I can assure that they do absolutely do this, and it is really annoying.
It's really bad on uploads -- I just ran a test and I got 300 KB/s for the first 5 megs, then it degrades 100 KB/second over the next few megs, so that by the time you have uploaded 14 megs you are getting close to 40 KB/S in upload speed, and the connection is so bad that the shared digital phone line does not have enough bandwidth to have a phone conversation. Stop the upload and start it up again, and you get 330 kb/second, with the same degradation curve.
For downloads they do the same thing, but not so severely -- I downloaded a 67 meg file and it ran at about 750 KB initially, but then dropped to around 350-400 KB/S (according to the FTP app) about halfway through.
So for anyone using the connection for smaller file sizes (like the speed tests) you seem to get "blazing" speeds -- I ran the test at a couple of the internet speed test sites and they both think that I have 12000-14000 kb/s download speed and 2700 kb/s upload speed.
So if I didn't have any other way to measure it, I would think that I was getting way more than I paid for, rather than something that in reality is very pitiful.
Man you're crazy..... He's been attacked by censors who are linked to powerful political dynasties, and a lot of the "hate radio" label has come from them. They are your enemy, my friend. They wan tto shu Rush up so they gain some miniscule political advantage. Let Rush speak, and feel free to speak against him. That's what democracy looks like. So you are saying that Rush is somehow the victim of a... "liberal conspiracy"? That sounds pretty crazy, my friend. But seriously, this whole division of "Conservatives" vs. "Liberals" has extremely damaged America, and allowed people like Bush and Cheney to bankrupt our country with continual wars. Thanks to them, we now have wars on two fronts (Iraq and Afghanistan) that don't look like they will end any time soon, and they seem desperate to start a war with Iran as well. (Bush even threatened to start WWIII over Iran's nuclear program, even though he knew it was stopped in 2003).
They are your enemy, my friend. This is why people like Rush are dangerous to America. Americans are not my enemy, and people who listen to Rush (or Air America) and thinks that any American is an enemy, is a traitor, or "hates America" has been seriously confused. "Liberals" and "Conservervatives" just have differing views on what is best for America, which is a good thing. Anyone who promotes anger toward either side is not helping America at all, and doesn't deserve a personal Slashdot discussion just for doing so.
Bugs are a part of life in the software world -- they're annoying and painful, but like death and taxes, there's no way of avoiding their existence.
But what I don't get is why this guy gets to have a personal forum on Slashdot to solve his problems. The guy is a vicious hypocrite who makes his living inciting attacking people all day and getting his audience angry.
Instead of the Orwellian "two minutes of hate" this guy puts forth a daily radio show full of hate and anger 3-5 hours a day (I don't know, I don't listen to the show) and I have heard the show and he is often inaccurate but very capable at seeding his audience with misconceptions and anger.
Before the Rwandan massacres, they had similar radio programs pumping the audience full of hate and anger with deadly results.
That kind of behavior has made him a wealthy man, but I don't see why it should get him any love from Slashdot, or any priority over anyone else who has technical issues.
This is totally unconstitutional. And I can guarantee you that there are extremely few citizens out there thinking that telecommunications companies should not be held accountable for breaking the law and helping our government subvert the Constitution. Senator Chris Dodd has to filibuster his own party to try to prevent this from happening, and he said he did it because there was so much concern from his constituents.
Amendment IV of our Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. I would make a joke here about not welcoming our corpo-government overlords, but I wish I could find more of a sense of humor about this type of thing. The founders of our country knew this was going to happen, and worked extremely hard to avoid it, and the citizens of our country are sleep-walking right into it.
Here's Senator Dodd's thoughts about telecom immunity:
The President has no right to secretly eavesdrop on the conversations and activities of law abiding American citizens and anyone who has aided and abetted him in these illegal activities should be held accountable, said Dodd. It is unconscionable that such a basic right has been violated, and that the President is the perpetrator. I will do everything in my power to stop Congress from shielding this Presidents agenda of secrecy, deception, and blatant unlawfulness.
I think you haven't grasped what this is. It Isn't like MS Passport, where one other service knows your password and can pretend to be you. Its a protocol that anyone can implement. I grant you that open ID sounds better than Passport, but you still have the fact that it's major companies pushing this product rather than the demand from the people. Microsoft's failed "Passport" program shows that people didn't really feel like they needed that program, even with Microsoft trying to stuff it down their throats by tying the "passport" in with MSN, Hotmail, etc.
The problem with a system like this is the issue of trust, and no one trusted Microsoft. I am sure some people are still using "passport", but it's nothing I have heard about in a long while.
First off, a single point of failure is still a single point of failure no matter how you implement it, but the second point is that the US government has been getting more and more intrusive by the month. Just a few stories below this one on the front page of Slashdot is a story about US border agents copying data off equipment going across the border and insisting that it is their right to do so. (All in the name of "protecting" you, of course). A few stories above this one is a story about the RIAA thinking it's not enough that AT&T is going to try to scan the entire internet for copyright violations, they want to put a filter right on your PC so you can't use encryption to get around the internet filter.
So once this single point of failure becomes widespread, then it would be trivial to make a law requiring all Open ID servers to authenticate to a government server -- you know, to "protect the children" from online stalkers, or stop "terrorists" from entering Second Life. It sounds ridiculous, but so is requiring a government ID to buy cold medicine (again, it's only for your own protection). Once you get enough big corporations signed on and enough people using this, then you can start requiring everyone sending email to authenticate to one of their servers to stop the spam problem, for example. Then your own little authentication server would suddenly not be good enough.
So even though it sounds ridiculous, there are plenty of precedents. When the Social Security card was introduced, everyone swore up and down that it would only be for getting benefits, that it would never ever ever be a national ID number. Of course, now you can't rent an apartment, buy a house, get utilities turned on at your residence, or get a cell phone without using that national identification number for authentication. Most of your transactions through credit or debit cards are also attached to that national identification number. You would think it's ridiculous that the US government says that it is worried that people might be conducting "terrorist activities" in Second Life, but it's true.
Getting back to the issue of trust, once the US government decides it needs to "trust" any authentication server "just to be sure you're not a pedophile or a terrorist", the frog is cooked. You might think it's paranoid not to trust a system like this, but large corporations (RIAA, AT&T, etc) and your own government are showing extreme levels of paranoia about your online activities right now, and the corporations have shown that they are very willing to sell your rights and privacies for a buck (or go to prison like the Qwest CEO if they refuse). So go ahead and trust these organizations that don't trust you -- but if you want to see how this is likely to end up, just go ahead and try to do anything important in your life without using your SSN as a national identification number. This system will only be "open" as long as it takes to get everyone to use it. If you still don't believe me, go try to buy real cold medicine without using any ID connected to your SSN.
This is just a really, really bad idea for anyone to actually use.
I dated a girl once who had a jerk for an ex-boyfriend. He had gotten her hotmail password and started forwarding emails from her account to me and others in an attempt to make her life hell, and changed the password so she couldn't lock him out. It was annoying but she simply created a new Yahoo email account, told her parents that someone had hacked her account, and went on with her life, but if all of her online activities (banking, flickr account, etc) were tied into that account he could really have made her life pure hell.
Now imagine a brutal policeman with access to government systems tied in to the Open ID system and you can see a lot of real nasty potential problems -- if he dates any women and they break up with him or even threaten to, sucks to be them. And government systems are naturally going to be tied in to this thing. It doesn't have to be a policeman -- all you need is a bad roommate or a failed relationship or someone breaking into your house while you're still logged in.
