My main point is that making sure that the military service is really spread around would help to personalize the costs. It is easy to support a war when it is strangers fighting in your name. Would people support the same war if it meant that they would personally know people who were fighting in the conflict?
And there are a number of anti-war folks around who make the same point, that the draft would ensure the political involvement of people because the their necks would be at stake, and this would prevent unnecessary wars.
And I disagree with them too, strongly. History has shown the larger American public to be easily manipulated. If only draftees could vote on a given war resolution that might be one thing, but just imagine that even today 25% of people polled say they approve of the job W. is doing. We are dealing with morons here, and I don't want those people to decide my (or my potential children's) fate.
Bottom line: except for *real* emergencies, let each of us choose our own actions, rather than having them decided by others.
And one final thought, consider this. You say that if we all had something (or someone) at stake we'd be more likely to resist a stupid war. But consider that if you are otherwise not politically active at all, you will be at a huge disadvantage when the time to resist a stupid policy comes along.
The draft as an anti-(stupid)-war instrument is utter fool's gold. Don't buy it.
If you seriously think that a draft would have stopped us from going into Vietnam (a war that had public support in the beginning just like Iraq, and for the same reason - well-practiced manipulation of public opinion by Washington), then God help you.
Interesting details, but this is ultimately a red herring.
There exist today situations in which commercially-held personal private data is accessible to non-US employees in, e.g., India. And there are no doubt situations in which commercially-held personal private data is accessible to US Citizens who have criminal histories that haven't been vetted by the ISP.
But the fact that we have unresolved problems with privacy in the commercial world should in no way serve as examples for what the US Gov't should be allowed to do with personal private data. It's a totally separate standard and with good reason, as lots of folks here have described.
Except for the post-employment part, alot of this is typical stuff. But folks in academia, who need the right to publish what they've done and may already have patent assignment obligations to their university for certain work, need the ability to modify the terms of these contracts. And, of course, so do open-source people, who may want the right to work on un-related stuff on their own time.
I recently helped an academic friend who was doing consulting on the side. He had a similar contract, and I helped him draft alternative language that preserved certain freedoms he needed. I think in part because we offered a concrete alternative, his company agreed. [I would have felt much better if my friend had run this by a lawyer, but alas...]
During that experience I was surprised to NOT find appropriate boilerplate contract language waiting for us out on the web. I think it would be a big help to both open-source and academics to have this kind of resource when confronted with old-school contracts. Have the lawyering done once, and we can all use it.
Kerr said at an October intelligence conference in San Antonio that he finds concerns that the government may be listening in odd when people are ``perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an (Internet service provider) who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data.''
Really, I don't need to read beyond this. Does the US have a privacy problem with personal data held by corporations without regulation? Yes. Does the US have a privacy problem with novel government surveillance methods without (serious) oversight? Hell Yes. Can one be used to excuse the other in any way shape or form? Hell no!
This guy should not be the standard bearer for the dialog that the US needs to have over privacy in the age of information technology.
Over the past year several of Novell's msGNU/Linux employees have left: Robert Love - beagle, kernel, now at Google Joe Shaw - beagle, not at ITA Software Crispin Cowan and the entire AppArmor team (fired en-masse) plus others I can't remember off the top of my head
Who of note is still drawing a Novell check? Miguel de Icaza, mono Nat Friedman, "chief technology and strategy officer for open source" (but mighty quiet lately) Greg Kroah-Hartman, kernel
Fast torrent this time
on
Fedora 8 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For past Fedora releases I've had slow torrent downloads (and I'm not even on Comcast). This time I downloaded at nearly full bore the whole time. I don't know why that is, but thank you seeds.
I hope the rest of you have called your Congressmen.
IIRC, the House already passed a bill without immunity. It's the Senate who is considering adding immunity to their version of the FISA reform bill. Then the two bills would go to conference, and a frankenstein of the two would be enacted.
So call your Senators. They'll be voting on this soon.
