He says he doesn't support gay marriage, just unions.
Well, we both agree that he says supports civil unions while simultaneously saying that he supports an amendment that would prohibit the recognition of civil unions
I'll agree with you -- he's certainly not a flip flopper, because he hasn't change his mind with time. He's simply a liar.
No-one has presented any evidence that this was not a voluntary interview.
Regardless, I think you have it backwards. There are circumstances where you can be compelled to answer questions, as long as you're not incriminating yourself. In simple (and misleading) words, in America you can only be compelled to talk if you haven't committed a crime, in all cases. This has nothing to do with the Secret Service, though the Secret Service may have different procedures for compelling that testimony than other law enforcement organizations.
I suspect you either misunderstood what the Secret Service agent said, or he was lying to you.
this is one power that the Secret Service has that no other law enforcement agency in the US has, they can force someone who has commited no crime to talk to them.
This claim is extraordinary. Can you give any reference?
I am a computer program run by the NSA to search for threats against the United States on line. As part of my programmed duty, I am reporting the following live journal article....
There were no charges, either. Last time I checked, anyone who wants to do so is perfectly free to knock on your door and ask you any damned questions they want to ask. And, the last time I checked, you have the legal right to someone at the door to go fuck themselves if you don't want to answer their questions.
it states clearly that the Secret Service said that the page was reported to them by someone.
No. She claims that the agents who came to her house claimed that they recieved a report. So, they claimed that someone or something generated a report that eventually made its way to these agents for followup. I'm pretty sure we could have figured that out on our own, thanks.
She is guessing that one of her civilian readers reported her, but there is absolutely no evidence presented that this is or is not the case.
Being investigated for threats against another person's life does not violate due process. The FBI keeping a record of the people that have made threats against another person's life doesn't violate due process, either. Having an FBI file doesn't restrict any liberties.
The no-fly list is an entirely different beast. There are some serious problems with a secret no-fly list. But, I don't have any desire to the argument against the no-fly list as some sort of support for an ass-bag who threatens the President's life, so this is emphatically not the forum for discussing those problems.
No, the author claims that the Secret Service (or the FBI, I don't think the author knows the difference) claims that they "recieved a report."
The author has absolutely no idea how the Secret Service or the FBI came upon her journal, except that they claim that someone "recieved a report." She says that the agents "as much as told [her]" that it was reported by a concerned citizen, but they did emphatically not actually tell her any such a thing. She's just assuming that she knows what happened.
For all anyone knows, an FBI department recieved a report from the NSA, or the Justice Department, or another department of the FBI, or even from Santa Clause.
Regardless, a Live Journal isn't a private journal. It's a public journal, for broadcasting your public thoughts. It's never been a secret that public statements that can be construed as threats against someone's life are not looked on favorably. Public threats against the President of the United States are especially stupid.
I assume the secret service has a computer spidering the web and flagging "troublesome" content for further review. I doubt anyone reads your live journal to find out what color underwear you have on, or which pokemon character you are (except maybe your mom).
If we're going to add exceptions to the kernel, lets go all the way and add "call-with-current-continuation." Imagine how much cleaner the resulting code would be!
A riced out civic once passed me at about 80 mph down a narrow residential side street. The back end moved a lot when the driver threw the car back into his lane. To this day, I'm still suprised he kept that thing under control. The old trees and parked cars on the side of the road would have made his life momentarily very, very painful.
It's also worth remembering that back in the late 80's you could talk about "the internets" without being laughed out of the room. Al Gore really does bear some responsibility for making one of "the internets" into "The Internet" as we know it today.
You're right. This has nothing to do with DOS attacks.
The truth is, I don't know why they've chosen to shut off access outside the United States. I assume that they've taken advantage of choice given to them by Akamai, and the non-US edge servers are configured to not serve up the site to save some money. I doubt they've configured the their actual webserver to deny access to non-US server.
If they haven't blocked it at the router, and they webserver is configured to to accept the connection and serve up an "access denied" page, then no, they have not done this to prevent DOS attacks.
Actually, it is possible that their sys admin is incredibly incompetent, and thinks he's doing this to prevent DOS attacks.
I believe that Kerry is a "good person" in the same way that George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton are good people. They don't measure up to Jimmy Carter (or even Reagan), but I believe their faults come more from good convictions worn down by the years rather than malice. Kerry is a decent guy. He won't be a great President, but he'll get us by.
PHP is seriously one of the worst languages in wide use today.
I'd rank PHP about the same as old-style ASP. ASP certainly has some advantages over PHP, like ActiveX, Active Script, and (oddly enough for a Microsoft Product) API stability. And, the build process for PHP always made me seriously question the PHP developer's abilities.
