Half of which's results will be one discussion forum or another where people who are not smug asses thoughtfully took a moment to answer a person's question.
You had time to post this self-important drivel, surely you have time to answer the question as well -- but you elected for the drivel. And you think that somehow says something about the people asking the question rather than about you?
Are the rules the same as they've always been, or have they changed?
A little bit of both. Fillibusters have always existed in this country; they're something we brought over from England with us, along with things like sovereign immunity. However, as others have said, they used to be actual filibusters: You stopped the work of the Senate by exploting the rule that you held the floor as long as you held the floor (kept speaking, kept standing, etc), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style. Somewhere along the way--and I really don't know where--it became you simply saying "I'd like this bill to require 60 votes instead of 50 please!" and going back home to see how it turns out. It's both the same and different.
But I think the real change is the invention of career politicians and the cementing of political parties. Political parties have pretty much always existed, but more and more they have become enshrined by law. Third parties have difficulty getting into debates or onto ballots and are decried as a "wasted vote," which wasn't always the case. The party in power is in charge of drawing district lines, leading to things like gerrymandering. Most states in the union perpetuate closed primaries, encouraging the polarization of their candidates to appeal to the extreme fringes of their own party and not the moderate climate of the nation as a whole. The nation's political makeup is essentially determined, year after year, by a handful of in-play districts across the nation; almost everybody else is safe, as evidenced by a re-election rate historically of about 90% (true even in the Democrats' "sweeping win" in 2008; I haven't looked at the 2010 Republican results that closely yet. I suspect it will be close be slightly under.) Each party determines its own leadership, right down to the committee assignments -- meaning that even if by some miracle an independent did win, or he turned independent during a term, which is what we see far more often, he still needs to choose which party he wants to caucus with and whether he is one of the most powerful men in the Senate or one of the most impotent depends on one of the two big parties anyway, which you can be sure leads to quite a bit of deal-making behind closed doors.
"Politician" is now a job description rather than a public service. These people are no longer ordinary citizens, still working their fields or selling their wares. Their entire job is politics, the vast majority of their working time spent trying to get re-elected, a little with their staff and with their party scheming on how best to screw the other side, and a handful of time actually voting or conferencing or debating--you know, getting things done.
In that sense, things have changed. But the problem is not that it has become unworkable--the problem is actually that it has become too workable. Republicans consistently walk in lock-step. Democrats usually walk in lock-step. The outcome of bills are usually known well before the votes are taken, and most of it is known before the whip even goes around asking people how they intend to vote. Congress--the Senate in particular--was never meant to work quickly, but with a two-party system and a divided nation we can typically count on any disputed bill already having somewhere around 40-45% votes for and 40-45% votes against, leaving the outcome pending not only a small number of people, but in reality whether or not that small number of people are going to continue walking in lock-step with their party. Nobody has to spend time convincing others to vote for them (unless by that we mean coercing others to vote for them either by threats or by promises to vote their way on something else or include some money for such-and-such), nobody has to spend time convincing others that he's right, and bills succeed more by the combination of which party is in power and which party supports it than actual merit.
If you made the same comment about how 'security through obscurity works' in the context of OS security, you would be laughed off Slashdot. Why would general blocking of sites be any different?
Because getting your box owned is a binary state. You're owned or you're not, and one person doing it is one too many and more than enough. Even if security through obscurity were to achieve a 90% success rate, it's a tool in the toolbox but not good enough to rely on.
Blocking websites is not binary. If you can block 10% of people from accessing content you don't want them to access, that's 10% better success than you woke up with. Geeks are a relatively small part of the population, so making something harder is a victory even if making something impossible is unobtainable. Whether they can make it sufficiently hard to justify the costs of pursuing or the opportunity costs of tying the courts up with this sort of nonsense, or even whether or not the bill would pass constitutional muster in a challenge are all open questions and much more difficult to answer. I have my doubts, to be certain.
I don't know why he went so far down the weird road, or why he strayed from HIV which was the perfect example
Are you really saying that if somebody asks if you have AIDs and you say no, and sleep with them, that it should not be illegal? It's not something one would necessarily find out, even during a long relationship, if the other party does not admit to it -- nor am I prudish enough about sex to suggest it should only be had in those circumstances.
I don't know that I would call it rape--I'm not particularly opposed to the idea, just haven't given it a ton of thought--but it should definitely be illegal. Particularly if you actually infect them. AIDS is not the sure-fire death sentence it used to be, but it is extremely serious and life-threatening and a seriously disproportionate number of people will die for it. We can call it some type of rape, since the consent was predicated on a lie; we can call it some kind of fraud, since it was obtained on a lie; we can call it some sort of reckless homicide, since you weren't trying to infect them but very well may have.
In fact, after thinking about it in the course of this post I support the rape charge for it. I think you committed a crime regardless of whether or not they are infected and regardless of whether or not they die from it, and the idea that the crime should change a decade or more down the road based on what happens doesn't sit well. It should be rape, period, and the fact that you could have infected or did infect them with HIV should be considered an aggravating circumstance at sentencing.
Re:Have two forms of flying, safe and unsafe.
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TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree, 9/11-style attacks were not a problem as of 9/12.
That said, an "absolutely no screening" line really is a horrendously stupid idea. Why WOULDN'T they attack it? Pack a bomb in the 'ole carry-on. Or fuck, just a pistol. One attack is all it would take to completely decimate the idea of "no security" flying and probably, for no real good reason whatsoever, once again devastate the airline industry as a whole. Which is exactly what the terrorists want; death tolls are well and good, but billions of dollars of economic harm as a result of them? Yes please.
I don't know why people always insist on the extremes. The government forms the TSA who immediately runs to the full body scanning, pat down, toothpaste in a plastic bag, behavioral profiling police state security theater nonsense side, so other people feel somehow justified in going to the batshit crazy, guaranteed to be attacked, just playing the odds that somebody else dies before I do while this minor convenience continues to exist side. I assure everybody: There is a medium.
The body scans can take a hike. I have no problems with the bomb detection devices, particularly since we already bought them. The attempt at some quasi-psychic behavioralist profiling police squad can go. The reinforced cockpit doors and requirements they be secured during flight can stay. Limitations on liquids can go. Guns in the hands of (properly trained) pilots and air marshals can stay. Fondling the three year old girl is straight out. Hell, I'll even let them keep the taking off the shoes thing because while it's pretty stupid, it's just not that big of a deal.
Practical security measures that actually might have a chance of stopping something real -- that's what I'm looking for. An apparent goal of somehow alternating every other seat on a plane with an armed national guardsman to show how tough and secure we are... not so much. Sensible policy. On both sides. It's not asking that much.
I can appreciate the cynacism, but in this case I just don't see any insight behind it.
2) The democratic party has a long standing unspoken agreement with the entertainment industry.
Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories aside, the Democrats will support such a bill. So will the Republicans. Just as an example, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was passed in the Republican Senate by a margin of... there was no margin. It was passed by a voice vote with unanimous consent. It was passed in the House on the very same day, again by a voice vote. A few minutes of digging didn't turn up the margin there, but if they didn't even think it was worth debating enough to show up you can bet it was substantial if not also unanimous.
The Democrats are cozy with the entertainment industry as the entertainment industry. The Republicans are cozy with them as a big business where money can be made.
Which brings me back to...
