If that author had made a better case than "here's an emotional story; therefore Wikileaks is bad", then maybe you would have a point.
As it is, the bit about torture victims is a non-sequitor, and honestly I don't see how Wikileaks releasing these cables affects it. Let's just follow the chain of reasoning through, shall we?
1. The journalist meets with the school teacher and receives the torture photos 2. The journalist cables the torture photos back to Canada 3. Canada uses the torture photos as leverage to make the torture stop 4. Wikileaks releases the torture cables. 5. The journalist is kicked out of the country 7. The Canadian embassy is burned down 6. Canada uses the fact that the journalist was kicked out of the country and their embassy was burned down as more leverage, because now everyone knows what the country was doing.
I can't imagine how it would work out the way the author thinks it would - but then, he's used to doing things secretly, and not in the open. Do you think cockroaches understand the benefits of sunlight?
I've actually come to realize that I have what can only be described as "color dyslexia", especially with pink and purple. I can tell the shades apart - if you put something pink and something purple in front of me, I can tell you that they're different - but when you show me a pink item and ask me what color it is, half the time I'll tell you it's purple.
It's clearly some sort of cartoon character; further down the page there's a picture of one with someone's hand near it, and from the scale it's obvious that the thing isn't big enough to hold a significant quantity of explosives (certainly not enough to do damage to the structural elements of an overpass).
Huh, since it starts out in mythtv, what's wrong with just using mythcommflag? As a bonus, if the algorithm doesn't work, the original data is still available.
1) A person or small company makes a big invention. Patents keep big companies form stealing it from them and profiting off the work of others. Like if a 5 man company invented an amazing new wireless communications device that is cheap to make and effective. However since they are small, they produce them for $50 each. Motorola, being huge, can do it for $20 each. With no patents Motorola just takes their work and goes for it, and they get crushed being unable to compete.
It doesn't really work like that. Motorola says* "Hey little five man company, you see that nifty little amazing wireless communication device you just patented? Weeeell here's the thing - it's really awesome, but we've got these five patents on some fundamental wireless technology and our lawyers believe that the not-so-awesome parts of your device, the ones you'd need to make it actually work, will infringe on them. Now, either license us your awesome patent for a pittance, or you'll be stuck in court until you run out of money".
And that's why the patent system is screwed up. Companies with lots of patents in fast moving industries can use their current patent base as leverage against innovators, which is the exact opposite of what we want.
*That or Motorola just buys them outright - I mean, it's better to have those five dudes working for you than to have them working for themselves.
Sorry man, but your "it's all baryonic matter" hypothesis doesn't explain the Bullet Cluster. Feel free to try again when you can explain it using only baryonic matter, though - that should be interesting!
Yes, it was the "Blue Dog" democrats who opposed Obama, all of the Republicans were totally supporting him!
Oh wait, the Republicans were voting against everything, and throwing filibusters in on top of it; the "Blue Dogs" were just icing on the Party of No's cake.
The thing about Palin, though, is that she energizes both bases - there's gonna be the idiots who think "She's just like me, and I could totally run the country, so I'll vote for her!", but there's also going to be more intelligent people who are like "oh shit, there's a chance she might actually become president - I'd better vote for the other guy just to make sure she doesn't".
I'm not sure who'll have the higher turnout, but it's not all bad really.
Maybe we can finally get a party that is center-right, instead of overrun with right-wing radicals and religious nutjobs.
If that's what you want, you should be voting Democrat; after all, when the healthcare plan you so dislike was initially proposed, it was pretty much a copy of the Republican health care plan that was put forth back when Hilary started talking about health care reform in the 90s.
Of course, this makes things awkward for us center- and far- left voters, but you right-leaning voters are essentially spoilt for choice.
Who, exactly, is "kidnapping" the stories in this case? The people who are putting them in a publicly accessible format so that everyone can look at them, or the people who are keeping them behind an iron wall of intellectual property?
I was under the impression that it was the people doing the imprisoning that were generally the kidnappers, not the people granting freedom. Silly me.
That Assanage loves to spill the secrets of others doesn't mean he is the same way. You'll notice that Wikileaks has no part devoted to him. He hasn't released things like childhood photos/essays, financial information, and so on about himself.
