At the end, when people say that during the "off" time they were fine and during the "on" time the problems came back, you get to reveal the test results and say STFU.
Seriously, if there is something to this WiFi thing how come we can't get any laboratory results on it? The answer to that is because there is nothing to it, it is all in the heads of the people who allegedly have the problems.
The only reason nobody's done this is because they don't fancy the political implications of publicly proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that the people complaining are neurotic fools. Even if you're not in a position where your job is elected regularly, the chances are you ultimately report to someone whose job is up for re-election.
You have no business running a network of any significant size without switches you can remotely disable ports on - and hopefully up to date documentation of which physical ports are patched into which switch ports, though I know from experience that such documentation tends to be obsolete before it's even completed.
*shrug* Most likely they'd never considered a "hostile" DHCP server on the network (lots of other things could have killed the network, so they thought), and had never seen what that looks like.
OTOH we can't pay very well, so we can't get top-notch talent.
My employer develops router firmware. Our engineers are experts at finding odd ways to kill the network;)
You get something on the network which has an IP from the offending DHCP server, use ARP to establish what that DHCP servers' MAC address is then lookup the switches' own tables to figure out which port that MAC is plugged into and switch that port off and wait for the equipment owner to start complaining. Takes about 3-5 minutes to do by hand, and some switches can do it automatically.
If no one actually bootlegs the event, who pays the monetary damages and attorney fees?
If no-one actually bootlegs the event, there will be no monetary damages and the billions of dollars the record industry will make from selling nothing but legitimate recordings will more than compensate them for attorney fees. In fact, they should have enough left over to buy Belgium and make "Baby One More Time" the new national anthem.
Re:the english language is better off with out gra
on
The Great Typo Hunt
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· Score: 1
There's no such thing as rigid formal rules with any language that's in common use. Words fall in and out of use all the time - maybe the thing to which they refer becomes obsolete, maybe some other word finds favour instead - and accepted grammar changes all the time.
"Fuck", for instance, has not always been considered rude, and quite a few UK towns used to have roads called "Grope Cunt Lane". On a rather less coarse note, Bryson notes in "Mother Tongue" that the English language has changed quite a bit since the early days of the US - there's some evidence to suggest that the early immigrants spoke somewhat like Yosemite Sam. And when was the last time you hailed a hansom?
I think the pictures and videos are the important elements, because they constitute actual evidence. Otherwise, there are fairly stringent tests for what makes something a legitimate confession that's admissible in court. People do sometimes brag about things they didn't actually do, especially in pseudo-anonymous environments, and that isn't a crime. It may be stupid, and it may cause you a lot of hassle as you try to convince police / a judge that you were just making empty boasts, but courts do still have to try to sort that out: if they determine the confession was indeed not a genuine confession, it isn't sufficient for conviction.
Which is not to say it won't fuck your life up royally.
Interviewer: "So, can you explain what you've been doing for the last 9 months?" Interviewee: "I was remanded in custody because I wanted to look big and clever and so bragged about a serious crime which I didn't commit" Interviewer: "Okay, so we've established that you're a prat. Have you got any questions you'd like to ask me?"
Why shouldn't it swing both ways? Doesn't the policeman have to make sure that there's actually a dead person?
You are not the first to have made that mistake. All that has to be proven is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond any shadow of a doubt. While hard proof of a dead person (such as identifiable remains) would obviously give you "beyond any shadow of a doubt", it's quite possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt without such proof, as Hans Reiser's trial demonstrated.
IOW, the police only need good reason to believe that there's a dead person.
Someone openly admits to speeding - worst that's likely to happen is they get a fine and (depending on where it takes place) some sort of penalty on their license. Few people openly admit to speeding unless they've actually done so.
Someone openly admits to murder - worst that's likely to happen (again depending on where) is the death penalty - or at the very least life in prison. And - even though it sounds totally absurd to most of us - apparently the occasional lunatic does confess to a murder they couldn't possibly have committed.
I've received things that I was fairly sure were form letters before - generally when contacting my MP about a contentious issue which probably has lots of people writing more-or-less the same letter.
But I've also received very helpful letters that most definitely weren't form, largely because my MP took the trouble to ask someone else a question on my behalf - she actually asked me how I'd like the question worded. So yes, I definitely have some expectation of non-form letters.
I've certainly never received a letter thanking me for supporting an issue I wrote to express my opposition to.
