Well, good for them that legality is all that matters and public opinion has nothing to do with it.
When it comes to the actions of the US government, legality is supposed to be what matters.
They made it clear they wanted attention and money, not to show the injustices done in the world.
If I had information that suggested that powerful people were committing heinous crimes and getting away with it, I'd want that information spread far and wide. That would necessarily entail having attention, and would require funding. This is all regardless of whether Julian Assange is a jerk who two-timed a couple of Swedish gals.
The 'financial blockade' predates the threat to publish stuff about Bank of America. When the leaks about Iraq were published, the US government, with Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) leading the way, worked with PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and other financial institutions to cut off funding that went through any US-based corporation.
Note that Wikileaks had not (and still hasn't) done anything illegal in the United States: Publishing classified information that was handed to you is protected under the First Amendment, as decided in the Pentagon Papers case.
Congratulations for working your way up. You worked hard to get where you are today, and I salute you.
But now, doing what you did is essentially impossible: * Average annual in-state tuition, room and board at a state university, books and basic supplies - $7600+$1100+$2000=$10,700 (numbers from the College Board. Private schools are about 3 times that cost. * US minimum wage: $7.25 per hour. After taxes, about $6.00. * So weekly hours worked to earn your way through school: $10,700 / $6 / 52 (weeks per year) = about 35 hours per week. * Being a student requires basically full-time hours, so schoolwork takes up about 35-40 hours per week. That leaves, of your 168 hours in a week, 94 hours for everything that isn't working or studying. If you assume 8 hours of sleep a night, you have a total of 5 hours a day to do everything else: eating, dressing, laundry, cleaning, bathing, traveling to and from work and class, etc. Your only chance of relief would be the summer, where you might be able to live with your parents. I've worked those kind of hours for short bursts, but the human body simply can't handle that over long periods.
And of course this all assumes that minimum wage jobs are available in your area, which is probably not true at the moment.
Regarding the 10th Amendment argument that keeps on being brought up:
The whole reason there was a Constitutional Convention in 1787 was because the existing federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, was unable to function. In large part this was because if the central government needed money, the only way they could get it was to politely ask the states for cash, and the states generally responded to that by giving jack squat. This proved to be a problem when the federal government needed to try to enforce its laws, build a navy to defend US shipping from the British in particular, or do much of anything at all
Direct taxation was one of the many reasons the US Constitution exists, and any idea that it wasn't the intent of the people who signed it and advocated for it is just plain wrong.
I thought "the invisible hand of the market" was supposed to make things work.
Except it's well known (at least among economists) that markets do not in fact work correctly all the time. If I start a landfill on my property, that presents an economic cost to my neighbors even though my neighbors weren't part of the deal. Or if the point of buying the product is to show off how rich I am, then instead of lower prices yielding more sales, higher prices yield more sales. Or if my factory emits lots of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, and your kid catches asthma because of it, that's a cost paid by you even though it was caused by me. Or if I go to buy a used car, while I can evaluate the car somewhat carefully, ultimately the dealer knows more about the history of that car than I do, so it's possible that he'll sell me a piece of junk. Or if there's an IPO of a very hyped but fundamentally worthless company, lots of investors will buy it up early, wait for the price to skyrocket, and try to find some bigger sucker to sell to before anyone realizes how worthless the company is.
Point is, things are a lot more complicated than you were probably taught in high school.
It's not entirely about the environmental regulations. In addition to toxic waste spewing all over their country, Chinese workers don't have the kind of labor protections that European and even US workers currently have, like protection from unpaid overtime, workplace safety laws so they don't get killed on the job, minimum wages, collective bargaining rights, child labor laws, etc.
I assume you mean "Shoot people according to the rules of engagement", right? The US has treaty obligations that make it very clear that mowing down civilians is not ok. I'm not saying they don't do that kind of thing, but that's not supposed to be the way it works.
