Before you had to choose between crappy cable or crappy dsl and watched as other nations like South Korea were on the lucky side of the digital divide.
Now we have three tiers: Crappy American connection, Awesome South Korean connection, and Fantasy Google connection.
Thanks Google for giving people unrealistic dreams.... As soon as they announce where they are connecting in Austin, I'm moving.
Fairness is an interesting concept. "Fair" and "Equitable" are different. "Fair" and "Equal" are different. Is it fair that you can have two similarly-skilled, similarly-trained, similarly-experienced programmers working side by side but they have a difference in pay?
If you think it is unfair, then push for labor unions and publicly shared compensation details at every level. Most (all?) state already do this, publishing the salary tables for every job from governor and legislator to university coach to public school teacher to public park janitor. You can look up exactly how much anybody earns, and you can petition the government to change their rates.
If someone is hired when the team is in dire need and the other is hired when the team is flush with workers, then at negotiation time one will be in a better position that the other for compensation. Some people don't like that, and want everyone to be paid based on a standardized table of years of work experience and years of education; look up where they cross, that is your salary.
Personally I prefer a market wage of whatever I can negotiate. Of course, I can negotiate a fairly strong package based on projects I have worked on, roles I have lead, and other measurable results in my history.
BILLIONS of people will be displaced if the water level rises even a moderate amount. Here is a fun toy It only covers part of the world, but the hyperlinked areas are illuminating.
Notice how even a small increase will shut down some of the most populated regions of the world as the cities are right on the coast. China will likely see a billion displaced. India might have a a half billion displaced.
The US might see only around 40 million displaced, but having New York, San Francisco, LA, Houston, Miami, and a bunch of others at least partially underwater or seasonally flooded will be difficult enough. That means rebuilding the infrastructure for millions of people in the United States alone. When Hurricane Katrina type flooding becomes an annual event due to higher sea levels, continuously rebuilding the cities will not be an option. People will be displaced and the annually-flooded buildings looted and condemned.
Wars are very likely. Look at India losing about half of its useful land and displacing so many people; suddenly all the land to the North looks mighty inviting, even with their arsenals. The Nile Delta flooding could displace seven million; there isn't much nearby green on the map for them to move to within the country. Netherlands probably won't survive as we know it, so what about erasing the line between them and Germany? That one at least has a chance of being somewhat civil.
When you combine the stress of losing a lot of land, some countries having their land vanish almost completely, and billions of displaced individuals, tensions are going to skyrocket very quickly.
Long-term real estate investors and the filthy rich have been picking up tracts of land in places that are elevated, cool, and have fresh water sources. Most people haven't really noticed.
... all the more reason for a "fruit of the poisoned vine" doctrine to be adopted in the UK. The whole stop should have been thrown out in the US if it were based on an unwarrented bug. Not that it will be, nor that "poisoned vine" is safe in the US.
I'm not certain that applies here.
His detention was long after the Guardian had broken the story. There were many news stories about many British organizations before that took place. It is quite reasonable that Greenwald's home was bugged because it was well known he had a large collection of documents. It is quite clear they have both audio and video feeds at his home and his office if you read the documents the court released.
It wouldn't surprise me if any number of agencies had already raided his home, copied his disk drives, and otherwise done their espionage job at the same time they were planting their bugs around the place, and he likely has people watching CCTV taking note of everybody who approaches his home. There is nothing "poison vine" about that; considering the background they are lawful (even though they are blaming the messenger for the message).
On this ruling, the court said that if Schedule 7 applies at all, it applies completely, therefore the full time can be taken.
What they didn't rule on was the fact that while on the surface it was a stop for national security reasons (likely with recordings in the home showing him loading up the classified documents and discussing how to carry them through security) they didn't touch the concern that the motives were to bully and harass, rather than protect state secrets. As a parallel, an officer may be able to legally bring me to the station for questioning every morning before I enter the office, but it would take a while before we could make a case for harassment. Similarly, this single instance fills the letter of the law, and while it strongly appears it was designed by a legal team to threaten and harass to the full extent permitted under the law, there is no proof it actually crossed the line.
Considering how much the previously-released stories had offended so many people in government, it is quite likely, nearly certain, and very probable it was an attempt to threaten, but these guys are all legal experts. They know exactly the extent of the law, exactly what to write, exactly what NOT to write, and exactly how far they can push. The conspiracy is clear to everyone at every level, including the judges. The problem is the level physical proof that is required. Considering the legal experts who launched the attack and their reasoning, you can be pretty certain that such evidence does not physically exist.
Even if one of them came out and said "Put me in jail for breaking the law. We intentionally railroaded the guy, studied exactly the limits of harassment before it broke the law", everything about it immediately becomes hearsay without physical evidence and is dismissed.
The message you're responding to actually makes it clear that this is not an example of "the bad thing". It was a correction to drivel people are posting because, well, they hear "Valve is digging through your cache" and think that Valve is indiscriminately looking at your cache, and sending private information it has no right to know.
When people are upset about "digging through your machine", they're worried not about an anti-cheat algorithm sending a yes/no answer to the question "Is Frobnicator cheating", they're worried about a long answer to "What has Frobnicator been doing recently?"
No, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. There was nothing accidental about it.
It is everywhere. Just minutes ago I read a news report on license plate scans. The police are adamant: We only send results back if there are illegal immigration concerns, we don't look at anything else, and we only transmit the data if there is a match.
That's great that they don't send the whole thing back for evaluation, because that would be blatantly evil and would invite the pitchforks.
EITHER WAY, government organizations or business organizations or criminal organizations, the organizations are paying a visit and digging in to potentially valuable, potentially incriminating, and always very sensitive personal information.
Both the government agencies and the business are clear about it: THIS TIME they are only using it for good. THIS TIME the scans won't be archived or searched. THIS TIME we use it identify specific bad guys. THIS TIME we are invading your privacy for a good cause.
The doctor may say "THIS TIME I am sticking my hand up there to check for colon cancer, nothing to worry about." I don't care how many times it happens, I want to know EVERY TIME. I want to know well in advance EVERY TIME they want to poke in. I want to know EVERY TIME what they are doing, why they are doing it. I want to know EVERY TIME so I can check the results and monitor them and make sure that THIS TIME is still acceptable to me. Because maybe THIS TIME it is not.
