There are plenty of times when I'd like to throttle my lusers. Usually, though, I just solve the problem by changing the DNS resolution for their bank to a Russian phishing site, and following it up with planting some nice illegal content in their network share and calling the authorities when I "discover" it.
No one seriously argues that Awlaki wasn't an enemy actor, therefore there is zero logical argument against killing him.
Actually, a lot of people do seriously argue that point. The one thing that is not in dispute is that al-Awlaki advocated violence against the US government, but that has been ruled protected speech - if it hadn't been, people like William Piece (author of the Turner Diaries) would be up on charges. What has never been proven in a court of law, and is disputed by many folks who actually know what they're talking about in Yemen, is that Awlaki had anything to do with planning and executing any actual terrorist attacks.
Attacking him was a "necessity" because there was no other way to interdict his activities.
Sure there was: 1. Present evidence to a judge sufficient to demonstrate probable cause for arresting him. 2. Work with the Yemeni authorities, who are allies of the US, to attempt to capture him and bring him to the US for trial. If he attempts to resist arrest, by all means shoot back. 3. Indict and try him, and if he is guilty, lock him up forever or execute him.
Force used was "proportional" because it was sufficient to decisively counter a hostile act or hostile intent, but reasonable in intensity, duration and magnitude.
Awlaki posted hostile videos on Youtube. The US and Yemeni governments fired cruise missiles that killed not only Awlaki but several others nearby. Tell me exactly what 'proportional' means to you.
Anwar al-Awlaki was not and had never been a member of the US military, which is what that clause is plainly referring to. And even the military doesn't have carte blanche to just slaughter people - they're (in theory at least) bound by treaties and rules of engagement. No matter how you slice it, this was a US president ordering (or even worse, the CIA and DoD acting without orders) a US citizen killed far from any battlefield without presenting a shred of evidence to a jury.
There would be also some question about whether this was a time of war, as no declaration of war has ever been passed by Congress against Iraq, Afghanistan, or Al Qaida. Regarding "public danger", your chance of being killed by a terrorist has never been greater than your chance of being killed by a washing machine.
Size of an organization definitely also makes a real practical difference.
When you're part of (as I am) a technical staff small enough to all fit in the same room, it's very easy to consult across the admin-developer boundary, along the lines of a quick phone call or stop by somebody's desk. Admins and devs regularly interact, both professionally and socially. That also creates a culture where the admins and devs are very much on the same team, are working towards the same goals, and collectively creating less suckitude. Someone who tried to hold back on helping out someone on the other side would find themselves in hot water.
When you're part of a giant technical staff, though, it's much easier to get silo effects, where in order to consult across the dev-admin boundary you have to go up your chain of command until you get somebody who knows somebody on the other side, then work your way down the other chain of command until you find somebody who can actually work with you on solving the problem. And chances are not tiny that you'll encounter somebody somewhere along those chains of commands that really doesn't like the cross-team work (officially because it's allowing people to work outside of their area of expertise, but probably because they think it will help job security, as you suggested).
For instance, consider a dev who's trying to make sure they're not doing something stupid with a database. In a smaller organization, they might do something like "Hey, DBAs, is the plan on this query hitting the indexes I think it's supposed to if we run it in production, and is that a reasonably fast way of doing it?" In a large organization, this may be a multi-day multi-meeting effort to track down somebody, so that dev may skip that step so that they can meet their deadline and find that what they did that worked perfectly well in a development or test environment wreaked havoc in the production environment.
That's exactly what the officials at the rat race are trying to get all the contestants to think. What the contestants fail to notice is that if you win the rat race, all you get is to be chief rat for a little while.
For example, if everybody works harder and tries to come up with great apps, then more apps will sell, so Apple's 30% becomes a bigger chunk of change, all without Apple having to lift a finger.
Most notably, Monsanto has sued farmers because their crops (which were not Monsanto seeds) reproduced with pollen blown in from the neighbor's farm. Apparently, patent law trumps laws of nature, at least when it comes to assessing damages, because Monsanto has won those cases.
This despite the farmer's counterpoint that Monsanto's terminator gene was contaminating their crop, quite against the will of the farmer.
