If they were asked to produce all relevant correspondence then a simple search algorithm won't be relyable enough.
If that is the case and that's how they interpret that request then it is further proof that red tape is thicker than their mission statement. Cooperation looks differently. This is a bureaucracy trying to weather a storm. And this is why the NSA should be dismantled and their place should be taken by somebody who understands their mission and takes it a little bit more seriously.
I've seen enough CYA reactions to know one when I see one. This is one. Doesn't even need to quack like a duck.
The past 20 years I have found it increasingly difficult to follow action sequences. Maybe we should remember how those were handled in the olden days. Simply replace the whole CGI borefest with plain Teichoskopy interspersed by dramatic monologues for those who are dying.
All that visual story telling makes me pine for the old theatrical days when a chair could be the throne room of Elisnore, a ship boarded by pirates or a poodle who turns out to be the devil. A really good movie can be reenacted by a bunch of good actors on a stage with minimal props directed by a guy who knows WTF he is doing. Your typical summer blockbuster reenacted in this way would hardly last longer than half an hour.
A word to the wise: Romeo and Juliet is absolute crap after the death of Mercutio who is the only likeable character in the whole story. He went and watched the latest Superman flick and now he is a very grave man.
The problem is, once a story gets reported enough it starts to ring true. Especially when the audience has had a spotty education. The Daily Mail used this story quite a lot. Even after Wakefield had been exposed.
That smallpox vaccination scar is there to hide the government implant they put there to spy on you. Or was it the Russians? Or was that in the X-Files? I can't quite remember.
"I was afraid of the autism," says the grandmother, Margaret Mugford, 63 years old. "It was in all the papers and on TV."
And here we have an illustration of your garden-variety Daily Mail reader.
I don't get it. The study and its author(Andrew Wakefield) have been disgraced. There is a widely reported outbreak with actual deaths in the UK. And still the Daily Fail humped that hairy old chestnut in as late as early 2013. I don't read the Daily Fail but I wonder how they reported on the Swansea measles epidemic.
Meanwhile in the rest of the world we are currently discussing to exclude kids without jabs from school in order to finally exterminate this disease.
You'll also have to take publication frequency into account. If you are running a daily rag, then piracy will not be an issue as long as you can provide faster than the pirates. If it is a monthly rag you might have to reconsider.
The best thing to do is actually to have a tablet app with a no-fuss subscription. Also you'll need a website with free articles and a link to the app in cas you won't get featured. Also being available via Amazon and B&N helps. Ease of purchase is the key here. And you'll obviously need to know your audience. If you do a knitware magazine then going purely digital might not be such a bright idea.
I'm currently in the process of moving. Seems like I'm moving shop every 5 years or so. And again I have packed all my media stuff. Guess what? I haven't used my DVDs in ages. Same goes for my books and my CDs. These days I purchase exclusively electonically. My games are on GOG/Steam. My music comes in form of Amazon MP3s. Same goes for my books.
The very moment I can get stuff dirt cheap(Steam) or I can easily remove DRM so I can take full possession of my purchases I do prefer buying electronically. In that respect I do love this our electonic age. DRM is just teething problems.
I even find that reading comics is actually very good on a high-res tablet.
So in the following months I will get rid of most of my books, CDs and DVDs. Should have done so ages ago. There is very little I will hang onto. Time to de-clutter. I like being able to move with only stuff that fits into the trunk of a car. Not quite Fight Club style, but close enough.
Yep. If somebody breaks down your door and shines a light into your eyes so you can't see them properly then it is your damn right to shoot the bastard. At that point it propably is even your duty if you've got a wife and kids cowering in the room behind you. This kind of police action is ok when they are intervening to interrupt an ongoing physical assault on somebody. It's propably even a bad idea even then. It is a damn bad idea if they want to pick up any amount of dope, kiddie porn or whatever. They also seem to be damn sloppy in their procedures. There are far too many instances where they did so little recon that they even get the wrong house.
Now I am sorry, any tactical computer game requires more preparation than that. If you did that in X-COM then you would have a lot of dead people at your hand and you will get shut down.
Damn overreacting unprepared idiots. Their uniform is nothing more than gang colors. Yet if they get killed by a frightened family father THEY get the full honors burial complete with flag and trumpets the widow will get sued for damages by the cop's family.
It's gone way out of proportion. Guns get pointed at people for no proper reason at all. It feels like cops are not trained in the art of deescalation anymore.
