Are you really, with a straight face, tell me that if Microsoft or Google (Obama donors #2 and 3 respectively) call up for a meeting, Obama's not going to take their call?
Do you even bother to read what you cite? That table does not list any donations from Microsoft or Google as companies, it lists individual donations from people and their families who happen to be working at those companies, plus a small number of PACs affiliated with those companies. The maximum donation for any individual or PAC is $2500 (large donation) or $200 (small donation).
Yeah, Microsoft obviously represents thousands of politically active Democrats, so I would hope that Obama listens what they have to say (which may or may not coincide with what their management or their stockholders want); that's what democratically elected representatives are supposed to do: listen to their supporters and voters. Where do you see the problem?
First, the postal service is a distinct entity, just like any other corporation. There is no reason why any information they have should be available to other parts of "the government" without a court order.
Second, to do their job, they need to "know" all these things only for a short amount of time; there is no need to retain the data beyond a few weeks past delivery, if that. The data should be deleted by then.
And those principles should apply equally to public and private delivery services.
I live in a medium-sized city in Canada. About a million people, nothing big. To make a run for city council here costs $50-60 thousand dollars. (More if you want to be mayor). That's roughly a year's salary at a pretty good job. Since most people can't afford to spend a year's salary at the shot of winning an election, you get people to donate to you. And the rich people who can afford to throw thousands of dollars at you... expect you to do certain things.
It's cute that you think politics and campaign donations work that way, but they really don't. For one thing, most donations don't come from "rich people" or even "corporations", they come from non-profits, unions, and other non-corporate lobbies.
Politicians can be as popular as they want to be - without the money they won't win. Which means that the people who supply the money are far more influential than the voters.
It's no great mystery how this works. The first priority of a politician is to make their voters happy, the second priority to make their donors happy, and doing the right thing has the lowest priority. Since most voters actually don't care about most decisions either way, usually the donors come off best in the end.
It has long been held by US courts that the exteriors of letters and other items sent through the mail are not considered private.
Courts decide whether something is legal and constitutional, not whether it's a good idea.
I mean, did you really think that a piece of mail sent through a government controlled organization would be hidden from law enforcement?
Why should a service that I'm forced to subsidize with my taxes offer me less privacy than a corporate service?
All businesses should be required to disclose their data retention policies and be truthful about it. And when it comes to the postal service, data retention should be limited to what is necessary for delivery.
Except (as far as the article implies), the government isn't aware of what's in the box.
They know the sender and the recipient. That gives them just enough information to get you into trouble. For example, you may order from a chemical company, an electronics company, and a Islamic book store, and their software may flag you as a potential terrorist because everybody else who has received packages from these three companies has been. Now you face endless interviews when you try to travel, restrictions when you try to get a government job, etc. It doesn't even matter that what you actually ordered was completely harmless.
And if some prosecutor gets it into his head that you really are a terrorist, out of the millions of bits and pieces of information about you, he can then pick out exactly those that fit his theory: "In addition to those suspicious packages he received, he made five postings to Slashdot expressing anti-government sentiments and saying bad things about the president. For the past five months, he has had breakfast in the same IHOP as another foreign terrorist suspect 17 times, and we believe they were using the soap dispenser to pass clandestine messages. Etc." If they have enough data on you, they can certainly enough to convince a grand jury, and either blackmail you into making a deal, or even win a case.
Having lots of data on people is intrinsically dangerous, even if you think you have nothing to hide and have committed no crimes.
Western ideals are no more bankrupt than they were a year ago or a century ago; they are ideals, not actual laws. "The Western world" is a balance between lots of competing interests, ideals, and laws, and it has always been. Grandiose generalizations like yours do nothing to help.
First things first: Clapper lied to Congress, blatantly, deliberately, and clearly. He should lose his job and serve jail time, preferably more than a year. That's what the rule of law means. We should not accept lawlessness and lies like this. (Of course, Obama lied even more blatantly, but unfortunately, people weren't smart enough to kick him out on his ass in the 2012 elections.)
