FWIW, approximately the same amount of money pays for full private coverage in Germany. (Most people pay far less, unemployed people pay nothing.) Visits to the doctor, prescription meds, glasses, hospital stays and surgery are basically all covered 100%. If you don't need the coverage for a full quarter, a part of the fees is returned.
You're missing his point. People say that spending money on warfare is good for the economy, because it pumps money in some sectors. It's true that this is good at least for those people working in those sectors, and for those people who can sell them stuff, and so on.
But it's still a poor investment; in the same way as buying a bridge that leads nowhere or having people dig holes and then fill them again. It buys you nothing of worth, pumping money into the economy is, basically, the only thing you gain. You do get the research and development results, but you could also get interesting results from R+D into bridge building or hole digging.
What constitutes a better investment is a matter of debate, but you'd want something where the end result of the work is something that is useful to society, instead of just the work process itself being useful. Education is something that is often brought up, as are all kinds of infrastructure works (power distribution, internet, roads, railways, sustainable energy).
That's assuming the police and justice system works fairly, a fairly controversial issue. If it doesn't, your participation in it is immoral. And, if anything, your civic duty would be to work on improving the system. Most will agree that this is true for very unliberal systems as in former Eastern Germany or China. Whether or not it's true for Western nations (and to what degree) is a matter of opinion or debate.
You can also be selective about what kinds of things you report. In China, I might report a thief to the police, but I wouldn't report a political dissenter, even though both may be illegal (and the latter may, in fact, be considered worse). In Germany, I'd probably report a thief, but I might not report a graffiti artist. Of course you also need to consider the punishment: I'd have moral qualms about testifying in certain situations in Japan, China, Iran, the USA, etc., because you still murder your prisoners. I don't want their blood on my hands.
Tapping a key is actually much slower when you're not actually touching the keyboard already, hardly an unusual scenario for most users and much of the time. And even when you're already working with the keyboard, yanking the cursor to the top right corner, an infinitely sized area, is a minimal effort and not much more involved than hitting a key. (However, you do lose your previous cursor position, which is a bigger issue, I'd argue; though not so much if you're switching windows anyway.)
What spectacular abuses of power has the House of Lords prevented? I'm curious; the Wikipedia page wasn't helpful.
I'm not convinced that a house of "betters" is a good element of a checks and balances systems. I'm pretty sure I think the majority of my "betters" in terms of peerage are people I disagree with vehemently on many issues and, overall, nutters. I'm not sure why you'd be unable to bribe them, either: sure, they're wealthy, but that just means bribing them is a tad more expensive. If they're sufficiently wealthy, chances are they're integrated well enough with corporate interests that bribing isn't necessary or that they're doing the bribing.
As for a meritocratic house, well, how would that work? Who gets to decide whose merits warrant inclusion in the house? In fact, who gets to decide what kinds of merits are considered: years of charity work, rescuing people from a burning building, personal wealth, impeccable hygiene, maybe Slashdot karma? I guess in the end we'd have to let people vote on who is "good" enough to be included (maybe you could make it a TV show or something...), which would make a fairly odd parallel system.
It sounds like terrorism to you because anything is called terrorism these days. The word serves no useful function anymore -- it probably never did -- and political conversations would be improved by avoiding it at all costs.
So basically you're saying the stuff they thought is harmless enough not to bury or process it is now, 25 years later, still pretty harmful? I'm so relieved. Not to mention the fact that the harmful radiation level is a huge point of contention. So after a month your cancer risk is elevated by X%. Is it increased by X/2% after 15 days? Or is it zero for 29 days then suddenly X%? What if you sit 40 people in a circle around it for a single day, how will the overall (cumulative) cancer risk be affected?
I got used to coding on widescreen displays. It's fine. Sure, 4:3 1200px high displays basically aren't made anymore. The upside is that 16:10 1200px high displays are widely available and affordable. I don't see it as losing vertical space but as gaining horizontal space. 1920 horizontal pixels mean that I can put two 1200px tall windows side-by-side. Or, if you've got dual 24" screens, one enormous 1920x1200 for something like an IDE on the main screen and two tall windows side by side on the other. Splitting the 1920 in 1/3 + 2/3 is also very nice, as 2/3s is just wide enough for a useful browser window.
Not a very good analogy. This is more like (car analogy time) hiring a tow car for a vehicle you don't own as a way of stealing it. The tow car driver facilitates the crime without being aware that they are doing anything illicit.
This is clearly appropriate for Slashdot since it's an intellectual property thing. And why on Earth would you think military stories have a place on Slashdot? Yikes.
The same law exists in Germany, although it's currently suspended. I doubt they're required to retain email headers from mail servers other than their own. I assume most people use SSL one way or another when talking to their mail provider, DPI won't do jack squat in that case. As for storing URLs, maybe it's enough to store IP addresses? You could do that without DPI.
