We live in an abused, yes, compromised, yes, but still functioning democracy, meaning rule is by consent, not force and fear.
... unless you're Muslim or involved in any way in Wikileaks, in which case most bets are off. You can have your property seized, be searched and harassed at airports, and of course be labeled an enemy combatant and sent to Gitmo or maybe sent to our good friends to be tortured. Julian Assange has been very clear that the reason he's fighting extradition is because he doesn't trust the Swedes to not hand him over to the United States, and he doesn't trust the United States to follow its own laws right now.
Maybe because you have that right AND THAT RIGHT IS RESPECTED.
An example of how this is being undermined: A good friend of Bradley Manning visited him in prison regularly, and reported on the conditions Manning was being held under, conditions which were very different from what the US military said they were in public statements. This eventually got national attention by the mainstream media. Shortly afterwords, when this friend went back for another visit, most of what he took with him, including his laptop, was seized. No charges, no due process, no probable cause.
Or when a foreigner who had done some work defending Wikileaks went to visit the US, upon arrival at US customs all his electronics were seized, again without any kind of charges or judicial review. The foreigner had anticipated this and had a representative of the ACLU meet him there to argue his case, to no avail. He'd also had the good sense to ensure that the electronics in question just had a copy of the US Bill of Rights on them.
That's even ignoring issues like "Free Speech Zones", police aggression against protesters and reporters at events like party conventions or pro-immigration rallies, and the occasional lethal penalty for Driving/Walking While Not White.
So no, that right isn't really respected. There exists a classified list of actions that will cause you to be mistreated by the US government. Right now, that appears to be a fairly small list, but we have no idea really what's on it.
not the cosmetic fight over ISPs censoring content which they can't do anyways
Sure they could, either by intercepting DNS requests for a site and returning a bogus IP, or by dropping packets too or from some IP address. Both of those would be quite simple to pull off if you're in control of the routers in between the clients and the site you're trying to censor. Would it take effort? Yes, but not all that much.
Remember what this whole fight started over: SBC went to Google and basically said "Nice website you have there, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Bill's charitable work is actually quite awesome. Among other things, his foundation is very good at making sure that their funding goes to projects that actually work (surprisingly unusual in the non-profit world).
Now, I don't approve of how he made his money, but I do approve of him using his money to help people rather than just hang out and be rich with Warren Buffett all day.
It turns out the penalty for being caught doesn't make much difference. One thing criminologists generally agree on is that it's the chance of getting caught that matters much more than the consequences when you do get caught. Part of it is that our monkey brains don't do a good job calculating the situations with a really small chance of something bad happening but really nasty consequences if it happens.
100,000 P2P users means that if you illegally download something you have approximately a %0.25 chance of being sued. If you're trying to deter people from a behavior, you have to increase the chance that there will be negative consequences for that behavior.
And of course it doesn't help that many of those 100,000 may well be guilty of nothing. Being sued doesn't necessarily make somebody actually liable, but the RIAA's tactics are all about making the cost of defending yourself higher than the cost of settling, as NewYorkCountryLawyer has made very clear for a while now.
A dating site's value is directly correlated with how many other members sign up. Ergo a new competitor trying to get into the big-picture marketplace either needs to create fictional people to attract members, or they need to pull in people who didn't intend to sign up to get things going.
Mark Zuckerberg, for all his many faults, started the right way - serve a tiny market that generally is looking for other people in that market.
You don't need to go back to the brownshirts to get the gist of what these guys are up to. You could just as easily point to every single authoritarian regime that's existed in modern times from the USSR to the Chinese Communist Party to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to Fidel Castro to Hosni Mubarak
The basics: 1. Spy on your own people so you know who's dissenting from the government. 2. Use whatever means at your disposal to suppress those who are dissenting. 3. If you get caught, enjoy the scare you just gave to anyone else who's dissenting, and say that whatever horrible thing you did was necessary to maintain national security. 4. Build up an system where people who are in the oppressive regime are far better off than those who aren't, so that the normal folks who want to get ahead in life are motivated to join up. 5. If possible, get the population arguing about things that don't matter much in the grand scheme of things (e.g. gay marriage)
Actually, "Don't Download This Song" was put up for free download by Al. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume he secured distribution rights (which isn't as obvious as it sounds, stupid #@)@( record company contracts)
Weird Al described exactly how dangerous illegal downloading was:
Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge To break international copyright law By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA
But deep in your heart you know the guilt would drive you mad And the shame would leave a permanent scar 'Cause you start out stealing songs and then you're robbing liquor stores And sellin' crack and runnin' over school kids with your car
So really all this stuff is protecting the children and stopping drug crimes. Now, who could possibly be against that? Won't somebody please think of the children!