The biggest problem with most of these approaches are in effect rule by those who can easily access a computer with Internet access. That excludes somewhere around 40% of Americans from governance. I grant you, it's far better than the current system of government which effectively excludes 99% of Americans, but it's still a problem.
If I wanted to, I could rig GCC and the like to do that too: That's the wonderful thing about command-line tools and piping, you can munge things together any way you want. And of course you can always tell gcc to stop partway through the compilation if you need assembler code or a parse tree or something. This sort of thing is common in open-source compilers, because they need these features for debugging purposes and have no reason to leave them out of the released version.
Of course, I probably don't want to include a feature like this dynamic code execution, because if I screw up, it would be a fantastic way to get a machine to execute code that it's not supposed to.
No, the true deniers will just say that Richard Muller has joined the great conspiracy of climate scientists and liberals threatening to turn us all into slaves by introducing a modest tax on CO2 emissions. So long as they do that, the problem is still debatable in the public press.
You think they won't? Consider how many people think that the Theory of Evolution is a giant conspiracy.
Yeah! Screw those damned Conservatives Obama, Biden, Reid, Napolitano, and Holder!
For the record, many self-described Progressives have precisely that sentiment. When you compare what Obama, Biden, Reid, Napolitano, and Holder are doing with what the American public reports wanting in numerous polls, you'll find that they're much more conservative than the public.
There are almost daily terrorist attacks in Iraq, thousands and thousands have been killed in acts of terrorism...
As a rule, attacking foreign soldiers occupying your country is not considered terrorism, it's considered a resistance movement. At least, we always called it a 'resistance' when the foreign soldiers being attacked were on the other side. This is true in Afghanistan too, where the US supported resistance fighters against the Soviets.
Consider, for instance, if Iranian troops were walking through your neighborhood uninvited. Would you consider yourself a terrorist if you took it upon yourself to attack them?
It should be pointed out that during the 70's, when there were a lot of hijackings, in most cases the planes would fly to Cuba or Libya or someplace, the passengers would get off, their countries of origin would negotiate a release, and nobody got hurt. That's precisely why before 2001 the standard doctrine for handling a hijacking was to not fight back - that choice maximized the chance of survival for the passengers.
'Had SureView been on Bradley Manning's machine, no one would know who Bradley Manning is today,' says Ryan Szedelo, manager for Raytheon's SureView software.
And nobody would have evidence of the serious crimes he told the world about. That's what they're really worried about.
But that would be aiming for a society that matches the advanced democratic socialist nations of Europe. You know, the ones that want their citizens healthy, well-fed, educated, housed properly, etc. A significant number of Americans, by contrast, want a society in which it's everyone for themselves, and if you don't win the rat race, we'll clean up your body off the street for you.
I'm not kidding, either: Listen to the Republican debates, in which statements involving executions or people dying due to lack of health care get cheers, statements that are pro-evolution are met with stoney silence, and statements by gay soldiers are met with boos.
The danger in that position is that there are people who are anxious to use science as an excuse to take away liberty.
The thing is, when you're talking about sound research, the liberty is already gone. I don't have the liberty to fall upwards, no matter how much I want to.
Regarding social sciences, like other areas of study, some findings are indisputable and should probably have strong influence on public policy, while others are not. For instance, black defendants in the US get much harsher sentences than white defendants for the same crime, and that should probably affect public policy.
It is, but AC is right that another way around the paywall is to just remove the &gwh=... from the URL. Works like a charm, and I think there are even automated tools to do that.
Interestingly, I can also browse freely at work without having either cookie issues or monkeying with URLs. I'm guessing that somebody with the same public IP has a subscription, so NYTimes just assumes everything's fine.
We need a Unix-like government: efficient, fast, responsive, cleanly designed, compartmentalized, and well documented.
No we don't. We need a mainframe OS government - big and robust and carefully calibrated to do its job as well as it possibly can. The reason we need a mainframe OS for the US government is that a responsive government of a country the size of the US has to do a huge amount of stuff.