I thought it was kind of underwhelming when compared to the elegant awesomeness that is wingsuit flying. No turbine needed. Those videos always give me the chills.
Who there gets to choose exactly what is "safe" to release and what isn't, and how are they qualified to judge what repercussions may result from released information?
Well, obiously, they get to decide. Broken down, Wikileaks mission is to publish the information they think should be published. Surely you can see that there's a logical difference between that and non-discriminately releasing all information.
You could argue that it amounts to the same thing, but I don't think that's reasonable: if you "leak" the PSN credit card information to them, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't post that stuff, the same goes for all kinds of other things, it's unlikely that they'd post celebrity porn videos, for instance. So, obviously, they do have some kind of editorial process.
Of course, you can make fairly sound arguments that their stated (or unstated) rules for releasing documents aren't good. You could also argue that their process is flawed, and as a result of that they release stuff (or fail to release stuff) without conforming with those rules. Not being able to judge the repercussions could be part of a flawed process, for instance.
You're missing the point. Confidentiality agreements necessarily involve agreeing to something the nature and scale of which you can't know at the time you agree to them. The point isn't whether or not you should have to face the consequences -- whatever, maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't, I don't really care to discuss it -- but rather that by it's very nature it's not an agreement any ethical person can agree to with complete confidence. That's very, very different from a typical contract involving, say, the exchange of goods and services.
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time? That's a fairly simpleminded way to look at it. You need to be aware of the consequences your actions might have, but you don't have to accept them, you're well within your rights to complain about treatment you perceive as unjust and fight for better treatment (even violently, I suppose, and I don't say this lightly). Dissidents in corrupt countries almost always run afoul of some kind of law. Whether or not this applies to Manning or other Wikileaks-related people is another matter.
For what it's worth, I don't have a fundamental problem with the confidentiality agreement: There is no real conflict with Wikileak's mission here, despite what many other people might claim in a kneejerk reaction. Wikileaks doesn't advocate the indiscriminate release of all information, and with any organisation dedicated to releasing confidential resources while protecting whistleblowers, secrecy is obviously a central fact of live. More so with an organisation that must be under tremendous, even violent, pressure from the US. And while I found the commercial aspects of the agreement a bit odious -- they talk about the financial damages caused by breaking the agreement -- it makes sense since, even though Wikileaks is not for profit, their media partners (e.g. the NYT, the Guardian, der Spiegel) are.
All that said, Wikileaks is more secretive of their own organisation than is good for them, and it would not have hurt to simply be open about this confidentiality agreement: they could have posted it on their websites for potential volunteers to see, for instance. Of coure, if they had done that, everybody would have started shouting about the supposed paradoxical situation of a whistleblowing organisation having secrets themselves (hurr durr) -- ie. what's happening now.
You know what you're getting into in legal terms, but you can't possibly know if you can justify keeping quiet before seeing the confidential information. I can easily imagine someone signing a confidentiality agreement in good faith only to find out that the information does warrant whistleblowing, despite the possibility of dire personal consequences.
No. Not sure what gave you that idea. Wikileaks doesn't indiscriminately release confidential information, they release information in order to uncover injustices, or information that should have been freely available in the first place. That's a judgement call, no doubt, and I assume you don't agree with their politics, but it's hardly unprecedented; basically, it's journalism.
Ok, I think I overstated my case: the teachers probably aren't hired by the churches, but they do get to fire them or bar them from teaching religion if they don't like them as evidenced by the gay religion teacher. I also imagine the churches are involved in the academic career of their teachers, so "unfit" persons might simply not get the degree required for teaching religion. Which makes sense since it's a denominational class and arguably the respective church organisation is the proper authority on who gets to teach its, er, teachings. But public school just isn't the right venue for it. (And obviously nobody should ever be fired for being gay but that's a separate issue.)
That said, religious fundamentalism isn't a big issue in Germany, and I know that most school teachers of religion have a very sane and modern approach to their religion as well as being tolerant towards others.
WTF, please don't bring up the religion classes in Germany as a good example. They're not. It's all kinds of messed up. The public is paying the teachers' salaries, while the churches get to pick them and pretty much tell them what to teach. A catholic teacher recently got fired because he is gay -- from a public school!
If anything, schools should teach comparative religious studies embedded in a class on ethics and philosophy and maybe even logic. No reason to segregate kids if you're doing that. If you want your kids to have a religious education and go to Sunday school, that's your business, but don't do it in school time and do it with your own money. And if your kid doesn't want to go to Sunday school, well, I guess they've made their choice?!
