This is the act that allows the president to declare ANYONE an enemy combatant. Even an American Citizen. And disappear them. No representation. No trial. They just vanish, to be indefinitely imprisoned and even tortured. Hell, killed, for all we know. Since nobody knows that the person is being held, there's no limitation. Granted, this has gone wrong pretty much every time it has been used (documented incidents of innocent people being shipped off to gitmo for example) against innocent people a number of times. But hey, it has the word PATRIOT in it!
These assholes despise the citizenship of this country so much that they stuff something called the PATRIOT act with everything that is the opposite of patriotism and that directly undermines the country they claim the act is meant to protect. And we all sit around like fucking sheep, worrying about meaningless bullshit like birth certificates. And worse, all those jackholes who went around doing the "you HAVE to vote!" last year think that they've done their civic duty, because they voted. They chose between the giant douche and the turd sandwich and disavow any responsibility for upholding the status quo that continues to pin us all under its thumb.
Maybe people will start to finally learn that the choices they are fed are bullshit and that both A and B are part of the greater subject -- C. If you vote for A, it benefits C. If you vote for B, it benefits C. Instead of idiots arguing "derp derp derp red versus blue" they might finally invest that energy into understanding what is really going on and doing something about it. Then again, probably not.
I'm sure the president has the ability to veto this though. Surely he will? All these people that were so intent on voting this past election for "change" because the new jackass was going to be entirely different from the last jackass are surely going to have saved us from evil, right? So their pony will do everything he can to overthrow the USAPATRIOT Act, right? That must be why we haven't heard him say a single damn word about it. At all. Because he's just holding his tongue, so he can wield the veto power, yeah?
I'm sure everyone will finally stop investing all of their energy in Obama's birth certificate and being raging homophobes and marching around abortion clinics so they can focus on things that are actually impacting our entire way of life, like government oppression and the absolute corruption of government by corporate shills. Right?
It's some chick I've never heard of from a shitty reality show and some dude I've never heard of. All of the American outlets are being fucking fucktards and using vague language to skirt naming the people involved. I guess they're to god damn fucking retarded to understand that the UK can't issue a gag order to the American press. This includes Slashdot. Fucking idiots. Put the names IN THE BLURB ON SLASHDOT.
The reality we live in is that big corporations with marketing departments largely operate the big government with guns. If you doubt it, look at the employment and lobbying history of any random handful of politicians or cabinet and committee members in the government before and after their time "serving the public".
Where is this list of politicians who don't feel that their constituency is just a power pool to fuel their own personal selfish motivations and goals?
Also, where is the statement in the Constitution that says rights are granted by this "God" fellow? The closest I'm aware of is all men being created equal, endowed by their creator (where creator is clearly intentionally open and vague to be interpreted by each individual as is appropriate to them - including sensibly metaphorically).
Also, it is false to say that our "rights" are somehow granted by a mythological sky-person. The fact is that they ARE granted by the government. In the days when Kings owned all the land and you were allowed to live and toil on their land, you were subject to their whims. Today, you are subject to the government's whims. Ostensibly, that means the whims of your fellow man, but in practice it's more of a limited control by aristocracy than "fellow man". At any rate, if you have some inherent right to speak freely and posses a weapon, I suggest you think again. Any right that I feel is a basic right of a human being and that I currently enjoy the freedom to exercise is done so only because the government hasn't taken it away from me. They could come in tomorrow and shut me up and take my gun or even take my life and there isn't a fucking thing I could do about it, because I'm one person and I don't own nukes or tanks or bombs or assault rifles or have a military or an entire court and legal team on my payroll.
Just google "cops warrant wrong house" for an endless flood of no-knock warrant stories where cops broke down the door of the wrong house. They often end with an innocent citizen (of course, until convicted, aren't they ALL innocent?) being shot or even killed or with a home owner defending themselves against the home invasion by shooting the police (which never works out well for the victim).
