Even if that were true (and it's not -- see some of the other replies to you) the complete lack of critical thinking skills displayed by anybody who believes this remains... disturbing to say the least. (You have no idea how tempted I was to say "classified" there.)
I mean honestly. "Classified flesh-eating?" Do these idiots truly believe that the people would leave a term like flesh-eating in there next to something classified? It's both the worst and the most descriptive term in the sentence! "A new Bill of Rights will be drafted" is silly enough on its own, but just gets worse when paired with "to be approved by classified."
I know our own history is funny enough that none of this is IMPOSSIBLE (it basically happened), but to anybody with a handful of functioning brain cells it should be more than enough to throw up red flags and start looking into things -- starting, perhaps, with the fake congressman. But instead morons treat it as a reason to start running their mouths about their terribly ill-informed opinions on fake news stories. Bravo, morons, for continuously proving why the right to speak is not bundled with the right to be listened to.
it's the most abused term since you can't possibly be against security of your nation (and yourself). But no country is really free of this abuse...
Huh? Of course you can.
For starters, "your nation" is an ambiguous term. If I'm a terrorist from Belgium* living as a permanent resident or even citizen of the US, what is "[my] country?" What if I am living there with the express intent of harming the country, much as the 9/11 terrorists were?
Even if I'm purely from the US, born and raised, that's not to say that I can't be against it. I'm pretty tired of a lot of the crap that goes on here, for example. Personally it would make me much more likely to move elsewhere than seek to destroy it or kill people, but that doesn't mean I couldn't be somebody who takes that tact.
Maybe I'm against a standing army so I want to kill all the soldiers I see, even though I love my country itself. Maybe I even think I'm doing what's best for it. Few people would argue that committing murder as a demand for the dismantling of our military doesn't run contrary to national security.
The US political system has gotten old, but if I go around advocating killing all of our politicians they're going to charge me as a terrorist acting against national security -- and I would deserve it.
All of these are just examples of the multitude of hard-to-argue-against ways I can be "against security of [my] nation (and [myself])." There are plenty more, in addition to all sorts of rather insane possibilities and ones that are much more debatable. I could make a good case, I think, for the Tienanmen Square photos being against national security, for example. It could cause severe unrest, it could cause violence, it could cause the (attempted) overthrow of the government. As a US citizen who does not support what they did, does not support their covering up what they did and does not support that sort of censorship in general that would be a great thing, but I am also compelled to admit that from the perspective of the Chinese government, rebellion goes against national security.
The term is absolutely abused, and with 9/11 in our rear-view mirrors it may just be the most overused excuse today -- but that doesn't mean it is never valid explanation. It may or may not also be a valid reason for whatever happened.
* Yeah yeah. I'm intentionally not picking some Middle Eastern country.
It has nothing to do with religion, it was just the way the world was in the past. I suppose it makes more sense in periods when life expectancies were 35 or lower. That being the case, marrying and having children in ones early teens suddenly doesn't seem as distasteful.
It's one of many reasons I always hate when people try to judge historical figures or activities according to modern sensibilities.
I want to see every fucking screen in use in there 24/7, with the place filled with Ph.Ds that cost them hundreds of dollars an hour who are actively working on this problem.
Well, I think you've just illustrated beyond a doubt why they did what they did. A couple of screens are blank for reasons we don't even know and your immediate response is "ROAR I WANT PHDS TO MONITOR VIDEO SCREENS 24/7~~!!one!" Come on now. You don't even need PhD's in that room much less be bitching about whether or not a particular video stream is up at any given time.
Is it a bad picture? Yeah. So what? It's simply hatred of BP for what happened that makes you think it's a big deal, because it's absolutely not. The idea that a poor Photoshop job somehow means they're a terrible company who doesn't know what it's doing is laughably absurd.
Now if you want to talk about them being greedy bastards who very probably ignored safety concerns for the chance at slightly increased profits, or that this needs to cost them so much they don't want to go on living, I'm all on board.
But for everyone of me, there are probably a lot of free-loaders.
No doubt.
The real question, however, is this: How many of those "free-loaders" are going to pay if you lock it away behind a paywall? Some will, I'm sure, either through the paywall or with a paper subscription, but just like in movie/music piracy I suspect the majority will not -- at least not as long as there is a free alternative someplace.
Now take that number and the profits you make from them and compare it to what you could get from advertisements on a free edition. If it works out, well, go for it.
The tricky thing for newspapers is that subscriptions were never the biggest portion of their income; it was advertisements contained within the paper (classifieds, etc). The Internet has decimated that model, but by the time they realized it they had already been free online for years. Now they're asking people to pay for something they haven't paid for in ages, and people are understandably resistant.
One would assume that Viacom will be required to pay Google's defense fees.
Unlikely. The US is not a loser pays system. Unless Google can prove that Viacom's case had no merit whatsoever (which courts almost never agree with, since frivolous cases are technically not supposed to go forward) or that they otherwise acted in some manner that abuses the legal system, there's little chance the court will order them to pay expenses. And even if they did, they would only order whatever part of $100MM they found to be a reasonable expenditure on Google's part. Obviously I don't know the specifics but that is a loooot of money, so I doubt it would be full and I'm not sure it would even be half.
I am also waiting for a better cable company, better internet service, a better bank, and oh, a better PC...
I get your point and I do agree overall, but you picked some really bad examples. Cable companies are (natural) monopolies, and most ISPs are simply the cable companies or the phone companies, also a monopoly. Free market practices don't particularly apply there.
Banking? There WERE small-town banks but most of them are closed these days. There are still credit unions and a handful of banks to choose from, though I'm not sure what you're looking for.
And PCs? They're not exactly the best PC company in the world, but Dell did a tremendous job in getting relatively powerful PCs in consumers' hands for cheap prices. Hardware prices have plummeted. I'm not sure what else you want from free market influences.
That said, the problem with the idea that free markets solve something is it's predicated on the idea that people actually put value on anything other than money. I recall reading a story on Slashdot some time ago about somebody who went to a small mom-and-pop store for a TV (I think it was) and he raved about the great service he got from them in figuring everything out and getting it all squared away. And then he went to the big-box store to buy it.
A competitor airline re-bundling things to get rid of the hidden fees is almost guaranteed to result in higher fares (even if the total overall cost is lower), and most consumers will not look any farther than that. That being the case, the free market is powerless to solve the issue.
In a way it's a lot like those infomercials you see on TV. "Order now and we'll send you a second money sink FREE, just pay [$9.99] postage and handling!" Well, sorry, if your product is $10 and you're charging me $10 postage it's most certainly not free, you're just re-structuring the costs in a way that is even more beneficial to you (since S&H is not taxed).
We have to operate in the real world. Maybe we can make a principled stand on our personal blogs or websites or what-have-you, but so long as there is more profit left on the table by ruining the experience of IE6 users than there is extra cost for working around it, the companies and websites that the majority of people care about will still demand support for IE6, and anybody who wants to collect a paycheck in the web development field will do it or they will be replaced by somebody who will. The idea of some sort of massive IE6 strike from developers that nobody can work around is naive.
