I can't tell if you're being sarcastic/sardonic or not, I hope so... but just in case not: the aim of liberals and greens (and stinky hippies) who were opposed to nuclear power was not simply to eliminate nuclear power plants, but to prevent the disasters that they can cause. This isn't winning, this is having their nightmare come to pass. If it helps prevent other disasters in the future, that's salvaging some good from the tragedy, but I don't know a single anti-nuclear activist who wouldn't prefer to be wrong if it meant living in a world where the proliferating nuclear power plants all operated without hurting anyone.
Note that I'm not personally an activist of any sort on this topic.
i don't think any RESPONSIBLE parent would have a problem with school admin monitoring and policing what their kids do while they are at work, and in fact, probably appreciate it
Here's one responsible parent who has no problem with the school monitoring the behavior of children in school, but has a serious problem if they reach outside that very limited scope. I expect my kids to behave themselves and obey reasonable rules at school, even if some may be different from the rules at home, but outside of school, I see zero right, much less responsibility, of the school to enforce any standards at all.
unless everyone here wants to register an opinion on this subject as if all teenagers were perfect responsible darlings all the time
pfffffffft
Ah, so you're announcing in advance that you'll use ridiculous logic to dismiss opinions with which you disagree? Outside of school, it is my (the parent's) responsibility to keep my kids in line, and my right to determine what sort of behavior I'll accept. This has nothing to do with teenagers being or not being responsible and well-behaved.
Oops, I should clarify my last paragraph. The situation I describe there is one where the birthday paradox does not arise (no extensive DNA database is involved) but I still think it's wrong to force someone to provide a sample for testing on the basis of arrest (or perhaps even conviction) if an ordinary citizen would otherwise be entitled to refuse.
You're correct about the birthday paradox, but it still applies to the misuse of these databases. There are two ways it can come up. First, and the one I am most worried about, is a database being built with the DNA from an incomplete sample of the population, then queried when DNA evidence is found in an investigation. Because there are many such investigations and many entries in the database, the birthday paradox arises. I think this would actually be ok (statisically, not in terms of civil liberties) if literally everyone were in the DNA database, but that's a ridiculous assumption.
Second, there's the inverse arrangement where you obtain a DNA sample from an individual and compare it to a database of DNA samples from open investigations. The numbers are presumably smaller here, but you still have many individuals being checked against many samples, so again the paradox hits.
If you have both a specific individual *and* a specific crime, then yes, there's no paradox and the odds of a false positive are very small. That's not what I'm worried about with the birthday paradox. The situation I'm thinking of is a suspect is picked up while investigating crime A, and is forced to provide a sample to be checked against DNA evidence from crime B. Ordinarily, the police could not pick an arbitrary citizen and demand such a sample. In the absence of a specific connection between the suspect and crime B, why should he have to submit a sample simply because of his possible connection to crime A? Answer: he shouldn't.
Because I don't trust them to get the statistics right. Hammering a DNA database looking for matches will produce many false positives (due to the birthday paradox), and recent history suggests that those doing the searching will try (and likely succeed) in presenting to the jury the statistics that are correct when you test a single pair of samples.
I have serious reservations about the legitimacy of doing a wide search to see if you can find other charges to levy against someone you've picked up on suspicion of a single crime. Sure, check for outstanding warrants, and if there is actual evidence of a connection to another crime, investigate. However, I don't see that forcing someone picked up for crime A makes it ok to force him to consent to anything not directly related to that investigation.
To say that something is ten times less massive means that you consider the thing to which it's being compared to already be not very massive (compared to what?).
No, you are incorrectly parsing the statement. "X is ten times less massive than Y" is clearly comparing X to Y, finding the difference to be a ratio of ten, and specifying the sense to be that X is less than Y. There's no implication about the absolute massiveness of Y.
There IS a very slim opportunity for ambiguity, but it's not the one you're suggesting. Because of the parallel structure to "X is ten kg less massive than Y" so, if one is not very perceptive, he might conclude that mass(X) = -9 * mass(Y). If that is actually what was meant, though, it was a misuse of the original structure. The "n times" comparison means you're taking a ratio.