Why don't they just install cellphone towers specifically for prisons;). If you do it right, the phones will always use your towers in preference to others.
Extending this principle: 1. Give out cell phones to any prisoner who wants one. Secretly configure them to talk only to a special tower you control (not even the guards can know about that part). 2. All calls on those phones will be wiretapped. (prisoners have a lot less 4th Amendment protection than folks out of prison) This solves a couple of problems at once - giving out cell phones dries up the black market and allows those who want to talk to their loved ones, but since you're wiretapping them anyone who's trying to organize and escape or crime actually unwittingly helps the police catch and prosecute their accomplices.
I at one point in my life wrote software for a GPS navigation unit.
At least back when I was writing that kind of software a few years ago, the map data we had rated roads on a scale from something like 0 to 7, with 0 being a side street or back road and 7 being a major divided highway. There wasn't any storage for "You really don't want to take this road in the middle of winter" or "Dirt road going through swamp that has a tendency to sink" or anything like that. So without that data, there's no possible way for the software to account for it. And while it might seem stupid that this would happen, there are 2 fairly logical reasons why it did: 1. When the formats for the map data were being decided, every bit counted, so they really wanted to limit the number of possible road ratings. 2. On the flip side, they didn't want to create a situation where you couldn't navigate to somebody's home way out in the middle of nowhere because the road that it was on wasn't good enough to be rated.
So that meant including the roads you really didn't want to take, and marking them at the lowest possible rating. But that meant that if the sane route was too much longer than the insane route, an algorithm would take you along the insane route because it appeared to its graph-theory-addled-brain to be shorter and faster. In short, for any of the GPS algorithms, garbage in, garbage out.
The correct way to use a GPS is in combination with more careful planning. Use paper or online maps to figure out your options, write that down or print it out, then use the GPS to handle situations where you end up off course (either intentionally because you need to stop and get gas or something, or unintentionally because you can't follow directions).
I didn't mention mention climate change at all, and the problem is hardly limited to climate change. The same thing happened with issues like fish stock depletion, the antarctic ozone hole, and acid rain, all of which were documented to have happened, be anthropogenic, and damaging to both humans and the natural world.
At least, that's what the ISPs have largely been thinking on the ipv4 / ipv6 switch. And it's completely understandable why - ipv6 is a significant investment, while sticking to ipv4 is short-term more profitable. In addition, they may be thinking that they can make the other ISPs or even other countries do all the work for them.
The economics of it are probably no different than any theoretical global environmental problem: It affects everybody, but nobody wants to pay to fix it, and nobody will until either the situation is dire or they're forced to (typically by treaties and government action, but possibly an industry association in this case).
Not quite. It's more like his enemies at that siege said he'd done that, and no one's been able to replicate it since, unlike almost every other crazy machine Archimedes figured out.
I agree that News Corp is evil, but it's hard to call them the "greatest evil in our world today".
Yes, when governments imprison people without trial, torture people, shoot unarmed citizens, encourage companies to fire people for their political views, build a massive surveillance state, etc etc, News Corp is there to cheer them on, hire on their political leaders, and propagandize the population into going along with these measures. But they aren't the ones actually doing it. They are part of the machine, but they aren't the machine, and they definitely aren't the ones controlling the machine.
The Nobel Peace Prize means absolutely nothing now. It was blatantly given to someone who had not earned it and did not deserve it, and that person is Henry Kissinger. While in office, he did very little to promote peace, and often actively promoted war. It's clear that this once-lofty prize has become infected and tainted by the very politics and cronyism that has corrupted most other institutions. So yeah, this is a nice gesture, but it's just a token one with no real meaning.
