was basically not a new ideas guy. What he was good at was implementation. He didn't make the first audio player, but he made one where all the details were in line and it was easy to use and stylish, thus distinctive, as a result. Same thing with the Macintosh interface, Apple TV, and so on. He specialized in a certain way of doing things well, and this building is no different.
A better metaphor for American politics would be hard to find.
Can't wait for another stunning Hollywood interpretation of computer science. Maybe this time when he flies up to the spaceship and hacks it with his MacBook, it will show a virus check on screen and tell us that it's the Matrix.
Maybe we should recognize that virtual worlds are second homes to many people, and often are preferred to everyday life. Should we set up voting booths in virtual worlds, and let people transition entirely to the digital worlds? It's not like they're going to miss out on anything by not physically standing in line for seven hours.
We probably shouldn't forget how much of this idea originated in Christopher Alexander, who posited a "pattern language" for architecture based on the usage of spaces, not the intersection of structural needs. It turned architecture and even computer programming on their heads.
Without considering the winner, this election spells trouble for the USA.
First, the population is clearly split down the middle over values, which means constant infighting and that a large segment of the population will always be disappointed and possibly look to secede. We've had this problem before. The values of the hives (dense cities) seem to clash with the values of the suburbs and rural areas.
Second, the major issues of our time went un-addressed because they are too difficult to bring up in a campaign. There is still no plan to balance the budget, which will require cutting either entitlements (50% of budget; Dems stronghold) or the military (25% of budget; Republican stronghold). We still have problems with corruption, the economy and a hostile world that's getting more armed and dangerous by the day.
Third, non-issues dominated the campaign. The media makes a big deal of these "unjust wars," but from a broader foreign policy perspective they exist to check (1) rising middle eastern radicalism, generally by reducing the technological level of those nations to keep them neutered, and then bringing them into our global capitalist economy, a strategy that worked in Viet Nam and South Korea; and (2) Russian and Chinese designs on theater domination in Europe and the Middle East, using Russian oil as a carrot and new militarism as a stick. Further, while abortion and gay marriage are important in their own right, they're not the most important problems we face or anything close. They're flag-waving issues.
Finally, what makes me queasy is that this ultimately came down to a contest between identities. Some people "see themselves" as one side or the other, and it's usually from a self of class standing or social and cultural identity. This makes these elections more of a battle of demographics than anything else, which is going to ensure class conflict, ethnic conflict, gender conflict and other forms of highly divisive politics.
I don't need to look at the election results to see that these pervasive problems are cracking the USA and Europe. The USA is trending toward where it was in 1861, a nation divided. The EU is falling apart in much of a similar way, with the central states wanting a more federal union and others wanting to break away.
It seems to me that our inability to talk honestly about our political motivations ensures demagoguery and therefore continued fracturing of the electorate and ongoing internal hostility. This means that we do not act as nations, but as large committees that can never take decision action, and it leaves us wide open for these empires to be replaced by rising powers in the East.
You're right, according to this source:
However, I was thinking of a descending or ascending flight leaving an airport, many of which are at the water's edge. We have enough problems with people shining laser pointers at these planes.
I'm fond of Detroit, but it's worth mentioning that it could be a set from Blade Runner.
You're probably right that this is duct tape for a leaky political mess.
I'm less concerned about them shooting down our drones than smuggling them into New Jersey and shooting down commuter flights, or waiting on boats offshore to shoot down international flights. When a few 747s explode into the Pacific, we might find ourselves reconsidering these giveaways.
Whether or not the land was owned/leased seems to be mired in some uncertainty.
This makes sense to me, because if someone could see it in the course of their normal activities, it wouldn't be private anyway. The courts seem to think that what you do inside your own home with shades pulled is private, and that once you go out into the world, you are in public.
I'm not so concerned about this particular issue, because with the low cost and small size of cameras, it's inevitable they will proliferate, especially as wireless access improves. I'm waiting for the first pot field busted because the cops used an algorithm to search YouTube videos for accidental shots of other people's property where suspicious activity or plants could be seen.
