Congress defunding something merely results in the administration transferring discretionary funds to the program so that nothing is changed [...]
You might have missed the words "chain reaction" in the writeup. Anyone who isn't completely naive knows that this amendment, if it passes, isn't even close to the end of the story.
It's a marketing point to have a kickstarter. It gives you validity.
It's market research to have a kickstarter. If you reach your funding goal, you know that people will pay money for it. If you don't reach your goal, you find out that they won't, and you didn't have to go to the trouble of building it first. (*cough* surface *cough*)
I believe that by "creationists", Black Parrot was talking about the leaders and debaters of the movement who come up with the talking points, not the ordinary everyday creationists whom they have misled. That may explain why your experience is different.
AFAIK, nobody uses Sir Thomas Moore's criminal record as a reason to object to Catholicism. That argument, should someone try it in the UK, would be treated with the contempt it deserves.
I understand the argument against posthumously pardoning people who were accurately convicted of something that a crime at the time. It really wouldn't change anything, and would set a precedent that politicians don't want to go down. Has the US government pardoned those convicted under the Smith Act yet?
Pardoning Turing vindicates him, but it's hard to see how it honours him.
I don't. But they're disclosing different stuff than the NSA will and different stuff than Snowden is still in the process of and different stuff than Congress is trying to get.
Really? I worked out Metro in less than a minute by myself. And I thought it was typographically elegant, and a genuine improvement over the previous XBox interface.
Actually there is no evidentiary basis for your opinion.
I was careful with my choice of weasel words such as "it wouldn't surprise me if".
Only the threat of losing their priveledges stands in the way.
That, and the threat of being dragged through the courts. Normally that wouldn't intimidate a big corporation, but experience with these national security cases is that they make it unnecessarily hard for your legal team to see any of the evidence against you.
Some department of or office in those companies is responsible for taking in requests from law enforcement or intelligence, analysing their legal status and whether or not they are obliged to comply, and then responding to those requests. At some point, that group of people, in consultation with lawyers, decided what was the proper response. It is that group of people to whom I am assigning a moral conscience.
I believe that behind closed doors, Google, Microsoft, et al, are just fine with the surveillance state, because it plays to their strengths and they're already on the inside.
I don't think you have any evidentiary basis on which to base that judgment.
It wouldn't surprise me if Google and Microsoft have convinced themselves that whatever they did was right. Moreover, I find it easy to believe that the exact extent of their complicity (unlike, say, the extent of the complicity of telcos) was exaggerated in the leaked documents themselves, and they are genuinely pissed off that they can't set the record straight (as they see it).
Did they go further than you or I or any other civil liberties-minded person would? Almost certainly. But how far did they actually go? We don't know, and they're not allowed to say.
It's rich that the NSA gets to spin this as "people are talking crap about stuff they don't know anything about" (e.g. "the PRISM isn't a programme, just the name of a specific database" line) . What the hell did they expect? No, we don't have complete information first-hand from the people who truly understand it. That's exactly the problem.
So I applaud the tech companies for actually trying to disclose more. More information means we have a better basis on which to judge them, and judge them we shall.
This must be a new definition of the word "better" that I wasn't previously aware of.
I don't know about you, but if I'd led Steve Jobs' life, I'd consider my life a failure. I'd have wished that I'd spent less time gouging every last penny out of my suppliers and destroying open platforms, and more time with my family.
The difference between Linus and the Biebs is that Linus has earned the right, by conquest, to be listened to by the community. Even his half-baked dumb ideas are usually fairly interesting once the Slashdot system has filtered out the ones not worth listening to.
Oh, you insular Americans, thinking that the only kind of "religion" in the world is US-style evangelical protestantism.
You do know that among the minority of the world's two billion odd Christians who have actually heard of William Lane Craig, most think he's a joke? Only US fundamentalists and "new" atheists seem to take him seriously.
The same may be true of Hugh Ross, but I honestly don't know. I hadn't heard of him before you mentioned him. I wouldn't have heard of Craig if it wasn't for reading American blogs making fun of him. Hell, the fact that you have to point people to them says quite a lot about their prominence in, and level of influence on, the major world religions.
Religion or not, if you don't think belief was the cause of all those deaths, i have to wonder if you know anything about human history.
Nice goalpost-move!
As it happens, I agree with you. Religion has been a convenient excuse for war, but as a simple matter of history, any "good" belief will do. The war in Iraq was fought on the pretext of "freedom" and "security" and "democracy". Only an idiot would think that this means that freedom, security, and democracy "cause" wars.
The flip side is that, as Steven Pinker pointed out in his recent book, the world today is a less violent place than it's ever been (on a per capita basis), and it's only improving.
The dream to constantly improve humanity by embracing Truth, Justice and the American Way was just that; a fantasy; an unattainable illusion.
That phrase is from the opening of post-WW2-era Superman, not the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers or the US Constitution.
If you imagine a linear continuum with the cold war superhero fantasy at one end and the collectivist dystopia nightmare at the other end, reality lies somewhere in between.
Slashdot Mirror
You might have missed the words "chain reaction" in the writeup. Anyone who isn't completely naive knows that this amendment, if it passes, isn't even close to the end of the story.
It's market research to have a kickstarter. If you reach your funding goal, you know that people will pay money for it. If you don't reach your goal, you find out that they won't, and you didn't have to go to the trouble of building it first. (*cough* surface *cough*)
Remember, folks, the NSA is only one ASCII code point away from the NRA.