Is it selfish? Yes. Humanity is selfish. Capitalism is selfish. Business is certainly selfish. So long as they are the underpinnings of our society that's just a fact of life. Wishing it weren't so doesn't change anything, and swimming against the current is unproductive at best and suicidal at worst.
IE6 and other bad technologies will die when one of two things happen: That culture changes from the top (asking the people who profit from it to abandon it in favor of something more universally valuable--highly unlikely) or the natural technology update cycles make IE6 such a niche case that the time, money and effort spent accommodating it is no longer worthwhile in the same way that almost nobody cares about IE5.5 anymore.
I'm certainly not holding my breath for the former. The latter is close to happening, in my estimation. ME ME ME believes in working in the real world, so I'll take that.
It was not impolite, it was an opinion built from fact, and it even recognized the possibilities that the side I was "for" was not playing fair at any point during the situation in question.
Posts that go against the Slashdot group-think do get upmodded sometimes; I've certainly seen that myself. I have seen nothing to suggest it's more likely than a downmod, though, and it really depends on how ingrained the group-think is. The site is probably 50-50 Apple lovers versus bashers, for example, which it's probably 80-20 in favor of OSS and against proprietary, closed-source software. I suspect the reverse are roughly your odds of a reasonable but contrary point getting modded up instead of down.
In my mind, the problem is that there are no valid options for modding down. Overrated is okay but obviously prone to extreme abuse. Troll asks the moderator to guess the motives of the poster. Some trolls are obvious, but anything non-obvious has you judging, essentially, whether the poster really believes what he posted or if he's just trying to get people angry. Flamebait is similar, except that it's also not necessarily a bad thing. If I post something that goes completely against a deeply-ingrained group-think, isn't that flame bait? Despite the fact that it may be a fantastic post on its own merits? What is flame bait a judge of other than going against convention? My reason for posting it? And of course Offtopic. While I recognize the value of Offtopic in general, the nature of Slashdot discussions is that half of the threads are actually Offtopic to the story (though usually on topic to the parent). The only ones who get modded that way are posts that the moderator does not agree with and happened to feel could fit there.
Now, I think that was intentional. I think Slashdot wanted narrowly-defined categories for downmods because they wanted the focus to be on upmods and they figured the reaction would be "aw, it doesn't fit anywhere, I guess I can't mod them down" but of course that isn't how it turns out. People seemingly decide to downmod when they read it and then click whichever fits best.
It's just human nature to promote ideas one agrees with and try to bury those one doesn't. The people who go against that in order to do their best job moderating according to how they were asked to moderate are probably the best, but they are the minority.
I don't think we fundamentally disagree, but I do have trouble thinking about what exactly we're protecting them from.
Bad language? They're going to be exposed to it, online and off, and aside from a few uncomfortable moments it's going to cause from time to time it's simply not a big deal. Use it as a lesson on appropriate language for certain situations.
Violence? There might be some kind of an argument here, but with television, movies and video games bathed in it its already a fight that is lost. Once again, use it as a life lesson when the violence is realistic and don't worry to much when it's not. I can say though, violence is something I don't believe I have ever stumbled onto on the Internet without seeking it out somehow. Usually it is in the form of those very same movies and video games.
Sex? It's hard but not impossible to stumble into. Aside from having to give the birds and the bees speech sooner, what actual harm is there? I'm not saying I would want my kids to see it, but I don't think they would somehow be instantly harmed if they did. It's hardly different than little Timmy stumbling into the bedroom while mommy and daddy are doing it, and that happens often enough out in the world. Are any of those parents claiming their children are horribly destroyed by their behavior? Or is it only other peoples' behavior that is deviant and harmful?
The hardcore stuff is certainly worse. I don't think a young child would honestly be able to understand fetishes (hell, I barely understand most of them as an adult). But really, it's just the same arguments as for sex and violence and sometimes "I have no idea why some people would like that" is not an unreasonable response. Plus if the kid is having a "WTF!" moment about it you're already pretty safe from whatever consequences you're fearing. Besides, the stranger and more hardcore we get the less likely we are to have found it accidentally and the more likely it is that it was sought out.
I'm not saying you should expose children to any of this; I think you should take reasonable steps as a parent to do what you can to ensure your children see what they are ready for. That doesn't mean child-proofing the entire world is the answer. It doesn't mean that the rest of society needs to conform to your views or do whatever they can to help you raise your children the way you feel they should be raised, and especially not to some government definition of how they should be raised. Nor does it mean that if your reasonable steps aren't enough that the children are horribly scarred for life.
Eight to ten year olds shouldn't be left unsupervised on the Internet, whether that supervision is personal, technical or both. Beyond that it's time to start letting go and realize that even with a squeaky-clean Internet you're going to need to cover all of these topics by the time these kids are 12 or 13 anyway. We don't need to shove it down their throats, but let's stop pretending we somehow wreck children forever if they see breasts when they're ten.
If not, why would you make an exception for the music lottery?
Regardless of if the odds are the same (and I frankly doubt it, even from a strictly mathematical standpoint) there is a vast difference between "you lose because the cool little balls with numbers on them didn't come up your way" and "you lose because not enough people liked your music."
Even if you pick your own numbers in the lottery, there's nothing you can do--aside from buying more tickets of course--to improve your odds. An artist's odds change with the appeal of his work. Getting rejected by random chance and getting rejected because people don't like what I produce are not the same.
(Of course I'm not a musician so I don't mean "I" literally.)
Does anyone know of any creative works that were provably a financial failure due to piracy? [. ..] accurately and precisely quantifying damages from p2p is impossibly hard
Those two are mutually exclusive. If you can't accurately quantify damages then how can you prove that a work's failure was a result of piracy?
You're just setting up a question that can't be answered so you can go "SEE! LYING RIAA BASTARDS, NOBODY COULD PROVE IT!" That doesn't help anybody in the debates swirling around piracy.
I'd point out that the people who sign on the dotted line for "net" deals know exactly what they're getting, which is nothing -- writers, actors, directors and "staff" (of which I guess I'm one) sign their contracts with the advice of a lawyer and a manager, and all of these people know exactly what "defined net" is, and how it's defined is completely clear in the contract.
So what you're saying is that multiple parties willingly enter into an agreement, the following being the possible outcomes:
1. Studio best case -- nobody sues you and you get to pay the nothing you knew you were going to pay.
2. Talent best case -- you sue the studio and win more than the nothing you knew you were going to get, putting up large sums of money for large risks in the legal system to get paid.
3. Studio second-best case -- you get sued but ultimately win and pay the nothing you knew you were going to pay, minus legal fees.
4. Incompetence case -- the accountants can't cook the books properly and somebody accidentally gets paid more than nothing. The studios will still likely do their best not to pay if such a case arose, so it's really just a prelude to case #2 or #3.
That's really your argument? What's the point? It's a risk for the studios since they lose at least some money in three of the four possibilities compared to just leaving the damn clause out entirely, and for the talent they know their best-case scenario is both rare and expensive to pursue so including it is hardly an incentive. Such clauses literally benefit nobody (reliably) if we're operating under the assumption that both parties know what's really going to happen.