That's a very cynical view of class actions. What do you suppose the actual damages are to any individual user? A few bucks or tens of bucks, maybe a bit more if it's been going on for a long time. Certainly not enough to warrant a rational person pursuing a lawsuit to recoup. Yes, the lawyers are interested in building a large enough class that the damages from which they'll draw their fees are substantial enough to be profitable to them. And you know what? That's pretty much the purpose of a class action lawsuit.
In some cases they're abused, I suppose, and I have had my share of worthless payoffs (gee, thanks for those 90 minute domestic long distance calling cards, Sprint, too bad I have free long distance). Still, it is a mechanism for private parties to effectively punish small-scale but large-volume misbehavior by large companies. I don't know of many others.
It's just that it's on a sidetrack for someone who's just learning what it means for a series of commands to be executed in sequence.
I'm not saying it's far, far beyond their grasp, but understanding what a namespace means beyond just "type this nonce" requires understanding of a few things you don't need just to see how a simple program is constructed. Plus, it can lead to bad habits along the lines of "from turtle import *".
It's a diversion from the goal. Memorizing "type turtle dot before every command" is both not quite right (is it turtle.print or just print? why?) and doesn't add anything to the educational experience. It adds one more "just do this and we'll explain later" layer.
Also, don't discount the cost of distracting syntax. Sure, to you and me it's just "turtle." at the start of each line and is easy to ignore. But someone who doesn't yet recognize the patterns it's another word to read and think about. If you ignore the rectangle option, even with irregular syntax, it's really clear what LINE(x,y)-(x,y) does---there's nothing there that doesn't contribute to the meaning (to the human, not to the interpreter) of the statement.
Sure, things like this are not complete deal-breakers, but they do add difficulty for a newcomer without adding any benefit to the experience. BASIC may not be absolutely perfect as a first language, but it's pretty good in terms of presenting a simple model as an introduction to the concept and basics of programming.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge Python fan and regular user, and do think it's a language that is worthy of introduction early in one's education. I just think it's less than ideal for teaching the very basics of programming.
The one serious limitation of Python, particularly for beginners, is that it makes extremely liberal use of external (though standard) libraries. While the availability and easy of extending it like this makes it powerful, it doesn't make it a great beginner's language. You've either got to introduce the concepts of namespaces and hierarchies before you can do some of the good stuff or you need to drill in a lot more rote syntax.
I love Python, and it's much simpler than many of its alternatives, but I think BASIC is still a pretty solid language for a n00b. Many of the weaknesses people point out (line numbers, simple flow control) are actually strengths when you are training someone who really doesn't have the slightest background in how computers work. I thought the article's rationales were pretty sound.
If, as is the case for the OP, BASIC fulfills all your needs, there's no shame in using it. It may not be ideal for all purposes, but if you know it and it can do what you need, then sometimes it's better to use the tool you know than to learn a new one. All it has to be is good enough for the task at hand.
Give your specific definition for "emergency services" that qualify and I'm sure we can find a way to slip some things through it that weren't meant to be included. A loophole arises from a mismatch between the intended scope of the exception and the precise meaning of the words with which it's described.
However, this is tangential to my point which is that the exceptions that are necessary for the law to be practical need to be in place before the law is enacted. The loopholes that arise from the exceptions will do so whether you make the rule ahead or amend it later. Counting on the service providers to break the law to provide emergency services with priority while the political process works on the later legislation is silly.
Do you know what "legislate[d] exceptions" are called? Loopholes. When they're necessary, they're less bad than passing a law that will necessarily be broken from the get-go.
The copyrighted work in question is the original drawing that Omega reproduces on each of its watches. Each printing is a copy of that original, so the OP is correct to apply that definition.
It's not so simple. There are plenty of easy examples of obtaining something in a physical sense without acquiring legal ownership, e.g. outright theft. There are also subtler examples, such as purchasing under the terms of a contract that stipulate things you agree not to do later. Another is making a purchase outside the U.S. while subject to different laws. It's not clear that the U.S. interests (or even those of its people) are served by the U.S. legal system ignoring these sorts of things.
