That's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it?
I give a confidential press conference.
You leak.
He's been charged under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act.
I'm reasonably sure that screwing over those around them to enable their own advancement is the most effective long-term strategy for pursuing their happiness...
The administration may well have felt that the Fourth Amendment did not or should not apply - but they did not feel that most people would not object to them taking on this extra dimension of authority.
While some things are legal, they do not necessarily play well with voters - particularly conservative-with-a-small-"c" voters who might swing away from supporting the Republicans.
The fact that an activity might survive judicial scrutiny is moot if it cannot survive electoral scrutiny as well. Not drawing attention to actions that might alienate your political base is just good common sense.
Of course, getting found out, if you *have* tried to cover things up, makes you look both guilty and incompetent. C'est la vie.
Americans should expect their speech to be free from suppression by their government.
Americans should not expect their speech to be free from consequences from other non-governmental parties.
The Federalist Papers were written anonymously for a reason - and the anonymous speech is protected as a consequence. If one does not choose to take advantage of that protection, then one should not be surprised that people or corporations seek punitive retribution, if they are adversely affected by that speech.
You are assuming that a download is a lost sale. I don't believe that to be the case - hell, I don't believe that *you* believe that to be the case. And so it does not sound to me like the $990,000 in your example is a fair number at all.
Similarly, I *do* think $150,000 is "outrageous", as you put it, because I believe it is a figure wholly unrepresentative of the lost revenue from copyright infringement. I think that the damages assessed are wrong, because I think that they are disproportionate to the harm caused to the RIAA member companies. And if the restitution demanded is disproportionate to the harm suffered, then the law is immoral and needs to be changed.
I believe it is moral to help people gain access to information...
would you distinguish between helping adults and children in that context?
Regardless of the criteria one uses for determining that someone is a child, the implication of considering them to be children is that they are not yet possessed of enough life experience to make informed value judgements - and so should defer to someone acting in loco parentis to make those judgements for them. Should one help a child do things that the adult who has taken on the responsibility for their upbringing has chosen to forbid?
The basic premise is this - while the Federal government protects the people from foreign threats, it is perceived as also being a threat itself to many facets of the lives of the people of the United States. The reasoning goes like this: 1) We do not elect politicians on the basis of how well they run the country, but on the basis of how good they are at getting elected. That means they may be terrible at economics, social policy, administration, financial management, or people skills, but have good hair, white teeth, a loving spouse and attractive children, and are seen to attend church regularly. 2) Whoever gets elected will try to use their elected position to:
a) get elected again. While one useful goal is "run the country well", a more useful goal is "convince everyone that the way you are running the country is the best possible way - even if it's not!"
b) spend tax dollars buying stuff from companies run by their political allies, even when a competitor may offer better value.
c) rework the taxation system so those taxes are paid most heavily by the people who didn't vote for them.
d) legislate the morals and ethics of their supporters so as to make the behaviour they approve of mandatory and all other behaviour illegal, regardless of the morals and ethics of the citizens to whom that legislation is applied.
These facts combine to provide the rationale for the conclusion that we must distrust all politicians who are elected, for they have only displayed the same skills as are necessary for a confidence trickster, not for a statesman. Therefore, we should regard any attempt by politicians to extend their authority over the people as not primarily being for the people's benefit, and reject it.
Apologies for presumably teaching one's grandmother to suck eggs, but if this expert has been retained in every RIAA suit so far, it becomes necessary to ask what remuneration he has received for his work, and how that compares to his Iowa State U salary. There was a thread on Groklaw you might refer to, where Cravath Swain Moore sought similar financial details from one of SCO's experts, and I think there should be a transcript with the relevant citations where such information was compelled.
Similarly, one might seek to determine what his role actually is at Iowa State, and how that permits him so much time to be an expert witness - if his position is a sinecure, and he does not publish, then how expert can he be?
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave two speeches recently on the topic, including one on Friday in which he said "we must do all that we can to protect our children from these cowardly villains who hide in the shadows of the Internet."
There's also more than a hint of desperate scurrying to try to recapture the moral high ground that was lost by Foley. I mean, if you're not going to protect children from brazen villains who openly seek election on Capitol Hill, then cowardly villains who hide in the shadows of the Internet are a reasonable secondary target.
IANAL, and I'm not too clear on the details of Constitutional law, but isn't this an abrogation of the right to free speech? In that the right anonymity is protected, particularly for political speech? Like The Federalist Papers, that's what usually gets cited IIRC.
