Anyone else getting really tired of the US Gov. in general? Wah wah at least it didn't happen to me... right?
Yes, but I'm even more afraid of the alternatives. As long as the people crying the loudest for its overthrow and/or dismantlement are the last people I want running things, I'm pretty much sticking with it.
I wonder if this is what it feels like to be an Egyptian. </bitterness>
He didn't hurt anyone. He rapidly requested web pages for 1 minute, slightly contributing to a computer bogging down. In a less batshit-crazy, less rabidly corporatist world, this would carry a punishment on par with dropping a cigarette butt on the street.
In the process, he cost the victim a good amount of money in reworking their network to make sure this didn't happen again. It's analogous to making someone pay the cost of the door they broke to get into a house. That's the cost he's being forced to pay financially.
He admitted to guilt, but it's not fair to hold him completely financially responsible simply because he was the only person they were able to catch and was honest enough to confess.
So it's instead fair to let the victim be uncompensated for the harm done to them if some of the guilty parties are too crafty?
What you call justice for the liable party is injustice for the injured party. We have rules for joint and several liability (used here) and related doctrines like respondeat superior because our civil justice system focuses largely on the principle that the victim must be made whole. If perfect justice cannot be achieved for both, then let the one who has caused the harm bear the pain and not the one he has done harm to.
Not one mention of Republicans in that link. So, you are just guessing? Hoping? Accusing?
Who do you think was behind the attack on the ObamaCare website while calling it "an affront to Constitutional rights?" Some too-clever left-wing conspiracy out to tarnish conservatives by doing something terrible that could be plausibly pinned on them? Al Qaeda? Illuminati lizard Jews? The AFLAC duck?
It would be quite a feat to directly image life on a planet over vast distances and through atmospheres, so my complete and total guess is unless they've got something really large and obvious like city lights, we probably can't.
The presence of large amounts of oxygen in an atmosphere would be a very, very strong indication, because oxygen doesn't stick around unbound to minerals and most gasses without something working very hard at separating it out. This holds true for any other highly reactive chemical that doesn't have any significant geological causes. We could find out by spectroscopy of the atmosphere.
In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h). As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt.
Let's try this demonstration again in a situation where you would actually need such a device, i.e. in a high-speed pursuit. A 15 mph demonstration means nothing for the safety of the product.
If you think to yourself after reading the first page, "But all of those long passwords were phrases, not nonsense strings!" then you should keep reading to page 2's sidebar for the list of passwords that were cracked using the methods in the article. Crackers have dictionaries of billions of words now and can try combinations and variations at GPU-fueled speeds. Length only protects you if and only if you can exhaust dictionary attacks.
The only safe password is long and either randomly generated or indistinguishable from it. Using some other device to store and auto-fill your passwords like a password manager or a device like a YubiKey is the only long-term solution. Humans are the weakest link.
I don't accept the level of government's (or business's) collection of data on people and invading the privacy of individuals.... In the end I expect the general public to yawn and go about their daily lives. And nothing will change. So any high and mighty principal of 'changing the world' has failed.
Funny, for someone who supposedly doesn't accept high levels of data collection, you seem to mock anyone else who actually cares.
Both men voluntarily swore an oath to the United States. Both men voluntarily violated that oath. They could have found other ways to address their concerns that didn't involve collaborating with people who have sworn an oath to attack the United States. They chose not to because the other path was difficult.
And ineffectual.
We have whistleblowing protections, but in both of their cases, those protections do not apply. Government protection for government whistleblowers really only extends to financial fraud and waste and to workplace safety and other regulations non-compliance. It doesn't apply to officially sanctioned policies that are in legal gray areas, and it does not provide any exceptions (that I am aware of) for the release of classified data to the parties you are blowing the whistle to. Telling Congress or their superiors about acts they had no business knowing would have simply landed them in jail without any positive effect.
So what options do you speak of?
They could have found other ways to address their concerns that didn't involve collaborating with people who have sworn an oath to attack the United States.