Oh and for you more childish types who instantly polarize when Kissinger is mentioned, grow up. I don't care how nice and decent of a fellow he is. I don't care how much you like him. None of that has anything to do with it. He simply hadn't done anything for the cause of peace when the prize was awarded to him. There are many people who were more deserving of it than him -- heroes, scientists, doctors, philanthropists, lots of folks who have done much more good. They were all passed up. That's the point.
They also needed to reinstall the eyes, as they'd been damaged by having to see priceless treasures wrecked by the tiny minority of asshats in the crowds.
Yes, these protests are absolutely incredible. And from those Americans who have a clue what's actually going on in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, etc, you're seeing a lot of support for the protesters. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans don't have a clue what's actually going on, and many that do are getting nothing but misinformation about who the protesters are and what they want.
There are a few major reasons for that: 1. For far too many Americans, "Arab", "Muslim", "terrorist", and "scary guy" are basically indistinguishable concepts. For instance, those that find Barack Obama scary because he doesn't look like they do will say he's a Muslim, even though he's never said anything remotely similar to "There's no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet." So the idea that Muslims could be doing something good in the world runs straight into cognitive dissonance. 2. The US government has close ties to the Israeli government, and the Israeli government is very scared that whatever comes after Mubarak won't be so keen on adhering to the Camp David Accords. As a result, the messages Americans have been getting from their government has been lukewarm at best about the protests. 3. Establishment media outlets have mostly followed the Obama administration's lead. Many reports are taking advantage of my first point to state that these were organized by the Muslim Brotherhood (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), and are describing "chaos" and "looting" more than "protests". 4. Some have memories of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and fear that what Egypt is going through will lead to the same result.
A lot of Americans are ignoring their government, their media sources, and their fears, and supporting the protesters.
Slashdot Mirror
We live in an abused, yes, compromised, yes, but still functioning democracy, meaning rule is by consent, not force and fear.
... unless you're Muslim or involved in any way in Wikileaks, in which case most bets are off. You can have your property seized, be searched and harassed at airports, and of course be labeled an enemy combatant and sent to Gitmo or maybe sent to our good friends to be tortured. Julian Assange has been very clear that the reason he's fighting extradition is because he doesn't trust the Swedes to not hand him over to the United States, and he doesn't trust the United States to follow its own laws right now.
Maybe because you have that right AND THAT RIGHT IS RESPECTED.
An example of how this is being undermined: A good friend of Bradley Manning visited him in prison regularly, and reported on the conditions Manning was being held under, conditions which were very different from what the US military said they were in public statements. This eventually got national attention by the mainstream media. Shortly afterwords, when this friend went back for another visit, most of what he took with him, including his laptop, was seized. No charges, no due process, no probable cause.
Or when a foreigner who had done some work defending Wikileaks went to visit the US, upon arrival at US customs all his electronics were seized, again without any kind of charges or judicial review. The foreigner had anticipated this and had a representative of the ACLU meet him there to argue his case, to no avail. He'd also had the good sense to ensure that the electronics in question just had a copy of the US Bill of Rights on them.
That's even ignoring issues like "Free Speech Zones", police aggression against protesters and reporters at events like party conventions or pro-immigration rallies, and the occasional lethal penalty for Driving/Walking While Not White.
So no, that right isn't really respected. There exists a classified list of actions that will cause you to be mistreated by the US government. Right now, that appears to be a fairly small list, but we have no idea really what's on it.
not the cosmetic fight over ISPs censoring content which they can't do anyways
Sure they could, either by intercepting DNS requests for a site and returning a bogus IP, or by dropping packets too or from some IP address. Both of those would be quite simple to pull off if you're in control of the routers in between the clients and the site you're trying to censor. Would it take effort? Yes, but not all that much.
Remember what this whole fight started over: SBC went to Google and basically said "Nice website you have there, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Chicks dig anime, right?
That's so rude. You should never call broads "chicks"!
Bill's charitable work is actually quite awesome. Among other things, his foundation is very good at making sure that their funding goes to projects that actually work (surprisingly unusual in the non-profit world).
Now, I don't approve of how he made his money, but I do approve of him using his money to help people rather than just hang out and be rich with Warren Buffett all day.