They do have a donation-only option, so you can do that if you want.
But plenty of geeks could use the XO for more than a toy. It's screen would make a good e-book reader. It's fast resume and long battery life, light weight, and solid state disk make it better than a standard laptop for grab-and-go type uses.
I won't drag my laptop everywhere, and my cellphone is too small and keyboard-less to use for much web/email or ssh. The XO fits nicely between the two. It looks very useful to me.
When the Comcast guy says they won't tell exactly what's going on because "spammers and other miscreants" might exploit that knowledge, that's the point he flushed his credibility down the drain.
This is exactly like the cynical use of the fear of terrorism to game our political system. (And that appears to work over and over again.)
This kind of thing is why the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice made recommendations to reduce wrongful convictions including: - mandatory recording of confessions made while in custody of law enforcement - corroboration of jailhouse informant testimony - standards for eyewitness identification procedures
The Commission is made up of law enforcement, prosecutors and defense attorneys. Their recommendations were embodied in three California Senate bills (SB511, SB609, SB756) and were passed by the Senate.
Governor Schwarzenneger vetoed all three bills. About the bill requiring the recording of confessions he said: "This bill would place unnecessary restrictions on police investigators."
So does this mean that communications with my bank (just for example) could be tapped under CALEA etc., since my bank's SSL certificate is maintained by Verisign? Or is SSL still safe so long as the bank itself doesn't cough up it's own private key?
As stated in TFA Comcast is not blocking BT downloads (that would piss people off). What they are doing is preventing seeding once the DL is complete.
Interesting. While BT-ing my copy of Ubuntu 7.10 yesterday I was watching the list of connected hosts, including several comcast customers. I wonder what their avg. share ratio tends to be by the time they've finished downloading and become unable to seed.
I assume that comcast does this to save money on bandwidth. But couldn't they accomplish this by encouraging BT traffic that stays within their network, while discouraging external transit? IOW, it's a net benefit to them to NOT send RSTs between a comcast BT seed and a comcast BT client.
Basket warrants aren't really warrants at all. They're just a blank check to scoop up lots of data without naming an individual like you normally need to.
I'm not sure if so-called "basket" warrants made it into the Senate version or not. If so, they should go.
I'm absolutely certain such systems would be greeted as liberators from the drudgery of all the planning we do now for these complicated military and political situations.
Your point pretty much aligns with the one I was trying to make via mostly historical example:
[b]Due to the fuzzyness of human thinking, it is easy for deceptive people to use Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt to prevent the general public from coming to a truthful conclusion about a given danger.[/b]
Good epidemiology is necessary by not sufficient -- you can have 99+% of scientists agree on global climate change, but the 1% that Exxon/Mobil funds get equal weight in the fuzzy public mind, leading to enough confusion to cause inaction. Same with tobacco. Apparently the same with Saddam and 9/11.
Also, the data is still out on Global Warming. Nuclear power is completely safe. Seat belts and airbags are unnecessary, and will ruin the auto industry.
By way of making lemonade, here's a post by an Intel engineer to ubuntu-kernel-devel about a proposed grub patch that would make resuming from hibernation much faster:
Below is the work theory of our "grub fast resume" patch The normal swsusp2 resume process is: "grub" -> "kernel" -> "initrd" -> "resume from the hibernate" Our "grub fast resume patch" can work as below: "grub" -> "resume from hibernate"
Our "grub fast resume" patch can resume the saved hibernation image from grub directly that will save much time to load and run kernel and initrd. The patch does not change any kernel code.
[I use hibernate on Fedora all the time, so I'd love to see a patch like this go in to Fedora's grub. Thing is, the patch is apparently based on swsusp2, and I'm not sure Fedora's kernel uses the swsusp2 version of hibernation.]
In a reply to the post, a debian guy points out that grub is legacy at this point, and that they are looking to move to grub2.
When the policy is written down and the lawyers get involved, they fence in a square mile in order to protect an acre.