If you don't think the government would be interested in this, here's a link to a clip of failed presidential candidate Rudi Giulani advocating the idea
The Department of Homeland Security also now thinks that online services like "Second Life" are terrorist threats
The Pentagon also seems to think that the Internet needs to be treated as an enemy weapons system
So once this idea gets going and you actually only had one password through "Open ID" for all your services, there would now be at least a hundred easy ways for anyone to make your life hell once they got that information. Government or not, you have now made your entire online life vulnerable to a single point of failure (or tracking).
Sure, you can charge your car at home for the daily commute, but what about road trips? Seriously -- how often do you go on a road trip? Most people only go on road trips a few times a year due to job and other considerations. So you rent a car, and you get to drive a new car that is fully maintained by *someone else* -- you don't have to take your car to the mechanic for a pre-trip "checkover". And you better hope that your mechanic doesn't cheat you and tell you something needs to be fixed when it doesn't.
One of the huge bonuses associated with electric cars is reduced maintenance. There are no timing chains to break, no radiators to leak, no oil to be changed. Electric motors are highly reliable and very easy to fix. In the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" they discussed that the dealers did not like the electric cars at all because of the tremendously lowered need for maintenance and repair. (Of course the mechanics loved them because the cars were easy to work and and the mechanics didn't end up covered in oil and grease all the time)
If you really do a lot of extended road trips, you should get a gas car or hybrid, but for everybody else the electric car + renting a gas car occasionally would be the much better choice.
However, filtering also raises the "you are now liable for what they say to an extent" issue that the whole Safe Harbor thing was suppose to fix for ISPs and could definately cost a huge pile more than just cutting access and losing customers. People have raised that idea as wel about AT&Ts plan to filter their network for copyrighted material.
The answer I have to that is "9/11 Changed Everything".
Seriously -- when the US government asked the telcos to commit surveillance crimes against the US citizens, only Qwest refused. Usually, breaking the law is a bad thing, but the US government was offering lots of money to the telcos, and presumably the promise not to prosecute. So the only company that got in trouble was the one following the law. And somehow the Qwest CEO that refused the deal ended up in jail. Meanwhile Dick Cheney is desperately trying to get immunity for the cooperating telcos for their crimes. See how that works?
So on the surface of things scanning and filtering our email might seem to be a bad busines move. But if the same US Government that got illegal telephone surveillance of US Citizens is also going for illegal surveillance of our emails, email filtering starts to make much more business sense.
It used to be that the idea of the US government secretly finding out what was in your emails was in the tin-foil hat realm. But the illegal surveillance of telephone calls would have been as well, along with secretly torturing people in secret overseas prisons. As well as "constitution-free" zones such as Gitmo that are paid for by US taxpayer dollars.
So if you have a government that scans your telephone calls, email, and web-surfing habits, you get very close to a goal of "total information awareness", which was one of the government's programs that was renamed and shuffled around after the public got very upset.
The same exact thing you said about "mind doping" holds true for "substance abuse" of athletes. Steroids don't magically give you a bulkier body. You still have to work out. You could almost say that all steroids do is compensate for lack of hormonal inclination towards building higher muscle mass. The exact same way caffeine helps you stay awake more and other substances help you concentrate (beyond what you'd "normally" be able to do). This is absolutely true. I remember college kids taking Ritalin to help them study. The things that it does for ADHD kids it also does for regular people -- it stimulats the brain and makes it easier to focus and concentrate on studying.
Meditation creats the ability to concentrate just like weight-lifting increases muscle mass. Ritalin and Amphetamines can give the same kind of shortcut to mental athletes (students and coders), but also at a high price. Studies have found that Ritalin has a greater effect on some brain systems than cocaine, leading some to call it kiddy cocaine .
Some side effects (just the central nervous system side effects) ilsted on an adhd website include :
5.Altered mental status (psychosis) 6.Hallucinations 7.Depression or excitement 8.Convulsions / seizures (excessive brain stimulation) 9.Drowsiness or "dopey" feeling 10.Confusion 11.Lack of sleep (insomnia) 12.Agitation, irritation, anxiety, nervousness 13.Hostility 14.Unhappiness (Dysphoria) 15.Impaired mental abilities (cognitive impairment on tests) 16.Jerky movements (Dyskinesias, tics, Tourette's syndrome) 17.Nervous habits (such as picking at skin or pulling hair) 18.Compulsive behavior 19.Depression/over-sensitivity 20.Decreased social interest 21.Zombie-like behavior
So there are very definite parallels between steroids and brain doping. Both can significantly enhance short-term performance in exchange for potentially high costs. Personally I have found that paying the price up-front in terms of time and effort spent in meditation has tremendous long-lasting benefits in terms of enhancing concentration, memory, reaction-time while also lifting moods and creating happiness.
If you want to teach people through headlines, the White House has deleted 10 Million emails and is getting nothing -- not even a slap on the wrist for it.
They're just teaching through example.
There's no way you can have a more egregious example of failure to comply with federal document retention laws, or a more important reason to retain the emails, but absolutely no punishment seems to be forthcoming. Neither half of our political party seems to be even pretending to want to do anything about it.
So why should anyone else get punished for failure to keep their emails or other documents?
Well the article is for registered users only so I can't read it, but I feel like there's something missing from this story. Some key detail like Dodele hanging around the contrustion worker's trailer constantly or something. Otherwise this killer is just using his son as an excuse for being batshit psycho Basically you are saying that the guy had to be somehow "asking for it". There are details like that that come out in some cases, but in this case it looks like a case of batshit psycho looking for a place to express itself. Another poster made the point about the killer already being on probation for assault with a deadly weapon.
But I do know that these lists cause a lot of problems in people's lives. I know a single mother whose ex-husband threatened her from Oregon because he found out that she (in North Carolina) moved near a registered "sex offender". (Never mind that the neighborhood that they used to live together in had 2 registered sex offenders on their block). So the ex-husband sends her a threatening letter saying that she has endangered his children by moving there and he will hold her fully responsible if anything happens to the children.
Never mind that the "sex offender"'s "crime" was to have sex with his girlfriend when they were both right around the "age of consent" (him slightly above, her slightly below).
These "sex offender" lists are just part of the "criminalization of America". If you are not on a sex offender list for peeing in the street, or on a drug offender list for smoking a joint, or traffic offender for exceeding posted speed limits, it just means that you don't leave the house much. We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population (according to Wikipedia) and that doesn't include the "sex offender lists" or other forms of punishment while not incarcerated.
So why is what used to be the world's richest country also the world's most incarcerated country? A British politician was shown in "Sicko" as saying that this was a tactic used to control Society -- if the people were demoralized they were easier to control. Is that the case or is America just crazy? We're certainly not "the land of the free" any more. And the government is now starting a hunt for "Homegrown Terrorists" as if we really had any.
If violent games lead to violent kids, then why has there been no upswing of violence in that demographic since the advent of violent games? Violence has actually declined and while that has nothing (provable) to do with video games, it sure as hell puts paid to any notion that violent games create more violent kids. Kids were more violent 20 years ago. There are different kinds of violence -- some are very obvious such as the murder and beatings you mention, but there are other kinds of violence as well, that are more insidious.