BTW, how did they know it was GCHQ docs? Did he confess? or Were they unencrypted and GCHQ attested?
That is one of many oddities in the report.
Numbers 11 and 12 of the judgement(pdf) are the most telling. In the days before he was detained, the Security Service wrote, among other things "there is a substantial risk that David MIRANDA holds material which would be severely damaging to UK national security interests." Less than 24 hours before the airport incident they wrote this: "We assess that MIRANDA is knowingly carrying material, the release of which would endanger people’s lives. Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism and as such we request that the subject is
examined under Schedule 7."
So what, exactly, does that bolded bit mean? The security services HAS ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE (not suspicion) that Mr Miranda was knowingly carrying the material. Think hard about that. They told the court that they knew the actual content of the conversation he had inside Mr Greenwald's home hours before he left. So yeah, that is a thing to think about. The bugs in that home are awful.
Now, as this is slashdot we can pontificate about how something being "made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause" equates to terrorism, but that is current UK law that they need to deal with.
There is also this one in 72, that shows the justices are really out of touch: "I accept that the Schedule 7 stop constituted an indirect interference with press freedom, though no such interference was asserted by the claimant at the time." So basically the justices expected a foreign citizen (Brazilian) to properly cite the UK legal code while being locked in a room by thugs. Seriously guys?!
Overall their reasoning is frustrating but correct. If Schedule 7 applies (which it seems to) then EVERYTHING under the law applies. Even though they could have done the job in 10 minutes, the law doesn't require any kind of speed. It says the stop can last for 9 hours "for the purpose of satisfying himself... an examining officer may [list of actions]". As long as the examining officer was "satisfying himself" (13-year-old-giggle) during that time the entire 9 hours can legally be used. It was obviously intentional that he used the full time. There is no doubt that he was trying to send a message by using the maximum time allowed, but short of declaring perjury against the investigators the court is going to accept each investigator was busy "satisfying himself" rather than punishing the guy. Unless they have some hard proof of their mental state at the time, it would be exceedingly hard to discredit their sworn statement.
Are they lying in their sworn statement about "satisfying himself"? Very likely, as it was atypical, most workers have a vague idea of the law and just follow broad training. A junior official is unlikely to ever follow along the strict edge of law, with timings down to the minute, following bullet-point by bullet-point down the law, and so it appears to be a calculated attack by legal experts. Can you PROVE it was an attack and not "satisfying himself"? Probably not without a smoking-gun document being leaked by the government.
I hate replying to myself, but since we don't have a way to edit...
The ones with the cameras have the power. Governments with CCTV have power. Corporate overlords with CCTV have power.
Protesters recording police abuses have power if they record it, but if they don't record it usually they lose.
Activists recording business abuses have power when challenged since they can expose problems, but no recordings and they find themselves sued to oblivion.
Drivers in Russia with dashboard cameras have power when people jump in front of their vehicles.
When the people have the cameras, they have the power. Sadly many individuals equate cameras with power so they feel powerless when they see another individual with a camera. Just give everybody cameras, let them record everything. Power to the people, and all that.
In public, I want ubiquitous recording BY THE INDIVIDUALS.
If I'm in a club, I want a few cameras running. Inevitably there are fights, and if we can get viewpoints from five different individuals it could clean up a lot of problems.
If I'm out dealing with a drunk, I want a few cameras running. If anything goes wrong we can get viewpoints from several angles to prove innocence against accusations.
If I'm dealing with a difficult client, I want a few cameras running. Let's have both of our viewpoints and more besides. If I did something wrong let me know, show me so I can fix it.
I'm a photographer who insists on having someone present when I shoot women alone, I really want a few cameras running. I once had baseless accusations against me, and a few cameras would have cleaned things up quick.
If I need to interact with police for anything from a speeding ticket to an arrest, I want a few cameras running. If I'm guilty, I am content to have those cameras show my guilt. If I am innocent, I want those cameras to prove not just to the court, but to show the media, to show facebook, to show youtube.
There is a HUGE difference between government run CCTV, corporate overlords monitoring our movements, versus individuals who can use recordings to preserve what they see for any use.
Individuals with cameras in public? Bring them on. When everybody (not just the authorities) have the cameras running the world will be that much better.
True, and well-worded, but I think it's a bunch of handwaving. If he truly believed in an open internet, he'd do something about this more than just saying: "I'm gonna let them handle it"
You must be new to this whole "government" thing.
In general they do nothing. And in general that is actually the best response.
Usually when they do take fast action it is the wrong action. The kneejerk reaction laws are written by organizations that have their own aggressive agendas, they provide them to the legislators during an emergency under the promise that the bad provisions can be corrected later... but they seldom are.
The correct course, even though it is slow and tedious and painful, is for Congress to act deliberately.
Even in the best of times trying to force Congress to pass a law that benefits the people is nearly impossible. Often it requires a massive upswelling, grand marches and presentations and events that are daily on the news until the congress-critters realize they must take action or lose their jobs. In the worst of times, like today, even that wouldn't work since they cn trivially deflect the most severe upheavals with "We worked on a bill but the other party shut it down".
Examples of that were the civil rights movement, the Vietnam and Korean war protests, more recently we have the occupy movement and the tea party movement. It takes considerable force to make congress move, and even these multi-million member groups tend to produce only slight changes in government.
Sadly, the correct action is also the action we are least likely to see. It may not be the one the nation wants, but given the national attitudes and apathy, it is probably the one we deserve.
It is actually pretty funny from a distant and abstract view.
When most companies dig through your machine, evaluate records and browser caches, and otherwise dig through the garbage that is sure to exist, most people start screaming about privacy rights, corporations and governments intruding in personal lives, and the huge potential for abuse. Assertions that it is only to catch the bad actors are usually dismissed by the crowd.
Valve does exactly the same thing, searches through your machine, digs through all the garbage, and has the potential to collect quite a lot of incriminating details. Assertions that it is only to catch the bad actors are followed by... mostly acceptance.
0.000876% -- the 570 bad actors that scanning 65 million Valve user accounts has identified.
0.0142% -- the "around 1,000,000 Terrorist Watch List names in March 2009" relative to the number of people the NSA spies on.
