That's not much different than the summary's author, who seems to think that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health sets standards in China.
And that N95 masks are "professionally fit" and uncomfortable.
Neither statement is true, first, they come in four or so sizes: small, medium, large and extra large. You put them on, tighten the straps a bit and bend the metal wire. They go for about 14 bucks for a box of ten. They have a metal band at the top just like medical masks.
In fact it IS a glorified medical mask with the addition of an exhaust valve for exhaling.
They are quite useful around the home if you ever do any type of home maintenance or "projects" yourself. But they aren't professionally fit by any means.
Subby is confusing an actual "dust mask" with rubber casing and filters.
Returning 127.0.53.53 makes a lot of sense if you put up an ad-farm parking page on it to make a bunch of fake money with ad impressions.
Double bonus points when the "service" gets sold to a bottom feeder who's ad-network gets infected, ending up trying to spread viruses with fake "you are infected!" pop up windows.
While a few year delay won't do that much, there is significantly less of the stuff than there was.
That also means, that even given exposure and biological uptake, beta radiation exposure levels don't happen very fast. There's a burst at the end when it turns to Y-90 and then Zr-90 a stable element.
A lot of what we know about Sr-90 effect on mammals on this came from studying milk-tooth levels in children in the US and Russia during the 50's and 60's.
Given that wasn't a disaster, but something to be "concerned about"... then the Fukushima plant spills are in the "concerned about" category as well. Don't swim in the stuff, and avoid foods that would be exposed. Somehow people can't tell the difference between a nuclear weapon going off under their ass and a bit of radiation here and there.
Can anyone come up with a sensible reason to implement such a thing?
Sensibility seems to get lost when the submitter's question is rephrased in the following way: Is there a device that can selectively deactivate cameras of one's choosing? If not, can someone here invent such a method and tell me the solution?
However, imagining some of the possibilities, one would seem to be a paradise for the authorities — something they assuredly would feel to be very sensible.
Soooo... the CIA / NSA / military industrial complex are now crowd sourcing stuff out to Slashdot?
This is a good example of where you need a fast-cycling firearm with decent capacity. Either of the AR / AK platforms would work, as well as a variety of (much more expensive) newer styles. Heck, even a Mini-14.
A shotgun will take care of one guy well enough, but if it's four, you are in deep shit real fast with only 8 or so rounds in a slow loading plaftorm.
No, it's unreasonable for a 16 year old to have a job.
A 16 year old should be in school, they should not be working at all. A college student should not be working more than 10 hours a week, if at all. Oh, and "saving for college" with tuition where it is today is just plain stupid. You come out behind if you try.
The minimum wage should be set to a level that someone working 40 hours a week should be well above the poverty level for a family of three. They shouldn't be competing for work with high school students.
And yes, if someone wants to make a career of a full time minimum wage position, they should be able to have a reasonable income.
Start it at $15/hour. Index it to inflation.
Nonsense. The product of a job for a 16 year old individual is not simply money.
Having a job in food service has a huge impact on the social norms the person has as an adult.
Having a physical job (say, loading trucks) has a huge impact on how active the person is as an adult.
Working with people who are stuck there in their 40's (after 5 DUIs and jail time for cocaine possession) has a huge impact on "gee, better not do that myself"
Those things people learn at that age makes them better, and results in actual "living wages" as a productive person in society. Instead of a highly-paid skag or drag on society. If you want a good society, you lead people into doing good things, not just give them good things.
The idea that everybody deserves a living wage for doing no personal development, no effort, no commitment (at least, learning to, not saying they have to be stupid loyal) to a job is foolish. You are creating another dependent, not another producer.
You sir, are an outright communist. There's no question anymore. Which is fine I guess, the problem is you are SO STUPID you think that it's going to work even in the face of real, big, dire, and far reaching consequences for what you want.
Hint: nothing happens if you lick a red hot stove burner element if your tongue is wet enough. Try it!
Somehow, mysteriously, the price changes slightly every month and it's always up.
Once the promotions are gone, it creeps up a bit every month. (The promotion ending for '1 year sign up price" is a big jump.)