Consider, for instance, the laws against fraud. Those laws are needed to make contracts at all useful, and the government needs to be the one to enforce them if we don't want contracts to be irrelevant if you don't have a private army to enforce it, so even the most libertarian-minded generally consider laws against fraud to be necessary. Well, lo and behold, in the recent financial crisis, there's substantial evidence that companies like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have committed fraud on a massive scale. However, the Department of Justice has a grand total of 24 FBI agents to investigate all fraud on Wall Street. There's no possible way for those 24 agents to come close to doing their job, and the job they need to do is unquestionably complex. Also, in cases of securities fraud, you can't easily compartmentalize between the FBI's role (gathering evidence and prosecuting crimes), the SEC's role (ensuring that the stocks on the market are what they say they are), and the Federal Reserve's role (ensuring that the financial system doesn't collapse).
To be fair, Ron Paul does advocate removing all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and I suspect would be fine with pulling them out of other foreign countries as well (Do we really need troops ready to defend West Germany from the USSR?). He's also probably a lot more comfortable with slashing defense spending than just about every other candidate in the race right now.
And I say this as someone who's probably not going to vote for him.
For every open job right now, there are about 5 people looking for work. Assuming normal distribution of ability, 1 of those people is stellar, 3 of those people are about average, and 1 is an idiot. Now, that stellar person is likely to be hired (unless one of the others benefits from some inappropriate factor like nepotism). Great for him/her. But the difference between a healthy economy and a depressed economy is that in a healthy economy, those 3 average people, who are perfectly capable of usefully contributing to productive enterprise, are hired, whereas in the current economy they are not.
You're demanding a statistical impossibility, namely that all people are above average.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, good for them that legality is all that matters and public opinion has nothing to do with it.
When it comes to the actions of the US government, legality is supposed to be what matters.
They made it clear they wanted attention and money, not to show the injustices done in the world.
If I had information that suggested that powerful people were committing heinous crimes and getting away with it, I'd want that information spread far and wide. That would necessarily entail having attention, and would require funding. This is all regardless of whether Julian Assange is a jerk who two-timed a couple of Swedish gals.
The 'financial blockade' predates the threat to publish stuff about Bank of America. When the leaks about Iraq were published, the US government, with Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) leading the way, worked with PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and other financial institutions to cut off funding that went through any US-based corporation.
Note that Wikileaks had not (and still hasn't) done anything illegal in the United States: Publishing classified information that was handed to you is protected under the First Amendment, as decided in the Pentagon Papers case.
Congratulations for working your way up. You worked hard to get where you are today, and I salute you.
But now, doing what you did is essentially impossible:
* Average annual in-state tuition, room and board at a state university, books and basic supplies - $7600+$1100+$2000=$10,700 (numbers from the College Board. Private schools are about 3 times that cost.
* US minimum wage: $7.25 per hour. After taxes, about $6.00.
* So weekly hours worked to earn your way through school: $10,700 / $6 / 52 (weeks per year) = about 35 hours per week.
* Being a student requires basically full-time hours, so schoolwork takes up about 35-40 hours per week.
That leaves, of your 168 hours in a week, 94 hours for everything that isn't working or studying. If you assume 8 hours of sleep a night, you have a total of 5 hours a day to do everything else: eating, dressing, laundry, cleaning, bathing, traveling to and from work and class, etc. Your only chance of relief would be the summer, where you might be able to live with your parents. I've worked those kind of hours for short bursts, but the human body simply can't handle that over long periods.
And of course this all assumes that minimum wage jobs are available in your area, which is probably not true at the moment.
Regarding the 10th Amendment argument that keeps on being brought up:
The whole reason there was a Constitutional Convention in 1787 was because the existing federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, was unable to function. In large part this was because if the central government needed money, the only way they could get it was to politely ask the states for cash, and the states generally responded to that by giving jack squat. This proved to be a problem when the federal government needed to try to enforce its laws, build a navy to defend US shipping from the British in particular, or do much of anything at all
Direct taxation was one of the many reasons the US Constitution exists, and any idea that it wasn't the intent of the people who signed it and advocated for it is just plain wrong.