It turns out the penalty for being caught doesn't make much difference. One thing criminologists generally agree on is that it's the chance of getting caught that matters much more than the consequences when you do get caught. Part of it is that our monkey brains don't do a good job calculating the situations with a really small chance of something bad happening but really nasty consequences if it happens.
100,000 P2P users means that if you illegally download something you have approximately a %0.25 chance of being sued. If you're trying to deter people from a behavior, you have to increase the chance that there will be negative consequences for that behavior.
And of course it doesn't help that many of those 100,000 may well be guilty of nothing. Being sued doesn't necessarily make somebody actually liable, but the RIAA's tactics are all about making the cost of defending yourself higher than the cost of settling, as NewYorkCountryLawyer has made very clear for a while now.
Maybe.. she's an entertainer pretending to be a politican
Oh, you mean like Ronald Reagan? People like that make perfect figureheads.
A dating site's value is directly correlated with how many other members sign up. Ergo a new competitor trying to get into the big-picture marketplace either needs to create fictional people to attract members, or they need to pull in people who didn't intend to sign up to get things going.
Mark Zuckerberg, for all his many faults, started the right way - serve a tiny market that generally is looking for other people in that market.
You don't need to go back to the brownshirts to get the gist of what these guys are up to. You could just as easily point to every single authoritarian regime that's existed in modern times from the USSR to the Chinese Communist Party to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to Fidel Castro to Hosni Mubarak
The basics: 1. Spy on your own people so you know who's dissenting from the government. 2. Use whatever means at your disposal to suppress those who are dissenting. 3. If you get caught, enjoy the scare you just gave to anyone else who's dissenting, and say that whatever horrible thing you did was necessary to maintain national security. 4. Build up an system where people who are in the oppressive regime are far better off than those who aren't, so that the normal folks who want to get ahead in life are motivated to join up. 5. If possible, get the population arguing about things that don't matter much in the grand scheme of things (e.g. gay marriage)
Actually, "Don't Download This Song" was put up for free download by Al. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume he secured distribution rights (which isn't as obvious as it sounds, stupid #@)@( record company contracts)
"I'll believe it when I see it."
When you said "exactly that", what I thought you were going to refer to was the No-Fly placed on Senator Ted Kennedy years ago.
Weird Al described exactly how dangerous illegal downloading was:
Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA
But deep in your heart you know the guilt would drive you mad
And the shame would leave a permanent scar
'Cause you start out stealing songs and then you're robbing liquor stores
And sellin' crack and runnin' over school kids with your car
So really all this stuff is protecting the children and stopping drug crimes. Now, who could possibly be against that? Won't somebody please think of the children!
Why don't they just install cellphone towers specifically for prisons ;). If you do it right, the phones will always use your towers in preference to others.
Extending this principle: 1. Give out cell phones to any prisoner who wants one. Secretly configure them to talk only to a special tower you control (not even the guards can know about that part). 2. All calls on those phones will be wiretapped. (prisoners have a lot less 4th Amendment protection than folks out of prison) This solves a couple of problems at once - giving out cell phones dries up the black market and allows those who want to talk to their loved ones, but since you're wiretapping them anyone who's trying to organize and escape or crime actually unwittingly helps the police catch and prosecute their accomplices.
If he hasn't used 'period' and 'full stop' and created enough dramatic pause, I wouldn't have believed him.
Of course you want to include dramatic pauses. How do you think James T Kirk was able to pull off the Corbomite Maneuver so well?
I at one point in my life wrote software for a GPS navigation unit.
At least back when I was writing that kind of software a few years ago, the map data we had rated roads on a scale from something like 0 to 7, with 0 being a side street or back road and 7 being a major divided highway. There wasn't any storage for "You really don't want to take this road in the middle of winter" or "Dirt road going through swamp that has a tendency to sink" or anything like that. So without that data, there's no possible way for the software to account for it. And while it might seem stupid that this would happen, there are 2 fairly logical reasons why it did:
1. When the formats for the map data were being decided, every bit counted, so they really wanted to limit the number of possible road ratings.
2. On the flip side, they didn't want to create a situation where you couldn't navigate to somebody's home way out in the middle of nowhere because the road that it was on wasn't good enough to be rated.