Running diesels of cooking oil has been done in the UK enough for the government to threaten prosecution for it - since vehicle fuels are taxed at a higher rate than foodstuffs, this is seen more as tax evasion than an environmental initiative.
Makes for an interesting thought experiment though, doesn't it? I mean, just how many Americans do you reckon jerk off to porno? How many admit to it? Fundamentally, sex can't be that bad, it's the sort of pastime the parents enjoy, right? And given that the Supreme Court, the most solemn repository of legal wisdom in our nation, has deliberated upon the question of looking at naked people banging and decided that the Constitution, the document that is the basis for our state, as seen in the light of our present-day mores and ethics, does not permit the banning of such images, then where's the issue? Instead, I'd say the issue is with the state of denial that we are presented with governing the attitude to doing the wild mambo in our country.
I think an enormous problem that strains the fabric of American society is that there is such a dichotomy between the legal and the moral. If every time a newspaper article castigated someone for some ethical impropriety, you could look up the browser history of the reporter on the byline and the editor giving it their blessing, might it not serve to unify the two disparate concepts of "what's publicly acceptable" and "what's privately commonplace"? I think as a nation we might benefit from slaughtering a few sacred cows and providing one or two less straw men for the mockery that is an electoral cycle. If we aren't breaking the law, we/shouldn't/ have to hide anything. If whatever it was that we should be ashamed of was that bad, it would be illegal, no?
Mind you, you might have to shift the location of the "legal" barrier a bit as well. Just think what you could do for Social Security if you stopped jailing people for using marijuana (which means that the state houses and feeds them, which is expensive) and started taxing it'a retail sale instead? Never happen, I suppose. Mind you, it's further from New York to San Francisco than it is from London to Istanbul, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised if it's rather difficult to get the country to speak with one voice on anything.
WTFZOMGBBQ?
This is a bill that America needs to have. If law-abiding citizens refrained from encryption and anonymizers and onion routers and that sort of thing, the terrorists and drug cartels that need such anonymity to hide from our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies would find that much more difficult to do so.
Junior engineers want to work on sites with a strong brand. That sets them up to leave the low-paid junior engineer jobs to go and be senior engineers in jobs with the aforementioned pay, benefits, etc.
Senior engineers are not so desperate for things that look good on the resume, so much as things that pay for their kids' college fees.
North Korea may have nukes now, but how many? I doubt more than a handfull. If we struck pre-emptively with our own nukes, even small tac-nukes on military sites, we could probably cripple them so they couldn't launch even one.
The major drawback to an offensive war against the DPRK is the effect on South Korea, the staunch US ally. Seoul is within 122mm range of the DMZ, and a strike on the North risks massive damage to the ROK capital from a large number of conventional rounds. And that's assuming that the US nuclear strike successfully accounts for the DPRK's WMD arsenal.
Last but not least there is the question of fallout from such a pre-emptive strike drifting South, or over to Japan, or into China. What would be the use of an ally who is willing to poison you with radioactive clouds? Maintaining US relations with other powers would be more than difficult after such a scenario.
All evidence is not destroyed in the blast. Nukes are not very efficient - lots of the radiological material doesn't get to fission or fusion because the warhead is blown apart before it finishes. That unused material has a fairly unique fingerprint in the relative concentrations of isotopes in it as a result of the various enrichment processes in use. So you are highly likely to be able to match a detonation to its source location... if you can get a sample from that source. Which is often tricky.
Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them.
Why not? I would certainly submit that there are many occasions when the US would be better off not using them, but (picking an example entirely at random) a nuclear option to neutralize the Iranian enrichment capability would seem sensible in many ways.
As a horrible counterexample, say for instance, that the US launches a conventional campaign against the DPRK. With a conventional response, North Korea is doomed, just like Iraq was. If, two hours into the air campaign, a Nodong missile makes Honolulu glow in the dark, while DPRK embassies around the world issue public communiques that Seattle will follow in one hour unless hostilities stop, will a US president call Kim's bluff, and trust that the Navy will intercept the next one?
Richard Reid is white. Germaine Lindsay was Afro-caribbean. There has been a successful woman suicide bomber in Iraq, still unidentified, and some caught before they were able to detonate.
Focussing on such a profile invites one's enemy to similarly focus on recruiting candidates that do not fit it. Air transport defence must include a purely random element that searches the occasional Quaker grandmother, lest targetted identity theft be used to defeat the profile-based techniques. The Israelis suffered when Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade turned to women suicide bombers because they were not searched as closely as men. It is imperative that the US not relearn that lesson the hard way when it has been so dramatically illustrated for the DHS to see already.
