As an example, even if you have photographic evidence to back up your story that a certain politician is a transvestite, an English jury can still find you guilty if they consider that it blackened the man's reputation badly enough.
Probably not the best of examples. Since most people would tend to consider that simply being a politician would be enough to have the "blackest" of reputations.
And that's different in the US how, exactly? If someone accused you of being a murderer, and you didn't like that very much, how would you prove that you aren't?
This would be a criminal case where the prosecution is required to prove both that a murder has happened and that the accused was responsible. The accused isn't required to prove anything since they are assumed to be innocent. Whereas with libel things appear to be more a case of "guilty until proven innocent".
So, if I go around Britain saying that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are murdering, blood-drinking, child molesters, I could be found liable for libel? Funny that.
Possibly not on the basis that for it to be libel you'd have to be reducing their reputation in some way. Something which would only be credible if you were saying this about random members of the public who happened to have the same names.
It would require actual competence to detect a piece of hardware that essentially did nothing until activated and simply sat on a motherboard.
In the case of a phone the activation might require you to connect to a specific network. It's not as if you actually need anything special in the phone. Having the telephone network automatically "tap" all foreign phones and international calls is perfectly possible. Not just to the Chinese either...
the real trick is getting the data back off again. It's trivial to convince a cell phone (for example) to record conversations while appearing off. The trick is to get to the data without anyone noticing, while you're in a foreign (possibly hostile) nation. I'd think someone would notice if a cell phone was constantly 'phoning home'.
Thing is that "phoning home" or at frequently trying to contact it's home network is exactly the sort of behaviour you can expect from a roaming phone.
This is probably over the fact that a couple of kids died last year from that rare heart problem? Sorry I don't remember the name and my Google Fu doth suckth but we had one here in AR a few years back. Kid was healthy looking, football player as a matter of fact. Finished a big play, waved at the crowd and fell over dead as a hammer.
The same thing has been known to adult athletes.
So most likely they are just doing it as a combo of CYA and to try to ensure the kid's safety. Nobody wants to make the call and say "I'm sorry, but your kid had an undiagnosed heart problem and..." and under stress this condition can be caught and the kid told to stop, then it is treatable with medication.
On the other hand how much strees related problems with this cause for the majority of students.
Just making a parabola with some foil and a printed template and placing your antenna at the focal point can increase signal by 5db, with a corresponding decrease in signal in the other direction. Antennas with some actual effort put into them can boost distances dramatically.
Or you can do the same thing with visible light. The beam from a light which uses a some kind of reflector (or a combination of mirrors and lenses) will appear brighter and be visible further away than if you had the same lamp (or one with the same light output) on its own. A parabolic reflector will also gather "light" and bring it to a focus.
What you're referring to is the biggest problem with WiFi there isn't really enough intelligence built into it for those sorts of densely packed situations. It's not really meant to have more than about 3 routers within range of each other, and even then only if their really spread out on the spectrum due to the overlap on some channels.
It's not just "intelligence" so much as the ability to control TX power and channel. There would be little point in trying this at 2.4G because B & G hardware can act as jammers. Even on the less used 5G you still have the issue an A or N device which goes for range...
There has never been such a thing as an unbiased news source. That's some sort of urban legend or somehting. For a while, some news sources tried to present you with the biased view for both sides of an issue,
Ignoring the false dichotomy (and related) fallacies.
I remember a early 1990s (?) story where a national bus company installed a front bumper radar to enforce a safe following distance for their drivers. It would activate the brakes automatically when the driver got too close to the car ahead based on the speed. The problem was other drivers cutting in front of the bus would make the system stomp on the brakes, thus dumping the people in the bus and causing tailgaters to rear end the vehicle.
Which is actually the fault of the tailgaters... Before that there was the Goodyear Grand Prix S. Advertised as safer because of decreasing stopping distance, especially of wet roads. At least until it was pointed out that having a shorter stopping distance than most other cars is carries it's own set of dangers.
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant. I know that the Republicans saw it as a huge victory when Clinton was impeached basically for having an extramarital affair (and don't tell me that it was for perjury; it was his personal life that was on trial), but, in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit. I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests.