Even if the contracts are poured over by lawyers and clear as day, all you know is what the contract says. The studios are not violating the letter of their contracts; the whole point of the term "Hollywood accounting" is that they're technically doing exactly what they're legally bound to do. Rather, they violate the spirit and act in bad faith by setting up subsidiary corporations and what-have-you in order to make gobs of money but avoid actually having to share it with anybody they agreed to share it with. Naturally they'll have an idea of how they're doing it in advance when they offer the contract, but I'm sure half the scheming of "how can we get out of this?" happens long after the paperwork is signed, and there are some veeeeerry clever lawyers and accountants out there who would love even a fraction of the money they could save their bosses.
The more likely explanation is the simplest: The studios are hoping to scam people into feeling like they will be compensated more than they really will if things happen to become wildly successful. Some people won't buy it and either find a new project or get their profit shares negotiated in a way not so subject to being gamed (assuming they have such negotiating muscle to begin with), many will mistakenly assume that they're not going to get screwed for making the studio fistfuls of money, most won't even merit such considerations.
You're right: By and large, the J.K. Rowlings of the world aren't the ones being screwed by this. They have the muscle, either by their money, their popularity, or their control over whether or not a movie even gets made (ie, rights holders) to get clauses that are virtually game-proof. The people who get screwed are the small guys who are working their asses off and working in good faith with the expectation that what makes the show money makes them all money. That's frankly what studios are counting on. They want you to work as though you are more invested than you are.
Wait, how much was the license for Photoshop? $699. Wow, in retrospect, that's pretty damn cheap compared, huh?
Penetrating analysis, since obviously a newspaper would have exactly one copy of one tool they use for production and zero copies of any others.
How many copies of Photoshop? How many copies of Office? How many copies of InDesign? It doesn't take all that many to start adding up, especially for a large paper.
How much time do you save by having software do exactly what you want the way you find most productive instead of working around the way the software expects you to want it? How much do you ultimately end up saving when you realize that many newspapers are owned by the same companies, who can employ a couple programmers and extend the benefits to hundreds or even thousands of employees? Or that many little companies can pool resources for the programmers and all enjoy the benefits? And of course any number of other positive and negative consequences of such a switch.
Maybe it ultimately doesn't add up, but it would certainly take a more in-depth analysis than yours to decide that.
The question is, is there a way for paranoid individuals to turn this capability off if they want to.
There shouldn't be, for all the reasons you gave in support of why users really ARE a security threat rather than the ones who should be setting security policy for their phones. If the question is "does Google or the owner know better whether or not something should be installed?" the answer can't be "Google, but they should make a checkbox that says 'lulz just kidding, I'm smarter, turn it off.'" It's not logically consistent. Whether "Google" was the right answer or even if that was the right question is, of course, a different matter.
Responding backward to your post because I think the more important point I wanted to speak to was made first in your post.
If that advertising is localised and potentially more relevant for me then I don't mind 'paying' this price. This is why even though I have the option I don't disable advertising on Slashdot.
I agree, and I also have not disabled advertising on Slashdot. I don't mind advertising. I don't even mind things like Google ads and all the information they've collected about me being used to decide which ads I get.
I DO mind my zip code being sent along to websites and advertisers, without my permission and without any way to opt-out or stop it. It's a privacy issue for me. My visiting a website does not immediately mean I want them to know the exact neighborhood I live in. Do we really believe the only people who will be able to read these HTTP headers are the advertisers themselves?
Someone has to pay the bills for running a 'free' site and that is generally advertising.
Again I agree, as I stated above. But that's not what's happening here. ISPs--who I have already paid some rather ridiculous fees for their service--are deciding that they want to double-dip and profit even more from me by sending the information they have as a result of my paying them along to other people who want to make money off of me, getting a cut in the process of course. This also makes the ad companies money, since better targeting will attract more customers (advertisers). None of this has anything to do with the websites I visit, it's just lining the pockets of greedy corporations one of whom I already pay.
Maybe--maaaaybe--those ad companies choose to pass along some of these new profits to the websites hosting their advertisements for clicks or impressions, but there's not any guarantee of it. In fact I would consider it fairly unlikely. It may or may not mean more clicks for the hosting websites. I'm not entirely convinced that hyper-local online advertising is a great idea. If I want a pizza, I already know what the phone numbers to the pizza joints who deliver here are and I already know what my preference is as far as the pizza joint I call. Occasionally I suppose a new business might spring up, but when we're talking ZIP+4 local advertising it's probably something I would see just driving around.
In any event, there's no guarantee whatsoever that selling out my privacy this way will enrich anybody other than the ISP who does it and the ad serving companies who attract new clients because of it. No way I approve of that. This has nothing to do with helping pay for free websites.
The leaks they have are only half the story, what people are willing to do to stop the leaks is the other half.
...want him to answer questions about how classified or otherwise illegal-to-distribute information ended up in his hands? OH NOES, THE BIG BAD GUBMINT!
Just reading the summary you can see some of the problems with Wikileaks in general and everything surrounding Manning and now Assange in particular. He released a video about the military doing some Really Bad Shit; that's important, and it should have been done. He may have another video of them doing Equally Bad Shit; that's important too, so he should stop huffing and puffing and just release the damn thing already instead of stoking his ego for a few months first.
But then there's the rest. A quarter of a million cables? I mean really? Do you think Manning or anybody else sifted through them to ensure that only information related to the military's Bad Shit operations and their cover-ups ended up in this man's hands? We have NO IDEA what information may be in there. We have no idea what the leak and potential public posting of those cables has done to individuals, to the military, to a particular operation. We have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of dollars it might have cost to scrap a plan or alter a timetable because there was a fear it was about to put into the open. Hell, we don't even know if the military knows yet what they might need to scrap or change. We don't know if they know what's gone.
People should be made accountable for bad and illegal actions. That means the soldiers who perpetrated the atrocities*, the chain of command that failed to act, and anybody who helped cover it up. It also means Manning. Personally I would like to see him arrested, prosecuted and sentenced. If it turns out that all those cables really were related to these incidents or those like them, I would like to see him pardoned -- justice, and yet a recognition of the fact that outing this sort of thing is important. If not, if he just started blindly scooping up sensitive information between military commanders of a war because he didn't support it, shuttling it off to some egomaniac to do with as he pleases, then let him rot.
As an aside, I wonder when Americans obtained an expectation that doing illegal things because they're the right thing to do should be without consequence. You didn't see the black civil rights activists screaming "LET ME GO, I'M BEING CIVILLY DISOBEDIENT, YOU CAN'T ARREST ME FOR BREAKING THE LAW!! RRAAAWRWRWR." They did what they did because it was right; they did what they did in hopes of getting bad laws changed or, in this case, people who did bad things punished for them. They didn't expect to get away free for it. I don't mind setting up laws and systems that help these people (ie whistleblower-type laws) to come forward because I understand that not everybody has the stomach for the potential life-altering consequences, but this expectation that people can do anything if they mean well... well, "the ends justify the means" has always been one of the world's most dangerous concepts.