Then we can think about what we need to do about the NSA and rein in its powers. That requires some discussion, because people don't even agree on what the problem is. For example, I don't have a problem with the NSA spying on Europeans or foreign diplomats, I think that's their function, but others may disagree. I do have a problem with the NSA spying on US citizens in the US, and I hope we can agree on the fact that that is a problem. We need better oversight, better reporting, and more freedom of information rules for the NSA.
The Florida Keys have taken their present form as the result of the drastic changes in sea level associated with recent glaciations or ice ages. Beginning some 130,000 years ago the Sangamonian Stage raised sea levels to approximately 25 feet (7.5 m) above the current level. All of southern Florida was covered by a shallow sea [...] Starting about 100,000 years ago the Wisconsin glaciation began lowering sea levels, exposing the coral reef and surrounding marine sediments. By 15,000 years ago the sea level had dropped to 300 to 350 feet (110 m) below the contemporary level.
The Florida keys are an environment that's neither stable nor safe from flooding, and when you live near the water, you have to live with the fact that you need to move sooner or later. Even without anthropogenic warming, there would have been substantial sea level rise over the last century, and these precautions would be necessary and prudent.
Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they [the three letter agencies] seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all.
"They" don't get paid for thinking about that. They do what a bunch of old politicians with a mindset steeped in hula-hoops and cold war espionage want them to do.. And those old politicians get reelected because, despite their ignorance of much of the modern world, they are perceived as preferable to the alternatives by the voters. And even that may not be irrational: an older politician, ignorant of technology, may still be better than some young hothead.
You can't change the world into a post-scarcity world until you actually understand why it is working the way it is today.
No, but politicians approve those laws. And they approve those laws because voters reelect them even though they do. In different words, if you reelect Obama, don't complain that he goes a-hunting after Snowden, starts wars, causes racial divisiveness, or gives billions to his rich buddies and donors because that's the kind of politician he showed himself to be during the first term.
There was a limit, - and I use the past tense, "was", - and that limit, was morality
I can't tell whether you're trolling, joking, or are just plain stupid. US politicians, like politicians everywhere, run the gamut from saints to psychopaths and they always have. In any government, you find plenty of people who abuse their position to enrich themselves and hurt other people. US history is full of examples, as is the history of all other nations. If anything, things may have gotten a little better over time.
Pretending that you can fix government dysfunction by just restoring morality and electing better politicians is about the worst mistake you can make. Rotten as it is, we probably have a (relatively speaking) better and more honest government than ever before, in part because leaks and scrutiny are getting ever easier and politicians can get away with less and less. Obama isn't unusually dishonest for a president, he is just unusually incompetent.
The best way to reduce governmental abuses is to reduce the size and power of government. Of course, there's a limit to how far you can go, because eventually essential functions are going to be affected and other abuses are going to become your primary problem. But our current federal government could easily be cut down to half of what it is with little ill effect, because that's what it used to be like not too long ago. If, on the other hand, you want to use the federal government to realize progressive notions of equality and justice, you have to live with the fact that there is a lot of corruption and abuse of power that inevitably go along with that.
More importantly, like many "alternative energy" devices, this one doesn't actually generate any renewable energy once you take into account the huge amount of energy needed for making the components.
That's only true if you restrict your analysis to a single, central pump. But no "intelligently designed" fluid-distribution system has just one pump. A distributed set of small, specialized pumps (and a redundant pipe system that can route around pump failures) is how any halfway-intelligent engineer would do the job.
Evolution doesn't try to make you happy, it simply ends up favoring choices that optimize survival of the species. If you don't reproduce, you don't count. Once you have reproduced and raised a few kids, you don't count. Everything needs to last about 40 years for that; the extra 40 years we're getting are already a byproduct.
Besides, multiple circulatory systems probably would reduce individual fitness anyway: they are overly complex and costly.
Well, thankfully, engineers don't get to design our bodies.
Given how crucial efficient walking has been essential for our survival, rest assured that the proportions of our limbs are exactly what they need to be.
My post is exactly on-topic: I pointed out that it doesn't matter whether ZRTPCPP is secure or not because both Android and iPhone are intrinsically vulnerable to the attacks that ZRTPCPP is supposed to guard against.
