Many constitutional rights violations are felonies. Convicted felons can not hold a security clearance and can not work for an agency such as the NSA in any capacity.
You can't convict a government agency of a felony. Even if you could, you obviously can't rule that the NSA isn't allowed to work for the NSA.
Unless you actually name and convict AN INDIVIDUAL these penalties are fairly meaningless.
Also, only a prosecutor can bring up an individual on a criminal charge. The ACLU can file a civil suit against an individual, but that does not carry any criminal penalties.
Yup. A keyboard/mouse brings the interface to you. A touchscreen makes you go to the interface. A touchscreen also forced you to look at the same surface that you interact with, so either you'll be reaching or craning your neck, since your arms and eyeballs are separated by a considerable distance.
The interface works fine for media consumption, because then you're only using your fingers minimally and thus you can position the device for comfortable viewing, though probably less comfortable than watching your TV.
So, your point is that while minimum wage hasn't kept up with housing prices, neither has average wages either? That doesn't exactly sound like a good thing, but it generally seems to be true. Most people working today do not seem to expect the same standard of living that their parents had - certainly not in retirement at least.
Couldn't agree more. The elimination of labor doesn't necessarily mean that things shouldn't have a cost - unless we get to a point where NO resources are scarce - labor is just one type of resource.
I don't really care for the trend in society to focus on "creating jobs" for the sake of there being jobs. If a job is best done by a person then great, but if a job is better done by a machine, well, let the machine do the job and just pay a random unemployed person from some of the money saved by using the machine.
This is not money "sequestered" anywhere, it's value derived from the operations of a productive operation.
It is only a derivative in the sense that its value is related to the productivity of the operations. If I spend $10M on Apple stock, Apple has exactly $0 more available to it in order to conduct its business.
Granted, a high market cap does allow companies to issue new stock (which doesn't happen much), or to buy other companies with stock (which happens fairly often). When they buy another company with stock, exactly $0 of that money goes into the operation of the part of the company they just bought - it all goes to the investors in the original company.
Oh, and even during an IPO most of the money raised doesn't go towards operating the business - it goes to rewarding the previous owners.
Ultimately investing in a stock is much more about investing in your own future value than investing in the company's future value.
How is that not an improvement. If we could automate a job that only pays $10/hr, how is it not better for society to free somebody up to do something more valuable. Why should humans be employed so cheaply? Do we not value people's time?
It seems like a solution is to just pay basic income to everybody, and stop fighting the war to ensure that people continue to dig ditches.
You cannot have democracy (in the sense of a free society) and socialism in the same political system. What you can have is a tyranny of the majority and socialism, which soon degrades into a simple tyranny.
The US is socialist and hasn't degenerated into simple tyranny. Or, are your forgetting that we already have a minimum wage, public schools, medicare, etc?
The US just isn't a particular good implementation of socialism compared to a lot of other places - most of which aren't authoritarian either.
Oh, and define authoritarian... Does that happen to include free-speech zones and intercepting every text message on the planet?
Yup - I've known lots of people who have been living on the margins and this sort of thing is par for the course.
If you're scheduled 12-4 one day and you show up and it isn't busy, they might send you home after an hour. Then they want you back again at 6 because things picked up.
If they could get away with it they'd tell you to live on a cot in the break room and clock in whenever a customer walked into the store, and clock back out when they leave. The general trend is to push the risks of running a business onto the employees, which is obviously nice for the owners.
Heck, I know somebody who worked for a public school who was paid for the hours scheduled even if they had to stay later than the scheduled hours to complete their work. That sort of thing happens all over the place and is illegal, but it is truly ironic to see the government doing it.
I don't see a lot of unemployed people in Europe trying to move to the US. They'd be crazy to do it!
I think that if you're successful there is probably more opportunity in the US, but more stress as well. You'll do just fine in any country, but the sky is the limit in the US due to the libertarian mindset.
