Hey, don't worry. Everything is going to be better in a few years, because we're going to elect someone who isn't Bush *or* Obama. All of today's sixteen year old kids will be ready and eager to vote in 2016 and they all know -- just like the teenagers from six years ago and ten years ago and fourteen years ago -- that 220 years of shitty presidents and politics is finally going to be over, because for the first time every they are going to vote in a real stalwart hero into office. This guy will totally be a man of his word and focus on the fundamentals and not a bunch of vote-buying bullshit that tramples over principals in an effort to appease constituents by appealing to their demands for things based on religion or other irrelevant things. This time, everything is totally gonna be different!
Yeah, because the Senate and House have sure had strong spines over the last two presidents, huh?
They've done nothing but consistently rolled over and played "yes-men" to the executive branch - essentially operating this country for a dozen years as a one-branch government.
Blaming it on the GOP or anyone else is also sort of undermined by everything else he failed to do in the last six years.
Anyone remember how the first thing he was going to do was not only shutdown Gitmo, but get us out of Iraq? In fact, you could "take that to the bank"?
Remember how it was going to be the most transparent presidency, ever?
Remember how Bush didn't need anyone to "let" him do anything, because he was the decider?
Remember the last six months to a year, how Obama frequently talks about how he needs to do things directly and is going to find ways to do them despite lack of support in the house and senate?
Yeah, if they really want to accomplish something, they could do it. He doesn't, so he doesn't.
2012 - European Union (how's that going, guys?) 2009 - Barack Obama (for strengthening international diplomacy and cooperation) 2007 - Al Gore (promoted a film that promoted his carbon credits scam) 2001 - Kofi Annan "and the United Nations" (did dick all during the Rwanda and Balkin genocides). 1994 - Yasser Arafat 1992 - Rigoberta Menchú Tum (was found to have fabricated most of the achievements she was being praised for) 1979 - Mother Theresa (I guess we're awarding it to her for the media sensationalized fabrication of her and not the real apathetic version of her?) 1973 - Henry Kissenger (for engaging in Vietnam Peace Accords while simultaneously secretly bombing Vietnam). 1945 - Cordell Hull - Secretary of State during Roosevelt. He denied the Holocaust and forced Jewish refugees back into the arms of the Nazis.
An awful lot of people (especially in the last 35 years) who really don't seem to be contributing much (if anything) to peace.
First, you are breaking your oath if in your supposed execution of the office of the POTUS you are failing to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. As you noted, there is a conjunction. It is not an OR statement.
Second, commanding the armed forces to protect the country is NOT the same thing nor in the same spirit as this current and last president have regarded and used the phrase "my most important job is to protect the population". You simply can not take "command the armed forces" to mean "take arms away from our citizens" or "give free health care at tax-payer expense" or "create and utilize massive surveillance facilities on and against the population and use information gathered to blackmail, threaten, and discredit people".
It would be incredibly dishonest to suggest that these are the same things. In fact, as I pointed out, what our current president is talking about when he keeps talking about "my first priority is protecting the american people" are things that directly fly in the face of what comes after the AND in the oath.
Especially when it's all free of cost and commercials on the internet. I'm not necessarily supporting, condoning, or endorsing things like eztv.it -- but when you're trying to shove tons of commercials, limited and mixed and inconsistent content restrictions on people, and making them pay for it to boot . . . you have to remember that you're competing with a service that offers exactly what people want without the commercials they don't want and at no cost only one click away.
For about a decade, I haven't had a DVR or a cable subscription or even over-the-air television. It just isn't worth the $100-$200/mo for what little content is actually worth watching. Netflix is a damn good deal. Hulu could be a good deal, if they did away with the commercials and were more consistent with the content they actually do have. If I have to go hunt around the internet to find the seasons you are missing on a show you yourself are providing, then your service has already failed.
Have you ever actually used Hulu? Their assortment of content is random as fuck. Most of the shows I have checked out do not have all of the episodes. They only have the new ones or they only have the old ones. Or they only have seasons 1, 4, and 5. It's ridiculous. It's pointless. And on top of that, they charge for it *and* cram more commercials down you than you'd get if you were dumb enough to still watch live broadcast television.