The democratic congress is a lame duck congress. They are looking for new jobs. They have nothing to lose, and the senate is still democrat controlled.
So what? Not only does control not matter one lick, but neither does it being a lame duck session. A lame duck session only matters when either 1) somebody who couldn't have supported it for fear of backlash now can or 2) when this Congress would pass it and the other wouldn't.
The bill will suffer no lack of support from either side. Painting it as some sort of democratic conspiracy just makes you look like a twat.
The supreme court will bend over backwards to support this measure, and pull the constitution through a knothole backwards to make it fit, for similar interest reasons.
If you're accusing the Supreme Court of corruption I think you'd better offer something more concrete than "similar interest reasons." The entire setup of the Supreme Court was to avoid politics and influence peddling. That's not to say it fully succeeded, but the burden of proof is clearly on you and all you've offered by way of evidence is some sort of backward tie-in to a corrupt democratic conspiracy to exploit a lame duck congress to satisfy interests they're in bed with on behalf of members no longer employed in Congress. That's pretty fucking out there, even for conspiracy theories.
It might pass the Supreme Court, it might not. I honestly don't know; this is where I have the most hope of it being stopped. Still, the Court leans conservative and conservatives tend to let Congress have their way.
For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you about #5; the reason the US pushes so hard for IP protection is because things related to IP are pretty much our only exports at this point.
But again you take it too far. According to you, we're to simultaneously believe that the US economy would collapse if bills like this were not allowed to pass (something I can actually get somewhat on board with) -- and yet that it is the improper thing for the Congress to do and thus we should send angry mobs to Washington (and Hollywood though I fail to see why) and go vigilante-style and guillotine some bitches until we get a government more to our liking, that will acquiesce and allow the economy to collapse. And you present that as the responsible course of action.
Yes, this bill will pass -- overwhelmingly. We will get "ridden, and ridden, and ridden" to the tune of IP laws actually getting enforced. And all we'll have to show for defeating these IP-related bills is an economy not plunged into something that makes the Great Depression look cozy. Woe is us.
This particular bill may be a horrible idea. Enforcing IP protection is not. If Congress is only going to understand half of that, I'm glad it's the latter. The reality is it will probably pass and actions that will simply under the label of censorship will probably be slapped down by the courts while Slashdot gets an extra few years of income from stories about how evil people protecting movies and music are.
It would be nice if we could just say, "well, obviously this corporation could not possible have believed it would prevail on the merits, and was just throwing money at the problem, so that's clearly abuse of process," but the standard of proof for intent is yet another obstacle that brings with it a host of other problems.
We can say that, and indeed had he done so he probably would have prevailed at trial. The problem is that the people he should have sued--the corporation, ie, the people who actually lied--were bankrupt and he didn't feel it worth the time to sue them. He's probably right. But rather than go "this sucks but there's nothing I can do," he instead decided to look around for somebody who did have some money he could sue for and he went after their lawyers.
Now you have an entirely different ballgame. Not because of some "judges protect lawyers" conspiracy, but because you're now suing a tangential party. Lawyers are their clients' advocates and they operate on an assumption of good faith. Proving the client lied is not enough; now he has to prove the lawyers knew, when they knew, and that they then acted in bad faith to the courts by continuing the case either without informing the respondent or by continuing a case that no longer had merit with the lies exposed -- all of which are tricky.
He knows he sued the wrong people, he says as much in the summary when he mentions the corporation went bankrupt. He just seems to believe that their wrongdoing was also their lawyers' and is acting like a petulant child when two separate courts disagreed with him. What happened to him sucks. The fact that somebody can get away with it because he did it from behind the veil of a corporation sucks, and is, in my mind, the real issue to be gleaned from this situation and addressed. The ruling I'm fine with.
every one of those low priority bugs could be driving off a user or a customer at this point, had they not been fixed.
Driving people off from their products which are free or ad-supported?
Even if we were to grant your premise that it's happening and in some way significant, that's a lot of money. If 1,000 people per month would have left, and I think that's very much on the high end, you're paying $80 per user retention. Based on ad revenue, how long is that going to take to recover? Months and months during which you are still paying out more money for other non-bugs people are reporting so you can have the honor of trying to recoup your costs to them?
But it's worse than that -- a lot of what Google does isn't about your specific value to them, but rather your value as an aggregate. Google Voice is a great example; free US calls is going to cost them some bucks, far more than each of those customers brings as their share of some sort of advertising revenue, but there is value to them because they can use all those free users to tune their speech-to-text algorithms, algorithms that then show up on YouTube and suddenly allow the beginnings of search inside of videos by their contents. Something that, if done fairly well, is going to attract all sorts of searchers and bump up advertising revenue appropriately. Losing a few thousand of the millions of users its various services have is even less significant in that perspective.
While I couldn't find any sort of list of "bugs we paid but think are stupid," we can infer a bit from their clarifications. XSS attacks on sandboxed domains; URL redirectors; vulnerabilities in applications they have just purchased and may not even continue -- these don't sound like the sort of problems users are leaving over except perhaps the latter, and I'm not sure Google is crying to the tune of $80,000 a month that people are leaving a service it hasn't even decided if it wants to keep. Hell, if they wanted to throw away $80,000 a month on things of questionable value they could hire 12 new $80,000 a year employees and assign them to... you know, whatever. Or nothing. Might have the same ultimate value.
Inciting violence is something that I do. I did it or not; it's not something dependent on how many people might like to comply, and it's plenty clear just from his wording that it was a joke. I mean really, if I were trying to get somebody to kill you do you really think I would choose stoning and then claim I will not tell a human rights group who opposes it? How about not telling the fucking police? You know, the ones who are going to arrest you and put you in jail for decades if not the rest of your life instead of the people who would issue a sternly-worded press release about how terrible stoning is? And really, the idea that somebody would want to stone a journalist to death and yet be waiting for some Twitter posting to give them the go-ahead is ridiculous. If police want to charge him in some complicated murder-for-hire scheme with a Twitter post go-ahead trigger, then do it -- but you and I both know they would never, ever be able to meet that burden of proof even in today's "they charged him so he must be guilty!" climate.
This is nothing more than the ever-increasing population of idiots who feel that the only thing that matters is the letter of the law and not actual justice. No justice is served by arresting this man, much less prosecuting and--god forbid--convicting him, but that's exactly what some people want for no other reason than "will somebody stone to death" is technically a request that somebody stone to death. Ignore the context, ignore all the following elements that make it clearly a joke, ignore everything else because damn it, we have to be tough on even ridiculous perceptions of the possibility of crime!
I thought this insanity was confined to the US, but apparently I was wrong.
I think that is an oversimplified analysis. The reality is that almost anybody who likes you enough to want to give you a gift can probably select one that you will love given the right amount of time and money, but those are not always available.
We have a lot of trouble in my immediate family with gifts, and the major problem is that we're all fairly old (I'm the youngest at 27). That means there isn't a ton of things we want in general, and also that most of what we do want tends toward the expensive side. Everybody knows I'm a hardcore computer geek, but nobody's going to buy me a new computer for my birthday and there's only so many people you can tell you need blank media or something tangential before you just run out of the smaller gift ideas. "Do you want any books?" "None of them are coming out around my birthday." "Video games?" "None of them are coming out around my birthday." (And frankly I wouldn't want them to spend $50 on my birthday anyway; it's just not that serious an event for me.) On and on down the list of things I like but no particular hits.