Not to say I think this is a good decision, I don't really understand it enough, but your oversimplification doesn't work. It's quite possible for physical possession to be insufficient grounds for "legal importation."
Successfully placing people on other celestial bodies and bringing them back is far more difficult than some measly hunks of metal, rubber, and electronics
It's not a difficulty contest. Part of the problem with manned space missions is that they are far more difficult and complex than necessary with little actual return on that investment, and greatly reducing the number and scientific complexity of the missions.
Let that last bit sink in some more. Conducting research on terrestrial lakes is considered "space exploration". That certainly fits my criteria for a bloated agency.
Astrobiology is one of the most fascinating subfields to develop / flourish in recent years. Funding research to understand the parameter space in which life can be detected is kind of central to this mission, rather than mission creep as you suggest.
For example, spending taxpayer money on "why does the shower curtain suck in the way it does in a shower"
Let me get this straight, one of the strengths of spending $billions and billions on the moon mission is that it incidentally brought us the wonder technology of cooking foil, yet a small computer simulation of what turns out to be surprisingly complicated and not understood fluid dynamics in an everyday environment is an example of unacceptable waste? Sorry, either you value exploration of the unknown in part because it occasionally gives you unexpected breakthroughs, your you don't you can't have it both ways. (And, incidentally, toy problems like this example are kind of an important step in approaching more serious research, so it's not even a legitimate example of funding for a flippant study.)
And finally, your argument relies on the fallacy that we can, or should, continue to take more and more form the people who get out and are *productive* members of the economy and redistribute it around for such things as space exploration as opposed to letting the people decide for themselves. Really, NASA needs to refocus it's mission. Get back down to space exploration; do things the private sector simply isn't willing to front the costs for - if NASA is to *do* any of it. And NASA/the FedGov needs get the hell out of the way of private space exploration. We already have a private space launch capacity of many billions per year, well exceeding the budget of NASA. Hell, most of the satellites are launched on private rockets.
I really can't work out what you're suggesting here. So NASA should stop stealing from "productive" members of society to fund space exploration so it can refocus its mission on space exploration (if it needs to), and it needs to stop keeping private entities from also doing space exploration? But you said it should refocus on space exploration without using the money it didn't take from "productive" society . . . . .
I actually agree that NASA has serious problems and have had personal experience with its frustrating bureaucracy, but whether you choose to respect the challenges in unmanned projects or not, they have done and still do a lot of amazing science.
The excuses for skipping the moon are as hollow as a ping pong ball (they boil down to "it's boring" when it plainly isn't)
They're a lot more complicated than "it's boring," but even that is sort of true from a scientific perspective. The things you can do on a manned trip to the moon (and even to Mars) are extremely limited because you have to "waste" so much effort keeping the humans alive. Given the limited budgets that science has seen lately, it's necessary to get the most actual bang for the buck.
That's not to say there is no value in manned missions. As a general matter, I would love to see them happening, but only if they're accompanied by a massive increase in funding---they should not replace the more effective scientifically-focused missions. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any actual commitment to properly funding science in this country.
and it would be an ideal place to construct other spacecraft.
Not any time soon it wouldn't, unless it turns out actually to have large quantities of water and recoverable mineral deposits.
I agree that Assenge is not subject to US criminal law. He is, however, providing material aid to our enemies and is thus an enemy of the United States and is therefore subject to military action.
He is doing no such thing. Someone gave him a document and he released it, taking precautions to make it difficult to prevent his doing so. If the US does not want that material to be public, then it needs to do a better job keeping it out of the possession of people with no duty to respect its requests to keep it private.
The original supplier of the information was in the US Army and clearly committed treason, which in wartime is a capital offense. Arguably it's not wartime since it is undeclared, but he is certainly subject to military justice.
No, even if you grant it as "clear" that the accused actually is the source for the leak, it is far from clear that this amounts to anything even approaching treason.