It reminds me of a discussion we had in a history class at my high school once. I don't remember the specifics, but the teacher basically posited a question such as this: What would you do if something was horribly illegal, but you truly believed that you would rot in hell for all of eternity for not doing it? (Or for doing it, I really don't remember how it was set up.) Random hands would shoot up with some scheme or another, and he'd always be able to shoot them down. People wanted it both ways. Eventually everybody gave up guessing and waited for his answer: "You do it and you go to jail." Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes you have to operate on a higher law, whether that is religion** or your own set of morality. But at the same time, you can't expect the rest of the world to behave the same way or to pardon you (literally or figuratively) for
Your characterisation is apt, but it's not entirely accurate as using such an internet connection, the school still has both an ethical and legal obligation to prevent the kids from browsing porn.
Legal? Quite possibly.
Ethical? I don't believe anybody has any such ethical obligation. They may do it or not as they choose, according to their own set of morality and appropriateness.
I'm going to bet it has everything to do with the fact that people can die as a result of being homeless while nobody has ever died from not being able to perform encrypted Internet searches.
Further, homeless people are bad for society as a whole. They're bad for property values, bad from cleanliness and thus health issues, bad from safety issues (when you're starving to death or dying of cold, robbing that guy for food money or a nice coat is suddenly not a big deal) -- just bad. Not to mention how bad it is for the person who is actually homeless.
When the consequence of having to give people 30 or 60 or 90 days to try to find a new place to live is to deprive a landlord of a couple months rent, it's paltry compared to the effects of the consequences of performing the eviction. Ultimately it will still happen, but yeah; they certainly try to at least eliminate the "homeless" step between eviction and new place to live.
For myself, the announcement itself was something that is newsworthy in its own right and deserved to be said.
I agree.
It's also worth noting that there was quite a bit of press prior to his execution. In addition to just his typical appeals and the somewhat strange manner of his execution (that he chose), there was also one of his victims' fiancee and father saying how the victim didn't approve of the death penalty and would want the sentence commuted to life and a few other things I can't recall but remember reading about. It was a press event long before the AG ever got involved, so even if he never did it before and never does it again I find it somewhat understandable.
We typically don't hear much about executions because they're isolated things; a person was killed and that's tragic in itself, but its impact is on the victim's family, the killer and his family, and the communities shaken by it. I wouldn't have heard of this execution in Illinois had some reporter not had found the circumstances strange enough to write an article about in a national publication.
Well if 90% of people are against something and lobbyists do buy votes and the voters are angry enough they can vote the representative out of office, something money can't do directly, and he will no longer be in a position to take bribes.
Well that's true, but I think you're underestimating how game-changing the words "angry enough" really are. In addition to how hard it is to get 90% of people to think one way about an issue, there are a few other problems with that fact in practice:
1. It would have to be an issue worth voting somebody out of office for. The reality is that the vast majority of issues are simply not to the average voter. Probably a reason that incumbents tend to win around 90% of re-election bids overall.
2. The seat has to be realistically in play. Due to demographics, districting, and--let's be honest here--a bit of gerrymandering from time to time, that's not always the case. Worse still, the opposing party will often not field good candidates or devote adequate resources to districts that they do not believe they can win, meaning that even if the issue was enough to propel a seat deemed unwinnable into contention, the opposition may not be in a position to mount a realistic challenge.
3. If Congress overrode the FCC, it means they got at least 50%+1 vote of each house to agree. Unless it was a straight party-line split, it would be extremely difficult to know if his replacement would have voted identically. If it WAS a party-line vote, it will probably eliminate a whole potential group because of #1. Anybody who votes for a specific party is unlikely to vote for another guy at all, much less on this sort of issue. (And primary challenges are relatively rare.)
4. Do you remember the issue at voting time? Have you noticed that the truly unpopular things tend to take place as far as possible from election time? It's not an accident.
5. It's an outrage, you find a candidate who would vote differently, the seat is in play -- can he win? It's still an election after all, and anything can happen.
It reminds me of a scene from an episode of The West Wing. A pollster had told the president's advisers that he could sew up re-election with one issue: The president should lead the charge in support of an amendment banning flag burning, and he showed them the statistics he had to back that point.
Later on they talked to a different pollster, who said (paraphrasing): "That's roughly the same percentage of people who would support sending litter bugs to jail. He never asked them how much they cared." And as it turns out, pretty much nobody would have cared enough to change their vote based on it.
All in all, while I oppose the merger and I would oppose overruling the FCC in any event, I don't see this as one of those things to vote somebody out of office for. Other people obviously felt that way about things like the Patriot Act and throwing people in jail indefinitely with no evidence or hearing. Even if 90% opposed this (and I suspect it would be more 50-50 closely along party lines with Republicans okay with the merger) I doubt it would come to anything.
They're free to ignore their constituents on this one. And, frankly, most others. As much as I'd like to get outraged about it, it's just really the way this sort of thing is going to work. A single vote that can truly win or lose a politician an election is rare.
Maybe it shouldn't have been. Maybe it was all just a massive cover-up. Maybe it still is. But if I were a military commander or another authority in charge of these decisions, I would not be inclined to let them be dictated to me by some private breaking the law and releasing them anyway. That's not how things work, nor should it be.
The fact that he did that does not declassify what was released, and it certainly doesn't declassify what was not released.
Otherwise, anyone anywhere in the world can sue you and you'd have the burden of representing yourself in all the different venues. Why?
Because international law sucks and has no means to fix such a problem. At least not currently.
Each individual country determines its jurisdiction on its own terms. According to the judge's interpretation, at least, a US court has jurisdiction over the issue. It's probably based on some spurious argument that Spamhaus' activities occur, at least partly, within the United States. In any event, it went to an appeals court who could have thrown the whole thing out due to jurisdictional issues but didn't, so the judge's interpretation there is probably correct. It's similar to Italy's indictment of Google employees for not personally policing the Internet as well as their laws wanted: Stupid, but legally correct according to the legal system it took place in.
That said, "jurisdiction" is not the same thing as "means to enforce." If Spamhaus has no US assets, there's really nothing the US can do about it.
I'm not saying they aren't greedy bastards, but I wonder if that time period coincided with our national "decision" that everybody needed to have at least a bachelor's degree for everything.
A sudden influx of tens of thousands more students per year would obviously require universities to expand, hire new staff, and any number of other things that could easily have their costs grow exponentially, especially compared to a more general metric like overall inflation.
(The book publishers, on the other hand... yeah, greed.)
Though the feds would prefer you forget that it exists, there is a tenth amendment (and a second). Why not go read them? In fact, read all 27.
For starers, I want to say I agree with what I think your premise is. I don't appreciate the trampling of rights that has occurred and continues to occur.
However, even if that's the case the worst that can be said is that the United States suffered a kind of mini-coup. It's worth noting that the Constitution itself was a mini-coup. Its ratification is roughly akin to if Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden* appeared a press conference tomorrow and said: "I have here the Obamatution. If we receive at least a two-thirds majority of myself [as president], Mr. Biden [as president of the Senate and vice president], Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid [as Speaker and majority leader], and Mr. McConnell and Mr. Boehner [as minority leaders] this document is ratified and supercedes the Constitution. And oh yeah, Pelosi, Reid, Biden and myself have already voted 'yea.'"
Okay, okay, I did say roughly akin, but the point is that the creators of a new governmental framework ratified it according to whatever criteria they so desired and wrote into their document, rather than the process that the old document had in effect for governmental changes. It was a bloodless coup.