Emotive rhetoric is not all that badly executed, but transparent straw men and ad hominem attacks in the face of reasoned debate leave you looking just too desperate. The actual stances the two of you adopt almost don't matter, given the gap in the quality of your arguments.
Don't worry. US coders may not be up to scratch, but our lawyers are the best in the world, and they'll make sure that the profits from all those foreign engineers and technical experts are properly exploited to benefit you and me. Hurrah!
In the sense that your 401-K is properly invested with a major fund management company, obviously.
Bear in mind that the US gave significant ground in its relations with other countries to stay their ire over invading Iraq. Consider the policy change on the Russian conduct of their war in Chechnya (and Dagestan, Ingushetya and the rest) - criticism of Putin's conduct of that conflict dropped to nil, and in return the Russians didn't complain *too* much about how the Bremer administration gave oil development contracts, which had been awarded to Russian and French companies under Hussein, to Bechtel and Halliburton. Ditto China - no serious opposition to intervention in Iraq, no serious criticism of human rights issues, IP issues, or an artificially-low exchange rate. France and Germany produced sound and fury, signifying nothing - but they were constrained to operate within the auspices of the EU, and the UK commitment to the intervention hamstrung that. Iran saw regime-change as an opportunity to gain influence with a Shia-majority post-Saddam Iraq - ultimately, to bring a Shia-led Iraq into the Iranian sphere of influence, not the US one. The Islamic Republic expected to *benefit* from regime change. Turkey was the most overtly negative to the US invasion - not because of political ties to Saddam, or economic benefits, but because US policy towards allowing the north-Iraqi Kurdish minority an autonomous regional government threatened to destabilise Turkey, which has had significant issues with its own Kurdish minority's separatist movement. But Turkey's power projection capability is... rather limited.
I don't think that the GP post meant a foreign national should lead the inquiry, but that someone outside the Bush administration should, in the same way that Clinton appointed Starr to investigate Whitewater - a rabidly partisan foe, whose conclusions would at least not be tarred with the claim of "whitewash".
Slashdot Mirror
That's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I give a confidential press conference. You leak. He's been charged under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act.
Interesting. ...I don't think he broke any laws with his disclosure.
Isn't there a tort of "intentional infliction of emotional distress" - not a criminal offence, but a civil one?
I'm reasonably sure that screwing over those around them to enable their own advancement is the most effective long-term strategy for pursuing their happiness...
The underhandedness is an unfortunate necessity.
The administration may well have felt that the Fourth Amendment did not or should not apply - but they did not feel that most people would not object to them taking on this extra dimension of authority.
While some things are legal, they do not necessarily play well with voters - particularly conservative-with-a-small-"c" voters who might swing away from supporting the Republicans.
The fact that an activity might survive judicial scrutiny is moot if it cannot survive electoral scrutiny as well. Not drawing attention to actions that might alienate your political base is just good common sense.
Of course, getting found out, if you *have* tried to cover things up, makes you look both guilty and incompetent. C'est la vie.
Americans should expect their speech to be free from suppression by their government.
Americans should not expect their speech to be free from consequences from other non-governmental parties.
The Federalist Papers were written anonymously for a reason - and the anonymous speech is protected as a consequence. If one does not choose to take advantage of that protection, then one should not be surprised that people or corporations seek punitive retribution, if they are adversely affected by that speech.
You are assuming that a download is a lost sale. I don't believe that to be the case - hell, I don't believe that *you* believe that to be the case. And so it does not sound to me like the $990,000 in your example is a fair number at all. Similarly, I *do* think $150,000 is "outrageous", as you put it, because I believe it is a figure wholly unrepresentative of the lost revenue from copyright infringement. I think that the damages assessed are wrong, because I think that they are disproportionate to the harm caused to the RIAA member companies. And if the restitution demanded is disproportionate to the harm suffered, then the law is immoral and needs to be changed.
I believe it is moral to help people gain access to information...
would you distinguish between helping adults and children in that context?
Regardless of the criteria one uses for determining that someone is a child, the implication of considering them to be children is that they are not yet possessed of enough life experience to make informed value judgements - and so should defer to someone acting in loco parentis to make those judgements for them. Should one help a child do things that the adult who has taken on the responsibility for their upbringing has chosen to forbid?
The basic premise is this - while the Federal government protects the people from foreign threats, it is perceived as also being a threat itself to many facets of the lives of the people of the United States.
