When bad things happen, action is always taken. If it's a comedy then action is taken in favor of the victim. If it's a tragedy then the action is to repeat the bad thing and re-victimize the victim.
Maybe it's cynical but, in the US, I see more and more of the revictimization pattern. It's like an unwritten/unspoken Darwinian philosophy that if a victim is revictimized until they go nuts/get killed/commit suicide, then the problem is solved and there is no more victim.
----- the whole "we can't allow you to see/challenge the evidence/witnesses" ----- The US uses this premise for issuing tickets and harassing citizens. An officer serving a ticket for a noise ordinance violation will never ever tell you which neighbor made the initial telephone call. Speeding tickets don't require any witness other than the officer issuing the ticket.
Is this like saying "Don't sign your employee agreement because McDonald's is always hiring"?
Yeah... don't sign a government NDA... uh-huh... and then wonder why you're constantly getting pulled over for driving 2 mph over the limit, or because "you seem to be driving erratically".
It's not about enforcement or any paranoid big brother infringement. It's just about the potential for harassment. It doesn't matter if it's legal by the books or not if you're harassed into jumping off a cliff. Problem solved and no court case is needed.
I know that the legal community wouldn't agree with me since there's no way to actually make a move based on it...
But isn't this the core of terrorism? Where a government has threatened a citizen to the point where they seek anonymity and are afraid to talk about the current topics of the day? When they're constantly looking over their shoulders to check and see if they might be breaching an "approved topic".
Sure it's just one person but the implication is, well, enough to make me ill.
----- The "PATRIOT" act changes that so that librarians, ISPs, banks, etc. are forced by the FBI to spy on their customers ----- Schools have been using our most gullible resource, children, to spy on their parents for years. Children who are less than conformist are approached more often by counselors and teachers. They're engaged in more conversation and encouraged to tell things about the family. Human society, as a general rule, seems to be a suspicious lot of witch hunters always looking for the next witch.
I'm not so much worried about coordinated government big-brotherism. I'd like to hypothesize that Big Brotherism doesn't exist. It can't exist. It's too complicated to actually formally exist. What feeds the concept of Big Brotherism are individual abuses made by vindictive people who find themselves in positions of available power and who get their feathers ruffled by someone who isn't in a position of power.
Like McCarthy. He wasn't targeting all the communist pinkos. He only targeted the ones who personally got under his skin.
I guess the trick is to fly below the radar. But how does one fly below the radar when they're being squeezed by taxes which keep going up and and up and up?
I've noticed this on occasion. Once in a while I manage to squeeze out a really insightful thought which puts a new, fresh spin on something, and those are most often the posts which seem to never show up in my "last 24 of xxx comments" list anymore. Sometimes I can go back and find them manually in the original discussion, sometimes I can't.
I always wondered if that was active editorial review or if the indexes/disks/databases were simply hiccuping at oddly predictable times. I guess I have my answer now.
I agree. The FBI probably does its homework on the employees and figures out a good secure contact point before they just mail the NSL to the front-desk secretary.
That's fine and dandy in principle but, in reality, any citizen who tries this will find themselves in jail or jobless/homeless within a few years unless they're independently wealthy.
Independent wealth solves about 99% of problems as long as the person is careful and doesn't attract any outside attention.
Usually I find I'm getting trolled by the ACs, but this time I agree with one.
----- these are democratically elected dectorships ----- I've been forwarding this same idea for years and usually I'm beaten down by mid-level yuppies who are ultimately convinced that anything with the word "democracy" (or its variants) can't possibly be bad for anyone. It's like using the vocal intonation of "dem-ok-ra" sends off a sensor in their brain which causes them to think of a perfect utopia, and everything else is blissfully ignored.
----- Ditto the US feds ----- Due to the heavyweight nature of this sort of thing, as evidenced by all the gag orders on the case itself, I'm guessing that even mid managers at the ISP would never even know if someone presented an NLS letter to the ISP. The person that _is_ told about it is probably also told that, if word of it gets out to anyone, they can be prosecuted under federal law for espionage or somesuch.
The article specifically says,"the law that prohibits an entity that receives a National Security Letter request for information from telling anyone about the request." Perhaps the president of the company receives the letter and is forced to comply without telling anyone else.
----- its in your power to sack them if you are unhappy with what they are doing ----- That must be the special formula crack#9 you're smoking.
----- Start explaining vociferously to you CongressPerson/Senator what the issue is and act with your ballot ----- There's no one else to vote for. Dems and Pubs, same body, different head.
