Yes, who needs a middle-man? Or, who needs "a portal to the web?"
AOL tried for years to situate themselves between individuals and... other individuals (early web). Didn't work.
I forget who tried it next. Didn't work.
OK, just a list is enough: MySpace, Time-Warner via a reboot of the AOL idea,.... currently it's Google+ and FaceBook.
I can use email (etc.) myself, thanks. No need to run every message and page-view through a third party. More hassle, they read them, and could disappear at a moment's notice.
In future, someone else will think they force their way in to being an uninvited middle-man. It hasn't worked yet..."
Yes, N-rays were a false pursuit. (See book "Diamond Dealers and Feather Merchants")
Cold fusion also. The palladium was soaking up hydrogen, which the original experimenters (Pons & Fleischmann?) misinterpreted as demonstrating room-temperature cold fusion.
The public needs understand that un-refereed reports are not fact. Further, even refereed journal articles are not fact. It is only after others reproduce experiments and find confirming results that we get closer to "fact." Even then, it's just "confirmed theory."
Why the popular press loves to breathlessly report on recent journal articles as "fact" only confuses the matter.
I do, but always get removed in voire dire due to being "too educated." Neither side usually likes PhDs, MBAs, MDs, or JDs serving in juries. Too much potential surprise factor.
The CNN talking-head calls the leaker a "mole." WRONG.
A Federal Whistle-blower is not a "mole," but simply a whistle-blower.
This is similar to the concept of "jury nullification," whereby a jury can find an accused guilty of breaking a law, but can also recommend ZERO punishment, as jury nullification is a mechanism for citizens to nullify unjust laws.
It was used a lot in the civil-rights era, but has been buried by Attys. and judges alike, leading to a lack of awareness by potential jurors.
PS – Want to get out of jury duty? Get informed, and assert your faith in Jury Nullification in open court during voire dire.
They hate being held to account, and prefer an ignorant "jury of peers."
sjbe: Explain to me how some leftover vials of a pathogen from decades ago has any relevance...
(1) Labels fall off of vials after a decade or two.
(2) Viruses are not alive, and can remain viable indefinitely.
(3) A pathogen (e.g., influenza) from decades ago can cause another pandemic if released. No one alive will have immunity, which is built up on a per-organism basis, not genetically.
I've known for a long time that if you want something screwed up really badly, you call in the US Army Corps of Engineers. This is not them, the "best and brightest" of the Army, but the general army. So multiply the dumb by 10X.
But what have the "best and brightest" done for us? A few examples:
* Diverted the Mississippi river by dynamiting, such that now, land subsidence on the former delta causes a retreat of coastline by about 1/4 mile per year.
* Built a seawall to protect Newport Beach, CA. It's a straight line. Do you know basic physics? Yes, deep-sea waves do indeed recombine constructively, creating monster beach-breaks (The Wedge).
* Uh, Katrina? Insisted on NO trees on Gulf-coast flood levees. Duh. Trees are what hold hillsides together.
* Katrina. Ignoring their own rules, they used landfill, construction debris, and wadded newspaper when building said levees.
* The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. These naturally have giant floodplains, hence our good farmland. COE has leveed-off almost anywhere the rivers could flood, resulting in a huge flood-risk multiplier for anyone downriver, any time it rains in the US mid-west (see above).
OK, now back up. The above were done by the Army's "brightest." The Ebola guy is being brought to the US by just the "regular" Army.
That is, non-toxic transfection and organelle targeting of a combination "marker & delivery vehicle" into live cells, confirmed by both optical and electron imaging. Special nanodiamonds in this case.
There is a quote from a former Stasi guy (East-German secret police) regarding the Snowden leaks of NSA capabilities: "We could only have dreamed of having such powers."
FTA:"Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it,"
And all this time I thought that my paying an access provider, paying for web hosting, paying for email services (in the past), paying people for products through their web-stores, and donating to Wikipedia — I stupidly thought that was what powered the internet.
I will now dutifully watch all banner and video ads to avoid breaking the sacred "social contract" that enables the internet's existence.
I'll add a more generic reference, Adam's Fallacy, by Duncan Foley. It's about how Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is selectively interpreted by modern economists of the (predominant) Chicago school of thought.
I just hope that Wikileaks doesn't publish my non-conforming TPS Reports. I did get the memo.
Just claim the data was lost due to a "hard drive crash." I mean, it worked for the IRS, right?
It worked for the CIA video recordings of interrogations.
It worked for the CHP & KCSO after they confiscated, w/o warrant, the two cell phones which had video of the deadly police beating. The phones were later returned, sans video.
If this were not the case then the Tobacco and Asbestos companies could have just said "all those meeting minutes and research records are stored in our warehouse in mexico so ha ha, you all lose." Any company or person, on any issue, could just mail the evidence out of state or out of country and get off scott free.
Interesting point. There is one subtle difference to consider.