The reasoning goes like this:
1) We do not elect politicians on the basis of how well they run the country, but on the basis of how good they are at getting elected. That means they may be terrible at economics, social policy, administration, financial management, or people skills, but have good hair, white teeth, a loving spouse and attractive children, and are seen to attend church regularly.
2) Whoever gets elected will try to use their elected position to:
a) get elected again. While one useful goal is "run the country well", a more useful goal is "convince everyone that the way you are running the country is the best possible way - even if it's not!"
b) spend tax dollars buying stuff from companies run by their political allies, even when a competitor may offer better value.
c) rework the taxation system so those taxes are paid most heavily by the people who didn't vote for them.
d) legislate the morals and ethics of their supporters so as to make the behaviour they approve of mandatory and all other behaviour illegal, regardless of the morals and ethics of the citizens to whom that legislation is applied.
These facts combine to provide the rationale for the conclusion that we must distrust all politicians who are elected, for they have only displayed the same skills as are necessary for a confidence trickster, not for a statesman. Therefore, we should regard any attempt by politicians to extend their authority over the people as not primarily being for the people's benefit, and reject it.
Apologies for presumably teaching one's grandmother to suck eggs, but if this expert has been retained in every RIAA suit so far, it becomes necessary to ask what remuneration he has received for his work, and how that compares to his Iowa State U salary. There was a thread on Groklaw you might refer to, where Cravath Swain Moore sought similar financial details from one of SCO's experts, and I think there should be a transcript with the relevant citations where such information was compelled.
Similarly, one might seek to determine what his role actually is at Iowa State, and how that permits him so much time to be an expert witness - if his position is a sinecure, and he does not publish, then how expert can he be?
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave two speeches recently on the topic, including one on Friday in which he said "we must do all that we can to protect our children from these cowardly villains who hide in the shadows of the Internet."
There's also more than a hint of desperate scurrying to try to recapture the moral high ground that was lost by Foley. I mean, if you're not going to protect children from brazen villains who openly seek election on Capitol Hill, then cowardly villains who hide in the shadows of the Internet are a reasonable secondary target.
IANAL, and I'm not too clear on the details of Constitutional law, but isn't this an abrogation of the right to free speech? In that the right anonymity is protected, particularly for political speech? Like The Federalist Papers, that's what usually gets cited IIRC.
Running diesels of cooking oil has been done in the UK enough for the government to threaten prosecution for it - since vehicle fuels are taxed at a higher rate than foodstuffs, this is seen more as tax evasion than an environmental initiative.
Makes for an interesting thought experiment though, doesn't it?
/shouldn't/ have to hide anything. If whatever it was that we should be ashamed of was that bad, it would be illegal, no?
I mean, just how many Americans do you reckon jerk off to porno? How many admit to it? Fundamentally, sex can't be that bad, it's the sort of pastime the parents enjoy, right? And given that the Supreme Court, the most solemn repository of legal wisdom in our nation, has deliberated upon the question of looking at naked people banging and decided that the Constitution, the document that is the basis for our state, as seen in the light of our present-day mores and ethics, does not permit the banning of such images, then where's the issue? Instead, I'd say the issue is with the state of denial that we are presented with governing the attitude to doing the wild mambo in our country.
I think an enormous problem that strains the fabric of American society is that there is such a dichotomy between the legal and the moral. If every time a newspaper article castigated someone for some ethical impropriety, you could look up the browser history of the reporter on the byline and the editor giving it their blessing, might it not serve to unify the two disparate concepts of "what's publicly acceptable" and "what's privately commonplace"? I think as a nation we might benefit from slaughtering a few sacred cows and providing one or two less straw men for the mockery that is an electoral cycle. If we aren't breaking the law, we
Mind you, you might have to shift the location of the "legal" barrier a bit as well. Just think what you could do for Social Security if you stopped jailing people for using marijuana (which means that the state houses and feeds them, which is expensive) and started taxing it'a retail sale instead?
Never happen, I suppose. Mind you, it's further from New York to San Francisco than it is from London to Istanbul, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised if it's rather difficult to get the country to speak with one voice on anything.
I'm sorry, I don't think I understand the tenor of your post. You see, as an American, sarcasm has no meaning for me.
WTFZOMGBBQ? This is a bill that America needs to have. If law-abiding citizens refrained from encryption and anonymizers and onion routers and that sort of thing, the terrorists and drug cartels that need such anonymity to hide from our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies would find that much more difficult to do so.
Junior engineers want to work on sites with a strong brand. That sets them up to leave the low-paid junior engineer jobs to go and be senior engineers in jobs with the aforementioned pay, benefits, etc. Senior engineers are not so desperate for things that look good on the resume, so much as things that pay for their kids' college fees.