You can blame the lawyers if you want, but someone had to instruct them that they wanted to add the right to pull the plug on anyone or anything that "tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries."
That could not have been added by accidental over-lawyering, IMHO.
I mean, at that time there must have been a zillion well-funded operations that would've hired you with a high salary *and* stock, given that you had actual experience running a high-volume site.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, so then you're telling us you were "big in Japan"?
A bit more seriously, I still wonder why iPhone excitement equates with Leopard though. It doesn't seem to over here in the US.
Then how about Johns Hopkins?
The truth is there, you just don't want to see it.
And there are a number of anti-war folks around who make the same point, that the draft would ensure the political involvement of people because the their necks would be at stake, and this would prevent unnecessary wars.
And I disagree with them too, strongly. History has shown the larger American public to be easily manipulated. If only draftees could vote on a given war resolution that might be one thing, but just imagine that even today 25% of people polled say they approve of the job W. is doing. We are dealing with morons here, and I don't want those people to decide my (or my potential children's) fate.
Bottom line: except for *real* emergencies, let each of us choose our own actions, rather than having them decided by others.
And one final thought, consider this. You say that if we all had something (or someone) at stake we'd be more likely to resist a stupid war. But consider that if you are otherwise not politically active at all, you will be at a huge disadvantage when the time to resist a stupid policy comes along.
The draft as an anti-(stupid)-war instrument is utter fool's gold. Don't buy it.
Yes, I have zero doubt about it.
If you seriously think that a draft would have stopped us from going into Vietnam (a war that had public support in the beginning just like Iraq, and for the same reason - well-practiced manipulation of public opinion by Washington), then God help you.
I'm beyond draft age, but there's no way I'd subject my younger relatives to being drafted for another BS war-of-choice like Iraq or Vietnam.
I would trust them to be patriotic enough to join up if they were needed to fight a *real* threat like WWII.
Holy crap. Is that normal now?
Interesting details, but this is ultimately a red herring.
There exist today situations in which commercially-held personal private data is accessible to non-US employees in, e.g., India.
And there are no doubt situations in which commercially-held personal private data is accessible to US Citizens who have criminal histories that haven't been vetted by the ISP.
But the fact that we have unresolved problems with privacy in the commercial world should in no way serve as examples for what the US Gov't should be allowed to do with personal private data. It's a totally separate standard and with good reason, as lots of folks here have described.
I agree with this.
Except for the post-employment part, alot of this is typical stuff. But folks in academia, who need the right to publish what they've done and may already have patent assignment obligations to their university for certain work, need the ability to modify the terms of these contracts. And, of course, so do open-source people, who may want the right to work on un-related stuff on their own time.
I recently helped an academic friend who was doing consulting on the side. He had a similar contract, and I helped him draft alternative language that preserved certain freedoms he needed. I think in part because we offered a concrete alternative, his company agreed. [I would have felt much better if my friend had run this by a lawyer, but alas...]
During that experience I was surprised to NOT find appropriate boilerplate contract language waiting for us out on the web. I think it would be a big help to both open-source and academics to have this kind of resource when confronted with old-school contracts. Have the lawyering done once, and we can all use it.
Really, I don't need to read beyond this. Does the US have a privacy problem with personal data held by corporations without regulation? Yes. Does the US have a privacy problem with novel government surveillance methods without (serious) oversight? Hell Yes. Can one be used to excuse the other in any way shape or form? Hell no!
This guy should not be the standard bearer for the dialog that the US needs to have over privacy in the age of information technology.
Over the past year several of Novell's msGNU/Linux employees have left:
Robert Love - beagle, kernel, now at Google
Joe Shaw - beagle, not at ITA Software
Crispin Cowan and the entire AppArmor team (fired en-masse)
plus others I can't remember off the top of my head
Who of note is still drawing a Novell check?