Depends who that someone is. If you're the one having your home or business invaded, then yes, it's almost certainly okay to shoot you. In fact, it has happened before without any discipline of the shooter. Just "part of the job". Even when the warrant was served on the wrong fucking place and person. However, if you're the one being searched and a bunch of armed guys storm into your home in the middle of the night and your initial response is to grab a weapon and defend yourself - you'll probably be killed in return. Or at least imprisoned. Even if you are an innocent person and the warrant was served (as seems to happen often) on the wrong address (say, the cops go to 1131 W. Broadway when the address is supposed to be 1311 W Broadway).
I still fail to see how this is a criminal issue. Why are government resources being used to enforce and police what should be civil matters? If you and I sign a contract and you violate that contract, can I send the police (or the FBI or other armed squad of gestapo) to exact retribution on you?
I don't see enough people ever taking it seriously enough to matter. I ignored BitCoin entirely for a year, simply because they did such a poor job of explaining (in user-facing content, at least) just exactly what the fuck the clients were doing and the fundamentals of the process. You can watch their promotional video, which amounts to "install a client that does magic and makes money appear".
The reason I ignored it for over a year is that it just instantly hit me as a garbage. As a scam. As those companies that used to ask you to install a client that would do distributed work and would pay you for your CPU usage, but never really actually accomplish enough work per user to ever bet any money back (especially when counting the energy your system used to do the work). With this, the starting user is left wondering "okay, what am I doing? is my client doing computational work that is being sold by bitcoin to companies and institutions and they're giving my bitcoins in return for that?" but you never really know, until you start digging around in white papers - which most users aren't going to do.
And if you check out the forums, there's even more scammy sounding things. Like advertising sites that sell pre-built computers made just for running your own bitcoin farming machine. Or guys offering to contract to you for a certain amount of work, etc, etc. It all just rubs even the experienced person as shady and scammy. You really have to overcome a lot of mental hurdles to stop and give it a real look.
The problem is that when you go to a job interview or otherwise interact in the real world, the comments don't follow you at every turn and you don't have to rely on that third party being willing or able to discern which comments they read on the internet are legitimate and which are just asshats. The website or facebook site someone made about you being a complete whore and genital-wart-riddled slut maybe pops up in the top few results of every search on your name for the rest of your life. Or maybe the more clever and devious take the less obvious route and complain about you as an individual they did business with, so that because you dumped some vindictive guy you dated for a couple weeks, he has now made sure you have plenty of results showing up online with every search that implicate you as a deceitful fraud.
I suspect that it becomes more difficult to react to things on the net where they have a greater audience and permanence with a mere shrug and an "I'm above all that".
I agree that words are just words and as a libertarian, I despise any attempt to regulate or control anything that doesn't have to be, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to reconcile that ideal with the current reality, where a single angry person that you turned down advances from or had a bad experience with or just plain don't get along with can significantly impact your reputation in meaningful ways and yet still not be considered to have reached the point of "libel" (or even if it does, be so difficult to follow-up as an individual in libel cases as to make it so).
Things like this are becoming much more difficult for any rational person to reach a sensible conclusion on. My initial reaction would be that you don't censor or criminalize thoughts. Even mean or vile ones. As long as it is not libel, you just need to have thick skin and move the fuck on.
On the other hand, it's a different thing when it's something that has a global audience of potentially billions, will be archived and indexed by search engines, possibly have a longer life than the person it is about, come up in searches for that person for the rest of their life by future friends, mates, and employers and otherwise follow them around indefinitely. You can't graduate the internet and move away from the "attack" and you can't just go to a new town. You are stuck forever with whatever some ignorant idiotic juvenile wrote years ago or whatever some spiteful twat might write about you today.
If I had a kid and this happened pre-internet, I would tell them to ignore it and know they're better than that and that the words aren't true and to move on and eventually it will go away. With the internet, I don't know what I would do. As a parent, I think I would be helpless and stuck. How do you stick to the ideal that nobody should be able to dictate what you can do or say short of actual libel or threats and reconcile that with words or images that will be there under google for your name for decades to come?
