Now imagine what would have happened if Snowden had provided his materials only to the NY Times. Oh, wait, we don't have to imagine. We know what would have happened because previous leakers did that, only to find the NYT was already under the thumb and they chose not to publish.
Yeah, like they chose not to publish the papers Daniel Ellsberg released to them! Oh, wait...
Electorally, the rich are way dis-empowered compared to the masses, whether based on simple capita counts, or contributions to the treasury, or indeed receipts from the treasury.
Nice obfuscation. The problem with political contributions is that they purchase access. If I contribute $5000 to a senator's campaign, and you contribute $0, which of us is more likely to be able to get a meeting with him/her? The ability to call a politician on the phone and have them take your call, personally is worth much more than the value of a vote.
The meme going around is that people are increasingly being mugged in major cities specifically for their smartphones. I don't know if that's real or not, but the cops in several places (SanFran, NYC, LA) are saying it is.
Ya know, this is a trend that is really beginning to piss me off. In the beginning, one of the best things about UNIX/Linux was that the documentation was all, always, locally-available. And, for the most part, to read it you just had to type "man whatever". Yes, manpages were not known for their readability, but they did (usually) have all the info you needed. Now, for so many projects, the documentation is all somewhere on teh Interwebs, or (at best) you have to find/usr/share/doc/program-version/ and, if you're lucky, there will be some documentation there.
Would it hurt GNOME/KDE/whatever devs to at least include basic manpages in their packages? Why can't aI type "man evolution" to see what command switches might be available, or to get some kind of tips?
I thought the 'common carrier' status meant they were required to send everything without preference. Because since if they lost their common carrier status, they'd be responsible for things like child porn.
Once again, for, I dunno, maybe the thousandth time here, ISPs are explicitly NOT Common Carriers in the US (I don't know about other countries), but Enhanced Services or Information Services. The ISPs fought against Common Carrier status for lots of reasons , such as being exempted from usage or access charges from the backbone providers (who are Common Carriers).
Just discovered - if you zoom to > 150% in Chrome/Chromium, the annoying sidebars and the top "menu" junk all disappear - you just get the stories/comments, and at higher zoom factors the text flows properly.
Federal marijuana prohibition is not a law, it is a usurpation. It took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, and that amendment was repealed. There is no legal authority whatsoever for the federal government to ban a drug.
-jcr
Actually, the basis for present-day prohibition of marijuana is the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, which updated the Paris Convention of 1931. The Paris Convention was targeted at opioids, while the Single Convention of 1931 added cannabis and other drugs, as well as establishing the "Schedules" of drugs used today. Since the Single Convention is a treaty, it had to be ratified by the US Senate (in 1967), and has the same force as any other law or provision of the Constitution itself (see Art. VI, US Constitution). Thus, no Amendment was required to allow Congress to pass legislation implementing the Convention.
I just want to see better cruise control - more akin to actual autopilot. Especially on freeways, I should be able to tell the vehicle "maintain this speed, stay in the lane (modify speed as needed wrt other vehicles/road conditions) until point X" and not worry about it. I'll handle city street/"last mile" driving myself.
Yes - ignore FOX. I have the real scoop from Rush:
RUSH: Folks, you can try to get to the New York Times story on the Clinton Global Initiative on the Web. I don't think you can. It's been taken down. Well, I don't know if it's been taken down or they just ended the access to it. But don't worry, I have enough of it for certain pull quotes. Oh, the whole website's inaccessible, so maybe the Times got hacked. Okay, Times got hacked. I thought just that one story pulled down. All right. It's obviously the Clinton story, the expose of the Clinton Global Initiative that's resulted in the Times website being hacked. The story is in the UK Telegraph, by Tim Stanley. "The New York Times Takes Down the Clinton Foundation. This Could Be Devastating for Bill and Hillary," is the headline. The lead is, "Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh?"
Using roundup ready GMO means roundup is used on the plant, and you get roundup in you food. Using BT-producing GMO means there is botulism toxin on your food. Are you sure about the consequences?
Uhh... Bt-producing GMO plants have a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis in their DNA. Bt has been used for years as an alternative to more-harmful pesticides, and can even be used on certified organic crops. It has nothing whatever to do with botulism (from Clostridium botulinum).
You really should make sure you know what you're talking about before you make outrageous and trivially refutable statements. Just sayin'
OK (Karma whoring) U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens
By JULIA ANGWIN
Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizensâ"even people suspected of no crime.
Not everyone was on board. "This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiencyâ"how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be storedâ"and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.
Now, NCTC can copy entire government databasesâ"flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans "reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information" may be permanently retained.
The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.
"It's breathtaking" in its scope, said a former senior administration official familiar with the White House debate.