I hope the company and service fucking go away, so we can start focusing on real content delivery solutions, instead of this trivial bullshit. Why the fuck would you pay $8/mo for a service that presents just as many (and sometimes more) commercials than you would have on the free live television version of the programming? Why would you pay money for a service that makes you watch commercials, at all? Why would you pay for the service, when it forces commercials on you when you could avoid them by skipping ahead with a DVR in other avenues? Why would you pay for the service, when you could get the content from torrents? Why would you pay for the service, when most of the programming is inane bullshit that even a toddler is too intelligent for? Why would you pay for the service, when what (shitty) programming there actually is, is almost never there in full? Why would you pay for a service that only gives you the latest episodes on some shows, but not the older ones or only the older ones but not the newer ones or only a random assortment of some in the middle or only the last two episodes of it and only a couple weeks after they air?
It is such a mish-mash random smattering of incoherent and poorly organized shit. I was trying Hulu recently and they had seasons 1, 4 and 5 of a show I wanted to watch.. I had to go to fucking Netflix to see seasons 2 and 3 (and Netflix charges the same amount. . . and I didn't have to watch a single commercial).
If you want people to stop "stealing" your shit -- or for people to start *watching* your shit at all (much less even pay for it), then you need to give them access to everything. Every episode from first to last and as soon as it has aired on television. That's it. That's the only solution. No amount of boardroom deals, backroom negotiations, or transfer of ownership is going to fix that fundamental problem.
It serves the same purpose as telling your sleepless and scared toddler that their blanket is actually an anti-monster device. So that they'll shut up and go to bed.
If we paid attention to evidence or lack of evidence, then we wouldn't be in Iraq to begin with and wouldn't continue to be in Afghanistan a dozen years later.
The real reason they continue to use these isn't because they somehow have convinced themselves that it works. It's probably not even directly a scam insofar as they're shoving money to some business cohort through the military industrial complex. I would suspect that what this is really about is that it's far cheaper to stick a device in a young man's hand and convince him that it's there to protect him, so that he'll actually continue to actively do his job, and have him wind up being blown up -- than it is to spend money on any sort of real device. The man is disposable. The worthless device is the placebo to motivate him to feel safe in doing his job. And when he dies, it was a far cheaper investment than the amount that any sort of real device would cost to produce, purchase, train on, and deploy.
Unfortunately, if the VPN provider is located in the US, they are compelled to comply with the government in providing access to your logs and data and anything else. They can also simply put in a shunt and siphon off a copy of your data (even without the provider even being aware it is happening, just as is likely to have happened with Google/Facebook/etc). If they are outside of the US, you'll have a hard time getting the service, since credit card companies are banning payments made to VPN providers.
Anyway, there are things you can do to make everything just a tiny bit more of a nuisance -- that is about it. There is nothing you can really do to safeguard yourself if you somehow become a specific target, of course.
You need to be able to trust the sites and services and systems you connect to. Good luck, there. You need to be able to trust that the government isn't tapping all data transfer with a shunt at your ISP, or as near the service as possible, or at the backbone. You need to have an encryption tunnel for your data. You need to make sure that the provider of that service is reliable and not logging data. Or isn't being tapped. And can't be compelled to hand over whatever data they *do* have. Then, you have to trust that all of the advertisers tracking you on all these sites and services aren't able to correlate your identity. That's almost impossible, since they need very few data points (mostly seemingly anonymous ones) to pinpoint who you actually are.
You need to trust that all of this is the same about any online/cloud services you may happen to use. After all of that -- if it is all somehow accounted for -- you still have to be able to trust your operating system and your hardware. That there isn't something built into your OS or some software you are running or into the hardware itself that grants access to the government.
And once you are sure of all of that *too* . . . you just have to be able to trust that someone hasn't infected your system directly with something and that nobody has planted something on your system. Say, while you were out of the house for awhile, one day.
In other words, no matter what we do, we are doing the modern equivalent of setting a Windows desktop/screensaver password. It will protect you against the opportunistic coworker or nosey family member -- but provide no protection against someone who truly wants to get information on you and monitor you.
Criminal and Civil law carry different requirements for proof:
Criminal: Beyond a reasonable doubt. Burden of proof is always on the state. Civil: Preponderance of evidence. The burden of proof falls on the plaintiff. One must produce evidence beyond the balance of probabilities.
Criminally, you can be found not guilty because there is reasonable doubt that you committed a crime. You can then be found guilty and punished accordingly in a civil suit, because it is found just slightly more likely that you committed the crime than that you did not.
I dunno . . . I got in a lot of fights in grade school and high school. I never started them and preferred to avoid them, every time. However, being a serious athlete my entire young life (training and competing 40hrs a week), I never lost a fight. As a result, I was always in detention or being suspended and being chastised. Not for starting a fight -- but for finishing it. If I had just not fought back and had just let people pummel me (in some instances, multiple people at a time), I would have been seen as the victim and not punished.
