My guess, and I can only guess given that you've provided no actual evidence, is that the real story went something like this: 1. Somebody was murdered in Florida. 2. The police investigating the murder discovered evidence that strongly suggested who the perp might be (or narrowed the list down quickly). 3. The police asked Google about the online activities of those people around the time of the murder. Google probably is willing to comply, this being a murder case. 4. Google comes back with: "Hey, check this out, one of those people you asked about searched on how to kill people" 5. The (admittedly circumstantial) evidence from Google was part of the case against the perp, who was convicted.
Iceland isn't exactly European. I mean, it was settled by Vikings back in the day, and Norway has occasionally over the course of history tried to take charge of it, but generally speaking the Icelanders have done their own thing. They aren't part of the EU or the Euro, for instance.
But yeah, 3 cheers for the world's oldest democracy!
Yeah, I really want some alphabet soup dude from Washington looking out for my internet security.
I might want that, because the government guy at the very least doesn't have a short-term financial incentive to skimp on doing a decent job of it.
Imagine, if you will, a company where the tech team has done a fantastic job of buttoning everything up tight, and has some smart guys who focus on really keeping things secure. New manager comes in: "Hey, we could cut back a bit on the size of our security team, our customers won't notice a difference, and we'll save $500K a year!" His boss will almost definitely approve, because it makes more money this quarter.
How do the guns help the 50,000 civilians in the second scenario? If anything, I'd think they'd hurt your chances.
Consider being in the role of an Air Force pilot being told to bomb a large gathering of Americans, and being told this from your commanding officer: "There's a large gathering of 50,000 people armed with assault rifles, stating that they're getting together to resist the government's policies. Our intelligence reports strongly suggest that they intend to rebel against the US government, and we have thus gotten authorization to use any and all means to suppress the armed insurrection."
Compared to this: "There's a large gathering of 50,000 people. They do not seem to be armed, but they seem very upset with the government. They've stated their demands clearly, and refused to leave the area until their demands are met. Our intelligence reports indicate that while many are ordinary citizens, some of them may be terrorists and anarchists."
Which group would you be more likely to be convinced presented a threat that should be bombed out of existence?
You think the US 2-party system has ANY accountability to the voter whatsoever?
I've always thought it would be kinda interesting to follow an idea from ancient Athens: After someone holding political office had his term end, he was immediately put on trial for his actions while in office, and could be personally punished for those actions (e.g. a treasurer who was caught embezzling funds could have his own property confiscated).
Do you really think that your small arms are any real defense against violent suppression by the US government? That's the bit of Second Amendment ideology I've never understood: there's this fantasy that the civilians of the US with enough guns could stand up to the US military. If it came down to US Army and Marine units versus a semi-organized group of gun-toting libertarians, my guess is that the professionals would wipe the floor with the amateurs. That's for the simple reason that they're professionals - they've trained much more than you have, many of them have seen serious combat before, they're much better equipped than you are, and they have trained officers to lead and direct them. You, on the other hand, are probably not in combat shape, maybe train a few weekends a year, have probably not had to continue fighting after watching your best friend's head get blown off, and have no West Point graduates handy to tell you how to make your actions most effective.
Another way of thinking about it: If you had all the assault rifles you wanted, how long would you be able to defend yourself against a drone strike? How about against a tank? How long could you last in a siege with your communications cut off, your property surrounded so you can't leave, your assets frozen in case you somehow managed to get to a store where you could buy something? In all those scenarios, even with, say, 20 buddies, you're still going to lose if the US government decides to turn its guns on its population.
The difference between censorship committees and regular people is that the censorship committees want to watch and read their smut in a group setting rather than at home alone. It's rather kinky when you think about it that way.
One time Republican front runner Herman Cain was asked if he agreed or disagreed with what the President had done in Libya. It was painfully obvious that Cain had absolutely no idea what was happening in Libya, but it was likewise clear that whatever it was, he disagreed with it.
Actually, IIRC, there was a significant question as to whether Herman Cain had the slightest clue where Libya was, much less what was going on there. Remember, he didn't think he needed to know about who the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan was.