In comparison of SWAT teams busting friendly poker games this may sound a little bit irrelevant. But that dog incident a couple of weeks back illustrates perfectly why the cops don't feel like a civilian organization anymore.
The cops were busting somebody. A guy came along and proceeded to film him with his cell phone. Things escalated and he got cuffed. Here two things had already gone wrong.
The cops reacted to being filmed. Why? What's wrong with that? Aren't they accountable for what they do? Then they cuffed him. Which comes way WAY too easy for them nowadays. Cuffing somebody is a major thing to do and should come as a last resort. Repeatedly saying no to the request to stop filming does NOT warrant detaining somebody.
The guy had a dog with him. Who got excited by the cops handling his owner. The guy was asked to lock his dog in his car, which he did. The cops continued their cop thing. The dog got even more excited and broke out of the car. Cops shot the dog. Dying dog all over Youtube.
Here's my thing. If you point a gun at me and mine then I will not treat you as an officer of the law. I will treat you as a threat. I will treat your uniform as very elaborate gang colors. And I would imagine I am not the only one who feels that way. And that's why I totally buy into the stories where cops got wasted in a SWAT style home invasion for being mistaken as violent gangsters.
Serve and protect it once was. Now with all this "Getting tuff on jaywalking" they are just plain bullies. Trust is at an all time low and we always suspect some CYA coverups happening. And while we are at it, have them wear name plates. And for fucks sake ban those ridiculus mirror shades. They hide behind them and I'm always tempted to check my hairdo in them.
I find it remarkable that the corporate veil has actually been breached in this one. Usually personal wrong-doing is not prosecuted in price-fixing cases. The companies in question get fined and that's the end of it. Or at least that was my understanding.
And it doesn't take a brainiac to point out this will be an awefull lot of data.
IIRC somebody had figured out that on Facebook people had an average 4.74 degrees of separation. So if they went just one or two hops further they might have caught the guy who was plotting that bomb that never blew up because he didn't build it.
Our esteem minister of interior affairs went on a fact-finding mission to the US to find out WTF was going on. Before his trip he had claimed that this dragnet had prevented 5 attacks in our country alone. After he got back he said that only "deliberations for attacks" had been stopped. Now they claim that two attacks have been stopped. One of which was a peculiar little thing where it turned out that the boys who wanted to blow us to smithereens didn't get the mixture right and had produced duds. The plods were also already on them because the chemists they were buying from had called them. They even already had a mole close to that merry band of gobshites.
This whole thing does sweet FA for prevention. They still need good old coppering and the odd good luck to catch on to goings on going on. This whole thing is wrong, expensive and not fit for the stated purpose. The UK gov called for an official circle-jerk to find out if this GCHQ thing was illegal. Well, it wasn't. It was legal under laws that were intended to allow for crocodile clamps on copper wires in houses even if that would be snooping on uninvolved tenants. The mind boggles. They've gone bloody 'round the twist, they have. Fuck me! Fuck all of us!
We're de-facto still stuck on DirectX9 due to the current console generation. Most games are half-arsed ports. And if they tack on new features for the PC version then it is bound to go horribly wrong likeit did for Rage and Arkham City.
But we are relatively safe since in most cases they don't even bother with proper mouse control in menu screens and leave us stuck with an FOV that's suitable for a TV screen that's a couple of meters away. Yesteryears games brought to you today by the same people who invented safe points, two-weapon-limits and platform exclusives.
Here's an experiment:
Call on Facebook for a Spy Safari. Tell potential attendees to bring booze and binoculars and invite them to some semi-secret spy installation for a spot of Spy Spotting. Chances are you will have coppers on your front porch in no time. If you are lucky you might also get the whole SWAT routine since if the ATF can use it for busting friendly poker games the rest of the alfabetti spaghetti agencies can do likewise.
This is what happened in Germany. A guy called for a Spy Safari. US MP called the local authorities. A couple of cops turned up on the guys front door. BTW, the cops were quite awesome since they also thought this was ridiculous. They told the guy to simply register it as a demonstration and he'd be fine to go ahead. They also told him they preferred not to read about this embarrassing episode on teh intarwebs. It hit national news a couple of hours later, naturally.
Do not deceive yourself. You are free to post whatever you want on the internet. But you may be manhandled, spend 3 months in jail awaiting trial or may face a prison sentence where community service would be more appropriate. These are not isolated events. This is what you have to expect.
Seriously. Thanks to Obama's administration we have this problem. He has single handedly wrecked trust in US operating systems, web hosts, hardware, online services... everything.