Perhaps more importantly, how do we make sure that we deal with this in a rational way and don't just say "that pisses me off, so I'm going to make a blanket law about it" like with that stupid bitch and her family that drove that little girl to kill herself over myspace? A case where it was so tempting to have so much anger and hatred over the incident that even the completely logical person was tempted to say "fuck it, I don't care what the lasting legal consequences are for the rest of society, as long as we come up with a way to stick that bitch in a max security prison for life".
Ideally, the price of the DLC would be pro-rated or maps would always be free or they would prolong the life of the game. I mean, the latest version of Counter Strike has been going for almost eight years, now. The latest version of MW/COD has been going for six months and will mostly expire in about five months. (I know some will still play beyond that, but the majority of the community moves on).
The annual release makes the previous games obsolete. What I hate about this (in concept, mostly, since I don't play much COD/MW) is that a game has about one year of life left at launch. Then they launch a DLC map pack three months in. So that's $15 for maps that have nine months of life left. Then they release more DLC six months in, for another $15. So that's full $15 price for only half the original life span. Then (if I recall) they usually release a third and final map pack for these (the last three titles, at least). So another full $15 for only a quarter left of the life span.
You know these games are going to be popular. Just fucking make the content and release it up front. Charge another $45 for it and people are going to pay it, because then they can get a full year of content out of it (and those of us who grow tired of the same few maps in the first few months and stop playing out of sheer boredom, before the first map pack is even released will probably stick around longer).
Also, this was "leaked" in as much as someone said "let's get this out there and see people's reaction while there is still time to change some of our direction if there is a backlash".
"Terrorists could hide a bomb in a diaper, and we don't seem to have anything much better than pat-downs to detect it. "
The thing is, they do have something better. They said in the article itself that they ran the stroller through a bomb chemical trace detection system. So why didn't they take the baby through it? In fact, why aren't people going through it? That's what these were made for. You walk through it and it blows a puff of air at you that has a higher detection rate than anything else. After 9/11, these were going in all over the country in every airport (in fact, I invested in the company that makes them as a result). And now? No, we can't be bothered with those. Having something that can detect the most minute traces of explosive chemicals is no solution, when we can take naked photos of citizens and stick our hands down their pants.
I'm tired of everyone pissing their pants when it involves a child or a mother or an elderly person. How about when it involves any person? Why is it okay to dismiss the experience and violations of me, because I'm a middle aged single male? Why are we only concerned with the value of people's rights if they fall into the above exceptions?
TPB was not down outside of Comcast land, initially. For several hours when the initial reports were being published online, nobody could reach TPB from Comcast, but they could useing a proxy or VPN and those on other networks could reach it. It wasn't until hours later that the same behavior started to appear on other networks. In light of those circumstances and prior Comcast behavior, it's not entirely irrational that people started to question if they were intentionally blocking them.
So, no, what would have happened in your example is that someone with Comcast would have tried to reach TPB and failed. Then they'd ping it and fail. Then they'd login via another network and ping it and it would work.
Except they have stooped to that level in the recent past and after months of denying it, finally admitted it and were called to task for it by the FCC. That is precisely the reason why everyone jumped to the worst conclusion when everyone with Comcast was having trouble reaching TPB and everyone with another provider was (for the first many hours of the incident) not having a problem.
If you're known as the neighborhood trouble-maker, it's your own damn fault if everyone looks accusingly at you the next time there is some trouble that you actually didn't make.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the act that allows the president to declare ANYONE an enemy combatant. Even an American Citizen. And disappear them. No representation. No trial. They just vanish, to be indefinitely imprisoned and even tortured. Hell, killed, for all we know. Since nobody knows that the person is being held, there's no limitation. Granted, this has gone wrong pretty much every time it has been used (documented incidents of innocent people being shipped off to gitmo for example) against innocent people a number of times. But hey, it has the word PATRIOT in it!
