AOL always sucked, There were always better alternatives. Always.
Yes, but back in 1993 its not like you could just Google it. If you were not attacked to some organization with access, and your local public library did not offer shell accounts or something the big name BBS services (with internet gateways) AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were usually the way to go. At least until you could find a local ISP.
Keep in mind most folks were at the time using DOS and Windows. So you also needed to bring some software to the mix, to do PPP etc. That stuff was no on the shelf at your local shop and it was not simple to figure out without online reference materials. The AOL diskette solved both problems.
Once you got online and found an ISP with local access numbers, got the trumpet winsock installed or downloaded Slackware you switched to a real ISP with local dialup numbers. AOL was a first step to something more than a local BBS even for a lot of us techies though, because it as available AND accessible when nothing else way especially if you did not have friends who could help you.
You think policy don't have procedures governing the handling and questioning of persons under arrest?
Miranda is a "due process" case. Essentially the court decided the process of questioning people before apprising them of their rights was unconstitutional. There is no problem with the act of asking a question.
I am sure you are right. The criminals would adapt quickly there are plenty of inexpensive packaging materials that could be used which be sufficient to defeat detection by a dog. The biggest challenge for drug packers would probably be developing handling protocol to avoid contaminating the outer packaging with product.
That does not need to be perfect either just 'pretty good' assuming the postal service/government deployed a detective device more sensitive than a dog it would have to be tuned down otherwise the false positive rate would be insane.
Did the guy working packing at the Amazon roll a J before coming to work? Think that canabis oil from his skin won't transfer in some quantity to the absorbent porous cardboard he handles?
I doubt TSA style x-ray scanning would work well either, I don't know how you could distinguish drugs from many perfectly legal frequently shipped substances. Its a difficult problem unless you are willing to raise the costs of parcel shipping to insane levels to pay for manual inspections and all the abuse, theft, and fraud that will entail
While I realize VMware isn't effected by this vuln;
Fusion can't boot a VM off USB (why the fuck is that?) So if I want to test a USB boot stick on my MAC I have to use this to chain load the USB sticks boot loader: https://www.plop.at/en/bootman...
Its pretty convenient to just keep a VM defined with a floppy and the plop disk always attached. It would be better if it could/would boot a USB device, but the virtual floppy is my work around.
Nobody can just own anything any more can they, nor can they accept we live in an imperfect world where mistakes happen.
An app developer should do their best to provide users with concise, but complete, accurate, and timely information to the extent the technology allows. Perhaps developers/vendors have some responsibility to set realistic expectation about the quality of the information, but that is as far is can possibly go.
Beyond that people/users just have to make decisions and bear the responsibility. If your counter terrorism intelligence app does face recognition and determines Jim on camera is really Oliver Public Enemy No.1, and Mr.Policeman shoots Jim, its Mr.Police man who is at fault unless your application was deliberately misleading or you mislead Mr. Policeman about the accuracy and confidence possibly with your app.
So were the record companies. Now amazon sells mp3 files without DRM.
DVD ripping is childs play, yet they still release their stuff on that format.
Grandparent is correct eventually they will give up, probably because the competition will be beat them. The competition being indie (which lets face it the CGI that talented folks can do in their basement now is better than what the studios did in the 90s.) and their own older unencumbered stuff, and again there is so so so much of that there really is no need to watch a 'new' movie in our own life times.
Its a damn good way to get busted as well. IDS sensors and SEIM systems will pick up on a small number of hosts performing a large number of authentication attempts or a large number of hosts making attempts against the same account.
Either way you going to at least tip off the site operator. If your target is a free webmail host or something there might not be much they could/would do but a corporate security team will probably alert the account owner, and watch that account very carefully, will other folks contact the lawyers and the authorities to hunt your ass down.
Honestly this should be pretty simple. The default operating mode of a password manager should be generate a password from PRNG data.
Store the value encrypted with AES a key derived from a master password extended via PBKDF-2 or similar should be used for the cipher.
