I'm not liking the way WoW plays with this interface. I'd think, at a minimum that you'd want to use controller-plus-body. There's just too damn many buttons.
Sports titles would be good. Are there any good ones for PC?
Or perhaps Kinect-plus-WiiZapper for some awesome FPS action?
WoW sucks as an example, but surely we can do better...
Well, aside from 'getting off your lawn', can you cite any way that this would be worse than going outside? The criteria you've left here is pretty weak:
A) burning more calories - This depends on the length and availability of play, doesn't it? Which of the two options would be susceptible to weather? Scheduling conflicts?
B) using more muscle groups - Um, no. Not necessarily. The wireframe is full-skeletal. You could make walking tied to leg movements, for example. You could tie 'attack' to 'jumping' and really work the little suckers to death...
C) breathing fresh air - Indoor air can easily be preferable, especially in an urban setting. And where it is not, windows can easily be opened.
D) learn to speak to and relate to other human beings - Ventrillo. Been there, done that.
E) learn essential social skills like co-operation and mutual goal seeking - Indoor games are usually better at this because they're more structured.
Now for some points of my own:
1) Aren't parents presently required to observe their children at all times when they're outside, due to 'stranger danger'? Would not indoor exercise solutions mean a net gain for those kids?
2) Are indoor and outdoor exercise mutually exclusive? And if they're not, wouldn't replacing exercise-less video gaming with this concept be a net gain as well?
3) Can you think of any ways in which this idea is actually worse than sedentary video gaming?
And here is where this argument falls completely flat. Infertile couples are permitted to marry, and that has been the case for centuries -- elderly couples could marry long before birth control. The legal institution of civil marriage has nothing to do with bearing children.
I don't think you're being intellectually honest here. It can exist without children, and I touched on that above, but to state that it has 'nothing to do with' children is patently false.
Note, please, that sexual activity is REQUIRED for legal marriage to exist. Why else would this be the case??
I'm not advocating sexist gender roles being 'enforced', but they absolutely need to be part of a child's social education, because they're a key part of what is considered 'normal'.
I think, in terms of law, "spouse is property" isn't quite as accurate as "spouse is self". But yes, otherwise this is a really good point. It should be noted, in support of this view of the law, that it wasn't until only very recently that it was possible, legally, to rape your spouse. The concept of these being individual people is somewhat new, I think.
As to the gay marriage issue, in all due respect to your atheist religion, I think pinning everything on God is cheap logic. As we saw with the Prop 8 trial, there's a fairly solid line of logic behind the bans as well. The reasoning goes like this:
A) We need children, or we're going to die out. Further we'd like these children to be raised in two-parent homes wherever possible.
B) To encourage this behavior, we're going to incentivize marriage at the government-subsidy level, the employee benefit level, and others.
C) Because gay couples cannot directly produce children raised in two-parent households, they're not entitled to the incentives.
I do realize that I'm simplifying. Gay couples can, indeed, successfully raise children from other couplings. And being more than one of them in the household, the technical standard of 'more than one parent' has been met. There should, however, be some extra credit provided for having a parent present from each gender, as their individual experiences can be instrumental to raising a well-adjusted child. Imagine a child raised without contact with any women, for example, who does not understand mood swings due to biological timing. Further imagine a hetero child who cannot relate to the western concept of being 'tough'. It gets messy.
Now, as for the caveats, yes there exist single parent households. Yet those don't receive the benefits of marriage, by definition. Also there exist childless homes, but I assume that the legal situation was all well established before the widespread use of birth control, so it is entirely possible that children were assumed to be a 'risk' worthy of the benefits.
And, divorce happens and causes more harm than the benefits provide. But to be fair, I think this needs to be changed. Parents who divorce are getting benefits without providing child-rearing homes in return...
All that said, the ban isn't necessarily the right answer. There exist many:
A) Remove all benefits. It isn't working, and we seem to have ample supplies of children, so why continue to subsidize it?
B) Incentivize the children without respect to marriage. This risks 'puppy mills', but is legally more fair than the current situation.
C) Increase incentives for model child-rearing environments.
There are a lot more ways to address the disparity.
Anyway, while I do concede that Judeao-Christian cultures codify these benefits, you should also concede that other cultures do as well. Blaming it all on God is just a cop-out.