These assholes despise the citizenship of this country so much that they stuff something called the PATRIOT act with everything that is the opposite of patriotism and that directly undermines the country they claim the act is meant to protect. And we all sit around like fucking sheep, worrying about meaningless bullshit like birth certificates. And worse, all those jackholes who went around doing the "you HAVE to vote!" last year think that they've done their civic duty, because they voted. They chose between the giant douche and the turd sandwich and disavow any responsibility for upholding the status quo that continues to pin us all under its thumb.
Maybe people will start to finally learn that the choices they are fed are bullshit and that both A and B are part of the greater subject -- C. If you vote for A, it benefits C. If you vote for B, it benefits C. Instead of idiots arguing "derp derp derp red versus blue" they might finally invest that energy into understanding what is really going on and doing something about it. Then again, probably not.
I'm sure the president has the ability to veto this though. Surely he will? All these people that were so intent on voting this past election for "change" because the new jackass was going to be entirely different from the last jackass are surely going to have saved us from evil, right? So their pony will do everything he can to overthrow the USAPATRIOT Act, right? That must be why we haven't heard him say a single damn word about it. At all. Because he's just holding his tongue, so he can wield the veto power, yeah?
I'm sure everyone will finally stop investing all of their energy in Obama's birth certificate and being raging homophobes and marching around abortion clinics so they can focus on things that are actually impacting our entire way of life, like government oppression and the absolute corruption of government by corporate shills. Right?
It's some chick I've never heard of from a shitty reality show and some dude I've never heard of. All of the American outlets are being fucking fucktards and using vague language to skirt naming the people involved. I guess they're to god damn fucking retarded to understand that the UK can't issue a gag order to the American press. This includes Slashdot. Fucking idiots. Put the names IN THE BLURB ON SLASHDOT.
You don't get to question anything.
You know, I was glad to get rid of the last guy, but I haven't seen all that much "change" with the new one, either. (Shocker, I know!)
The reality we live in is that big corporations with marketing departments largely operate the big government with guns. If you doubt it, look at the employment and lobbying history of any random handful of politicians or cabinet and committee members in the government before and after their time "serving the public".
Where is this list of politicians who don't feel that their constituency is just a power pool to fuel their own personal selfish motivations and goals?
Also, where is the statement in the Constitution that says rights are granted by this "God" fellow? The closest I'm aware of is all men being created equal, endowed by their creator (where creator is clearly intentionally open and vague to be interpreted by each individual as is appropriate to them - including sensibly metaphorically).
Also, it is false to say that our "rights" are somehow granted by a mythological sky-person. The fact is that they ARE granted by the government. In the days when Kings owned all the land and you were allowed to live and toil on their land, you were subject to their whims. Today, you are subject to the government's whims. Ostensibly, that means the whims of your fellow man, but in practice it's more of a limited control by aristocracy than "fellow man". At any rate, if you have some inherent right to speak freely and posses a weapon, I suggest you think again. Any right that I feel is a basic right of a human being and that I currently enjoy the freedom to exercise is done so only because the government hasn't taken it away from me. They could come in tomorrow and shut me up and take my gun or even take my life and there isn't a fucking thing I could do about it, because I'm one person and I don't own nukes or tanks or bombs or assault rifles or have a military or an entire court and legal team on my payroll.
Just google "cops warrant wrong house" for an endless flood of no-knock warrant stories where cops broke down the door of the wrong house. They often end with an innocent citizen (of course, until convicted, aren't they ALL innocent?) being shot or even killed or with a home owner defending themselves against the home invasion by shooting the police (which never works out well for the victim).
http://www.google.com/search?q=cops+warrant+wrong+house
Depends who that someone is. If you're the one having your home or business invaded, then yes, it's almost certainly okay to shoot you. In fact, it has happened before without any discipline of the shooter. Just "part of the job". Even when the warrant was served on the wrong fucking place and person. However, if you're the one being searched and a bunch of armed guys storm into your home in the middle of the night and your initial response is to grab a weapon and defend yourself - you'll probably be killed in return. Or at least imprisoned. Even if you are an innocent person and the warrant was served (as seems to happen often) on the wrong address (say, the cops go to 1131 W. Broadway when the address is supposed to be 1311 W Broadway).