However, with that comes quite a bit of stress. If you lose your job in most of Europe it isn't fun, but you aren't going to die from a lack of medicine or living on the street. The safety net really helps out those who fall on bad luck. Oh, and the employment laws tend to prevent people from falling on bad luck in the first place. My employer tried to shut down a plant in Europe and took about 3 years to do it, which obviously gives everybody a fair bit of time to look for other jobs. You could argue that companies won't build in Europe, but they still do, because unlike in the US the government gives preferential treatment to local employers. If you want to sell your goods in most countries, you at least hire a token number of locals - which is why nobody else has the kinds of trade deficits you see in the US.
You see, the question is not "easy" The question is possible.
Yup. With automation we just don't have that much demand for people who can work on assembly lines or dig ditches. If you made the minimum wage $20/hr it would just become cheaper to have a bunch of robots make your burgers.
Sure, there are high-skill jobs out there, but automation and productivity gains are slowly eating into those jobs as well, and the bar is constantly being raised. You can't just show up to math and programming classes and pass the tests and expect to get hired by Google.
All of these are good things. I think what is broken is the expectation that everybody have a job in a world where machines can do all those tedious jobs that people used to do. Would we really be better off if half the population were back to being employed on farms?
So, just what field is a worker's paradise in the USA today? And what are the chances it will still be 10 years from now once you've established the training and experience to excel in it? Well-paying jobs in the US require a substantial development time before you can really break into them. That makes switching around as the economy shifts very difficult.
Oh, and if you don't win the genetic lottery then forget even trying for them. My employer fires plenty of people who are quite skilled at what they do - people who can just barely manage to graduate with a college degree don't have a chance.
keep in mind that there is a price point at which you maximize revenue.
Sure, if I work for 5 cents an hour there will be so much demand for my labor that I could get hired for 87,000 jobs and work a million hours per week, thus easily making more money than if I sold only a measly 40 hours of my time for $10/hr.
However, that logic works a lot better for selling widgets than for selling yourself...
Um.. I thought a neutron star was mainly neutronium, with a layer of degenerate matter on top of that, and maybe a layer of normal matter on top of that?
In general I think that destroying evidence should result in the assumption that they're hiding a worst case scenario. So I agree with the EFF. Destroying evidence = automatically guilty of accusations. Have a nice day.
The problem with this is that what is that even going to accomplish? Ok, the court rules that they illegally spied on US citizens. They tell the NSA that they have to stop doing that. The NSA says, "fine - we were never doing it in the first place, and we'll continue to not do it." Then they keep doing what they've been doing all along, which they define as not being illegal spying by whatever contortions they apply.
It isn't like the court is going to make somebody go to jail if the law is broken. If YOU spy on somebody illegally you'll get locked up for it. If the government does it, well, I guess the rules just must not have been clear enough.
Job experience might be a motivator, though, and anyway a living wage isn't exactly a luxury wage -- somebody who made $10 an hour might be perfectly willing to work the same job at $2 an hour to effectively push their income up and save up for that xbox or whatever.
I suspect workplace safety and conditions would generally go up as well. When it is a choice between cutting corners to not get fired or watching your kid starve to death, workers are faced with a tough choice. When the choice is between some disposable income and not losing your hands, the choice is easier. When the employer is only paying a few bucks an hour and the employee isn't desperate they also need to think about actually treating their good employees well to retain them.
They would have received the exact same treatment you advocate for Snowden - a trial of his peers under the justice system being run in the colonies at the time. The American justice system was irrelevant as there was no "legitimate" American government at the time.
What you argue for is like some whackos out West wanting to be tried by their local militia and not by the US government when they violate firearms laws or whatever.
They are designed to be installed and then you forget about them. So the "classic" mitigation technique doesn't work. This is a big problem.
Hell, I thought the "classic" mitigation schemata for embedded devices was to not have them networked at all, leaving them to run for years (decades?) on end.
Unfortunately, the guys at Buffalo who sold me my router haven't heard of this principle. It contains a version of openssl known to be vulnerable to Heartbleed, and it has yet to be patched. Previously I figured I didn't use anything that depended on the library, but now the article came out that it potentially could be used for EAP - I have no idea if this is the case but I'd prefer not to wait and find out.