We live in a world now where the Constitution they set up has been carefully worked around such that the government can do almost anything it pleases except the handful of things we still find too sacred about our structure to permit. (And even that is subject to change.) I don't approve. I don't like it. But I'm left somewhat... uncaring. Unsurprised. We've seen it happen before, such that I'm not even sure if it's right or wrong. A lot of good can come of it; a lot of evil can come of it. Last time we did alright. This time? Well, we'll see I suppose.
The Founders would probably be pissed at what happened, but they would be more pissed that nobody's out grabbing their guns to do something about it. They urged eternal vigilance; if we wanted to be strictly loyal to their interpretations we should have given it. Maybe we didn't want to, and all these debates are really about are which set of anti-constitutional policies are the ones we should tolerate and we just steep those arguments in an appeal to patriotism.
* I use them because they're currently in power and it's fashionable to hate on them, not to indicate any particular personal dislike of them or their policies.
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Even if that were true (and it's not -- see some of the other replies to you) the complete lack of critical thinking skills displayed by anybody who believes this remains... disturbing to say the least. (You have no idea how tempted I was to say "classified" there.)
I mean honestly. "Classified flesh-eating?" Do these idiots truly believe that the people would leave a term like flesh-eating in there next to something classified? It's both the worst and the most descriptive term in the sentence! "A new Bill of Rights will be drafted" is silly enough on its own, but just gets worse when paired with "to be approved by classified."
I know our own history is funny enough that none of this is IMPOSSIBLE (it basically happened), but to anybody with a handful of functioning brain cells it should be more than enough to throw up red flags and start looking into things -- starting, perhaps, with the fake congressman. But instead morons treat it as a reason to start running their mouths about their terribly ill-informed opinions on fake news stories. Bravo, morons, for continuously proving why the right to speak is not bundled with the right to be listened to.
Huh? Of course you can.
For starters, "your nation" is an ambiguous term. If I'm a terrorist from Belgium* living as a permanent resident or even citizen of the US, what is "[my] country?" What if I am living there with the express intent of harming the country, much as the 9/11 terrorists were?
Even if I'm purely from the US, born and raised, that's not to say that I can't be against it. I'm pretty tired of a lot of the crap that goes on here, for example. Personally it would make me much more likely to move elsewhere than seek to destroy it or kill people, but that doesn't mean I couldn't be somebody who takes that tact.
Maybe I'm against a standing army so I want to kill all the soldiers I see, even though I love my country itself. Maybe I even think I'm doing what's best for it. Few people would argue that committing murder as a demand for the dismantling of our military doesn't run contrary to national security.
The US political system has gotten old, but if I go around advocating killing all of our politicians they're going to charge me as a terrorist acting against national security -- and I would deserve it.
All of these are just examples of the multitude of hard-to-argue-against ways I can be "against security of [my] nation (and [myself])." There are plenty more, in addition to all sorts of rather insane possibilities and ones that are much more debatable. I could make a good case, I think, for the Tienanmen Square photos being against national security, for example. It could cause severe unrest, it could cause violence, it could cause the (attempted) overthrow of the government. As a US citizen who does not support what they did, does not support their covering up what they did and does not support that sort of censorship in general that would be a great thing, but I am also compelled to admit that from the perspective of the Chinese government, rebellion goes against national security.
The term is absolutely abused, and with 9/11 in our rear-view mirrors it may just be the most overused excuse today -- but that doesn't mean it is never valid explanation. It may or may not also be a valid reason for whatever happened.
* Yeah yeah. I'm intentionally not picking some Middle Eastern country.
It has nothing to do with religion, it was just the way the world was in the past. I suppose it makes more sense in periods when life expectancies were 35 or lower. That being the case, marrying and having children in ones early teens suddenly doesn't seem as distasteful.
It's one of many reasons I always hate when people try to judge historical figures or activities according to modern sensibilities.
Well, I think you've just illustrated beyond a doubt why they did what they did. A couple of screens are blank for reasons we don't even know and your immediate response is "ROAR I WANT PHDS TO MONITOR VIDEO SCREENS 24/7~~!!one!" Come on now. You don't even need PhD's in that room much less be bitching about whether or not a particular video stream is up at any given time.
Is it a bad picture? Yeah. So what? It's simply hatred of BP for what happened that makes you think it's a big deal, because it's absolutely not. The idea that a poor Photoshop job somehow means they're a terrible company who doesn't know what it's doing is laughably absurd.
Now if you want to talk about them being greedy bastards who very probably ignored safety concerns for the chance at slightly increased profits, or that this needs to cost them so much they don't want to go on living, I'm all on board.
No doubt.
The real question, however, is this: How many of those "free-loaders" are going to pay if you lock it away behind a paywall? Some will, I'm sure, either through the paywall or with a paper subscription, but just like in movie/music piracy I suspect the majority will not -- at least not as long as there is a free alternative someplace.
Now take that number and the profits you make from them and compare it to what you could get from advertisements on a free edition. If it works out, well, go for it.
The tricky thing for newspapers is that subscriptions were never the biggest portion of their income; it was advertisements contained within the paper (classifieds, etc). The Internet has decimated that model, but by the time they realized it they had already been free online for years. Now they're asking people to pay for something they haven't paid for in ages, and people are understandably resistant.
Unlikely. The US is not a loser pays system. Unless Google can prove that Viacom's case had no merit whatsoever (which courts almost never agree with, since frivolous cases are technically not supposed to go forward) or that they otherwise acted in some manner that abuses the legal system, there's little chance the court will order them to pay expenses. And even if they did, they would only order whatever part of $100MM they found to be a reasonable expenditure on Google's part. Obviously I don't know the specifics but that is a loooot of money, so I doubt it would be full and I'm not sure it would even be half.
I get your point and I do agree overall, but you picked some really bad examples. Cable companies are (natural) monopolies, and most ISPs are simply the cable companies or the phone companies, also a monopoly. Free market practices don't particularly apply there.
Banking? There WERE small-town banks but most of them are closed these days. There are still credit unions and a handful of banks to choose from, though I'm not sure what you're looking for.
And PCs? They're not exactly the best PC company in the world, but Dell did a tremendous job in getting relatively powerful PCs in consumers' hands for cheap prices. Hardware prices have plummeted. I'm not sure what else you want from free market influences.
That said, the problem with the idea that free markets solve something is it's predicated on the idea that people actually put value on anything other than money. I recall reading a story on Slashdot some time ago about somebody who went to a small mom-and-pop store for a TV (I think it was) and he raved about the great service he got from them in figuring everything out and getting it all squared away. And then he went to the big-box store to buy it.
A competitor airline re-bundling things to get rid of the hidden fees is almost guaranteed to result in higher fares (even if the total overall cost is lower), and most consumers will not look any farther than that. That being the case, the free market is powerless to solve the issue.
In a way it's a lot like those infomercials you see on TV. "Order now and we'll send you a second money sink FREE, just pay [$9.99] postage and handling!" Well, sorry, if your product is $10 and you're charging me $10 postage it's most certainly not free, you're just re-structuring the costs in a way that is even more beneficial to you (since S&H is not taxed).
What's the difference?