But, I'll grant that open source and wide adoption does have advantages. For a site like yahoo with "smart coders" doing the difficult lifting in a real language while the designers tweak the layout with PHP, open source source has serious advantages. Bolting enough extra stuff onto the language to make it useful would be difficult if PHP was closed source.
But seriously, PostNuke and PHP live do what they need to do, and they're no shittier than many shitty closed source programs are. And, believe me, there are a lot of very shitty closed source programs out there (and, I don't mean Windows). Unlike their open source counterparts, most shitty closed source programs will never be fixed, and when support is dropped someone gets screwed. At least with open source, you have the option of supporting it yourself when the original developers lose interest (monetary or otherwise).
At one point I won a door prize of my pick between several "writing secure code" books by MS Press.
CIS people are managers who generally learn everything they know about computers from Microsoft-sponsored developer meetings. It's an incestuous little relationship, much like the one between doctors and drug companies. It's not healthy for anyone but Microsoft, believe me.
Regardless, you should have taken one of the "writing secure code" books. Microsoft does employ some very smart people, and the Microsoft Press books are often reasonably good. As a publisher, I personally rank them on about the same level as O'Reilly or Prentice Hall/Sun Microsystems, though not as good as Addison Wesley.
Mr. Matzan, I question why the editors would accept a submission by you that was nothing but copy-and-pasting the first paragraph out of your article on News Forge into the Slashdot submission box.
Regardless, I object to the assertion you've made above. No respected person, zealot or otherwise, has ever said that "open source programs are likely to contain backdoors." The article you cite for this assertion is Steve Lipner of Microsoft making some observations about the difficulty of security, and and contrasting the security process behind open and closed source software. His claims may be questionable, but they are serious and they do deserve a meaningful response. Dismissing those claims by building snarky little strawman through mischaracterization is not the response they deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm damn near 30 years old (I'm 29). But if anything I've become MORE liberal in the past 6 or 7 years than the other way around.
That's odd. It was the same with Churchill.
He says he doesn't support gay marriage, just unions.
Well, we both agree that he says supports civil unions while simultaneously saying that he supports an amendment that would prohibit the recognition of civil unions
I'll agree with you -- he's certainly not a flip flopper, because he hasn't change his mind with time. He's simply a liar.
He's just farming for karma.
So is everyone else on slashdot.
I'm sorry, I can't find an article or any factual information to accompany this Slashdot story.
No-one has presented any evidence that this was not a voluntary interview.
Regardless, I think you have it backwards. There are circumstances where you can be compelled to answer questions, as long as you're not incriminating yourself. In simple (and misleading) words, in America you can only be compelled to talk if you haven't committed a crime, in all cases. This has nothing to do with the Secret Service, though the Secret Service may have different procedures for compelling that testimony than other law enforcement organizations.
I suspect you either misunderstood what the Secret Service agent said, or he was lying to you.
this is one power that the Secret Service has that no other law enforcement agency in the US has, they can force someone who has commited no crime to talk to them.
This claim is extraordinary. Can you give any reference?
The coffee at 7-11 is better than the coffee where you work?
You need a new job.
It is that this was reported by a civilian. It also possible that this was reported by a law enforcement agent or government contractor.
No evidence has been presented either way. We simply know that they were acting on a report.
More like,
Dear Secret Service:
I am a computer program run by the NSA to search for threats against the United States on line. As part of my programmed duty, I am reporting the following live journal article....
There was no threat.
There were no charges, either. Last time I checked, anyone who wants to do so is perfectly free to knock on your door and ask you any damned questions they want to ask. And, the last time I checked, you have the legal right to someone at the door to go fuck themselves if you don't want to answer their questions.
it states clearly that the Secret Service said that the page was reported to them by someone.
No. She claims that the agents who came to her house claimed that they recieved a report. So, they claimed that someone or something generated a report that eventually made its way to these agents for followup. I'm pretty sure we could have figured that out on our own, thanks.
She is guessing that one of her civilian readers reported her, but there is absolutely no evidence presented that this is or is not the case.
Being investigated for threats against another person's life does not violate due process. The FBI keeping a record of the people that have made threats against another person's life doesn't violate due process, either. Having an FBI file doesn't restrict any liberties.
The no-fly list is an entirely different beast. There are some serious problems with a secret no-fly list. But, I don't have any desire to the argument against the no-fly list as some sort of support for an ass-bag who threatens the President's life, so this is emphatically not the forum for discussing those problems.
No, the author claims that the Secret Service (or the FBI, I don't think the author knows the difference) claims that they "recieved a report."