Also, to preempt the ad hominem, I'd like to state for the record that my stance is similar to that of the Rent is Too Damn High Party. I do not think that the government has any role whatsoever in this situation, and in that light support the right of anyone to participate in any cultural/religious ceremony they so wish.
Ethanol is the worst thing you can put in a lawn mower, boat, or other motor that isn't run every day.
No, ethanol is a bad thing to use as a fuel in an engine that is not designed to use it. Engines that are designed to use alcohol run good with it though.
Falcon
To be fair, this may be correct as to terms of damage but not towards a general performance angle. I have a van that's designed to take ethanol, all the way up to E85. I recently drove that van about 4000 miles over the course of a single week, using a mix of gas and gas plus 10-20% ethanol. Every time corn went in the tank, the miles per gallon plummeted. Bear in mind that we were actually keeping track of the dollars spent as well as the miles traveled before refueling. Doing the math on the way home, we discovered that even dollars per mile were way, way up on ethanol gas. And again, the vehicle is designed to take it. It worked just fine to use it, but would have been stupid to do so. And that's WITH A TAX SUBSIDY that wasn't included at the pump. Imagine paying full price!
I used to love ethanol and went out of my way to find a station with a blend. It's just that nobody ever told me that I was wasting my money...
That is what they said about the junk fax laws, if you allow people to sue it will create junk fax trolls. I have not seen that, but instead I saw junk faxes become almost extinct.
Right, and I'm sure this had NOTHING to do with the rise of email spam? It was all the 'junk fax laws'? Correlation, my friend.
I don't think anybody who matters is getting hurt here...Only bad guys can be hurt by his scam.
Well, bad guys and the customers of those companies that advertise via spam. I'm not advocating that they keep on spamming, but minor monetary damages are likely only to drive up prices, rather than influence actual behavior.
Not that he's doing the wrong thing at all, but he is indeed hurting the people who would otherwise be taking advantage of cheaper prices at the expense of a million spammy inboxes. It's a trade-off.
It's morally wrong because he's being no greater than your average RIAA shill. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but he's not suing these companies to make them stop, he's suing them to get them to settle (so, among other things, a judge can't order them to stop).
I tend to agree. I'm not opposed to seeing this kind of suit - after all, the laws were designed to encourage them. But I do think that if his efforts had a meaningful impact then we might be seeing less spam by now. He started this EIGHT YEARS AGO, and other than his income, I'm not seeing what good he's actually done.
In short, 'go for it' = 'yes' while 'hero' = 'no'.
I think the issue of spousal privilege might be pertinent here. She can't technically keep secrets from him - he's assumed, legally, to know them all. Unless it only works this way in one direction (information out to the court) and not within the marriage, I think this fact could acquit him.
If my wife gets an important letter she's waiting for, while she's at work, I phone her to ask for permission to open it and read it to her. It's one of the cornerstones of marriage that you respect the privacy of your partner, even if you're a jealous asshole.
Wait, wait, wait. The wife in this story is cheating on her third husband with her ex-second, who by the way has a criminal record for abusing her. The third goes into her email and provides it to the first husband, the father of their son, so that he might intervene and prevent any contact between his son and the second.
And the third is the asshole?
Really??
It seems to me that the Mrs has very poor judgement, and her privacy has less value than making sure her son stays safe. Sometimes individuals need to violate the law in order to do the right thing. This appears to be one of those times.
Further, he's not 'jealous'. That appears to be his WIFE that we're talking about. Everyone that she sleeps with is also sleeping with him, in terms of VD, and she genuinely has no right to keep that sort of secret until after they're separated. Vis-a-vis him cheating on her.
I'm just out-and-out stunned that you'd defend her by blaming number three. Do husbands really have NO rights any more? Are they genuinely just boyfriends with joint bank accounts? Marriage means NOTHING additional?
Should a drug mule go unpunished because he didn't KNOW he was carrying drugs?
Yep.
Should an accomplice in a murder go unpunished because he didn't KNOW that his partner would kill someone.
Yep.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
Sure I do. You're getting at 'vengeance' - same as the CIA.
Wikileaks doesn't have to KNOW what they were receiving to be guilty of collusion. Does it really matter though?
Ergo the 'vengeance'. It doesn't really matter if any crimes were committed, they must be made to pay. I get it, I really do.