Eventually, people start looking at the bill trying to figure out how to reduce it. That act, is what kills them. You don't want people thinking about the bill, you want them to just pay it.
I'll be dropping the TV / Movie portion of my cable in a month or two (summer means outside, and moving to a single abode again). But I wouldn't if it wasn't $45 a month more than it was when I moved in.
The problem with that approach is that a lot of those internet criminals are actually just immature teenagers - all they really need is a slap on the wrist to scare them straight and a good talking-to by their parents. Throwing them in jail is a good way to make sure they turn into real career criminals - if you can't get employment in legitimate work, what other choice is there? It's the same problem with heavy sentences for drug possession.
Almost every decent computer security expert dabbled in black-hating a little when they were learning, if only to prove to themselves what they could do or for the fun of adventuring into forbidden places. I used to port-scan for open netbios shares back in the win9x era - found a lot of people who had their entire C: drive open to the world. I left text files on their desktops warning them about the open access.
Ok, public caning in the town square. One lash for each gigabit of wasted bandwidth, plus $100 fine for each of the same.
The issue isn't what GP posted but rather moderators using their points to express agreement/disagreement with a particular point of view.
I'm trying to understand what's so "insightful" about the comment to be worthy of the points. Did the comment really contribute something to the conversation that allows all of us, or even any of us, to have a deeper insight into the overall problem.
I try, when I get points, to focus "insightful" points on posts that made me re-think the discussion or understand the problem at a deeper level regardless of my agreement or disagreement with the poster's perspective. It becomes frustrating to have to throw away moderator points on "overrated" because other people are using their moderator points to vote up a posting that supports their point of view but adds nothing to the greater conversation.
Nonsense.
The first post did nothing to foster any discussion.
The first post did nothing to back up the claim that it's all politicians with corporations in their back pockets.
The first post didn't solve the problem all of these discussions have which is explain why "no rules" is better than "some rules." It seems to me like "no rules" means a company is free to do what it wants, including tiered pricing. And, "some rules" will inevitably ALSO provide some company, if not the same ones, ability to do tiered pricing and influence things to make more money.
There is NOTHING but opinion on this issue yet. And the first post, didn't even explain his own opinion properly.
What he/she/it DID do was sling a blanket ad hominem attack out of the gate, before even knowing what anybody else was going to post.
I loathe to say this but, HTTPS Everywhere is security theater. It makes your browser have a green icon where it otherwise might not but, that green icon is just an illusion of security. Considering recent revelations about the NSA, I would assume all SSL certificates are compromised. Like, literally, all of them. If the trust chain has been compromised by one party (the NSA), I would assume it compromised by all parties.
While this is true, chances are SLL Certificates still work well enough to keep the other nerd at the coffee shop from stealing your WoW forum account credentials.
No single person, ever, anywhere, has been able to single handedly defend themselves from the government of the place they reside. If the Government wants the account, they'll get it through twisting laws and sending the cops, not by snooping on it.
SSL protects against run of the mill crime. And, it does that well.
The technique is called cloaking. You basically check if a page request is coming from Googlebot or not to decide what to return (or redirect). See: https://support.google.com/web...
The services you mentioned have different rules, of course.
Some of those tools use the browser identifier to decide to let them in or not.
Something that in some browsers, can be modified by the end user....
The files are encrypted, wouldn't that make it much harder to recover after rewriting the storage? Seriously asking, I honestly don't know the answer.
My guess it doesn't matter if they were encrypted.
There are copies of the encrypted files. But, as a newspaper, you don't really want third rate spooks breaking into the office trying to steal the hard drive or SD cards.
You don't want run of the mill nerds rifling your dumpster for a piece of history they can sell on eBay.
etc.
By getting most people to think the stuff was destroyed they head off a lot of headaches without really changing anything.
They have been surprised by some of the information, so they don't know for sure what he has. Look into the details of how he got the stuff. THEY HAVE NO IDEA.
They also have no idea who has information. You can bet there are dead-mans-switches sitting on some of it. What the media has is what he wanted to release, plus the material to make it clear he could strike back.