Fuck you Obama/Biden. You've broken the trust of everyone who elected you.
The problem with the US system of democracy is there's no way to FIRE dirtbag politicians who run on specific campaign promises and then turn around and do the exact opposite. That mother fucker promised to end this shit and instead made it worse, intentionally. He should be fired without a pension or golden parachute. Where are the calls for impeachment over this direct breach of the Constitution that he swore to protect?
Umm. Trust in US infrastructure wasn't that high under Clinton, either. We rediscovered the existence of Echelon in the late 90ies and the tinfoil-hat brigade predicted something like PRISM. They used the USS Cole incident to justify a lot of snooping. Then there was 9/11. Then there was 3/11. Then there was 7/7. And even though nothing noteworthy happened in terms of organized terrorism in the western emisphere ever since we still happily cling to all those moronic laws that are there to "prevent" terrorism and to "punish" terrorism.
Why do we even need special laws to punish terrorists? Terrorism isn't even a crime. Murder is. Manslaughter is. Maiming is. Damage of property is. Terrorism is a motivation and is nicely covered by mens rea.
Why are we even afraid of terrorism? There are higher risks in life than that in the western hemisphere. Are you more afraid that your kid will be blown to smithereens by some idiot with half-baked ideas that aren't even his own or run over by some idiot with a car? Our perception of risks is so distorted that we are easily preyed upon by sensationalist media and powerhungry politicians. Take for instance the Boston bombings. 24h breathless news coverage for a couple of days. 3 dead, 300 injured. That reads like a traffic casualty statistic. Yet if it were nobody would give a fuck. Because traffic casualties are expected and terrorist attacks aren't. Media and politicians will take an unexpected event, blow it way out of proportion and will try their damnedest to turn it into a perpetual fear to keep their stranglehold over the bleating masses.
Well, the latest Marianne stamp/"lick Femen's ass" brouhaha and the violent anti-gay-marriage protests and Christine Boutin do not paint a picture of a very secular society. France is very divided society with near impenetrable boundaries. But that rings true for about every western European country.
You perceive France as a highly secular society because you are atheist. So it is very likely that most of your friends are also secular. It is a case of "Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein." Meaning that your existence determines your conciousness and the way you live will determine how you will perceive your environment. The "white catholic frenchman" brigade is as strong as the WASPs in their respective countries.
I also thought that Germany was a very secular society. But we still have some damn odd remnants from our religious past. We still have our officials swear their oaths to god(with the option to swear to something else; I would rather swear on a stack of Hellblazer comics). We still have federal agencies collect collect church tax. We still tell neighbours to suck it up if they complain about the racket those Christian muezzins do with their aweful church bells.
Secularisation is a process that is not yet completed. Le bon dieu n'est pas mort. He is pining for the fjords.
As for Algerian immigrants...they do not have the same experience as a white Frenchman will have. This is not a matter of who is at fault for failed integration of immigrants. Nobody got that right. Ever. But you just ask somebody of ethnicity how they are treated by cops and you will find that their existence will paint a totally different picture.
Looks like they just copied the VLC link by accident. There was only one link there(besides its probably a virus and not a real VLC copy anyways). Yawn.
When it comes to these large media companies you should never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice.
IIRC there were safeguards planned against wrongful DMCA takedown notices. There were actual fines attached to them. What happened to those?
It is a no-brainer to attribute this to corporate stupidity. But there is such a thing as due dilligence. And if HBO arms the lawyerpult for an extended siege they could easily bring down a private citizen. Due diligence is expected of us in all things and we do get thrown into prison for honest mistakes.
Our access to the law is not equal anymore since it is hidden behind a huge paywall.
Honestly, I would leave the final details of this discussion to constitutional experts. The most important bit is that in an enlightened civilisation secret courts issuing secret orders to enable secret operations of secret organisations is an absolute no-go. The people simply shouldn't wear it.
Especially since this data trawling dragnet is show to be next to useless when it comes to prevention if it is the sole measure. You still need to know what to query for since no human being will analyze all the data as it streams in and there's too much for a stab in the dark. Also we have been strewing random Al-Quaida, cocaine, bomb-threat, terrorism and other terms into all our internet communication since Echelon was rediscovered in the late 90ies. Now, 20 years later it's not a couple of geeks pissing into their keyword searches anymore. Now it is also senior politicians who start to object. No thanks to the giant, gormless, embedded echo chamber that is the US press.