It seems, to me, that is also how the justice system (and media) often see things, too.
This is essentially how I feel. He could have watched from a distance and called the police and then intervened if he witnessed a crime being committed or just about to be. It seems clear that this was the right verdict *and* Zimmerman is still probably a douche.
I'm not sure I get the point. He should have been willing to take a beating rather than fend off someone attempting to give a beating? How far do we extend that? If you just lay back and take the raping, rather than shooting the rapist, your vagina will be pretty sore, but at least you'll both still be alive?
A1: So what? Since when are "tools" a crime? Don't we spend a lot of time around here saying that just because encryption tools can be used for criminal activities, there is no inherent justification for outlawing the possession, creation, or use of encryption tools? (Or decryption, etc, for that matter).
A2: What does that have to do with the incident? Zimmerman had not just witnessed the kid burglarizing a house in the neighborhood or anything.
I think they are both douches and I think it was probably fair that he was found not guilty, but Zimmerman took the whole "Neighborhood Watch" thing (which would have been reasonable - keep an eye on the guy from a distance if you have reason to believe he is about to engage in criminal activities) and pushed it to a bit of harassment, like he's fucking Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson.
If you try to stop me as I'm passing through your neighborhood and start questioning me, I'll probably have at you, too.
Unfortunately, much of American society says exactly the contrary. I don't mean that they think that it's better to put innocent people away (or even kill them) instead of risking letting one guilty person go free . . . I mean, they actually *say* it.
Is that the idiot with the stupid puppets that does the shitty ventriloquist thing? (Not very familiar with comedians, because stand-up comedy is generally idiotic shit).
Having been around here for about sixteen years, I can say with some certainty that Slashdot has gone from being extremely libertarian in the past to extremely liberal and conservative in recent years. The comments and atmosphere around here has grown much more similar to the comment section of any news story linked to by drudgereport.com (you know, the "libtard/republithug" bullshit littered with lots of racism and religion and general vile display of humanity stuff). Slashdot has become more political, more hateful, and more split -- but hardly in one direction; in both directions.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, don't worry. Everything is going to be better in a few years, because we're going to elect someone who isn't Bush *or* Obama. All of today's sixteen year old kids will be ready and eager to vote in 2016 and they all know -- just like the teenagers from six years ago and ten years ago and fourteen years ago -- that 220 years of shitty presidents and politics is finally going to be over, because for the first time every they are going to vote in a real stalwart hero into office. This guy will totally be a man of his word and focus on the fundamentals and not a bunch of vote-buying bullshit that tramples over principals in an effort to appease constituents by appealing to their demands for things based on religion or other irrelevant things. This time, everything is totally gonna be different!
Yeah, because the Senate and House have sure had strong spines over the last two presidents, huh?
They've done nothing but consistently rolled over and played "yes-men" to the executive branch - essentially operating this country for a dozen years as a one-branch government.
Blaming it on the GOP or anyone else is also sort of undermined by everything else he failed to do in the last six years.
Anyone remember how the first thing he was going to do was not only shutdown Gitmo, but get us out of Iraq? In fact, you could "take that to the bank"?
Remember how it was going to be the most transparent presidency, ever?
Remember how Bush didn't need anyone to "let" him do anything, because he was the decider?
Remember the last six months to a year, how Obama frequently talks about how he needs to do things directly and is going to find ways to do them despite lack of support in the house and senate?
Yeah, if they really want to accomplish something, they could do it. He doesn't, so he doesn't.
Hey, we haven't been at war in almost 70 years. That's saying something, right?
. . . right?
Is that really what it's meant to do?
2012 - European Union (how's that going, guys?)
2009 - Barack Obama (for strengthening international diplomacy and cooperation)
2007 - Al Gore (promoted a film that promoted his carbon credits scam)
2001 - Kofi Annan "and the United Nations" (did dick all during the Rwanda and Balkin genocides).
1994 - Yasser Arafat
1992 - Rigoberta Menchú Tum (was found to have fabricated most of the achievements she was being praised for)
1979 - Mother Theresa (I guess we're awarding it to her for the media sensationalized fabrication of her and not the real apathetic version of her?)
1973 - Henry Kissenger (for engaging in Vietnam Peace Accords while simultaneously secretly bombing Vietnam).
1945 - Cordell Hull - Secretary of State during Roosevelt. He denied the Holocaust and forced Jewish refugees back into the arms of the Nazis.
An awful lot of people (especially in the last 35 years) who really don't seem to be contributing much (if anything) to peace.
Thirty-three is the magic number.
Yes it is.