Miguel de Icaza, mono
Nat Friedman, "chief technology and strategy officer for open source" (but mighty quiet lately)
Greg Kroah-Hartman, kernel
For past Fedora releases I've had slow torrent downloads (and I'm not even on Comcast). This time I downloaded at nearly full bore the whole time. I don't know why that is, but thank you seeds.
So call your Senators. They'll be voting on this soon.
They do have a donation-only option, so you can do that if you want.
But plenty of geeks could use the XO for more than a toy. It's screen would make a good e-book reader. It's fast resume and long battery life, light weight, and solid state disk make it better than a standard laptop for grab-and-go type uses.
I won't drag my laptop everywhere, and my cellphone is too small and keyboard-less to use for much web/email or ssh. The XO fits nicely between the two. It looks very useful to me.
When the Comcast guy says they won't tell exactly what's going on because "spammers and other miscreants" might exploit that knowledge, that's the point he flushed his credibility down the drain.
This is exactly like the cynical use of the fear of terrorism to game our political system. (And that appears to work over and over again.)
This kind of thing is why the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice made recommendations to reduce wrongful convictions including:
- mandatory recording of confessions made while in custody of law enforcement
- corroboration of jailhouse informant testimony
- standards for eyewitness identification procedures
The Commission is made up of law enforcement, prosecutors and defense attorneys. Their recommendations were embodied in three California Senate bills (SB511, SB609, SB756) and were passed by the Senate.
Governor Schwarzenneger vetoed all three bills. About the bill requiring the recording of confessions he said: "This bill would place unnecessary restrictions on police investigators."
So does this mean that communications with my bank (just for example) could be tapped under CALEA etc., since my bank's SSL certificate is maintained by Verisign? Or is SSL still safe so long as the bank itself doesn't cough up it's own private key?
Interesting. While BT-ing my copy of Ubuntu 7.10 yesterday I was watching the list of connected hosts, including several comcast customers. I wonder what their avg. share ratio tends to be by the time they've finished downloading and become unable to seed.
I assume that comcast does this to save money on bandwidth. But couldn't they accomplish this by encouraging BT traffic that stays within their network, while discouraging external transit? IOW, it's a net benefit to them to NOT send RSTs between a comcast BT seed and a comcast BT client.
Basket warrants aren't really warrants at all. They're just a blank check to scoop up lots of data without naming an individual like you normally need to.
I'm not sure if so-called "basket" warrants made it into the Senate version or not. If so, they should go.
I'm absolutely certain such systems would be greeted as liberators from the drudgery of all the planning we do now for these complicated military and political situations.
Your point pretty much aligns with the one I was trying to make via mostly historical example:
[b]Due to the fuzzyness of human thinking, it is easy for deceptive people to use Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt to prevent the general public from coming to a truthful conclusion about a given danger.[/b]
Good epidemiology is necessary by not sufficient -- you can have 99+% of scientists agree on global climate change, but the 1% that Exxon/Mobil funds get equal weight in the fuzzy public mind, leading to enough confusion to cause inaction. Same with tobacco. Apparently the same with Saddam and 9/11.
Also, the data is still out on Global Warming.
Nuclear power is completely safe.
Seat belts and airbags are unnecessary, and will ruin the auto industry.
1. smoking gun, mushroom cloud
2. ???
3. Let's invade Iran!
Cellphone radiation? Look, a pony!
[I use hibernate on Fedora all the time, so I'd love to see a patch like this go in to Fedora's grub. Thing is, the patch is apparently based on swsusp2, and I'm not sure Fedora's kernel uses the swsusp2 version of hibernation.]
In a reply to the post, a debian guy points out that grub is legacy at this point, and that they are looking to move to grub2.
At Defcon15 Bruce Schneier has said that he prefers optical scan *by far*.
You can blame the lawyers if you want, but someone had to instruct them that they wanted to add the right to pull the plug on anyone or anything that "tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries."
That could not have been added by accidental over-lawyering, IMHO.
I mean, at that time there must have been a zillion well-funded operations that would've hired you with a high salary *and* stock, given that you had actual experience running a high-volume site.