To call them "collaborators" is somewhere between spin doctoring and malicious slander. They provided information to the public without any specific intent to collaborate with enemies. If such people also picked up on the information, then that's the breaks, but it should not make it illegal to tell the rest of us what is going on when the government is acting without accountability and in ways hostile to the public's interest.
Or it's all just a game. Really, what devastating info has come to light so far? Nothing that any country with their own intelligence agency didn't already know about and likely do as well. It has set up a soap box for political grandstanding, but has it really changed any relationships or policies?
The fact that you aren't horrified isn't so much a measure of how unimportant the revelations are so much as your own cynicism and willingness to accept a terrible situation as just "business as usual." Democracies can only die when the people accept oppression as natural and proper.
And this article would be more appropriately titled "NSA prepared to expose hypocrisy of porn browsing religious radicals".
Two problems with this:
1) The government has a history of pulling this against its own citizens when they threaten the status quo. See COINTELPRO and MLK.
2) Hypocrisy is offensive, but doesn't invalidate a person's argument of how people should act, even if they can't live up to it. MLK would be a great example of this. He was a religious man who had a message of tolerance and justice. He also may or may not have had extramarital affairs. (He at the very least had straying eyes.) Would revealing this to the public negate the truth of his message? Maybe not, but it would be an excuse to shout that truth down and stifle it from spreading.
Encouraging people to accept ad hominem attacks as legitimate, even when it's for people advocating beliefs you find abhorrent, is a dangerous game. It's short-sighted, amoral, and displays the "all that matters is the ends" mentality that has gotten our country into so many risky and stupid entanglements before. Pretty much all of modern politics can be traced back to "pragmatic" things done during the Cold War and the fallout from putting advantage over principle.
Not to downplay the treason of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, but it hasn't exactly been the end of the world.
These two people are heroes, not traitors. They saw a great rot at the core of our nation, and rather than sit silently and watch as it ate deeper and deeper, they put their lives and freedom on the line to let people know so that we could act. If their actions have been ineffective, it has been more because of the nihilists like yourself than because of flaws in their motives.
I draw from this that most females prefer other careers. There is NO problem. NO crisis. They just want to do other things.
Few CEOs or executives at any level are women. Must just mean women don't want to work those jobs. Just like how most doctors are men and how most lawyers are too. No real crisis or problem. That's also probably why they make less than men in the same profession too -- they just aren't driven enough to go for the big bucks.
If that doesn't sound ignorantly dismissive to you yet, try substituting "black people" for women, and the statistics will be just as true and the reasoning just as false.
1st) Carrying literature which is contrary to the government is still free speech, and could be transported out of harms way
Meh. Weaksauce. There's no facts to suggest he was doing such a thing, and you don't get to challenge the Constitutionality of laws without having standing to do so. Besides, there are other ways to accomplish this other than secret compartment, so banning that method wouldn't implicate free speech either. Plus the law is narrowly tailored for a specific issue that doesn't implicate speech.
2nd If there's a specific exception for compartments for carrying firearms, he merely needs to mention his desire to get one
That could be an interesting defense argument, but I think he's going to have to have more intent than "I'd like to have one someday" if he already has a potentially illegal compartment for one. I'm too out of practice to remember whether the burden for proving this would be on the defense or the prosecution. I think on the defense.
Also, as a convicted felon, he might not legally be able to own and carry a firearm, so that may be moot.
I would expect the 5th to show up, though. He is under no requirement that he even say what it was to be used for. The prosecution will have to show that he intended to carry illegal drugs in the compartment. That's hard to do if there is an absence of drug traffiking in his life.
Nope. He has a prior drug conviction according to the third link in the summary. That means that under (4)(D), he has strict liability for operating such a vehicle. Intent won't matter. Heck, there's no need to even interrogate the guy or call him as a witness for the prosecution.
Does this law apply if you buy a used car and you don't even know about the hidden compartment?
Only if you have a prior drug conviction. Subsection (4)(D) makes it a strict liability crime to "operate, possess, or use" such a car (i.e. without any requirement of intent). Otherwise, you have to "knowingly" use or modify the car.