It's the magic number.
Two things:
First, you are breaking your oath if in your supposed execution of the office of the POTUS you are failing to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. As you noted, there is a conjunction. It is not an OR statement.
Second, commanding the armed forces to protect the country is NOT the same thing nor in the same spirit as this current and last president have regarded and used the phrase "my most important job is to protect the population". You simply can not take "command the armed forces" to mean "take arms away from our citizens" or "give free health care at tax-payer expense" or "create and utilize massive surveillance facilities on and against the population and use information gathered to blackmail, threaten, and discredit people".
It would be incredibly dishonest to suggest that these are the same things. In fact, as I pointed out, what our current president is talking about when he keeps talking about "my first priority is protecting the american people" are things that directly fly in the face of what comes after the AND in the oath.
Especially when it's all free of cost and commercials on the internet. I'm not necessarily supporting, condoning, or endorsing things like eztv.it -- but when you're trying to shove tons of commercials, limited and mixed and inconsistent content restrictions on people, and making them pay for it to boot . . . you have to remember that you're competing with a service that offers exactly what people want without the commercials they don't want and at no cost only one click away.
For about a decade, I haven't had a DVR or a cable subscription or even over-the-air television. It just isn't worth the $100-$200/mo for what little content is actually worth watching. Netflix is a damn good deal. Hulu could be a good deal, if they did away with the commercials and were more consistent with the content they actually do have. If I have to go hunt around the internet to find the seasons you are missing on a show you yourself are providing, then your service has already failed.
Have you ever actually used Hulu? Their assortment of content is random as fuck. Most of the shows I have checked out do not have all of the episodes. They only have the new ones or they only have the old ones. Or they only have seasons 1, 4, and 5. It's ridiculous. It's pointless. And on top of that, they charge for it *and* cram more commercials down you than you'd get if you were dumb enough to still watch live broadcast television.
I hope the company and service fucking go away, so we can start focusing on real content delivery solutions, instead of this trivial bullshit. Why the fuck would you pay $8/mo for a service that presents just as many (and sometimes more) commercials than you would have on the free live television version of the programming? Why would you pay money for a service that makes you watch commercials, at all? Why would you pay for the service, when it forces commercials on you when you could avoid them by skipping ahead with a DVR in other avenues? Why would you pay for the service, when you could get the content from torrents? Why would you pay for the service, when most of the programming is inane bullshit that even a toddler is too intelligent for? Why would you pay for the service, when what (shitty) programming there actually is, is almost never there in full? Why would you pay for a service that only gives you the latest episodes on some shows, but not the older ones or only the older ones but not the newer ones or only a random assortment of some in the middle or only the last two episodes of it and only a couple weeks after they air?
It is such a mish-mash random smattering of incoherent and poorly organized shit. I was trying Hulu recently and they had seasons 1, 4 and 5 of a show I wanted to watch.. I had to go to fucking Netflix to see seasons 2 and 3 (and Netflix charges the same amount. . . and I didn't have to watch a single commercial).
If you want people to stop "stealing" your shit -- or for people to start *watching* your shit at all (much less even pay for it), then you need to give them access to everything. Every episode from first to last and as soon as it has aired on television. That's it. That's the only solution. No amount of boardroom deals, backroom negotiations, or transfer of ownership is going to fix that fundamental problem.
It serves the same purpose as telling your sleepless and scared toddler that their blanket is actually an anti-monster device. So that they'll shut up and go to bed.
If we paid attention to evidence or lack of evidence, then we wouldn't be in Iraq to begin with and wouldn't continue to be in Afghanistan a dozen years later.
The real reason they continue to use these isn't because they somehow have convinced themselves that it works. It's probably not even directly a scam insofar as they're shoving money to some business cohort through the military industrial complex. I would suspect that what this is really about is that it's far cheaper to stick a device in a young man's hand and convince him that it's there to protect him, so that he'll actually continue to actively do his job, and have him wind up being blown up -- than it is to spend money on any sort of real device. The man is disposable. The worthless device is the placebo to motivate him to feel safe in doing his job. And when he dies, it was a far cheaper investment than the amount that any sort of real device would cost to produce, purchase, train on, and deploy.
Unfortunately, if the VPN provider is located in the US, they are compelled to comply with the government in providing access to your logs and data and anything else. They can also simply put in a shunt and siphon off a copy of your data (even without the provider even being aware it is happening, just as is likely to have happened with Google/Facebook/etc). If they are outside of the US, you'll have a hard time getting the service, since credit card companies are banning payments made to VPN providers.