Fortunately it runs DD-WRT which means that OpenWRT is almost certainly a practical option. I'll just have to flash it one of these days. Still, it isn't that old, so vendor support should still be available.
Sure, but I just checked and apparently the WZR-HP-G300NH2 I'm using does contain a vulnerable OpenSSL. There is no mention of whether it is used for EAP, though. They do promise an update within a few days - back in April. No sign of one yet.
Interesting that they mention videoconferences as well.
So, if you're at a meeting at work, the NSA is capturing that. If you stay off the grid at home, they can still figure out where you work. If they archive the footage then if you're interesting they could probably work out your name/etc from the meeting content. If not, they can just show up at work with your picture.
Yup. Much of what the NSA is doing is just taking stuff done by black hats all over the place and industrializing it.
If you hack into a bunch of PCs you'll eventually be traced, caught, and put in prison.
If the NSA hacks into a bunch of PCs and somebody notices and calls the FBI, they just get sent a national security letter telling them that if they talk about it to anybody else they'll be the ones going to jail.
When a PC is hacked it can be handled over to the rootkit management team, who runs an automated scan daily to make sure that all 14 of their back-doors into the system are still intact. If only 12 of them are working due to security patches then they can send that to the special care group who goes ahead and gets the working back-door count to the required level.
Then they can have another team that does nothing but extract data from rooted PCs, etc. Basically you divide-and-conqueror like any other professional IT endeavor. The dev team doesn't have to worry about figuring out what features to priorities, the dev team doesn't have to worry about backing up the servers, etc.
So, if you could have black-hats run like a Fortune 500 company you end up with the NSA.
They didn't turn themselves in because they would not have gotten a trial of their peers under the American justice system.
They would have received the exact same treatment you advocate for Snowden - a trial of his peers under the British justice system. The American justice system was irrelevant as there was no "legitimate" American government at the time.
What you argue for is like some whackos out West wanting to be tried by their local militia and not by the US government when they violate firearms laws or whatever.
I don't have a problem with cost-plus working out to a few more cents per GB in some areas - that just reflects the nature of the business. As you point out, the rates Comcast charges are FAR higher than that.
Also, last-mile providers should be required to offer coloc space for a cost-plus rate, with no charges for relaying from there to the last mile. That would allow competing ISPs to use their last mile connections in direct competition, and it could also be used for service providers like Netflix. In fact, I'd be in favor of just making that their entire business and forbid anybody with last-mile connections from actually providing Internet, Phone, or Video services. Their only business would be maintaining the last mile and selling Coloc space to others who provide services that run over it.
Once you've wired up the connection, turned on the equipment, and established connections to the other networks, you've spent what you're going to spend. If the connection is saturated 24/7 or not used at all, it still costs you the same to run it.
That is only true if every connection is point-to-point. I have a fiber optic connection to the central office. I bet the marginal cost to transmit 1Gbps 24x7 to the central office is zero. However, the problem is that this economy ends right there.
Suppose that central office serves 1000 customers. If we all transmit an average of 100kbps (with some bursting at 50Mbps and most idle), then all that CO needs is one fiber connection back to the next tier up. On the other hand, if we're all saturating our connections at 1Gbps each then that CO needs a whole trunk full of fiber up to the next tier and a rack of equipment on both sides to manage it. At the next level up you repeat, with data being consolidated until it leaves the network. Then if they want to dump 50Pbps onto their peers you can bet they're not going to get free peering agreements for that, unless all those users are downloading just as much in which case the peering is free but all the server-side ISP are spending a fortune on connectivity.
Since the costs are all in the last mile it makes sense for the telecom company to run out a cable capable of carrying excess capacity to each home. However, that doesn't mean that it is economical for everybody to saturate their connections.
The costs to actually use a connection are far lower than ISPs would like Congress to believe, but that doesn't mean that there is no cost if everybody saturates their links.
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Many constitutional rights violations are felonies. Convicted felons can not hold a security clearance and can not work for an agency such as the NSA in any capacity.
You can't convict a government agency of a felony. Even if you could, you obviously can't rule that the NSA isn't allowed to work for the NSA.