----- Its becoming a concern that the US its leaders and institutions are becoming more and more isolated from the people they are supposed to represent and serve ----- I'm not going to go tin-foil over the gov't vs. people aspect. I'm more concerned about the petty abuses of power. Say the business exec down the road gets a case of small-penis syndrome because you decided to make fun of middle-aged guys who need Viagra to get it up. Say he talks with his business buddies at the exclusive golf club, the one with the $25k yearly membership, and eventually word gets around and they happen to brush shoulders with someone who can get one of these NSLs. It gets quietly served and honored by the guy over on tee 6 who sits as a VP of the local ISP, and next thing you know you're getting harangued to death and losing your mind 'cuz everyone at work seems to have an inside clue of what your personal likes and dislikes are and you're now the target of an ultimate mind-fsck.
I don't give a rats butt about the gov't anymore. They're big, bad, ugly, and they're going to do whatever they're going to do. I'm now devoting my attention to the petty, vindictive nature of self-important, arrogant, wealthy humans who have skin as thin as crepe paper.
We'll see how many 90s and 2k family albums stored on digital CD are still available in 50 years, as opposed to all this "inferior film" that we still have from the 1800s.
I did approve the offtopic in M2 but I'd like to add to this.
I feel the same way about "touch base". Every time I hear someone use the term "touch base" I get the impression that they want to keep in contact because the association is doing far more to benefit them than it is to benefit me. I guess I've just been screwed over by too many managers who always want to "touch base". Funny how they never want to "touch base" about increasing my salary or promoting me. It's always just to ride my backside.
This is where I'm hoping that, sometime in the next year or two, I get to be an in-house support manager for some large company which wants to migrate to open source software.
I knew it. It's all subjective and heavily weighted to the personal bias of the individual DAA. eg. The DAA knows bo-diddly about OS design, knows bo-diddly about Linux, and MS receives a free pass while everything else gets the critical eye at the third degree.
I'm not surprised. That's pretty much the way of the world.
Rarely do we ever see such a sugarcoated description of the hamster-wheel useless nature of jumping through hoops, hurdles, and doing a song and dance to justify our right to exist and earn a living.
One day we're going to fire the managers and keep the money for ourselves.
And using DRM they could even preload your player with the song if they're GPS system detects that you are approaching the poster. If you tap the poster then the system has preemptively served you better. If you don't tap the poster then the software could delete the tune from the player.
I wouldn't call it hatred. More "realistic". Every administration, including the current one, tends to skew the numbers in their favor especially in election years.
The average weekly earnings for private sector employment is $545.38? I barely make that with a top-notch education. Is it possible that number is skewed by the all-time high of CEO compensation disproportionately skewing the scale? $525/week, here in the US, barely pays the bills. Knock of 30% for taxes, then knock of 6% sales tax on any money that's spent and even a $600 rent, with $50 electric, and a $30 telephone, plus an average $450 food ($15/day), and $50 car insurance, plus at least $20/week for gas. It starts to get pretty thin on just basic living expenses. Heaven forbid anyone's paying college loans. We're in the red before we ever get out of the gate.
If I'm blinded by this supposed "hatred", you're blinded by a perfect naivete.
How about the search of many of the network binaries which returns "Regents of California"? Unless MS decides to bare out all of their source code then the only evidence is behavioral analysis.
Proprietary software companies could pirate the entire GNU/FSF/Linux/OSS library, charge $500/copy for it, never credit, employ, or even acknowledge the original authors, and the burden of proof would lie with some high school kid who can't even afford to have a consultation session with an IP lawyer--much less be taken seriously. Yet the trolls will argue to their death that there's nothing wrong with the current system of IP, copyrights, and patents.
----- Chemical weapons are WMDs ----- How about a definition before you start nutcasing around?
Your lawn fertilizer could be a "chemical weapon" if you keep it in an unmarked jar in your garage. I don't think the police are worried about you. The mustard/sarin was just another case of finding what they wanted to find. How do they know that some disgruntled Palestinian didn't drop those shells off the back of a recent truck? We can't even guard the US borders very tightly. Who's to say that a bunch of Syrians didn't drive through sometime in the last year while the warmongers have been scrambling to find any old leaky barrel of chemical waste from a petro refinery to label as a WMD?
Slashdot Mirror
Am I going to get red-flagged as a terrorist by Carnivore/Echelon if I click that link?
Even the Tony Blair quote is suspect.
When bad things happen, action is always taken. If it's a comedy then action is taken in favor of the victim. If it's a tragedy then the action is to repeat the bad thing and re-victimize the victim.