Next apply the necessary mixture bitwise rules applied bytewise to the 'clear text' to ensure the password will contain type-able characters and accommodate character restrictions. (Something like x = ((x % 126); x = x | 32 if x 32; for those of us using ascii and yes its not perfect and will produce some bias maybe a crypto expert could propose a better alternative ) Store which rules must be applied as well. That should not be an information leak as the attacker probably can research the target system and divine these requirements anyway.
That will mean most of your passwords are nearly random goblody gook. (Important). No matter what master password is used a key can be derived, the decipher operations and the rules can be applied the result will appear to be a legal password, but it will be incorrect. In the event you have stored a specific less random value it should 'decipher' as well but appear highly random given that is how all your other password appear to be it will not be a strong indicator the wrong key has been chosen either.
I would argue they have already show the rule of law to be an absolute joke.
When senior officials at the White House argues "the law does not require us to make a formal determination as to whether a coup took place." so they can ignore restrictions on aid to Egypt you know the law is a joke.
When the Treasury department rewrite bankruptcy law on the fly and over bond holder objections allows foreign investors to take a large stake in an American auto company because..jerbs.. you know the rule of law is a joke.
When banks rig overnight lending rates bilking investors, mortgage holders, and Municipalities out of billions and there are but a few wrist slap level civil judgements and no prosecutions of individuals you know the rule of law is a joke.
When NSA officers make disproven statements before congress under oath and nothing happens...
When clearly legally questionable activities are identified and courts duck the issue resorting to arguments, like "oh well you can't know your calls logged so you don't have standing"
Lets face it, its painful obvious the "rule of law" still gets a lot of lip service but is much closer to the old rules of "might makes right" than to the found principles of this nation. (Which is not say things were ever really any different). It boils down to what it always has; does someone bigger and badder than you want something you have or dislike what you are doing, better watch out!
Why do assume that because Obama is a two faced freckles asshole that Rand is?
Rand has essentially spent his entire life watching his fathers political career be pretty severely constrained by rigid adherence to principles. Keep in mind, Slashdot aside, the NSA generally does better in opinion polls than Snowden. Paul is seeking to win a national election.
Obama was running for office and said those things when the popular view was Iraq and all the stuff we were doing to fight terror were abusive acts by our cowboy president. Opinion has shifted with the rise of ISIS, a majority of the sheep have returned to the "whatever it takes" view that existed on 9/12/2001.
My point is that is not politically expedient for Paul to take this position really, its at best no especially harmful to his electoral hopes. I think maybe we ought to withhold some judgement until/if we some actual performance.
To put it succinctly: The NSA was ruled to be operating outside the law... which effectively makes them criminals
Wait a moment. For the most part that which isn't illegal, is legal. What we prosecute the NSA for exactly? Misappropriation of funds, they used to build an unauthorized massive surveillance apparatus? Acting under the color of law, when they were requesting the records? Conspiracy of some kind?
I am not really sure there is actually much to charge them with and what there is, although fairly serious, might be hard to prove.
IANAL but I look at it this way an activity isn't constitutional or unconstitutional, its legal or illegal; a law, order, process, or procedure could be unconstitutional. What the court said essentially is it does not consider the law Congress passed to authorize the activity.
We don't know if Congress can authorize such an activity.
So write your congress person. I think its important we express the view that perhaps outside the limited scope of defense; secret law making is an unacceptable practice that undermines democracy.
How can I express my wishes to you as a constituent if I can't know what is being discussed. Even if you take the view that as my representative after the election I am supposed to trust you to look out for my interests, how can evaluate you and decide if I should help re-elect you if I can't know what legislating you did until after the end of your term when it goes into effect.
I think as the public we need to send the message that unless there is a clear direct immediate relationship to the secrecy and national security our expectation is "Just vote no."
"We have to pass the bill to see what is in it" is just irresponsible in the context of our core value of government by the people for the people.
The could publish the entire text of the bill if that was the reason with blanks for country specific percentages. They could let congress persons make notes and just check that they have not noted the percentages before they leave.
The reason offered is 100% pure bull shit, but its not even quality bull shit, its the kind that leaves you to wonder what they fed the poor bull.
Its kind of grey area. Full disk encryption could itself be though of in those terms. I mean why are ciphering literally every block of information your store? Certainly it must be because you have something to hide right.