This bomb detector thing was a mixture of greed, negligence, incompetence and corruption. I can't even begin to imagine the mindset that enables somebody to make money by directly endangering lives. Every aspect of this war stinks.
For me it was Lovecraft. I loved his books. But the more I read and the more I grew up I was really turned off by his racism. While I can read around that the enjoyment is basically gone.
Card can call for tolerance as much as he wants. If the movie doesn't iron out the kinks his intolerance introduced into his writing then I have absolutely no intention to watch it since I assume I will not enjoy it either. My time is too precious to me to waste it on it. But he may rally the anti-gay-marriage troops to watch his movie. They propably wouldn't have bothered with Sci-fi(that's not in the bible) otherwise. So it might be win-win for him.
Yep. What we need is more ATF SWAT teams breaking down doors. Busting low-stakes friendly poker games alone don't justify massive spending on law enforcement. Also privately run prisons aren't anywhere running near capacity and there clearly aren't enough of them.
There clearly is a need for Stephen Seagal driving a tank through the window of an internet cafe.
Do new laws not get checked if they are clearly worded and can only be used for what they are intended for? The sheer amount of sloppyness in the legislative branch boggles the mind. And since these are laws they need to be followed. And since they make no sense they fill up prisons.
What about that kid who is in custody since February for making hateful, stupid remarks online without even having had his day in court? He could be facing up to 10 years based on anti-terrorism legislation. They even set his bail to 500k. For an 18yr old internet troll! On a level that would qualify for a year of community service and no prior convictions on his record.
Overily broad anti-internet cafe laws, my ass. Overly broad legislation full stop. Legislation has left the realm of common sense and each and every existing law has to be checked if the wording and the use fit the intent of the legislative at the time.
Precisely. They spy on each other's citizens and exchange data in order to circumvent "don't spy on your own" laws. All Western countries are complicit in this. Which is why only politicians in opposition scream bloody murder while everybody else tries to smudge it all over. With a few exceptions.
Snowden hasn't only embarrassed the US but the whole "Free World".
Things like this degrade any kind of uniform to mere gang-colours.
If you think this is only an issue in teh US, think again. In Germany we just recently had a high-profile case that backfired on the coppers/DA in ways beyond comedy.
After a anti-Nazi rally a preacher who organized a youth club got charged for inciting violence. The cops testified that he called for them, to be pelted with rocks. Furthermore they testified that he had sheltered a violent protester in his mini-bus. In court they presented heavily edited video material in support of their claims which cast doubt on the preachers testimony. After reviewing the video material two coppers got charged for beating up a non-violent, non-threatening protestor who was hanging on to the back of the mini-bus trying to escape the truncheon-to-the-face coppering. The preacher had not as the coppers had claimed pulled the guy into the bus. So there is that claim gone.
Next the court was shown video-material where the preacher told the protestors to not go behind his mini-bus because the protest had turned violent and somebody was throwing rocks. Which somehow doesn't quite match the coppers account of him calling for them to be pelted with rocks. The defense then was handed 140hrs of unedited raw video very late during the trial. In fact every bit of evidence given by the cops was twisted beyond recongnition. There has been no verdict yet since the defense needs to review the raw video material. Everybody expect the case to collapse.
The preacher told the press that the only reason he will be able to walk is because his was a high profile case with lots of support and he wouldn't expect an ordinary citizen to be able to get any kind of justice.
A uniform can safely be considered as nothing more than gang colours. Worldwide. Also this is why coppers hate being filmed. It suddenly makes them accountable and DAs will think twice before they believe them. The sad thing is a lot of cops do not believe in violence as a first resort. But a lot of them think it is absolutely legitimate to cuff and detain citizens for something absolutely trivial. They forgot how disrupting this actually is.
Yeah, I was taking the mikey out of you. Even if they were invited the line between conquest and liberation are quite blurry. William of Orange wasn't very popular. His wife(the only quasi-legitimate link to his kingship being the daughter of the former king) died. When he snuffed it his sister in law was immediately dubbed Good Queen Anne.
William the Bastard(aka Teh Conqueror) claimed that his cousin Edward the Bloody Idiot(aka Teh Confessor) had promised the English throne to him and that Harold Godwinson had sworn fealty to him. So conquest? Or liberation?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still going with "can't".
If they were asked to produce all relevant correspondence then a simple search algorithm won't be relyable enough.
If that is the case and that's how they interpret that request then it is further proof that red tape is thicker than their mission statement. Cooperation looks differently. This is a bureaucracy trying to weather a storm. And this is why the NSA should be dismantled and their place should be taken by somebody who understands their mission and takes it a little bit more seriously.