As a general rule, if the bill is bipartisan, it's a situation in which many different businesses benefit at the expense of ordinary people. Bills that are controversial usually are those where some businesses benefit while others are hurt (e.g. Obama's health care law).
Consult with a lawyer on this, but courts tend to take issue with judgment debtors just not paying, and some states have procedures that allow you to go after not just assets of the business but also the business's income, bank accounts, etc, and (also varying by jurisdiction) may send in a law enforcement officer to either take money directly from the business's cash on hand, or arrest the owner to force them to tell you where their assets are.
Am I the only person here thinking that at least part of the reason behind this is so that the GOP and/or the DNC can legally get away with robocalling voters?
I'd expect that's only an added bonus. Really, they're probably thinking much more along the lines of "Direct marketing industry wants this, telecom wants this, banking and finance want this, no industry opposes it, easy yes, win $50,000 in 'campaign contributions'."
No, you have the wrong definition of "peer": The clear intent of the Constitution was to have all juries made up entirely of British nobility. After all, that's what the most common meaning of the word "peer" in the 1790's.
London calling to the faraway towns Now there's too much traffic and network goes down London calling to old CGI Perl, Come texting the shortcodes, all you boys and girls London calling, now don't look at us But that silly iPhone mania has bitten the dust London calling, see we ain't got no bling 'Cept for the ringtone that sounds like swing.
The tech age is coming, the screen is zooming in Engines stop running and the bandwidth growing thin A critical error, but I have no fear London is lagging and I've spilled all my beer.
A few of the major reasons why health care is more expensive in the US than other developed countries: 1. A significant portion of the cost of health care in the US goes to profits for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, hospitals and other providers, and insurance companies. Government-run systems aren't run for profit, so they don't have as much of this. 2. Another significant portion goes to medical billing, as hospitals and other providers try to get paid and insurance companies try to avoid paying. Again, a non-issue in a government-run system. 3. Most providers operate on Fee-For-Service. That means that the more services they provide, necessary or not, the more money they make. For instance, there are podiatrists that make very good money going to nursing homes once a week and clipping toenails and sending the bill to Medicare. This also motivates hospitals to use the $1500 MRI test rather than the $150 test that is just as good 999 times out of 1000. Again, a non-issue for those systems that have state-run hospitals and clinics with salaried doctors.
The tried-and-true solution to these problems, namely an entirely public system, is politically unacceptable because those very profitable health care companies bribe Congress and the President to prevent it from being a reality. And if for some reason the President or Congress doesn't look like they'll cave, they run Harry and Louise ads to ramp up the public pressure.
a hundred years ago the National Guard made it clear by turning machine guns on striking workers
And 41 years ago, they turned the guns on unarmed students.
If you consider non-lethal weapons, then you can look at the videos earlier this week of police pepper-spraying people for the crime of standing on the sidewalk looking like a protester.
I'm not sure whether the figures are quite right, but the basic story they tell is quite accurate.
The cheapest health plans I could find (via a quick search) for a 50-year-old non-smoking male were about $2160 (1585 euro) per year. However, all of those plans have a high deductible, so even if you are sick or injured you have to pay up to $10,000 (7340 euro) before the insurance company pays anything. And if they can, the insurance company will attempt to avoid paying the bill entirely, leaving you stuck with the bill but still requiring that you pay the insurance premiums.
The new health care law requires everyone to get insurance, and also puts a dent in some of the tricks insurance companies use to avoid paying the bill. At best, it makes the US system more like the Dutch system.
If the "public option" had been retained in the bill, it might have ended up as the only option.
That's not a bad thing
Unless, of course, you were an insurance company, or on the take of insurance companies (in other words, most of Congress).
If Congress were really trying to create the highest quality health care system the world has ever seen for the lowest cost possible, we'd be talking about how to introduce a completely socialized system into the US. That's because all of the top-notch health care systems are completely socialized, and even within the US the most socialized systems (like the VA) do far better than the most privatized systems in terms of providing care at low prices. There are ways of getting kinda close to that with a highly regulated private system, but there's very little question that's the best you can possibly do.