So really, they're forced to try. My aunt used to be notorious for buying video games when I was younger, but they were always terrible. I didn't hold it against her or anything; she certainly tried and she understood that "video game" was likely something I would enjoy, but it was a 'bad gift" in the sense that it wasn't anything I wanted and even trying it turned it out badly. It's not for a lack of knowing me.
As far as being selfish and not caring about the person, that's also wrong in many cases. I've never once complained about a gift I got, whether I loved it or not. I know that people are trying and they care for me and I care for them. But let's be honest here: You like a gift or you don't and it has nothing to do with how you feel about the person. I'm not saying you go "OH MY GOD, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?! THIS IS THE WORST GIFT I HAVE EVER RECEIVED!" even if that were the truth, but smiling and nodding and being polite about a gift you're really indifferent toward at best because you DO care about that person's feelings does not mean you suddenly like the gift.
And really, if you, as a gift-giver, would be so hurt that you'd prefer somebody keep a gift they didn't want rather than get something they would like better, you probably have some insecurity problem or you are one of the people who really DOES fit into category A. If that can be done while simultaneously sparing your feelings for a gift you tried on within your time and budget constraints, so much the better.
First, let me say that I do NOT think that she is deliberately trying to get absurd rewards. I just don't buy that argument. But playing devil's advocate and agreeing with it...
A yo-yo of decisions on the same case does not make sense in the record books.
That's the point. The Supreme Court takes cases based largely on two criteria: First, that there is an important constitutional issue to settle. And second, that lower courts have arrived at different decisions. If every court that has ever heard a case agrees on how it should be handled, there's little reason to step in -- unless they want to reverse it. I don't see any reason that lower appeals courts wouldn't also consider cases along such lines.
This is one case with one set of facts, and yet four different outcomes. On the one hand you have a couple of jury decisions obviously attempting to apply the law, but arriving at pretty wildly different decisions. $1.92MM is over 30% higher than $1.5MM just in percentage terms, and almost half a million dollars higher in absolute terms. And then of course the first jury with a $222K verdict that is nearly an order of magnitude different. That alone is an indication that the law may be too vague and require clarification, either by the Congress or the judiciary.
At the same time we have judges raising constitutional concerns. An award that is "monstrous and shocking" is essentially code for "in violation of the Eighth Amendment," and his reduction took the damages from the highest the case has ever seen to four times less than the lowest jury award. That's significant. So startling, in fact, that the RIAA offered to let her settle for half that ($25,000) if she asked the judge to vacate his verdict -- it is so vastly different, in short, that it has the RIAA worried it might be used as precedent.
These are all extremely intriguing things for appeal, and for a higher court to step in and go "alright, wait a minute here; something obviously is not right." If they do so, and if they agree that following the law leads to unconstitutional awards, or even that the law is so ambiguous that justice is not being served leaving it so wildly in the jury's hands, it may end up with the law being struck down.
On the other hand, if you acknowledge that remote kill is sometimes necessary then 2, 3 and potentially 5 are counterproductive.
Presumably, the users installed and want the application in question because it is installed on their phone, and the negative effects are not noticable, or they would have uninstalled the application themselves. Think of reasons Microsoft might (legitimately) want to remote kill an application: Something that is stealing identities, violating privacy, etc; something that is causing harm, either to the handset itself, the networks it runs on or other hosts (botnet/DDOS style, intentional or otherwise). Honestly that's all I can think of. Even your example of PHI (which I had to look up by the way!) doesn't necessarily make sense, unless companies have their own killswitches or Microsoft plans on doing it on their behalf, and the kills can be device-targeted -- any of which might be true, but I didn't see evidence of it from the article. Ether way, if somebody is trying to kill an app with PHI on your phone it's probably because you are no longer employed there; it's not like you'd be in surgery with your patient and go to look up anesthesia allergies and find the information is no longer on your phone.
In either case I'm not sure "nahhh, I'll keep it" is a valid option. If you're harming somebody else, your opinion on whether or not to keep such an app is irrelevant. If you're harming your own hardware, the only reason I can see that you would keep it anyway is you don't believe it -- essentially punishing lack of technical expertise or naiveté ("I don't SEE my phone hardware melting..."). Similar with some sort of privacy-violating trojan. "This fart app is so cool that I don't care if it's trying to steal my bank login details!" isn't something I would consider valid. I mean, they would definitely DESERVE whatever happened to them but it isn't a case I would design the feature around.
#4 is similar to what they're doing, except that "sync" is "checks in automatically for updates" and thus not requiring user intervention. Any user intervention that is required simply brings us back of the points above.
Your concerns about security are valid and is something that definitely needs to be addressed in the feature planning stage, but I don't think it is an impossible problem to solve. Beyond that, if you don't trust Microsoft to only use the feature for valid reasons then you should probably buy a phone with another operating system.
That there is any carrier lockdown at all is a pretty hilarious illustration of just how much some companies don't get it.
If I'm in the market for a smartphone, and I don't choose the iPhone, lockdown is likely a major factor for the decision; it's one of the major things Android has going for it over the iPhone. A carrier making the non-locked-down phone locked down just makes me giggle.
utilitarianism can be used to justify evil things including letting a few starve so everyone else can live
Which is not evil, since by your wording the choices are "let a few starve so everyone else can live" or "let everyone starve because you're not willing to let anybody die first." I'm not saying it would be easy to decide (personally or from a ethical system standpoint) who should live and die in such a circumstance, but it is hardly a failure of utilitarianism.
The major problem with utilitarianism is actually fairly obvious: "The greatest good for the greatest number" is really hard to define. Just as an example: Let's say there is you and four of your friends. Is it the greatest good for the greatest number to kill you and distribute all of your positions evenly among the other four people? Four people are very happy and one isn't, but the one that "isn't happy" is actually dead --which is quite a lot of harm to balance against a relatively small amount of good. But there's really nothing in the system that says "+4 -1" is any less a valid way to approach the ethicality of the situation than "+(4 * 10) -(1 * 1000000)." There's nothing in the system--even though I think we all know it is wrong--to cause you not to question, "well, how much money are we talking about here?" or "how poor are my friends?" or something like that.
A lot of the problems, by the way, are solved with what's called "rule utilitarianism," which basically removes consideration of the individual act and steps back to creating a rule based on how much good or ill is caused by the rule. It would stomp on the "murder-for-profits" thing if for no other reason than once they kill you, there nothing stopping them from following the same act utilitarianism that led them to do so to pick and kill another person off. In other words, if everybody were allowed to operate under that rule the greatest good for the greatest number is not achieved.
Utilitarianism negates free will
It has nothing to do with free will, it's simply a system for deciding morality or ethicality. How you ultimately act can be guided by a system of morality but it isn't decided by it. If utilitarianism negates free will, then so do laws against murder if I really, really want to kill somebody.
Neither of the things you said has anything to do with statistics, they're simply an opinion based on opinions about a number, and the latter one doesn't even have a sound basis in reality.
For starters, right from the summary: Clapper's statement was made during his confirmation hearing. Do you know what a confirmation hearing is? It means it wasn't his job at the time, making your comment completely inane without even evaluating the sentiment.