Maybe it's cynical but, in the US, I see more and more of the revictimization pattern. It's like an unwritten/unspoken Darwinian philosophy that if a victim is revictimized until they go nuts/get killed/commit suicide, then the problem is solved and there is no more victim.
Rather morbid...
-----
the whole "we can't allow you to see/challenge the evidence/witnesses"
-----
The US uses this premise for issuing tickets and harassing citizens. An officer serving a ticket for a noise ordinance violation will never ever tell you which neighbor made the initial telephone call. Speeding tickets don't require any witness other than the officer issuing the ticket.
YUCK!
Such an inflammatory post is unworthy of the holy Amiga checkmark at the bottom.
Is this like saying "Don't sign your employee agreement because McDonald's is always hiring"?
Yeah... don't sign a government NDA... uh-huh... and then wonder why you're constantly getting pulled over for driving 2 mph over the limit, or because "you seem to be driving erratically".
It's not about enforcement or any paranoid big brother infringement. It's just about the potential for harassment. It doesn't matter if it's legal by the books or not if you're harassed into jumping off a cliff. Problem solved and no court case is needed.
I know that the legal community wouldn't agree with me since there's no way to actually make a move based on it...
But isn't this the core of terrorism? Where a government has threatened a citizen to the point where they seek anonymity and are afraid to talk about the current topics of the day? When they're constantly looking over their shoulders to check and see if they might be breaching an "approved topic".
Sure it's just one person but the implication is, well, enough to make me ill.
-----
The "PATRIOT" act changes that so that librarians, ISPs, banks, etc. are forced by the FBI to spy on their customers
-----
Schools have been using our most gullible resource, children, to spy on their parents for years. Children who are less than conformist are approached more often by counselors and teachers. They're engaged in more conversation and encouraged to tell things about the family. Human society, as a general rule, seems to be a suspicious lot of witch hunters always looking for the next witch.
I'm not so much worried about coordinated government big-brotherism. I'd like to hypothesize that Big Brotherism doesn't exist. It can't exist. It's too complicated to actually formally exist. What feeds the concept of Big Brotherism are individual abuses made by vindictive people who find themselves in positions of available power and who get their feathers ruffled by someone who isn't in a position of power.
Like McCarthy. He wasn't targeting all the communist pinkos. He only targeted the ones who personally got under his skin.
I guess the trick is to fly below the radar. But how does one fly below the radar when they're being squeezed by taxes which keep going up and and up and up?
I've noticed this on occasion. Once in a while I manage to squeeze out a really insightful thought which puts a new, fresh spin on something, and those are most often the posts which seem to never show up in my "last 24 of xxx comments" list anymore. Sometimes I can go back and find them manually in the original discussion, sometimes I can't.
I always wondered if that was active editorial review or if the indexes/disks/databases were simply hiccuping at oddly predictable times. I guess I have my answer now.
I agree. The FBI probably does its homework on the employees and figures out a good secure contact point before they just mail the NSL to the front-desk secretary.
I know. It's the way of the world. The blind lead the blind and the leaders are chosen by a rigged popularity contest.
Makes me wonder why I bothered trying to excel at anything.
A dozen well informed and intelligent people don't stand a chance against a million television addicts.
Even if they did it's still the dog and pony show. Dems and Pubs, two heads, same body.
That's fine and dandy in principle but, in reality, any citizen who tries this will find themselves in jail or jobless/homeless within a few years unless they're independently wealthy.
Independent wealth solves about 99% of problems as long as the person is careful and doesn't attract any outside attention.
Usually I find I'm getting trolled by the ACs, but this time I agree with one.
-----
these are democratically elected dectorships
-----
I've been forwarding this same idea for years and usually I'm beaten down by mid-level yuppies who are ultimately convinced that anything with the word "democracy" (or its variants) can't possibly be bad for anyone. It's like using the vocal intonation of "dem-ok-ra" sends off a sensor in their brain which causes them to think of a perfect utopia, and everything else is blissfully ignored.
-----
Ditto the US feds
-----
Due to the heavyweight nature of this sort of thing, as evidenced by all the gag orders on the case itself, I'm guessing that even mid managers at the ISP would never even know if someone presented an NLS letter to the ISP. The person that _is_ told about it is probably also told that, if word of it gets out to anyone, they can be prosecuted under federal law for espionage or somesuch.
The article specifically says,"the law that prohibits an entity that receives a National Security Letter request for information from telling anyone about the request." Perhaps the president of the company receives the letter and is forced to comply without telling anyone else.
-----
its in your power to sack them if you are unhappy with what they are doing
-----
That must be the special formula crack#9 you're smoking.