That would be a completely accurate description of Ehrenreich, one that she'd be quite proud of.
You're right that she doesn't tend to write overtly socialist stuff in her books, she just writes about how demonstrably unfair the capitalist economic system is to working and middle-class people and lets you draw your own conclusions.
Well, I don't know about libraries near you, but in my area (which is politically quite liberal), in public and publicly accessible libraries, there were about 500 copies of The Turner Diaries, over 4000 copies of Mein Kampf, 1800 copies of Starship Troopers, and over 4000 copies of Atlas Shrugged. That suggests that those books are widely available. (This will help you find those books in a library near where you live.)
Every voter registers his email address with the election council.
There's your first problem. Not all voters have access to a computer, and many don't have an email address.
At the last step, instead of paper print, you send out an email with a secret code associated with that email.
Which, since email is plaintext, can be intercepted.
Now all news channels/NGOs/Etc conduct exit polls as before and your voter can go and enter the secret code/email address to each one of those exit polls
If a voter can demonstrate their individual vote at any location other than the polling place, then their vote can be bought or coerced. Imagine, say, an employer saying "Vote against this business tax increase if you want to keep your job."
But Nickel and Dimed?? Are the uber-capitalists now descending on libraries to challenge the sort of books that illustrate that the economic status-quo is not exactly peachy for everyone?
It appears so, yes. FTFA:
Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint
In other words, they're going after it because Ehrenreich is an atheist socialist who believes drug use is acceptable. And the right wing is right about describing her as a pro-drug socialist - she's one of the co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and on the board of NORML.
A Sherman? Why bother with that when you can track down his location using his ISP, fly a drone there, and blow it to smithereens with a missile?
Oh, wait, whoops, our targeting is a little off. Hope this guy's neighbor's next-of-kin doesn't mind too much. (If you think that doesn't happen, read Al Jazeera.)
Slashdot Mirror
No it's not. The oldest and most natural form of security on the planet is the cell membrane, a.k.a. the biological firewall.
There are plenty of times when I'd like to throttle my lusers. Usually, though, I just solve the problem by changing the DNS resolution for their bank to a Russian phishing site, and following it up with planting some nice illegal content in their network share and calling the authorities when I "discover" it.
No one seriously argues that Awlaki wasn't an enemy actor, therefore there is zero logical argument against killing him.
Actually, a lot of people do seriously argue that point. The one thing that is not in dispute is that al-Awlaki advocated violence against the US government, but that has been ruled protected speech - if it hadn't been, people like William Piece (author of the Turner Diaries) would be up on charges. What has never been proven in a court of law, and is disputed by many folks who actually know what they're talking about in Yemen, is that Awlaki had anything to do with planning and executing any actual terrorist attacks.
Attacking him was a "necessity" because there was no other way to interdict his activities.
Sure there was:
1. Present evidence to a judge sufficient to demonstrate probable cause for arresting him.
2. Work with the Yemeni authorities, who are allies of the US, to attempt to capture him and bring him to the US for trial. If he attempts to resist arrest, by all means shoot back.
3. Indict and try him, and if he is guilty, lock him up forever or execute him.
Force used was "proportional" because it was sufficient to decisively counter a hostile act or hostile intent, but reasonable in intensity, duration and magnitude.
Awlaki posted hostile videos on Youtube. The US and Yemeni governments fired cruise missiles that killed not only Awlaki but several others nearby. Tell me exactly what 'proportional' means to you.
Anwar al-Awlaki was not and had never been a member of the US military, which is what that clause is plainly referring to. And even the military doesn't have carte blanche to just slaughter people - they're (in theory at least) bound by treaties and rules of engagement. No matter how you slice it, this was a US president ordering (or even worse, the CIA and DoD acting without orders) a US citizen killed far from any battlefield without presenting a shred of evidence to a jury.
There would be also some question about whether this was a time of war, as no declaration of war has ever been passed by Congress against Iraq, Afghanistan, or Al Qaida. Regarding "public danger", your chance of being killed by a terrorist has never been greater than your chance of being killed by a washing machine.
Size of an organization definitely also makes a real practical difference.