It's likely that there wont be any direct evidence linking Assange and Wikileaks to Manning, just circumstantial evidence and testimony. It's very unlikely he'll even face extradition to the US.
I suppose time will tell. They put that Canadian kid in Gitmo for, what, seven years because they thought someone threw a grenade from his general direction.
I think a lot of people "understand the protocol" with passwords... They just don't want to follow it.
Partly, but also I think a lot of people just don't care. This is the third, fourth, or even fifth time 'OMG GAWKER" has appeared on slashdot, so I'm sure you can find lots of discussion there, but suffice to say that most of these online accounts just aren't that important. Kind of like how I don't lock the doors on my Taurus.
What we don't have is people focused on finding, removing, and spouting a product yet like Norton/McAffee/AVG/whatever.
Go wash your mouth out with soap, right now!
Can you imagine how god-awful slow people's phones will become after installing Norton Mobile 2011? And I bet the 'uninstall' process involves reflashing the device, too.
Please no, for the love of all smartphones everywhere, please DO NOT speak this 'solution' out loud where others might hear it. If you speak it's name you give it power, after all...
This. Anytime you spot the formula "Will 'x' be the Year of 'y'" - particularly on slashdot - the answer is ALWAYS no. I think it has to do with that particular phrasing. Nobody ever seems to ask 'Will 2011 be the Year of 365 days' or something similar. It's always outlandish...
Yes I understand that our government has to be transparent. There are however, methods to get information in the properway. Using the law, one can subpena the governemet, private industry, and individuals. Using legal ways information can be forced to be released.
Except that this isn't actually true because there's no one to enforce these rules and laws. There's zero oversight. Consider the cases of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. In the former case they attempted to make a young woman a war hero against her will. They fabricated a 'Rambo from West Virginia' story out of whole cloth, and tried to force her to go along with it. In the latter case they assassinated a dissenter before his scheduled visit with Noam Chomsky, falsified the coroner's report, burned his uniform and his diary, then lied to the family. In these two cases we had people on the inside telling us the truth and STILL the military lied about it. What of the myriad other situations where there's nobody brave enough to tell the truth?
Maybe Wikileaks is not the answer, but someone needs to do something, so at least in this way I support them. Stop the lies, end the secrets. Let's move together into a new era of being decent human beings.
If someone mails classified documents to a newspaper, and the newspaper wasn't expecting them, the newspaper isn't guilty of anything. If someone calls the newspaper and and paper provides their address to send them classified documents, is the newspaper breaking a law? I don't know the laws involved, but I doubt it.
The question would be, does the newspaper know that it's getting classified documents?
Without seeing them, how would Wikileaks have known? This is the INTERNET after all. Not everything you see in an online chat is reality.
Wait,did you send money to Nigeria? Did you give 'sexylady1954' your home address? Please for the love of GOD tell me you didn't agree to reship packages for that Prince in Malaysia?!?!
Think for a second on what Mr. Mannings goal was... informing the public. Now think of how easily it would be for a foreign security agency or even a terrorist sympathizer to achieve the same level of clearance. Their goals would be far less noble, and far less public. They'd most likely never get caught. Bradley Manning has probably done more to help secure the US Militarys network than any idiot at the CIA that doesn't even know what the acronym WTF stands for.
Understand, though, that with a minimum of the Apache attack, someone on the inside clearly WANTED those documents to be leaked. They were in a folder marked 'please leak me', or something functionally similar, when Manning went snooping for them. We probably have a case of individuals alarmed by what they're seeing, motivated enough to make things easy to steal, but not yet motivated enough to face prison time over it.
The military and to a larger extent the government are suffering from systemic corruption and there are people on the inside who hate it. They, far more than Manning, made this situation possible.
I don't think it is so much that we 'slashtards', as you so lovingly refer to such a wide group of people whom you'll probably never even meet, simply disagree. Rather, I think it is that you're without a point. You say:
Assange provided Manning with locations and instructions on how to submit the documents...
This is only a crime if using Wikileaks is a crime. As far as I know, it is not. Until they had the documents, there was no legal reason to believe that they were in fact classified. Manning could have been deceiving them, etc. Wikileaks is designed to receive files, so aiding someone in that task is within the scope of helping someone use their website. This is a thought crime, at best.
...to Wikileaks instead of submitting them like everyone else and waiting for Wikileaks to sift through the submissions, and the timeline from when Manning had the documents to when Wikileaks released them supports this claim.