And then there's our crazy spelling. But there's a plan:
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Where that 10% savings comes from: 1. You don't have to do much training, because you're just hiring directly the people that were actually doing the job to do exactly the same job they've always done. 2. You don't have to help pay for IBM's financial, marketing, custodial, etc departments. 3. You don't have to help create IBM's profit margins.
It seems to me like: 1. The FTC is actually doing something about these complaints. As you said yourself, they've taken people to court and gotten convictions, e.g. Time on the ever-popular "This is Rachel from Cardholder Services" scam. My guess is that the office that handles this is not staffed to handle all the complaints, though, so they probably count up the complaints and only really go after the top offenders. 2. Most of the problems with catching spammers also apply to catching phone scammers, like finding them in the first place. They make all sorts of efforts to hide who they really are, because they know law enforcement is after them. 3. The "corporate veil" (where employees are not personally liable if their company breaks the law) is protecting the scammers from going to jail or losing some of their own money, which means that scammers can just form a new company and keep scamming if they get caught. Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of the corporate veil, because it means that if somebody gets told to break the law, it's safer to do so and remain employed than to blow the whistle and likely lose your job.
You mean like the Do Not Call complaint system, set up by the FTC to report robocalls as well as calls to numbers in the Do Not Call registry? (I agree a text would be more efficient, but reporting exists, and isn't remotely difficult)
The big problem is actually tracking down the bad guys. Phone robocall spammers aren't doing anything fundamentally different from what email spammers do.
Re:Let them talk forever, it's what the EU is for
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
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· Score: 1
GP's point is that the problems in the EU really seriously suck, but are way better than what happened the last time there was a serious economic crisis, namely about 60 million people killed in the biggest shooting war in the history of the planet. Or the time before that, where you had 16 million people killed. Arguments about monetary policy and banking bailouts are far preferable to sending out armies.
You can thank Ronald Reagan for much of that sentiment: the idea that the government is incompetent at best, evil at worst.
My usual view on the GOP: Modern post-Reagan Republicans believe that government can't function well, and while in office do everything they can to ensure that they're right!
The official reason is just a slightly papered-over description of Jefferson's real crime, namely being clear and convincing evidence that the founders of the United States weren't all devout Christians who wanted to create a nation that was explicitly Christian (never mind all the evidence to the contrary, like, say, the First Amendment).
Re:And, it will be defeated just like before ...
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
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· Score: 1
It's working in the sense of angering those in power. It's not working in the sense of actually accomplishing a policy change, or fundamentally changing the political dynamics of the country. In other words, they successfully pushed to step 3 of Gandhi's formula (1. first they ignore you, 2. then they laugh at you, 3. then they fight you, 4. then you win) but didn't get close to step 4.
Part of the problem is that the ideas that were generally pushed by the protesters had no representation whatsoever in the halls of power. For comparison's sake, I'll use the UK, although I suspect this would be true in other countries as well.
In the UK, if there's some street protests about, say, government involvement in the LIBOR scandal, there are going to be at least a few MPs, even if only backbenchers, who take up the issue and demand answers from the companies and government officials involved. In the US, on the other hand, the legislators called in the CEO of a bank that's admitted publicly to at least $2 billion worth of fraud, and spent their time asking him what he wanted the elected officials to do for him.
In the UK, a politician telling the police to go and crack some skulls for standing around with signs disagreeing with him would be a scandal. In the US, a politician telling the police to go crack some skulls for protesting gets a large amount of public support, Constitutional protections notwithstanding.
Re:I'm reminded of the EU referendum in Ireland
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
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· Score: 1
Same thing in the US. For instance, my state of Ohio had a group of companies that wanted the state constitution amended so they could build casinos in major cities, which required a referendum. The voters rejected the idea in 1990, 1996, 2006, and 2008, but the group got what they wanted in 2009, in part because most of groups that had opposed them the last 4 times were out of funds to really compete with.
Re:And, it will be defeated just like before ...