-----
Start explaining vociferously to you CongressPerson/Senator what the issue is and act with your ballot
-----
There's no one else to vote for. Dems and Pubs, same body, different head.
-----
Its becoming a concern that the US its leaders and institutions are becoming more and more isolated from the people they are supposed to represent and serve
-----
I'm not going to go tin-foil over the gov't vs. people aspect. I'm more concerned about the petty abuses of power. Say the business exec down the road gets a case of small-penis syndrome because you decided to make fun of middle-aged guys who need Viagra to get it up. Say he talks with his business buddies at the exclusive golf club, the one with the $25k yearly membership, and eventually word gets around and they happen to brush shoulders with someone who can get one of these NSLs. It gets quietly served and honored by the guy over on tee 6 who sits as a VP of the local ISP, and next thing you know you're getting harangued to death and losing your mind 'cuz everyone at work seems to have an inside clue of what your personal likes and dislikes are and you're now the target of an ultimate mind-fsck.
I don't give a rats butt about the gov't anymore. They're big, bad, ugly, and they're going to do whatever they're going to do. I'm now devoting my attention to the petty, vindictive nature of self-important, arrogant, wealthy humans who have skin as thin as crepe paper.
We'll see how many 90s and 2k family albums stored on digital CD are still available in 50 years, as opposed to all this "inferior film" that we still have from the 1800s.
I did approve the offtopic in M2 but I'd like to add to this.
I feel the same way about "touch base". Every time I hear someone use the term "touch base" I get the impression that they want to keep in contact because the association is doing far more to benefit them than it is to benefit me. I guess I've just been screwed over by too many managers who always want to "touch base". Funny how they never want to "touch base" about increasing my salary or promoting me. It's always just to ride my backside.
This is where I'm hoping that, sometime in the next year or two, I get to be an in-house support manager for some large company which wants to migrate to open source software.
I knew it. It's all subjective and heavily weighted to the personal bias of the individual DAA. eg. The DAA knows bo-diddly about OS design, knows bo-diddly about Linux, and MS receives a free pass while everything else gets the critical eye at the third degree.
I'm not surprised. That's pretty much the way of the world.
Rarely do we ever see such a sugarcoated description of the hamster-wheel useless nature of jumping through hoops, hurdles, and doing a song and dance to justify our right to exist and earn a living.
:)
One day we're going to fire the managers and keep the money for ourselves.
Good job!
And using DRM they could even preload your player with the song if they're GPS system detects that you are approaching the poster. If you tap the poster then the system has preemptively served you better. If you don't tap the poster then the software could delete the tune from the player.
I wouldn't call it hatred. More "realistic". Every administration, including the current one, tends to skew the numbers in their favor especially in election years.
The average weekly earnings for private sector employment is $545.38? I barely make that with a top-notch education. Is it possible that number is skewed by the all-time high of CEO compensation disproportionately skewing the scale? $525/week, here in the US, barely pays the bills. Knock of 30% for taxes, then knock of 6% sales tax on any money that's spent and even a $600 rent, with $50 electric, and a $30 telephone, plus an average $450 food ($15/day), and $50 car insurance, plus at least $20/week for gas. It starts to get pretty thin on just basic living expenses. Heaven forbid anyone's paying college loans. We're in the red before we ever get out of the gate.
If I'm blinded by this supposed "hatred", you're blinded by a perfect naivete.
How about the search of many of the network binaries which returns "Regents of California"? Unless MS decides to bare out all of their source code then the only evidence is behavioral analysis.
Proprietary software companies could pirate the entire GNU/FSF/Linux/OSS library, charge $500/copy for it, never credit, employ, or even acknowledge the original authors, and the burden of proof would lie with some high school kid who can't even afford to have a consultation session with an IP lawyer--much less be taken seriously. Yet the trolls will argue to their death that there's nothing wrong with the current system of IP, copyrights, and patents.
Sure, and then get blasted by the industry trolls who will say,"See? We expose them and now they clam up!"
-----
Chemical weapons are WMDs
-----
How about a definition before you start nutcasing around?
Your lawn fertilizer could be a "chemical weapon" if you keep it in an unmarked jar in your garage. I don't think the police are worried about you. The mustard/sarin was just another case of finding what they wanted to find. How do they know that some disgruntled Palestinian didn't drop those shells off the back of a recent truck? We can't even guard the US borders very tightly. Who's to say that a bunch of Syrians didn't drive through sometime in the last year while the warmongers have been scrambling to find any old leaky barrel of chemical waste from a petro refinery to label as a WMD?