So... I guess that means Valve is spying on 65 million people with even less effectiveness than the NSA spying? Or maybe this make it less bad somehow because Steam is voluntary? Maybe we can vote with our wallet! That means go back in time over the past decade, choose someone else to buy the games from, locking us to their platform instead, and... wait...
Doesn't seem any worse than a Zero Knowledge Proof system.
Even if we cannot prove it formally, systems like this can put together a system with a very high probability of being correct if we simply test their results. If you can get multiple automated proof systems to claim it is impossible, and you trust the automated proof systems with a moderate degree of certainty, you can trust the results with about the same certainty.
For many problems, having something "statistically proven" is good enough.
But now we get childish anti-science potshots making it up to score 5, Informative? What the heck happened? Has Slashdot been taken over by commenting shrills paid by the Koch brothers? Or did all the intelligent Slashdotters simply leave long ago? If so, could someone please tell me where they went?
Natural ebb and flow.
Site is new and has mostly insiders. SNR is high. Site gets popular. Hordes arrive. SNR drops. Signal moves to clearer channels.
It is often mentioned that the Slashdot heyday ended around 2006. Much of the signal moved over to reddit. Observe that reddit went from a great ratio of insightful stories and insightful comments in the past to having today's home page mostly filled with meme-style images but occasionally containing intellectual content, very much like modern slashdot. Some of the individual moderated sub-reddits maintain a high SNR on a single topic, but the broader intelligent community vanished a few years back.
These days go for industry-based and credential-based discussion boards. IEEE and ACM both offer fairly broad geek news coverage with open discussion after the stories.
Sounds like you are falling for an obvious diversionary tactic. Kerry is in Indonesia. Indonesians are pissed at the USA for spying on them. Kerry decides to talk about climate change and lobs around hyperbola like "weapon of mass destructions threating your way of life!!11ONE!!!1"
Indeed!
We should all take action for climate change. Don't let the horrible practices of the nations of the world interrupt it.
Do what you can for climate change!
(I recommend igniting your nearby forests. After all the forests are gone there will be plenty of evidence for climate change.)
It isn't logical to completely destroy the essence of a popular website just to try to extract some extra money from it, but destroy it in the process.
Kinda like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs just so you can try to extract the eggs quicker. Sorry, but you may find the essence of the site dies in the process.
NBC made a bid for the rights to show the Olympics and offered what they thought they could pay. Not saying that the IOC aren't a bunch of greedy bastards. Just that they took bids from all the of greedy networks and NBC happened to win the rights.
A lot like the greedy slashdot beta programmers who in turn took the bid from the greedy Dice who are also in the business of extracting the most money they can.
Days like this I'm glad I shop around to find old-school paper-using doctors.
All of my doctors currently make a point that they stick with paper records, and also make it a point to use the most generic diagnostic codes possible to the insurance companies. Blood test results are faxed (I know, right?) and everyone on the staff claims to support medical privacy.
I don't know what it would take to break their security, but it is better than the companies that share everything with anybody who asks. Hooray for freedom of choice.
Oh, I get it! This question for Ask Slashdot must come from the Slashdot beta team.
Now, I understand that as a Slashdot beta developer you don't know how to program. We can all see that.
Web site development is more difficult than the programs you are used to where you drag a picture of a shape onto another picture of the shape, or how when a large colored shape is presented you click on the corresponding color image.
All of that "cryptic jargon" is important to computers. Just like all that "cryptic jargon" in legal agreements is important to judges.
Since you must be on the Slashdot beta development team, I'll point out that people sometimes don't like it when you make changes. Try some of these:
* Go to the Louvre with a paintbrush and some oil paints. Attempt to fix the eyebrows on the Mona Lisa, because they have faded off. Tell me how people like your slight changes.
* Go to the Royal Academy of Arts and slightly modify DaVinci's Last Supper. Maybe stand the salt shaker back up and paint over some of the damage that was done after people cut an arch through it for a doorway, or after the WW2 bombing damage. See how well people respond.
* Pay a visit to the Sistine Chapel, that thing has lots of cracks on it. Tell me what happens after you climb up to the ceiling with your bucket off plaster to fix the cracks.
* The White House lawn looks nice, but it could be changed to allow more foot traffic. Tell me what happens when you take your backhoe up to the presidential mansion and being excavating for new footpaths.
Any change, no matter how tiny, has the potential to destroy the essence of the item. You got that, Slashdot beta team?
... what appears, to me at least, be a relatively minor website redesign (uh a bigger font and more white space basically?) of a site that's pretty much just a sequential listing of stories with links and comments anyway.
Yes, some people feel that way: The site is a collection of stories, links, and comments.
In many respects that is true. If you were forced to describe the site in ten words or less, that would work.
However, real life is more nuanced than the condensed summary.
It is not just about a color palate, or a style of expression, or white space, or the color of the background.
I could ask artists to draw a seated woman with folded hands sitting before a landscape and to use a specific color palette, or a table with thirteen men seated before a feast, with perhaps a few other guides. It is unlikely the artists would produce anything like the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper.
The design of slashdot is also complex and nuanced. With a brief summary you may explain the superficial aspects of the site, but the essense of the site -- which has grown into millions of accounts -- is not so easily expressed or duplicated. Even minor changes can completely destroy that essense.
Cisco found the closest duplicate replacement part in another state, chartered a flight to a nearby airport, had a taxi driver on standby when the plane arrived, and delivered it to our door within about four hours of reporting the fairly minor problem.
For far less money than the Cisco support contract, you could have just bought several spares of each model of Cisco device, and have had the replacement on-hand a quickly as you could walk over and grab it.
Perhaps you missed the first part of my post. Fortune 500 data center.
If you are talking about consumer devices and even common office server room equipment that is quite true. We had lots of commodity stuff lying around. We also kept a bit of less common stuff around, such as spare UPS racks; the $30,000 price tag is low enough cost that we could keep a few of them around when equipment shuffles.
Note that some critical equipment gets mighty expensive. You can find a good deal on low latency, high volume interconnect that can handle ten million concurrent connections for around $250K, but you'll probably want to pay around $350K for the better ones. It would be insane to just keep a few of EVERYTHING lying around, just in case. Far cheaper for the Cisco contract that will get us any replacement we need, quickly.
Coal is inflexible too. The money needs to go into more renewables and into energy storage. All the necessary technology exists, it just needs building, and there is only so much money to go around which is one reason why we don't want it spent on nuclear.