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
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· Score: 1
but the apathy I see coming (perhaps, not coming is more accurate) out of North America just flat-out baffles me
Lots of Americans tried protesting last fall, and ended up on the receiving end of pepper spray, billy clubs, unlawful arrests, destruction of personal property by police, tear gas, getting run over by police motorcycles, and at least 1 protester killed, all with the approval of some of the top government officials. I mean, it's not the same as protesting in, say, Cairo, but it's not a safe thing to be doing. In addition, they got nothing but derision from most public officials and much of the press.
Usually he does this by inserting it in legislation that has no bearing on the new insertions - recently this meant changes to our criminal code and prison system, revamping the entire fisheries act, attempting to close down environmental groups etc, all inserted in some budget legislation that was because of its nature, not open to general debate.
Wait, that's a new horrible thing in Canada? In the States, that's an extremely common technique called a rider, where the unpopular provision is passed by riding along with something completely unrelated.
A related technique is called the "poison pill", where you add a provision totally unrelated to the main bill to either wreck a good bill or sweeten a bad bill. The idea is to put incumbents in a bad spot by creating a bill that says something like "Motherhood and apple pie are both fantastic, and we should kill 10 kittens a day for fun." If our hapless legislator votes Nay, the ads will say "Senator Buford opposes motherhood and apple pie!" while if he votes Yea, the ads will say "Senator Buford supports killing kittens!" And no, Senator Buford can't defend himself by explaining what really happened, because the voter's attention span is too short.
No it doesn't: They had demonstrated that he had means, incriminating physical evidence, opportunity, and a coverup attempt. The motive isn't all that important under those circumstances.
The way that IBM makes money managing GM's IT infrastructure is to pay their people less than GM paid IBM, say 25% less. So if you're GM, you can go to the guys who are currently doing your work and getting a paycheck from IBM, and say "Hey, how would you like a 15% raise to work for us doing the same job you've been doing all along?", get a lot of people to say "Great deal!", and you've just gotten a 10% cost savings.
The reason they decided to de-emphasize Jefferson was that he coined the phrase "separation of church and state". They replaced him with St Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and William Blackstone.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess, and I can only guess given that you've provided no actual evidence, is that the real story went something like this:
1. Somebody was murdered in Florida.
2. The police investigating the murder discovered evidence that strongly suggested who the perp might be (or narrowed the list down quickly).
3. The police asked Google about the online activities of those people around the time of the murder. Google probably is willing to comply, this being a murder case.
4. Google comes back with: "Hey, check this out, one of those people you asked about searched on how to kill people"
5. The (admittedly circumstantial) evidence from Google was part of the case against the perp, who was convicted.
I'm not seeing the problem.
Thank you for the correction, sir. You are a gentleman and a scholar. Or at least a scholar.
Iceland isn't exactly European. I mean, it was settled by Vikings back in the day, and Norway has occasionally over the course of history tried to take charge of it, but generally speaking the Icelanders have done their own thing. They aren't part of the EU or the Euro, for instance.
But yeah, 3 cheers for the world's oldest democracy!
Yeah, I really want some alphabet soup dude from Washington looking out for my internet security.
I might want that, because the government guy at the very least doesn't have a short-term financial incentive to skimp on doing a decent job of it.
Imagine, if you will, a company where the tech team has done a fantastic job of buttoning everything up tight, and has some smart guys who focus on really keeping things secure. New manager comes in: "Hey, we could cut back a bit on the size of our security team, our customers won't notice a difference, and we'll save $500K a year!" His boss will almost definitely approve, because it makes more money this quarter.
How do the guns help the 50,000 civilians in the second scenario? If anything, I'd think they'd hurt your chances.
Consider being in the role of an Air Force pilot being told to bomb a large gathering of Americans, and being told this from your commanding officer:
"There's a large gathering of 50,000 people armed with assault rifles, stating that they're getting together to resist the government's policies. Our intelligence reports strongly suggest that they intend to rebel against the US government, and we have thus gotten authorization to use any and all means to suppress the armed insurrection."
Compared to this:
"There's a large gathering of 50,000 people. They do not seem to be armed, but they seem very upset with the government. They've stated their demands clearly, and refused to leave the area until their demands are met. Our intelligence reports indicate that while many are ordinary citizens, some of them may be terrorists and anarchists."