Counterterrorism officials say they will be circumspect with the data. "The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes," said Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the parent agency for the National Counterterrorism Center.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution says that searches of "persons, houses, papers and effects" shouldn't be conducted without "probable cause" that a crime has been committed. But that doesn't cover records the government creates in the normal course of business with citizens.
Congress specifically sought to prevent government agents from rifling through government files indiscriminately when it passed the Federal Privacy Act in 1974. The act prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren't "compatible" with the reason the data were originally collected.
But the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government's daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. "All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want," says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.
As a result, the National Counterterrorism Center program's opponents within the administrationâ"led by Ms. Callahan
According to USA Today, NY Times, and other papers that performed independent ballot counts (using multiple methods), it would not have mattered if the SCOTUS had allowed Florida to continue counting. Bush beat Gore by ~1000 votes, mainly because of the western republican counties. Therefore Bush would have had FL's electoral votes and won.
Actually, it was mainly because Jeb Bush (Florida governor and GWB's brother) and Kathleen Harris (Florida Secretary of State - in charge of voting - and GWB's Florida campaign manager) purged over 180,000 people from the voter rolls just before the election - supposedly for being convicted felons. Turns out that these voters were predominately black or hispanic, and most of them turned out not to have been felons (some misdemeanor convictions, but you don't lose the right to vote for that).
Happened just the other day. They didn't claim to be from Microsoft, though. I asked the caller what OS was on my computer, and she said "Either XP or 7". I don't have any Windows systems in my house, and the call was interrupting something else I wanted to do, so I just said "Wrong!" and hung up.
Not only that, but these building codes are often incorporated wholesale into local codes, even when they don't make any sense. As one example, take the insulation requirements in the IBC - in Hawaii, at sea level, the temperature ranges between ~60F and ~90F (15-32C); we don't need insulation (or heating, or, in most residences, air conditioning). Yet, the County building code requires it because of the IBC. It's ridiculous.
I am writing in opposition to HB 2288, which if enacted will impose onerous reporting requirements on anyone providing Internet access in the State of Hawaii and expose the citizens of Hawaii to the possible exposure of their online habits.
This Bill requires any "company that provides access to the Internet" (sec. 1, line 6-7) to "retain customer records" including "each subscriber's information and internet destination history information" for "no less than two years" (sec. 1, lines 14-17). The "internet destination history information" is to include the Internet protocol address, domain name, or host name of every destination contacted by a subscriber.
It is no business of the State (or my Internet provider, for that matter) what sites I visit on the Internet. Most Internet providers currently have their subscribers' information, but very few record the destination of the subscribers' connections. This Bill would impose a requirement on all Internet providers to record and retain this information, which would require a large investment in equipment and network configuration expertise to achieve.
It is also unclear to whom this Bill would apply. Clearly the intent is for it to apply to Internet Service Providers, but given the language of "company that provides access to the Internet", it could be held to apply to coffe shops, hotels, Internet cafes, or even the individual who fails to secure a wireless home Internet router. For even moderately busy providers, this would be a huge amount of data which must be recorded and stored.
More importantly, there is no provision in this Bill to safeguard the information collected. Data on an individual's Internet traffic habits could be extremely sensitive - for example, an employer might be able to discover that an employee participates in workplace safety discussions from his/her home, information that the individual might not want the employer to know about. Under this Bill, there is no prohibition against Internet providers selling this sensitive customer information to anyone, nor are there any provisions requiring judicial review before the State (police, prosecutors, etc.) acquire these records.
As the manager of a corporate Internet-connected network, would this Bill require me to monitor all of my organization's users' Internet traffic? That would be a huge invasion of their privacy. If not, then the Bill is useless, since all traffic from my organization appears (to my upstream provider) to come from a single Internet address. How would this Bill accomplish anything in this case?
In summary, this is a poorly thought out, fundamentally flawed Bill that would do nothing to solve any current or even perceived problem, would impose onerous data retention and reporting requirements on all providers of Internet connectivity, and would expose the citizens of Hawaii to an unprecedented invasion of their privacy. I urge you to reject this Bill.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure there are lots of docs in that....
Whoosh....
Now imagine what would have happened if Snowden had provided his materials only to the NY Times. Oh, wait, we don't have to imagine. We know what would have happened because previous leakers did that, only to find the NYT was already under the thumb and they chose not to publish.
Yeah, like they chose not to publish the papers Daniel Ellsberg released to them! Oh, wait...
They pass their information to the military that assassinates them instead. Is this meant to be better?
OK, name one person who has been assassinated by the US military for any involvement in the Occupy movement or for any blog posts. I'll wait...
Electorally, the rich are way dis-empowered compared to the masses, whether based on simple capita counts, or contributions to the treasury, or indeed receipts from the treasury.