As soon as Assange incorporates himself as a company, or writes himself a governmental constitution and declares personal sovereignty, you will have a point. Up until then, he's just a person, and Wikileaks doesn't really tend to "leak" information about mere people.
Exactly, where the hell did this meme that Assange is a "media whore" come from? I'd never heard it brought up at all until the "collateral murder" video was released, and then suddenly it seemed to be everywhere. Hell, the first articles I read about Assange all mentioned that he was reclusive and/or secretive.
What gives? Why has this weird meme stuck? Who came up with it?
Fundamental question, here: if these documents are "putting at risk the lives and the freedom of countless Americans and non-Americans around the world", how the hell did Wikileaks get ahold of them? If this information is so sensitive, how is it that an upstart organization like Wikileaks managed to acquire it?
Because honestly, anything that Wikleaks knows, intelligence agencies the world over have probably known for decades.
Seriously? Why are so many people reacting negatively to this?
Look, here's what happened: the researcher came up with some system for weighing the importance of events, probably kinda like page rank but with more structured information, and fed it a ton of historical data.
He then realized that from there, calculating the least important day (as defined by the sum of the importance of the events that happened during that day, I imagine - it certainly wasn't an average over the importances) was essentially just a query away.
Seriously guys, what's wrong with doing that? This researcher came up with a useful system that can answer this sort of question relatively easily, decided to ask the question and got a blurb about it in the newspaper. It probably took him all of five seconds to pose the question to the system, and then a max of maybe a couple of minutes for the system to spit out the answer. It's not like the whole thing is going to be tossed in the trash can now that this one useless question has been answered!
Apparently several of the motions always fail, but USCG still must respond to them or they lose automatically. This costs USCG and, to a lesser extent, the courts, more money than is necessary.
But I was under the impression that real lawyers do shit like that all the time? I mean, one of the fundamental ideas of game theory is that you should attempt to maximize your opponent's ability to lose, while maximizing your ability to win - and if we're not supposed to game the system like that, why is it even possible?
This really seems to boil down to the USCG saying "No fair! He's teaching the other guys the rules!"
I enjoy the U.S. strategic superiority over North Korea and other nations who would like to have ultimate strategic superiority over us. Wikileaks did not do an overall public good by releasing today's documents.
I love how, by the phrasing of your statement, "U.S. strategic superiority" == "an overall public good".
Given the incidence rate of terrorism in places that aren't currently destabilized, I would be totally okay with that informant not coming forward - because statistically, he is significantly more likely to be providing us with a false positive than a true one.
Seriously, you have to be pragmatic about these things; what's more important, the guy who may or may not blow some people up maybe if a ton of (very well-funded!) intelligence agencies fail in their jobs, or the fact that our government is right now sending American troops to die for absolutely no reason?
Yup, that's what I've been hearing - that the TSA is shutting down the naked people scanners today, presumably in order to deflate the number of people who opt-out of naked people scanning.
What I would really like to see is the number of people who went through the naked people scanners, as a percentage of the total number of passengers passing through airports today. If the TSA was purposefully shutting down the naked scanners in order to deflate the number of people who can object to going through them, then that sort of manipulation would show up in such a statistic.
Maybe we're getting to that point now, but I remember flying out of Seattle circa 2007; I randomly mentioned to someone else who was also going through TSA security that the only reason why we have to take our shoes off is because of some idiot whose plot didn't even work, and wouldn't have worked even if he'd managed to pull it off. The other guy shrugged and said "Well, it makes me feel safer."
So yeah. People hate flying, but they like how safe taking their shoes off makes them feel.
Uhm, she sold her old home, moved to wherever the new job was, and bought a new home? These things do happen, you know.
Though to be honest she should have been more cautious than to buy a house less than three months after moving to a new location; I mean, what if it doesn't work out (like this didn't)? What if she just hates the new position?
If the company wants you to have mobile email, they can pay for it themselves - after all, you're just as likely to not have a smartphone as to have one, so if the employer wants you to have one, they can provide it. I don't see why I should pay for a data plan on my phone that my employer can eat into. What - I went with a 100MB plan and you sent me 200MB of email? I'm not paying the extra $500 that usually costs.