There seems to be some disagreement on this issue.
My source is ars technica (which I quoted above, but got distracted and didn't paste in the URL):
That's at the bottom of the page.
It seems there's some confusion about this issue.
Everything can be hacked, given time and effort, and what this plan will do is to encourage the crazies of the world to get a better understanding of how to make even more lethal weapons. Please don't.
It seems that the US and Russia are fighting a proxy war over middle east oil by alternately propping up and destabilizing the already unstable Islamic regimes there. There is probably legitimacy to this. Without the middle east, Russia will become Europe's oil supply, and thus Europe will lean toward supporting the least stable major power and probably involve itself in another exciting world war.
A better answer here might be to heat up this cold war, as Reagan did in the 1980s and Mitt Romney suggests he may do, by talking tough to the Russians and the Europeans both, and making it clear what's on the table here. International politics is a purely Machiavellian matter because as cruel as Machiavellianism can be, it saves lives and empires from the dustbin of history.
Not to interrupt the flame war in progress, but these guys didn't own the land:
At least, according to the gubb-mint lawyers.
I don't know how this is different from having the police fly over in a plane to observe these guys.
It looks like Google was ahead of the curve after all with their idea for floating server farms.
There's a lot of pushback against bullet points, with people talking about "The Power Point effect," where somehow reading a lot of bullet points turn ordinary people into morons. I'm with you -- I think whatever works to make the simplest and clearest communication is best. Going to the level of memes might be taking it too far, but no one's suggest that yet thankfully.
I disagree that it's going to be that different. If they need to list different data fields that will be retained, or change a length of time, they can edit the open-source document for their specific needs. But this gives them a template to work from which has all of the lawyerese perfected.
I can't agree that the document will differ in every case. In my experience, the differences will be slight, and thus having an open source document would encourage programmers to adopt a general standard (like a community rule) for how they're going to approach privacy issues.
The result would be a raising of the overall standard to that of the proposed document, which is why it's a good idea to have professionals write it and "promulgate" it.
Instead of attaching a sample compliance letter, why didn't the AG attach a sample privacy policy and open source it so that developers can use it?
Pasting in a generic document is much more likely to happen than all those app developers running out and hiring lawyers, so she will either get lower compliance or shoddier privacy policies.
Is it too much to ask that government take the lead in this case? I can't imagine it costs the AG anything, since that office hires a staff of lawyers.
Consider the feedback loop. In response to our actions, the flu itself will change.
We're already seeing how microbes are developing resistance to antibiotics, and how germs acquired during healthcare are more virulent than those out there in the wild.
Do we want to incentivize the flu to mutate into something more vicious and fast-acting?
Sometimes, mother nature represents a balance between extremes. Somewhere between no-flu and a flu that resembles airborne superfast Ebola is the current balance.
I am not saying we should not explore this technology, but with our current record, we should move cautiously.
That's a really excellent point. People have been complaining for decades or centuries that the news is either contentless, or yellow journalism, or salacious.
There should be a news source for people who really don't care about Honey Boo-Boo. Usually, that's a high-quality newspaper like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times.
I wouldn't mind if we lost all the "news" that was contentless, yellow or salacious (gossip). The perception is that many more people "want" that news than not.
It could be that as newspapers go bankrupt, we see another part of the equation: more people are willing to pay for real news than for the Honey Boo-Boo, or rather, that people who like Honey Boo-Boo "news" aren't willing to pay for it.
I'm certainly from this group.
However this view avoids the real question: How is online content going to be paid for?
Newspapers already cannot make enough money off of online advertising to pay for the creation of their content.
I don't see internet users lining up for (a) micropayments or (b) some kind of universal subscription, and they're definitely not thinking about (c) maintain subscriptions to each of the 50 newspapers and magazines who post articles they want to read.
Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
Your average newspaper's website would have to improve in navigability and reliability too.
There's a lot more to this question than one lawsuit can answer.