For example, which do you think is worse -- having someone beat you up, or cheat you out of $100,000 or even $10,000? The bruises would heal in weeks, but the financial damage could take much longer to heal. What if you got cancer and the insurance administrator got paid a bonus to disqualify you from treatment? What about the executives at Enron that cheated their employees out of their life savings? What about cheating with other people's spouses? There are many ways that people mistreat each other every day in many ways that make people suffer far morse than physical beatings ever could, and even make people wish that they were killed instead.
So a game where people actively work against the best interests of other people and delight in their misfortune does not have to literally produce murderers to have negative effects in society. Just training generations of children to laugh at the pain, suffering and misfortunes of others can slowly leach away at the humanity in our society, teaching people to be more cruel and to cheat others more.
The violent effects of video games don't even have to be confined to this country. For example, when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, most people I know were in favor of the invasion -- it was treated like another video game. The massive human cost of the effects of the war didn't even enter into the minds of most Americans I talked to, even though it's inevitable.
Most networks treated the start of the Iraq War as just another "Superbowl" type event, and very few Americans had the heart to even imagine the vast devastation the war would wreak on both Iraq and the US. Americans should have been horrified at the idea of attacking a defenseless country, but they cheered instead.
I am not saying that violent video games caused the Iraq war, or that they should be banned. I have enjoyed many fragging sessions with co-workers and would still enjoy it. But I also think every action has an effect, and those effects should be thought about. In a day when massive fraud of all kinds is causing the sub-prime mortgage market to fail, taking along banks and threatening our economy, and when our the best and bravest of our country are killing and being killed abroad, and coming home to commit suicide here at far too high rates, one of our biggest problems seems to be a lack of concern for how our actions affect other people. America is still a great country filled with great people, but our position in the world is changing, and we have a lot to think about.
It is already a totalitarianism state, you don't have to wait for it.
Your words are, frankly, insulting to the millions of individuals who lost their liberty, lives, property, and loved ones in REAL totalitarian states. Read the Gulag Archipelago sometime and get informed. The problem is, that the REAL totalitarian states never just appear fully formed. They go through stages. Germany before WWI had a constitution and elected its leaders in a democratic (or at least Republican, to be more correct) fashion. There were no gas chambers then.
Another example is that the Jews were forced to wear the yellow "star of david" on their clothes in 1938. If they were to complain about the regulations and say that they were living in a "police state", then by your logic they could easily be ridiculed because the concentration camps such as Auschwitz had not been built yet -- construction on those started in 1940. By your logic the star of david is just a patch on a coat, nothing to be worried about, right? So by your words and logic they would be "frankly, insulting" their future selves who would be dying in the gas chambers two years later.
The problem with your logic is that you are saying that a person cannot complain about the totalitarian nature of his country until he can be killed for just complaining about the totalitarian nature of his country -- a "catch 22".
America is definitely becoming less and less free every day and more authoritarian -- that is very easy to see. The right of privacy is guaranteed by our constitution, and when it is public knowledge that our government is publicly ignoring that constitution that is definitely the time to complain. Our constitution was created to protect us from our government and when our government starts treating it like toilet paper it is time definitely time to do something.
I honestly think you feel good about yourself through pretending you live in a totalitarian state for the same reason that Christians enjoy hearing stories about "persecuted Christians" in third-world hell holes. It is illegal for the government to do domestic warrantless wiretapping, yet they admit that they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to torture people, yet they admit they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to deny people their judicial due process by taking people to secret prisons in foreign countries, but they admit they are doing it. Anyone who does not understand that American rights and freedoms, like the right to privacy and t are disappearing has their head in the sand.
America is no longer the "land of the free and home of the brave" and it is very much high time for everyone to start recognizing that fact and start speaking up. Trying to say that our government is not repressive enough or authoritarian enough to speak up about it is ridiculous. The people who were tortured and killed at Abu Ghraib and other places at the hands of our government would not find those words "frankly, insulting". They would say that those words are an understatement.
When people in America joke on a regular basis that if you say anything against the government that you might be sent to Guantanamo, and when our elected officials argue about whether or not repeatedly drowning someone and reviving them is torture, you can be pretty sure that we have crossed the line that divides a free state and an authoritarian state.
This all seems great 'in theory' as in "look -- shiny new avatar! over There! instant portability!"
But the reality seems more like "all your logins are belong to us".
No one here has raised the government angle, but once you get all the logins coordinated to a central system, then it starts getting easy to lock people out of the internet.
For example, right now "sex offenders" (everything from child rapists to people caught pissing outdoors) have to register themselves everywhere, and trial balloons are being floated to do the same thing to drug offenders, creating your typical "slippery slope" situation. (For another example, the government swore up and down when Social Security numbers were created that they would not be a universal ID number for US citizens. Riiiight)
People who owe child support are currently being denied passports, and the government has their famous "no-fly" list but they have also created a new "no-work" list so that the "illegal aliens" (and possibly political activists) can now be denied jobs via an anonymous government database. So once you have your "single sign-on" to all your internet communities/services (for avatar portability), then it will be easy to start locking out "sex offenders" (to protect the children, of course) from the communities, and tie it to a Social Security Number (to prevent the sex offenders from just creating a new login or userid). From there it is a simple step for repressive governments to block that login / avatar from public discussions.
Our country has admitted "disappearing" people and has admitted "enhanced interrogation" (torture to anyone else), so it does fit the description of a repressive government. And Yahoo and Google certainly seem to want to jump at the chance to do this kind of thing for China and other repressive governments so it's not too much of a stretch to think of it happening at home. No different than your telecommunications companies spying on you for the government.
Senator Ted Kennedy somehow found himself on the terrorist "no-fly" list 5 different times when he tried to fly in the US after 9/11. So it would not be too much of a stretch to find yourself with a "Denied" message when you... [No Carrier]
Standing in front of a blackboard and addressing the students orally is an excellent method of education.
And interactive, for that matter. Children love to learn and explore, are usually constantly asking "why", and they love to explore and practice -- that's what "play" is all about.
The singular achievement of schools has been to take all the fun out of learning, so that you have a teacher droning on in front of the class, and 30 fidgeting students stuck in chairs trying to stay awake in front of him and keep from being bored off their asses.
The routine of boring teachers, brain-dead fact recitals, and rigid schedules punctuated by bells tends to drive all desire to learn out of students through a clockwork-orange type of negative-association technique. The principal result of all this is a person who can carry out orders and follow routines without challenging the system -- the perfect office worker.
"We categorically reject the idea that, in a society committed to the rule of law, jury nullification is desirable or that courts may permit it to occur when it is within their authority to prevent...
The government can't punish you for returning an acquittal, regardless of the reasons for doing so (and they're reluctant to ask if they do at all); but they can certainly (and should) prevent you from sitting on the jury if they feel your impartiality will be threatened by your personal issues. Jury Nullification has nothing to do with "impartiality."
It has everything to do with the reason for having a "jury of your peers".
The reason that we have a right to a jury of our peers (and not, say, a professional jury of lawyers or policemen or other vested groups) is that there is the understanding that unfair laws will get passed and unfairly used as weapons.
Rosa Parks was actually arrested and taken to jail by the police for the real crime of not giving up her seat to a white person. She did do something that was against Alabama law, so would you as an Alabama juror convict her and send her to prison? That would be your only choice, unless you knew about jury nullification.