And giving him special treatment is what sort of crime, exactly?
Maybe, maybe, maybe if Assange and Wikileaks were under the jurisdiction of American law then MAYBE you'd have a nitpicky point. As they're not, you don't. There's no international consensus that helping someone use a website and giving someone priority status are crimes. These points alone are no more or less significant than the entire overall process of receiving the documents and publishing them.
My dream society is a loose federation of very small governments, cooperating AND competing to provide services.
I'd actually go in for that. Indeed, this is how I see the original design of the States.
But I also believe in social safety nets. It's either social safety nets, or lots of cops.
Here too we agree, and as well that nets are better than more cops. I've often said that the answer to the healthcare debate is to offer government-run/taxpayer-funded hospitals as an alternative, or even as the only solution. The government is good at providing certain things, among them being things that everyone ought to have without limit. Or with only sane limits, anyway.
So anyway, that's what I am, a lefty anarchist. I want small local government, where people can participate in the running of their society, and really feel like they "own" their society and government. But I also want real social safety nets, because the alternative is worse. And, because everyone benefits from the existence of a social safety net, everyone should help pay. And if they don't help pay, they should not be allowed to do business with the people who DO contribute. I'm all for withdrawal of reward as a punishment for non compliance, rather than the use of force.
That all sounds entirely, perfectly reasonable to me as well.
.....in a public place." - SCOTUS. It applies to the cops as well. They have no reason to believe they should be unrecordable when they are out on the road or on the sidewalk. Besides: They record us all the time, with cameras installed in their cars and taping during confessions.
I had this thought as well. The judge said, from the bench, that his privacy had been violated. How can this possibly be the case? He's in public as a function of his duties. Everything is on the record, by law, so wherein lies the privacy??
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not liking the way WoW plays with this interface. I'd think, at a minimum that you'd want to use controller-plus-body. There's just too damn many buttons.
Sports titles would be good. Are there any good ones for PC?
Or perhaps Kinect-plus-WiiZapper for some awesome FPS action?
WoW sucks as an example, but surely we can do better...
Well, aside from 'getting off your lawn', can you cite any way that this would be worse than going outside? The criteria you've left here is pretty weak:
A) burning more calories - This depends on the length and availability of play, doesn't it? Which of the two options would be susceptible to weather? Scheduling conflicts?
B) using more muscle groups - Um, no. Not necessarily. The wireframe is full-skeletal. You could make walking tied to leg movements, for example. You could tie 'attack' to 'jumping' and really work the little suckers to death...
C) breathing fresh air - Indoor air can easily be preferable, especially in an urban setting. And where it is not, windows can easily be opened.
D) learn to speak to and relate to other human beings - Ventrillo. Been there, done that.
E) learn essential social skills like co-operation and mutual goal seeking - Indoor games are usually better at this because they're more structured.
Now for some points of my own:
1) Aren't parents presently required to observe their children at all times when they're outside, due to 'stranger danger'? Would not indoor exercise solutions mean a net gain for those kids?
2) Are indoor and outdoor exercise mutually exclusive? And if they're not, wouldn't replacing exercise-less video gaming with this concept be a net gain as well?
3) Can you think of any ways in which this idea is actually worse than sedentary video gaming?
And here is where this argument falls completely flat. Infertile couples are permitted to marry, and that has been the case for centuries -- elderly couples could marry long before birth control. The legal institution of civil marriage has nothing to do with bearing children.
I don't think you're being intellectually honest here. It can exist without children, and I touched on that above, but to state that it has 'nothing to do with' children is patently false.
Note, please, that sexual activity is REQUIRED for legal marriage to exist. Why else would this be the case??
You're going for a point, but you aren't quite making it there.
A) Ethanol is worse.
B) Ethanol is more expensive.
C) Ethanol means I pay higher taxes.
Those are my points. What are yours, again?
I'm not advocating sexist gender roles being 'enforced', but they absolutely need to be part of a child's social education, because they're a key part of what is considered 'normal'.
I think, in terms of law, "spouse is property" isn't quite as accurate as "spouse is self". But yes, otherwise this is a really good point. It should be noted, in support of this view of the law, that it wasn't until only very recently that it was possible, legally, to rape your spouse. The concept of these being individual people is somewhat new, I think.