And yes, that's perfectly Constitutional. It would also be Constitutional to just outright ban hidden compartments for any purpose -- especially as a matter of state law. There is broadly speaking no real requirement of a mens rea component under the Constitution in laws like this.
(And can they put that protective coating on faster than oxygen can get at the single-atom layer of tin?)
Depending on the deposition process, they probably already are removing the oxygen either by substituting an inert atmosphere or working in a vacuum. How would they get it down in the first place otherwise?
Freedom in gender roles does not mean dragging women out of the kitchen; it means the freedom to stay or go as she choses, and my wife choses to stay.
That is true, but when most people speak of "old-fashioned gender roles," what they typically mean is that deviation from this scenario -- men working, women keeping the home -- is frowned upon. That women should have either less actual rights (as a matter of law) or less effective rights (as a matter of social pressure).
What, for example, would most Thai people think of a couple where the man stays at home to take care of the kids while his wife works? Would anyone think that was odd? Would they be subject to mockery or scorn? How about even just small jokes that aren't really jokes or odd looks?
Here, if your neighbors don't like what you are doing, they will stop you, and the Law is one tool that they can use to stop you. If society likes what you are doing, it does not matter if it is illegal.
Society rarely is flexible and forgiving especially if focused on conformity of tradition, and if your neighbors can punish you from deviating from their expectations, then you have no real freedom. "Freedom" to do whatever other people want you to do isn't real freedom. It's just oppression by more local means.
We used to have situations in America too when society trumped law: black people got lynched for being the wrong race in the wrong place, and the murderers got off scot free because society approved of what they did regardless of what the law thought. The reason for rule of law is to protect those who are unpopular but whose rights would be trampled without it.
In Thailand we have a constitutional king. He is a VERY good man, and he cares about his subjects. His power is primarily leadership, but it is real. He loves his people and his people love him.
He might well be, but a man who cannot be criticized cannot be trusted. No government or other organization can run well if it closes its ears to any data that might suggest a course correction, and the crime of lese majeste is an abomination that elevates a mere man to the position of a god. Respect should be earned, not dictated by law.
Yes, the baby boomers are now all over thirty, but they would probably be considered liberals not libertarians.
The baby boomers are in their 50's to 70's now. They used to be liberals a very long time ago when they were young, but they're now the core demographic of Fox News.
If solar is doing so great then why does it need subsidies?... Solar will eventually become cost effective without subsidies, lets wait for that to happen.
Because it would have never gotten to this state without enough investment to make it viable during the early decades when the technology for it just wasn't there yet. Part of what government is good for is doing things which are beneficial to society but not profitable or not profitable yet. When we reach profitability, we start backing off and letting the market take over.
Thats what the GOP doesn't like, not that such a thing exists, but that the government creates distortions in the economy by picking winners before the race starts.
Hard to win a race when everyone else has such a centuries or decades long lead. I think more than enough people have pointed out that every other form of energy is subsidized too -- largely because energy is absolutely essential to the economy and the well-being of the public.
Or did the "we're all Africans" diverge after leaving Africa and become these distinct species of hominids?
Yes, and then another wave of modern humans went out and met with / slept with / killed the descendants of the previous wave. Most of our evolutionary history seems to have happened in the Great Rift Valley area of Africa, but a few key branches that were folded back in happened elsewhere.
That was done before you posted; see up-thread. Just as there's an International Obfuscated C Code Contest, Slashdot should have an "Ultimate Pedantry" contest.
As someone with an overly sensitive nose. who once worked retail. you people reak. yes. even you. all of you.
I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else getting really tired of the US Gov. in general? Wah wah at least it didn't happen to me... right?
Yes, but I'm even more afraid of the alternatives. As long as the people crying the loudest for its overthrow and/or dismantlement are the last people I want running things, I'm pretty much sticking with it.