And you're also missing the bigger point. When thousands of people wrote in about the Digital Economy Bill when it was being "debated", they were more concerned with the Government giving it the proper debate time it deserved rather than rushing it through. I doubt people were that bothered as to whether they got a form reply from their MP, or if it was individually written to them in reply.
Actually, I had a huge problem with lots of legislation Labour pushed through - but really my problem is with the system. Labour had such a stranglehold on their MPs that it was unusual for many to rebel.
Their majority was big enough that it was a rare piece of law that Labour supported didn't make it through with little in the way of serious compromise - even when (as in the case of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) a senior MP announced late in the proceedings that he didn't like the wording.
On the other hand, a personally written letter or phone call is given whatever miniscule attention the congressman's office usually gives to constituent contacts...i.e., very little unless you are a major contributor, but at least it's not automatically routed to trash.
I have completely the opposite experience.
The UK system doesn't rely on individual contributions anything like as heavily as the US system. (Well, actually it does rely on them to a certain extent but it's nothing like as obvious - frankly, from what I've heard I'd describe the US system as formalised corruption) - if you write to your MP with a tangible issue that's likely to be impacting a number of people in their constituency and not too controversial, as I indeed have, you may very well get serious attention. OK, the serious attention may be little more than a letter written by an assistant and sent to somebody important but that somebody important is far more likely to take a letter from Fred Bloggs MP seriously than they are to take a letter from you or me.
The UK's political system is rather different from the US, however. We directly elect our representative (who becomes a Member of Parliament, or MP) by a simple majority - whoever has the most votes in an area is the MP for that area. (This can actually mean that a fairly unpopular person becomes MP, if the votes are split 30:28:28:14, the candidate with 30% of the vote becomes MP even though 70% of the people in the area didn't want him. We don't have a two-party system, so this can easily happen.)
The party with 50% or more of the elected MPs forms the government - the party leader becomes Prime Minister and s/he hands out positions within government to MPs. The most senior MPs form the cabinet - a sort of steering committee, if you like, given that it'd be pretty hard to have an intelligent group meeting of the 300 or so MPs a ruling party would have. This system ensures that the party in power can generally get legislation passed relatively easily - few MPs make a habit of voting against the party line, it's an extremely good way to find yourself kicked out of the party.
What's happened recently (though it's not directly related to this discussion) is that no single party has 50% of the elected MPs. So no single party commands a majority in Parliament. What happens then is that two parties whose votes together add up to more than 50% agree to form a coalition - a government comprised of MPs from two parties.
AIUI, his point is that there are always going to be pressure groups trying to change an MPs mind over an issue.
In the past, they may have got together and drafted a letter saying "500 people in your constituency alone believe this...", put together a petition or asked their members to write letters themselves. The first two would have meant the MP has one letter to answer (and answer the letter he must, if only to ensure he doesn't develop a reputation of ignoring his constituents altogether). The last option would - with the possible exception of really controversial issues - almost never have resulted in a deluge of correspondence because while lots of people may feel strongly enough about something to sign a petition, relatively few are likely to feel strongly enough to write a letter, put a stamp on it and post it.
Today. however, anyone can throw together a website with an email form that sends directly to a particular email address, and the amount of effort involved for the end user (particularly if most of the email is pre-written as a template) is little more than signing the petition they might have done in the past. The end result is that it's quite easy to find an MP is deluged with emails from individual constituents all basically saying the same thing - ultimately, the MP may be faced with a stark choice:
Ignore such emails. Not good - next thing you know there's a campaign of 500 people saying how Fred Bloggs MP didn't even have the good manners to acknowledge them.
Reply to each email with a form letter. Not much better - form letters tend to stick out a mile and the MP knows it.
Reply to each email individually. Except now your MP needs a 28 hour day to get everything done in.
Have an assistant draft the replies and just sign them. Or, if feeling really smart, obtain the use of an autopen machine. This is the closest thing anyone's likely to find to a real answer, and I imagine is what most MPs do. But your MP still needs to drill through the correspondence and instruct his/her assistant - well and good if the morning's email contained 10 emails needing a reply, but never going to scale if it contained 200.
It may be worth noting that the fossil record suggests that the Earth has undergone a number of periodic mass extinctions in which a significant proportion of species on it have died out. Quite what triggered them, nobody really knows. It's possible that underground bunkers would provide little or no real protection.