Nice obfuscation. The problem with political contributions is that they purchase access. If I contribute $5000 to a senator's campaign, and you contribute $0, which of us is more likely to be able to get a meeting with him/her? The ability to call a politician on the phone and have them take your call, personally is worth much more than the value of a vote.
He's a master baiter!
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the fish, and please tip your waitress...
The meme going around is that people are increasingly being mugged in major cities specifically for their smartphones. I don't know if that's real or not, but the cops in several places (SanFran, NYC, LA) are saying it is.
http://www.nclnet.org/technolo...
You have plenty of documentation available on https://help.gnome.org/users/ and https://developer.gnome.org/.
Ya know, this is a trend that is really beginning to piss me off. In the beginning, one of the best things about UNIX/Linux was that the documentation was all, always, locally-available. And, for the most part, to read it you just had to type "man whatever". Yes, manpages were not known for their readability, but they did (usually) have all the info you needed. Now, for so many projects, the documentation is all somewhere on teh Interwebs, or (at best) you have to find /usr/share/doc/program-version/ and, if you're lucky, there will be some documentation there.
Would it hurt GNOME/KDE/whatever devs to at least include basic manpages in their packages? Why can't aI type "man evolution" to see what command switches might be available, or to get some kind of tips?
GOML.
The Dartmouth BASIC timeshare system also had Star Trek and Lunar Lander (in 1972, anyway). Good times!
Just for kicks, I booted into Emacs once (init=/usr/bin/emacs in GRUB) - it works, but it's weird...
(Circa 1070 is when I did this stuff)
So, were you William the Conqueror's IT guy?
I thought the 'common carrier' status meant they were required to send everything without preference. Because since if they lost their common carrier status, they'd be responsible for things like child porn.
Once again, for, I dunno, maybe the thousandth time here, ISPs are explicitly NOT Common Carriers in the US (I don't know about other countries), but Enhanced Services or Information Services. The ISPs fought against Common Carrier status for lots of reasons , such as being exempted from usage or access charges from the backbone providers (who are Common Carriers).
Just discovered - if you zoom to > 150% in Chrome/Chromium, the annoying sidebars and the top "menu" junk all disappear - you just get the stories/comments, and at higher zoom factors the text flows properly.
Federal marijuana prohibition is not a law, it is a usurpation. It took a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, and that amendment was repealed. There is no legal authority whatsoever for the federal government to ban a drug.
-jcr
Actually, the basis for present-day prohibition of marijuana is the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, which updated the Paris Convention of 1931. The Paris Convention was targeted at opioids, while the Single Convention of 1931 added cannabis and other drugs, as well as establishing the "Schedules" of drugs used today. Since the Single Convention is a treaty, it had to be ratified by the US Senate (in 1967), and has the same force as any other law or provision of the Constitution itself (see Art. VI, US Constitution). Thus, no Amendment was required to allow Congress to pass legislation implementing the Convention.
I don't like it, but it's not unconstitutional.
I just want to see better cruise control - more akin to actual autopilot. Especially on freeways, I should be able to tell the vehicle "maintain this speed, stay in the lane (modify speed as needed wrt other vehicles/road conditions) until point X" and not worry about it. I'll handle city street/"last mile" driving myself.
Yes - ignore FOX. I have the real scoop from Rush:
RUSH: Folks, you can try to get to the New York Times story on the Clinton Global Initiative on the Web. I don't think you can. It's been taken down. Well, I don't know if it's been taken down or they just ended the access to it. But don't worry, I have enough of it for certain pull quotes. Oh, the whole website's inaccessible, so maybe the Times got hacked. Okay, Times got hacked. I thought just that one story pulled down. All right. It's obviously the Clinton story, the expose of the Clinton Global Initiative that's resulted in the Times website being hacked. The story is in the UK Telegraph, by Tim Stanley. "The New York Times Takes Down the Clinton Foundation. This Could Be Devastating for Bill and Hillary," is the headline. The lead is, "Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh?"
Using roundup ready GMO means roundup is used on the plant, and you get roundup in you food. Using BT-producing GMO means there is botulism toxin on your food. Are you sure about the consequences?
Uhh... Bt-producing GMO plants have a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis in their DNA. Bt has been used for years as an alternative to more-harmful pesticides, and can even be used on certified organic crops. It has nothing whatever to do with botulism (from Clostridium botulinum).
You really should make sure you know what you're talking about before you make outrageous and trivially refutable statements. Just sayin'
Also, see this: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/22/health/baby-surgery/index.html
tl;dr a 3d-printed splint to open a baby's airway
OK (Karma whoring)
U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens
By JULIA ANGWIN
Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizensâ"even people suspected of no crime.
Not everyone was on board. "This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiencyâ"how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be storedâ"and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.