The author has absolutely no idea how the Secret Service or the FBI came upon her journal, except that they claim that someone "recieved a report." She says that the agents "as much as told [her]" that it was reported by a concerned citizen, but they did emphatically not actually tell her any such a thing. She's just assuming that she knows what happened.
For all anyone knows, an FBI department recieved a report from the NSA, or the Justice Department, or another department of the FBI, or even from Santa Clause.
Regardless, a Live Journal isn't a private journal. It's a public journal, for broadcasting your public thoughts. It's never been a secret that public statements that can be construed as threats against someone's life are not looked on favorably. Public threats against the President of the United States are especially stupid.
I assume the secret service has a computer spidering the web and flagging "troublesome" content for further review. I doubt anyone reads your live journal to find out what color underwear you have on, or which pokemon character you are (except maybe your mom).
If we're going to add exceptions to the kernel, lets go all the way and add "call-with-current-continuation." Imagine how much cleaner the resulting code would be!
A riced out civic once passed me at about 80 mph down a narrow residential side street. The back end moved a lot when the driver threw the car back into his lane. To this day, I'm still suprised he kept that thing under control. The old trees and parked cars on the side of the road would have made his life momentarily very, very painful.
It's also worth remembering that back in the late 80's you could talk about "the internets" without being laughed out of the room. Al Gore really does bear some responsibility for making one of "the internets" into "The Internet" as we know it today.
You're right. This has nothing to do with DOS attacks.
The truth is, I don't know why they've chosen to shut off access outside the United States. I assume that they've taken advantage of choice given to them by Akamai, and the non-US edge servers are configured to not serve up the site to save some money. I doubt they've configured the their actual webserver to deny access to non-US server.
If they haven't blocked it at the router, and they webserver is configured to to accept the connection and serve up an "access denied" page, then no, they have not done this to prevent DOS attacks.
Actually, it is possible that their sys admin is incredibly incompetent, and thinks he's doing this to prevent DOS attacks.
It's 2004, and we're not holding him to the promises he made in 2000, in 2001, or in 2003. What the hell makes you think anything will change in 2005?
I believe that Kerry is a "good person" in the same way that George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton are good people. They don't measure up to Jimmy Carter (or even Reagan), but I believe their faults come more from good convictions worn down by the years rather than malice. Kerry is a decent guy. He won't be a great President, but he'll get us by.
Our current President, George W. Bush, shares company with men like Richard Nixon. He is not a good man. I honestly doubt our country will survive another four years of him.
I'm rooting for Bush because I'm looking forward to the Civil War.
PHP is seriously one of the worst languages in wide use today.
I'd rank PHP about the same as old-style ASP. ASP certainly has some advantages over PHP, like ActiveX, Active Script, and (oddly enough for a Microsoft Product) API stability. And, the build process for PHP always made me seriously question the PHP developer's abilities.
But, I'll grant that open source and wide adoption does have advantages. For a site like yahoo with "smart coders" doing the difficult lifting in a real language while the designers tweak the layout with PHP, open source source has serious advantages. Bolting enough extra stuff onto the language to make it useful would be difficult if PHP was closed source.
But seriously, PostNuke and PHP live do what they need to do, and they're no shittier than many shitty closed source programs are. And, believe me, there are a lot of very shitty closed source programs out there (and, I don't mean Windows). Unlike their open source counterparts, most shitty closed source programs will never be fixed, and when support is dropped someone gets screwed. At least with open source, you have the option of supporting it yourself when the original developers lose interest (monetary or otherwise).
At one point I won a door prize of my pick between several "writing secure code" books by MS Press.
CIS people are managers who generally learn everything they know about computers from Microsoft-sponsored developer meetings. It's an incestuous little relationship, much like the one between doctors and drug companies. It's not healthy for anyone but Microsoft, believe me.
Regardless, you should have taken one of the "writing secure code" books. Microsoft does employ some very smart people, and the Microsoft Press books are often reasonably good. As a publisher, I personally rank them on about the same level as O'Reilly or Prentice Hall/Sun Microsystems, though not as good as Addison Wesley.
Proprietary software zealots are always saying that open source programs are likely to contain backdoors, but is this situation truly what they mean when they say that?
Mr. Matzan, I question why the editors would accept a submission by you that was nothing but copy-and-pasting the first paragraph out of your article on News Forge into the Slashdot submission box.
Regardless, I object to the assertion you've made above. No respected person, zealot or otherwise, has ever said that "open source programs are likely to contain backdoors." The article you cite for this assertion is Steve Lipner of Microsoft making some observations about the difficulty of security, and and contrasting the security process behind open and closed source software. His claims may be questionable, but they are serious and they do deserve a meaningful response. Dismissing those claims by building snarky little strawman through mischaracterization is not the response they deserve.