As to the gay marriage issue, in all due respect to your atheist religion, I think pinning everything on God is cheap logic. As we saw with the Prop 8 trial, there's a fairly solid line of logic behind the bans as well. The reasoning goes like this:
A) We need children, or we're going to die out. Further we'd like these children to be raised in two-parent homes wherever possible.
B) To encourage this behavior, we're going to incentivize marriage at the government-subsidy level, the employee benefit level, and others.
C) Because gay couples cannot directly produce children raised in two-parent households, they're not entitled to the incentives.
I do realize that I'm simplifying. Gay couples can, indeed, successfully raise children from other couplings. And being more than one of them in the household, the technical standard of 'more than one parent' has been met. There should, however, be some extra credit provided for having a parent present from each gender, as their individual experiences can be instrumental to raising a well-adjusted child. Imagine a child raised without contact with any women, for example, who does not understand mood swings due to biological timing. Further imagine a hetero child who cannot relate to the western concept of being 'tough'. It gets messy.
Now, as for the caveats, yes there exist single parent households. Yet those don't receive the benefits of marriage, by definition. Also there exist childless homes, but I assume that the legal situation was all well established before the widespread use of birth control, so it is entirely possible that children were assumed to be a 'risk' worthy of the benefits.
And, divorce happens and causes more harm than the benefits provide. But to be fair, I think this needs to be changed. Parents who divorce are getting benefits without providing child-rearing homes in return...
All that said, the ban isn't necessarily the right answer. There exist many:
A) Remove all benefits. It isn't working, and we seem to have ample supplies of children, so why continue to subsidize it?
B) Incentivize the children without respect to marriage. This risks 'puppy mills', but is legally more fair than the current situation.
C) Increase incentives for model child-rearing environments.
There are a lot more ways to address the disparity.
Anyway, while I do concede that Judeao-Christian cultures codify these benefits, you should also concede that other cultures do as well. Blaming it all on God is just a cop-out.
Also, to preempt the ad hominem, I'd like to state for the record that my stance is similar to that of the Rent is Too Damn High Party. I do not think that the government has any role whatsoever in this situation, and in that light support the right of anyone to participate in any cultural/religious ceremony they so wish.
Of course that extends to wives, too.
Ethanol is the worst thing you can put in a lawn mower, boat, or other motor that isn't run every day.
No, ethanol is a bad thing to use as a fuel in an engine that is not designed to use it. Engines that are designed to use alcohol run good with it though.
Falcon
To be fair, this may be correct as to terms of damage but not towards a general performance angle. I have a van that's designed to take ethanol, all the way up to E85. I recently drove that van about 4000 miles over the course of a single week, using a mix of gas and gas plus 10-20% ethanol. Every time corn went in the tank, the miles per gallon plummeted. Bear in mind that we were actually keeping track of the dollars spent as well as the miles traveled before refueling. Doing the math on the way home, we discovered that even dollars per mile were way, way up on ethanol gas. And again, the vehicle is designed to take it. It worked just fine to use it, but would have been stupid to do so. And that's WITH A TAX SUBSIDY that wasn't included at the pump. Imagine paying full price!
I used to love ethanol and went out of my way to find a station with a blend. It's just that nobody ever told me that I was wasting my money...
That is what they said about the junk fax laws, if you allow people to sue it will create junk fax trolls. I have not seen that, but instead I saw junk faxes become almost extinct.
Right, and I'm sure this had NOTHING to do with the rise of email spam? It was all the 'junk fax laws'? Correlation, my friend.
I don't think anybody who matters is getting hurt here...Only bad guys can be hurt by his scam.
Well, bad guys and the customers of those companies that advertise via spam. I'm not advocating that they keep on spamming, but minor monetary damages are likely only to drive up prices, rather than influence actual behavior.
Not that he's doing the wrong thing at all, but he is indeed hurting the people who would otherwise be taking advantage of cheaper prices at the expense of a million spammy inboxes. It's a trade-off.
It's morally wrong because he's being no greater than your average RIAA shill. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but he's not suing these companies to make them stop, he's suing them to get them to settle (so, among other things, a judge can't order them to stop).
I tend to agree. I'm not opposed to seeing this kind of suit - after all, the laws were designed to encourage them. But I do think that if his efforts had a meaningful impact then we might be seeing less spam by now. He started this EIGHT YEARS AGO, and other than his income, I'm not seeing what good he's actually done.