When you're part of (as I am) a technical staff small enough to all fit in the same room, it's very easy to consult across the admin-developer boundary, along the lines of a quick phone call or stop by somebody's desk. Admins and devs regularly interact, both professionally and socially. That also creates a culture where the admins and devs are very much on the same team, are working towards the same goals, and collectively creating less suckitude. Someone who tried to hold back on helping out someone on the other side would find themselves in hot water.
When you're part of a giant technical staff, though, it's much easier to get silo effects, where in order to consult across the dev-admin boundary you have to go up your chain of command until you get somebody who knows somebody on the other side, then work your way down the other chain of command until you find somebody who can actually work with you on solving the problem. And chances are not tiny that you'll encounter somebody somewhere along those chains of commands that really doesn't like the cross-team work (officially because it's allowing people to work outside of their area of expertise, but probably because they think it will help job security, as you suggested).
For instance, consider a dev who's trying to make sure they're not doing something stupid with a database. In a smaller organization, they might do something like "Hey, DBAs, is the plan on this query hitting the indexes I think it's supposed to if we run it in production, and is that a reasonably fast way of doing it?" In a large organization, this may be a multi-day multi-meeting effort to track down somebody, so that dev may skip that step so that they can meet their deadline and find that what they did that worked perfectly well in a development or test environment wreaked havoc in the production environment.
Something like this has actually been done.
And as somebody who not-infrequently gets paid to play accordion (or at least, paid to stop playing), I'd definitely buy something like that.
Great instrument, or greatest instrument?
That's exactly what the officials at the rat race are trying to get all the contestants to think. What the contestants fail to notice is that if you win the rat race, all you get is to be chief rat for a little while.
For example, if everybody works harder and tries to come up with great apps, then more apps will sell, so Apple's 30% becomes a bigger chunk of change, all without Apple having to lift a finger.
Most notably, Monsanto has sued farmers because their crops (which were not Monsanto seeds) reproduced with pollen blown in from the neighbor's farm. Apparently, patent law trumps laws of nature, at least when it comes to assessing damages, because Monsanto has won those cases.
This despite the farmer's counterpoint that Monsanto's terminator gene was contaminating their crop, quite against the will of the farmer.
As a general rule, if the bill is bipartisan, it's a situation in which many different businesses benefit at the expense of ordinary people. Bills that are controversial usually are those where some businesses benefit while others are hurt (e.g. Obama's health care law).
Consult with a lawyer on this, but courts tend to take issue with judgment debtors just not paying, and some states have procedures that allow you to go after not just assets of the business but also the business's income, bank accounts, etc, and (also varying by jurisdiction) may send in a law enforcement officer to either take money directly from the business's cash on hand, or arrest the owner to force them to tell you where their assets are.
Am I the only person here thinking that at least part of the reason behind this is so that the GOP and/or the DNC can legally get away with robocalling voters?
I'd expect that's only an added bonus. Really, they're probably thinking much more along the lines of "Direct marketing industry wants this, telecom wants this, banking and finance want this, no industry opposes it, easy yes, win $50,000 in 'campaign contributions'."
No, you have the wrong definition of "peer": The clear intent of the Constitution was to have all juries made up entirely of British nobility. After all, that's what the most common meaning of the word "peer" in the 1790's.
London calling to the faraway towns
Now there's too much traffic and network goes down
London calling to old CGI Perl,
Come texting the shortcodes, all you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look at us
But that silly iPhone mania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no bling
'Cept for the ringtone that sounds like swing.
The tech age is coming, the screen is zooming in
Engines stop running and the bandwidth growing thin
A critical error, but I have no fear
London is lagging and I've spilled all my beer.
A few of the major reasons why health care is more expensive in the US than other developed countries:
1. A significant portion of the cost of health care in the US goes to profits for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, hospitals and other providers, and insurance companies. Government-run systems aren't run for profit, so they don't have as much of this.
2. Another significant portion goes to medical billing, as hospitals and other providers try to get paid and insurance companies try to avoid paying. Again, a non-issue in a government-run system.