I wonder if this is what it feels like to be an Egyptian. </bitterness>
He didn't hurt anyone. He rapidly requested web pages for 1 minute, slightly contributing to a computer bogging down. In a less batshit-crazy, less rabidly corporatist world, this would carry a punishment on par with dropping a cigarette butt on the street.
In the process, he cost the victim a good amount of money in reworking their network to make sure this didn't happen again. It's analogous to making someone pay the cost of the door they broke to get into a house. That's the cost he's being forced to pay financially.
The jailtime is a bit much, though.
He admitted to guilt, but it's not fair to hold him completely financially responsible simply because he was the only person they were able to catch and was honest enough to confess.
So it's instead fair to let the victim be uncompensated for the harm done to them if some of the guilty parties are too crafty?
What you call justice for the liable party is injustice for the injured party. We have rules for joint and several liability (used here) and related doctrines like respondeat superior because our civil justice system focuses largely on the principle that the victim must be made whole. If perfect justice cannot be achieved for both, then let the one who has caused the harm bear the pain and not the one he has done harm to.
Not one mention of Republicans in that link.
So, you are just guessing? Hoping? Accusing?
Who do you think was behind the attack on the ObamaCare website while calling it "an affront to Constitutional rights?" Some too-clever left-wing conspiracy out to tarnish conservatives by doing something terrible that could be plausibly pinned on them? Al Qaeda? Illuminati lizard Jews? The AFLAC duck?
It would be quite a feat to directly image life on a planet over vast distances and through atmospheres, so my complete and total guess is unless they've got something really large and obvious like city lights, we probably can't.
The presence of large amounts of oxygen in an atmosphere would be a very, very strong indication, because oxygen doesn't stick around unbound to minerals and most gasses without something working very hard at separating it out. This holds true for any other highly reactive chemical that doesn't have any significant geological causes. We could find out by spectroscopy of the atmosphere.
Ooh, someone's cruising for the party van to come pick them up!
"No, officers, I was talking about temperature! I swear!"
Agreed. This is part of why I kind of liked the article about sticky gps trackers shot by air cannon.
In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h). As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt.
Let's try this demonstration again in a situation where you would actually need such a device, i.e. in a high-speed pursuit. A 15 mph demonstration means nothing for the safety of the product.
Basically the smaller number of constituents to politician ratio, the more power the individual has.
And the more important it becomes to be one of the strong, because there's not enough weak people to defend themselves without resort to violence.
Perhaps everyone quoting that xkcd should be aware that such passwords are no longer safe.
If you think to yourself after reading the first page, "But all of those long passwords were phrases, not nonsense strings!" then you should keep reading to page 2's sidebar for the list of passwords that were cracked using the methods in the article. Crackers have dictionaries of billions of words now and can try combinations and variations at GPU-fueled speeds. Length only protects you if and only if you can exhaust dictionary attacks.
The only safe password is long and either randomly generated or indistinguishable from it. Using some other device to store and auto-fill your passwords like a password manager or a device like a YubiKey is the only long-term solution. Humans are the weakest link.
I don't accept the level of government's (or business's) collection of data on people and invading the privacy of individuals. ... In the end I expect the general public to yawn and go about their daily lives. And nothing will change. So any high and mighty principal of 'changing the world' has failed.
Funny, for someone who supposedly doesn't accept high levels of data collection, you seem to mock anyone else who actually cares.
Both men voluntarily swore an oath to the United States. Both men voluntarily violated that oath. They could have found other ways to address their concerns that didn't involve collaborating with people who have sworn an oath to attack the United States. They chose not to because the other path was difficult.
And ineffectual.
We have whistleblowing protections, but in both of their cases, those protections do not apply. Government protection for government whistleblowers really only extends to financial fraud and waste and to workplace safety and other regulations non-compliance. It doesn't apply to officially sanctioned policies that are in legal gray areas, and it does not provide any exceptions (that I am aware of) for the release of classified data to the parties you are blowing the whistle to. Telling Congress or their superiors about acts they had no business knowing would have simply landed them in jail without any positive effect.
So what options do you speak of?
They could have found other ways to address their concerns that didn't involve collaborating with people who have sworn an oath to attack the United States.