Mind you, it's also possible that we're the most adaptable species the Earth has ever seen and as such may be more able to adapt to whatever may cause a mass extinction than most other creatures.
You may be waiting a long time. Papermaster is hardly going to put out a press release saying "They sacked me. Bastards." (if nothing else, it may harm future job prospects...). And when was the last time any company announced proudly that they'd sacked somebody? "Fred has left to pursue other interests|for health reasons|by mutual agreement".
Look, all joking aside, let's say for the sake of argument that something like this is a catalyst in making Linux really popular on the desktop.
Do you really think the more paranoid governments in the world will simply throw up their collective hands and say "Bugger. We're screwed".
Or do you think they'll take steps to enforce such software - either by outlawing Linux on the desktop or by producing a version of their software for Linux and demanding that vendors include it as a compulsory package for Linux users who select "France" as their location?
I get a phone from the Netherlands, where there are no problems with downloads. I connect to the internet through this phone, while in France (I assume it costs a lot, but whatever). What laws am I supposed to obey?
Well, the government could compel the cell provider to block internet connections for roaming clients.
You assume it's the copyright industry. For years, any form of encryption was illegal in France and that had much more to do with government paranoia than anything else.
Heck, at one point my employer had a VPN tunnel to a subsidiary in France and I established beyond any doubt that the encrypted (no I am not losing my mind, I asked a respected colleague) traffic was being eavesdropped as a very select subset of this traffic was not making it across the tunnel - yet made it quite happily across another tunnel based on the same software.
That was the big driver that proved to me that not only was CIPE not hugely secure (which I already knew - it had been demonstrated a couple of months previously and the recommendation was to abandon in favour of IPSec), but it was being actively eavesdropped and censored (which I did not know).
I'm also suitably stupefied. All the "pink" and "red" flags that they are obviously so clever to spot, and which she spends almost the entire article talking about, are just her dancing around the elephant in the room: that she and her team are complete fucking idiots.
Part of me wonders if there is a difference in industries which makes this look so damn stupid.
Anyone in IT has probably seen so much malware, so many phishing and scam attempts that there's a strong chance most of us would have checked any company registration numbers with the relevant authorities, checked WHOIS information and contacted the bank directly using one of the banks' own published numbers before even returning the first email. But if you didn't normally meet such rubbish (because the IT department has already filtered out most of the malware, scams and phishing attempts before they even hit your mailbox), I wonder if you'd develop the same level of cynicism?
As per the title, this is a cultural thing as much as anything. Bear in mind I'm writing this as a Brit, so this is my own interpretation - it may be totally wrong but I'm sure anything that bad will be corrected, complete with sarcastic comments about my mental capacity.
Whoever you are, I am 90% certain that had you spent every hour of your waking life being essentially indoctrinated into believing your government was all-benevolent, only ever looking out for your interests (unlike those pigs in ${COUNTRY}), you too would have no problem with your government spying. That deals with any respondents in countries under a dictatorship of some sort - and in any case, those who don't agree with this and don't like their government are probably not stupid enough to say so in an online survey.
Next up you've got countries with Western-style democracies - where historically the inhabitants have had far more problems with their neighbours than they have had with themselves. I'm thinking particularly of Europe here, there hasn't been a period of 50 years go by without significant map re-drawing somewhere in Europe in the last few centuries. Frankly, most of mainland Europe is probably more concerned about neighbouring countries than they are about their own government.
The USA - and to a lesser extent countries with a strong US cultural influence - is a little different. You chaps were colonised in the main by a bunch of people whose government had let them down - both in the initial wave of immigrants and later waves such as during the Irish potato famine. And this was long before you could jump in a plane and be in another country in a few hours for relatively little money - it would have been a long, hazardous journey by ship which would have taken weeks, during which time your personal space(!) would have been a bunk in a tiny cabin, slightly longer than your bunk and about twice as wide.
Much of this colonisation was also long before any form of fast international communication - it's quite possible that many people leaving weren't quite sure what to expect at the other end, and at best may have had little more than a few letters from relatives who had already left. There was certainly no guarantee of a better life.
The point I'm making is that America was colonised - at least initially - by a group of men and women who were pretty damn desperate to get away from their government. Net result - a group of people who are automatically very suspicious of any government. Granted, for many people, that was generations ago. But societies don't change overnight, and I'm given to understand that the US culture and education system makes no bones about the idea of governments having a tendency to make screwups which affect the entire country. So a headline like this is guaranteed to make waves in a US-centric (or at least heavily US-influenced) site like/.