So that meant including the roads you really didn't want to take, and marking them at the lowest possible rating. But that meant that if the sane route was too much longer than the insane route, an algorithm would take you along the insane route because it appeared to its graph-theory-addled-brain to be shorter and faster. In short, for any of the GPS algorithms, garbage in, garbage out.
The correct way to use a GPS is in combination with more careful planning. Use paper or online maps to figure out your options, write that down or print it out, then use the GPS to handle situations where you end up off course (either intentionally because you need to stop and get gas or something, or unintentionally because you can't follow directions).
I didn't mention mention climate change at all, and the problem is hardly limited to climate change. The same thing happened with issues like fish stock depletion, the antarctic ozone hole, and acid rain, all of which were documented to have happened, be anthropogenic, and damaging to both humans and the natural world.
At least, that's what the ISPs have largely been thinking on the ipv4 / ipv6 switch. And it's completely understandable why - ipv6 is a significant investment, while sticking to ipv4 is short-term more profitable. In addition, they may be thinking that they can make the other ISPs or even other countries do all the work for them.
The economics of it are probably no different than any theoretical global environmental problem: It affects everybody, but nobody wants to pay to fix it, and nobody will until either the situation is dire or they're forced to (typically by treaties and government action, but possibly an industry association in this case).
Not quite. It's more like his enemies at that siege said he'd done that, and no one's been able to replicate it since, unlike almost every other crazy machine Archimedes figured out.
There were 10, but I just got an instruction saying "Spawn more overlords!"
Given the fact that Rupert Murdoch has managed to maintain an unnatural state of demi-life since approximately 1347
Is Rupert Murdoch some sort of Australian vampire? It's just a question, it's not like I'm insinuating anything.
the greatest evil in our world today
I agree that News Corp is evil, but it's hard to call them the "greatest evil in our world today".
Yes, when governments imprison people without trial, torture people, shoot unarmed citizens, encourage companies to fire people for their political views, build a massive surveillance state, etc etc, News Corp is there to cheer them on, hire on their political leaders, and propagandize the population into going along with these measures. But they aren't the ones actually doing it. They are part of the machine, but they aren't the machine, and they definitely aren't the ones controlling the machine.
The Nobel Peace Prize means absolutely nothing now. It was blatantly given to someone who had not earned it and did not deserve it, and that person is Henry Kissinger. While in office, he did very little to promote peace, and often actively promoted war. It's clear that this once-lofty prize has become infected and tainted by the very politics and cronyism that has corrupted most other institutions. So yeah, this is a nice gesture, but it's just a token one with no real meaning.
Oh and for you more childish types who instantly polarize when Kissinger is mentioned, grow up. I don't care how nice and decent of a fellow he is. I don't care how much you like him. None of that has anything to do with it. He simply hadn't done anything for the cause of peace when the prize was awarded to him. There are many people who were more deserving of it than him -- heroes, scientists, doctors, philanthropists, lots of folks who have done much more good. They were all passed up. That's the point.
They also needed to reinstall the eyes, as they'd been damaged by having to see priceless treasures wrecked by the tiny minority of asshats in the crowds.
Yes, these protests are absolutely incredible. And from those Americans who have a clue what's actually going on in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, etc, you're seeing a lot of support for the protesters. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans don't have a clue what's actually going on, and many that do are getting nothing but misinformation about who the protesters are and what they want.
There are a few major reasons for that:
1. For far too many Americans, "Arab", "Muslim", "terrorist", and "scary guy" are basically indistinguishable concepts. For instance, those that find Barack Obama scary because he doesn't look like they do will say he's a Muslim, even though he's never said anything remotely similar to "There's no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet." So the idea that Muslims could be doing something good in the world runs straight into cognitive dissonance.
2. The US government has close ties to the Israeli government, and the Israeli government is very scared that whatever comes after Mubarak won't be so keen on adhering to the Camp David Accords. As a result, the messages Americans have been getting from their government has been lukewarm at best about the protests.
3. Establishment media outlets have mostly followed the Obama administration's lead. Many reports are taking advantage of my first point to state that these were organized by the Muslim Brotherhood (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), and are describing "chaos" and "looting" more than "protests".
4. Some have memories of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and fear that what Egypt is going through will lead to the same result.
A lot of Americans are ignoring their government, their media sources, and their fears, and supporting the protesters.
Salaam.