To call them "collaborators" is somewhere between spin doctoring and malicious slander. They provided information to the public without any specific intent to collaborate with enemies. If such people also picked up on the information, then that's the breaks, but it should not make it illegal to tell the rest of us what is going on when the government is acting without accountability and in ways hostile to the public's interest.
Or it's all just a game. Really, what devastating info has come to light so far? Nothing that any country with their own intelligence agency didn't already know about and likely do as well. It has set up a soap box for political grandstanding, but has it really changed any relationships or policies?
The fact that you aren't horrified isn't so much a measure of how unimportant the revelations are so much as your own cynicism and willingness to accept a terrible situation as just "business as usual." Democracies can only die when the people accept oppression as natural and proper.
And this article would be more appropriately titled "NSA prepared to expose hypocrisy of porn browsing religious radicals".
Two problems with this:
1) The government has a history of pulling this against its own citizens when they threaten the status quo. See COINTELPRO and MLK.
2) Hypocrisy is offensive, but doesn't invalidate a person's argument of how people should act, even if they can't live up to it. MLK would be a great example of this. He was a religious man who had a message of tolerance and justice. He also may or may not have had extramarital affairs. (He at the very least had straying eyes.) Would revealing this to the public negate the truth of his message? Maybe not, but it would be an excuse to shout that truth down and stifle it from spreading.
Encouraging people to accept ad hominem attacks as legitimate, even when it's for people advocating beliefs you find abhorrent, is a dangerous game. It's short-sighted, amoral, and displays the "all that matters is the ends" mentality that has gotten our country into so many risky and stupid entanglements before. Pretty much all of modern politics can be traced back to "pragmatic" things done during the Cold War and the fallout from putting advantage over principle.
Not to downplay the treason of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, but it hasn't exactly been the end of the world.
These two people are heroes, not traitors. They saw a great rot at the core of our nation, and rather than sit silently and watch as it ate deeper and deeper, they put their lives and freedom on the line to let people know so that we could act. If their actions have been ineffective, it has been more because of the nihilists like yourself than because of flaws in their motives.
In at least 13 European countries there are more female doctors than male.
In the UK the number of women becoming doctors is 30% higher than the number of men.
This is a US-centric site, and the medical and legal professions are still dominated by men here.
I draw from this that most females prefer other careers. There is NO problem. NO crisis. They just want to do other things.
Few CEOs or executives at any level are women. Must just mean women don't want to work those jobs. Just like how most doctors are men and how most lawyers are too. No real crisis or problem. That's also probably why they make less than men in the same profession too -- they just aren't driven enough to go for the big bucks.
If that doesn't sound ignorantly dismissive to you yet, try substituting "black people" for women, and the statistics will be just as true and the reasoning just as false.
1st) Carrying literature which is contrary to the government is still free speech, and could be transported out of harms way
Meh. Weaksauce. There's no facts to suggest he was doing such a thing, and you don't get to challenge the Constitutionality of laws without having standing to do so. Besides, there are other ways to accomplish this other than secret compartment, so banning that method wouldn't implicate free speech either. Plus the law is narrowly tailored for a specific issue that doesn't implicate speech.
2nd If there's a specific exception for compartments for carrying firearms, he merely needs to mention his desire to get one
That could be an interesting defense argument, but I think he's going to have to have more intent than "I'd like to have one someday" if he already has a potentially illegal compartment for one. I'm too out of practice to remember whether the burden for proving this would be on the defense or the prosecution. I think on the defense.
Also, as a convicted felon, he might not legally be able to own and carry a firearm, so that may be moot.
I would expect the 5th to show up, though. He is under no requirement that he even say what it was to be used for. The prosecution will have to show that he intended to carry illegal drugs in the compartment. That's hard to do if there is an absence of drug traffiking in his life.
Nope. He has a prior drug conviction according to the third link in the summary. That means that under (4)(D), he has strict liability for operating such a vehicle. Intent won't matter. Heck, there's no need to even interrogate the guy or call him as a witness for the prosecution.