If you immediate start destroying the equipment when the cops show up that is a problems but in the case we have a device that has a normal operating behavior of putting itself into a secured state (by shutting down) whenever your wrist leave its proximity. Its not illegal (yet) to use a secure device. I would expect a good lawyer could spin this one to your favor.
The problem is the so call conservatives and their regulations. A libertarian would say you can put whatever you want in the ground on your property but if it leaks onto mine, I'll see you court.
A properly run court would arrange fair compensation for the loss of use. Stop passing laws that protect industrial polluters for liability and we would stop having these problems, stop having government recognize fictions legal entities so the real ownership escapes liability. The incentive to conceal problems with technology like injection wells would disappear because we all know it comes to light eventually if the problems are real you will be sued with the possibility of loosing far more than you ever made from the activity.
Yes but the spied on military and diplomatic communications, occasionally big industrial firms and very importantly foreign communications in most cases. The NSA is more or less spying on EVERY communication and domestic communications almost as frequently as foreign.
This is exactly what's wrong in politics these days. Politics is not a spectator sport. There aren't simply two teams vying for the prize of being elected and using that as the trophy to put in one's case. Treating it like a spectator sport completely ignores the whole point of the exercise, which is to effectively govern the wealthiest nation in the world, and to see to the interests of both the nation and the persons in that nation.
Its a matter of perspective though. From my perspective as a voter you are correct. If you are Reince Priebus, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz than it is a "team sport." You job is to maintain the influence of you party, you do that by winning the most elections for the most powerful offices; the most trophies so to speak.
Looking at in those terms to do you spend most of resources practicing the beat the least funded teams in the league, lets call them the Green party, the Libertarians, who you will likely beat anyway or do spend your efforts to try and defeat the big rival? Additionally do you look at your problems in things you have some control over brands, marketing strategy etc; or do spend your effort on broad policy research and development only to have half your people go rogue once elected anyway?
I think understanding politics and being effective no matter who your requires looking at it both ways, as purely competitive game, and a system of government.
Except that just like in Broad terms Hillary's tenure as Sec State IS a failure.
I am not talking about Benghazi specifically in scandal machine since that she should have anticipated and prevent the specific attack where our ambassador was killed. However in a more abstract sense its a fine example of Hillarys failure, we "went in to Libya" with a certain set of objectives and the outcome looks nothing like that, the security and human rights situations are both worse.
Ditto for her handling of the rest of the "Arab spring". Tunisia is about the only thing you could call a policy success that happened are her watch and we had a very limited role there.
I don't think there is any major foreign policy success she can point at, other than USAID handing out a money (Which isn't exactly difficult). Our security and influence certainly did improve on her watch. She does not have any major legislative successes either as a senator. The most we can charitably say is her service in these roles was "adequate."
Back to Benghazi she immediately tried to blame it on that stupid youTube movie "the innocence Islam" or whatever the title was, and proceeded to try and prosecute the person who made it. From a communications perspective which is it? Are Islam and its followers peaceful members of a global community we can live side by side with our are they violent lunatics who consider an insult on youTube a just pretext for warfare? Do we support freedom of expression or do with stand behind the idea that censorship is sometimes called for? A leader ought to have strong positions on things things, yet only a couple short years later her take on Charlie Hebdo is almost opposite.
This is a pattern with Hillary, sure I can agree her views on crime might have reasonably evolved since the 90's if she was to run away from her husbands era of "tough on crime" fine, but in lots of other areas she is doing an awful lots of evolving awful quick, so quick it starts to look more like responding to opinion polls to me.
Then we have her handling of the "e-mail" scandal I am not saying she did anything but her handling of it did more to make it look like a coverup, which gets back to the messaging and communications problems. She should have turned the operation of that server over to a trusted 3rd party immediately, she didn't. Its a lot like all of her memory and record keeping problems from the "White water" era.
Here again even if I set the whole scandal and legal aspects aside, we are left with someone who thought in 2009 that doing State Department business on her private mail server was a good idea. What sort of judgement is that? Next Bradly Manning happens and thought all that and the opsec questions it raised she never considers that her personal IT contractors might pose the sort of risk. Apparently the vetting and monitoring of active duty intelligence personnel (however junior) did not cut it, but Clintons' "guy" could be trusted?