Which group would you be more likely to be convinced presented a threat that should be bombed out of existence?
You think the US 2-party system has ANY accountability to the voter whatsoever?
I've always thought it would be kinda interesting to follow an idea from ancient Athens: After someone holding political office had his term end, he was immediately put on trial for his actions while in office, and could be personally punished for those actions (e.g. a treasurer who was caught embezzling funds could have his own property confiscated).
Do you really think that your small arms are any real defense against violent suppression by the US government? That's the bit of Second Amendment ideology I've never understood: there's this fantasy that the civilians of the US with enough guns could stand up to the US military. If it came down to US Army and Marine units versus a semi-organized group of gun-toting libertarians, my guess is that the professionals would wipe the floor with the amateurs. That's for the simple reason that they're professionals - they've trained much more than you have, many of them have seen serious combat before, they're much better equipped than you are, and they have trained officers to lead and direct them. You, on the other hand, are probably not in combat shape, maybe train a few weekends a year, have probably not had to continue fighting after watching your best friend's head get blown off, and have no West Point graduates handy to tell you how to make your actions most effective.
Another way of thinking about it: If you had all the assault rifles you wanted, how long would you be able to defend yourself against a drone strike? How about against a tank? How long could you last in a siege with your communications cut off, your property surrounded so you can't leave, your assets frozen in case you somehow managed to get to a store where you could buy something? In all those scenarios, even with, say, 20 buddies, you're still going to lose if the US government decides to turn its guns on its population.
The difference between censorship committees and regular people is that the censorship committees want to watch and read their smut in a group setting rather than at home alone. It's rather kinky when you think about it that way.
With that kind of glove, deaf people could say "Talk to the hand, because the ear's not listening!"
One time Republican front runner Herman Cain was asked if he agreed or disagreed with what the President had done in Libya. It was painfully obvious that Cain had absolutely no idea what was happening in Libya, but it was likewise clear that whatever it was, he disagreed with it.
Actually, IIRC, there was a significant question as to whether Herman Cain had the slightest clue where Libya was, much less what was going on there. Remember, he didn't think he needed to know about who the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan was.
And then there's our crazy spelling. But there's a plan:
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Of course not!
Where that 10% savings comes from:
1. You don't have to do much training, because you're just hiring directly the people that were actually doing the job to do exactly the same job they've always done.
2. You don't have to help pay for IBM's financial, marketing, custodial, etc departments.
3. You don't have to help create IBM's profit margins.
It seems to me like:
1. The FTC is actually doing something about these complaints. As you said yourself, they've taken people to court and gotten convictions, e.g.
Time on the ever-popular "This is Rachel from Cardholder Services" scam. My guess is that the office that handles this is not staffed to handle all the complaints, though, so they probably count up the complaints and only really go after the top offenders.
2. Most of the problems with catching spammers also apply to catching phone scammers, like finding them in the first place. They make all sorts of efforts to hide who they really are, because they know law enforcement is after them.
3. The "corporate veil" (where employees are not personally liable if their company breaks the law) is protecting the scammers from going to jail or losing some of their own money, which means that scammers can just form a new company and keep scamming if they get caught. Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of the corporate veil, because it means that if somebody gets told to break the law, it's safer to do so and remain employed than to blow the whistle and likely lose your job.
You mean like the Do Not Call complaint system, set up by the FTC to report robocalls as well as calls to numbers in the Do Not Call registry? (I agree a text would be more efficient, but reporting exists, and isn't remotely difficult)
The big problem is actually tracking down the bad guys. Phone robocall spammers aren't doing anything fundamentally different from what email spammers do.
GP's point is that the problems in the EU really seriously suck, but are way better than what happened the last time there was a serious economic crisis, namely about 60 million people killed in the biggest shooting war in the history of the planet. Or the time before that, where you had 16 million people killed. Arguments about monetary policy and banking bailouts are far preferable to sending out armies.
You can thank Ronald Reagan for much of that sentiment: the idea that the government is incompetent at best, evil at worst.