Or even to the interests of one or more foreign countries. Why should the President have to be married in the first place? Maybe his or her private life should be well private.
So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about politicians hiding emails to their girlfriends/boyfriends.
Though prostitutes on "expenses" is a different problem.
We should be so lucky if that's all they were hiding. It's more the potential bribes, nepotism/cronyism, and backroom deals that I'm worried about. Those are the type of things that actually conflict with good governance--in other words, government corruption.
Maybe a government made up entirely of single promiscuious bisexuals would be less corrupt... It's hard to see how it could possibly be more corrupt than some we have now.
Asking legislators to actually understand every nuance of every bill is naive. Laws refer to other laws, and constantly amend bits and pieces of legislation.
I disagree since this is their job. If they are not up to it then they shouldn't be doing it. If things are so complicated that it isn't possible to find enough people to do the job then it's past time to simplify statute law.
Wiretapping--with warrants--IS useful for fighting terrorism,
But only in combination with other things such as infiltration to distinguish groups which are actually dangerous from "wannabes" who make a lot of noise.
but remember that the number of people killed by terrorists in the US in the past five years is zero,
It's definitly more that zero, e.g. Dr. George Tiller was recently killed by a terrorist and had previously been subject to many attacks.
>> "'Anyone who would give-up ESSENTIAL liberty for *temporary* security, deserve neither.' - Benjamin Franklin. Also while we may be able to trust a President Bush or President Obama with the ability to monitor our internet transactions..."
It's also very questionable if giving up liberty actually actually results in any increase in security in the first place.
The blame of which they are worthy is definitely non-zero, however. At some point the individual needs to understand that everyone who would teach him anything has some sort of bias or agenda no matter how good their intentions may be.
The phrase "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" carries a degree of truth.
It's normal and healthy to question what you are taught and what was omitted from your education and why. Any individual who fails to do so is correctly regarded as one of the sheeple or whatever you prefer to call them and their beliefs are unfortunately little more than sophisticated programming. It's amazing to consider just how much this alone is responsible for the world we know today and many of the problems it experiences.
The most disturbing thing is that many people are just too trusting of governments. Both at a corporate level and at the level of individuals. They will honestly believe that whilst "The Government" may have done awful things 20-100 years ago these things don't happen now. Similarly elected officials still get trusted even reelected after being caught doing something dishonest. People who are sceptical of governerments/government officials are often portrayed as irrational (even subject to ad hominem attracks). Even though the most rational position would be to assume that any politician is lying (including by omission) and that any offical government statement is propaganda until and unless proved otherwise.
Asking questions of strange people is not harassment. Lots of people wear uniforms (cop, electrician, fireman, et cetera) bought off the net and they SHOULD be questioned to find-out if they are genuine cops, or just people pretending to be cops.
It certainly isn't unknown for criminals (including terrorists, serial killers and hitmen) to impersontate police. It's also been the case that actual police officers have turned out to also be criminals. Most disturbingly many police forces appear to oppose "keeping their own house in order".
Oh, please. Large parts of America and Europe haven't even entered the 20th century on this one. If you think Americans, or Europeans have 'gotten over' doing bad things to innocent people out of sexual prejudice, you are really missing out on a lot of important news.
Quite possibly this won't be finally over for another three thousand years. At least according to TV writer Steven Moffat.
Some of them, such as Marxism, are every bit as harmful to life and liberty as that Old Testament stuff, as most people now agree. Others are harmful to liberty in a more insidious way, such as political correctness and the doctrine of equality.
In quite a few cases these might be more accuratly described as "newspeak". Since as with 1984 you have terms which mean something other than the obvious meaning, sometimes even the exact opposite.
Seriously, all you folks that think that religion doesn't account for the vast majority of the worlds bigotry needs to pull their heads out and start paying attention to history and current events.
If there was no religion then bigots would just have to find something else to hide behind. It isn't even necessary since it isn't that hard to find atheistic bigots and those hiding behind the likes of nationalism.
Who's going to vote to ban gay marriage if there weren't any Southern Baptists and Mormons? Who's going to stone women to death for having sex in Afghanistan if there was no Sharia Law?