Near as I can tell Hillary is where she is because she married Bill, who had the talent to get himself elected governor than president. Hillary got thrust into money/power/politics and has since not blown it so badly as to loose it, but never could have got where she is on her own. Which isn't to say Carly is any better a choice. Hillary's candidacy however would be a joke (like Carly's) but for the fact the rest of the national Democratic party lacks anyone with a decent brand. They are either unknown, older than igneous rock, or the special kinda of crazy that if allowed to speak more publicly risks making Ted Cruz sound normal.
The GOP is like the Red Skins, relatively few like the brand but the individual players all find their fans, the DNC is like the Starts & Stripes, more people have a favorable view of the team just don't ask them to try and name any players.
his is how societal norms distort what economists like to imagine is the free market.
That is why there are two areas of study micro-economics and macro-economics. On the micro-scale, it usually is better to fire 10% of your staff. After all the people who are working hard and doing good work usually know it. If you give them a 10% pay cut they will be butt hurt about it, they won't work as hard, or do as good a work. You will most likely see a greater than 10% loss in productivity.
On the other hand hand if you fire 10% of workforce, those that "survive" will feel threatened and if anything the need to continually show how valuable they are. You probably see less than a 10% decrease in productivity, over the short term; inside the limited scope of your organization.
Now on the macro scale all the other firms out there do essentially the same thing. When hiring starts up again its done at the new wage level the market has valued the skill at. So the prevailing wage ends up just at the value supply and demand expect. Economics works you just have to be careful not to zoom in to much when applying maco-principles or zoom out to much when you try and use micro-principles.
I consider myself a true Libertarian but I still support neutrality at least until such time this organizations are stripped of their rights-way across MY property and local, state, and federal governments surrender the right to use eminent domain to facilitate anything that will have private ownership.
Lift the restrictions on me from demanding a rent on pain of eviction from the cable co to use my property to host their wire, then they can use their wire however they like, once I am being fair compensated for the use of what is mine. Until then I think the I should have some say via representative government what they can do with.
Empower individual land owners, when the cable co wants to over charge and under deliver, I'll just respond that's fine raise your rates all you like, double dip if you want to I don't care, I'll just raise your rent. Sure dig up your wire and run around my property but my neighbors will probably do the same things to you so, just pay up. The problem will be fixed in a hurry. Mutual cooperation will ensure fairness.
True, but if you had a working exploit that was no patch to fix, and you knew that your target was about to go off support and loose the ability to submit issues and expect a fast fix turnaround, would you:
A) Go for it the moment you have a working sploit grab all you can.
B) Wait a little while before you take the big risk of using it widely and trying to ex-filtrate the loot to avoid discovery. Then after the support is up and you know the response will be hampered make your move. You know either it will likely take longer for your infiltration to be stopped or the victim will have to accept some self inflicted harm like off-lining production systems until they can find a fix (Which in the case of a government might mean a drone strike, but that is another issue).
Not really, since if there is no man made climate change we at least need to clean up our environment anyway. If on the other hand the skeptics are wrong and they win the argument humanity is up shit creek
Bzzt. WRONG!
A whole lot of "green energy" isn't clean energy. Hydro electric for example has huge ecological consequences, if your efforts are directed at lowering CO2 and methane emissions because your incorrectly believe the greatest environmental threat is climate change you could do lots of harm, for no reason.
Even if climate change is real emissions might be the wrong thing to try and control. Forests remove carbon from the atmosphere, but they do a lot of other potentially climate impacting things as well like wick water up from the ground and release it as vapor. Maybe the world needs more woods, and clearing space for another turbine is exactly the wrong thing to do.
In the end the only real answer in terms of global sustainability is likely fewer people. An area where the Church isn't exactly on the right side of as far as the prevailing views go.
Slashdot Mirror
AOL always sucked, There were always better alternatives. Always.