Jury nullification is a fantastic tool that needs to be used more often, because we have too many miscarriages of justice in this country. 12 states have rebelled against marijuana laws and instituted medical marijuana policies so far, but the federal government insists on ignoring the will of the people and continues to promote "Prohibition 2.0". Should a person using marijuana for medical purposes be convicted if they are following the law of their state?
The system may not like jury nullification, but it is the best tool that jurors have to help stop the havoc that unfair laws can cause.
Oppose the censorship that is inflicted upon us NOW
Which censorship is that, exactly, anyway? You certainly seem able to say whatever you'd like here, without fear of political actions being taken against you. Now, certainly there are plenty of university professors that don't want to hear certain perspectives in their classrooms (or have to grade papers expressing them), and there are workplaces where some actions and attitudes simply aren't tolerated... but there is no central authority preventing you from dealing with those situations yourself (if by no other means, then by simply choosing another school or job). I don't have to listen to what you have to say, but that's not the same as censorship. And I can't call up the government and have you silenced (which WOULD be such).
It's the corporate censorship where stories that harm a corporation's relationship with the government are spiked. Do you really think a multinational corporation will pay lobbyists millions of dollars to get beneficial legislation, and then jeopardize those invested millions by criticising the government? For exaample, Rupert Murdoch's NY POST refused to print any stories that were critical of the Chinese government because he had business deals pending with that same Chinese government. He wasn't about to screw that up. Was that censorship? Sure it was.
Dan Rather got fired because he his employer wanted to suck up to the Republicans, and his story about Bush ditching his duty in the National Guard was not helping. He is suing CBS about it, and there's an interesting quote about the Internal CBS panel that reviewed Rather's story about the memo.
As the panel called witnesses, Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (CBS's owner), declared his interest in the 2004 election. "I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom," he said. In fact, Viacom had a number of crucial issues before the Federal Communications Commission, including loosening media ownership rules. "I don't want to denigrate Kerry," said Redstone, "but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people... But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."
So Rather is looking to have his day in court, because the memo never was proven false, and he wants to be vindicated. But the case exposes how Viacom was more interested in supporting and promoting the current government than earning money through a sensational story.
Censorship also happens when people get tased for using their free speech. Some Americans still think you can say whatever you want here, but you can't -- the guy who tried his "free speech" rights at John Kerry's lecture found that out when he got tackled and tased for merely asking a question and speaking out of turn. He was not doing anything except standing at a microphone and speaking freely, and got tased for his troubles.
Censorship shows up in other ways, too. You think you might have right to free speech and criticise the government, but you might then find yourself on a no-fly list (like Senator Ted Kerry experienced 5 times until he made personal call to the head of DHS and get it stopped) or on the end of other governmental harassment like political analyst Naomi Wolf, who is now on the "get-searched-every-time-you-fly list".
For serious censorship, look at the old FBI programs like "COINTELPRO" where trying to start a new party or being anti-war would get you harassed, beaten up, vandalized -- anything to stop you from being able to make a political change. Martin Luther King was surveilled by the FBI and blackmailed in an attem
Better yet, how about airplanes? If it's not really off at any time, isn't it illegal to take an iphone on a flight? I heard from the husband of a flight attendant that a phone (that was on) was left in the galley of a plane before takeoff. It got a call, and the radio waves of the thing turned on the coffeemaker.
I hadn't realized how powerful cell phone electromagnetic fields were.
The program was secret until 1971, when an FBI field office in Media, PA was burglarized by a group of left-wing radicals calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. Several dossiers of files were taken and the information passed to news agencies, many of which initially refused to publish the information. Within the year, Director Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over, and that all future counterintelligence operations would be handled on a case-by-case basis.[3]
Further documents were revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC correspondent Carl Stern, the SWP, and a number of other groups. A major investigation was launched in 1976 by the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, commonly referred to as the "Church Committee" for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho. However, millions of pages of documents remain unreleased, and many released documents are entirely censored.... The Church Committee documented a history of the FBI being used for purposes of political repression as far back as World War I, through the 1920s, when they were charged with rounding up "anarchists and revolutionaries" for deportation, and then building from 1936 through 1976.
No one would have known about all of this if it wasn't for the burglary, which got enough documents out there that enraged the pubilc, and so that lawsuits could get more information. We still don't know the whole picture, except that it was really bad.
You can say what you want in the US, China, Russia, or anywhere else in the world. No one is holding their hands over your mouth so that you cannot speak -- that's impossible, and if that's your standard, it is ridiculous. Repression of free speech happens when the government takes action against you for speaking freely, and tries to stop you from doing so. That was abundantly proven by the church committee when they investigated the illegal acts of the FBI.
When the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into stopping his civil rights work, how was that not limiting his free speech rights? When the government uses your tax dollars to stop your free speech from getting on TV, how is that not limiting your free speech rights? There are a ton more examples, it's not limited to those cases in case you are inclined to quibble. FBI repression was proven in court to extend to vandalims and violence, including murder.
The FBI has been tapping phones since day one. In the US they must have a court order to do it.
The FBI has also been abusing our rights since day one. They have been doing many illegal things in the name of "suppressing communist activity". Just check out operation COINTELPRO
from the linked article -- these are the methods the FBI used to suppress domestic political activity:
" 1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents." [5]
2. "Psychological Warfare From the Outside: The FBI and police used myriad other "dirty tricks" to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists." [6]
3. "Harassment Through the Legal System: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, 'investigative' interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters."
4. "Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI and police threatened, instigated, and themselves conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans [citation needed]), these attacksincluding political assassinationswere so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can accurately be termed a form of official 'terrorism.'". [7]
The FBI also conducted "black bag jobs", warrantless surreptitious entries, against the targeted groups and their members.[8]
Supporters of the FBI argue that the Bureau was convinced that there was such a threat of domestic subversion posed by radical groups that extraordinary efforts were required to forestall violence and revolutionary insurgency. Hoover was willing to use false claims to attack his political enemies.
As far as any restrictions on political speech? Not that I have seen. I am not fond of the patriot act but your rant is a little over the top.
That's because you have only been listening to the corporate media. If you actually do the research on the published activities of the FBI (and CIA as well) you will be shocked.
Here's what an official congressional committee that was tasked to study domestic intelligence activities said in 1976:
"Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence."
You haven't "seen" any of this stuff because our corporate media gets huge amounts of money in tax breaks and other forms of special treatment from the government, so the media is not wanting to upset the government in any way, shape or form. You w
if you can, give me one, just one example of a situation where you cannot survive in this world without internet access. i hypothesize that any daily activity you decree to be necessary involving internet access can, in and of itself, also be considered a luxury. In that case, roads and telephone lines are also luxuries, since you don't need them to survive. If you don't believe me, go check out 3rd world countries where people are surviving just fine without those, or even running water or sewer services.
America is not a 3rd world country, and we do not need to justify ourselves on a purely survival basis.
The reason you need roads and telephones, and broadband as well, is for participating in America's economy and society. The reason this is an issue is that America is supposed to be a "world leader", and a "first world country".
Countries in Europe like Denmark that have a population density roughly equal to the state of Florida have broadband penetration of 98%, with 95% of the population getting better than 2mps download speeds (as of 2005). I have seen rural farming areas there with about the same population as Gilmore where there was no problem getting DSL service.
If an area of America has roads and telephone service then it should have internet access as well. The fact that internet access is a virtual requirement to do business in America these days is reason enough to have it.