I've seen enough CYA reactions to know one when I see one. This is one. Doesn't even need to quack like a duck.
Dr. Mercola is listed on Quackwatch and is under close scrutiny by the FDA. He also keeps dodgy company:
http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/mercola.html
The past 20 years I have found it increasingly difficult to follow action sequences. Maybe we should remember how those were handled in the olden days. Simply replace the whole CGI borefest with plain Teichoskopy interspersed by dramatic monologues for those who are dying.
All that visual story telling makes me pine for the old theatrical days when a chair could be the throne room of Elisnore, a ship boarded by pirates or a poodle who turns out to be the devil. A really good movie can be reenacted by a bunch of good actors on a stage with minimal props directed by a guy who knows WTF he is doing. Your typical summer blockbuster reenacted in this way would hardly last longer than half an hour.
A word to the wise: Romeo and Juliet is absolute crap after the death of Mercutio who is the only likeable character in the whole story. He went and watched the latest Superman flick and now he is a very grave man.
Well, she propably read the paper in The Lancet.
The problem is, once a story gets reported enough it starts to ring true. Especially when the audience has had a spotty education. The Daily Mail used this story quite a lot. Even after Wakefield had been exposed.
That smallpox vaccination scar is there to hide the government implant they put there to spy on you. Or was it the Russians? Or was that in the X-Files? I can't quite remember.
And here we have an illustration of your garden-variety Daily Mail reader.
I don't get it. The study and its author(Andrew Wakefield) have been disgraced. There is a widely reported outbreak with actual deaths in the UK. And still the Daily Fail humped that hairy old chestnut in as late as early 2013. I don't read the Daily Fail but I wonder how they reported on the Swansea measles epidemic.
Meanwhile in the rest of the world we are currently discussing to exclude kids without jabs from school in order to finally exterminate this disease.
You'll also have to take publication frequency into account. If you are running a daily rag, then piracy will not be an issue as long as you can provide faster than the pirates. If it is a monthly rag you might have to reconsider.
The best thing to do is actually to have a tablet app with a no-fuss subscription. Also you'll need a website with free articles and a link to the app in cas you won't get featured. Also being available via Amazon and B&N helps. Ease of purchase is the key here. And you'll obviously need to know your audience. If you do a knitware magazine then going purely digital might not be such a bright idea.
I would start worrying if you weren't pirated.
But real life isn't a computer game, and cops shouldn't treat it like one.
My point exactly. They should do better.
I'm currently in the process of moving. Seems like I'm moving shop every 5 years or so. And again I have packed all my media stuff. Guess what? I haven't used my DVDs in ages. Same goes for my books and my CDs. These days I purchase exclusively electonically. My games are on GOG/Steam. My music comes in form of Amazon MP3s. Same goes for my books.
:P
The very moment I can get stuff dirt cheap(Steam) or I can easily remove DRM so I can take full possession of my purchases I do prefer buying electronically. In that respect I do love this our electonic age. DRM is just teething problems.
I even find that reading comics is actually very good on a high-res tablet.
So in the following months I will get rid of most of my books, CDs and DVDs. Should have done so ages ago. There is very little I will hang onto. Time to de-clutter. I like being able to move with only stuff that fits into the trunk of a car. Not quite Fight Club style, but close enough.
Suprisingly the same does not apply to my GF
Yep. If somebody breaks down your door and shines a light into your eyes so you can't see them properly then it is your damn right to shoot the bastard. At that point it propably is even your duty if you've got a wife and kids cowering in the room behind you. This kind of police action is ok when they are intervening to interrupt an ongoing physical assault on somebody. It's propably even a bad idea even then. It is a damn bad idea if they want to pick up any amount of dope, kiddie porn or whatever. They also seem to be damn sloppy in their procedures. There are far too many instances where they did so little recon that they even get the wrong house.
Now I am sorry, any tactical computer game requires more preparation than that. If you did that in X-COM then you would have a lot of dead people at your hand and you will get shut down.
Damn overreacting unprepared idiots. Their uniform is nothing more than gang colors. Yet if they get killed by a frightened family father THEY get the full honors burial complete with flag and trumpets the widow will get sued for damages by the cop's family.
It's gone way out of proportion. Guns get pointed at people for no proper reason at all. It feels like cops are not trained in the art of deescalation anymore.