They could just as easily claim that these things are "not natural", "inappropriate", etc, etc.
My whole point is that fundamentalist Christianity is largest belief system in America that is allowed to get away with making horrifyingly bigoted statements in public without having to answer for it.
Depends how you do the counting, this claim could also be applied to some feminist group or other, since they claim to represent more than half of the population.
n fact, we are all told that we need to respect the religious beliefs of psychopaths such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, simply because it's in the Bible.
This is just two people. Who are certainly subject to critique. No doubt anyone saying they shouldn't be critiqued would asked to read the first Ammendment to the US Constitution!
It reeks of hatred and bigotry for me to say that Fundamentalist Christianity is based on bigotry? Okay, I'll bite. Fundamentalist Christians say that every word of the Bible is literal truth, right? Okay, we are on the same page with that. Now please open your good books. Now put that book aside, and open your Bible. Please turn to Leviticus 20:13. It says the following:
There are a couple of issues here. The first is with people calling themselves "Christians" being more concerned with passages in The Torah than anything in the New Testament. (If they were claiming to be "Fundermentalist Jews" then things would make a lot more sense.) The other problem is that this section of Leviticus enumerates a whole set of other rules which these kind of people make a lot less fuss about.
Fundamentalist Christianity is, however, one of the last and greatest bastions of hatred and bigotry left in the first world.
Whilst it might be an easily identifiable example of such it certainly isn't unique or without plenty of company. Arguably some of the other groups are more of a danger to society. Especially those who enguage in "direct action" a common euphemism for "terrorism".
That's exactly what a government is (except maybe the "intelligent" part). Sure, it's a legal fiction, but it's a very useful one, particularly when you consider that if the Government had no continuity from one election to the next, it would be forced to re-enact all the old laws from the previous government before it could enact any new ones. This would quickly become so time-consuming that no governing at all would get done.
On the other hand you'd get fewer laws and the most important ones would be sorted first. Daft and redundent laws wouldn't last that long.
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As an example, even if you have photographic evidence to back up your story that a certain politician is a transvestite, an English jury can still find you guilty if they consider that it blackened the man's reputation badly enough.
Probably not the best of examples. Since most people would tend to consider that simply being a politician would be enough to have the "blackest" of reputations.
And that's different in the US how, exactly? If someone accused you of being a murderer, and you didn't like that very much, how would you prove that you aren't?
This would be a criminal case where the prosecution is required to prove both that a murder has happened and that the accused was responsible. The accused isn't required to prove anything since they are assumed to be innocent.
Whereas with libel things appear to be more a case of "guilty until proven innocent".
So, if I go around Britain saying that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are murdering, blood-drinking, child molesters, I could be found liable for libel? Funny that.
Possibly not on the basis that for it to be libel you'd have to be reducing their reputation in some way. Something which would only be credible if you were saying this about random members of the public who happened to have the same names.
It would require actual competence to detect a piece of hardware that essentially did nothing until activated and simply sat on a motherboard.
In the case of a phone the activation might require you to connect to a specific network.
It's not as if you actually need anything special in the phone. Having the telephone network automatically "tap" all foreign phones and international calls is perfectly possible. Not just to the Chinese either...
the real trick is getting the data back off again. It's trivial to convince a cell phone (for example) to record conversations while appearing off. The trick is to get to the data without anyone noticing, while you're in a foreign (possibly hostile) nation. I'd think someone would notice if a cell phone was constantly 'phoning home'.
Thing is that "phoning home" or at frequently trying to contact it's home network is exactly the sort of behaviour you can expect from a roaming phone.
This is probably over the fact that a couple of kids died last year from that rare heart problem? Sorry I don't remember the name and my Google Fu doth suckth but we had one here in AR a few years back. Kid was healthy looking, football player as a matter of fact. Finished a big play, waved at the crowd and fell over dead as a hammer.
The same thing has been known to adult athletes.
So most likely they are just doing it as a combo of CYA and to try to ensure the kid's safety. Nobody wants to make the call and say "I'm sorry, but your kid had an undiagnosed heart problem and..." and under stress this condition can be caught and the kid told to stop, then it is treatable with medication.