Jean Charles de Menezes died because many things wen't wrong that shouldn't have been allowed to go wrong. No, he died because police officers jumped on top of him and fired 7 bulllets into his head. Then they lied about the details to make the actions seem much more reasonable. The only reason that the horrifying truth came out was because outraged individuals risked their jobs and their freedom to make the truth known. The police still claim that the multiple CCTV cameras covering the incident were all malfunctioning at the time.
If you're going to use an example then at least use one that's typical rather than one that's unique. Unfortunately police brutality and consequent coverups to avoid the consequences of the brutality is unfortunately very typical. Each case is unique, but the overall pattern is far too predictable.
The original claim stands true. "Reasonable force" is a fluid term, and far too many innocent people die from police mis-application of "reasonable force".
Because spending more doesn't always mean killing more. Most of the money the US spends in R&D is into technologies that risk fewer lives, or are less lethal. Tossing a few guys with AKs into a meat-grinder is cheap. Firebombs that leave cities smoking ruins are cheap. Bulletproof vests are expensive. Smart bombs that only destroy limited targets are expensive. It's not about saving lives, it's just about spending money, period.
The truth is it doesn't really matter what the money is spent on -- the whole point is just to spend money, period. For anyone who doesn't believe this, President Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
If you still don't believe it, consider the fact that our Vice President, Cheney, is still getting a deferred salary from Halliburton. What his position is in Halliburton is not quite clear, but Halliburton's stock has gone up over 3,000% while he has been in office. Cheney also happens to hold nearly a half-million shares of Halliburton stock as well.
We spent about the same amount of money on the "War on Drugs" as we did in the Vietnam war, and we're spending even more in the Iraq War. From the viewpoint of the US Citizen, these wars were/are flops. From the viewpoint of the contractors who got the money in the past and are currently getting billions more, though, it's all been very, very, very successful.
Well, there is a big difference between what Scooter Libby did and what these guys are doing. Scooter was prosecuted for perjury. His "recollection" of a conversation was different than that of the guy he spoke with. No one was in danger over what Scooter did.
That's ridiculous, and a lie in itself. Outing an undercover CIA agent endangers the lives of everyone else abroad who ever associated with that CIA agent or other undercover agents working for the same front company and their associates too. People are routinely killed for being "spies".
If Scooter didn't do it himself, he lied knowing he would go to jail for it to protect those who did do it. Probably because they were higher in the administration than he was and would have gone to jail themselves for doing it. Libby was convicted of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one count of lying to the FBI about how he learned Plame's identity. One count of perjury sent Martha Stewart to jail, got Clinton disbarred and nearly cost him his Presidency, but you are fine with Scooter getting off "scot free" for far more serious stuff.
As far as the Patriot act is concerned, more people die of lightning strikes or bee stings every year than die in terrorist attacks. Traffic accidents kill 40,000 people a year, but you don't see us quivering in fear every time we are about to get behind the wheel.
The modding on Slashdot has gotten way out of control. It seems like too many Digg users are coming here trying to "digg down" any posts that they don't agree with.
If you don't agree with it, contribute to the discussion by explaining why it's wrong but don't just mark it as flamebait to hide it from people. Privacy is a legitimate issue and very important in the online world. People should also know when their data is probably getting added to government databases.
The post is accurate and well-supported. Slashdotters need to get bad karma from improper modding, not just from posting.
Slashdot Mirror
I can assure that they do absolutely do this, and it is really annoying.
It's really bad on uploads -- I just ran a test and I got 300 KB/s for the first 5 megs, then it degrades 100 KB/second over the next few megs, so that by the time you have uploaded 14 megs you are getting close to 40 KB/S in upload speed, and the connection is so bad that the shared digital phone line does not have enough bandwidth to have a phone conversation. Stop the upload and start it up again, and you get 330 kb/second, with the same degradation curve.
For downloads they do the same thing, but not so severely -- I downloaded a 67 meg file and it ran at about 750 KB initially, but then dropped to around 350-400 KB/S (according to the FTP app) about halfway through.
So for anyone using the connection for smaller file sizes (like the speed tests) you seem to get "blazing" speeds -- I ran the test at a couple of the internet speed test sites and they both think that I have 12000-14000 kb/s download speed and 2700 kb/s upload speed.
So if I didn't have any other way to measure it, I would think that I was getting way more than I paid for, rather than something that in reality is very pitiful.
Bugs are a part of life in the software world -- they're annoying and painful, but like death and taxes, there's no way of avoiding their existence.
But what I don't get is why this guy gets to have a personal forum on Slashdot to solve his problems. The guy is a vicious hypocrite who makes his living inciting attacking people all day and getting his audience angry.
Instead of the Orwellian "two minutes of hate" this guy puts forth a daily radio show full of hate and anger 3-5 hours a day (I don't know, I don't listen to the show) and I have heard the show and he is often inaccurate but very capable at seeding his audience with misconceptions and anger.
Before the Rwandan massacres, they had similar radio programs pumping the audience full of hate and anger with deadly results.
That kind of behavior has made him a wealthy man, but I don't see why it should get him any love from Slashdot, or any priority over anyone else who has technical issues.
Amendment IV of our Constitution: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. I would make a joke here about not welcoming our corpo-government overlords, but I wish I could find more of a sense of humor about this type of thing. The founders of our country knew this was going to happen, and worked extremely hard to avoid it, and the citizens of our country are sleep-walking right into it.
Here's Senator Dodd's thoughts about telecom immunity
password and can pretend to be you. Its a protocol that anyone can implement. I grant you that open ID sounds better than Passport, but you still have the fact that it's major companies pushing this product rather than the demand from the people. Microsoft's failed "Passport" program shows that people didn't really feel like they needed that program, even with Microsoft trying to stuff it down their throats by tying the "passport" in with MSN, Hotmail, etc.
The problem with a system like this is the issue of trust, and no one trusted Microsoft. I am sure some people are still using "passport", but it's nothing I have heard about in a long while.
First off, a single point of failure is still a single point of failure no matter how you implement it, but the second point is that the US government has been getting more and more intrusive by the month. Just a few stories below this one on the front page of Slashdot is a story about US border agents copying data off equipment going across the border and insisting that it is their right to do so. (All in the name of "protecting" you, of course). A few stories above this one is a story about the RIAA thinking it's not enough that AT&T is going to try to scan the entire internet for copyright violations, they want to put a filter right on your PC so you can't use encryption to get around the internet filter.
So once this single point of failure becomes widespread, then it would be trivial to make a law requiring all Open ID servers to authenticate to a government server -- you know, to "protect the children" from online stalkers, or stop "terrorists" from entering Second Life. It sounds ridiculous, but so is requiring a government ID to buy cold medicine (again, it's only for your own protection). Once you get enough big corporations signed on and enough people using this, then you can start requiring everyone sending email to authenticate to one of their servers to stop the spam problem, for example. Then your own little authentication server would suddenly not be good enough.
So even though it sounds ridiculous, there are plenty of precedents. When the Social Security card was introduced, everyone swore up and down that it would only be for getting benefits, that it would never ever ever be a national ID number. Of course, now you can't rent an apartment, buy a house, get utilities turned on at your residence, or get a cell phone without using that national identification number for authentication. Most of your transactions through credit or debit cards are also attached to that national identification number. You would think it's ridiculous that the US government says that it is worried that people might be conducting "terrorist activities" in Second Life, but it's true.