That's OK. I don't want people to "talk" to me about the security of their systems, I want them to provide clear proof that I can verify myself. That doesn't require any talking.
If spying on US citizens is wrong then spying on foreign citizens is just as wrong.
It's not a question of right and wrong, it's a question of checks and balances. Europeans are free to try to spy on American citizens; it's the NSA's job to stop them, and that's the check and balance. The NSA does not have the right to spy on American citizens because there would be no checks and balances. Surveillance of US citizens by US institutions is supposed to be done by the executive branch, with the judicial branch serving as checks and balances.
Personally if governments are to be judged by different moral standards from individuals I would prefer that those standards be higher, not lower.
You can judge governments by whatever moral standards you like, it isn't going to make any difference. The US is still going to spy on Europeans, and Europeans are still going to spy on the US. If you try to create a higher authority to stop that, we end up worse off than before, because that authority would end up abusing its power.
The BND is the only German intelligence service tasked with collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence, collecting intelligence necessary for the production of knowledge about foreign countries necessary for the foreign and security policy of the Federal Republic of Germany information ( 1 BNDG). This information will be sent to the federal government and covers many topics: politics, economy, military, science, or technology. To obtain this information available to the BND many methods of intelligence collection available, although the majority comes from the "OSINT" designated study open sources such as newspapers, radio and television or the Internet. In addition, the BND is also using intelligence methods, such as the recruitment and management of agents abroad (Operational Procurement) and electronic surveillance (Technical Procurement). This happens on many levels and includes the phone, as well as secret surveillance of audio and video recordings and monitoring the Internet.
US is not "closed" economy. They need the other countries to buy US stuffs, and to buy it with dollars.
Have you looked at the German-US or French-US trade imbalance? It may not be economically rational, but less of that kind of trade would be politically popular in the US, and rather unpopular in Europe.
Now, i wonder, who is going to pay the US debt, if no one, but USA is trading with these little, greeny pesky things....
If nobody but the US were trading with US dollars, the US dollar would be worthless. In that case, Europe would hold a shitload of worthless US debt.
I can say this for Germany, but it probably applies to any sane Government. The BND does intelligence gathering that any private individual could, such as areal photos and driving by installations. Their main effort is centered around inferring information from what is "publicly" available. To actually infiltrate installations, the country in question must be at war with Germany.
And you know this... how? Because they say so? And even if this were true, it would be a post-war restriction placed on the BND by the allies, rather than a voluntary choice.
And while the BND hasn't admitted much about their foreign intelligence gathering, they have pretty much admitted to vacuuming up all E-mail and other communications within Germany that they can get their hands on. The "Verfassungsschutz" even bugs parliamentarians and journalists. They used to listen in on many East/West German calls. And a large part of the German intelligence services were rebuilt from the employees of the intelligence services of the Third Reich.
Stop being so naive. Germany needs to clean house. This "at least we don't have amerikanische Verhältnisse" is a lame political propaganda tool to distract you from how rotten the situation is in Germany. It would be great if Germany started living up to its rhetoric, because then it could take a principled stance against NSA spying. As is, German objections are hypocritical and pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you even bother to read what you cite? That table does not list any donations from Microsoft or Google as companies, it lists individual donations from people and their families who happen to be working at those companies, plus a small number of PACs affiliated with those companies. The maximum donation for any individual or PAC is $2500 (large donation) or $200 (small donation).
Yeah, Microsoft obviously represents thousands of politically active Democrats, so I would hope that Obama listens what they have to say (which may or may not coincide with what their management or their stockholders want); that's what democratically elected representatives are supposed to do: listen to their supporters and voters. Where do you see the problem?
First, the postal service is a distinct entity, just like any other corporation. There is no reason why any information they have should be available to other parts of "the government" without a court order.
Second, to do their job, they need to "know" all these things only for a short amount of time; there is no need to retain the data beyond a few weeks past delivery, if that. The data should be deleted by then.
And those principles should apply equally to public and private delivery services.
You're just reiterating common beliefs and anecdotes. Go look at some data.