The "moving physical documents off-shore" approach would be conceivable if not for the fact that such documents, etc. were generated by a US-based Corp., by people acting as representatives of the Corp., thus subject to US laws. IANAL, but I think this kind of maneuver would be obstruction of justice, contempt, or something similar to "destruction of evidence."
In the online case here, the issue is email caching. It does really make sense to cache users' "cloud" data in close physical proximity to said users. That said, one can easily imagine MS using this excuse as a shield to deliberately hide documents they'd like kept secret. Probably not the case here, but extend this ruling to company-internal documents, and you'll spot the trick that US DOJ is trying to prevent.
Kind of like how many Corps. have a "delete any email over two weeks old to 'save storage space'." If you delete a category of data, on a regular schedule, and before any subpoena, then the trick will work. But good luck preserving any sort of corporate memory...
At the moment, downloaded "purchases" from the iTunes Store, Netflix, and Amazon don't have ads. Replayable, scrubbable, etc.
With this deal, viewers pay three times to watch. Once for cable/internet service, second by watching on Comedy Central, and then third via Hulu plus un-skippable ads, if you like an occasional re-run. Yeech!
Similarly, I've seen the rotorwash of an LAPD copter, 50 feet above my street, blow 4' X 8' plywood panels dangerously airborne in the construction site across the street. Grit was thrown in my face.
This was around 3:00 am, and NOT in LA City proper. If only I'd grabbed my camera...
Government, police, etc will always be corrupt. Always. People are people. The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job, with no excess or space for overreach. It's all about taxes. ..
Close, but wrong. It's all about the purse-strings.
Elected leaders, held to account, will reign in organizational misbehavior by tightening the purse-strings
(cutting their budget).
Government, like many things, is a necessary evil. Flat-out saying that "paying taxes is wrong!" solves nothing. Because, you see, there will always be someone in charge.
Hold them to account, and they will hold departments, etc. within their purview to account.
Slashdot Mirror
Best Buy was frequently called the "Showroom for Amazon."
What goes around comes around. Eaxmple:
Amazon is my "Showroom for the local library." (Also for books, before go buy them elsewhere – used – many ex-library copies.)
Yes, who needs a middle-man? Or, who needs "a portal to the web?"
... other individuals (early web). Didn't work.
.... currently it's Google+ and FaceBook.
AOL tried for years to situate themselves between individuals and
I forget who tried it next. Didn't work.
OK, just a list is enough: MySpace, Time-Warner via a reboot of the AOL idea,
I can use email (etc.) myself, thanks. No need to run every message and page-view through a third party. More hassle, they read them, and could disappear at a moment's notice.
In future, someone else will think they force their way in to being an uninvited middle-man. It hasn't worked yet..."
It's a fun read.
Enjoy.
Yes, N-rays were a false pursuit. (See book "Diamond Dealers and Feather Merchants")
Cold fusion also. The palladium was soaking up hydrogen, which the original experimenters (Pons & Fleischmann?) misinterpreted as demonstrating room-temperature cold fusion.
The public needs understand that un-refereed reports are not fact. Further, even refereed journal articles are not fact. It is only after others reproduce experiments and find confirming results that we get closer to "fact." Even then, it's just "confirmed theory."
Why the popular press loves to breathlessly report on recent journal articles as "fact" only confuses the matter.
I do, but always get removed in voire dire due to being "too educated." Neither side usually likes PhDs, MBAs, MDs, or JDs serving in juries. Too much potential surprise factor.
Precisely.
Several foreign governments have outlawed purchase of US-designed, computer-related devices.
Several are also looking into creating their "own" internet system that is air-gapped from "the" internet.
Go NSA! Good job destroying your own country's economy!
The CNN talking-head calls the leaker a "mole." WRONG.
A Federal Whistle-blower is not a "mole," but simply a whistle-blower.
This is similar to the concept of "jury nullification," whereby a jury can find an accused guilty of breaking a law, but can also recommend ZERO punishment, as jury nullification is a mechanism for citizens to nullify unjust laws.
It was used a lot in the civil-rights era, but has been buried by Attys. and judges alike, leading to a lack of awareness by potential jurors.
PS – Want to get out of jury duty? Get informed, and assert your faith in Jury Nullification in open court during voire dire.
They hate being held to account, and prefer an ignorant "jury of peers."
Really, why bother?
You can buy an unlocked iPhone directly from Apple these days.
Very interesting if true. References or links?
(1) Labels fall off of vials after a decade or two.
(2) Viruses are not alive, and can remain viable indefinitely.
(3) A pathogen (e.g., influenza) from decades ago can cause another pandemic if released. No one alive will have immunity, which is built up on a per-organism basis, not genetically.
Link to Slashdot post of the smallpox thing.
Did you read the news about two weeks ago? Smallpox has for decades been extinct, save for two frozen samples in US and Russia.