Getting back to the issue of trust, once the US government decides it needs to "trust" any authentication server "just to be sure you're not a pedophile or a terrorist", the frog is cooked. You might think it's paranoid not to trust a system like this, but large corporations (RIAA, AT&T, etc) and your own government are showing extreme levels of paranoia about your online activities right now, and the corporations have shown that they are very willing to sell your rights and privacies for a buck (or go to prison like the Qwest CEO if they refuse). So go ahead and trust these organizations that don't trust you -- but if you want to see how this is likely to end up, just go ahead and try to do anything important in your life without using your SSN as a national identification number. This system will only be "open" as long as it takes to get everyone to use it. If you still don't believe me, go try to buy real cold medicine without using any ID connected to your SSN.
This is just a really, really bad idea for anyone to actually use.
I dated a girl once who had a jerk for an ex-boyfriend. He had gotten her hotmail password and started forwarding emails from her account to me and others in an attempt to make her life hell, and changed the password so she couldn't lock him out. It was annoying but she simply created a new Yahoo email account, told her parents that someone had hacked her account, and went on with her life, but if all of her online activities (banking, flickr account, etc) were tied into that account he could really have made her life pure hell.
Now imagine a brutal policeman with access to government systems tied in to the Open ID system and you can see a lot of real nasty potential problems -- if he dates any women and they break up with him or even threaten to, sucks to be them. And government systems are naturally going to be tied in to this thing. It doesn't have to be a policeman -- all you need is a bad roommate or a failed relationship or someone breaking into your house while you're still logged in.
If you don't think the government would be interested in this, here's a link to a clip of failed presidential candidate Rudi Giulani advocating the idea
The Department of Homeland Security also now thinks that online services like "Second Life" are terrorist threats
The Pentagon also seems to think that the Internet needs to be treated as an enemy weapons system
So once this idea gets going and you actually only had one password through "Open ID" for all your services, there would now be at least a hundred easy ways for anyone to make your life hell once they got that information. Government or not, you have now made your entire online life vulnerable to a single point of failure (or tracking).
Stay away. Stay far, far away.
One of the huge bonuses associated with electric cars is reduced maintenance. There are no timing chains to break, no radiators to leak, no oil to be changed. Electric motors are highly reliable and very easy to fix. In the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" they discussed that the dealers did not like the electric cars at all because of the tremendously lowered need for maintenance and repair. (Of course the mechanics loved them because the cars were easy to work and and the mechanics didn't end up covered in oil and grease all the time)
If you really do a lot of extended road trips, you should get a gas car or hybrid, but for everybody else the electric car + renting a gas car occasionally would be the much better choice.
The answer I have to that is "9/11 Changed Everything".
Seriously -- when the US government asked the telcos to commit surveillance crimes against the US citizens, only Qwest refused. Usually, breaking the law is a bad thing, but the US government was offering lots of money to the telcos, and presumably the promise not to prosecute. So the only company that got in trouble was the one following the law. And somehow the Qwest CEO that refused the deal ended up in jail. Meanwhile Dick Cheney is desperately trying to get immunity for the cooperating telcos for their crimes. See how that works?
So on the surface of things scanning and filtering our email might seem to be a bad busines move. But if the same US Government that got illegal telephone surveillance of US Citizens is also going for illegal surveillance of our emails, email filtering starts to make much more business sense.
It used to be that the idea of the US government secretly finding out what was in your emails was in the tin-foil hat realm. But the illegal surveillance of telephone calls would have been as well, along with secretly torturing people in secret overseas prisons. As well as "constitution-free" zones such as Gitmo that are paid for by US taxpayer dollars.
So if you have a government that scans your telephone calls, email, and web-surfing habits, you get very close to a goal of "total information awareness", which was one of the government's programs that was renamed and shuffled around after the public got very upset.
Meditation creats the ability to concentrate just like weight-lifting increases muscle mass. Ritalin and Amphetamines can give the same kind of shortcut to mental athletes (students and coders), but also at a high price. Studies have found that Ritalin has a greater effect on some brain systems than cocaine, leading some to call it kiddy cocaine .
Some side effects (just the central nervous system side effects) ilsted on an adhd website include :
5.Altered mental status (psychosis)
6.Hallucinations
7.Depression or excitement
8.Convulsions / seizures (excessive brain stimulation)
9.Drowsiness or "dopey" feeling
10.Confusion
11.Lack of sleep (insomnia)
12.Agitation, irritation, anxiety, nervousness
13.Hostility
14.Unhappiness (Dysphoria)
15.Impaired mental abilities (cognitive impairment on tests)
16.Jerky movements (Dyskinesias, tics, Tourette's syndrome)
17.Nervous habits (such as picking at skin or pulling hair)
18.Compulsive behavior
19.Depression/over-sensitivity
20.Decreased social interest
21.Zombie-like behavior
So there are very definite parallels between steroids and brain doping. Both can significantly enhance short-term performance in exchange for potentially high costs. Personally I have found that paying the price up-front in terms of time and effort spent in meditation has tremendous long-lasting benefits in terms of enhancing concentration, memory, reaction-time while also lifting moods and creating happiness.
If you want to teach people through headlines, the White House has deleted 10 Million emails and is getting nothing -- not even a slap on the wrist for it.
They're just teaching through example.
There's no way you can have a more egregious example of failure to comply with federal document retention laws, or a more important reason to retain the emails, but absolutely no punishment seems to be forthcoming. Neither half of our political party seems to be even pretending to want to do anything about it.
So why should anyone else get punished for failure to keep their emails or other documents?
But I do know that these lists cause a lot of problems in people's lives. I know a single mother whose ex-husband threatened her from Oregon because he found out that she (in North Carolina) moved near a registered "sex offender". (Never mind that the neighborhood that they used to live together in had 2 registered sex offenders on their block). So the ex-husband sends her a threatening letter saying that she has endangered his children by moving there and he will hold her fully responsible if anything happens to the children.
Never mind that the "sex offender"'s "crime" was to have sex with his girlfriend when they were both right around the "age of consent" (him slightly above, her slightly below).
These "sex offender" lists are just part of the "criminalization of America". If you are not on a sex offender list for peeing in the street, or on a drug offender list for smoking a joint, or traffic offender for exceeding posted speed limits, it just means that you don't leave the house much. We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population (according to Wikipedia) and that doesn't include the "sex offender lists" or other forms of punishment while not incarcerated.
So why is what used to be the world's richest country also the world's most incarcerated country? A British politician was shown in "Sicko" as saying that this was a tactic used to control Society -- if the people were demoralized they were easier to control. Is that the case or is America just crazy? We're certainly not "the land of the free" any more. And the government is now starting a hunt for "Homegrown Terrorists" as if we really had any.
For example, which do you think is worse -- having someone beat you up, or cheat you out of $100,000 or even $10,000? The bruises would heal in weeks, but the financial damage could take much longer to heal. What if you got cancer and the insurance administrator got paid a bonus to disqualify you from treatment? What about the executives at Enron that cheated their employees out of their life savings? What about cheating with other people's spouses? There are many ways that people mistreat each other every day in many ways that make people suffer far morse than physical beatings ever could, and even make people wish that they were killed instead.
So a game where people actively work against the best interests of other people and delight in their misfortune does not have to literally produce murderers to have negative effects in society. Just training generations of children to laugh at the pain, suffering and misfortunes of others can slowly leach away at the humanity in our society, teaching people to be more cruel and to cheat others more.