It's cute that you think politics and campaign donations work that way, but they really don't. For one thing, most donations don't come from "rich people" or even "corporations", they come from non-profits, unions, and other non-corporate lobbies.
It's no great mystery how this works. The first priority of a politician is to make their voters happy, the second priority to make their donors happy, and doing the right thing has the lowest priority. Since most voters actually don't care about most decisions either way, usually the donors come off best in the end.
Courts decide whether something is legal and constitutional, not whether it's a good idea.
Why should a service that I'm forced to subsidize with my taxes offer me less privacy than a corporate service?
All businesses should be required to disclose their data retention policies and be truthful about it. And when it comes to the postal service, data retention should be limited to what is necessary for delivery.
They know the sender and the recipient. That gives them just enough information to get you into trouble. For example, you may order from a chemical company, an electronics company, and a Islamic book store, and their software may flag you as a potential terrorist because everybody else who has received packages from these three companies has been. Now you face endless interviews when you try to travel, restrictions when you try to get a government job, etc. It doesn't even matter that what you actually ordered was completely harmless.
And if some prosecutor gets it into his head that you really are a terrorist, out of the millions of bits and pieces of information about you, he can then pick out exactly those that fit his theory: "In addition to those suspicious packages he received, he made five postings to Slashdot expressing anti-government sentiments and saying bad things about the president. For the past five months, he has had breakfast in the same IHOP as another foreign terrorist suspect 17 times, and we believe they were using the soap dispenser to pass clandestine messages. Etc." If they have enough data on you, they can certainly enough to convince a grand jury, and either blackmail you into making a deal, or even win a case.
Having lots of data on people is intrinsically dangerous, even if you think you have nothing to hide and have committed no crimes.
I agree: "Yes Minister!" should be required watching before anybody is permitted to vote.
(It might be useful to have a US remake.)
Western ideals are no more bankrupt than they were a year ago or a century ago; they are ideals, not actual laws. "The Western world" is a balance between lots of competing interests, ideals, and laws, and it has always been. Grandiose generalizations like yours do nothing to help.
First things first: Clapper lied to Congress, blatantly, deliberately, and clearly. He should lose his job and serve jail time, preferably more than a year. That's what the rule of law means. We should not accept lawlessness and lies like this. (Of course, Obama lied even more blatantly, but unfortunately, people weren't smart enough to kick him out on his ass in the 2012 elections.)
Then we can think about what we need to do about the NSA and rein in its powers. That requires some discussion, because people don't even agree on what the problem is. For example, I don't have a problem with the NSA spying on Europeans or foreign diplomats, I think that's their function, but others may disagree. I do have a problem with the NSA spying on US citizens in the US, and I hope we can agree on the fact that that is a problem. We need better oversight, better reporting, and more freedom of information rules for the NSA.
The article says:
But whatever they do to "adapt to climate change", they would have to do anyway even if there were no anthropogenic warming.
To put this into perspective:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_keys
The Florida keys are an environment that's neither stable nor safe from flooding, and when you live near the water, you have to live with the fact that you need to move sooner or later. Even without anthropogenic warming, there would have been substantial sea level rise over the last century, and these precautions would be necessary and prudent.
"They" don't get paid for thinking about that. They do what a bunch of old politicians with a mindset steeped in hula-hoops and cold war espionage want them to do.. And those old politicians get reelected because, despite their ignorance of much of the modern world, they are perceived as preferable to the alternatives by the voters. And even that may not be irrational: an older politician, ignorant of technology, may still be better than some young hothead.
You can't change the world into a post-scarcity world until you actually understand why it is working the way it is today.
No, but politicians approve those laws. And they approve those laws because voters reelect them even though they do. In different words, if you reelect Obama, don't complain that he goes a-hunting after Snowden, starts wars, causes racial divisiveness, or gives billions to his rich buddies and donors because that's the kind of politician he showed himself to be during the first term.
I can't tell whether you're trolling, joking, or are just plain stupid. US politicians, like politicians everywhere, run the gamut from saints to psychopaths and they always have. In any government, you find plenty of people who abuse their position to enrich themselves and hurt other people. US history is full of examples, as is the history of all other nations. If anything, things may have gotten a little better over time.