In comparison of SWAT teams busting friendly poker games this may sound a little bit irrelevant. But that dog incident a couple of weeks back illustrates perfectly why the cops don't feel like a civilian organization anymore.
The cops were busting somebody. A guy came along and proceeded to film him with his cell phone. Things escalated and he got cuffed. Here two things had already gone wrong.
The cops reacted to being filmed. Why? What's wrong with that? Aren't they accountable for what they do? Then they cuffed him. Which comes way WAY too easy for them nowadays. Cuffing somebody is a major thing to do and should come as a last resort. Repeatedly saying no to the request to stop filming does NOT warrant detaining somebody.
The guy had a dog with him. Who got excited by the cops handling his owner. The guy was asked to lock his dog in his car, which he did. The cops continued their cop thing. The dog got even more excited and broke out of the car. Cops shot the dog. Dying dog all over Youtube.
Here's my thing. If you point a gun at me and mine then I will not treat you as an officer of the law. I will treat you as a threat. I will treat your uniform as very elaborate gang colors. And I would imagine I am not the only one who feels that way. And that's why I totally buy into the stories where cops got wasted in a SWAT style home invasion for being mistaken as violent gangsters.
Serve and protect it once was. Now with all this "Getting tuff on jaywalking" they are just plain bullies. Trust is at an all time low and we always suspect some CYA coverups happening. And while we are at it, have them wear name plates. And for fucks sake ban those ridiculus mirror shades. They hide behind them and I'm always tempted to check my hairdo in them.
I find it remarkable that the corporate veil has actually been breached in this one. Usually personal wrong-doing is not prosecuted in price-fixing cases. The companies in question get fined and that's the end of it. Or at least that was my understanding.
And it doesn't take a brainiac to point out this will be an awefull lot of data.
IIRC somebody had figured out that on Facebook people had an average 4.74 degrees of separation. So if they went just one or two hops further they might have caught the guy who was plotting that bomb that never blew up because he didn't build it.
Our esteem minister of interior affairs went on a fact-finding mission to the US to find out WTF was going on. Before his trip he had claimed that this dragnet had prevented 5 attacks in our country alone. After he got back he said that only "deliberations for attacks" had been stopped. Now they claim that two attacks have been stopped. One of which was a peculiar little thing where it turned out that the boys who wanted to blow us to smithereens didn't get the mixture right and had produced duds. The plods were also already on them because the chemists they were buying from had called them. They even already had a mole close to that merry band of gobshites.
This whole thing does sweet FA for prevention. They still need good old coppering and the odd good luck to catch on to goings on going on. This whole thing is wrong, expensive and not fit for the stated purpose. The UK gov called for an official circle-jerk to find out if this GCHQ thing was illegal. Well, it wasn't. It was legal under laws that were intended to allow for crocodile clamps on copper wires in houses even if that would be snooping on uninvolved tenants. The mind boggles. They've gone bloody 'round the twist, they have. Fuck me! Fuck all of us!
We're on D3D11 now people.
We're de-facto still stuck on DirectX9 due to the current console generation. Most games are half-arsed ports. And if they tack on new features for the PC version then it is bound to go horribly wrong likeit did for Rage and Arkham City.
But we are relatively safe since in most cases they don't even bother with proper mouse control in menu screens and leave us stuck with an FOV that's suitable for a TV screen that's a couple of meters away.
Yesteryears games brought to you today by the same people who invented safe points, two-weapon-limits and platform exclusives.
Here's an experiment:
Call on Facebook for a Spy Safari. Tell potential attendees to bring booze and binoculars and invite them to some semi-secret spy installation for a spot of Spy Spotting. Chances are you will have coppers on your front porch in no time. If you are lucky you might also get the whole SWAT routine since if the ATF can use it for busting friendly poker games the rest of the alfabetti spaghetti agencies can do likewise.
This is what happened in Germany. A guy called for a Spy Safari. US MP called the local authorities. A couple of cops turned up on the guys front door. BTW, the cops were quite awesome since they also thought this was ridiculous. They told the guy to simply register it as a demonstration and he'd be fine to go ahead. They also told him they preferred not to read about this embarrassing episode on teh intarwebs. It hit national news a couple of hours later, naturally.
Do not deceive yourself. You are free to post whatever you want on the internet. But you may be manhandled, spend 3 months in jail awaiting trial or may face a prison sentence where community service would be more appropriate. These are not isolated events. This is what you have to expect.
Seriously. Thanks to Obama's administration we have this problem. He has single handedly wrecked trust in US operating systems, web hosts, hardware, online services... everything.