I still fail to see how this is a criminal issue. Why are government resources being used to enforce and police what should be civil matters? If you and I sign a contract and you violate that contract, can I send the police (or the FBI or other armed squad of gestapo) to exact retribution on you?
I don't see enough people ever taking it seriously enough to matter. I ignored BitCoin entirely for a year, simply because they did such a poor job of explaining (in user-facing content, at least) just exactly what the fuck the clients were doing and the fundamentals of the process. You can watch their promotional video, which amounts to "install a client that does magic and makes money appear".
The reason I ignored it for over a year is that it just instantly hit me as a garbage. As a scam. As those companies that used to ask you to install a client that would do distributed work and would pay you for your CPU usage, but never really actually accomplish enough work per user to ever bet any money back (especially when counting the energy your system used to do the work). With this, the starting user is left wondering "okay, what am I doing? is my client doing computational work that is being sold by bitcoin to companies and institutions and they're giving my bitcoins in return for that?" but you never really know, until you start digging around in white papers - which most users aren't going to do.
And if you check out the forums, there's even more scammy sounding things. Like advertising sites that sell pre-built computers made just for running your own bitcoin farming machine. Or guys offering to contract to you for a certain amount of work, etc, etc. It all just rubs even the experienced person as shady and scammy. You really have to overcome a lot of mental hurdles to stop and give it a real look.
I think you mean "US Government Foundation Recognizes Games as Art; Tax Payers Fund Videogames as Art".
I don't need a gun. I have this here knife.
And I thought my ISP was a real jack ass.
Now those groups that want to censor everything adults consume can assert that not only does pornography lead to rape, but terrorism!
The problem is that when you go to a job interview or otherwise interact in the real world, the comments don't follow you at every turn and you don't have to rely on that third party being willing or able to discern which comments they read on the internet are legitimate and which are just asshats. The website or facebook site someone made about you being a complete whore and genital-wart-riddled slut maybe pops up in the top few results of every search on your name for the rest of your life. Or maybe the more clever and devious take the less obvious route and complain about you as an individual they did business with, so that because you dumped some vindictive guy you dated for a couple weeks, he has now made sure you have plenty of results showing up online with every search that implicate you as a deceitful fraud.
I suspect that it becomes more difficult to react to things on the net where they have a greater audience and permanence with a mere shrug and an "I'm above all that".
I agree that words are just words and as a libertarian, I despise any attempt to regulate or control anything that doesn't have to be, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to reconcile that ideal with the current reality, where a single angry person that you turned down advances from or had a bad experience with or just plain don't get along with can significantly impact your reputation in meaningful ways and yet still not be considered to have reached the point of "libel" (or even if it does, be so difficult to follow-up as an individual in libel cases as to make it so).
Things like this are becoming much more difficult for any rational person to reach a sensible conclusion on. My initial reaction would be that you don't censor or criminalize thoughts. Even mean or vile ones. As long as it is not libel, you just need to have thick skin and move the fuck on.
On the other hand, it's a different thing when it's something that has a global audience of potentially billions, will be archived and indexed by search engines, possibly have a longer life than the person it is about, come up in searches for that person for the rest of their life by future friends, mates, and employers and otherwise follow them around indefinitely. You can't graduate the internet and move away from the "attack" and you can't just go to a new town. You are stuck forever with whatever some ignorant idiotic juvenile wrote years ago or whatever some spiteful twat might write about you today.
If I had a kid and this happened pre-internet, I would tell them to ignore it and know they're better than that and that the words aren't true and to move on and eventually it will go away. With the internet, I don't know what I would do. As a parent, I think I would be helpless and stuck. How do you stick to the ideal that nobody should be able to dictate what you can do or say short of actual libel or threats and reconcile that with words or images that will be there under google for your name for decades to come?