The publishers of the classified portions of the information are clearly committing felonies. I haven't read any of it but it's my understanding that the vast majority of the information is not classified but something else that may or may not constitute a crime to release. It's hardly a new phenomenon for the NYT and I doubt anything will be done about it.
They *might* be if they're located in the US, but even then it's unclear.
You can argue that this is all somehow noble (the First Amendment permits you to make this, or any other patently asinine argument you might want) but you can't plausibly argue that it is legal.
You know what, I'm convinced. Some guy on the Internet who doesn't seem to understand the limited jurisdiction of US law, that freedoms granted by the first amendment trump laws when there's a conflict, or why it's critically important to our ideals that the first amendment actually provide this protection called contrary arguments asinine and implausible.
None of what you said is clear or even likely to be correct.
Perhaps, but if a reasonable person would interpret it as a threat, if there is clear evidence that it was intended to have that effect, and if there's a pattern of that behavior, it may be hard to sneak out of it on the technicality that you didn't use particular keywords.
I disagree. First, you seem to be jumping on a bit of understatement by the OP's reference (and writing with a needlessly disrespectful tone that seems not unlike the "attitude of a pre-teen" yourself).
But more substantively, in all but rare cases, I think the OP's tech writer friend has a very good point and can hardly be called a moron on the basis of the statement. The user for a piece of software can be (or should be able to be) assumed to be familiar with the problem that the software solves, just not with the particular software. If the software is well designed, then there should be a fairly clear connection between sub-tasks in the software and therefore be easy to explain. Just because a solution is complicated does not imply that it's hard to explain.
If the software is introducing complications that don't have analogs in the methods for solving the problem that came before that software was written, then that's a big red flag that something is wrong with the design.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic/sardonic or not, I hope so... but just in case not: the aim of liberals and greens (and stinky hippies) who were opposed to nuclear power was not simply to eliminate nuclear power plants, but to prevent the disasters that they can cause. This isn't winning, this is having their nightmare come to pass. If it helps prevent other disasters in the future, that's salvaging some good from the tragedy, but I don't know a single anti-nuclear activist who wouldn't prefer to be wrong if it meant living in a world where the proliferating nuclear power plants all operated without hurting anyone.
Note that I'm not personally an activist of any sort on this topic.
If you don't read all the words, you're not going to understand what I say. Quoting myself, adding emphasis:
I expect my kids to behave themselves and obey reasonable rules at school
outside of school, I see zero right, much less responsibility, of the school to enforce any standards at all.
i don't think any RESPONSIBLE parent would have a problem with school admin monitoring and policing what their kids do while they are at work, and in fact, probably appreciate it
Here's one responsible parent who has no problem with the school monitoring the behavior of children in school, but has a serious problem if they reach outside that very limited scope. I expect my kids to behave themselves and obey reasonable rules at school, even if some may be different from the rules at home, but outside of school, I see zero right, much less responsibility, of the school to enforce any standards at all.
unless everyone here wants to register an opinion on this subject as if all teenagers were perfect responsible darlings all the time
pfffffffft
Ah, so you're announcing in advance that you'll use ridiculous logic to dismiss opinions with which you disagree? Outside of school, it is my (the parent's) responsibility to keep my kids in line, and my right to determine what sort of behavior I'll accept. This has nothing to do with teenagers being or not being responsible and well-behaved.
Oops, I should clarify my last paragraph. The situation I describe there is one where the birthday paradox does not arise (no extensive DNA database is involved) but I still think it's wrong to force someone to provide a sample for testing on the basis of arrest (or perhaps even conviction) if an ordinary citizen would otherwise be entitled to refuse.
You're correct about the birthday paradox, but it still applies to the misuse of these databases. There are two ways it can come up. First, and the one I am most worried about, is a database being built with the DNA from an incomplete sample of the population, then queried when DNA evidence is found in an investigation. Because there are many such investigations and many entries in the database, the birthday paradox arises. I think this would actually be ok (statisically, not in terms of civil liberties) if literally everyone were in the DNA database, but that's a ridiculous assumption.