A smart guy (Snowden counts as that) would have more stuff set aside being held by someone who's not public about it yet. There are quite a few large encrypted files floating around on BitTorrent if you know where to look. All they would have to do is release a key and thousands of/b/ chan nerds and spooks would have all of it.
Yes, he revealed some shady intelligence gathering programs the US was running against its own people, but he also went out of his way to dump information on programs we were running against foreign entities. Had he stuck to the former, I'd consider him a hero and would support a full pardon.
But, when you run off to our biggest political rivals and tell the world the details of how we spy, you're violating the whistleblower's code of ethics to minimize injury. And, for what purpose did it serve? It did nothing to help the American people.
Without proving with certainty with no possibility of doubt that he could massively hurt the US government, he would have been a dead man. Releasing that information HAD to be done to PROVE he could hurt the administration.
You are completely stupid if you believe otherwise. He would have simply been killed before the media decided what to do with the data.
Remember, this is the Obama administration that has no problem missile striking US citizens who happen to be accused of being terrorists in foreign countries without even a sham trial. (Some of them are, but some of them might not have been before they were blown up.)
If anything, releasing that information made it clear he does want to help. Doing so put him at greater risk of ending up in jail assuming the US didn't outright kill him, because that's less excusable during a trial. It was the ONLY gambit that he could play to get the information out.
So the fault of the information being out there is twofold: the US for doing the illegal and morally wrong shit in the first place, and the US for being corrupt enough that whistleblowers get treated poorly (if not killed) in the first place.
That someone would come along and do this was basically a certainty.
And when they did, that they would also take and prove they have massively damaging information is ALSO a certainty.
Snowden uncovered crimes being committed on a daily basis against the citizens of the United States, and knowing that his own chain of command was just as guilty and would silence him (probably permanently) he took it upon himself to make these crimes known to the world, and did so at the ultimate personal risk: His life. Don't sit there and tell me that at some point, they considered sending someone after him to kill him. Regardless he's now an exile. If you ask me, he deserves a medal for what he did, but I'd be just as happy if they left the man alone.
Yup.
And consider Holder, who trafficked guns into Mexico knowing that Mexicans would be killed with them for political purposes, then swept the fact that a US Citizen Border Patrol Agent was killed by one of them under the rug, as someone to trust for "let's a make a deal" on the NSA leaks....
Only a complete idiot would deal with Holder. Snowden should drop a bunch more embarrassing documents just to punish Holder for opening his big fucking mouth on the subject.
No, it is not obvious. Dumping information on foreign collections is not obvious. Even if you give him a free pass on the so-called whistleblowing of domestic operations, he is a traitor for divulging (and continuing to divulge: "I'll tell you how they are spying on your country if you give me asylum") foreign intel. You can't have it both ways. If he was the principled man he says he is, he would have revealed the info he needed to reveal to show what was going on domestically, but he's not. He did a blind grab and dump without any concern of the consequences. He has not only shown the desire to shop around foreign collections information, he is also believed to have made contacts with Chinese and Russian operatives before he fled the country.
The blind idealism and fanatical devotion shown to him around here is scary; I'm starting to see how people follow cult leaders in spite of all the evidence that would otherwise show them not to be the divine being they claim to be. It is interesting to see, on one hand, the hero-worship shown to him by so many here, and the derision given by these same people to religious cults like Scientology.
If following the Constitution, and expecting all levels and members of government to follow the Constitution is a "cult" to you
Guilty as charged.
By the way, considering that other people who tried to do whistle blowing by other means ended up in jail, dead, or hiding in some other country when they tried "limited" release, taking the whole schebang was the proper and prudent move.
How about this, asshole, let's have a government that doesn't break the fucking law and violate the constitution in the first place? Then you can stop worrying about people fighting back with a large pile of damaging secrets.
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide right?
Network Solutions has to operate within their role as a bleeding legacy domain name provider.
To anyone reading this who doesn't know, they used to be the sole provider of domain names in the world.
Most of their remaining clients are very large businesses who don't care if their domain renewal is $6 bucks or $35 bucks or $500 bucks.