Second, even if he said it again today and it were completely true, not knowing what every intelligence agency in the nation is doing may or may not be his failure. It may, for starters, be a statement of the impossibility of the task; even with all the information at his disposal, chances are there's no way he can know everything each of 1,200 different agencies is doing because they are doing, well, apparently $80 billion worth of things. He may know the overall strategies or even the major tasks or operations going at a particular moment, but that simply leaves a statement like "[nobody] in the world knows what they're all doing" up to subjective determinations of what "what they're all doing" means. It may also be because he does not have the authority needed or that he is not receiving the cooperation needed to do all aspects of his job. This isn't like corporate America where if you stall or disobey your boss he can simply fire you. Most of the top positions, while ostensibly reporting to the DNI, are Senate-confirmed. He can't, for example, walk up to the CIA Director and say "I've had enough of your insubordination, you're fired!" no matter how much he might want to.
Third, Feinstein's comments have nothing to do with her fitness to be on the committee. "The last decade" was dominated by 8 years of Republican control, meaning that even if she disapproved of what was going on she was a minority voice. It's also worth noting that while such committees do have considerable power (but not necessarily authority) over budget matters in their areas, that the House and not the Senate controls the purse-strings and that there are so many budgetary loopholes and exceptions that money could easily be moved around from discretionary spending accounts that obfuscate the true expenditures, until a specific report that deals specifically with realities and not budgets is released.
And need I point out again that neither comment has anything to do with statistics or how they can be spun multiple ways?
I'm going to say this again, and more clearly and forcefully: it is immoral to trample on one person's rights because you think other people will be somehow better off if you do so
You forgot the "in my opinion" part. Actually you didn't forget it; you specifically left it out in order to give the appearance that yours in the only correct opinion and paint anybody who disagrees with you as immoral. That takes the right to have one's own opinion to a new level of arrogant douchebaggery.
You specifically mention utilitarianism in your post, so you're not ignorant to the fact that there are other systems of morals and ethics than you hold. The fact that you rejected them does not make them invalid or a poor argument. Saying what amounts to "explain how doing something for the greater good is right, and don't bother mentioning any theories of right and wrong that espouse the greater good over the individual interest" just makes you look like an idiot pretending to be interested in the debate while telling the opposition that you don't care what they have to say. And more insufferably, considering such nonsense, non-argument to be some sort of intellectual victory.
The fact of the matter is, those people will not be better off as we all suffer when rights are sacrificed for convenience or good feelings.
Hardly a fact at all.
For starters, you're simply assuming that the ability to spend as much money as you want influencing an election is a right. Most of the countries of the world that hold real, actual elections disagree with you, making it pretty clearly not some sort of universal, "God-given" right. At best it is a right granted in the US, and that is the subject of the debate meaning you're begging the question.
If it is a right, then I should be able to outright bribe a politician. After all, money = speech = right, right? No? Okay, how about threatening him instead: "Vote yes for bill 802 or my $150,000 in campaign contributions goes to your opponent." I'm not buying his vote, he's free to vote how he pleases. Still no? Okay, I've got it. I won't say it, I'll simply call his office and say "I've donated a lot of money to this campaign and if you don't vote yes on 802, I would have a really hard time justifying why." Politicians live in a world where you can't say what you mean. He'll certainly get my point.
Why should ANY of these behaviors be okay? Why should the idea that I have $150,000 to throw around guaranteeing that politicians vote the way I want them to or find themselves jobless be acceptable? Why should votes go to the highest bidders if we're going to pretend we have a true republic instead of an aristocracy? Hell, the only reason to stop me from doing any of this is because other people will be somehow better off. Obviously the inability to buy legislation I want leaves me worse off.
The fact is, all of this is utilitarianism. It is the recognition that my interests are no more important than somebody else's interests, regardless of how much money I have or they have. The recognition that my vote is not worth more because it is backed by more money. The recognition that the fundamental fairness of the system is more important than my right to spend my money on whatever I want without exception. All the desire to get money out of the political system is is one more step in that direction.
As far as your original post about "individuals pooling their resources," sometimes it is. More often it's a sham, claiming to be a random assortment of individuals in order to bypass other campaign finance laws. "Concerned Voters for Bill 802" sounds perfectly lovely, except when your realize that its chairman is Karl Rove or Al Gore. If you ever realize it. But hey, at least you know that organization is for Bill 802. It gets far worse when they have no issue, toeing the line of illegality in order to dump money for a candidate's campaign, ra
Part of the problem is that these things lack definitions, especially ones that are easy enough to use that you can actually fit people into.
For example, what I want from the government fiscally is to stop playing around with deficits and debt. I understand that sometimes things happen. I understand that, for example, about a decade ago some planes smashed into some buildings and two wars ensued* and lots of other changes were made and these things couldn't have been predicted in the budget set the previous year. I don't think "oops, can't help, it's not in the budget!" is the appropriate response in that situation, but at the same time I think the default position should be not to run a deficit. And in the event that we do create some debt either because of some emergency or because our economy didn't perform the way we expected it to and we brought in less tax revenue than expected, it should be a consideration in future budgets -- that there should be some sort of plan for paying it down. Again, I'm not saying the next year budget has to absorb it all but it should be factored in as a debt that needs repayment. And as much as I don't want to pay more taxes, and I suspect increased efficiency and some program/spending cuts could cover the difference, if it means more taxes then it means more taxes.
Does that make me liberal or conservative fiscally? Does it change your opinion if I say that I also think we could spend less money overall? Does it change (again) if I say that one of the major places I think we could get some money from without a serious impact is national defense spending? (We spend more than the rest of the world combined. Surely we can scale back, if nothing else, to "as much as the rest of the world combined" without some catastrophic consequence.) I'm open to many other suggestions as well.
If I had to pick I'd say I was fiscally conservative, but I certainly don't fit the traditional definitions. I wouldn't fit in with the Republicans or Tea Party-ers, even just on this one issue. I don't (necessarily) think tax cuts are the solution to everything, nor do I necessarily think that government needs to get smaller -- just that it needs to pay its bills. On the other hand I would certainly be willing to cut some programs and save some money and if that means tax cuts, then woohoo!
Now socially is a completely different matter. I'm extremely liberal on social matters. There is very little in terms of social policy that I feel the conservatives do right. Politically? Independent in that I belong to no party nor do I vote for one party by default, but if I have to choose a candidate that agrees with me fiscally or socially--and I often do--I'll almost certainly pick socially.
* Maybe they shouldn't have, but they did. Not trying to get into a debate on the wars here.
It can be. It really all depends on what else they decide not to take your hard-earned money for donating to.
Tax break for donating to First Baptist Church of Podunk but not ASPCA or ACLU or a non-religious battered women's shelter or something like that? It may not be promotion of a religion but it certainly smacks of promotion of religion. The distinction between "donate money and we'll take less tax dollars" and "we'll take your tax dollars and donate money" is fairly small.
That said, I suspect the reason the practice has survived as long as it has is because they play it fairly loose in terms of what they consider tax-deductible. I also don't believe it's because they want to, I believe it's because they know if they didn't that they would be smacked down by the courts.
You have a point about the Internet supposedly replacing paper, but if you think delivering direct-mail advertisements is evil then I would suggest you look for some perspective.
It depends on what you mean by "common people" I suppose.
If the television ads are to believed (and I do believe them because this is something that would be easy to determine and sue for libel or false advertising were it false), there is pretty much no politician in Illinois currently running for office who paid income taxes. Bill Brady, millionaire businessman running for governor? Didn't pay taxes. Alexi Gianulius, son of a bank owner, Illinois Treasurer running for the Senate? Didn't pay income taxes. I'm not talking about their businesses, I'm talking about them personally.