Yes, but back in 1993 its not like you could just Google it. If you were not attacked to some organization with access, and your local public library did not offer shell accounts or something the big name BBS services (with internet gateways) AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were usually the way to go. At least until you could find a local ISP.
Keep in mind most folks were at the time using DOS and Windows. So you also needed to bring some software to the mix, to do PPP etc. That stuff was no on the shelf at your local shop and it was not simple to figure out without online reference materials. The AOL diskette solved both problems.
Once you got online and found an ISP with local access numbers, got the trumpet winsock installed or downloaded Slackware you switched to a real ISP with local dialup numbers. AOL was a first step to something more than a local BBS even for a lot of us techies though, because it as available AND accessible when nothing else way especially if you did not have friends who could help you.
You think policy don't have procedures governing the handling and questioning of persons under arrest?
Miranda is a "due process" case. Essentially the court decided the process of questioning people before apprising them of their rights was unconstitutional. There is no problem with the act of asking a question.
I am sure you are right. The criminals would adapt quickly there are plenty of inexpensive packaging materials that could be used which be sufficient to defeat detection by a dog. The biggest challenge for drug packers would probably be developing handling protocol to avoid contaminating the outer packaging with product.
That does not need to be perfect either just 'pretty good' assuming the postal service/government deployed a detective device more sensitive than a dog it would have to be tuned down otherwise the false positive rate would be insane.
Did the guy working packing at the Amazon roll a J before coming to work? Think that canabis oil from his skin won't transfer in some quantity to the absorbent porous cardboard he handles?
I doubt TSA style x-ray scanning would work well either, I don't know how you could distinguish drugs from many perfectly legal frequently shipped substances. Its a difficult problem unless you are willing to raise the costs of parcel shipping to insane levels to pay for manual inspections and all the abuse, theft, and fraud that will entail
While I realize VMware isn't effected by this vuln;
Fusion can't boot a VM off USB (why the fuck is that?) So if I want to test a USB boot stick on my MAC I have to use this to chain load the USB sticks boot loader: https://www.plop.at/en/bootman...
Its pretty convenient to just keep a VM defined with a floppy and the plop disk always attached. It would be better if it could/would boot a USB device, but the virtual floppy is my work around.
Nobody can just own anything any more can they, nor can they accept we live in an imperfect world where mistakes happen.
An app developer should do their best to provide users with concise, but complete, accurate, and timely information to the extent the technology allows. Perhaps developers/vendors have some responsibility to set realistic expectation about the quality of the information, but that is as far is can possibly go.
Beyond that people/users just have to make decisions and bear the responsibility. If your counter terrorism intelligence app does face recognition and determines Jim on camera is really Oliver Public Enemy No.1, and Mr.Policeman shoots Jim, its Mr.Police man who is at fault unless your application was deliberately misleading or you mislead Mr. Policeman about the accuracy and confidence possibly with your app.
So were the record companies. Now amazon sells mp3 files without DRM.
DVD ripping is childs play, yet they still release their stuff on that format.
Grandparent is correct eventually they will give up, probably because the competition will be beat them. The competition being indie (which lets face it the CGI that talented folks can do in their basement now is better than what the studios did in the 90s.) and their own older unencumbered stuff, and again there is so so so much of that there really is no need to watch a 'new' movie in our own life times.
Its a damn good way to get busted as well. IDS sensors and SEIM systems will pick up on a small number of hosts performing a large number of authentication attempts or a large number of hosts making attempts against the same account.
Either way you going to at least tip off the site operator. If your target is a free webmail host or something there might not be much they could/would do but a corporate security team will probably alert the account owner, and watch that account very carefully, will other folks contact the lawyers and the authorities to hunt your ass down.
Honestly this should be pretty simple. The default operating mode of a password manager should be generate a password from PRNG data.
Store the value encrypted with AES a key derived from a master password extended via PBKDF-2 or similar should be used for the cipher.
Next apply the necessary mixture bitwise rules applied bytewise to the 'clear text' to ensure the password will contain type-able characters and accommodate character restrictions. (Something like x = ((x % 126); x = x | 32 if x 32; for those of us using ascii and yes its not perfect and will produce some bias maybe a crypto expert could propose a better alternative ) Store which rules must be applied as well. That should not be an information leak as the attacker probably can research the target system and divine these requirements anyway.