They have to fight to survive in a way compatible with their mainstream client base --- big inept companies that didn't switch to a cheaper provider a decade ago like Godaddy or [insert your favorite low cost provider here].
Network Solutions has a client base similar to a company running COBOL or with mostly government agencies as clients. Sure their business practices suck, but they are little different than other legacy service providers --- you might ask why the blogger of the article has been overpaying for domain names for 15 years? He probably has flushed $700+ dollars down the toilet compared to what he could have saved with another domain registrar ages ago. But he didn't, he's been volunteering overpaying for quite a while now and that is your average "still with Network Solutions" customer. Network Solutions has been doing this for a decade now through inertia and now for survival. This doesn't make Network Solutions innocent -- they aren't --- but their customer base does consist of people largely willing to overpay, which is largely big faceless corporations --- I bet Blackberry prices gouges captive legacy clients and I bet so does IBM, EDS and Accenture and even Microsoft. It is just what happens to legacy service provider's customers.
This fellow should have switch a dozen years back if he was price shopping the market.
Network Solutions is one of the few registrars you can get to on the phone.
Which is quite valuable for some companies, especially those that make good money with a web site.
Yeah, they are a bunch of spamming assholes and try to trick you into buying more services with every web site visit, but they are better than a lot of registrars. If GoDaddy spent as much money on proper customer service as they do on fancy advertising, they'd have taken over long ago. The market is saturated with stupid hucksters... which a lot of customers just don't trust.
It used to be, the old impala could bang into a pole in the parking lot at low speed and drive away. A little duct tape, a new light or two and you could use it.
Bang into that same pole at the same speed now and you've got four panels that need replacing, the radiator came off it's mount and the car has to be towed. Some cars, that may even total them.
This new car is MUCH safer for the occupant, the real expensive part of repair would be the bodies inside. But, the cars now days don't withstand normal little "oopsies" anymore. Which translates into repairs or loss of the vehicle over minor events.
Which in turn makes it more expensive to drive.
My guess is, teens getting in reasonable "accident accidents" are living now, and even not getting injured due to the vehicles saving them. The ones that go 100 mph and hit a tree still die. But the "low end" of the accident ends up costing money in trade for people damage.
That trade off has made it harder for a non-working teen family to afford a car for them, and harder for the working teen to support a car and the spending money they want. Some of them, are rationally, choosing the spending money over ability to wander all over the county.
You say that now while self-driving cars are in their infancy. Where will your rights be when they use them to take everyone past the age of 65 off the roads because being "old" gets added to the list of things that are prohibited while operating a vehicle....hmm?
I know a few 65+ year olds that are scared to death of driving. Plus a few too stubborn to stop when they get dangerous, and a few who simply don't have driver's permits in the first place.
A safe and efficient way for all of them to get to the store or doctor's office would be a godsend to most of them.
Sure, a few stubborn old men have substituted their driving and car for their non-functional penis, but that's not a valid reason to do anything.
PS, 65 would be way too young now days. 75 or 80 is a more realistic "most of them can't drive anymore" age.
Obama is a very smart man. He's a scholar who taught Constitutional Law for twelve years. He campaigned on a reduction of surveillance and spying. Then, once President, he did a 180.
Something happened to make him change his mind. Was he corrupted by power? Are the monied interests that powerful that they made him deny what he'd been teaching for years? Or is there something else afoot?
That's called the "It's not fascism when WE do it!" effect.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not much different than the summary's author, who seems to think that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health sets standards in China.
And that N95 masks are "professionally fit" and uncomfortable.
Neither statement is true, first, they come in four or so sizes: small, medium, large and extra large. You put them on, tighten the straps a bit and bend the metal wire. They go for about 14 bucks for a box of ten. They have a metal band at the top just like medical masks.
In fact it IS a glorified medical mask with the addition of an exhaust valve for exhaling.
They are quite useful around the home if you ever do any type of home maintenance or "projects" yourself. But they aren't professionally fit by any means.
Subby is confusing an actual "dust mask" with rubber casing and filters.