Second, there's the inverse arrangement where you obtain a DNA sample from an individual and compare it to a database of DNA samples from open investigations. The numbers are presumably smaller here, but you still have many individuals being checked against many samples, so again the paradox hits.
If you have both a specific individual *and* a specific crime, then yes, there's no paradox and the odds of a false positive are very small. That's not what I'm worried about with the birthday paradox. The situation I'm thinking of is a suspect is picked up while investigating crime A, and is forced to provide a sample to be checked against DNA evidence from crime B. Ordinarily, the police could not pick an arbitrary citizen and demand such a sample. In the absence of a specific connection between the suspect and crime B, why should he have to submit a sample simply because of his possible connection to crime A? Answer: he shouldn't.
Because I don't trust them to get the statistics right. Hammering a DNA database looking for matches will produce many false positives (due to the birthday paradox), and recent history suggests that those doing the searching will try (and likely succeed) in presenting to the jury the statistics that are correct when you test a single pair of samples.
I have serious reservations about the legitimacy of doing a wide search to see if you can find other charges to levy against someone you've picked up on suspicion of a single crime. Sure, check for outstanding warrants, and if there is actual evidence of a connection to another crime, investigate. However, I don't see that forcing someone picked up for crime A makes it ok to force him to consent to anything not directly related to that investigation.
Apples to apples. How does that handheld compare to the same-sized handheld of the 1960s?
To say that something is ten times less massive means that you consider the thing to which it's being compared to already be not very massive (compared to what?).
No, you are incorrectly parsing the statement. "X is ten times less massive than Y" is clearly comparing X to Y, finding the difference to be a ratio of ten, and specifying the sense to be that X is less than Y. There's no implication about the absolute massiveness of Y.
There IS a very slim opportunity for ambiguity, but it's not the one you're suggesting. Because of the parallel structure to "X is ten kg less massive than Y" so, if one is not very perceptive, he might conclude that mass(X) = -9 * mass(Y). If that is actually what was meant, though, it was a misuse of the original structure. The "n times" comparison means you're taking a ratio.
That's a very cynical view of class actions. What do you suppose the actual damages are to any individual user? A few bucks or tens of bucks, maybe a bit more if it's been going on for a long time. Certainly not enough to warrant a rational person pursuing a lawsuit to recoup. Yes, the lawyers are interested in building a large enough class that the damages from which they'll draw their fees are substantial enough to be profitable to them. And you know what? That's pretty much the purpose of a class action lawsuit.
In some cases they're abused, I suppose, and I have had my share of worthless payoffs (gee, thanks for those 90 minute domestic long distance calling cards, Sprint, too bad I have free long distance). Still, it is a mechanism for private parties to effectively punish small-scale but large-volume misbehavior by large companies. I don't know of many others.
foo bar biz baz my ass, it's foo bar baz quux.
Ah yes, the good ol' "security through obscurity" way...
Obscurity itself is not security, but security + obscurity is stronger than security without obscurity.
It's just that it's on a sidetrack for someone who's just learning what it means for a series of commands to be executed in sequence.
I'm not saying it's far, far beyond their grasp, but understanding what a namespace means beyond just "type this nonce" requires understanding of a few things you don't need just to see how a simple program is constructed. Plus, it can lead to bad habits along the lines of "from turtle import *".
It's a diversion from the goal. Memorizing "type turtle dot before every command" is both not quite right (is it turtle.print or just print? why?) and doesn't add anything to the educational experience. It adds one more "just do this and we'll explain later" layer.
Also, don't discount the cost of distracting syntax. Sure, to you and me it's just "turtle." at the start of each line and is easy to ignore. But someone who doesn't yet recognize the patterns it's another word to read and think about. If you ignore the rectangle option, even with irregular syntax, it's really clear what LINE(x,y)-(x,y) does---there's nothing there that doesn't contribute to the meaning (to the human, not to the interpreter) of the statement.
Sure, things like this are not complete deal-breakers, but they do add difficulty for a newcomer without adding any benefit to the experience. BASIC may not be absolutely perfect as a first language, but it's pretty good in terms of presenting a simple model as an introduction to the concept and basics of programming.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge Python fan and regular user, and do think it's a language that is worthy of introduction early in one's education. I just think it's less than ideal for teaching the very basics of programming.