We have to operate in the real world. Maybe we can make a principled stand on our personal blogs or websites or what-have-you, but so long as there is more profit left on the table by ruining the experience of IE6 users than there is extra cost for working around it, the companies and websites that the majority of people care about will still demand support for IE6, and anybody who wants to collect a paycheck in the web development field will do it or they will be replaced by somebody who will. The idea of some sort of massive IE6 strike from developers that nobody can work around is naive.
Is it selfish? Yes. Humanity is selfish. Capitalism is selfish. Business is certainly selfish. So long as they are the underpinnings of our society that's just a fact of life. Wishing it weren't so doesn't change anything, and swimming against the current is unproductive at best and suicidal at worst.
IE6 and other bad technologies will die when one of two things happen: That culture changes from the top (asking the people who profit from it to abandon it in favor of something more universally valuable--highly unlikely) or the natural technology update cycles make IE6 such a niche case that the time, money and effort spent accommodating it is no longer worthwhile in the same way that almost nobody cares about IE5.5 anymore.
I'm certainly not holding my breath for the former. The latter is close to happening, in my estimation. ME ME ME believes in working in the real world, so I'll take that.
I know an example does not necessarily disprove your point, but can you tell me what about this post deserved not one but two troll mods?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1691254&cid=32620598
It was not impolite, it was an opinion built from fact, and it even recognized the possibilities that the side I was "for" was not playing fair at any point during the situation in question.
Posts that go against the Slashdot group-think do get upmodded sometimes; I've certainly seen that myself. I have seen nothing to suggest it's more likely than a downmod, though, and it really depends on how ingrained the group-think is. The site is probably 50-50 Apple lovers versus bashers, for example, which it's probably 80-20 in favor of OSS and against proprietary, closed-source software. I suspect the reverse are roughly your odds of a reasonable but contrary point getting modded up instead of down.
In my mind, the problem is that there are no valid options for modding down. Overrated is okay but obviously prone to extreme abuse. Troll asks the moderator to guess the motives of the poster. Some trolls are obvious, but anything non-obvious has you judging, essentially, whether the poster really believes what he posted or if he's just trying to get people angry. Flamebait is similar, except that it's also not necessarily a bad thing. If I post something that goes completely against a deeply-ingrained group-think, isn't that flame bait? Despite the fact that it may be a fantastic post on its own merits? What is flame bait a judge of other than going against convention? My reason for posting it? And of course Offtopic. While I recognize the value of Offtopic in general, the nature of Slashdot discussions is that half of the threads are actually Offtopic to the story (though usually on topic to the parent). The only ones who get modded that way are posts that the moderator does not agree with and happened to feel could fit there.
Now, I think that was intentional. I think Slashdot wanted narrowly-defined categories for downmods because they wanted the focus to be on upmods and they figured the reaction would be "aw, it doesn't fit anywhere, I guess I can't mod them down" but of course that isn't how it turns out. People seemingly decide to downmod when they read it and then click whichever fits best.
It's just human nature to promote ideas one agrees with and try to bury those one doesn't. The people who go against that in order to do their best job moderating according to how they were asked to moderate are probably the best, but they are the minority.
I don't think we fundamentally disagree, but I do have trouble thinking about what exactly we're protecting them from.
Bad language? They're going to be exposed to it, online and off, and aside from a few uncomfortable moments it's going to cause from time to time it's simply not a big deal. Use it as a lesson on appropriate language for certain situations.
Violence? There might be some kind of an argument here, but with television, movies and video games bathed in it its already a fight that is lost. Once again, use it as a life lesson when the violence is realistic and don't worry to much when it's not. I can say though, violence is something I don't believe I have ever stumbled onto on the Internet without seeking it out somehow. Usually it is in the form of those very same movies and video games.
Sex? It's hard but not impossible to stumble into. Aside from having to give the birds and the bees speech sooner, what actual harm is there? I'm not saying I would want my kids to see it, but I don't think they would somehow be instantly harmed if they did. It's hardly different than little Timmy stumbling into the bedroom while mommy and daddy are doing it, and that happens often enough out in the world. Are any of those parents claiming their children are horribly destroyed by their behavior? Or is it only other peoples' behavior that is deviant and harmful?
The hardcore stuff is certainly worse. I don't think a young child would honestly be able to understand fetishes (hell, I barely understand most of them as an adult). But really, it's just the same arguments as for sex and violence and sometimes "I have no idea why some people would like that" is not an unreasonable response. Plus if the kid is having a "WTF!" moment about it you're already pretty safe from whatever consequences you're fearing. Besides, the stranger and more hardcore we get the less likely we are to have found it accidentally and the more likely it is that it was sought out.
I'm not saying you should expose children to any of this; I think you should take reasonable steps as a parent to do what you can to ensure your children see what they are ready for. That doesn't mean child-proofing the entire world is the answer. It doesn't mean that the rest of society needs to conform to your views or do whatever they can to help you raise your children the way you feel they should be raised, and especially not to some government definition of how they should be raised. Nor does it mean that if your reasonable steps aren't enough that the children are horribly scarred for life.
Eight to ten year olds shouldn't be left unsupervised on the Internet, whether that supervision is personal, technical or both. Beyond that it's time to start letting go and realize that even with a squeaky-clean Internet you're going to need to cover all of these topics by the time these kids are 12 or 13 anyway. We don't need to shove it down their throats, but let's stop pretending we somehow wreck children forever if they see breasts when they're ten.
Regardless of if the odds are the same (and I frankly doubt it, even from a strictly mathematical standpoint) there is a vast difference between "you lose because the cool little balls with numbers on them didn't come up your way" and "you lose because not enough people liked your music."
Even if you pick your own numbers in the lottery, there's nothing you can do--aside from buying more tickets of course--to improve your odds. An artist's odds change with the appeal of his work. Getting rejected by random chance and getting rejected because people don't like what I produce are not the same.
(Of course I'm not a musician so I don't mean "I" literally.)
Those two are mutually exclusive. If you can't accurately quantify damages then how can you prove that a work's failure was a result of piracy?
You're just setting up a question that can't be answered so you can go "SEE! LYING RIAA BASTARDS, NOBODY COULD PROVE IT!" That doesn't help anybody in the debates swirling around piracy.
So what you're saying is that multiple parties willingly enter into an agreement, the following being the possible outcomes:
1. Studio best case -- nobody sues you and you get to pay the nothing you knew you were going to pay.
2. Talent best case -- you sue the studio and win more than the nothing you knew you were going to get, putting up large sums of money for large risks in the legal system to get paid.
3. Studio second-best case -- you get sued but ultimately win and pay the nothing you knew you were going to pay, minus legal fees.
4. Incompetence case -- the accountants can't cook the books properly and somebody accidentally gets paid more than nothing. The studios will still likely do their best not to pay if such a case arose, so it's really just a prelude to case #2 or #3.
That's really your argument? What's the point? It's a risk for the studios since they lose at least some money in three of the four possibilities compared to just leaving the damn clause out entirely, and for the talent they know their best-case scenario is both rare and expensive to pursue so including it is hardly an incentive. Such clauses literally benefit nobody (reliably) if we're operating under the assumption that both parties know what's really going to happen.