North Korea may have nukes now, but how many? I doubt more than a handfull. If we struck pre-emptively with our own nukes, even small tac-nukes on military sites, we could probably cripple them so they couldn't launch even one.
The major drawback to an offensive war against the DPRK is the effect on South Korea, the staunch US ally. Seoul is within 122mm range of the DMZ, and a strike on the North risks massive damage to the ROK capital from a large number of conventional rounds. And that's assuming that the US nuclear strike successfully accounts for the DPRK's WMD arsenal.
Last but not least there is the question of fallout from such a pre-emptive strike drifting South, or over to Japan, or into China. What would be the use of an ally who is willing to poison you with radioactive clouds? Maintaining US relations with other powers would be more than difficult after such a scenario.
All evidence is not destroyed in the blast. Nukes are not very efficient - lots of the radiological material doesn't get to fission or fusion because the warhead is blown apart before it finishes. That unused material has a fairly unique fingerprint in the relative concentrations of isotopes in it as a result of the various enrichment processes in use. So you are highly likely to be able to match a detonation to its source location... if you can get a sample from that source. Which is often tricky.
Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them.
Why not? I would certainly submit that there are many occasions when the US would be better off not using them, but (picking an example entirely at random) a nuclear option to neutralize the Iranian enrichment capability would seem sensible in many ways.
As a horrible counterexample, say for instance, that the US launches a conventional campaign against the DPRK. With a conventional response, North Korea is doomed, just like Iraq was. If, two hours into the air campaign, a Nodong missile makes Honolulu glow in the dark, while DPRK embassies around the world issue public communiques that Seattle will follow in one hour unless hostilities stop, will a US president call Kim's bluff, and trust that the Navy will intercept the next one?
Richard Reid is white. Germaine Lindsay was Afro-caribbean. There has been a successful woman suicide bomber in Iraq, still unidentified, and some caught before they were able to detonate.
Focussing on such a profile invites one's enemy to similarly focus on recruiting candidates that do not fit it. Air transport defence must include a purely random element that searches the occasional Quaker grandmother, lest targetted identity theft be used to defeat the profile-based techniques. The Israelis suffered when Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade turned to women suicide bombers because they were not searched as closely as men. It is imperative that the US not relearn that lesson the hard way when it has been so dramatically illustrated for the DHS to see already.
(BTW, let's be grownups and stop with the personal attacks, M-Kay?)
*applause*
Thank you for bringing a smile to my otherwise dull afternoon.
"Give me liberty or give me death!" is a rallying cry for American patriots. 'Nuff said.
Sammybaby pwnz amightywind for teh win!
Don't worry. US coders may not be up to scratch, but our lawyers are the best in the world, and they'll make sure that the profits from all those foreign engineers and technical experts are properly exploited to benefit you and me. Hurrah! In the sense that your 401-K is properly invested with a major fund management company, obviously.
Bear in mind that the US gave significant ground in its relations with other countries to stay their ire over invading Iraq.
Consider the policy change on the Russian conduct of their war in Chechnya (and Dagestan, Ingushetya and the rest) - criticism of Putin's conduct of that conflict dropped to nil, and in return the Russians didn't complain *too* much about how the Bremer administration gave oil development contracts, which had been awarded to Russian and French companies under Hussein, to Bechtel and Halliburton.
Ditto China - no serious opposition to intervention in Iraq, no serious criticism of human rights issues, IP issues, or an artificially-low exchange rate.
France and Germany produced sound and fury, signifying nothing - but they were constrained to operate within the auspices of the EU, and the UK commitment to the intervention hamstrung that.
Iran saw regime-change as an opportunity to gain influence with a Shia-majority post-Saddam Iraq - ultimately, to bring a Shia-led Iraq into the Iranian sphere of influence, not the US one. The Islamic Republic expected to *benefit* from regime change.
Turkey was the most overtly negative to the US invasion - not because of political ties to Saddam, or economic benefits, but because US policy towards allowing the north-Iraqi Kurdish minority an autonomous regional government threatened to destabilise Turkey, which has had significant issues with its own Kurdish minority's separatist movement. But Turkey's power projection capability is... rather limited.
I don't think that the GP post meant a foreign national should lead the inquiry, but that someone outside the Bush administration should, in the same way that Clinton appointed Starr to investigate Whitewater - a rabidly partisan foe, whose conclusions would at least not be tarred with the claim of "whitewash".