Yeah. Right. Like the fucking TSA is going to let you aboard an airplane with THAT.
They'll have a new toy in the back room.
It's interesting they are now saying "information that was only retained for a period of five years."
Five years is about as long as some of that stuff has been in place. Which means basically, on their own, none of it has been deleted ever.
Also, this "five years" thing just popped up. I am sure it would have been discussed at length. So it's new, made up information.
And also probably a gigantic, colossal, and obvious LIE.
So THIS now means "don't sue us or we'll go even MORE tyrannical on your ass".
Elections have consequences folks.
Returning 127.0.53.53 makes a lot of sense if you put up an ad-farm parking page on it to make a bunch of fake money with ad impressions.
Double bonus points when the "service" gets sold to a bottom feeder who's ad-network gets infected, ending up trying to spread viruses with fake "you are infected!" pop up windows.
Sr-90 has a half life of 28 some years.
While a few year delay won't do that much, there is significantly less of the stuff than there was.
That also means, that even given exposure and biological uptake, beta radiation exposure levels don't happen very fast. There's a burst at the end when it turns to Y-90 and then Zr-90 a stable element.
A lot of what we know about Sr-90 effect on mammals on this came from studying milk-tooth levels in children in the US and Russia during the 50's and 60's.
Given that wasn't a disaster, but something to be "concerned about"... then the Fukushima plant spills are in the "concerned about" category as well. Don't swim in the stuff, and avoid foods that would be exposed. Somehow people can't tell the difference between a nuclear weapon going off under their ass and a bit of radiation here and there.
NSA contacted them and said "Don't do that, we already did, all you are doing is stirring up negative controversy with that talk."
"Here's the URL and the credentials, have fun!
Can anyone come up with a sensible reason to implement such a thing?
Sensibility seems to get lost when the submitter's question is rephrased in the following way: Is there a device that can selectively deactivate cameras of one's choosing? If not, can someone here invent such a method and tell me the solution?
However, imagining some of the possibilities, one would seem to be a paradise for the authorities — something they assuredly would feel to be very sensible.
Soooo... the CIA / NSA / military industrial complex are now crowd sourcing stuff out to Slashdot?
This is a good example of where you need a fast-cycling firearm with decent capacity. Either of the AR / AK platforms would work, as well as a variety of (much more expensive) newer styles. Heck, even a Mini-14.
A shotgun will take care of one guy well enough, but if it's four, you are in deep shit real fast with only 8 or so rounds in a slow loading plaftorm.
No, it's unreasonable for a 16 year old to have a job.
A 16 year old should be in school, they should not be working at all. A college student should not be working more than 10 hours a week, if at all. Oh, and "saving for college" with tuition where it is today is just plain stupid. You come out behind if you try.
The minimum wage should be set to a level that someone working 40 hours a week should be well above the poverty level for a family of three. They shouldn't be competing for work with high school students.
And yes, if someone wants to make a career of a full time minimum wage position, they should be able to have a reasonable income.
Start it at $15/hour. Index it to inflation.
Nonsense. The product of a job for a 16 year old individual is not simply money.
Having a job in food service has a huge impact on the social norms the person has as an adult.
Having a physical job (say, loading trucks) has a huge impact on how active the person is as an adult.
Working with people who are stuck there in their 40's (after 5 DUIs and jail time for cocaine possession) has a huge impact on "gee, better not do that myself"
Those things people learn at that age makes them better, and results in actual "living wages" as a productive person in society. Instead of a highly-paid skag or drag on society. If you want a good society, you lead people into doing good things, not just give them good things.
The idea that everybody deserves a living wage for doing no personal development, no effort, no commitment (at least, learning to, not saying they have to be stupid loyal) to a job is foolish. You are creating another dependent, not another producer.
You sir, are an outright communist. There's no question anymore. Which is fine I guess, the problem is you are SO STUPID you think that it's going to work even in the face of real, big, dire, and far reaching consequences for what you want.
Hint: nothing happens if you lick a red hot stove burner element if your tongue is wet enough. Try it!
Nukes still have a role as big bunker busters, ship killers / sub, and deterrent.