3. Most providers operate on Fee-For-Service. That means that the more services they provide, necessary or not, the more money they make. For instance, there are podiatrists that make very good money going to nursing homes once a week and clipping toenails and sending the bill to Medicare. This also motivates hospitals to use the $1500 MRI test rather than the $150 test that is just as good 999 times out of 1000. Again, a non-issue for those systems that have state-run hospitals and clinics with salaried doctors.
The tried-and-true solution to these problems, namely an entirely public system, is politically unacceptable because those very profitable health care companies bribe Congress and the President to prevent it from being a reality. And if for some reason the President or Congress doesn't look like they'll cave, they run Harry and Louise ads to ramp up the public pressure.
a hundred years ago the National Guard made it clear by turning machine guns on striking workers
And 41 years ago, they turned the guns on unarmed students.
If you consider non-lethal weapons, then you can look at the videos earlier this week of police pepper-spraying people for the crime of standing on the sidewalk looking like a protester.
I'm not sure whether the figures are quite right, but the basic story they tell is quite accurate.
The cheapest health plans I could find (via a quick search) for a 50-year-old non-smoking male were about $2160 (1585 euro) per year. However, all of those plans have a high deductible, so even if you are sick or injured you have to pay up to $10,000 (7340 euro) before the insurance company pays anything. And if they can, the insurance company will attempt to avoid paying the bill entirely, leaving you stuck with the bill but still requiring that you pay the insurance premiums.
The new health care law requires everyone to get insurance, and also puts a dent in some of the tricks insurance companies use to avoid paying the bill. At best, it makes the US system more like the Dutch system.
If the "public option" had been retained in the bill, it might have ended up as the only option.
That's not a bad thing
Unless, of course, you were an insurance company, or on the take of insurance companies (in other words, most of Congress).
If Congress were really trying to create the highest quality health care system the world has ever seen for the lowest cost possible, we'd be talking about how to introduce a completely socialized system into the US. That's because all of the top-notch health care systems are completely socialized, and even within the US the most socialized systems (like the VA) do far better than the most privatized systems in terms of providing care at low prices. There are ways of getting kinda close to that with a highly regulated private system, but there's very little question that's the best you can possibly do.
That would be a completely accurate description of Ehrenreich, one that she'd be quite proud of.
You're right that she doesn't tend to write overtly socialist stuff in her books, she just writes about how demonstrably unfair the capitalist economic system is to working and middle-class people and lets you draw your own conclusions.
Luke would have posted first, but he had to do it entirely left-handed because somebody jostled him on the subway.
Well, I don't know about libraries near you, but in my area (which is politically quite liberal), in public and publicly accessible libraries, there were about 500 copies of The Turner Diaries, over 4000 copies of Mein Kampf, 1800 copies of Starship Troopers, and over 4000 copies of Atlas Shrugged. That suggests that those books are widely available. (This will help you find those books in a library near where you live.)
Every voter registers his email address with the election council.
There's your first problem. Not all voters have access to a computer, and many don't have an email address.
At the last step, instead of paper print, you send out an email with a secret code associated with that email.
Which, since email is plaintext, can be intercepted.
Now all news channels/NGOs/Etc conduct exit polls as before and your voter can go and enter the secret code/email address to each one of those exit polls
If a voter can demonstrate their individual vote at any location other than the polling place, then their vote can be bought or coerced. Imagine, say, an employer saying "Vote against this business tax increase if you want to keep your job."
But Nickel and Dimed?? Are the uber-capitalists now descending on libraries to challenge the sort of books that illustrate that the economic status-quo is not exactly peachy for everyone?
It appears so, yes. FTFA:
Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Reasons: drugs, inaccurate, offensive language, political viewpoint, and religious viewpoint
In other words, they're going after it because Ehrenreich is an atheist socialist who believes drug use is acceptable. And the right wing is right about describing her as a pro-drug socialist - she's one of the co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and on the board of NORML.
That plus the religious rituals to Ford that had an element of group sex.
A Sherman? Why bother with that when you can track down his location using his ISP, fly a drone there, and blow it to smithereens with a missile?
Oh, wait, whoops, our targeting is a little off. Hope this guy's neighbor's next-of-kin doesn't mind too much. (If you think that doesn't happen, read Al Jazeera.)