That will mean most of your passwords are nearly random goblody gook. (Important). No matter what master password is used a key can be derived, the decipher operations and the rules can be applied the result will appear to be a legal password, but it will be incorrect. In the event you have stored a specific less random value it should 'decipher' as well but appear highly random given that is how all your other password appear to be it will not be a strong indicator the wrong key has been chosen either.
Silly Pleb, the millionaires will pay someone else to camp out for them.
I would argue they have already show the rule of law to be an absolute joke.
When senior officials at the White House argues "the law does not require us to make a formal determination as to whether a coup took place." so they can ignore restrictions on aid to Egypt you know the law is a joke.
When the Treasury department rewrite bankruptcy law on the fly and over bond holder objections allows foreign investors to take a large stake in an American auto company because..jerbs.. you know the rule of law is a joke.
When banks rig overnight lending rates bilking investors, mortgage holders, and Municipalities out of billions and there are but a few wrist slap level civil judgements and no prosecutions of individuals you know the rule of law is a joke.
When NSA officers make disproven statements before congress under oath and nothing happens...
When clearly legally questionable activities are identified and courts duck the issue resorting to arguments, like "oh well you can't know your calls logged so you don't have standing"
Lets face it, its painful obvious the "rule of law" still gets a lot of lip service but is much closer to the old rules of "might makes right" than to the found principles of this nation. (Which is not say things were ever really any different). It boils down to what it always has; does someone bigger and badder than you want something you have or dislike what you are doing, better watch out!
Why do assume that because Obama is a two faced freckles asshole that Rand is?
Rand has essentially spent his entire life watching his fathers political career be pretty severely constrained by rigid adherence to principles. Keep in mind, Slashdot aside, the NSA generally does better in opinion polls than Snowden. Paul is seeking to win a national election.
Obama was running for office and said those things when the popular view was Iraq and all the stuff we were doing to fight terror were abusive acts by our cowboy president. Opinion has shifted with the rise of ISIS, a majority of the sheep have returned to the "whatever it takes" view that existed on 9/12/2001.
My point is that is not politically expedient for Paul to take this position really, its at best no especially harmful to his electoral hopes. I think maybe we ought to withhold some judgement until/if we some actual performance.
To put it succinctly: The NSA was ruled to be operating outside the law... which effectively makes them criminals
Wait a moment. For the most part that which isn't illegal, is legal. What we prosecute the NSA for exactly? Misappropriation of funds, they used to build an unauthorized massive surveillance apparatus? Acting under the color of law, when they were requesting the records? Conspiracy of some kind?
I am not really sure there is actually much to charge them with and what there is, although fairly serious, might be hard to prove.
IANAL but I look at it this way an activity isn't constitutional or unconstitutional, its legal or illegal; a law, order, process, or procedure could be unconstitutional. What the court said essentially is it does not consider the law Congress passed to authorize the activity.
We don't know if Congress can authorize such an activity.
So write your congress person. I think its important we express the view that perhaps outside the limited scope of defense; secret law making is an unacceptable practice that undermines democracy.
How can I express my wishes to you as a constituent if I can't know what is being discussed. Even if you take the view that as my representative after the election I am supposed to trust you to look out for my interests, how can evaluate you and decide if I should help re-elect you if I can't know what legislating you did until after the end of your term when it goes into effect.
I think as the public we need to send the message that unless there is a clear direct immediate relationship to the secrecy and national security our expectation is "Just vote no."
"We have to pass the bill to see what is in it" is just irresponsible in the context of our core value of government by the people for the people.
The could publish the entire text of the bill if that was the reason with blanks for country specific percentages. They could let congress persons make notes and just check that they have not noted the percentages before they leave.
The reason offered is 100% pure bull shit, but its not even quality bull shit, its the kind that leaves you to wonder what they fed the poor bull.
Its kind of grey area. Full disk encryption could itself be though of in those terms. I mean why are ciphering literally every block of information your store? Certainly it must be because you have something to hide right.