I know someone's gonna say this started under Bush, but Obama could have stopped it. In fact, Obama ran on the promise that he would stop it.I know someone is going to split hairs: "He's NOT wiretapping!!11!!ONE He's only collecting teh metadatas." Obama's running mate, Joe Biden would like to have a word with you.
Fuck you Obama/Biden. You've broken the trust of everyone who elected you.
The problem with the US system of democracy is there's no way to FIRE dirtbag politicians who run on specific campaign promises and then turn around and do the exact opposite. That mother fucker promised to end this shit and instead made it worse, intentionally. He should be fired without a pension or golden parachute. Where are the calls for impeachment over this direct breach of the Constitution that he swore to protect?
Umm. Trust in US infrastructure wasn't that high under Clinton, either. We rediscovered the existence of Echelon in the late 90ies and the tinfoil-hat brigade predicted something like PRISM. They used the USS Cole incident to justify a lot of snooping. Then there was 9/11. Then there was 3/11. Then there was 7/7. And even though nothing noteworthy happened in terms of organized terrorism in the western emisphere ever since we still happily cling to all those moronic laws that are there to "prevent" terrorism and to "punish" terrorism.
Why do we even need special laws to punish terrorists? Terrorism isn't even a crime. Murder is. Manslaughter is. Maiming is. Damage of property is. Terrorism is a motivation and is nicely covered by mens rea.
Why are we even afraid of terrorism? There are higher risks in life than that in the western hemisphere. Are you more afraid that your kid will be blown to smithereens by some idiot with half-baked ideas that aren't even his own or run over by some idiot with a car? Our perception of risks is so distorted that we are easily preyed upon by sensationalist media and powerhungry politicians. Take for instance the Boston bombings. 24h breathless news coverage for a couple of days. 3 dead, 300 injured. That reads like a traffic casualty statistic. Yet if it were nobody would give a fuck. Because traffic casualties are expected and terrorist attacks aren't. Media and politicians will take an unexpected event, blow it way out of proportion and will try their damnedest to turn it into a perpetual fear to keep their stranglehold over the bleating masses.
Well, the latest Marianne stamp/"lick Femen's ass" brouhaha and the violent anti-gay-marriage protests and Christine Boutin do not paint a picture of a very secular society. France is very divided society with near impenetrable boundaries. But that rings true for about every western European country.
You perceive France as a highly secular society because you are atheist. So it is very likely that most of your friends are also secular. It is a case of "Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein." Meaning that your existence determines your conciousness and the way you live will determine how you will perceive your environment. The "white catholic frenchman" brigade is as strong as the WASPs in their respective countries.
I also thought that Germany was a very secular society. But we still have some damn odd remnants from our religious past. We still have our officials swear their oaths to god(with the option to swear to something else; I would rather swear on a stack of Hellblazer comics). We still have federal agencies collect collect church tax. We still tell neighbours to suck it up if they complain about the racket those Christian muezzins do with their aweful church bells.
Secularisation is a process that is not yet completed. Le bon dieu n'est pas mort. He is pining for the fjords.
As for Algerian immigrants...they do not have the same experience as a white Frenchman will have. This is not a matter of who is at fault for failed integration of immigrants. Nobody got that right. Ever. But you just ask somebody of ethnicity how they are treated by cops and you will find that their existence will paint a totally different picture.
Looks like they just copied the VLC link by accident. There was only one link there(besides its probably a virus and not a real VLC copy anyways). Yawn.
When it comes to these large media companies you should never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice.
IIRC there were safeguards planned against wrongful DMCA takedown notices. There were actual fines attached to them. What happened to those?
It is a no-brainer to attribute this to corporate stupidity. But there is such a thing as due dilligence. And if HBO arms the lawyerpult for an extended siege they could easily bring down a private citizen. Due diligence is expected of us in all things and we do get thrown into prison for honest mistakes.
Our access to the law is not equal anymore since it is hidden behind a huge paywall.
Honestly, I would leave the final details of this discussion to constitutional experts. The most important bit is that in an enlightened civilisation secret courts issuing secret orders to enable secret operations of secret organisations is an absolute no-go. The people simply shouldn't wear it.
Especially since this data trawling dragnet is show to be next to useless when it comes to prevention if it is the sole measure. You still need to know what to query for since no human being will analyze all the data as it streams in and there's too much for a stab in the dark. Also we have been strewing random Al-Quaida, cocaine, bomb-threat, terrorism and other terms into all our internet communication since Echelon was rediscovered in the late 90ies. Now, 20 years later it's not a couple of geeks pissing into their keyword searches anymore. Now it is also senior politicians who start to object. No thanks to the giant, gormless, embedded echo chamber that is the US press.