That last one is the only one that requires big nukes. The best deterrent isn't "we will defeat you" it's "we will wipe you out".
For that, you need city-killer nukes to kill the "civilian" population.
*in quotes, because the line is blurred now.
Is not be messing with the price all the time.
Somehow, mysteriously, the price changes slightly every month and it's always up.
Once the promotions are gone, it creeps up a bit every month. (The promotion ending for '1 year sign up price" is a big jump.)
Eventually, people start looking at the bill trying to figure out how to reduce it. That act, is what kills them. You don't want people thinking about the bill, you want them to just pay it.
I'll be dropping the TV / Movie portion of my cable in a month or two (summer means outside, and moving to a single abode again). But I wouldn't if it wasn't $45 a month more than it was when I moved in.
The problem with that approach is that a lot of those internet criminals are actually just immature teenagers - all they really need is a slap on the wrist to scare them straight and a good talking-to by their parents. Throwing them in jail is a good way to make sure they turn into real career criminals - if you can't get employment in legitimate work, what other choice is there? It's the same problem with heavy sentences for drug possession.
Almost every decent computer security expert dabbled in black-hating a little when they were learning, if only to prove to themselves what they could do or for the fun of adventuring into forbidden places. I used to port-scan for open netbios shares back in the win9x era - found a lot of people who had their entire C: drive open to the world. I left text files on their desktops warning them about the open access.
Ok, public caning in the town square. One lash for each gigabit of wasted bandwidth, plus $100 fine for each of the same.
The issue isn't what GP posted but rather moderators using their points to express agreement/disagreement with a particular point of view.
I'm trying to understand what's so "insightful" about the comment to be worthy of the points. Did the comment really contribute something to the conversation that allows all of us, or even any of us, to have a deeper insight into the overall problem.
I try, when I get points, to focus "insightful" points on posts that made me re-think the discussion or understand the problem at a deeper level regardless of my agreement or disagreement with the poster's perspective. It becomes frustrating to have to throw away moderator points on "overrated" because other people are using their moderator points to vote up a posting that supports their point of view but adds nothing to the greater conversation.
Nonsense.
The first post did nothing to foster any discussion.
The first post did nothing to back up the claim that it's all politicians with corporations in their back pockets.
The first post didn't solve the problem all of these discussions have which is explain why "no rules" is better than "some rules." It seems to me like "no rules" means a company is free to do what it wants, including tiered pricing. And, "some rules" will inevitably ALSO provide some company, if not the same ones, ability to do tiered pricing and influence things to make more money.
There is NOTHING but opinion on this issue yet. And the first post, didn't even explain his own opinion properly.
What he/she/it DID do was sling a blanket ad hominem attack out of the gate, before even knowing what anybody else was going to post.
That, my AC Friendo, is trolling or flamebait.
You are assuming your software doesn't send the private key somewhere when you aren't looking.
I loathe to say this but, HTTPS Everywhere is security theater. It makes your browser have a green icon where it otherwise might not but, that green icon is just an illusion of security. Considering recent revelations about the NSA, I would assume all SSL certificates are compromised. Like, literally, all of them. If the trust chain has been compromised by one party (the NSA), I would assume it compromised by all parties.
While this is true, chances are SLL Certificates still work well enough to keep the other nerd at the coffee shop from stealing your WoW forum account credentials.
No single person, ever, anywhere, has been able to single handedly defend themselves from the government of the place they reside. If the Government wants the account, they'll get it through twisting laws and sending the cops, not by snooping on it.
SSL protects against run of the mill crime. And, it does that well.
The technique is called cloaking. You basically check if a page request is coming from Googlebot or not to decide what to return (or redirect). See: https://support.google.com/web...
The services you mentioned have different rules, of course.
Some of those tools use the browser identifier to decide to let them in or not.
Something that in some browsers, can be modified by the end user....
The files are encrypted, wouldn't that make it much harder to recover after rewriting the storage? Seriously asking, I honestly don't know the answer.
My guess it doesn't matter if they were encrypted.