Even if the contracts are poured over by lawyers and clear as day, all you know is what the contract says. The studios are not violating the letter of their contracts; the whole point of the term "Hollywood accounting" is that they're technically doing exactly what they're legally bound to do. Rather, they violate the spirit and act in bad faith by setting up subsidiary corporations and what-have-you in order to make gobs of money but avoid actually having to share it with anybody they agreed to share it with. Naturally they'll have an idea of how they're doing it in advance when they offer the contract, but I'm sure half the scheming of "how can we get out of this?" happens long after the paperwork is signed, and there are some veeeeerry clever lawyers and accountants out there who would love even a fraction of the money they could save their bosses.
The more likely explanation is the simplest: The studios are hoping to scam people into feeling like they will be compensated more than they really will if things happen to become wildly successful. Some people won't buy it and either find a new project or get their profit shares negotiated in a way not so subject to being gamed (assuming they have such negotiating muscle to begin with), many will mistakenly assume that they're not going to get screwed for making the studio fistfuls of money, most won't even merit such considerations.
You're right: By and large, the J.K. Rowlings of the world aren't the ones being screwed by this. They have the muscle, either by their money, their popularity, or their control over whether or not a movie even gets made (ie, rights holders) to get clauses that are virtually game-proof. The people who get screwed are the small guys who are working their asses off and working in good faith with the expectation that what makes the show money makes them all money. That's frankly what studios are counting on. They want you to work as though you are more invested than you are.
Penetrating analysis, since obviously a newspaper would have exactly one copy of one tool they use for production and zero copies of any others.
How many copies of Photoshop? How many copies of Office? How many copies of InDesign? It doesn't take all that many to start adding up, especially for a large paper.
How much time do you save by having software do exactly what you want the way you find most productive instead of working around the way the software expects you to want it? How much do you ultimately end up saving when you realize that many newspapers are owned by the same companies, who can employ a couple programmers and extend the benefits to hundreds or even thousands of employees? Or that many little companies can pool resources for the programmers and all enjoy the benefits? And of course any number of other positive and negative consequences of such a switch.
Maybe it ultimately doesn't add up, but it would certainly take a more in-depth analysis than yours to decide that.
There shouldn't be, for all the reasons you gave in support of why users really ARE a security threat rather than the ones who should be setting security policy for their phones. If the question is "does Google or the owner know better whether or not something should be installed?" the answer can't be "Google, but they should make a checkbox that says 'lulz just kidding, I'm smarter, turn it off.'" It's not logically consistent. Whether "Google" was the right answer or even if that was the right question is, of course, a different matter.
Responding backward to your post because I think the more important point I wanted to speak to was made first in your post.
I agree, and I also have not disabled advertising on Slashdot. I don't mind advertising. I don't even mind things like Google ads and all the information they've collected about me being used to decide which ads I get.
I DO mind my zip code being sent along to websites and advertisers, without my permission and without any way to opt-out or stop it. It's a privacy issue for me. My visiting a website does not immediately mean I want them to know the exact neighborhood I live in. Do we really believe the only people who will be able to read these HTTP headers are the advertisers themselves?
Again I agree, as I stated above. But that's not what's happening here. ISPs--who I have already paid some rather ridiculous fees for their service--are deciding that they want to double-dip and profit even more from me by sending the information they have as a result of my paying them along to other people who want to make money off of me, getting a cut in the process of course. This also makes the ad companies money, since better targeting will attract more customers (advertisers). None of this has anything to do with the websites I visit, it's just lining the pockets of greedy corporations one of whom I already pay.
Maybe--maaaaybe--those ad companies choose to pass along some of these new profits to the websites hosting their advertisements for clicks or impressions, but there's not any guarantee of it. In fact I would consider it fairly unlikely. It may or may not mean more clicks for the hosting websites. I'm not entirely convinced that hyper-local online advertising is a great idea. If I want a pizza, I already know what the phone numbers to the pizza joints who deliver here are and I already know what my preference is as far as the pizza joint I call. Occasionally I suppose a new business might spring up, but when we're talking ZIP+4 local advertising it's probably something I would see just driving around.
In any event, there's no guarantee whatsoever that selling out my privacy this way will enrich anybody other than the ISP who does it and the ad serving companies who attract new clients because of it. No way I approve of that. This has nothing to do with helping pay for free websites.
...want him to answer questions about how classified or otherwise illegal-to-distribute information ended up in his hands? OH NOES, THE BIG BAD GUBMINT!
Just reading the summary you can see some of the problems with Wikileaks in general and everything surrounding Manning and now Assange in particular. He released a video about the military doing some Really Bad Shit; that's important, and it should have been done. He may have another video of them doing Equally Bad Shit; that's important too, so he should stop huffing and puffing and just release the damn thing already instead of stoking his ego for a few months first.
But then there's the rest. A quarter of a million cables? I mean really? Do you think Manning or anybody else sifted through them to ensure that only information related to the military's Bad Shit operations and their cover-ups ended up in this man's hands? We have NO IDEA what information may be in there. We have no idea what the leak and potential public posting of those cables has done to individuals, to the military, to a particular operation. We have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of dollars it might have cost to scrap a plan or alter a timetable because there was a fear it was about to put into the open. Hell, we don't even know if the military knows yet what they might need to scrap or change. We don't know if they know what's gone.
People should be made accountable for bad and illegal actions. That means the soldiers who perpetrated the atrocities*, the chain of command that failed to act, and anybody who helped cover it up. It also means Manning. Personally I would like to see him arrested, prosecuted and sentenced. If it turns out that all those cables really were related to these incidents or those like them, I would like to see him pardoned -- justice, and yet a recognition of the fact that outing this sort of thing is important. If not, if he just started blindly scooping up sensitive information between military commanders of a war because he didn't support it, shuttling it off to some egomaniac to do with as he pleases, then let him rot.
As an aside, I wonder when Americans obtained an expectation that doing illegal things because they're the right thing to do should be without consequence. You didn't see the black civil rights activists screaming "LET ME GO, I'M BEING CIVILLY DISOBEDIENT, YOU CAN'T ARREST ME FOR BREAKING THE LAW!! RRAAAWRWRWR." They did what they did because it was right; they did what they did in hopes of getting bad laws changed or, in this case, people who did bad things punished for them. They didn't expect to get away free for it. I don't mind setting up laws and systems that help these people (ie whistleblower-type laws) to come forward because I understand that not everybody has the stomach for the potential life-altering consequences, but this expectation that people can do anything if they mean well... well, "the ends justify the means" has always been one of the world's most dangerous concepts.
It reminds me of a discussion we had in a history class at my high school once. I don't remember the specifics, but the teacher basically posited a question such as this: What would you do if something was horribly illegal, but you truly believed that you would rot in hell for all of eternity for not doing it? (Or for doing it, I really don't remember how it was set up.) Random hands would shoot up with some scheme or another, and he'd always be able to shoot them down. People wanted it both ways. Eventually everybody gave up guessing and waited for his answer: "You do it and you go to jail." Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes you have to operate on a higher law, whether that is religion** or your own set of morality. But at the same time, you can't expect the rest of the world to behave the same way or to pardon you (literally or figuratively) for
Legal? Quite possibly.