Pretending that you can fix government dysfunction by just restoring morality and electing better politicians is about the worst mistake you can make. Rotten as it is, we probably have a (relatively speaking) better and more honest government than ever before, in part because leaks and scrutiny are getting ever easier and politicians can get away with less and less. Obama isn't unusually dishonest for a president, he is just unusually incompetent.
The best way to reduce governmental abuses is to reduce the size and power of government. Of course, there's a limit to how far you can go, because eventually essential functions are going to be affected and other abuses are going to become your primary problem. But our current federal government could easily be cut down to half of what it is with little ill effect, because that's what it used to be like not too long ago. If, on the other hand, you want to use the federal government to realize progressive notions of equality and justice, you have to live with the fact that there is a lot of corruption and abuse of power that inevitably go along with that.
More importantly, like many "alternative energy" devices, this one doesn't actually generate any renewable energy once you take into account the huge amount of energy needed for making the components.
Yeah, and that's why we call that "engineering". It's distinctly different from "inventing" anything or doing "science".
Why? Do they all have an oral fixation and would like to give lots of "head jobs"?
Evolution doesn't try to make you happy, it simply ends up favoring choices that optimize survival of the species. If you don't reproduce, you don't count. Once you have reproduced and raised a few kids, you don't count. Everything needs to last about 40 years for that; the extra 40 years we're getting are already a byproduct.
Besides, multiple circulatory systems probably would reduce individual fitness anyway: they are overly complex and costly.
Well, thankfully, engineers don't get to design our bodies.
Given how crucial efficient walking has been essential for our survival, rest assured that the proportions of our limbs are exactly what they need to be.
My post is exactly on-topic: I pointed out that it doesn't matter whether ZRTPCPP is secure or not because both Android and iPhone are intrinsically vulnerable to the attacks that ZRTPCPP is supposed to guard against.
That's OK. I don't want people to "talk" to me about the security of their systems, I want them to provide clear proof that I can verify myself. That doesn't require any talking.
That wouldn't even be an attack or a backdoor, it would just be a broken implementation.
Backdoors in crypto implementations leak keys or plaintext, or they use predictable values for important "random" numbers.
It's not a question of right and wrong, it's a question of checks and balances. Europeans are free to try to spy on American citizens; it's the NSA's job to stop them, and that's the check and balance. The NSA does not have the right to spy on American citizens because there would be no checks and balances. Surveillance of US citizens by US institutions is supposed to be done by the executive branch, with the judicial branch serving as checks and balances.
You can judge governments by whatever moral standards you like, it isn't going to make any difference. The US is still going to spy on Europeans, and Europeans are still going to spy on the US. If you try to create a higher authority to stop that, we end up worse off than before, because that authority would end up abusing its power.
Turns out it's bullshit:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fde.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBundesnachrichtendienst&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8
What should really "creep you out" is the history of the BND on the same page.
Have you looked at the German-US or French-US trade imbalance? It may not be economically rational, but less of that kind of trade would be politically popular in the US, and rather unpopular in Europe.
If nobody but the US were trading with US dollars, the US dollar would be worthless. In that case, Europe would hold a shitload of worthless US debt.
Any more brilliant ideas?
And you know this... how? Because they say so? And even if this were true, it would be a post-war restriction placed on the BND by the allies, rather than a voluntary choice.
And while the BND hasn't admitted much about their foreign intelligence gathering, they have pretty much admitted to vacuuming up all E-mail and other communications within Germany that they can get their hands on. The "Verfassungsschutz" even bugs parliamentarians and journalists. They used to listen in on many East/West German calls. And a large part of the German intelligence services were rebuilt from the employees of the intelligence services of the Third Reich.
Stop being so naive. Germany needs to clean house. This "at least we don't have amerikanische Verhältnisse" is a lame political propaganda tool to distract you from how rotten the situation is in Germany. It would be great if Germany started living up to its rhetoric, because then it could take a principled stance against NSA spying. As is, German objections are hypocritical and pathetic.