If you immediate start destroying the equipment when the cops show up that is a problems but in the case we have a device that has a normal operating behavior of putting itself into a secured state (by shutting down) whenever your wrist leave its proximity. Its not illegal (yet) to use a secure device. I would expect a good lawyer could spin this one to your favor.
The problem is the so call conservatives and their regulations. A libertarian would say you can put whatever you want in the ground on your property but if it leaks onto mine, I'll see you court.
A properly run court would arrange fair compensation for the loss of use. Stop passing laws that protect industrial polluters for liability and we would stop having these problems, stop having government recognize fictions legal entities so the real ownership escapes liability. The incentive to conceal problems with technology like injection wells would disappear because we all know it comes to light eventually if the problems are real you will be sued with the possibility of loosing far more than you ever made from the activity.
Yes but the spied on military and diplomatic communications, occasionally big industrial firms and very importantly foreign communications in most cases. The NSA is more or less spying on EVERY communication and domestic communications almost as frequently as foreign.
Its not the same.
This is exactly what's wrong in politics these days. Politics is not a spectator sport. There aren't simply two teams vying for the prize of being elected and using that as the trophy to put in one's case. Treating it like a spectator sport completely ignores the whole point of the exercise, which is to effectively govern the wealthiest nation in the world, and to see to the interests of both the nation and the persons in that nation.
Its a matter of perspective though. From my perspective as a voter you are correct. If you are Reince Priebus, or Debbie Wasserman Schultz than it is a "team sport." You job is to maintain the influence of you party, you do that by winning the most elections for the most powerful offices; the most trophies so to speak.
Looking at in those terms to do you spend most of resources practicing the beat the least funded teams in the league, lets call them the Green party, the Libertarians, who you will likely beat anyway or do spend your efforts to try and defeat the big rival? Additionally do you look at your problems in things you have some control over brands, marketing strategy etc; or do spend your effort on broad policy research and development only to have half your people go rogue once elected anyway?
I think understanding politics and being effective no matter who your requires looking at it both ways, as purely competitive game, and a system of government.
Except that just like in Broad terms Hillary's tenure as Sec State IS a failure.
I am not talking about Benghazi specifically in scandal machine since that she should have anticipated and prevent the specific attack where our ambassador was killed. However in a more abstract sense its a fine example of Hillarys failure, we "went in to Libya" with a certain set of objectives and the outcome looks nothing like that, the security and human rights situations are both worse.
Ditto for her handling of the rest of the "Arab spring". Tunisia is about the only thing you could call a policy success that happened are her watch and we had a very limited role there.
I don't think there is any major foreign policy success she can point at, other than USAID handing out a money (Which isn't exactly difficult). Our security and influence certainly did improve on her watch. She does not have any major legislative successes either as a senator. The most we can charitably say is her service in these roles was "adequate."
Back to Benghazi she immediately tried to blame it on that stupid youTube movie "the innocence Islam" or whatever the title was, and proceeded to try and prosecute the person who made it. From a communications perspective which is it? Are Islam and its followers peaceful members of a global community we can live side by side with our are they violent lunatics who consider an insult on youTube a just pretext for warfare? Do we support freedom of expression or do with stand behind the idea that censorship is sometimes called for? A leader ought to have strong positions on things things, yet only a couple short years later her take on Charlie Hebdo is almost opposite.
This is a pattern with Hillary, sure I can agree her views on crime might have reasonably evolved since the 90's if she was to run away from her husbands era of "tough on crime" fine, but in lots of other areas she is doing an awful lots of evolving awful quick, so quick it starts to look more like responding to opinion polls to me.
Then we have her handling of the "e-mail" scandal I am not saying she did anything but her handling of it did more to make it look like a coverup, which gets back to the messaging and communications problems. She should have turned the operation of that server over to a trusted 3rd party immediately, she didn't. Its a lot like all of her memory and record keeping problems from the "White water" era.
Here again even if I set the whole scandal and legal aspects aside, we are left with someone who thought in 2009 that doing State Department business on her private mail server was a good idea. What sort of judgement is that? Next Bradly Manning happens and thought all that and the opsec questions it raised she never considers that her personal IT contractors might pose the sort of risk. Apparently the vetting and monitoring of active duty intelligence personnel (however junior) did not cut it, but Clintons' "guy" could be trusted?