Unless you actually name and convict AN INDIVIDUAL these penalties are fairly meaningless.
Also, only a prosecutor can bring up an individual on a criminal charge. The ACLU can file a civil suit against an individual, but that does not carry any criminal penalties.
Yup. A keyboard/mouse brings the interface to you. A touchscreen makes you go to the interface. A touchscreen also forced you to look at the same surface that you interact with, so either you'll be reaching or craning your neck, since your arms and eyeballs are separated by a considerable distance.
The interface works fine for media consumption, because then you're only using your fingers minimally and thus you can position the device for comfortable viewing, though probably less comfortable than watching your TV.
So, your point is that while minimum wage hasn't kept up with housing prices, neither has average wages either? That doesn't exactly sound like a good thing, but it generally seems to be true. Most people working today do not seem to expect the same standard of living that their parents had - certainly not in retirement at least.
Couldn't agree more. The elimination of labor doesn't necessarily mean that things shouldn't have a cost - unless we get to a point where NO resources are scarce - labor is just one type of resource.
I don't really care for the trend in society to focus on "creating jobs" for the sake of there being jobs. If a job is best done by a person then great, but if a job is better done by a machine, well, let the machine do the job and just pay a random unemployed person from some of the money saved by using the machine.
That might work if wages actually kept up with inflation.
This is not money "sequestered" anywhere, it's value derived from the operations of a productive operation.
It is only a derivative in the sense that its value is related to the productivity of the operations. If I spend $10M on Apple stock, Apple has exactly $0 more available to it in order to conduct its business.
Granted, a high market cap does allow companies to issue new stock (which doesn't happen much), or to buy other companies with stock (which happens fairly often). When they buy another company with stock, exactly $0 of that money goes into the operation of the part of the company they just bought - it all goes to the investors in the original company.
Oh, and even during an IPO most of the money raised doesn't go towards operating the business - it goes to rewarding the previous owners.
Ultimately investing in a stock is much more about investing in your own future value than investing in the company's future value.
How is that not an improvement. If we could automate a job that only pays $10/hr, how is it not better for society to free somebody up to do something more valuable. Why should humans be employed so cheaply? Do we not value people's time?
It seems like a solution is to just pay basic income to everybody, and stop fighting the war to ensure that people continue to dig ditches.
You cannot have democracy (in the sense of a free society) and socialism in the same political system. What you can have is a tyranny of the majority and socialism, which soon degrades into a simple tyranny.
The US is socialist and hasn't degenerated into simple tyranny. Or, are your forgetting that we already have a minimum wage, public schools, medicare, etc?
The US just isn't a particular good implementation of socialism compared to a lot of other places - most of which aren't authoritarian either.
Oh, and define authoritarian... Does that happen to include free-speech zones and intercepting every text message on the planet?
Yup - I've known lots of people who have been living on the margins and this sort of thing is par for the course.
If you're scheduled 12-4 one day and you show up and it isn't busy, they might send you home after an hour. Then they want you back again at 6 because things picked up.
If they could get away with it they'd tell you to live on a cot in the break room and clock in whenever a customer walked into the store, and clock back out when they leave. The general trend is to push the risks of running a business onto the employees, which is obviously nice for the owners.
Heck, I know somebody who worked for a public school who was paid for the hours scheduled even if they had to stay later than the scheduled hours to complete their work. That sort of thing happens all over the place and is illegal, but it is truly ironic to see the government doing it.
Then why is everyone trying to move to the US?
I don't see a lot of unemployed people in Europe trying to move to the US. They'd be crazy to do it!
I think that if you're successful there is probably more opportunity in the US, but more stress as well. You'll do just fine in any country, but the sky is the limit in the US due to the libertarian mindset.