Meh, all that crap will take to long. In just a few short years our species will consume more energy than we can produce with all of those combined. So not only is the sum of them insufficient, the pollution involved in mining and harvesting the resources, construction of the facilities, all the infrastructure, and so on will destroy the planet just as part of the opportunity cost.
We need to cut our losses, start researching and building generational spaceships, and roll out the lottery to find the lucky few humans who will get off the rock and hopefully go find (and eventually destroy) another one.
I won't touch Cisco gear with a 10 ft pole, and this is exactly why.
On the other hand...
When working in a Fortune 500 company there were some mighty expensive premium contracts with Cisco. Among them was an agreement I learned about when we had an outage late in the afternoon that affected about 15 people. We have hardware that could have affected hundreds of people, but in this case the outage only affected a few.
Cisco found the closest duplicate replacement part in another state, chartered a flight to a nearby airport, had a taxi driver on standby when the plane arrived, and delivered it to our door within about four hours of reporting the fairly minor problem.
I understand the contract is in place because we had hardware that affects hundreds of thousands of people. The Cisco crew was adamant that the contract had a clause that required a six-hour turnaround on any of that class of hardware. If it had been a major device at a major data center those same four hours could have felt like an eternity, so for those people where an outage can cost thousands of dollars every second in lost productivity and sales I can certainly understand the need for the contract with the devil.
You could have kept your employer plan through COBRA. Why did you not do it?
Yes, for the low, low price of $2700 per month I could continue my insurance through COBRA.
The whole reason of going through the healthcare exchange was to find out about less costly alternatives. Like the $700 plan that the site recommended, and that I signed up for, and was guaranteed coverage for, and then was told the paperwork was lost due to government error, and to try again. And after the second attempt, to repeat the process.
So yes, I could have done that. And if the government's newfangled system worked properly I would have been just fine.
As I still have the paperwork I am planning on enforcing their guaranteed coverage rules. They told me it was guaranteed, I was using the government's system that also assured me it was guaranteed, and I am keeping all receipts and notes about who I talked to, when, and the results. They will be paying as was promised, I have some lawyer friends who have told me they would help there. But still, not everyone does, and that is entirely the point of this/. story headline.
Thanks to government incompetence in cases like mine the requirement that everyone get private insurance with government help has backfired, leaving me and my family technically uninsured for a month. Yay government!
> All this evidence, collected this way, is admissable because it could have been discovered
The ccops illegally tap your phone line and hear about a pot deal.
What did not happen is that a a K9 officer COULD HAVE been taking the dog out for a walk when they just happened to walk by a car full of pot. That didn't happen, but it could have.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you are claiming that the cops can search the vehicle and it's not fruit of a poisonous tree because they could have stumbled upon it. They didn't, but they could have. Do you have a citation for that? In all of American jurisprudence has any appeals court held that it's okay to violate the Constitution because they could have not violated it? I know a certain "law professor" (who never taught law) who might believe that, but has the court ever ruled such?
And that is precisely the difficulty around parallel construction.
The government cannot withhold potentially exculpatory evidence. In the late 1960s, right after the SCOTUS decided the Brady case, prosecutors gave quite a lot of information to defendants. Over the years prosecutors and judges have taken progressively stricter interpretations to the point where they routinely withhold everything again, only handing over the minimum that they think might fall under Brady and often only if the defense uses very specifically worded discovery demands. If the prosecutors can argue that they didn't think it was material evidence, or argue that the discovery demand wasn't quite specific enough, they can get away with it. And since the defense doesn't know about the evidence (as it was withheld from them) they almost always get away with it.
In very recent time, perhaps the last 18 months or so, there has been a surge in claims of withheld exculpatory evidence, and judges are increasingly more sympathetic to defendants during discovery. There have been quite a few major cases where prosecutors realize that maybe some of the evidence might have been potentially exculpatory, but often their excuses are enough to keep judges from dismissing the case outright. Both behaviors are changing, and we have multiple cases going right now in my state that are currently on the fast track for the state supreme court where evidence was "accidentally" withheld (except some leaked information shows it was quite intentional as the defense 'would never know') but prosecutors and judges had a wink-and-a-nod when it was discovered to be "accidentally" withheld. (There is a very active public debate about this right now; since prosecutors are immune for these violations and they are kept employed based on their results rather than fairness, they have every incentive to break the law with impunity.)
Parallel construction is nearly impossible to detect, and if discovered is subject to the exclusionary rules. Depending on the nature of the construction and the interpretation of the judge, it could exclude no evidence, some evidence, or be enough to cause the case to be dismissed entirely. The problem is that when it happens you don't have any evidence that it happened. Prosecutors and officers might not even know it happened, since groups like the DEA use anonymous tips to police for the construction. Even though the entire case might be tainted enough for dismissal, it is possible nobody directly involved (even the police and prosecutors) know about the unlawfulness because it was laundered through anonymous reporting systems.
I'd love to see where you see that in the US Constitution, because no such specific language exists as far as I know. "Due process of law" is all that seems to be required, and in practice that means that discovery has to proceed in a normal manner and the prosecution may bring as much or as little evidence against you as they may require to convict you, no more or less. They must produce this evidence, and how they got it; any evidence they don't bring to court, they don't have to explain.
That's okay, not everybody went to law school.
Due Process, as currently enumerated:
1. An unbiased tribunal.
2. Notice of the proposed action and the grounds asserted for it.
3. Opportunity to present reasons why the proposed action should not be taken.
4. The right to present evidence, including the right to call witnesses.
5. The right to know opposing evidence.
6. The right to cross-examine adverse witnesses.
7. A decision based exclusively on the evidence presented.
8. Opportunity to be represented by counsel.
9. Requirement that the tribunal prepare a record of the evidence presented.
10. Requirement that the tribunal prepare written findings of fact and reasons for its decision.
Got that?
Next up, the SCOTUS clarified the requirements (and some consequences) in Brady V Maryland. Coupled with that is a body of rules such as Brady disclosure. In the past few decades judges have slowly gotten lax on Brady rules, but that has picked up sharply in the past year or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you had to choose between crappy cable or crappy dsl and watched as other nations like South Korea were on the lucky side of the digital divide.