Slashdot Mirror
At the end, when people say that during the "off" time they were fine and during the "on" time the problems came back, you get to reveal the test results and say STFU.
Seriously, if there is something to this WiFi thing how come we can't get any laboratory results on it? The answer to that is because there is nothing to it, it is all in the heads of the people who allegedly have the problems.
The only reason nobody's done this is because they don't fancy the political implications of publicly proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that the people complaining are neurotic fools. Even if you're not in a position where your job is elected regularly, the chances are you ultimately report to someone whose job is up for re-election.
You have no business running a network of any significant size without switches you can remotely disable ports on - and hopefully up to date documentation of which physical ports are patched into which switch ports, though I know from experience that such documentation tends to be obsolete before it's even completed.
*shrug* Most likely they'd never considered a "hostile" DHCP server on the network (lots of other things could have killed the network, so they thought), and had never seen what that looks like.
OTOH we can't pay very well, so we can't get top-notch talent.
My employer develops router firmware. Our engineers are experts at finding odd ways to kill the network ;)
Hours?
You get something on the network which has an IP from the offending DHCP server, use ARP to establish what that DHCP servers' MAC address is then lookup the switches' own tables to figure out which port that MAC is plugged into and switch that port off and wait for the equipment owner to start complaining. Takes about 3-5 minutes to do by hand, and some switches can do it automatically.
It has in theory. Spanning tree should take care of it.
Though I have seen interop issues which prevent any traffic from going between two different vendors' STP-enabled switches.
If no one actually bootlegs the event, who pays the monetary damages and attorney fees?
If no-one actually bootlegs the event, there will be no monetary damages and the billions of dollars the record industry will make from selling nothing but legitimate recordings will more than compensate them for attorney fees. In fact, they should have enough left over to buy Belgium and make "Baby One More Time" the new national anthem.
There's no such thing as rigid formal rules with any language that's in common use. Words fall in and out of use all the time - maybe the thing to which they refer becomes obsolete, maybe some other word finds favour instead - and accepted grammar changes all the time.
"Fuck", for instance, has not always been considered rude, and quite a few UK towns used to have roads called "Grope Cunt Lane". On a rather less coarse note, Bryson notes in "Mother Tongue" that the English language has changed quite a bit since the early days of the US - there's some evidence to suggest that the early immigrants spoke somewhat like Yosemite Sam. And when was the last time you hailed a hansom?
I think the pictures and videos are the important elements, because they constitute actual evidence. Otherwise, there are fairly stringent tests for what makes something a legitimate confession that's admissible in court. People do sometimes brag about things they didn't actually do, especially in pseudo-anonymous environments, and that isn't a crime. It may be stupid, and it may cause you a lot of hassle as you try to convince police / a judge that you were just making empty boasts, but courts do still have to try to sort that out: if they determine the confession was indeed not a genuine confession, it isn't sufficient for conviction.
Which is not to say it won't fuck your life up royally.
Interviewer: "So, can you explain what you've been doing for the last 9 months?"
Interviewee: "I was remanded in custody because I wanted to look big and clever and so bragged about a serious crime which I didn't commit"
Interviewer: "Okay, so we've established that you're a prat. Have you got any questions you'd like to ask me?"
Why shouldn't it swing both ways? Doesn't the policeman have to make sure that there's actually a dead person?
You are not the first to have made that mistake. All that has to be proven is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond any shadow of a doubt. While hard proof of a dead person (such as identifiable remains) would obviously give you "beyond any shadow of a doubt", it's quite possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt without such proof, as Hans Reiser's trial demonstrated.
IOW, the police only need good reason to believe that there's a dead person.
It's a question of magnitude, though.
Someone openly admits to speeding - worst that's likely to happen is they get a fine and (depending on where it takes place) some sort of penalty on their license. Few people openly admit to speeding unless they've actually done so.
Someone openly admits to murder - worst that's likely to happen (again depending on where) is the death penalty - or at the very least life in prison. And - even though it sounds totally absurd to most of us - apparently the occasional lunatic does confess to a murder they couldn't possibly have committed.
Better than mine. "Aardvark Accident Associated Attorneys".
I've received things that I was fairly sure were form letters before - generally when contacting my MP about a contentious issue which probably has lots of people writing more-or-less the same letter.