Now, NCTC can copy entire government databasesâ"flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans "reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information" may be permanently retained.
The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.
"It's breathtaking" in its scope, said a former senior administration official familiar with the White House debate.
Counterterrorism officials say they will be circumspect with the data. "The guidelines provide rigorous oversight to protect the information that we have, for authorized and narrow purposes," said Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the parent agency for the National Counterterrorism Center.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution says that searches of "persons, houses, papers and effects" shouldn't be conducted without "probable cause" that a crime has been committed. But that doesn't cover records the government creates in the normal course of business with citizens.
Congress specifically sought to prevent government agents from rifling through government files indiscriminately when it passed the Federal Privacy Act in 1974. The act prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren't "compatible" with the reason the data were originally collected.
But the Federal Privacy Act allows agencies to exempt themselves from many requirements by placing notices in the Federal Register, the government's daily publication of proposed rules. In practice, these privacy-act notices are rarely contested by government watchdogs or members of the public. "All you have to do is publish a notice in the Federal Register and you can do whatever you want," says Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant who advises agencies on how to comply with the Privacy Act.
As a result, the National Counterterrorism Center program's opponents within the administrationâ"led by Ms. Callahan
According to USA Today, NY Times, and other papers that performed independent ballot counts (using multiple methods), it would not have mattered if the SCOTUS had allowed Florida to continue counting. Bush beat Gore by ~1000 votes, mainly because of the western republican counties. Therefore Bush would have had FL's electoral votes and won.
Actually, it was mainly because Jeb Bush (Florida governor and GWB's brother) and Kathleen Harris (Florida Secretary of State - in charge of voting - and GWB's Florida campaign manager) purged over 180,000 people from the voter rolls just before the election - supposedly for being convicted felons. Turns out that these voters were predominately black or hispanic, and most of them turned out not to have been felons (some misdemeanor convictions, but you don't lose the right to vote for that).
Happened just the other day. They didn't claim to be from Microsoft, though. I asked the caller what OS was on my computer, and she said "Either XP or 7". I don't have any Windows systems in my house, and the call was interrupting something else I wanted to do, so I just said "Wrong!" and hung up.
Not only that, but these building codes are often incorporated wholesale into local codes, even when they don't make any sense. As one example, take the insulation requirements in the IBC - in Hawaii, at sea level, the temperature ranges between ~60F and ~90F (15-32C); we don't need insulation (or heating, or, in most residences, air conditioning). Yet, the County building code requires it because of the IBC. It's ridiculous.
I am writing in opposition to HB 2288, which if enacted will impose onerous reporting requirements on anyone providing Internet access in the State of Hawaii and expose the citizens of Hawaii to the possible exposure of their online habits.
This Bill requires any "company that provides access to the Internet" (sec. 1, line 6-7) to "retain customer records" including "each subscriber's information and internet destination history information" for "no less than two years" (sec. 1, lines 14-17). The "internet destination history information" is to include the Internet protocol address, domain name, or host name of every destination contacted by a subscriber.
It is no business of the State (or my Internet provider, for that matter) what sites I visit on the Internet. Most Internet providers currently have their subscribers' information, but very few record the destination of the subscribers' connections. This Bill would impose a requirement on all Internet providers to record and retain this information, which would require a large investment in equipment and network configuration expertise to achieve.
It is also unclear to whom this Bill would apply. Clearly the intent is for it to apply to Internet Service Providers, but given the language of "company that provides access to the Internet", it could be held to apply to coffe shops, hotels, Internet cafes, or even the individual who fails to secure a wireless home Internet router. For even moderately busy providers, this would be a huge amount of data which must be recorded and stored.
More importantly, there is no provision in this Bill to safeguard the information collected. Data on an individual's Internet traffic habits could be extremely sensitive - for example, an employer might be able to discover that an employee participates in workplace safety discussions from his/her home, information that the individual might not want the employer to know about. Under this Bill, there is no prohibition against Internet providers selling this sensitive customer information to anyone,
nor are there any provisions requiring judicial review before the State (police, prosecutors, etc.) acquire these records.
As the manager of a corporate Internet-connected network, would this Bill require me to monitor all of my organization's users' Internet traffic? That would be a huge invasion of their privacy. If not, then the Bill is useless, since all traffic from my organization appears (to my upstream provider) to come from a single Internet address. How would this Bill accomplish anything in this case?
In summary, this is a poorly thought out, fundamentally flawed Bill that would do nothing to solve any current or even perceived problem, would impose onerous data retention and reporting requirements on all providers of Internet connectivity, and would expose the citizens of Hawaii to an unprecedented invasion of their privacy. I urge you to reject this Bill.
Praise Bob!
WHOOOOSH!