Perhaps more importantly, how do we make sure that we deal with this in a rational way and don't just say "that pisses me off, so I'm going to make a blanket law about it" like with that stupid bitch and her family that drove that little girl to kill herself over myspace? A case where it was so tempting to have so much anger and hatred over the incident that even the completely logical person was tempted to say "fuck it, I don't care what the lasting legal consequences are for the rest of society, as long as we come up with a way to stick that bitch in a max security prison for life".
As an American Citizen let me inform you, across the border, that our Constitution doesn't really mean much of anything anymore.
Ideally, the price of the DLC would be pro-rated or maps would always be free or they would prolong the life of the game. I mean, the latest version of Counter Strike has been going for almost eight years, now. The latest version of MW/COD has been going for six months and will mostly expire in about five months. (I know some will still play beyond that, but the majority of the community moves on).
If you care about privacy or security, you're either a child molester or a terrorist, I guess.
The annual release makes the previous games obsolete. What I hate about this (in concept, mostly, since I don't play much COD/MW) is that a game has about one year of life left at launch. Then they launch a DLC map pack three months in. So that's $15 for maps that have nine months of life left. Then they release more DLC six months in, for another $15. So that's full $15 price for only half the original life span. Then (if I recall) they usually release a third and final map pack for these (the last three titles, at least). So another full $15 for only a quarter left of the life span.
You know these games are going to be popular. Just fucking make the content and release it up front. Charge another $45 for it and people are going to pay it, because then they can get a full year of content out of it (and those of us who grow tired of the same few maps in the first few months and stop playing out of sheer boredom, before the first map pack is even released will probably stick around longer).
Also, this was "leaked" in as much as someone said "let's get this out there and see people's reaction while there is still time to change some of our direction if there is a backlash".
"Terrorists could hide a bomb in a diaper, and we don't seem to have anything much better than pat-downs to detect it. "
The thing is, they do have something better. They said in the article itself that they ran the stroller through a bomb chemical trace detection system. So why didn't they take the baby through it? In fact, why aren't people going through it? That's what these were made for. You walk through it and it blows a puff of air at you that has a higher detection rate than anything else. After 9/11, these were going in all over the country in every airport (in fact, I invested in the company that makes them as a result). And now? No, we can't be bothered with those. Having something that can detect the most minute traces of explosive chemicals is no solution, when we can take naked photos of citizens and stick our hands down their pants.
I'm tired of everyone pissing their pants when it involves a child or a mother or an elderly person. How about when it involves any person? Why is it okay to dismiss the experience and violations of me, because I'm a middle aged single male? Why are we only concerned with the value of people's rights if they fall into the above exceptions?
I can't believe I just laughed at that. God damn it.
Well, they're based in Sweden. Has Sweden enacted their own DMCA laws recently or something? If not, then of course they ignore them.
TPB was not down outside of Comcast land, initially. For several hours when the initial reports were being published online, nobody could reach TPB from Comcast, but they could useing a proxy or VPN and those on other networks could reach it. It wasn't until hours later that the same behavior started to appear on other networks. In light of those circumstances and prior Comcast behavior, it's not entirely irrational that people started to question if they were intentionally blocking them.
So, no, what would have happened in your example is that someone with Comcast would have tried to reach TPB and failed. Then they'd ping it and fail. Then they'd login via another network and ping it and it would work.
Except they have stooped to that level in the recent past and after months of denying it, finally admitted it and were called to task for it by the FCC. That is precisely the reason why everyone jumped to the worst conclusion when everyone with Comcast was having trouble reaching TPB and everyone with another provider was (for the first many hours of the incident) not having a problem.
If you're known as the neighborhood trouble-maker, it's your own damn fault if everyone looks accusingly at you the next time there is some trouble that you actually didn't make.