But I've also received very helpful letters that most definitely weren't form, largely because my MP took the trouble to ask someone else a question on my behalf - she actually asked me how I'd like the question worded. So yes, I definitely have some expectation of non-form letters.
I've certainly never received a letter thanking me for supporting an issue I wrote to express my opposition to.
And you're also missing the bigger point. When thousands of people wrote in about the Digital Economy Bill when it was being "debated", they were more concerned with the Government giving it the proper debate time it deserved rather than rushing it through. I doubt people were that bothered as to whether they got a form reply from their MP, or if it was individually written to them in reply.
Actually, I had a huge problem with lots of legislation Labour pushed through - but really my problem is with the system. Labour had such a stranglehold on their MPs that it was unusual for many to rebel.
Their majority was big enough that it was a rare piece of law that Labour supported didn't make it through with little in the way of serious compromise - even when (as in the case of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) a senior MP announced late in the proceedings that he didn't like the wording.
On the other hand, a personally written letter or phone call is given whatever miniscule attention the congressman's office usually gives to constituent contacts...i.e., very little unless you are a major contributor, but at least it's not automatically routed to trash.
I have completely the opposite experience.
The UK system doesn't rely on individual contributions anything like as heavily as the US system. (Well, actually it does rely on them to a certain extent but it's nothing like as obvious - frankly, from what I've heard I'd describe the US system as formalised corruption) - if you write to your MP with a tangible issue that's likely to be impacting a number of people in their constituency and not too controversial, as I indeed have, you may very well get serious attention. OK, the serious attention may be little more than a letter written by an assistant and sent to somebody important but that somebody important is far more likely to take a letter from Fred Bloggs MP seriously than they are to take a letter from you or me.
The UK's political system is rather different from the US, however. We directly elect our representative (who becomes a Member of Parliament, or MP) by a simple majority - whoever has the most votes in an area is the MP for that area. (This can actually mean that a fairly unpopular person becomes MP, if the votes are split 30:28:28:14, the candidate with 30% of the vote becomes MP even though 70% of the people in the area didn't want him. We don't have a two-party system, so this can easily happen.)
The party with 50% or more of the elected MPs forms the government - the party leader becomes Prime Minister and s/he hands out positions within government to MPs. The most senior MPs form the cabinet - a sort of steering committee, if you like, given that it'd be pretty hard to have an intelligent group meeting of the 300 or so MPs a ruling party would have. This system ensures that the party in power can generally get legislation passed relatively easily - few MPs make a habit of voting against the party line, it's an extremely good way to find yourself kicked out of the party.
What's happened recently (though it's not directly related to this discussion) is that no single party has 50% of the elected MPs. So no single party commands a majority in Parliament. What happens then is that two parties whose votes together add up to more than 50% agree to form a coalition - a government comprised of MPs from two parties.
AIUI, his point is that there are always going to be pressure groups trying to change an MPs mind over an issue.
In the past, they may have got together and drafted a letter saying "500 people in your constituency alone believe this...", put together a petition or asked their members to write letters themselves. The first two would have meant the MP has one letter to answer (and answer the letter he must, if only to ensure he doesn't develop a reputation of ignoring his constituents altogether). The last option would - with the possible exception of really controversial issues - almost never have resulted in a deluge of correspondence because while lots of people may feel strongly enough about something to sign a petition, relatively few are likely to feel strongly enough to write a letter, put a stamp on it and post it.
Today. however, anyone can throw together a website with an email form that sends directly to a particular email address, and the amount of effort involved for the end user (particularly if most of the email is pre-written as a template) is little more than signing the petition they might have done in the past. The end result is that it's quite easy to find an MP is deluged with emails from individual constituents all basically saying the same thing - ultimately, the MP may be faced with a stark choice:
It may be worth noting that the fossil record suggests that the Earth has undergone a number of periodic mass extinctions in which a significant proportion of species on it have died out. Quite what triggered them, nobody really knows. It's possible that underground bunkers would provide little or no real protection.
Mind you, it's also possible that we're the most adaptable species the Earth has ever seen and as such may be more able to adapt to whatever may cause a mass extinction than most other creatures.
You may be waiting a long time. Papermaster is hardly going to put out a press release saying "They sacked me. Bastards." (if nothing else, it may harm future job prospects...). And when was the last time any company announced proudly that they'd sacked somebody? "Fred has left to pursue other interests|for health reasons|by mutual agreement".