In short, 'go for it' = 'yes' while 'hero' = 'no'.
I think the issue of spousal privilege might be pertinent here. She can't technically keep secrets from him - he's assumed, legally, to know them all. Unless it only works this way in one direction (information out to the court) and not within the marriage, I think this fact could acquit him.
If my wife gets an important letter she's waiting for, while she's at work, I phone her to ask for permission to open it and read it to her.
It's one of the cornerstones of marriage that you respect the privacy of your partner, even if you're a jealous asshole.
Wait, wait, wait. The wife in this story is cheating on her third husband with her ex-second, who by the way has a criminal record for abusing her. The third goes into her email and provides it to the first husband, the father of their son, so that he might intervene and prevent any contact between his son and the second.
And the third is the asshole?
Really??
It seems to me that the Mrs has very poor judgement, and her privacy has less value than making sure her son stays safe. Sometimes individuals need to violate the law in order to do the right thing. This appears to be one of those times.
Further, he's not 'jealous'. That appears to be his WIFE that we're talking about. Everyone that she sleeps with is also sleeping with him, in terms of VD, and she genuinely has no right to keep that sort of secret until after they're separated. Vis-a-vis him cheating on her.
I'm just out-and-out stunned that you'd defend her by blaming number three. Do husbands really have NO rights any more? Are they genuinely just boyfriends with joint bank accounts? Marriage means NOTHING additional?
Should a drug mule go unpunished because he didn't KNOW he was carrying drugs?
Yep.
Should an accomplice in a murder go unpunished because he didn't KNOW that his partner would kill someone.
Yep.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
Sure I do. You're getting at 'vengeance' - same as the CIA.
Wikileaks doesn't have to KNOW what they were receiving to be guilty of collusion. Does it really matter though?
Ergo the 'vengeance'. It doesn't really matter if any crimes were committed, they must be made to pay. I get it, I really do.
It's likely that there wont be any direct evidence linking Assange and Wikileaks to Manning, just circumstantial evidence and testimony. It's very unlikely he'll even face extradition to the US.
I suppose time will tell. They put that Canadian kid in Gitmo for, what, seven years because they thought someone threw a grenade from his general direction.
I think a lot of people "understand the protocol" with passwords... They just don't want to follow it.
Partly, but also I think a lot of people just don't care. This is the third, fourth, or even fifth time 'OMG GAWKER" has appeared on slashdot, so I'm sure you can find lots of discussion there, but suffice to say that most of these online accounts just aren't that important. Kind of like how I don't lock the doors on my Taurus.
What we don't have is people focused on finding, removing, and spouting a product yet like Norton/McAffee/AVG/whatever.
Go wash your mouth out with soap, right now!
Can you imagine how god-awful slow people's phones will become after installing Norton Mobile 2011? And I bet the 'uninstall' process involves reflashing the device, too.
Please no, for the love of all smartphones everywhere, please DO NOT speak this 'solution' out loud where others might hear it. If you speak it's name you give it power, after all...
No, it won't.
This. Anytime you spot the formula "Will 'x' be the Year of 'y'" - particularly on slashdot - the answer is ALWAYS no. I think it has to do with that particular phrasing. Nobody ever seems to ask 'Will 2011 be the Year of 365 days' or something similar. It's always outlandish...
Yes I understand that our government has to be transparent. There are however, methods to get information in the properway. Using the law, one can subpena the governemet, private industry, and individuals. Using legal ways information can be forced to be released.
Except that this isn't actually true because there's no one to enforce these rules and laws. There's zero oversight. Consider the cases of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. In the former case they attempted to make a young woman a war hero against her will. They fabricated a 'Rambo from West Virginia' story out of whole cloth, and tried to force her to go along with it. In the latter case they assassinated a dissenter before his scheduled visit with Noam Chomsky, falsified the coroner's report, burned his uniform and his diary, then lied to the family. In these two cases we had people on the inside telling us the truth and STILL the military lied about it. What of the myriad other situations where there's nobody brave enough to tell the truth?
Maybe Wikileaks is not the answer, but someone needs to do something, so at least in this way I support them. Stop the lies, end the secrets. Let's move together into a new era of being decent human beings.