However, with that comes quite a bit of stress. If you lose your job in most of Europe it isn't fun, but you aren't going to die from a lack of medicine or living on the street. The safety net really helps out those who fall on bad luck. Oh, and the employment laws tend to prevent people from falling on bad luck in the first place. My employer tried to shut down a plant in Europe and took about 3 years to do it, which obviously gives everybody a fair bit of time to look for other jobs. You could argue that companies won't build in Europe, but they still do, because unlike in the US the government gives preferential treatment to local employers. If you want to sell your goods in most countries, you at least hire a token number of locals - which is why nobody else has the kinds of trade deficits you see in the US.
You see, the question is not "easy" The question is possible.
Yup. With automation we just don't have that much demand for people who can work on assembly lines or dig ditches. If you made the minimum wage $20/hr it would just become cheaper to have a bunch of robots make your burgers.
Sure, there are high-skill jobs out there, but automation and productivity gains are slowly eating into those jobs as well, and the bar is constantly being raised. You can't just show up to math and programming classes and pass the tests and expect to get hired by Google.
All of these are good things. I think what is broken is the expectation that everybody have a job in a world where machines can do all those tedious jobs that people used to do. Would we really be better off if half the population were back to being employed on farms?
So, just what field is a worker's paradise in the USA today? And what are the chances it will still be 10 years from now once you've established the training and experience to excel in it? Well-paying jobs in the US require a substantial development time before you can really break into them. That makes switching around as the economy shifts very difficult.
Oh, and if you don't win the genetic lottery then forget even trying for them. My employer fires plenty of people who are quite skilled at what they do - people who can just barely manage to graduate with a college degree don't have a chance.
keep in mind that there is a price point at which you maximize revenue.
Sure, if I work for 5 cents an hour there will be so much demand for my labor that I could get hired for 87,000 jobs and work a million hours per week, thus easily making more money than if I sold only a measly 40 hours of my time for $10/hr.
However, that logic works a lot better for selling widgets than for selling yourself...
Um.. I thought a neutron star was mainly neutronium, with a layer of degenerate matter on top of that, and maybe a layer of normal matter on top of that?
Neutronium is just one type of degenerate matter.
In general I think that destroying evidence should result in the assumption that they're hiding a worst case scenario. So I agree with the EFF. Destroying evidence = automatically guilty of accusations. Have a nice day.
The problem with this is that what is that even going to accomplish? Ok, the court rules that they illegally spied on US citizens. They tell the NSA that they have to stop doing that. The NSA says, "fine - we were never doing it in the first place, and we'll continue to not do it." Then they keep doing what they've been doing all along, which they define as not being illegal spying by whatever contortions they apply.
It isn't like the court is going to make somebody go to jail if the law is broken. If YOU spy on somebody illegally you'll get locked up for it. If the government does it, well, I guess the rules just must not have been clear enough.
Job experience might be a motivator, though, and anyway a living wage isn't exactly a luxury wage -- somebody who made $10 an hour might be perfectly willing to work the same job at $2 an hour to effectively push their income up and save up for that xbox or whatever.
I suspect workplace safety and conditions would generally go up as well. When it is a choice between cutting corners to not get fired or watching your kid starve to death, workers are faced with a tough choice. When the choice is between some disposable income and not losing your hands, the choice is easier. When the employer is only paying a few bucks an hour and the employee isn't desperate they also need to think about actually treating their good employees well to retain them.
They would have received the exact same treatment you advocate for Snowden - a trial of his peers under the justice system being run in the colonies at the time. The American justice system was irrelevant as there was no "legitimate" American government at the time.
What you argue for is like some whackos out West wanting to be tried by their local militia and not by the US government when they violate firearms laws or whatever.
Happy?
They are designed to be installed and then you forget about them. So the "classic" mitigation technique doesn't work. This is a big problem.
Hell, I thought the "classic" mitigation schemata for embedded devices was to not have them networked at all, leaving them to run for years (decades?) on end.
Unfortunately, the guys at Buffalo who sold me my router haven't heard of this principle. It contains a version of openssl known to be vulnerable to Heartbleed, and it has yet to be patched. Previously I figured I didn't use anything that depended on the library, but now the article came out that it potentially could be used for EAP - I have no idea if this is the case but I'd prefer not to wait and find out.