The violent effects of video games don't even have to be confined to this country. For example, when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, most people I know were in favor of the invasion -- it was treated like another video game. The massive human cost of the effects of the war didn't even enter into the minds of most Americans I talked to, even though it's inevitable.
Most networks treated the start of the Iraq War as just another "Superbowl" type event, and very few Americans had the heart to even imagine the vast devastation the war would wreak on both Iraq and the US. Americans should have been horrified at the idea of attacking a defenseless country, but they cheered instead.
I am not saying that violent video games caused the Iraq war, or that they should be banned. I have enjoyed many fragging sessions with co-workers and would still enjoy it. But I also think every action has an effect, and those effects should be thought about. In a day when massive fraud of all kinds is causing the sub-prime mortgage market to fail, taking along banks and threatening our economy, and when our the best and bravest of our country are killing and being killed abroad, and coming home to commit suicide here at far too high rates, one of our biggest problems seems to be a lack of concern for how our actions affect other people. America is still a great country filled with great people, but our position in the world is changing, and we have a lot to think about.
Your words are, frankly, insulting to the millions of individuals who lost their liberty, lives, property, and loved ones in REAL totalitarian states. Read the Gulag Archipelago sometime and get informed. The problem is, that the REAL totalitarian states never just appear fully formed. They go through stages. Germany before WWI had a constitution and elected its leaders in a democratic (or at least Republican, to be more correct) fashion. There were no gas chambers then.
Another example is that the Jews were forced to wear the yellow "star of david" on their clothes in 1938. If they were to complain about the regulations and say that they were living in a "police state", then by your logic they could easily be ridiculed because the concentration camps such as Auschwitz had not been built yet -- construction on those started in 1940. By your logic the star of david is just a patch on a coat, nothing to be worried about, right? So by your words and logic they would be "frankly, insulting" their future selves who would be dying in the gas chambers two years later.
The problem with your logic is that you are saying that a person cannot complain about the totalitarian nature of his country until he can be killed for just complaining about the totalitarian nature of his country -- a "catch 22".
America is definitely becoming less and less free every day and more authoritarian -- that is very easy to see. The right of privacy is guaranteed by our constitution, and when it is public knowledge that our government is publicly ignoring that constitution that is definitely the time to complain. Our constitution was created to protect us from our government and when our government starts treating it like toilet paper it is time definitely time to do something. I honestly think you feel good about yourself through pretending you live in a totalitarian state for the same reason that Christians enjoy hearing stories about "persecuted Christians" in third-world hell holes. It is illegal for the government to do domestic warrantless wiretapping, yet they admit that they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to torture people, yet they admit they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to deny people their judicial due process by taking people to secret prisons in foreign countries, but they admit they are doing it. Anyone who does not understand that American rights and freedoms, like the right to privacy and t are disappearing has their head in the sand.
America is no longer the "land of the free and home of the brave" and it is very much high time for everyone to start recognizing that fact and start speaking up. Trying to say that our government is not repressive enough or authoritarian enough to speak up about it is ridiculous. The people who were tortured and killed at Abu Ghraib and other places at the hands of our government would not find those words "frankly, insulting". They would say that those words are an understatement.
When people in America joke on a regular basis that if you say anything against the government that you might be sent to Guantanamo, and when our elected officials argue about whether or not repeatedly drowning someone and reviving them is torture, you can be pretty sure that we have crossed the line that divides a free state and an authoritarian state.
This all seems great 'in theory' as in "look -- shiny new avatar! over There! instant portability!"
But the reality seems more like "all your logins are belong to us".
No one here has raised the government angle, but once you get all the logins coordinated to a central system, then it starts getting easy to lock people out of the internet.
For example, right now "sex offenders" (everything from child rapists to people caught pissing outdoors) have to register themselves everywhere, and trial balloons are being floated to do the same thing to drug offenders, creating your typical "slippery slope" situation. (For another example, the government swore up and down when Social Security numbers were created that they would not be a universal ID number for US citizens. Riiiight)
People who owe child support are currently being denied passports, and the government has their famous "no-fly" list but they have also created a new "no-work" list so that the "illegal aliens" (and possibly political activists) can now be denied jobs via an anonymous government database. So once you have your "single sign-on" to all your internet communities/services (for avatar portability), then it will be easy to start locking out "sex offenders" (to protect the children, of course) from the communities, and tie it to a Social Security Number (to prevent the sex offenders from just creating a new login or userid). From there it is a simple step for repressive governments to block that login / avatar from public discussions.
Our country has admitted "disappearing" people and has admitted "enhanced interrogation" (torture to anyone else), so it does fit the description of a repressive government. And Yahoo and Google certainly seem to want to jump at the chance to do this kind of thing for China and other repressive governments so it's not too much of a stretch to think of it happening at home. No different than your telecommunications companies spying on you for the government.
Senator Ted Kennedy somehow found himself on the terrorist "no-fly" list 5 different times when he tried to fly in the US after 9/11. So it would not be too much of a stretch to find yourself with a "Denied" message when you... [No Carrier]
And interactive, for that matter. Children love to learn and explore, are usually constantly asking "why", and they love to explore and practice -- that's what "play" is all about.
The singular achievement of schools has been to take all the fun out of learning, so that you have a teacher droning on in front of the class, and 30 fidgeting students stuck in chairs trying to stay awake in front of him and keep from being bored off their asses.
The routine of boring teachers, brain-dead fact recitals, and rigid schedules punctuated by bells tends to drive all desire to learn out of students through a clockwork-orange type of negative-association technique. The principal result of all this is a person who can carry out orders and follow routines without challenging the system -- the perfect office worker.
How else are we gonna fill all those cube farms?
The government can't punish you for returning an acquittal, regardless of the reasons for doing so (and they're reluctant to ask if they do at all); but they can certainly (and should) prevent you from sitting on the jury if they feel your impartiality will be threatened by your personal issues. Jury Nullification has nothing to do with "impartiality."
It has everything to do with the reason for having a "jury of your peers".
The reason that we have a right to a jury of our peers (and not, say, a professional jury of lawyers or policemen or other vested groups) is that there is the understanding that unfair laws will get passed and unfairly used as weapons.
Rosa Parks was actually arrested and taken to jail by the police for the real crime of not giving up her seat to a white person. She did do something that was against Alabama law, so would you as an Alabama juror convict her and send her to prison? That would be your only choice, unless you knew about jury nullification.
There was a guy in Georgia who spent 10 years in jail for the crime of "conspiracy to create marijuana" -- in spite of the fact that he was not found to have possessed or done anything illegal. His crime was knowing that some of his customers were using the equipment he sold them to grow marijuana.
Jury nullification is a fantastic tool that needs to be used more often, because we have too many miscarriages of justice in this country. 12 states have rebelled against marijuana laws and instituted medical marijuana policies so far, but the federal government insists on ignoring the will of the people and continues to promote "Prohibition 2.0". Should a person using marijuana for medical purposes be convicted if they are following the law of their state?
The system may not like jury nullification, but it is the best tool that jurors have to help stop the havoc that unfair laws can cause.
Oppose the censorship that is inflicted upon us NOW
Which censorship is that, exactly, anyway? You certainly seem able to say whatever you'd like here, without fear of political actions being taken against you. Now, certainly there are plenty of university professors that don't want to hear certain perspectives in their classrooms (or have to grade papers expressing them), and there are workplaces where some actions and attitudes simply aren't tolerated... but there is no central authority preventing you from dealing with those situations yourself (if by no other means, then by simply choosing another school or job). I don't have to listen to what you have to say, but that's not the same as censorship. And I can't call up the government and have you silenced (which WOULD be such).