The Volvos that they were building around that time looked an awful lot like tanks - and their body was built to a similar specification.
Recent models don't look much like tanks, but they have historically been very much a marque associated with safety.
Look, all joking aside, let's say for the sake of argument that something like this is a catalyst in making Linux really popular on the desktop.
Do you really think the more paranoid governments in the world will simply throw up their collective hands and say "Bugger. We're screwed".
Or do you think they'll take steps to enforce such software - either by outlawing Linux on the desktop or by producing a version of their software for Linux and demanding that vendors include it as a compulsory package for Linux users who select "France" as their location?
I get a phone from the Netherlands, where there are no problems with downloads. I connect to the internet through this phone, while in France (I assume it costs a lot, but whatever). What laws am I supposed to obey?
Well, the government could compel the cell provider to block internet connections for roaming clients.
You assume it's the copyright industry. For years, any form of encryption was illegal in France and that had much more to do with government paranoia than anything else.
Heck, at one point my employer had a VPN tunnel to a subsidiary in France and I established beyond any doubt that the encrypted (no I am not losing my mind, I asked a respected colleague) traffic was being eavesdropped as a very select subset of this traffic was not making it across the tunnel - yet made it quite happily across another tunnel based on the same software.
That was the big driver that proved to me that not only was CIPE not hugely secure (which I already knew - it had been demonstrated a couple of months previously and the recommendation was to abandon in favour of IPSec), but it was being actively eavesdropped and censored (which I did not know).
So does that mean that if we manage to record the words of Christ from a 2000 year old clay pot, the RIAA will come after us?
No, the Pope will.
I'm also suitably stupefied. All the "pink" and "red" flags that they are obviously so clever to spot, and which she spends almost the entire article talking about, are just her dancing around the elephant in the room: that she and her team are complete fucking idiots.
Part of me wonders if there is a difference in industries which makes this look so damn stupid.
Anyone in IT has probably seen so much malware, so many phishing and scam attempts that there's a strong chance most of us would have checked any company registration numbers with the relevant authorities, checked WHOIS information and contacted the bank directly using one of the banks' own published numbers before even returning the first email. But if you didn't normally meet such rubbish (because the IT department has already filtered out most of the malware, scams and phishing attempts before they even hit your mailbox), I wonder if you'd develop the same level of cynicism?
As per the title, this is a cultural thing as much as anything. Bear in mind I'm writing this as a Brit, so this is my own interpretation - it may be totally wrong but I'm sure anything that bad will be corrected, complete with sarcastic comments about my mental capacity.
Whoever you are, I am 90% certain that had you spent every hour of your waking life being essentially indoctrinated into believing your government was all-benevolent, only ever looking out for your interests (unlike those pigs in ${COUNTRY}), you too would have no problem with your government spying. That deals with any respondents in countries under a dictatorship of some sort - and in any case, those who don't agree with this and don't like their government are probably not stupid enough to say so in an online survey.
Next up you've got countries with Western-style democracies - where historically the inhabitants have had far more problems with their neighbours than they have had with themselves. I'm thinking particularly of Europe here, there hasn't been a period of 50 years go by without significant map re-drawing somewhere in Europe in the last few centuries. Frankly, most of mainland Europe is probably more concerned about neighbouring countries than they are about their own government.
The USA - and to a lesser extent countries with a strong US cultural influence - is a little different. You chaps were colonised in the main by a bunch of people whose government had let them down - both in the initial wave of immigrants and later waves such as during the Irish potato famine. And this was long before you could jump in a plane and be in another country in a few hours for relatively little money - it would have been a long, hazardous journey by ship which would have taken weeks, during which time your personal space(!) would have been a bunk in a tiny cabin, slightly longer than your bunk and about twice as wide.
Much of this colonisation was also long before any form of fast international communication - it's quite possible that many people leaving weren't quite sure what to expect at the other end, and at best may have had little more than a few letters from relatives who had already left. There was certainly no guarantee of a better life.
The point I'm making is that America was colonised - at least initially - by a group of men and women who were pretty damn desperate to get away from their government. Net result - a group of people who are automatically very suspicious of any government. Granted, for many people, that was generations ago. But societies don't change overnight, and I'm given to understand that the US culture and education system makes no bones about the idea of governments having a tendency to make screwups which affect the entire country. So a headline like this is guaranteed to make waves in a US-centric (or at least heavily US-influenced) site like /.