There are copies of the encrypted files. But, as a newspaper, you don't really want third rate spooks breaking into the office trying to steal the hard drive or SD cards.
You don't want run of the mill nerds rifling your dumpster for a piece of history they can sell on eBay.
etc.
By getting most people to think the stuff was destroyed they head off a lot of headaches without really changing anything.
They have been surprised by some of the information, so they don't know for sure what he has. Look into the details of how he got the stuff. THEY HAVE NO IDEA.
They also have no idea who has information. You can bet there are dead-mans-switches sitting on some of it. What the media has is what he wanted to release, plus the material to make it clear he could strike back.
A smart guy (Snowden counts as that) would have more stuff set aside being held by someone who's not public about it yet. There are quite a few large encrypted files floating around on BitTorrent if you know where to look. All they would have to do is release a key and thousands of /b/ chan nerds and spooks would have all of it.
Yes, he revealed some shady intelligence gathering programs the US was running against its own people, but he also went out of his way to dump information on programs we were running against foreign entities. Had he stuck to the former, I'd consider him a hero and would support a full pardon.
But, when you run off to our biggest political rivals and tell the world the details of how we spy, you're violating the whistleblower's code of ethics to minimize injury. And, for what purpose did it serve? It did nothing to help the American people.
Without proving with certainty with no possibility of doubt that he could massively hurt the US government, he would have been a dead man. Releasing that information HAD to be done to PROVE he could hurt the administration.
You are completely stupid if you believe otherwise. He would have simply been killed before the media decided what to do with the data.
Remember, this is the Obama administration that has no problem missile striking US citizens who happen to be accused of being terrorists in foreign countries without even a sham trial. (Some of them are, but some of them might not have been before they were blown up.)
If anything, releasing that information made it clear he does want to help. Doing so put him at greater risk of ending up in jail assuming the US didn't outright kill him, because that's less excusable during a trial. It was the ONLY gambit that he could play to get the information out.
So the fault of the information being out there is twofold: the US for doing the illegal and morally wrong shit in the first place, and the US for being corrupt enough that whistleblowers get treated poorly (if not killed) in the first place.
That someone would come along and do this was basically a certainty.
And when they did, that they would also take and prove they have massively damaging information is ALSO a certainty.
Snowden uncovered crimes being committed on a daily basis against the citizens of the United States, and knowing that his own chain of command was just as guilty and would silence him (probably permanently) he took it upon himself to make these crimes known to the world, and did so at the ultimate personal risk: His life. Don't sit there and tell me that at some point, they considered sending someone after him to kill him. Regardless he's now an exile. If you ask me, he deserves a medal for what he did, but I'd be just as happy if they left the man alone.
Yup.
And consider Holder, who trafficked guns into Mexico knowing that Mexicans would be killed with them for political purposes, then swept the fact that a US Citizen Border Patrol Agent was killed by one of them under the rug, as someone to trust for "let's a make a deal" on the NSA leaks....
Only a complete idiot would deal with Holder. Snowden should drop a bunch more embarrassing documents just to punish Holder for opening his big fucking mouth on the subject.
obviously did the right thing
No, it is not obvious. Dumping information on foreign collections is not obvious. Even if you give him a free pass on the so-called whistleblowing of domestic operations, he is a traitor for divulging (and continuing to divulge: "I'll tell you how they are spying on your country if you give me asylum") foreign intel. You can't have it both ways. If he was the principled man he says he is, he would have revealed the info he needed to reveal to show what was going on domestically, but he's not. He did a blind grab and dump without any concern of the consequences. He has not only shown the desire to shop around foreign collections information, he is also believed to have made contacts with Chinese and Russian operatives before he fled the country.
The blind idealism and fanatical devotion shown to him around here is scary; I'm starting to see how people follow cult leaders in spite of all the evidence that would otherwise show them not to be the divine being they claim to be. It is interesting to see, on one hand, the hero-worship shown to him by so many here, and the derision given by these same people to religious cults like Scientology.
If following the Constitution, and expecting all levels and members of government to follow the Constitution is a "cult" to you
Guilty as charged.