Oops! Someone cleaning out an old CDC-employee desk found vials of that and other pathogens that had been sitting there for decades.
It's known that plant seeds and bacteria can persist in viable form for millennia. Viruses, not being "alive," probably far longer.
I'm not attacking the CDC. Just you. Don't claim expertise unless you have it.
I've known for a long time that if you want something screwed up really badly, you call in the US Army Corps of Engineers. This is not them, the "best and brightest" of the Army, but the general army. So multiply the dumb by 10X.
But what have the "best and brightest" done for us? A few examples:
* Diverted the Mississippi river by dynamiting, such that now, land subsidence on the former delta causes a retreat of coastline by about 1/4 mile per year.
* Built a seawall to protect Newport Beach, CA. It's a straight line. Do you know basic physics? Yes, deep-sea waves do indeed recombine constructively, creating monster beach-breaks (The Wedge).
* Uh, Katrina? Insisted on NO trees on Gulf-coast flood levees. Duh. Trees are what hold hillsides together.
* Katrina. Ignoring their own rules, they used landfill, construction debris, and wadded newspaper when building said levees.
* The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. These naturally have giant floodplains, hence our good farmland. COE has leveed-off almost anywhere the rivers could flood, resulting in a huge flood-risk multiplier for anyone downriver, any time it rains in the US mid-west (see above).
OK, now back up. The above were done by the Army's "brightest." The Ebola guy is being brought to the US by just the "regular" Army.
This cannot end well.
It's been done already. Open access.
That is, non-toxic transfection and organelle targeting of a combination "marker & delivery vehicle" into live cells, confirmed by both optical and electron imaging. Special nanodiamonds in this case.
(Full disclosure: It was me.)
It's not.
There is a quote from a former Stasi guy (East-German secret police) regarding the Snowden leaks of NSA capabilities: "We could only have dreamed of having such powers."
If it's not fungible, it is not a currency.
FTA: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it,"
And all this time I thought that my paying an access provider, paying for web hosting, paying for email services (in the past), paying people for products through their web-stores, and donating to Wikipedia — I stupidly thought that was what powered the internet.
I will now dutifully watch all banner and video ads to avoid breaking the sacred "social contract" that enables the internet's existence.
Thanks.
I'll add a more generic reference, Adam's Fallacy, by Duncan Foley. It's about how Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is selectively interpreted by modern economists of the (predominant) Chicago school of thought.
I just hope that Wikileaks doesn't publish my non-conforming TPS Reports. I did get the memo.
Excellent test, to propose a citizen consider being on the other end of some legal action or law, as a way to consider whether it is reasonable.
I daresay acceptance of the described international-legal concept would be the end of the concept of Trade Secrets.
It would also be a boon to any company with "favored" status in their home nation.
[citation needed]
It worked for the CIA video recordings of interrogations.
It worked for the CHP & KCSO after they confiscated, w/o warrant, the two cell phones which had video of the deadly police beating. The phones were later returned, sans video.
And so on. . .
Interesting point. There is one subtle difference to consider.
The "moving physical documents off-shore" approach would be conceivable if not for the fact that such documents, etc. were generated by a US-based Corp., by people acting as representatives of the Corp., thus subject to US laws. IANAL, but I think this kind of maneuver would be obstruction of justice, contempt, or something similar to "destruction of evidence."
In the online case here, the issue is email caching. It does really make sense to cache users' "cloud" data in close physical proximity to said users. That said, one can easily imagine MS using this excuse as a shield to deliberately hide documents they'd like kept secret. Probably not the case here, but extend this ruling to company-internal documents, and you'll spot the trick that US DOJ is trying to prevent.
Kind of like how many Corps. have a "delete any email over two weeks old to 'save storage space'." If you delete a category of data, on a regular schedule, and before any subpoena, then the trick will work. But good luck preserving any sort of corporate memory...
It's an exclusive deal that kicks in this Fall.
At the moment, downloaded "purchases" from the iTunes Store, Netflix, and Amazon don't have ads. Replayable, scrubbable, etc.
With this deal, viewers pay three times to watch. Once for cable/internet service, second by watching on Comedy Central, and then third via Hulu plus un-skippable ads, if you like an occasional re-run. Yeech!
Similarly, I've seen the rotorwash of an LAPD copter, 50 feet above my street, blow 4' X 8' plywood panels dangerously airborne in the construction site across the street. Grit was thrown in my face.
This was around 3:00 am, and NOT in LA City proper. If only I'd grabbed my camera...
Close, but wrong. It's all about the purse-strings.
Elected leaders, held to account, will reign in organizational misbehavior by tightening the purse-strings (cutting their budget).
Government, like many things, is a necessary evil. Flat-out saying that "paying taxes is wrong!" solves nothing. Because, you see, there will always be someone in charge.
Hold them to account, and they will hold departments, etc. within their purview to account.
If you want zero taxes, go to Somalia.