Slashdot Mirror
Anonymous Launches a WikiLeaks For Hackers
Anonymous Launches Hackers For WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks Launches Anonymous For Hackers
WikiLeaks Launches Hackers For Anonymous
Hackers Launch a WikiLeaks For Anonymous
Hackers Launch Anonymous For WikiLeaks
FWIW, approximately the same amount of money pays for full private coverage in Germany. (Most people pay far less, unemployed people pay nothing.) Visits to the doctor, prescription meds, glasses, hospital stays and surgery are basically all covered 100%. If you don't need the coverage for a full quarter, a part of the fees is returned.
You're missing his point. People say that spending money on warfare is good for the economy, because it pumps money in some sectors. It's true that this is good at least for those people working in those sectors, and for those people who can sell them stuff, and so on.
But it's still a poor investment; in the same way as buying a bridge that leads nowhere or having people dig holes and then fill them again. It buys you nothing of worth, pumping money into the economy is, basically, the only thing you gain. You do get the research and development results, but you could also get interesting results from R+D into bridge building or hole digging.
What constitutes a better investment is a matter of debate, but you'd want something where the end result of the work is something that is useful to society, instead of just the work process itself being useful. Education is something that is often brought up, as are all kinds of infrastructure works (power distribution, internet, roads, railways, sustainable energy).
That's assuming the police and justice system works fairly, a fairly controversial issue. If it doesn't, your participation in it is immoral. And, if anything, your civic duty would be to work on improving the system. Most will agree that this is true for very unliberal systems as in former Eastern Germany or China. Whether or not it's true for Western nations (and to what degree) is a matter of opinion or debate.
You can also be selective about what kinds of things you report. In China, I might report a thief to the police, but I wouldn't report a political dissenter, even though both may be illegal (and the latter may, in fact, be considered worse). In Germany, I'd probably report a thief, but I might not report a graffiti artist. Of course you also need to consider the punishment: I'd have moral qualms about testifying in certain situations in Japan, China, Iran, the USA, etc., because you still murder your prisoners. I don't want their blood on my hands.
Tapping a key is actually much slower when you're not actually touching the keyboard already, hardly an unusual scenario for most users and much of the time. And even when you're already working with the keyboard, yanking the cursor to the top right corner, an infinitely sized area, is a minimal effort and not much more involved than hitting a key. (However, you do lose your previous cursor position, which is a bigger issue, I'd argue; though not so much if you're switching windows anyway.)
What spectacular abuses of power has the House of Lords prevented? I'm curious; the Wikipedia page wasn't helpful.
I'm not convinced that a house of "betters" is a good element of a checks and balances systems. I'm pretty sure I think the majority of my "betters" in terms of peerage are people I disagree with vehemently on many issues and, overall, nutters. I'm not sure why you'd be unable to bribe them, either: sure, they're wealthy, but that just means bribing them is a tad more expensive. If they're sufficiently wealthy, chances are they're integrated well enough with corporate interests that bribing isn't necessary or that they're doing the bribing.
As for a meritocratic house, well, how would that work? Who gets to decide whose merits warrant inclusion in the house? In fact, who gets to decide what kinds of merits are considered: years of charity work, rescuing people from a burning building, personal wealth, impeccable hygiene, maybe Slashdot karma? I guess in the end we'd have to let people vote on who is "good" enough to be included (maybe you could make it a TV show or something...), which would make a fairly odd parallel system.
It sounds like terrorism to you because anything is called terrorism these days. The word serves no useful function anymore -- it probably never did -- and political conversations would be improved by avoiding it at all costs.
So basically you're saying the stuff they thought is harmless enough not to bury or process it is now, 25 years later, still pretty harmful? I'm so relieved. Not to mention the fact that the harmful radiation level is a huge point of contention. So after a month your cancer risk is elevated by X%. Is it increased by X/2% after 15 days? Or is it zero for 29 days then suddenly X%? What if you sit 40 people in a circle around it for a single day, how will the overall (cumulative) cancer risk be affected?
Thanks for that. Watching the PBS Frontline episode on that whole thing now.
I got used to coding on widescreen displays. It's fine. Sure, 4:3 1200px high displays basically aren't made anymore. The upside is that 16:10 1200px high displays are widely available and affordable. I don't see it as losing vertical space but as gaining horizontal space. 1920 horizontal pixels mean that I can put two 1200px tall windows side-by-side. Or, if you've got dual 24" screens, one enormous 1920x1200 for something like an IDE on the main screen and two tall windows side by side on the other. Splitting the 1920 in 1/3 + 2/3 is also very nice, as 2/3s is just wide enough for a useful browser window.
Not a very good analogy. This is more like (car analogy time) hiring a tow car for a vehicle you don't own as a way of stealing it. The tow car driver facilitates the crime without being aware that they are doing anything illicit.
This is clearly appropriate for Slashdot since it's an intellectual property thing. And why on Earth would you think military stories have a place on Slashdot? Yikes.