There obviously are loopholes to be exploited by individuals. It just hinges on how you define "common;" these guys are both personally wealthy, and I have no idea how much they paid to manage avoiding these taxes in either accountant fees or other costs that may have been involved.
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Half of which's results will be one discussion forum or another where people who are not smug asses thoughtfully took a moment to answer a person's question.
You had time to post this self-important drivel, surely you have time to answer the question as well -- but you elected for the drivel. And you think that somehow says something about the people asking the question rather than about you?
So what you're saying is we can't allow the smog to become smug?
A little bit of both. Fillibusters have always existed in this country; they're something we brought over from England with us, along with things like sovereign immunity. However, as others have said, they used to be actual filibusters: You stopped the work of the Senate by exploting the rule that you held the floor as long as you held the floor (kept speaking, kept standing, etc), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style. Somewhere along the way--and I really don't know where--it became you simply saying "I'd like this bill to require 60 votes instead of 50 please!" and going back home to see how it turns out. It's both the same and different.
But I think the real change is the invention of career politicians and the cementing of political parties. Political parties have pretty much always existed, but more and more they have become enshrined by law. Third parties have difficulty getting into debates or onto ballots and are decried as a "wasted vote," which wasn't always the case. The party in power is in charge of drawing district lines, leading to things like gerrymandering. Most states in the union perpetuate closed primaries, encouraging the polarization of their candidates to appeal to the extreme fringes of their own party and not the moderate climate of the nation as a whole. The nation's political makeup is essentially determined, year after year, by a handful of in-play districts across the nation; almost everybody else is safe, as evidenced by a re-election rate historically of about 90% (true even in the Democrats' "sweeping win" in 2008; I haven't looked at the 2010 Republican results that closely yet. I suspect it will be close be slightly under.) Each party determines its own leadership, right down to the committee assignments -- meaning that even if by some miracle an independent did win, or he turned independent during a term, which is what we see far more often, he still needs to choose which party he wants to caucus with and whether he is one of the most powerful men in the Senate or one of the most impotent depends on one of the two big parties anyway, which you can be sure leads to quite a bit of deal-making behind closed doors.
"Politician" is now a job description rather than a public service. These people are no longer ordinary citizens, still working their fields or selling their wares. Their entire job is politics, the vast majority of their working time spent trying to get re-elected, a little with their staff and with their party scheming on how best to screw the other side, and a handful of time actually voting or conferencing or debating--you know, getting things done.
In that sense, things have changed. But the problem is not that it has become unworkable--the problem is actually that it has become too workable. Republicans consistently walk in lock-step. Democrats usually walk in lock-step. The outcome of bills are usually known well before the votes are taken, and most of it is known before the whip even goes around asking people how they intend to vote. Congress--the Senate in particular--was never meant to work quickly, but with a two-party system and a divided nation we can typically count on any disputed bill already having somewhere around 40-45% votes for and 40-45% votes against, leaving the outcome pending not only a small number of people, but in reality whether or not that small number of people are going to continue walking in lock-step with their party. Nobody has to spend time convincing others to vote for them (unless by that we mean coercing others to vote for them either by threats or by promises to vote their way on something else or include some money for such-and-such), nobody has to spend time convincing others that he's right, and bills succeed more by the combination of which party is in power and which party supports it than actual merit.
I
Because getting your box owned is a binary state. You're owned or you're not, and one person doing it is one too many and more than enough. Even if security through obscurity were to achieve a 90% success rate, it's a tool in the toolbox but not good enough to rely on.
Blocking websites is not binary. If you can block 10% of people from accessing content you don't want them to access, that's 10% better success than you woke up with. Geeks are a relatively small part of the population, so making something harder is a victory even if making something impossible is unobtainable. Whether they can make it sufficiently hard to justify the costs of pursuing or the opportunity costs of tying the courts up with this sort of nonsense, or even whether or not the bill would pass constitutional muster in a challenge are all open questions and much more difficult to answer. I have my doubts, to be certain.
I don't know why he went so far down the weird road, or why he strayed from HIV which was the perfect example
Are you really saying that if somebody asks if you have AIDs and you say no, and sleep with them, that it should not be illegal? It's not something one would necessarily find out, even during a long relationship, if the other party does not admit to it -- nor am I prudish enough about sex to suggest it should only be had in those circumstances.
I don't know that I would call it rape--I'm not particularly opposed to the idea, just haven't given it a ton of thought--but it should definitely be illegal. Particularly if you actually infect them. AIDS is not the sure-fire death sentence it used to be, but it is extremely serious and life-threatening and a seriously disproportionate number of people will die for it. We can call it some type of rape, since the consent was predicated on a lie; we can call it some kind of fraud, since it was obtained on a lie; we can call it some sort of reckless homicide, since you weren't trying to infect them but very well may have.
In fact, after thinking about it in the course of this post I support the rape charge for it. I think you committed a crime regardless of whether or not they are infected and regardless of whether or not they die from it, and the idea that the crime should change a decade or more down the road based on what happens doesn't sit well. It should be rape, period, and the fact that you could have infected or did infect them with HIV should be considered an aggravating circumstance at sentencing.
I agree, 9/11-style attacks were not a problem as of 9/12.
That said, an "absolutely no screening" line really is a horrendously stupid idea. Why WOULDN'T they attack it? Pack a bomb in the 'ole carry-on. Or fuck, just a pistol. One attack is all it would take to completely decimate the idea of "no security" flying and probably, for no real good reason whatsoever, once again devastate the airline industry as a whole. Which is exactly what the terrorists want; death tolls are well and good, but billions of dollars of economic harm as a result of them? Yes please.
I don't know why people always insist on the extremes. The government forms the TSA who immediately runs to the full body scanning, pat down, toothpaste in a plastic bag, behavioral profiling police state security theater nonsense side, so other people feel somehow justified in going to the batshit crazy, guaranteed to be attacked, just playing the odds that somebody else dies before I do while this minor convenience continues to exist side. I assure everybody: There is a medium.
The body scans can take a hike. I have no problems with the bomb detection devices, particularly since we already bought them. The attempt at some quasi-psychic behavioralist profiling police squad can go. The reinforced cockpit doors and requirements they be secured during flight can stay. Limitations on liquids can go. Guns in the hands of (properly trained) pilots and air marshals can stay. Fondling the three year old girl is straight out. Hell, I'll even let them keep the taking off the shoes thing because while it's pretty stupid, it's just not that big of a deal.
Practical security measures that actually might have a chance of stopping something real -- that's what I'm looking for. An apparent goal of somehow alternating every other seat on a plane with an armed national guardsman to show how tough and secure we are... not so much. Sensible policy. On both sides. It's not asking that much.
I can appreciate the cynacism, but in this case I just don't see any insight behind it.
Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories aside, the Democrats will support such a bill. So will the Republicans. Just as an example, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was passed in the Republican Senate by a margin of... there was no margin. It was passed by a voice vote with unanimous consent. It was passed in the House on the very same day, again by a voice vote. A few minutes of digging didn't turn up the margin there, but if they didn't even think it was worth debating enough to show up you can bet it was substantial if not also unanimous.