The one serious limitation of Python, particularly for beginners, is that it makes extremely liberal use of external (though standard) libraries. While the availability and easy of extending it like this makes it powerful, it doesn't make it a great beginner's language. You've either got to introduce the concepts of namespaces and hierarchies before you can do some of the good stuff or you need to drill in a lot more rote syntax.
I love Python, and it's much simpler than many of its alternatives, but I think BASIC is still a pretty solid language for a n00b. Many of the weaknesses people point out (line numbers, simple flow control) are actually strengths when you are training someone who really doesn't have the slightest background in how computers work. I thought the article's rationales were pretty sound.
If, as is the case for the OP, BASIC fulfills all your needs, there's no shame in using it. It may not be ideal for all purposes, but if you know it and it can do what you need, then sometimes it's better to use the tool you know than to learn a new one. All it has to be is good enough for the task at hand.
Give your specific definition for "emergency services" that qualify and I'm sure we can find a way to slip some things through it that weren't meant to be included. A loophole arises from a mismatch between the intended scope of the exception and the precise meaning of the words with which it's described.
However, this is tangential to my point which is that the exceptions that are necessary for the law to be practical need to be in place before the law is enacted. The loopholes that arise from the exceptions will do so whether you make the rule ahead or amend it later. Counting on the service providers to break the law to provide emergency services with priority while the political process works on the later legislation is silly.
Do you know what "legislate[d] exceptions" are called? Loopholes. When they're necessary, they're less bad than passing a law that will necessarily be broken from the get-go.
The copyrighted work in question is the original drawing that Omega reproduces on each of its watches. Each printing is a copy of that original, so the OP is correct to apply that definition.
It's not so simple. There are plenty of easy examples of obtaining something in a physical sense without acquiring legal ownership, e.g. outright theft. There are also subtler examples, such as purchasing under the terms of a contract that stipulate things you agree not to do later. Another is making a purchase outside the U.S. while subject to different laws. It's not clear that the U.S. interests (or even those of its people) are served by the U.S. legal system ignoring these sorts of things.
Not to say I think this is a good decision, I don't really understand it enough, but your oversimplification doesn't work. It's quite possible for physical possession to be insufficient grounds for "legal importation."
Successfully placing people on other celestial bodies and bringing them back is far more difficult than some measly hunks of metal, rubber, and electronics
It's not a difficulty contest. Part of the problem with manned space missions is that they are far more difficult and complex than necessary with little actual return on that investment, and greatly reducing the number and scientific complexity of the missions.
Let that last bit sink in some more. Conducting research on terrestrial lakes is considered "space exploration". That certainly fits my criteria for a bloated agency.
Astrobiology is one of the most fascinating subfields to develop / flourish in recent years. Funding research to understand the parameter space in which life can be detected is kind of central to this mission, rather than mission creep as you suggest.
For example, spending taxpayer money on "why does the shower curtain suck in the way it does in a shower"
Let me get this straight, one of the strengths of spending $billions and billions on the moon mission is that it incidentally brought us the wonder technology of cooking foil, yet a small computer simulation of what turns out to be surprisingly complicated and not understood fluid dynamics in an everyday environment is an example of unacceptable waste? Sorry, either you value exploration of the unknown in part because it occasionally gives you unexpected breakthroughs, your you don't you can't have it both ways. (And, incidentally, toy problems like this example are kind of an important step in approaching more serious research, so it's not even a legitimate example of funding for a flippant study.)
And finally, your argument relies on the fallacy that we can, or should, continue to take more and more form the people who get out and are *productive* members of the economy and redistribute it around for such things as space exploration as opposed to letting the people decide for themselves. Really, NASA needs to refocus it's mission. Get back down to space exploration; do things the private sector simply isn't willing to front the costs for - if NASA is to *do* any of it. And NASA/the FedGov needs get the hell out of the way of private space exploration. We already have a private space launch capacity of many billions per year, well exceeding the budget of NASA. Hell, most of the satellites are launched on private rockets.