The same law exists in Germany, although it's currently suspended. I doubt they're required to retain email headers from mail servers other than their own. I assume most people use SSL one way or another when talking to their mail provider, DPI won't do jack squat in that case. As for storing URLs, maybe it's enough to store IP addresses? You could do that without DPI.
I thought it was kind of underwhelming when compared to the elegant awesomeness that is wingsuit flying. No turbine needed. Those videos always give me the chills.
Well, obiously, they get to decide. Broken down, Wikileaks mission is to publish the information they think should be published. Surely you can see that there's a logical difference between that and non-discriminately releasing all information.
You could argue that it amounts to the same thing, but I don't think that's reasonable: if you "leak" the PSN credit card information to them, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't post that stuff, the same goes for all kinds of other things, it's unlikely that they'd post celebrity porn videos, for instance. So, obviously, they do have some kind of editorial process.
Of course, you can make fairly sound arguments that their stated (or unstated) rules for releasing documents aren't good. You could also argue that their process is flawed, and as a result of that they release stuff (or fail to release stuff) without conforming with those rules. Not being able to judge the repercussions could be part of a flawed process, for instance.
You're missing the point. Confidentiality agreements necessarily involve agreeing to something the nature and scale of which you can't know at the time you agree to them. The point isn't whether or not you should have to face the consequences -- whatever, maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't, I don't really care to discuss it -- but rather that by it's very nature it's not an agreement any ethical person can agree to with complete confidence. That's very, very different from a typical contract involving, say, the exchange of goods and services.
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time? That's a fairly simpleminded way to look at it. You need to be aware of the consequences your actions might have, but you don't have to accept them, you're well within your rights to complain about treatment you perceive as unjust and fight for better treatment (even violently, I suppose, and I don't say this lightly). Dissidents in corrupt countries almost always run afoul of some kind of law. Whether or not this applies to Manning or other Wikileaks-related people is another matter.
For what it's worth, I don't have a fundamental problem with the confidentiality agreement: There is no real conflict with Wikileak's mission here, despite what many other people might claim in a kneejerk reaction. Wikileaks doesn't advocate the indiscriminate release of all information, and with any organisation dedicated to releasing confidential resources while protecting whistleblowers, secrecy is obviously a central fact of live. More so with an organisation that must be under tremendous, even violent, pressure from the US. And while I found the commercial aspects of the agreement a bit odious -- they talk about the financial damages caused by breaking the agreement -- it makes sense since, even though Wikileaks is not for profit, their media partners (e.g. the NYT, the Guardian, der Spiegel) are.
All that said, Wikileaks is more secretive of their own organisation than is good for them, and it would not have hurt to simply be open about this confidentiality agreement: they could have posted it on their websites for potential volunteers to see, for instance. Of coure, if they had done that, everybody would have started shouting about the supposed paradoxical situation of a whistleblowing organisation having secrets themselves (hurr durr) -- ie. what's happening now.
You know what you're getting into in legal terms, but you can't possibly know if you can justify keeping quiet before seeing the confidential information. I can easily imagine someone signing a confidentiality agreement in good faith only to find out that the information does warrant whistleblowing, despite the possibility of dire personal consequences.
No. Not sure what gave you that idea. Wikileaks doesn't indiscriminately release confidential information, they release information in order to uncover injustices, or information that should have been freely available in the first place. That's a judgement call, no doubt, and I assume you don't agree with their politics, but it's hardly unprecedented; basically, it's journalism.
Ok, I think I overstated my case: the teachers probably aren't hired by the churches, but they do get to fire them or bar them from teaching religion if they don't like them as evidenced by the gay religion teacher. I also imagine the churches are involved in the academic career of their teachers, so "unfit" persons might simply not get the degree required for teaching religion. Which makes sense since it's a denominational class and arguably the respective church organisation is the proper authority on who gets to teach its, er, teachings. But public school just isn't the right venue for it. (And obviously nobody should ever be fired for being gay but that's a separate issue.)
That said, religious fundamentalism isn't a big issue in Germany, and I know that most school teachers of religion have a very sane and modern approach to their religion as well as being tolerant towards others.
WTF, please don't bring up the religion classes in Germany as a good example. They're not. It's all kinds of messed up. The public is paying the teachers' salaries, while the churches get to pick them and pretty much tell them what to teach. A catholic teacher recently got fired because he is gay -- from a public school!
If anything, schools should teach comparative religious studies embedded in a class on ethics and philosophy and maybe even logic. No reason to segregate kids if you're doing that. If you want your kids to have a religious education and go to Sunday school, that's your business, but don't do it in school time and do it with your own money. And if your kid doesn't want to go to Sunday school, well, I guess they've made their choice?!
Even if you don't inform them, it seems very unlikely that they'd shoot at what are obviously US helos. Nothing to gain there and plenty to lose.
I'm pretty sure a 700 MHz ARM can't remotely handle 1080p in software, so, yeah.
Accessing Blu-Ray disks.