My usual view on the GOP: Modern post-Reagan Republicans believe that government can't function well, and while in office do everything they can to ensure that they're right!
The official reason is just a slightly papered-over description of Jefferson's real crime, namely being clear and convincing evidence that the founders of the United States weren't all devout Christians who wanted to create a nation that was explicitly Christian (never mind all the evidence to the contrary, like, say, the First Amendment).
It's working in the sense of angering those in power. It's not working in the sense of actually accomplishing a policy change, or fundamentally changing the political dynamics of the country. In other words, they successfully pushed to step 3 of Gandhi's formula (1. first they ignore you, 2. then they laugh at you, 3. then they fight you, 4. then you win) but didn't get close to step 4.
Part of the problem is that the ideas that were generally pushed by the protesters had no representation whatsoever in the halls of power. For comparison's sake, I'll use the UK, although I suspect this would be true in other countries as well.
In the UK, if there's some street protests about, say, government involvement in the LIBOR scandal, there are going to be at least a few MPs, even if only backbenchers, who take up the issue and demand answers from the companies and government officials involved. In the US, on the other hand, the legislators called in the CEO of a bank that's admitted publicly to at least $2 billion worth of fraud, and spent their time asking him what he wanted the elected officials to do for him.
In the UK, a politician telling the police to go and crack some skulls for standing around with signs disagreeing with him would be a scandal. In the US, a politician telling the police to go crack some skulls for protesting gets a large amount of public support, Constitutional protections notwithstanding.
Same thing in the US. For instance, my state of Ohio had a group of companies that wanted the state constitution amended so they could build casinos in major cities, which required a referendum. The voters rejected the idea in 1990, 1996, 2006, and 2008, but the group got what they wanted in 2009, in part because most of groups that had opposed them the last 4 times were out of funds to really compete with.
but the apathy I see coming (perhaps, not coming is more accurate) out of North America just flat-out baffles me
Lots of Americans tried protesting last fall, and ended up on the receiving end of pepper spray, billy clubs, unlawful arrests, destruction of personal property by police, tear gas, getting run over by police motorcycles, and at least 1 protester killed, all with the approval of some of the top government officials. I mean, it's not the same as protesting in, say, Cairo, but it's not a safe thing to be doing. In addition, they got nothing but derision from most public officials and much of the press.
Usually he does this by inserting it in legislation that has no bearing on the new insertions - recently this meant changes to our criminal code and prison system, revamping the entire fisheries act, attempting to close down environmental groups etc, all inserted in some budget legislation that was because of its nature, not open to general debate.
Wait, that's a new horrible thing in Canada? In the States, that's an extremely common technique called a rider, where the unpopular provision is passed by riding along with something completely unrelated.
A related technique is called the "poison pill", where you add a provision totally unrelated to the main bill to either wreck a good bill or sweeten a bad bill. The idea is to put incumbents in a bad spot by creating a bill that says something like "Motherhood and apple pie are both fantastic, and we should kill 10 kittens a day for fun." If our hapless legislator votes Nay, the ads will say "Senator Buford opposes motherhood and apple pie!" while if he votes Yea, the ads will say "Senator Buford supports killing kittens!" And no, Senator Buford can't defend himself by explaining what really happened, because the voter's attention span is too short.
No it doesn't: They had demonstrated that he had means, incriminating physical evidence, opportunity, and a coverup attempt. The motive isn't all that important under those circumstances.
Another big advantage: No middle-men.
The way that IBM makes money managing GM's IT infrastructure is to pay their people less than GM paid IBM, say 25% less. So if you're GM, you can go to the guys who are currently doing your work and getting a paycheck from IBM, and say "Hey, how would you like a 15% raise to work for us doing the same job you've been doing all along?", get a lot of people to say "Great deal!", and you've just gotten a 10% cost savings.
Whaddaya mean, coming soon?
Thomas Jefferson removed from Texas history standards
The reason they decided to de-emphasize Jefferson was that he coined the phrase "separation of church and state". They replaced him with St Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and William Blackstone.