At my old job, we would offer to reimburse smartphone plan costs if you decided to hook your personal phone up to company e-mail - with the caveat that if you did that, there was a chance that personal data on your phone would be wiped when you and the company parted ways.
Which is why we highly recommended the company-issued Blackberries.
Slashdot Mirror
If that author had made a better case than "here's an emotional story; therefore Wikileaks is bad", then maybe you would have a point.
As it is, the bit about torture victims is a non-sequitor, and honestly I don't see how Wikileaks releasing these cables affects it. Let's just follow the chain of reasoning through, shall we?
1. The journalist meets with the school teacher and receives the torture photos
2. The journalist cables the torture photos back to Canada
3. Canada uses the torture photos as leverage to make the torture stop
4. Wikileaks releases the torture cables.
5. The journalist is kicked out of the country
7. The Canadian embassy is burned down
6. Canada uses the fact that the journalist was kicked out of the country and their embassy was burned down as more leverage, because now everyone knows what the country was doing.
I can't imagine how it would work out the way the author thinks it would - but then, he's used to doing things secretly, and not in the open. Do you think cockroaches understand the benefits of sunlight?
I've actually come to realize that I have what can only be described as "color dyslexia", especially with pink and purple. I can tell the shades apart - if you put something pink and something purple in front of me, I can tell you that they're different - but when you show me a pink item and ask me what color it is, half the time I'll tell you it's purple.
It's really weird.
Yeah right. You can see an image of the thing on the Wikipedia page.
It's clearly some sort of cartoon character; further down the page there's a picture of one with someone's hand near it, and from the scale it's obvious that the thing isn't big enough to hold a significant quantity of explosives (certainly not enough to do damage to the structural elements of an overpass).
That was a total overreaction.
Huh, since it starts out in mythtv, what's wrong with just using mythcommflag? As a bonus, if the algorithm doesn't work, the original data is still available.
Well you have to admit, the strategy works really well.
The Democrats say "Here's something we'd like to fix, here's some legislation to fix it".
The Republicans say "No, we're going to block you every step of the way until you give up".
Then in two years when elections come up, they campaign on "The Democrats didn't fix it! Vote for us, and we'll fix everything!"
It doesn't really work like that. Motorola says* "Hey little five man company, you see that nifty little amazing wireless communication device you just patented? Weeeell here's the thing - it's really awesome, but we've got these five patents on some fundamental wireless technology and our lawyers believe that the not-so-awesome parts of your device, the ones you'd need to make it actually work, will infringe on them. Now, either license us your awesome patent for a pittance, or you'll be stuck in court until you run out of money".
And that's why the patent system is screwed up. Companies with lots of patents in fast moving industries can use their current patent base as leverage against innovators, which is the exact opposite of what we want.
*That or Motorola just buys them outright - I mean, it's better to have those five dudes working for you than to have them working for themselves.
Sorry man, but your "it's all baryonic matter" hypothesis doesn't explain the Bullet Cluster. Feel free to try again when you can explain it using only baryonic matter, though - that should be interesting!
Yes, it was the "Blue Dog" democrats who opposed Obama, all of the Republicans were totally supporting him!
Oh wait, the Republicans were voting against everything, and throwing filibusters in on top of it; the "Blue Dogs" were just icing on the Party of No's cake.
The thing about Palin, though, is that she energizes both bases - there's gonna be the idiots who think "She's just like me, and I could totally run the country, so I'll vote for her!", but there's also going to be more intelligent people who are like "oh shit, there's a chance she might actually become president - I'd better vote for the other guy just to make sure she doesn't".
I'm not sure who'll have the higher turnout, but it's not all bad really.
If that's what you want, you should be voting Democrat; after all, when the healthcare plan you so dislike was initially proposed, it was pretty much a copy of the Republican health care plan that was put forth back when Hilary started talking about health care reform in the 90s.
Of course, this makes things awkward for us center- and far- left voters, but you right-leaning voters are essentially spoilt for choice.
Wholesale kidnapping?
Who, exactly, is "kidnapping" the stories in this case? The people who are putting them in a publicly accessible format so that everyone can look at them, or the people who are keeping them behind an iron wall of intellectual property?
I was under the impression that it was the people doing the imprisoning that were generally the kidnappers, not the people granting freedom. Silly me.