Does this law apply if you buy a used car and you don't even know about the hidden compartment?
Only if you have a prior drug conviction. Subsection (4)(D) makes it a strict liability crime to "operate, possess, or use" such a car (i.e. without any requirement of intent). Otherwise, you have to "knowingly" use or modify the car.
And yes, that's perfectly Constitutional. It would also be Constitutional to just outright ban hidden compartments for any purpose -- especially as a matter of state law. There is broadly speaking no real requirement of a mens rea component under the Constitution in laws like this.
(And can they put that protective coating on faster than oxygen can get at the single-atom layer of tin?)
Depending on the deposition process, they probably already are removing the oxygen either by substituting an inert atmosphere or working in a vacuum. How would they get it down in the first place otherwise?
Freedom in gender roles does not mean dragging women out of the kitchen; it means the freedom to stay or go as she choses, and my wife choses to stay.
That is true, but when most people speak of "old-fashioned gender roles," what they typically mean is that deviation from this scenario -- men working, women keeping the home -- is frowned upon. That women should have either less actual rights (as a matter of law) or less effective rights (as a matter of social pressure).
What, for example, would most Thai people think of a couple where the man stays at home to take care of the kids while his wife works? Would anyone think that was odd? Would they be subject to mockery or scorn? How about even just small jokes that aren't really jokes or odd looks?
Here, if your neighbors don't like what you are doing, they will stop you, and the Law is one tool that they can use to stop you. If society likes what you are doing, it does not matter if it is illegal.
Society rarely is flexible and forgiving especially if focused on conformity of tradition, and if your neighbors can punish you from deviating from their expectations, then you have no real freedom. "Freedom" to do whatever other people want you to do isn't real freedom. It's just oppression by more local means.
We used to have situations in America too when society trumped law: black people got lynched for being the wrong race in the wrong place, and the murderers got off scot free because society approved of what they did regardless of what the law thought. The reason for rule of law is to protect those who are unpopular but whose rights would be trampled without it.
In Thailand we have a constitutional king. He is a VERY good man, and he cares about his subjects. His power is primarily leadership, but it is real. He loves his people and his people love him.
He might well be, but a man who cannot be criticized cannot be trusted. No government or other organization can run well if it closes its ears to any data that might suggest a course correction, and the crime of lese majeste is an abomination that elevates a mere man to the position of a god. Respect should be earned, not dictated by law.
Yes, the baby boomers are now all over thirty, but they would probably be considered liberals not libertarians.
The baby boomers are in their 50's to 70's now. They used to be liberals a very long time ago when they were young, but they're now the core demographic of Fox News.
If solar is doing so great then why does it need subsidies? ... Solar will eventually become cost effective without subsidies, lets wait for that to happen.
Because it would have never gotten to this state without enough investment to make it viable during the early decades when the technology for it just wasn't there yet. Part of what government is good for is doing things which are beneficial to society but not profitable or not profitable yet. When we reach profitability, we start backing off and letting the market take over.
Thats what the GOP doesn't like, not that such a thing exists, but that the government creates distortions in the economy by picking winners before the race starts.
Hard to win a race when everyone else has such a centuries or decades long lead. I think more than enough people have pointed out that every other form of energy is subsidized too -- largely because energy is absolutely essential to the economy and the well-being of the public.
Pfffff...... his sound system goes to 11 .4 , bitch!
IT EXISTS.
That's why the victim's M fell off too.
Or did the "we're all Africans" diverge after leaving Africa and become these distinct species of hominids?
Yes, and then another wave of modern humans went out and met with / slept with / killed the descendants of the previous wave. Most of our evolutionary history seems to have happened in the Great Rift Valley area of Africa, but a few key branches that were folded back in happened elsewhere.
That was done before you posted; see up-thread. Just as there's an International Obfuscated C Code Contest, Slashdot should have an "Ultimate Pedantry" contest.
FTFY.
As someone with an overly sensitive nose. who once worked retail. you people reak. yes. even you. all of you.
I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.