I thought "the invisible hand of the market" was supposed to make things work.
Except it's well known (at least among economists) that markets do not in fact work correctly all the time. If I start a landfill on my property, that presents an economic cost to my neighbors even though my neighbors weren't part of the deal. Or if the point of buying the product is to show off how rich I am, then instead of lower prices yielding more sales, higher prices yield more sales. Or if my factory emits lots of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, and your kid catches asthma because of it, that's a cost paid by you even though it was caused by me. Or if I go to buy a used car, while I can evaluate the car somewhat carefully, ultimately the dealer knows more about the history of that car than I do, so it's possible that he'll sell me a piece of junk. Or if there's an IPO of a very hyped but fundamentally worthless company, lots of investors will buy it up early, wait for the price to skyrocket, and try to find some bigger sucker to sell to before anyone realizes how worthless the company is.
Point is, things are a lot more complicated than you were probably taught in high school.
It's not entirely about the environmental regulations. In addition to toxic waste spewing all over their country, Chinese workers don't have the kind of labor protections that European and even US workers currently have, like protection from unpaid overtime, workplace safety laws so they don't get killed on the job, minimum wages, collective bargaining rights, child labor laws, etc.
On the one hand, the female computer voice could at any moment turn into Lwaxana Troi.
On the other hand, it turns out Babylon 5's computer seems to have the same problem.
Arguably not, because anyone familiar with the history of the Vietnam War learned not to trust anything the US military said about its own operations.
we need to allow them to shoot anyone on site
I assume you mean "Shoot people according to the rules of engagement", right? The US has treaty obligations that make it very clear that mowing down civilians is not ok. I'm not saying they don't do that kind of thing, but that's not supposed to be the way it works.
The biggest problem with most of these approaches are in effect rule by those who can easily access a computer with Internet access. That excludes somewhere around 40% of Americans from governance. I grant you, it's far better than the current system of government which effectively excludes 99% of Americans, but it's still a problem.
If I wanted to, I could rig GCC and the like to do that too: That's the wonderful thing about command-line tools and piping, you can munge things together any way you want. And of course you can always tell gcc to stop partway through the compilation if you need assembler code or a parse tree or something. This sort of thing is common in open-source compilers, because they need these features for debugging purposes and have no reason to leave them out of the released version.
Of course, I probably don't want to include a feature like this dynamic code execution, because if I screw up, it would be a fantastic way to get a machine to execute code that it's not supposed to.
No, the true deniers will just say that Richard Muller has joined the great conspiracy of climate scientists and liberals threatening to turn us all into slaves by introducing a modest tax on CO2 emissions. So long as they do that, the problem is still debatable in the public press.
You think they won't? Consider how many people think that the Theory of Evolution is a giant conspiracy.
Yeah! Screw those damned Conservatives Obama, Biden, Reid, Napolitano, and Holder!
For the record, many self-described Progressives have precisely that sentiment. When you compare what Obama, Biden, Reid, Napolitano, and Holder are doing with what the American public reports wanting in numerous polls, you'll find that they're much more conservative than the public.
There are almost daily terrorist attacks in Iraq, thousands and thousands have been killed in acts of terrorism...
As a rule, attacking foreign soldiers occupying your country is not considered terrorism, it's considered a resistance movement. At least, we always called it a 'resistance' when the foreign soldiers being attacked were on the other side. This is true in Afghanistan too, where the US supported resistance fighters against the Soviets.
Consider, for instance, if Iranian troops were walking through your neighborhood uninvited. Would you consider yourself a terrorist if you took it upon yourself to attack them?