Ethical? I don't believe anybody has any such ethical obligation. They may do it or not as they choose, according to their own set of morality and appropriateness.
I'm going to bet it has everything to do with the fact that people can die as a result of being homeless while nobody has ever died from not being able to perform encrypted Internet searches.
Further, homeless people are bad for society as a whole. They're bad for property values, bad from cleanliness and thus health issues, bad from safety issues (when you're starving to death or dying of cold, robbing that guy for food money or a nice coat is suddenly not a big deal) -- just bad. Not to mention how bad it is for the person who is actually homeless.
When the consequence of having to give people 30 or 60 or 90 days to try to find a new place to live is to deprive a landlord of a couple months rent, it's paltry compared to the effects of the consequences of performing the eviction. Ultimately it will still happen, but yeah; they certainly try to at least eliminate the "homeless" step between eviction and new place to live.
I agree.
It's also worth noting that there was quite a bit of press prior to his execution. In addition to just his typical appeals and the somewhat strange manner of his execution (that he chose), there was also one of his victims' fiancee and father saying how the victim didn't approve of the death penalty and would want the sentence commuted to life and a few other things I can't recall but remember reading about. It was a press event long before the AG ever got involved, so even if he never did it before and never does it again I find it somewhat understandable.
We typically don't hear much about executions because they're isolated things; a person was killed and that's tragic in itself, but its impact is on the victim's family, the killer and his family, and the communities shaken by it. I wouldn't have heard of this execution in Illinois had some reporter not had found the circumstances strange enough to write an article about in a national publication.
Well that's true, but I think you're underestimating how game-changing the words "angry enough" really are. In addition to how hard it is to get 90% of people to think one way about an issue, there are a few other problems with that fact in practice:
1. It would have to be an issue worth voting somebody out of office for. The reality is that the vast majority of issues are simply not to the average voter. Probably a reason that incumbents tend to win around 90% of re-election bids overall.
2. The seat has to be realistically in play. Due to demographics, districting, and--let's be honest here--a bit of gerrymandering from time to time, that's not always the case. Worse still, the opposing party will often not field good candidates or devote adequate resources to districts that they do not believe they can win, meaning that even if the issue was enough to propel a seat deemed unwinnable into contention, the opposition may not be in a position to mount a realistic challenge.
3. If Congress overrode the FCC, it means they got at least 50%+1 vote of each house to agree. Unless it was a straight party-line split, it would be extremely difficult to know if his replacement would have voted identically. If it WAS a party-line vote, it will probably eliminate a whole potential group because of #1. Anybody who votes for a specific party is unlikely to vote for another guy at all, much less on this sort of issue. (And primary challenges are relatively rare.)
4. Do you remember the issue at voting time? Have you noticed that the truly unpopular things tend to take place as far as possible from election time? It's not an accident.
5. It's an outrage, you find a candidate who would vote differently, the seat is in play -- can he win? It's still an election after all, and anything can happen.
It reminds me of a scene from an episode of The West Wing. A pollster had told the president's advisers that he could sew up re-election with one issue: The president should lead the charge in support of an amendment banning flag burning, and he showed them the statistics he had to back that point.
Later on they talked to a different pollster, who said (paraphrasing): "That's roughly the same percentage of people who would support sending litter bugs to jail. He never asked them how much they cared." And as it turns out, pretty much nobody would have cared enough to change their vote based on it.
All in all, while I oppose the merger and I would oppose overruling the FCC in any event, I don't see this as one of those things to vote somebody out of office for. Other people obviously felt that way about things like the Patriot Act and throwing people in jail indefinitely with no evidence or hearing. Even if 90% opposed this (and I suspect it would be more 50-50 closely along party lines with Republicans okay with the merger) I doubt it would come to anything.
They're free to ignore their constituents on this one. And, frankly, most others. As much as I'd like to get outraged about it, it's just really the way this sort of thing is going to work. A single vote that can truly win or lose a politician an election is rare.
It's classified; that's the whole point.
Maybe it shouldn't have been. Maybe it was all just a massive cover-up. Maybe it still is. But if I were a military commander or another authority in charge of these decisions, I would not be inclined to let them be dictated to me by some private breaking the law and releasing them anyway. That's not how things work, nor should it be.
The fact that he did that does not declassify what was released, and it certainly doesn't declassify what was not released.
Because international law sucks and has no means to fix such a problem. At least not currently.
Each individual country determines its jurisdiction on its own terms. According to the judge's interpretation, at least, a US court has jurisdiction over the issue. It's probably based on some spurious argument that Spamhaus' activities occur, at least partly, within the United States. In any event, it went to an appeals court who could have thrown the whole thing out due to jurisdictional issues but didn't, so the judge's interpretation there is probably correct. It's similar to Italy's indictment of Google employees for not personally policing the Internet as well as their laws wanted: Stupid, but legally correct according to the legal system it took place in.
That said, "jurisdiction" is not the same thing as "means to enforce." If Spamhaus has no US assets, there's really nothing the US can do about it.
I'm not saying they aren't greedy bastards, but I wonder if that time period coincided with our national "decision" that everybody needed to have at least a bachelor's degree for everything.
A sudden influx of tens of thousands more students per year would obviously require universities to expand, hire new staff, and any number of other things that could easily have their costs grow exponentially, especially compared to a more general metric like overall inflation.
(The book publishers, on the other hand... yeah, greed.)
For starers, I want to say I agree with what I think your premise is. I don't appreciate the trampling of rights that has occurred and continues to occur.
However, even if that's the case the worst that can be said is that the United States suffered a kind of mini-coup. It's worth noting that the Constitution itself was a mini-coup. Its ratification is roughly akin to if Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden* appeared a press conference tomorrow and said: "I have here the Obamatution. If we receive at least a two-thirds majority of myself [as president], Mr. Biden [as president of the Senate and vice president], Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid [as Speaker and majority leader], and Mr. McConnell and Mr. Boehner [as minority leaders] this document is ratified and supercedes the Constitution. And oh yeah, Pelosi, Reid, Biden and myself have already voted 'yea.'"
Okay, okay, I did say roughly akin, but the point is that the creators of a new governmental framework ratified it according to whatever criteria they so desired and wrote into their document, rather than the process that the old document had in effect for governmental changes. It was a bloodless coup.
We live in a world now where the Constitution they set up has been carefully worked around such that the government can do almost anything it pleases except the handful of things we still find too sacred about our structure to permit. (And even that is subject to change.) I don't approve. I don't like it. But I'm left somewhat... uncaring. Unsurprised. We've seen it happen before, such that I'm not even sure if it's right or wrong. A lot of good can come of it; a lot of evil can come of it. Last time we did alright. This time? Well, we'll see I suppose.
The Founders would probably be pissed at what happened, but they would be more pissed that nobody's out grabbing their guns to do something about it. They urged eternal vigilance; if we wanted to be strictly loyal to their interpretations we should have given it. Maybe we didn't want to, and all these debates are really about are which set of anti-constitutional policies are the ones we should tolerate and we just steep those arguments in an appeal to patriotism.
* I use them because they're currently in power and it's fashionable to hate on them, not to indicate any particular personal dislike of them or their policies.