Fortunately it runs DD-WRT which means that OpenWRT is almost certainly a practical option. I'll just have to flash it one of these days. Still, it isn't that old, so vendor support should still be available.
Sure, but I just checked and apparently the WZR-HP-G300NH2 I'm using does contain a vulnerable OpenSSL. There is no mention of whether it is used for EAP, though. They do promise an update within a few days - back in April. No sign of one yet.
Interesting that they mention videoconferences as well.
So, if you're at a meeting at work, the NSA is capturing that. If you stay off the grid at home, they can still figure out where you work. If they archive the footage then if you're interesting they could probably work out your name/etc from the meeting content. If not, they can just show up at work with your picture.
Yup. Much of what the NSA is doing is just taking stuff done by black hats all over the place and industrializing it.
If you hack into a bunch of PCs you'll eventually be traced, caught, and put in prison.
If the NSA hacks into a bunch of PCs and somebody notices and calls the FBI, they just get sent a national security letter telling them that if they talk about it to anybody else they'll be the ones going to jail.
When a PC is hacked it can be handled over to the rootkit management team, who runs an automated scan daily to make sure that all 14 of their back-doors into the system are still intact. If only 12 of them are working due to security patches then they can send that to the special care group who goes ahead and gets the working back-door count to the required level.
Then they can have another team that does nothing but extract data from rooted PCs, etc. Basically you divide-and-conqueror like any other professional IT endeavor. The dev team doesn't have to worry about figuring out what features to priorities, the dev team doesn't have to worry about backing up the servers, etc.
So, if you could have black-hats run like a Fortune 500 company you end up with the NSA.
They didn't turn themselves in because they would not have gotten a trial of their peers under the American justice system.
They would have received the exact same treatment you advocate for Snowden - a trial of his peers under the British justice system. The American justice system was irrelevant as there was no "legitimate" American government at the time.
What you argue for is like some whackos out West wanting to be tried by their local militia and not by the US government when they violate firearms laws or whatever.
I happen to believe in trials. So did the founding fathers.
Then why didn't they turn themselves in at the nearest British courthouse for a trial? They were all wanted.
Now, you can argue about what the law should have been, but you can't argue that they were indeed breaking the laws as they were written at the time.
I don't have a problem with cost-plus working out to a few more cents per GB in some areas - that just reflects the nature of the business. As you point out, the rates Comcast charges are FAR higher than that.
Also, last-mile providers should be required to offer coloc space for a cost-plus rate, with no charges for relaying from there to the last mile. That would allow competing ISPs to use their last mile connections in direct competition, and it could also be used for service providers like Netflix. In fact, I'd be in favor of just making that their entire business and forbid anybody with last-mile connections from actually providing Internet, Phone, or Video services. Their only business would be maintaining the last mile and selling Coloc space to others who provide services that run over it.
Once you've wired up the connection, turned on the equipment, and established connections to the other networks, you've spent what you're going to spend. If the connection is saturated 24/7 or not used at all, it still costs you the same to run it.
That is only true if every connection is point-to-point. I have a fiber optic connection to the central office. I bet the marginal cost to transmit 1Gbps 24x7 to the central office is zero. However, the problem is that this economy ends right there.
Suppose that central office serves 1000 customers. If we all transmit an average of 100kbps (with some bursting at 50Mbps and most idle), then all that CO needs is one fiber connection back to the next tier up. On the other hand, if we're all saturating our connections at 1Gbps each then that CO needs a whole trunk full of fiber up to the next tier and a rack of equipment on both sides to manage it. At the next level up you repeat, with data being consolidated until it leaves the network. Then if they want to dump 50Pbps onto their peers you can bet they're not going to get free peering agreements for that, unless all those users are downloading just as much in which case the peering is free but all the server-side ISP are spending a fortune on connectivity.
Since the costs are all in the last mile it makes sense for the telecom company to run out a cable capable of carrying excess capacity to each home. However, that doesn't mean that it is economical for everybody to saturate their connections.
The costs to actually use a connection are far lower than ISPs would like Congress to believe, but that doesn't mean that there is no cost if everybody saturates their links.