I believe that by "creationists", Black Parrot was talking about the leaders and debaters of the movement who come up with the talking points, not the ordinary everyday creationists whom they have misled. That may explain why your experience is different.
For the same reason they call it "plate tectonics" now, rather than "continental drift".
AFAIK, nobody uses Sir Thomas Moore's criminal record as a reason to object to Catholicism. That argument, should someone try it in the UK, would be treated with the contempt it deserves.
I understand the argument against posthumously pardoning people who were accurately convicted of something that a crime at the time. It really wouldn't change anything, and would set a precedent that politicians don't want to go down. Has the US government pardoned those convicted under the Smith Act yet?
Pardoning Turing vindicates him, but it's hard to see how it honours him.
I don't. But they're disclosing different stuff than the NSA will and different stuff than Snowden is still in the process of and different stuff than Congress is trying to get.
Between them, we'll get a pretty good picture.
Really? I worked out Metro in less than a minute by myself. And I thought it was typographically elegant, and a genuine improvement over the previous XBox interface.
Oh, you were referring to Windows 8? Never mind.
I was thinking that too. I wasn't aware that there was anything on tumblr that wasn't porn.
I was careful with my choice of weasel words such as "it wouldn't surprise me if".
That, and the threat of being dragged through the courts. Normally that wouldn't intimidate a big corporation, but experience with these national security cases is that they make it unnecessarily hard for your legal team to see any of the evidence against you.
I think you know what I meant.
Some department of or office in those companies is responsible for taking in requests from law enforcement or intelligence, analysing their legal status and whether or not they are obliged to comply, and then responding to those requests. At some point, that group of people, in consultation with lawyers, decided what was the proper response. It is that group of people to whom I am assigning a moral conscience.
Microsoft is a government contractor.
Then the next cushy billion-dollar government contract would go to SAIC instead of them.
FTFY
I believe that behind closed doors, Google, Microsoft, et al, are just fine with the surveillance state, because it plays to their strengths and they're already on the inside.
I don't think you have any evidentiary basis on which to base that judgment.
It wouldn't surprise me if Google and Microsoft have convinced themselves that whatever they did was right. Moreover, I find it easy to believe that the exact extent of their complicity (unlike, say, the extent of the complicity of telcos) was exaggerated in the leaked documents themselves, and they are genuinely pissed off that they can't set the record straight (as they see it).
Did they go further than you or I or any other civil liberties-minded person would? Almost certainly. But how far did they actually go? We don't know, and they're not allowed to say.
It's rich that the NSA gets to spin this as "people are talking crap about stuff they don't know anything about" (e.g. "the PRISM isn't a programme, just the name of a specific database" line) . What the hell did they expect? No, we don't have complete information first-hand from the people who truly understand it. That's exactly the problem.
So I applaud the tech companies for actually trying to disclose more. More information means we have a better basis on which to judge them, and judge them we shall.
It's a metaphor, obviously.
Not in the RFC 2119 sense of "SHOULD". But if that's what you're into, knock yourself out. I won't judge.
Probably. But Jobs doesn't make me angry. I can't summon that much emotion over someone so pathetic.
This must be a new definition of the word "better" that I wasn't previously aware of.
I don't know about you, but if I'd led Steve Jobs' life, I'd consider my life a failure. I'd have wished that I'd spent less time gouging every last penny out of my suppliers and destroying open platforms, and more time with my family.
Oh, I'll take a project like that. But I won't contribute to it.
I gave up petty bullshit schoolyard politics back when I left high school. I don't want it infecting my hobby.
The difference between Linus and the Biebs is that Linus has earned the right, by conquest, to be listened to by the community. Even his half-baked dumb ideas are usually fairly interesting once the Slashdot system has filtered out the ones not worth listening to.
Apart from that, the comparison is apt.
Oh, you insular Americans, thinking that the only kind of "religion" in the world is US-style evangelical protestantism.
You do know that among the minority of the world's two billion odd Christians who have actually heard of William Lane Craig, most think he's a joke? Only US fundamentalists and "new" atheists seem to take him seriously.
The same may be true of Hugh Ross, but I honestly don't know. I hadn't heard of him before you mentioned him. I wouldn't have heard of Craig if it wasn't for reading American blogs making fun of him. Hell, the fact that you have to point people to them says quite a lot about their prominence in, and level of influence on, the major world religions.
Nice goalpost-move!
As it happens, I agree with you. Religion has been a convenient excuse for war, but as a simple matter of history, any "good" belief will do. The war in Iraq was fought on the pretext of "freedom" and "security" and "democracy". Only an idiot would think that this means that freedom, security, and democracy "cause" wars.
The flip side is that, as Steven Pinker pointed out in his recent book, the world today is a less violent place than it's ever been (on a per capita basis), and it's only improving.
He's a jackass even for a CEO.
In the tech business, that seems to be uncorrelated with being a good or bad CEO.
That phrase is from the opening of post-WW2-era Superman, not the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers or the US Constitution.
If you imagine a linear continuum with the cold war superhero fantasy at one end and the collectivist dystopia nightmare at the other end, reality lies somewhere in between.
It's not quite that bad. The current rules are complex and stupid, but not necessarily more evil than any similar complex bureaucratic regulation.