The Democrats are cozy with the entertainment industry as the entertainment industry. The Republicans are cozy with them as a big business where money can be made.
Which brings me back to...
So what? Not only does control not matter one lick, but neither does it being a lame duck session. A lame duck session only matters when either 1) somebody who couldn't have supported it for fear of backlash now can or 2) when this Congress would pass it and the other wouldn't.
The bill will suffer no lack of support from either side. Painting it as some sort of democratic conspiracy just makes you look like a twat.
If you're accusing the Supreme Court of corruption I think you'd better offer something more concrete than "similar interest reasons." The entire setup of the Supreme Court was to avoid politics and influence peddling. That's not to say it fully succeeded, but the burden of proof is clearly on you and all you've offered by way of evidence is some sort of backward tie-in to a corrupt democratic conspiracy to exploit a lame duck congress to satisfy interests they're in bed with on behalf of members no longer employed in Congress. That's pretty fucking out there, even for conspiracy theories.
It might pass the Supreme Court, it might not. I honestly don't know; this is where I have the most hope of it being stopped. Still, the Court leans conservative and conservatives tend to let Congress have their way.
For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you about #5; the reason the US pushes so hard for IP protection is because things related to IP are pretty much our only exports at this point.
But again you take it too far. According to you, we're to simultaneously believe that the US economy would collapse if bills like this were not allowed to pass (something I can actually get somewhat on board with) -- and yet that it is the improper thing for the Congress to do and thus we should send angry mobs to Washington (and Hollywood though I fail to see why) and go vigilante-style and guillotine some bitches until we get a government more to our liking, that will acquiesce and allow the economy to collapse. And you present that as the responsible course of action.
Yes, this bill will pass -- overwhelmingly. We will get "ridden, and ridden, and ridden" to the tune of IP laws actually getting enforced. And all we'll have to show for defeating these IP-related bills is an economy not plunged into something that makes the Great Depression look cozy. Woe is us.
This particular bill may be a horrible idea. Enforcing IP protection is not. If Congress is only going to understand half of that, I'm glad it's the latter. The reality is it will probably pass and actions that will simply under the label of censorship will probably be slapped down by the courts while Slashdot gets an extra few years of income from stories about how evil people protecting movies and music are.
Eh, I'll take it.
We can say that, and indeed had he done so he probably would have prevailed at trial. The problem is that the people he should have sued--the corporation, ie, the people who actually lied--were bankrupt and he didn't feel it worth the time to sue them. He's probably right. But rather than go "this sucks but there's nothing I can do," he instead decided to look around for somebody who did have some money he could sue for and he went after their lawyers.
Now you have an entirely different ballgame. Not because of some "judges protect lawyers" conspiracy, but because you're now suing a tangential party. Lawyers are their clients' advocates and they operate on an assumption of good faith. Proving the client lied is not enough; now he has to prove the lawyers knew, when they knew, and that they then acted in bad faith to the courts by continuing the case either without informing the respondent or by continuing a case that no longer had merit with the lies exposed -- all of which are tricky.
He knows he sued the wrong people, he says as much in the summary when he mentions the corporation went bankrupt. He just seems to believe that their wrongdoing was also their lawyers' and is acting like a petulant child when two separate courts disagreed with him. What happened to him sucks. The fact that somebody can get away with it because he did it from behind the veil of a corporation sucks, and is, in my mind, the real issue to be gleaned from this situation and addressed. The ruling I'm fine with.
Driving people off from their products which are free or ad-supported?
Even if we were to grant your premise that it's happening and in some way significant, that's a lot of money. If 1,000 people per month would have left, and I think that's very much on the high end, you're paying $80 per user retention. Based on ad revenue, how long is that going to take to recover? Months and months during which you are still paying out more money for other non-bugs people are reporting so you can have the honor of trying to recoup your costs to them?
But it's worse than that -- a lot of what Google does isn't about your specific value to them, but rather your value as an aggregate. Google Voice is a great example; free US calls is going to cost them some bucks, far more than each of those customers brings as their share of some sort of advertising revenue, but there is value to them because they can use all those free users to tune their speech-to-text algorithms, algorithms that then show up on YouTube and suddenly allow the beginnings of search inside of videos by their contents. Something that, if done fairly well, is going to attract all sorts of searchers and bump up advertising revenue appropriately. Losing a few thousand of the millions of users its various services have is even less significant in that perspective.
While I couldn't find any sort of list of "bugs we paid but think are stupid," we can infer a bit from their clarifications. XSS attacks on sandboxed domains; URL redirectors; vulnerabilities in applications they have just purchased and may not even continue -- these don't sound like the sort of problems users are leaving over except perhaps the latter, and I'm not sure Google is crying to the tune of $80,000 a month that people are leaving a service it hasn't even decided if it wants to keep. Hell, if they wanted to throw away $80,000 a month on things of questionable value they could hire 12 new $80,000 a year employees and assign them to... you know, whatever. Or nothing. Might have the same ultimate value.
Just take off the subdomain for now. http://slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/037241/Firefox-4-Regains-Speed-Mojo-With-No-2-Placing/
Huh?
Inciting violence is something that I do. I did it or not; it's not something dependent on how many people might like to comply, and it's plenty clear just from his wording that it was a joke. I mean really, if I were trying to get somebody to kill you do you really think I would choose stoning and then claim I will not tell a human rights group who opposes it? How about not telling the fucking police? You know, the ones who are going to arrest you and put you in jail for decades if not the rest of your life instead of the people who would issue a sternly-worded press release about how terrible stoning is? And really, the idea that somebody would want to stone a journalist to death and yet be waiting for some Twitter posting to give them the go-ahead is ridiculous. If police want to charge him in some complicated murder-for-hire scheme with a Twitter post go-ahead trigger, then do it -- but you and I both know they would never, ever be able to meet that burden of proof even in today's "they charged him so he must be guilty!" climate.
This is nothing more than the ever-increasing population of idiots who feel that the only thing that matters is the letter of the law and not actual justice. No justice is served by arresting this man, much less prosecuting and--god forbid--convicting him, but that's exactly what some people want for no other reason than "will somebody stone to death" is technically a request that somebody stone to death. Ignore the context, ignore all the following elements that make it clearly a joke, ignore everything else because damn it, we have to be tough on even ridiculous perceptions of the possibility of crime!
I thought this insanity was confined to the US, but apparently I was wrong.
I think that is an oversimplified analysis. The reality is that almost anybody who likes you enough to want to give you a gift can probably select one that you will love given the right amount of time and money, but those are not always available.
We have a lot of trouble in my immediate family with gifts, and the major problem is that we're all fairly old (I'm the youngest at 27). That means there isn't a ton of things we want in general, and also that most of what we do want tends toward the expensive side. Everybody knows I'm a hardcore computer geek, but nobody's going to buy me a new computer for my birthday and there's only so many people you can tell you need blank media or something tangential before you just run out of the smaller gift ideas. "Do you want any books?" "None of them are coming out around my birthday." "Video games?" "None of them are coming out around my birthday." (And frankly I wouldn't want them to spend $50 on my birthday anyway; it's just not that serious an event for me.) On and on down the list of things I like but no particular hits.
So really, they're forced to try. My aunt used to be notorious for buying video games when I was younger, but they were always terrible. I didn't hold it against her or anything; she certainly tried and she understood that "video game" was likely something I would enjoy, but it was a 'bad gift" in the sense that it wasn't anything I wanted and even trying it turned it out badly. It's not for a lack of knowing me.