Anyway, there are things you can do to make everything just a tiny bit more of a nuisance -- that is about it. There is nothing you can really do to safeguard yourself if you somehow become a specific target, of course.
You need to be able to trust the sites and services and systems you connect to. Good luck, there. You need to be able to trust that the government isn't tapping all data transfer with a shunt at your ISP, or as near the service as possible, or at the backbone. You need to have an encryption tunnel for your data. You need to make sure that the provider of that service is reliable and not logging data. Or isn't being tapped. And can't be compelled to hand over whatever data they *do* have. Then, you have to trust that all of the advertisers tracking you on all these sites and services aren't able to correlate your identity. That's almost impossible, since they need very few data points (mostly seemingly anonymous ones) to pinpoint who you actually are.
You need to trust that all of this is the same about any online/cloud services you may happen to use. After all of that -- if it is all somehow accounted for -- you still have to be able to trust your operating system and your hardware. That there isn't something built into your OS or some software you are running or into the hardware itself that grants access to the government.
And once you are sure of all of that *too* . . . you just have to be able to trust that someone hasn't infected your system directly with something and that nobody has planted something on your system. Say, while you were out of the house for awhile, one day.
In other words, no matter what we do, we are doing the modern equivalent of setting a Windows desktop/screensaver password. It will protect you against the opportunistic coworker or nosey family member -- but provide no protection against someone who truly wants to get information on you and monitor you.
Criminal and Civil law carry different requirements for proof:
Criminal: Beyond a reasonable doubt. Burden of proof is always on the state.
Civil: Preponderance of evidence. The burden of proof falls on the plaintiff. One must produce evidence beyond the balance of probabilities.
Criminally, you can be found not guilty because there is reasonable doubt that you committed a crime. You can then be found guilty and punished accordingly in a civil suit, because it is found just slightly more likely that you committed the crime than that you did not.
I dunno . . . I got in a lot of fights in grade school and high school. I never started them and preferred to avoid them, every time. However, being a serious athlete my entire young life (training and competing 40hrs a week), I never lost a fight. As a result, I was always in detention or being suspended and being chastised. Not for starting a fight -- but for finishing it. If I had just not fought back and had just let people pummel me (in some instances, multiple people at a time), I would have been seen as the victim and not punished.
It seems, to me, that is also how the justice system (and media) often see things, too.
This is essentially how I feel. He could have watched from a distance and called the police and then intervened if he witnessed a crime being committed or just about to be. It seems clear that this was the right verdict *and* Zimmerman is still probably a douche.
However, in American law you are innocent until proven guilty. Therefore, if you are not proven guilty, you are innocent.
I'm not sure I get the point. He should have been willing to take a beating rather than fend off someone attempting to give a beating? How far do we extend that? If you just lay back and take the raping, rather than shooting the rapist, your vagina will be pretty sore, but at least you'll both still be alive?
As opposed to now, when we can have guns and they trample all over our rights and do whatever they want. . . .?
A1: So what? Since when are "tools" a crime? Don't we spend a lot of time around here saying that just because encryption tools can be used for criminal activities, there is no inherent justification for outlawing the possession, creation, or use of encryption tools? (Or decryption, etc, for that matter).
A2: What does that have to do with the incident? Zimmerman had not just witnessed the kid burglarizing a house in the neighborhood or anything.
I think they are both douches and I think it was probably fair that he was found not guilty, but Zimmerman took the whole "Neighborhood Watch" thing (which would have been reasonable - keep an eye on the guy from a distance if you have reason to believe he is about to engage in criminal activities) and pushed it to a bit of harassment, like he's fucking Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson.
If you try to stop me as I'm passing through your neighborhood and start questioning me, I'll probably have at you, too.
That is known as Blackstone's Formulation.
Unfortunately, much of American society says exactly the contrary. I don't mean that they think that it's better to put innocent people away (or even kill them) instead of risking letting one guilty person go free . . . I mean, they actually *say* it.
Is that the idiot with the stupid puppets that does the shitty ventriloquist thing? (Not very familiar with comedians, because stand-up comedy is generally idiotic shit).
Having been around here for about sixteen years, I can say with some certainty that Slashdot has gone from being extremely libertarian in the past to extremely liberal and conservative in recent years. The comments and atmosphere around here has grown much more similar to the comment section of any news story linked to by drudgereport.com (you know, the "libtard/republithug" bullshit littered with lots of racism and religion and general vile display of humanity stuff). Slashdot has become more political, more hateful, and more split -- but hardly in one direction; in both directions.
What does the verdict of the case have to do with the other story?