Near as I can tell Hillary is where she is because she married Bill, who had the talent to get himself elected governor than president. Hillary got thrust into money/power/politics and has since not blown it so badly as to loose it, but never could have got where she is on her own. Which isn't to say Carly is any better a choice. Hillary's candidacy however would be a joke (like Carly's) but for the fact the rest of the national Democratic party lacks anyone with a decent brand. They are either unknown, older than igneous rock, or the special kinda of crazy that if allowed to speak more publicly risks making Ted Cruz sound normal.
The GOP is like the Red Skins, relatively few like the brand but the individual players all find their fans, the DNC is like the Starts & Stripes, more people have a favorable view of the team just don't ask them to try and name any players.
his is how societal norms distort what economists like to imagine is the free market.
That is why there are two areas of study micro-economics and macro-economics. On the micro-scale, it usually is better to fire 10% of your staff. After all the people who are working hard and doing good work usually know it. If you give them a 10% pay cut they will be butt hurt about it, they won't work as hard, or do as good a work. You will most likely see a greater than 10% loss in productivity.
On the other hand hand if you fire 10% of workforce, those that "survive" will feel threatened and if anything the need to continually show how valuable they are. You probably see less than a 10% decrease in productivity, over the short term; inside the limited scope of your organization.
Now on the macro scale all the other firms out there do essentially the same thing. When hiring starts up again its done at the new wage level the market has valued the skill at. So the prevailing wage ends up just at the value supply and demand expect. Economics works you just have to be careful not to zoom in to much when applying maco-principles or zoom out to much when you try and use micro-principles.
over the newly discovered Apple flaw.
How is it Apples fault your body contains a deposit of metallic pigments where there should be none?
Seems more like a defect in the wearer to me.
I consider myself a true Libertarian but I still support neutrality at least until such time this organizations are stripped of their rights-way across MY property and local, state, and federal governments surrender the right to use eminent domain to facilitate anything that will have private ownership.
Lift the restrictions on me from demanding a rent on pain of eviction from the cable co to use my property to host their wire, then they can use their wire however they like, once I am being fair compensated for the use of what is mine. Until then I think the I should have some say via representative government what they can do with.
Empower individual land owners, when the cable co wants to over charge and under deliver, I'll just respond that's fine raise your rates all you like, double dip if you want to I don't care, I'll just raise your rent. Sure dig up your wire and run around my property but my neighbors will probably do the same things to you so, just pay up. The problem will be fixed in a hurry. Mutual cooperation will ensure fairness.
True, but if you had a working exploit that was no patch to fix, and you knew that your target was about to go off support and loose the ability to submit issues and expect a fast fix turnaround, would you:
A) Go for it the moment you have a working sploit grab all you can.
B) Wait a little while before you take the big risk of using it widely and trying to ex-filtrate the loot to avoid discovery. Then after the support is up and you know the response will be hampered make your move. You know either it will likely take longer for your infiltration to be stopped or the victim will have to accept some self inflicted harm like off-lining production systems until they can find a fix (Which in the case of a government might mean a drone strike, but that is another issue).
Not really, since if there is no man made climate change we at least need to clean up our environment anyway. If on the other hand the skeptics are wrong and they win the argument humanity is up shit creek
Bzzt. WRONG!
A whole lot of "green energy" isn't clean energy. Hydro electric for example has huge ecological consequences, if your efforts are directed at lowering CO2 and methane emissions because your incorrectly believe the greatest environmental threat is climate change you could do lots of harm, for no reason.
Even if climate change is real emissions might be the wrong thing to try and control. Forests remove carbon from the atmosphere, but they do a lot of other potentially climate impacting things as well like wick water up from the ground and release it as vapor. Maybe the world needs more woods, and clearing space for another turbine is exactly the wrong thing to do.
In the end the only real answer in terms of global sustainability is likely fewer people. An area where the Church isn't exactly on the right side of as far as the prevailing views go.