As far as being selfish and not caring about the person, that's also wrong in many cases. I've never once complained about a gift I got, whether I loved it or not. I know that people are trying and they care for me and I care for them. But let's be honest here: You like a gift or you don't and it has nothing to do with how you feel about the person. I'm not saying you go "OH MY GOD, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?! THIS IS THE WORST GIFT I HAVE EVER RECEIVED!" even if that were the truth, but smiling and nodding and being polite about a gift you're really indifferent toward at best because you DO care about that person's feelings does not mean you suddenly like the gift.
And really, if you, as a gift-giver, would be so hurt that you'd prefer somebody keep a gift they didn't want rather than get something they would like better, you probably have some insecurity problem or you are one of the people who really DOES fit into category A. If that can be done while simultaneously sparing your feelings for a gift you tried on within your time and budget constraints, so much the better.
First, let me say that I do NOT think that she is deliberately trying to get absurd rewards. I just don't buy that argument. But playing devil's advocate and agreeing with it...
That's the point. The Supreme Court takes cases based largely on two criteria: First, that there is an important constitutional issue to settle. And second, that lower courts have arrived at different decisions. If every court that has ever heard a case agrees on how it should be handled, there's little reason to step in -- unless they want to reverse it. I don't see any reason that lower appeals courts wouldn't also consider cases along such lines.
This is one case with one set of facts, and yet four different outcomes. On the one hand you have a couple of jury decisions obviously attempting to apply the law, but arriving at pretty wildly different decisions. $1.92MM is over 30% higher than $1.5MM just in percentage terms, and almost half a million dollars higher in absolute terms. And then of course the first jury with a $222K verdict that is nearly an order of magnitude different. That alone is an indication that the law may be too vague and require clarification, either by the Congress or the judiciary.
At the same time we have judges raising constitutional concerns. An award that is "monstrous and shocking" is essentially code for "in violation of the Eighth Amendment," and his reduction took the damages from the highest the case has ever seen to four times less than the lowest jury award. That's significant. So startling, in fact, that the RIAA offered to let her settle for half that ($25,000) if she asked the judge to vacate his verdict -- it is so vastly different, in short, that it has the RIAA worried it might be used as precedent.
These are all extremely intriguing things for appeal, and for a higher court to step in and go "alright, wait a minute here; something obviously is not right." If they do so, and if they agree that following the law leads to unconstitutional awards, or even that the law is so ambiguous that justice is not being served leaving it so wildly in the jury's hands, it may end up with the law being struck down.
On the other hand, if you acknowledge that remote kill is sometimes necessary then 2, 3 and potentially 5 are counterproductive.
Presumably, the users installed and want the application in question because it is installed on their phone, and the negative effects are not noticable, or they would have uninstalled the application themselves. Think of reasons Microsoft might (legitimately) want to remote kill an application: Something that is stealing identities, violating privacy, etc; something that is causing harm, either to the handset itself, the networks it runs on or other hosts (botnet/DDOS style, intentional or otherwise). Honestly that's all I can think of. Even your example of PHI (which I had to look up by the way!) doesn't necessarily make sense, unless companies have their own killswitches or Microsoft plans on doing it on their behalf, and the kills can be device-targeted -- any of which might be true, but I didn't see evidence of it from the article. Ether way, if somebody is trying to kill an app with PHI on your phone it's probably because you are no longer employed there; it's not like you'd be in surgery with your patient and go to look up anesthesia allergies and find the information is no longer on your phone.
In either case I'm not sure "nahhh, I'll keep it" is a valid option. If you're harming somebody else, your opinion on whether or not to keep such an app is irrelevant. If you're harming your own hardware, the only reason I can see that you would keep it anyway is you don't believe it -- essentially punishing lack of technical expertise or naiveté ("I don't SEE my phone hardware melting..."). Similar with some sort of privacy-violating trojan. "This fart app is so cool that I don't care if it's trying to steal my bank login details!" isn't something I would consider valid. I mean, they would definitely DESERVE whatever happened to them but it isn't a case I would design the feature around.
#4 is similar to what they're doing, except that "sync" is "checks in automatically for updates" and thus not requiring user intervention. Any user intervention that is required simply brings us back of the points above.
Your concerns about security are valid and is something that definitely needs to be addressed in the feature planning stage, but I don't think it is an impossible problem to solve. Beyond that, if you don't trust Microsoft to only use the feature for valid reasons then you should probably buy a phone with another operating system.
Why not? This year's model is EVEN MORE SHINY!!!
That there is any carrier lockdown at all is a pretty hilarious illustration of just how much some companies don't get it.
If I'm in the market for a smartphone, and I don't choose the iPhone, lockdown is likely a major factor for the decision; it's one of the major things Android has going for it over the iPhone. A carrier making the non-locked-down phone locked down just makes me giggle.
Which is not evil, since by your wording the choices are "let a few starve so everyone else can live" or "let everyone starve because you're not willing to let anybody die first." I'm not saying it would be easy to decide (personally or from a ethical system standpoint) who should live and die in such a circumstance, but it is hardly a failure of utilitarianism.
The major problem with utilitarianism is actually fairly obvious: "The greatest good for the greatest number" is really hard to define. Just as an example: Let's say there is you and four of your friends. Is it the greatest good for the greatest number to kill you and distribute all of your positions evenly among the other four people? Four people are very happy and one isn't, but the one that "isn't happy" is actually dead --which is quite a lot of harm to balance against a relatively small amount of good. But there's really nothing in the system that says "+4 -1" is any less a valid way to approach the ethicality of the situation than "+(4 * 10) -(1 * 1000000)." There's nothing in the system--even though I think we all know it is wrong--to cause you not to question, "well, how much money are we talking about here?" or "how poor are my friends?" or something like that.
A lot of the problems, by the way, are solved with what's called "rule utilitarianism," which basically removes consideration of the individual act and steps back to creating a rule based on how much good or ill is caused by the rule. It would stomp on the "murder-for-profits" thing if for no other reason than once they kill you, there nothing stopping them from following the same act utilitarianism that led them to do so to pick and kill another person off. In other words, if everybody were allowed to operate under that rule the greatest good for the greatest number is not achieved.
It has nothing to do with free will, it's simply a system for deciding morality or ethicality. How you ultimately act can be guided by a system of morality but it isn't decided by it. If utilitarianism negates free will, then so do laws against murder if I really, really want to kill somebody.
Neither of the things you said has anything to do with statistics, they're simply an opinion based on opinions about a number, and the latter one doesn't even have a sound basis in reality.
For starters, right from the summary: Clapper's statement was made during his confirmation hearing. Do you know what a confirmation hearing is? It means it wasn't his job at the time, making your comment completely inane without even evaluating the sentiment.
Second, even if he said it again today and it were completely true, not knowing what every intelligence agency in the nation is doing may or may not be his failure. It may, for starters, be a statement of the impossibility of the task; even with all the information at his disposal, chances are there's no way he can know everything each of 1,200 different agencies is doing because they are doing, well, apparently $80 billion worth of things. He may know the overall strategies or even the major tasks or operations going at a particular moment, but that simply leaves a statement like "[nobody] in the world knows what they're all doing" up to subjective determinations of what "what they're all doing" means. It may also be because he does not have the authority needed or that he is not receiving the cooperation needed to do all aspects of his job. This isn't like corporate America where if you stall or disobey your boss he can simply fire you. Most of the top positions, while ostensibly reporting to the DNI, are Senate-confirmed. He can't, for example, walk up to the CIA Director and say "I've had enough of your insubordination, you're fired!" no matter how much he might want to.