This bomb detector thing was a mixture of greed, negligence, incompetence and corruption. I can't even begin to imagine the mindset that enables somebody to make money by directly endangering lives. Every aspect of this war stinks.
For me it was Lovecraft. I loved his books. But the more I read and the more I grew up I was really turned off by his racism. While I can read around that the enjoyment is basically gone.
Card can call for tolerance as much as he wants. If the movie doesn't iron out the kinks his intolerance introduced into his writing then I have absolutely no intention to watch it since I assume I will not enjoy it either. My time is too precious to me to waste it on it. But he may rally the anti-gay-marriage troops to watch his movie. They propably wouldn't have bothered with Sci-fi(that's not in the bible) otherwise. So it might be win-win for him.
Yep. What we need is more ATF SWAT teams breaking down doors. Busting low-stakes friendly poker games alone don't justify massive spending on law enforcement. Also privately run prisons aren't anywhere running near capacity and there clearly aren't enough of them.
There clearly is a need for Stephen Seagal driving a tank through the window of an internet cafe.
Do new laws not get checked if they are clearly worded and can only be used for what they are intended for? The sheer amount of sloppyness in the legislative branch boggles the mind. And since these are laws they need to be followed. And since they make no sense they fill up prisons.
What about that kid who is in custody since February for making hateful, stupid remarks online without even having had his day in court? He could be facing up to 10 years based on anti-terrorism legislation. They even set his bail to 500k. For an 18yr old internet troll! On a level that would qualify for a year of community service and no prior convictions on his record.
Overily broad anti-internet cafe laws, my ass. Overly broad legislation full stop. Legislation has left the realm of common sense and each and every existing law has to be checked if the wording and the use fit the intent of the legislative at the time.
Precisely. They spy on each other's citizens and exchange data in order to circumvent "don't spy on your own" laws. All Western countries are complicit in this. Which is why only politicians in opposition scream bloody murder while everybody else tries to smudge it all over. With a few exceptions.
Snowden hasn't only embarrassed the US but the whole "Free World".
Things like this degrade any kind of uniform to mere gang-colours.
If you think this is only an issue in teh US, think again. In Germany we just recently had a high-profile case that backfired on the coppers/DA in ways beyond comedy.
After a anti-Nazi rally a preacher who organized a youth club got charged for inciting violence. The cops testified that he called for them, to be pelted with rocks. Furthermore they testified that he had sheltered a violent protester in his mini-bus.
In court they presented heavily edited video material in support of their claims which cast doubt on the preachers testimony. After reviewing the video material two coppers got charged for beating up a non-violent, non-threatening protestor who was hanging on to the back of the mini-bus trying to escape the truncheon-to-the-face coppering. The preacher had not as the coppers had claimed pulled the guy into the bus. So there is that claim gone.
Next the court was shown video-material where the preacher told the protestors to not go behind his mini-bus because the protest had turned violent and somebody was throwing rocks. Which somehow doesn't quite match the coppers account of him calling for them to be pelted with rocks. The defense then was handed 140hrs of unedited raw video very late during the trial. In fact every bit of evidence given by the cops was twisted beyond recongnition. There has been no verdict yet since the defense needs to review the raw video material. Everybody expect the case to collapse.
The preacher told the press that the only reason he will be able to walk is because his was a high profile case with lots of support and he wouldn't expect an ordinary citizen to be able to get any kind of justice.
A uniform can safely be considered as nothing more than gang colours. Worldwide. Also this is why coppers hate being filmed. It suddenly makes them accountable and DAs will think twice before they believe them. The sad thing is a lot of cops do not believe in violence as a first resort. But a lot of them think it is absolutely legitimate to cuff and detain citizens for something absolutely trivial. They forgot how disrupting this actually is.
Yeah, I was taking the mikey out of you. Even if they were invited the line between conquest and liberation are quite blurry. William of Orange wasn't very popular. His wife(the only quasi-legitimate link to his kingship being the daughter of the former king) died. When he snuffed it his sister in law was immediately dubbed Good Queen Anne.
William the Bastard(aka Teh Conqueror) claimed that his cousin Edward the Bloody Idiot(aka Teh Confessor) had promised the English throne to him and that Harold Godwinson had sworn fealty to him. So conquest? Or liberation?