On the other hand how much strees related problems with this cause for the majority of students.
Just making a parabola with some foil and a printed template and placing your antenna at the focal point can increase signal by 5db, with a corresponding decrease in signal in the other direction. Antennas with some actual effort put into them can boost distances dramatically.
Or you can do the same thing with visible light. The beam from a light which uses a some kind of reflector (or a combination of mirrors and lenses) will appear brighter and be visible further away than if you had the same lamp (or one with the same light output) on its own.
A parabolic reflector will also gather "light" and bring it to a focus.
What you're referring to is the biggest problem with WiFi there isn't really enough intelligence built into it for those sorts of densely packed situations. It's not really meant to have more than about 3 routers within range of each other, and even then only if their really spread out on the spectrum due to the overlap on some channels.
It's not just "intelligence" so much as the ability to control TX power and channel. There would be little point in trying this at 2.4G because B & G hardware can act as jammers. Even on the less used 5G you still have the issue an A or N device which goes for range...
There has never been such a thing as an unbiased news source. That's some sort of urban legend or somehting. For a while, some news sources tried to present you with the biased view for both sides of an issue,
Ignoring the false dichotomy (and related) fallacies.
There's also a possibility that when it malfunctions, it could cause accidents.
What's going to happen when you have many cars fitted with radar in close proximity?
I remember a early 1990s (?) story where a national bus company installed a front bumper radar to enforce a safe following distance for their drivers. It would activate the brakes automatically when the driver got too close to the car ahead based on the speed. The problem was other drivers cutting in front of the bus would make the system stomp on the brakes, thus dumping the people in the bus and causing tailgaters to rear end the vehicle.
Which is actually the fault of the tailgaters... Before that there was the Goodyear Grand Prix S. Advertised as safer because of decreasing stopping distance, especially of wet roads. At least until it was pointed out that having a shorter stopping distance than most other cars is carries it's own set of dangers.
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant. I know that the Republicans saw it as a huge victory when Clinton was impeached basically for having an extramarital affair (and don't tell me that it was for perjury; it was his personal life that was on trial), but, in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit. I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests.
Or even to the interests of one or more foreign countries. Why should the President have to be married in the first place? Maybe his or her private life should be well private.
So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about politicians hiding emails to their girlfriends/boyfriends.
Though prostitutes on "expenses" is a different problem.
We should be so lucky if that's all they were hiding. It's more the potential bribes, nepotism/cronyism, and backroom deals that I'm worried about. Those are the type of things that actually conflict with good governance--in other words, government corruption.
Maybe a government made up entirely of single promiscuious bisexuals would be less corrupt... It's hard to see how it could possibly be more corrupt than some we have now.
Asking legislators to actually understand every nuance of every bill is naive. Laws refer to other laws, and constantly amend bits and pieces of legislation.
I disagree since this is their job. If they are not up to it then they shouldn't be doing it. If things are so complicated that it isn't possible to find enough people to do the job then it's past time to simplify statute law.
If I was in Congress I would automatically vote "nay" on any bill I have not read at least once.
What is you chance of ever being a Congressman?
Wiretapping--with warrants--IS useful for fighting terrorism,
But only in combination with other things such as infiltration to distinguish groups which are actually dangerous from "wannabes" who make a lot of noise.
but remember that the number of people killed by terrorists in the US in the past five years is zero,
It's definitly more that zero, e.g. Dr. George Tiller was recently killed by a terrorist and had previously been subject to many attacks.
>> "'Anyone who would give-up ESSENTIAL liberty for *temporary* security, deserve neither.' - Benjamin Franklin. Also while we may be able to trust a President Bush or President Obama with the ability to monitor our internet transactions..."
It's also very questionable if giving up liberty actually actually results in any increase in security in the first place.
The blame of which they are worthy is definitely non-zero, however. At some point the individual needs to understand that everyone who would teach him anything has some sort of bias or agenda no matter how good their intentions may be.
The phrase "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions" carries a degree of truth.
It's normal and healthy to question what you are taught and what was omitted from your education and why. Any individual who fails to do so is correctly regarded as one of the sheeple or whatever you prefer to call them and their beliefs are unfortunately little more than sophisticated programming. It's amazing to consider just how much this alone is responsible for the world we know today and many of the problems it experiences.