Third, Feinstein's comments have nothing to do with her fitness to be on the committee. "The last decade" was dominated by 8 years of Republican control, meaning that even if she disapproved of what was going on she was a minority voice. It's also worth noting that while such committees do have considerable power (but not necessarily authority) over budget matters in their areas, that the House and not the Senate controls the purse-strings and that there are so many budgetary loopholes and exceptions that money could easily be moved around from discretionary spending accounts that obfuscate the true expenditures, until a specific report that deals specifically with realities and not budgets is released.
And need I point out again that neither comment has anything to do with statistics or how they can be spun multiple ways?
You forgot the "in my opinion" part. Actually you didn't forget it; you specifically left it out in order to give the appearance that yours in the only correct opinion and paint anybody who disagrees with you as immoral. That takes the right to have one's own opinion to a new level of arrogant douchebaggery.
You specifically mention utilitarianism in your post, so you're not ignorant to the fact that there are other systems of morals and ethics than you hold. The fact that you rejected them does not make them invalid or a poor argument. Saying what amounts to "explain how doing something for the greater good is right, and don't bother mentioning any theories of right and wrong that espouse the greater good over the individual interest" just makes you look like an idiot pretending to be interested in the debate while telling the opposition that you don't care what they have to say. And more insufferably, considering such nonsense, non-argument to be some sort of intellectual victory.
Hardly a fact at all.
For starters, you're simply assuming that the ability to spend as much money as you want influencing an election is a right. Most of the countries of the world that hold real, actual elections disagree with you, making it pretty clearly not some sort of universal, "God-given" right. At best it is a right granted in the US, and that is the subject of the debate meaning you're begging the question.
If it is a right, then I should be able to outright bribe a politician. After all, money = speech = right, right? No? Okay, how about threatening him instead: "Vote yes for bill 802 or my $150,000 in campaign contributions goes to your opponent." I'm not buying his vote, he's free to vote how he pleases. Still no? Okay, I've got it. I won't say it, I'll simply call his office and say "I've donated a lot of money to this campaign and if you don't vote yes on 802, I would have a really hard time justifying why." Politicians live in a world where you can't say what you mean. He'll certainly get my point.
Why should ANY of these behaviors be okay? Why should the idea that I have $150,000 to throw around guaranteeing that politicians vote the way I want them to or find themselves jobless be acceptable? Why should votes go to the highest bidders if we're going to pretend we have a true republic instead of an aristocracy? Hell, the only reason to stop me from doing any of this is because other people will be somehow better off. Obviously the inability to buy legislation I want leaves me worse off.
The fact is, all of this is utilitarianism. It is the recognition that my interests are no more important than somebody else's interests, regardless of how much money I have or they have. The recognition that my vote is not worth more because it is backed by more money. The recognition that the fundamental fairness of the system is more important than my right to spend my money on whatever I want without exception. All the desire to get money out of the political system is is one more step in that direction.
As far as your original post about "individuals pooling their resources," sometimes it is. More often it's a sham, claiming to be a random assortment of individuals in order to bypass other campaign finance laws. "Concerned Voters for Bill 802" sounds perfectly lovely, except when your realize that its chairman is Karl Rove or Al Gore. If you ever realize it. But hey, at least you know that organization is for Bill 802. It gets far worse when they have no issue, toeing the line of illegality in order to dump money for a candidate's campaign, ra
Part of the problem is that these things lack definitions, especially ones that are easy enough to use that you can actually fit people into.
For example, what I want from the government fiscally is to stop playing around with deficits and debt. I understand that sometimes things happen. I understand that, for example, about a decade ago some planes smashed into some buildings and two wars ensued* and lots of other changes were made and these things couldn't have been predicted in the budget set the previous year. I don't think "oops, can't help, it's not in the budget!" is the appropriate response in that situation, but at the same time I think the default position should be not to run a deficit. And in the event that we do create some debt either because of some emergency or because our economy didn't perform the way we expected it to and we brought in less tax revenue than expected, it should be a consideration in future budgets -- that there should be some sort of plan for paying it down. Again, I'm not saying the next year budget has to absorb it all but it should be factored in as a debt that needs repayment. And as much as I don't want to pay more taxes, and I suspect increased efficiency and some program/spending cuts could cover the difference, if it means more taxes then it means more taxes.
Does that make me liberal or conservative fiscally? Does it change your opinion if I say that I also think we could spend less money overall? Does it change (again) if I say that one of the major places I think we could get some money from without a serious impact is national defense spending? (We spend more than the rest of the world combined. Surely we can scale back, if nothing else, to "as much as the rest of the world combined" without some catastrophic consequence.) I'm open to many other suggestions as well.
If I had to pick I'd say I was fiscally conservative, but I certainly don't fit the traditional definitions. I wouldn't fit in with the Republicans or Tea Party-ers, even just on this one issue. I don't (necessarily) think tax cuts are the solution to everything, nor do I necessarily think that government needs to get smaller -- just that it needs to pay its bills. On the other hand I would certainly be willing to cut some programs and save some money and if that means tax cuts, then woohoo!
Now socially is a completely different matter. I'm extremely liberal on social matters. There is very little in terms of social policy that I feel the conservatives do right. Politically? Independent in that I belong to no party nor do I vote for one party by default, but if I have to choose a candidate that agrees with me fiscally or socially--and I often do--I'll almost certainly pick socially.
* Maybe they shouldn't have, but they did. Not trying to get into a debate on the wars here.
It can be. It really all depends on what else they decide not to take your hard-earned money for donating to.
Tax break for donating to First Baptist Church of Podunk but not ASPCA or ACLU or a non-religious battered women's shelter or something like that? It may not be promotion of a religion but it certainly smacks of promotion of religion. The distinction between "donate money and we'll take less tax dollars" and "we'll take your tax dollars and donate money" is fairly small.
That said, I suspect the reason the practice has survived as long as it has is because they play it fairly loose in terms of what they consider tax-deductible. I also don't believe it's because they want to, I believe it's because they know if they didn't that they would be smacked down by the courts.
You have a point about the Internet supposedly replacing paper, but if you think delivering direct-mail advertisements is evil then I would suggest you look for some perspective.
It depends on what you mean by "common people" I suppose.
If the television ads are to believed (and I do believe them because this is something that would be easy to determine and sue for libel or false advertising were it false), there is pretty much no politician in Illinois currently running for office who paid income taxes. Bill Brady, millionaire businessman running for governor? Didn't pay taxes. Alexi Gianulius, son of a bank owner, Illinois Treasurer running for the Senate? Didn't pay income taxes. I'm not talking about their businesses, I'm talking about them personally.
There obviously are loopholes to be exploited by individuals. It just hinges on how you define "common;" these guys are both personally wealthy, and I have no idea how much they paid to manage avoiding these taxes in either accountant fees or other costs that may have been involved.
It's called the "Veil of Ignorance" by John Rawls.
If you're going to be indignant about something, you should probably check to make sure you aren't being a fucking moron who's missing the joke first.
Just being helpful.