As soon as Assange incorporates himself as a company, or writes himself a governmental constitution and declares personal sovereignty, you will have a point. Up until then, he's just a person, and Wikileaks doesn't really tend to "leak" information about mere people.
Exactly, where the hell did this meme that Assange is a "media whore" come from? I'd never heard it brought up at all until the "collateral murder" video was released, and then suddenly it seemed to be everywhere. Hell, the first articles I read about Assange all mentioned that he was reclusive and/or secretive.
What gives? Why has this weird meme stuck? Who came up with it?
You remind me of this guy I met while going through security at the Seattle airport.
Fundamental question, here: if these documents are "putting at risk the lives and the freedom of countless Americans and non-Americans around the world", how the hell did Wikileaks get ahold of them? If this information is so sensitive, how is it that an upstart organization like Wikileaks managed to acquire it?
Because honestly, anything that Wikleaks knows, intelligence agencies the world over have probably known for decades.
Seriously? Why are so many people reacting negatively to this?
Look, here's what happened: the researcher came up with some system for weighing the importance of events, probably kinda like page rank but with more structured information, and fed it a ton of historical data.
He then realized that from there, calculating the least important day (as defined by the sum of the importance of the events that happened during that day, I imagine - it certainly wasn't an average over the importances) was essentially just a query away.
Seriously guys, what's wrong with doing that? This researcher came up with a useful system that can answer this sort of question relatively easily, decided to ask the question and got a blurb about it in the newspaper. It probably took him all of five seconds to pose the question to the system, and then a max of maybe a couple of minutes for the system to spit out the answer. It's not like the whole thing is going to be tossed in the trash can now that this one useless question has been answered!
But I was under the impression that real lawyers do shit like that all the time? I mean, one of the fundamental ideas of game theory is that you should attempt to maximize your opponent's ability to lose, while maximizing your ability to win - and if we're not supposed to game the system like that, why is it even possible?
This really seems to boil down to the USCG saying "No fair! He's teaching the other guys the rules!"
I love how, by the phrasing of your statement, "U.S. strategic superiority" == "an overall public good".
Given the incidence rate of terrorism in places that aren't currently destabilized, I would be totally okay with that informant not coming forward - because statistically, he is significantly more likely to be providing us with a false positive than a true one.
Seriously, you have to be pragmatic about these things; what's more important, the guy who may or may not blow some people up maybe if a ton of (very well-funded!) intelligence agencies fail in their jobs, or the fact that our government is right now sending American troops to die for absolutely no reason?
If you throw enough shit at the wall, at least some of it is bound to stick - and nobody remembers the shit that didn't stick.
Yup, that's what I've been hearing - that the TSA is shutting down the naked people scanners today, presumably in order to deflate the number of people who opt-out of naked people scanning.
What I would really like to see is the number of people who went through the naked people scanners, as a percentage of the total number of passengers passing through airports today. If the TSA was purposefully shutting down the naked scanners in order to deflate the number of people who can object to going through them, then that sort of manipulation would show up in such a statistic.
Maybe we're getting to that point now, but I remember flying out of Seattle circa 2007; I randomly mentioned to someone else who was also going through TSA security that the only reason why we have to take our shoes off is because of some idiot whose plot didn't even work, and wouldn't have worked even if he'd managed to pull it off. The other guy shrugged and said "Well, it makes me feel safer."
So yeah. People hate flying, but they like how safe taking their shoes off makes them feel.
People are pretty stupid.
Uhm, she sold her old home, moved to wherever the new job was, and bought a new home? These things do happen, you know.
Though to be honest she should have been more cautious than to buy a house less than three months after moving to a new location; I mean, what if it doesn't work out (like this didn't)? What if she just hates the new position?
You don't need custom FPGA code for that.
Here's how it goes:
1. Virus waits for the user to enter in a password, any password.
2. Virus tries password on encrypted files.
Repeat until decryption is achieved.
No amount of encryption will save you from an untrustworthy program running on your machine.
At my old job, we would offer to reimburse smartphone plan costs if you decided to hook your personal phone up to company e-mail - with the caveat that if you did that, there was a chance that personal data on your phone would be wiped when you and the company parted ways.
Which is why we highly recommended the company-issued Blackberries.