Now we have three tiers: Crappy American connection, Awesome South Korean connection, and Fantasy Google connection.
Thanks Google for giving people unrealistic dreams. ... As soon as they announce where they are connecting in Austin, I'm moving.
I'm too am not convinced a 4-10C will be death of humanity. However, losing 90% of the species means we lose a huge part of the ecosystem
Let's word it differently:
Roll a 10 sided die. (What? You only have 6-sided? Are you a geek or not?)
If you roll a 10, humanity lives. If you roll any other number, humanity dies.
If you think it will help, have a lady blow on the die before you throw it.
Compensation is whatever you negotiate.
Fairness is an interesting concept. "Fair" and "Equitable" are different. "Fair" and "Equal" are different. Is it fair that you can have two similarly-skilled, similarly-trained, similarly-experienced programmers working side by side but they have a difference in pay?
If you think it is unfair, then push for labor unions and publicly shared compensation details at every level. Most (all?) state already do this, publishing the salary tables for every job from governor and legislator to university coach to public school teacher to public park janitor. You can look up exactly how much anybody earns, and you can petition the government to change their rates.
If someone is hired when the team is in dire need and the other is hired when the team is flush with workers, then at negotiation time one will be in a better position that the other for compensation. Some people don't like that, and want everyone to be paid based on a standardized table of years of work experience and years of education; look up where they cross, that is your salary.
Personally I prefer a market wage of whatever I can negotiate. Of course, I can negotiate a fairly strong package based on projects I have worked on, roles I have lead, and other measurable results in my history.
No, it is not millions of people.
BILLIONS of people will be displaced if the water level rises even a moderate amount. Here is a fun toy It only covers part of the world, but the hyperlinked areas are illuminating.
Notice how even a small increase will shut down some of the most populated regions of the world as the cities are right on the coast. China will likely see a billion displaced. India might have a a half billion displaced.
The US might see only around 40 million displaced, but having New York, San Francisco, LA, Houston, Miami, and a bunch of others at least partially underwater or seasonally flooded will be difficult enough. That means rebuilding the infrastructure for millions of people in the United States alone. When Hurricane Katrina type flooding becomes an annual event due to higher sea levels, continuously rebuilding the cities will not be an option. People will be displaced and the annually-flooded buildings looted and condemned.
Wars are very likely. Look at India losing about half of its useful land and displacing so many people; suddenly all the land to the North looks mighty inviting, even with their arsenals. The Nile Delta flooding could displace seven million; there isn't much nearby green on the map for them to move to within the country. Netherlands probably won't survive as we know it, so what about erasing the line between them and Germany? That one at least has a chance of being somewhat civil.
When you combine the stress of losing a lot of land, some countries having their land vanish almost completely, and billions of displaced individuals, tensions are going to skyrocket very quickly.
Long-term real estate investors and the filthy rich have been picking up tracts of land in places that are elevated, cool, and have fresh water sources. Most people haven't really noticed.
... all the more reason for a "fruit of the poisoned vine" doctrine to be adopted in the UK. The whole stop should have been thrown out in the US if it were based on an unwarrented bug. Not that it will be, nor that "poisoned vine" is safe in the US.
I'm not certain that applies here.
His detention was long after the Guardian had broken the story. There were many news stories about many British organizations before that took place. It is quite reasonable that Greenwald's home was bugged because it was well known he had a large collection of documents. It is quite clear they have both audio and video feeds at his home and his office if you read the documents the court released.
It wouldn't surprise me if any number of agencies had already raided his home, copied his disk drives, and otherwise done their espionage job at the same time they were planting their bugs around the place, and he likely has people watching CCTV taking note of everybody who approaches his home. There is nothing "poison vine" about that; considering the background they are lawful (even though they are blaming the messenger for the message).
On this ruling, the court said that if Schedule 7 applies at all, it applies completely, therefore the full time can be taken.
What they didn't rule on was the fact that while on the surface it was a stop for national security reasons (likely with recordings in the home showing him loading up the classified documents and discussing how to carry them through security) they didn't touch the concern that the motives were to bully and harass, rather than protect state secrets. As a parallel, an officer may be able to legally bring me to the station for questioning every morning before I enter the office, but it would take a while before we could make a case for harassment. Similarly, this single instance fills the letter of the law, and while it strongly appears it was designed by a legal team to threaten and harass to the full extent permitted under the law, there is no proof it actually crossed the line.
Considering how much the previously-released stories had offended so many people in government, it is quite likely, nearly certain, and very probable it was an attempt to threaten, but these guys are all legal experts. They know exactly the extent of the law, exactly what to write, exactly what NOT to write, and exactly how far they can push. The conspiracy is clear to everyone at every level, including the judges. The problem is the level physical proof that is required. Considering the legal experts who launched the attack and their reasoning, you can be pretty certain that such evidence does not physically exist.
Even if one of them came out and said "Put me in jail for breaking the law. We intentionally railroaded the guy, studied exactly the limits of harassment before it broke the law", everything about it immediately becomes hearsay without physical evidence and is dismissed.
The message you're responding to actually makes it clear that this is not an example of "the bad thing". It was a correction to drivel people are posting because, well, they hear "Valve is digging through your cache" and think that Valve is indiscriminately looking at your cache, and sending private information it has no right to know.
When people are upset about "digging through your machine", they're worried not about an anti-cheat algorithm sending a yes/no answer to the question "Is Frobnicator cheating", they're worried about a long answer to "What has Frobnicator been doing recently?"
No, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. There was nothing accidental about it.
It is everywhere. Just minutes ago I read a news report on license plate scans. The police are adamant: We only send results back if there are illegal immigration concerns, we don't look at anything else, and we only transmit the data if there is a match.
That's great that they don't send the whole thing back for evaluation, because that would be blatantly evil and would invite the pitchforks.
EITHER WAY, government organizations or business organizations or criminal organizations, the organizations are paying a visit and digging in to potentially valuable, potentially incriminating, and always very sensitive personal information.
Both the government agencies and the business are clear about it: THIS TIME they are only using it for good. THIS TIME the scans won't be archived or searched. THIS TIME we use it identify specific bad guys. THIS TIME we are invading your privacy for a good cause.