By the way, considering that other people who tried to do whistle blowing by other means ended up in jail, dead, or hiding in some other country when they tried "limited" release, taking the whole schebang was the proper and prudent move.
How about this, asshole, let's have a government that doesn't break the fucking law and violate the constitution in the first place? Then you can stop worrying about people fighting back with a large pile of damaging secrets.
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide right?
Network Solutions has to operate within their role as a bleeding legacy domain name provider. To anyone reading this who doesn't know, they used to be the sole provider of domain names in the world. Most of their remaining clients are very large businesses who don't care if their domain renewal is $6 bucks or $35 bucks or $500 bucks. They have to fight to survive in a way compatible with their mainstream client base --- big inept companies that didn't switch to a cheaper provider a decade ago like Godaddy or [insert your favorite low cost provider here]. Network Solutions has a client base similar to a company running COBOL or with mostly government agencies as clients. Sure their business practices suck, but they are little different than other legacy service providers --- you might ask why the blogger of the article has been overpaying for domain names for 15 years? He probably has flushed $700+ dollars down the toilet compared to what he could have saved with another domain registrar ages ago. But he didn't, he's been volunteering overpaying for quite a while now and that is your average "still with Network Solutions" customer. Network Solutions has been doing this for a decade now through inertia and now for survival. This doesn't make Network Solutions innocent -- they aren't --- but their customer base does consist of people largely willing to overpay, which is largely big faceless corporations --- I bet Blackberry prices gouges captive legacy clients and I bet so does IBM, EDS and Accenture and even Microsoft. It is just what happens to legacy service provider's customers. This fellow should have switch a dozen years back if he was price shopping the market.
Network Solutions is one of the few registrars you can get to on the phone.
Which is quite valuable for some companies, especially those that make good money with a web site.
Yeah, they are a bunch of spamming assholes and try to trick you into buying more services with every web site visit, but they are better than a lot of registrars. If GoDaddy spent as much money on proper customer service as they do on fancy advertising, they'd have taken over long ago. The market is saturated with stupid hucksters... which a lot of customers just don't trust.
Part of it is cars are different now too.
It used to be, the old impala could bang into a pole in the parking lot at low speed and drive away. A little duct tape, a new light or two and you could use it.
Bang into that same pole at the same speed now and you've got four panels that need replacing, the radiator came off it's mount and the car has to be towed. Some cars, that may even total them.
This new car is MUCH safer for the occupant, the real expensive part of repair would be the bodies inside. But, the cars now days don't withstand normal little "oopsies" anymore. Which translates into repairs or loss of the vehicle over minor events.
Which in turn makes it more expensive to drive.
My guess is, teens getting in reasonable "accident accidents" are living now, and even not getting injured due to the vehicles saving them. The ones that go 100 mph and hit a tree still die. But the "low end" of the accident ends up costing money in trade for people damage.
That trade off has made it harder for a non-working teen family to afford a car for them, and harder for the working teen to support a car and the spending money they want. Some of them, are rationally, choosing the spending money over ability to wander all over the county.
You say that now while self-driving cars are in their infancy. Where will your rights be when they use them to take everyone past the age of 65 off the roads because being "old" gets added to the list of things that are prohibited while operating a vehicle....hmm?
I know a few 65+ year olds that are scared to death of driving. Plus a few too stubborn to stop when they get dangerous, and a few who simply don't have driver's permits in the first place.
A safe and efficient way for all of them to get to the store or doctor's office would be a godsend to most of them.
Sure, a few stubborn old men have substituted their driving and car for their non-functional penis, but that's not a valid reason to do anything.
PS, 65 would be way too young now days. 75 or 80 is a more realistic "most of them can't drive anymore" age.
That's what scares me the most.
Obama is a very smart man. He's a scholar who taught Constitutional Law for twelve years. He campaigned on a reduction of surveillance and spying. Then, once President, he did a 180.
Something happened to make him change his mind. Was he corrupted by power? Are the monied interests that powerful that they made him deny what he'd been teaching for years? Or is there something else afoot?
That's called the "It's not fascism when WE do it!" effect.