It should be pointed out that during the 70's, when there were a lot of hijackings, in most cases the planes would fly to Cuba or Libya or someplace, the passengers would get off, their countries of origin would negotiate a release, and nobody got hurt. That's precisely why before 2001 the standard doctrine for handling a hijacking was to not fight back - that choice maximized the chance of survival for the passengers.
'Had SureView been on Bradley Manning's machine, no one would know who Bradley Manning is today,' says Ryan Szedelo, manager for Raytheon's SureView software.
And nobody would have evidence of the serious crimes he told the world about. That's what they're really worried about.
But that would be aiming for a society that matches the advanced democratic socialist nations of Europe. You know, the ones that want their citizens healthy, well-fed, educated, housed properly, etc. A significant number of Americans, by contrast, want a society in which it's everyone for themselves, and if you don't win the rat race, we'll clean up your body off the street for you.
I'm not kidding, either: Listen to the Republican debates, in which statements involving executions or people dying due to lack of health care get cheers, statements that are pro-evolution are met with stoney silence, and statements by gay soldiers are met with boos.
In an alternate way of reading history, they've already had several: French Revolutionary Wars, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, etc.
The danger in that position is that there are people who are anxious to use science as an excuse to take away liberty.
The thing is, when you're talking about sound research, the liberty is already gone. I don't have the liberty to fall upwards, no matter how much I want to.
Regarding social sciences, like other areas of study, some findings are indisputable and should probably have strong influence on public policy, while others are not. For instance, black defendants in the US get much harsher sentences than white defendants for the same crime, and that should probably affect public policy.
It is, but AC is right that another way around the paywall is to just remove the &gwh=... from the URL. Works like a charm, and I think there are even automated tools to do that.
Interestingly, I can also browse freely at work without having either cookie issues or monkeying with URLs. I'm guessing that somebody with the same public IP has a subscription, so NYTimes just assumes everything's fine.
Ron Paul is (or at least has been) in favor of marijuana legalization.
We need a Unix-like government: efficient, fast, responsive, cleanly designed, compartmentalized, and well documented.
No we don't. We need a mainframe OS government - big and robust and carefully calibrated to do its job as well as it possibly can. The reason we need a mainframe OS for the US government is that a responsive government of a country the size of the US has to do a huge amount of stuff.
Consider, for instance, the laws against fraud. Those laws are needed to make contracts at all useful, and the government needs to be the one to enforce them if we don't want contracts to be irrelevant if you don't have a private army to enforce it, so even the most libertarian-minded generally consider laws against fraud to be necessary. Well, lo and behold, in the recent financial crisis, there's substantial evidence that companies like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have committed fraud on a massive scale. However, the Department of Justice has a grand total of 24 FBI agents to investigate all fraud on Wall Street. There's no possible way for those 24 agents to come close to doing their job, and the job they need to do is unquestionably complex. Also, in cases of securities fraud, you can't easily compartmentalize between the FBI's role (gathering evidence and prosecuting crimes), the SEC's role (ensuring that the stocks on the market are what they say they are), and the Federal Reserve's role (ensuring that the financial system doesn't collapse).
To be fair, Ron Paul does advocate removing all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and I suspect would be fine with pulling them out of other foreign countries as well (Do we really need troops ready to defend West Germany from the USSR?). He's also probably a lot more comfortable with slashing defense spending than just about every other candidate in the race right now.
And I say this as someone who's probably not going to vote for him.
For every open job right now, there are about 5 people looking for work. Assuming normal distribution of ability, 1 of those people is stellar, 3 of those people are about average, and 1 is an idiot. Now, that stellar person is likely to be hired (unless one of the others benefits from some inappropriate factor like nepotism). Great for him/her. But the difference between a healthy economy and a depressed economy is that in a healthy economy, those 3 average people, who are perfectly capable of usefully contributing to productive enterprise, are hired, whereas in the current economy they are not.
You're demanding a statistical impossibility, namely that all people are above average.
News Corp is not - Murdoch is Australian, and much of News Corp's operations are in the UK (remember that whole phone hacking scandal?)