The doctor may say "THIS TIME I am sticking my hand up there to check for colon cancer, nothing to worry about." I don't care how many times it happens, I want to know EVERY TIME. I want to know well in advance EVERY TIME they want to poke in. I want to know EVERY TIME what they are doing, why they are doing it. I want to know EVERY TIME so I can check the results and monitor them and make sure that THIS TIME is still acceptable to me. Because maybe THIS TIME it is not.
BTW, how did they know it was GCHQ docs? Did he confess? or Were they unencrypted and GCHQ attested?
That is one of many oddities in the report.
Numbers 11 and 12 of the judgement(pdf) are the most telling. In the days before he was detained, the Security Service wrote, among other things "there is a substantial risk that David MIRANDA holds material which would be severely damaging to UK national security interests." Less than 24 hours before the airport incident they wrote this: "We assess that MIRANDA is knowingly carrying material, the release of which would endanger people’s lives. Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism and as such we request that the subject is examined under Schedule 7."
So what, exactly, does that bolded bit mean? The security services HAS ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE (not suspicion) that Mr Miranda was knowingly carrying the material. Think hard about that. They told the court that they knew the actual content of the conversation he had inside Mr Greenwald's home hours before he left. So yeah, that is a thing to think about. The bugs in that home are awful.
Now, as this is slashdot we can pontificate about how something being "made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause" equates to terrorism, but that is current UK law that they need to deal with.
There is also this one in 72, that shows the justices are really out of touch: "I accept that the Schedule 7 stop constituted an indirect interference with press freedom, though no such interference was asserted by the claimant at the time." So basically the justices expected a foreign citizen (Brazilian) to properly cite the UK legal code while being locked in a room by thugs. Seriously guys?!
Overall their reasoning is frustrating but correct. If Schedule 7 applies (which it seems to) then EVERYTHING under the law applies. Even though they could have done the job in 10 minutes, the law doesn't require any kind of speed. It says the stop can last for 9 hours "for the purpose of satisfying himself ... an examining officer may [list of actions]". As long as the examining officer was "satisfying himself" (13-year-old-giggle) during that time the entire 9 hours can legally be used. It was obviously intentional that he used the full time. There is no doubt that he was trying to send a message by using the maximum time allowed, but short of declaring perjury against the investigators the court is going to accept each investigator was busy "satisfying himself" rather than punishing the guy. Unless they have some hard proof of their mental state at the time, it would be exceedingly hard to discredit their sworn statement.
Are they lying in their sworn statement about "satisfying himself"? Very likely, as it was atypical, most workers have a vague idea of the law and just follow broad training. A junior official is unlikely to ever follow along the strict edge of law, with timings down to the minute, following bullet-point by bullet-point down the law, and so it appears to be a calculated attack by legal experts. Can you PROVE it was an attack and not "satisfying himself"? Probably not without a smoking-gun document being leaked by the government.
I hate replying to myself, but since we don't have a way to edit...
The ones with the cameras have the power. Governments with CCTV have power. Corporate overlords with CCTV have power.
Protesters recording police abuses have power if they record it, but if they don't record it usually they lose.
Activists recording business abuses have power when challenged since they can expose problems, but no recordings and they find themselves sued to oblivion.
Drivers in Russia with dashboard cameras have power when people jump in front of their vehicles.
When the people have the cameras, they have the power. Sadly many individuals equate cameras with power so they feel powerless when they see another individual with a camera. Just give everybody cameras, let them record everything. Power to the people, and all that.
In public, I want ubiquitous recording BY THE INDIVIDUALS.
If I'm in a club, I want a few cameras running. Inevitably there are fights, and if we can get viewpoints from five different individuals it could clean up a lot of problems.
If I'm out dealing with a drunk, I want a few cameras running. If anything goes wrong we can get viewpoints from several angles to prove innocence against accusations.
If I'm dealing with a difficult client, I want a few cameras running. Let's have both of our viewpoints and more besides. If I did something wrong let me know, show me so I can fix it.
I'm a photographer who insists on having someone present when I shoot women alone, I really want a few cameras running. I once had baseless accusations against me, and a few cameras would have cleaned things up quick.
If I need to interact with police for anything from a speeding ticket to an arrest, I want a few cameras running. If I'm guilty, I am content to have those cameras show my guilt. If I am innocent, I want those cameras to prove not just to the court, but to show the media, to show facebook, to show youtube.
There is a HUGE difference between government run CCTV, corporate overlords monitoring our movements, versus individuals who can use recordings to preserve what they see for any use.
Individuals with cameras in public? Bring them on. When everybody (not just the authorities) have the cameras running the world will be that much better.
True, and well-worded, but I think it's a bunch of handwaving. If he truly believed in an open internet, he'd do something about this more than just saying: "I'm gonna let them handle it"
You must be new to this whole "government" thing.
In general they do nothing. And in general that is actually the best response.
Usually when they do take fast action it is the wrong action. The kneejerk reaction laws are written by organizations that have their own aggressive agendas, they provide them to the legislators during an emergency under the promise that the bad provisions can be corrected later... but they seldom are.
The correct course, even though it is slow and tedious and painful, is for Congress to act deliberately.
Even in the best of times trying to force Congress to pass a law that benefits the people is nearly impossible. Often it requires a massive upswelling, grand marches and presentations and events that are daily on the news until the congress-critters realize they must take action or lose their jobs. In the worst of times, like today, even that wouldn't work since they cn trivially deflect the most severe upheavals with "We worked on a bill but the other party shut it down".
Examples of that were the civil rights movement, the Vietnam and Korean war protests, more recently we have the occupy movement and the tea party movement. It takes considerable force to make congress move, and even these multi-million member groups tend to produce only slight changes in government.
Sadly, the correct action is also the action we are least likely to see. It may not be the one the nation wants, but given the national attitudes and apathy, it is probably the one we deserve.
It is actually pretty funny from a distant and abstract view.
When most companies dig through your machine, evaluate records and browser caches, and otherwise dig through the garbage that is sure to exist, most people start screaming about privacy rights, corporations and governments intruding in personal lives, and the huge potential for abuse. Assertions that it is only to catch the bad actors are usually dismissed by the crowd.
Valve does exactly the same thing, searches through your machine, digs through all the garbage, and has the potential to collect quite a lot of incriminating details. Assertions that it is only to catch the bad actors are followed by ... mostly acceptance.