It's the corporate censorship where stories that harm a corporation's relationship with the government are spiked. Do you really think a multinational corporation will pay lobbyists millions of dollars to get beneficial legislation, and then jeopardize those invested millions by criticising the government? For exaample, Rupert Murdoch's NY POST refused to print any stories that were critical of the Chinese government because he had business deals pending with that same Chinese government. He wasn't about to screw that up. Was that censorship? Sure it was.
Dan Rather got fired because he his employer wanted to suck up to the Republicans, and his story about Bush ditching his duty in the National Guard was not helping. He is suing CBS about it, and there's an interesting quote about the Internal CBS panel that reviewed Rather's story about the memo.
As the panel called witnesses, Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (CBS's owner), declared his interest in the 2004 election. "I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom," he said. In fact, Viacom had a number of crucial issues before the Federal Communications Commission, including loosening media ownership rules. "I don't want to denigrate Kerry," said Redstone, "but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people ... But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."
So Rather is looking to have his day in court, because the memo never was proven false, and he wants to be vindicated. But the case exposes how Viacom was more interested in supporting and promoting the current government than earning money through a sensational story.
Censorship also happens when people get tased for using their free speech. Some Americans still think you can say whatever you want here, but you can't -- the guy who tried his "free speech" rights at John Kerry's lecture found that out when he got tackled and tased for merely asking a question and speaking out of turn. He was not doing anything except standing at a microphone and speaking freely, and got tased for his troubles.
Censorship shows up in other ways, too. You think you might have right to free speech and criticise the government, but you might then find yourself on a no-fly list (like Senator Ted Kerry experienced 5 times until he made personal call to the head of DHS and get it stopped) or on the end of other governmental harassment like political analyst Naomi Wolf, who is now on the "get-searched-every-time-you-fly list".
For serious censorship, look at the old FBI programs like "COINTELPRO" where trying to start a new party or being anti-war would get you harassed, beaten up, vandalized -- anything to stop you from being able to make a political change. Martin Luther King was surveilled by the FBI and blackmailed in an attem
I hadn't realized how powerful cell phone electromagnetic fields were.
So in your mind there is some catch-22 that if you can speak about government repression that proves that there is none?
And Do you really think that the FBI would just decide one day to tell everyone the illegal things that they were doing?
from the Wikipedia article on COINTELPRO
No one would have known about all of this if it wasn't for the burglary, which got enough documents out there that enraged the pubilc, and so that lawsuits could get more information. We still don't know the whole picture, except that it was really bad.
You can say what you want in the US, China, Russia, or anywhere else in the world. No one is holding their hands over your mouth so that you cannot speak -- that's impossible, and if that's your standard, it is ridiculous. Repression of free speech happens when the government takes action against you for speaking freely, and tries to stop you from doing so. That was abundantly proven by the church committee when they investigated the illegal acts of the FBI.
When the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into stopping his civil rights work, how was that not limiting his free speech rights? When the government uses your tax dollars to stop your free speech from getting on TV, how is that not limiting your free speech rights? There are a ton more examples, it's not limited to those cases in case you are inclined to quibble. FBI repression was proven in court to extend to vandalims and violence, including murder.
The FBI has also been abusing our rights since day one. They have been doing many illegal things in the name of "suppressing communist activity". Just check out operation COINTELPRO
from the linked article -- these are the methods the FBI used to suppress domestic political activity:
As far as any restrictions on political speech? Not that I have seen. I am not fond of the patriot act but your rant is a little over the top.
That's because you have only been listening to the corporate media. If you actually do the research on the published activities of the FBI (and CIA as well) you will be shocked.
Here's what an official congressional committee that was tasked to study domestic intelligence activities said in 1976:
You haven't "seen" any of this stuff because our corporate media gets huge amounts of money in tax breaks and other forms of special treatment from the government, so the media is not wanting to upset the government in any way, shape or form. You w
America is not a 3rd world country, and we do not need to justify ourselves on a purely survival basis.
The reason you need roads and telephones, and broadband as well, is for participating in America's economy and society. The reason this is an issue is that America is supposed to be a "world leader", and a "first world country".
Countries in Europe like Denmark that have a population density roughly equal to the state of Florida have broadband penetration of 98%, with 95% of the population getting better than 2mps download speeds (as of 2005). I have seen rural farming areas there with about the same population as Gilmore where there was no problem getting DSL service.
If an area of America has roads and telephone service then it should have internet access as well. The fact that internet access is a virtual requirement to do business in America these days is reason enough to have it.
The gunning down of a 92-year-old grandmother in a botched drug raid was also a unique case, and so were the accompanying lies attempting to justify the actions and make them seem reasonable.
Here's a map of the details of all the "unique" botched paramilitary raids in America.
The original claim stands true. "Reasonable force" is a fluid term, and far too many innocent people die from police mis-application of "reasonable force".
Because spending more doesn't always mean killing more. Most of the money the US spends in R&D is into technologies that risk fewer lives, or are less lethal. Tossing a few guys with AKs into a meat-grinder is cheap. Firebombs that leave cities smoking ruins are cheap. Bulletproof vests are expensive. Smart bombs that only destroy limited targets are expensive. It's not about saving lives, it's just about spending money, period.
The truth is it doesn't really matter what the money is spent on -- the whole point is just to spend money, period. For anyone who doesn't believe this, President Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
If you still don't believe it, consider the fact that our Vice President, Cheney, is still getting a deferred salary from Halliburton. What his position is in Halliburton is not quite clear, but Halliburton's stock has gone up over 3,000% while he has been in office. Cheney also happens to hold nearly a half-million shares of Halliburton stock as well.
We spent about the same amount of money on the "War on Drugs" as we did in the Vietnam war, and we're spending even more in the Iraq War. From the viewpoint of the US Citizen, these wars were/are flops. From the viewpoint of the contractors who got the money in the past and are currently getting billions more, though, it's all been very, very, very successful.
That's ridiculous, and a lie in itself. Outing an undercover CIA agent endangers the lives of everyone else abroad who ever associated with that CIA agent or other undercover agents working for the same front company and their associates too. People are routinely killed for being "spies".
If Scooter didn't do it himself, he lied knowing he would go to jail for it to protect those who did do it. Probably because they were higher in the administration than he was and would have gone to jail themselves for doing it. Libby was convicted of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one count of lying to the FBI about how he learned Plame's identity. One count of perjury sent Martha Stewart to jail, got Clinton disbarred and nearly cost him his Presidency, but you are fine with Scooter getting off "scot free" for far more serious stuff.
As far as the Patriot act is concerned, more people die of lightning strikes or bee stings every year than die in terrorist attacks. Traffic accidents kill 40,000 people a year, but you don't see us quivering in fear every time we are about to get behind the wheel.
"Flamebait"?
The modding on Slashdot has gotten way out of control. It seems like too many Digg users are coming here trying to "digg down" any posts that they don't agree with.
If you don't agree with it, contribute to the discussion by explaining why it's wrong but don't just mark it as flamebait to hide it from people. Privacy is a legitimate issue and very important in the online world. People should also know when their data is probably getting added to government databases.
The post is accurate and well-supported. Slashdotters need to get bad karma from improper modding, not just from posting.