The most disturbing thing is that many people are just too trusting of governments. Both at a corporate level and at the level of individuals. They will honestly believe that whilst "The Government" may have done awful things 20-100 years ago these things don't happen now. Similarly elected officials still get trusted even reelected after being caught doing something dishonest.
People who are sceptical of governerments/government officials are often portrayed as irrational (even subject to ad hominem attracks). Even though the most rational position would be to assume that any politician is lying (including by omission) and that any offical government statement is propaganda until and unless proved otherwise.
Asking questions of strange people is not harassment. Lots of people wear uniforms (cop, electrician, fireman, et cetera) bought off the net and they SHOULD be questioned to find-out if they are genuine cops, or just people pretending to be cops.
It certainly isn't unknown for criminals (including terrorists, serial killers and hitmen) to impersontate police. It's also been the case that actual police officers have turned out to also be criminals. Most disturbingly many police forces appear to oppose "keeping their own house in order".
Oh, please. Large parts of America and Europe haven't even entered the 20th century on this one. If you think Americans, or Europeans have 'gotten over' doing bad things to innocent people out of sexual prejudice, you are really missing out on a lot of important news.
Quite possibly this won't be finally over for another three thousand years. At least according to TV writer Steven Moffat.
Some of them, such as Marxism, are every bit as harmful to life and liberty as that Old Testament stuff, as most people now agree. Others are harmful to liberty in a more insidious way, such as political correctness and the doctrine of equality.
In quite a few cases these might be more accuratly described as "newspeak". Since as with 1984 you have terms which mean something other than the obvious meaning, sometimes even the exact opposite.
Seriously, all you folks that think that religion doesn't account for the vast majority of the worlds bigotry needs to pull their heads out and start paying attention to history and current events.
If there was no religion then bigots would just have to find something else to hide behind. It isn't even necessary since it isn't that hard to find atheistic bigots and those hiding behind the likes of nationalism.
Who's going to vote to ban gay marriage if there weren't any Southern Baptists and Mormons?
Who's going to stone women to death for having sex in Afghanistan if there was no Sharia Law?
They could just as easily claim that these things are "not natural", "inappropriate", etc, etc.
My whole point is that fundamentalist Christianity is largest belief system in America that is allowed to get away with making horrifyingly bigoted statements in public without having to answer for it.
Depends how you do the counting, this claim could also be applied to some feminist group or other, since they claim to represent more than half of the population.
n fact, we are all told that we need to respect the religious beliefs of psychopaths such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, simply because it's in the Bible.
This is just two people. Who are certainly subject to critique. No doubt anyone saying they shouldn't be critiqued would asked to read the first Ammendment to the US Constitution!
It reeks of hatred and bigotry for me to say that Fundamentalist Christianity is based on bigotry? Okay, I'll bite. Fundamentalist Christians say that every word of the Bible is literal truth, right? Okay, we are on the same page with that. Now please open your good books. Now put that book aside, and open your Bible. Please turn to Leviticus 20:13. It says the following:
There are a couple of issues here. The first is with people calling themselves "Christians" being more concerned with passages in The Torah than anything in the New Testament. (If they were claiming to be "Fundermentalist Jews" then things would make a lot more sense.) The other problem is that this section of Leviticus enumerates a whole set of other rules which these kind of people make a lot less fuss about.
Fundamentalist Christianity is, however, one of the last and greatest bastions of hatred and bigotry left in the first world.
Whilst it might be an easily identifiable example of such it certainly isn't unique or without plenty of company. Arguably some of the other groups are more of a danger to society. Especially those who enguage in "direct action" a common euphemism for "terrorism".
That's exactly what a government is (except maybe the "intelligent" part). Sure, it's a legal fiction, but it's a very useful one, particularly when you consider that if the Government had no continuity from one election to the next, it would be forced to re-enact all the old laws from the previous government before it could enact any new ones. This would quickly become so time-consuming that no governing at all would get done.
On the other hand you'd get fewer laws and the most important ones would be sorted first. Daft and redundent laws wouldn't last that long.