0.000876% -- the 570 bad actors that scanning 65 million Valve user accounts has identified.
0.0142% -- the "around 1,000,000 Terrorist Watch List names in March 2009" relative to the number of people the NSA spies on.
So... I guess that means Valve is spying on 65 million people with even less effectiveness than the NSA spying? Or maybe this make it less bad somehow because Steam is voluntary? Maybe we can vote with our wallet! That means go back in time over the past decade, choose someone else to buy the games from, locking us to their platform instead, and... wait...
Doesn't seem any worse than a Zero Knowledge Proof system.
Even if we cannot prove it formally, systems like this can put together a system with a very high probability of being correct if we simply test their results. If you can get multiple automated proof systems to claim it is impossible, and you trust the automated proof systems with a moderate degree of certainty, you can trust the results with about the same certainty.
For many problems, having something "statistically proven" is good enough.
But now we get childish anti-science potshots making it up to score 5, Informative? What the heck happened? Has Slashdot been taken over by commenting shrills paid by the Koch brothers? Or did all the intelligent Slashdotters simply leave long ago? If so, could someone please tell me where they went?
Natural ebb and flow.
Site is new and has mostly insiders. SNR is high. Site gets popular. Hordes arrive. SNR drops. Signal moves to clearer channels.
It is often mentioned that the Slashdot heyday ended around 2006. Much of the signal moved over to reddit. Observe that reddit went from a great ratio of insightful stories and insightful comments in the past to having today's home page mostly filled with meme-style images but occasionally containing intellectual content, very much like modern slashdot. Some of the individual moderated sub-reddits maintain a high SNR on a single topic, but the broader intelligent community vanished a few years back.
These days go for industry-based and credential-based discussion boards. IEEE and ACM both offer fairly broad geek news coverage with open discussion after the stories.
Sounds like you are falling for an obvious diversionary tactic. Kerry is in Indonesia. Indonesians are pissed at the USA for spying on them. Kerry decides to talk about climate change and lobs around hyperbola like "weapon of mass destructions threating your way of life!!11ONE!!!1"
Indeed!
We should all take action for climate change. Don't let the horrible practices of the nations of the world interrupt it.
Do what you can for climate change!
(I recommend igniting your nearby forests. After all the forests are gone there will be plenty of evidence for climate change.)
I bet the /. beta team are all smokers.
It isn't logical to completely destroy the essence of a popular website just to try to extract some extra money from it, but destroy it in the process.
Kinda like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs just so you can try to extract the eggs quicker. Sorry, but you may find the essence of the site dies in the process.
NBC made a bid for the rights to show the Olympics and offered what they thought they could pay. Not saying that the IOC aren't a bunch of greedy bastards. Just that they took bids from all the of greedy networks and NBC happened to win the rights.
A lot like the greedy slashdot beta programmers who in turn took the bid from the greedy Dice who are also in the business of extracting the most money they can.
Days like this I'm glad I shop around to find old-school paper-using doctors.
All of my doctors currently make a point that they stick with paper records, and also make it a point to use the most generic diagnostic codes possible to the insurance companies. Blood test results are faxed (I know, right?) and everyone on the staff claims to support medical privacy.
I don't know what it would take to break their security, but it is better than the companies that share everything with anybody who asks. Hooray for freedom of choice.
Oh, I get it! This question for Ask Slashdot must come from the Slashdot beta team.
Now, I understand that as a Slashdot beta developer you don't know how to program. We can all see that.
Web site development is more difficult than the programs you are used to where you drag a picture of a shape onto another picture of the shape, or how when a large colored shape is presented you click on the corresponding color image.
All of that "cryptic jargon" is important to computers. Just like all that "cryptic jargon" in legal agreements is important to judges.
Since you must be on the Slashdot beta development team, I'll point out that people sometimes don't like it when you make changes. Try some of these:
* Go to the Louvre with a paintbrush and some oil paints. Attempt to fix the eyebrows on the Mona Lisa, because they have faded off. Tell me how people like your slight changes.
* Go to the Royal Academy of Arts and slightly modify DaVinci's Last Supper. Maybe stand the salt shaker back up and paint over some of the damage that was done after people cut an arch through it for a doorway, or after the WW2 bombing damage. See how well people respond.
* Pay a visit to the Sistine Chapel, that thing has lots of cracks on it. Tell me what happens after you climb up to the ceiling with your bucket off plaster to fix the cracks.
* The White House lawn looks nice, but it could be changed to allow more foot traffic. Tell me what happens when you take your backhoe up to the presidential mansion and being excavating for new footpaths.
Any change, no matter how tiny, has the potential to destroy the essence of the item. You got that, Slashdot beta team?
... what appears, to me at least, be a relatively minor website redesign (uh a bigger font and more white space basically?) of a site that's pretty much just a sequential listing of stories with links and comments anyway.
Yes, some people feel that way: The site is a collection of stories, links, and comments.
In many respects that is true. If you were forced to describe the site in ten words or less, that would work.
However, real life is more nuanced than the condensed summary.
It is not just about a color palate, or a style of expression, or white space, or the color of the background.
I could ask artists to draw a seated woman with folded hands sitting before a landscape and to use a specific color palette, or a table with thirteen men seated before a feast, with perhaps a few other guides. It is unlikely the artists would produce anything like the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper.
The design of slashdot is also complex and nuanced. With a brief summary you may explain the superficial aspects of the site, but the essense of the site -- which has grown into millions of accounts -- is not so easily expressed or duplicated. Even minor changes can completely destroy that essense.
For far less money than the Cisco support contract, you could have just bought several spares of each model of Cisco device, and have had the replacement on-hand a quickly as you could walk over and grab it.
Perhaps you missed the first part of my post. Fortune 500 data center.
If you are talking about consumer devices and even common office server room equipment that is quite true. We had lots of commodity stuff lying around. We also kept a bit of less common stuff around, such as spare UPS racks; the $30,000 price tag is low enough cost that we could keep a few of them around when equipment shuffles.
Note that some critical equipment gets mighty expensive. You can find a good deal on low latency, high volume interconnect that can handle ten million concurrent connections for around $250K, but you'll probably want to pay around $350K for the better ones. It would be insane to just keep a few of EVERYTHING lying around, just in case. Far cheaper for the Cisco contract that will get us any replacement we need, quickly.