I really can't work out what you're suggesting here. So NASA should stop stealing from "productive" members of society to fund space exploration so it can refocus its mission on space exploration (if it needs to), and it needs to stop keeping private entities from also doing space exploration? But you said it should refocus on space exploration without using the money it didn't take from "productive" society . . . . .
I actually agree that NASA has serious problems and have had personal experience with its frustrating bureaucracy, but whether you choose to respect the challenges in unmanned projects or not, they have done and still do a lot of amazing science.
The excuses for skipping the moon are as hollow as a ping pong ball (they boil down to "it's boring" when it plainly isn't)
They're a lot more complicated than "it's boring," but even that is sort of true from a scientific perspective. The things you can do on a manned trip to the moon (and even to Mars) are extremely limited because you have to "waste" so much effort keeping the humans alive. Given the limited budgets that science has seen lately, it's necessary to get the most actual bang for the buck.
That's not to say there is no value in manned missions. As a general matter, I would love to see them happening, but only if they're accompanied by a massive increase in funding---they should not replace the more effective scientifically-focused missions. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any actual commitment to properly funding science in this country.
and it would be an ideal place to construct other spacecraft.
Not any time soon it wouldn't, unless it turns out actually to have large quantities of water and recoverable mineral deposits.
I agree that Assenge is not subject to US criminal law. He is, however, providing material aid to our enemies and is thus an enemy of the United States and is therefore subject to military action.
He is doing no such thing. Someone gave him a document and he released it, taking precautions to make it difficult to prevent his doing so. If the US does not want that material to be public, then it needs to do a better job keeping it out of the possession of people with no duty to respect its requests to keep it private.
The original supplier of the information was in the US Army and clearly committed treason, which in wartime is a capital offense. Arguably it's not wartime since it is undeclared, but he is certainly subject to military justice.
No, even if you grant it as "clear" that the accused actually is the source for the leak, it is far from clear that this amounts to anything even approaching treason.
The publishers of the classified portions of the information are clearly committing felonies. I haven't read any of it but it's my understanding that the vast majority of the information is not classified but something else that may or may not constitute a crime to release. It's hardly a new phenomenon for the NYT and I doubt anything will be done about it.
They *might* be if they're located in the US, but even then it's unclear.
You can argue that this is all somehow noble (the First Amendment permits you to make this, or any other patently asinine argument you might want) but you can't plausibly argue that it is legal.
You know what, I'm convinced. Some guy on the Internet who doesn't seem to understand the limited jurisdiction of US law, that freedoms granted by the first amendment trump laws when there's a conflict, or why it's critically important to our ideals that the first amendment actually provide this protection called contrary arguments asinine and implausible.
None of what you said is clear or even likely to be correct.
Ok, you're right. People who are not qualified for their jobs can't do their jobs well. Was that really your point?
Perhaps, but if a reasonable person would interpret it as a threat, if there is clear evidence that it was intended to have that effect, and if there's a pattern of that behavior, it may be hard to sneak out of it on the technicality that you didn't use particular keywords.
I disagree. First, you seem to be jumping on a bit of understatement by the OP's reference (and writing with a needlessly disrespectful tone that seems not unlike the "attitude of a pre-teen" yourself).
But more substantively, in all but rare cases, I think the OP's tech writer friend has a very good point and can hardly be called a moron on the basis of the statement. The user for a piece of software can be (or should be able to be) assumed to be familiar with the problem that the software solves, just not with the particular software. If the software is well designed, then there should be a fairly clear connection between sub-tasks in the software and therefore be easy to explain. Just because a solution is complicated does not imply that it's hard to explain.
If the software is introducing complications that don't have analogs in the methods for solving the problem that came before that software was written, then that's a big red flag that something is wrong with the design.
By definition, less than 5% (~4.2%) of any normally distributed population is going to be more than 5% from the average.
I presume it's a typo, but it should be "less than 5% [will be] more than 2 standard deviations from the average." (and it's more like 4.5% than 4.2%)