If someone mails classified documents to a newspaper, and the newspaper wasn't expecting them, the newspaper isn't guilty of anything. If someone calls the newspaper and and paper provides their address to send them classified documents, is the newspaper breaking a law? I don't know the laws involved, but I doubt it.
The question would be, does the newspaper know that it's getting classified documents?
Without seeing them, how would Wikileaks have known? This is the INTERNET after all. Not everything you see in an online chat is reality.
Wait ,did you send money to Nigeria? Did you give 'sexylady1954' your home address? Please for the love of GOD tell me you didn't agree to reship packages for that Prince in Malaysia?!?!
Think for a second on what Mr. Mannings goal was... informing the public. Now think of how easily it would be for a foreign security agency or even a terrorist sympathizer to achieve the same level of clearance. Their goals would be far less noble, and far less public. They'd most likely never get caught. Bradley Manning has probably done more to help secure the US Militarys network than any idiot at the CIA that doesn't even know what the acronym WTF stands for.
Understand, though, that with a minimum of the Apache attack, someone on the inside clearly WANTED those documents to be leaked. They were in a folder marked 'please leak me', or something functionally similar, when Manning went snooping for them. We probably have a case of individuals alarmed by what they're seeing, motivated enough to make things easy to steal, but not yet motivated enough to face prison time over it.
The military and to a larger extent the government are suffering from systemic corruption and there are people on the inside who hate it. They, far more than Manning, made this situation possible.
I don't think it is so much that we 'slashtards', as you so lovingly refer to such a wide group of people whom you'll probably never even meet, simply disagree. Rather, I think it is that you're without a point. You say:
Assange provided Manning with locations and instructions on how to submit the documents...
This is only a crime if using Wikileaks is a crime. As far as I know, it is not. Until they had the documents, there was no legal reason to believe that they were in fact classified. Manning could have been deceiving them, etc. Wikileaks is designed to receive files, so aiding someone in that task is within the scope of helping someone use their website. This is a thought crime, at best.
...to Wikileaks instead of submitting them like everyone else and waiting for Wikileaks to sift through the submissions, and the timeline from when Manning had the documents to when Wikileaks released them supports this claim.
And giving him special treatment is what sort of crime, exactly?
Maybe, maybe, maybe if Assange and Wikileaks were under the jurisdiction of American law then MAYBE you'd have a nitpicky point. As they're not, you don't. There's no international consensus that helping someone use a website and giving someone priority status are crimes. These points alone are no more or less significant than the entire overall process of receiving the documents and publishing them.
Molehill, meet mirror. Mountain is over there.
My dream society is a loose federation of very small governments, cooperating AND competing to provide services.
I'd actually go in for that. Indeed, this is how I see the original design of the States.
But I also believe in social safety nets. It's either social safety nets, or lots of cops.
Here too we agree, and as well that nets are better than more cops. I've often said that the answer to the healthcare debate is to offer government-run/taxpayer-funded hospitals as an alternative, or even as the only solution. The government is good at providing certain things, among them being things that everyone ought to have without limit. Or with only sane limits, anyway.
So anyway, that's what I am, a lefty anarchist. I want small local government, where people can participate in the running of their society, and really feel like they "own" their society and government. But I also want real social safety nets, because the alternative is worse. And, because everyone benefits from the existence of a social safety net, everyone should help pay. And if they don't help pay, they should not be allowed to do business with the people who DO contribute. I'm all for withdrawal of reward as a punishment for non compliance, rather than the use of force.
That all sounds entirely, perfectly reasonable to me as well.
'Same as the perjury rules' works for me. One could even vary it by jurisdiction.
I'd love to see a law where it was likewise illegal for any public employee to LIE during any interactions with the public.
Finally, cops will actually have to answer the question "Are you a cop?" truthfully.
Also, I have to throw this in: "Mr. Congressman, boxers or briefs?"
I'm willing to allow lies by omission. I'm pretty confident that the perjury laws do as well.
.....in a public place." - SCOTUS. It applies to the cops as well. They have no reason to believe they should be unrecordable when they are out on the road or on the sidewalk. Besides: They record us all the time, with cameras installed in their cars and taping during confessions.
I had this thought as well. The judge said, from the bench, that his privacy had been violated. How can this possibly be the case? He's in public as a function of his duties. Everything is on the record, by law, so wherein lies the privacy??