Coal is inflexible too. The money needs to go into more renewables and into energy storage. All the necessary technology exists, it just needs building, and there is only so much money to go around which is one reason why we don't want it spent on nuclear.
Meh, all that crap will take to long. In just a few short years our species will consume more energy than we can produce with all of those combined. So not only is the sum of them insufficient, the pollution involved in mining and harvesting the resources, construction of the facilities, all the infrastructure, and so on will destroy the planet just as part of the opportunity cost.
We need to cut our losses, start researching and building generational spaceships, and roll out the lottery to find the lucky few humans who will get off the rock and hopefully go find (and eventually destroy) another one.
I won't touch Cisco gear with a 10 ft pole, and this is exactly why.
On the other hand...
When working in a Fortune 500 company there were some mighty expensive premium contracts with Cisco. Among them was an agreement I learned about when we had an outage late in the afternoon that affected about 15 people. We have hardware that could have affected hundreds of people, but in this case the outage only affected a few.
Cisco found the closest duplicate replacement part in another state, chartered a flight to a nearby airport, had a taxi driver on standby when the plane arrived, and delivered it to our door within about four hours of reporting the fairly minor problem.
I understand the contract is in place because we had hardware that affects hundreds of thousands of people. The Cisco crew was adamant that the contract had a clause that required a six-hour turnaround on any of that class of hardware. If it had been a major device at a major data center those same four hours could have felt like an eternity, so for those people where an outage can cost thousands of dollars every second in lost productivity and sales I can certainly understand the need for the contract with the devil.
You could have kept your employer plan through COBRA. Why did you not do it?
Yes, for the low, low price of $2700 per month I could continue my insurance through COBRA.
The whole reason of going through the healthcare exchange was to find out about less costly alternatives. Like the $700 plan that the site recommended, and that I signed up for, and was guaranteed coverage for, and then was told the paperwork was lost due to government error, and to try again. And after the second attempt, to repeat the process.
So yes, I could have done that. And if the government's newfangled system worked properly I would have been just fine.
As I still have the paperwork I am planning on enforcing their guaranteed coverage rules. They told me it was guaranteed, I was using the government's system that also assured me it was guaranteed, and I am keeping all receipts and notes about who I talked to, when, and the results. They will be paying as was promised, I have some lawyer friends who have told me they would help there. But still, not everyone does, and that is entirely the point of this /. story headline.
Thanks to government incompetence in cases like mine the requirement that everyone get private insurance with government help has backfired, leaving me and my family technically uninsured for a month. Yay government!
> All this evidence, collected this way, is admissable because it could have been discovered
The ccops illegally tap your phone line and hear about a pot deal. What did not happen is that a a K9 officer COULD HAVE been taking the dog out for a walk when they just happened to walk by a car full of pot. That didn't happen, but it could have.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you are claiming that the cops can search the vehicle and it's not fruit of a poisonous tree because they could have stumbled upon it. They didn't, but they could have. Do you have a citation for that? In all of American jurisprudence has any appeals court held that it's okay to violate the Constitution because they could have not violated it? I know a certain "law professor" (who never taught law) who might believe that, but has the court ever ruled such?
And that is precisely the difficulty around parallel construction.
The government cannot withhold potentially exculpatory evidence. In the late 1960s, right after the SCOTUS decided the Brady case, prosecutors gave quite a lot of information to defendants. Over the years prosecutors and judges have taken progressively stricter interpretations to the point where they routinely withhold everything again, only handing over the minimum that they think might fall under Brady and often only if the defense uses very specifically worded discovery demands. If the prosecutors can argue that they didn't think it was material evidence, or argue that the discovery demand wasn't quite specific enough, they can get away with it. And since the defense doesn't know about the evidence (as it was withheld from them) they almost always get away with it.
In very recent time, perhaps the last 18 months or so, there has been a surge in claims of withheld exculpatory evidence, and judges are increasingly more sympathetic to defendants during discovery. There have been quite a few major cases where prosecutors realize that maybe some of the evidence might have been potentially exculpatory, but often their excuses are enough to keep judges from dismissing the case outright. Both behaviors are changing, and we have multiple cases going right now in my state that are currently on the fast track for the state supreme court where evidence was "accidentally" withheld (except some leaked information shows it was quite intentional as the defense 'would never know') but prosecutors and judges had a wink-and-a-nod when it was discovered to be "accidentally" withheld. (There is a very active public debate about this right now; since prosecutors are immune for these violations and they are kept employed based on their results rather than fairness, they have every incentive to break the law with impunity.)
Parallel construction is nearly impossible to detect, and if discovered is subject to the exclusionary rules. Depending on the nature of the construction and the interpretation of the judge, it could exclude no evidence, some evidence, or be enough to cause the case to be dismissed entirely. The problem is that when it happens you don't have any evidence that it happened. Prosecutors and officers might not even know it happened, since groups like the DEA use anonymous tips to police for the construction. Even though the entire case might be tainted enough for dismissal, it is possible nobody directly involved (even the police and prosecutors) know about the unlawfulness because it was laundered through anonymous reporting systems.
I'd love to see where you see that in the US Constitution, because no such specific language exists as far as I know. "Due process of law" is all that seems to be required, and in practice that means that discovery has to proceed in a normal manner and the prosecution may bring as much or as little evidence against you as they may require to convict you, no more or less. They must produce this evidence, and how they got it; any evidence they don't bring to court, they don't have to explain.
That's okay, not everybody went to law school.
Due Process, as currently enumerated:
1. An unbiased tribunal.
2. Notice of the proposed action and the grounds asserted for it.
3. Opportunity to present reasons why the proposed action should not be taken.
4. The right to present evidence, including the right to call witnesses.
5. The right to know opposing evidence.
6. The right to cross-examine adverse witnesses.
7. A decision based exclusively on the evidence presented.
8. Opportunity to be represented by counsel.
9. Requirement that the tribunal prepare a record of the evidence presented.
10. Requirement that the tribunal prepare written findings of fact and reasons for its decision.
Got that?
Next up, the SCOTUS clarified the requirements (and some consequences) in Brady V Maryland. Coupled with that is a body of rules such as Brady disclosure. In the past few decades judges have slowly gotten lax on Brady rules, but that has picked up sharply in the past year or two.