Lets just trust that the Feds would never abuse our help. That this isn't an effort on their part to examine malware in order to build better malware, or an effort to see what malware that we are able to detect to better help them build malware that we can't detect. After all, have they ever abused our trust in the past?
I already sent them mine. Heck, it's already on a good 2/3rds of their computers. How much more do they want, anyways?
And Agent Robinson, get your feet off of your desk and get to work, slacker!
The US doesn't have a Left/Right, (R)/(D) problem as much as it simply has grave, ongoing, massive and broad civil rights violations being committed by the government against the entire population under both major political parties.
If the government can be reined-in and brought back under the people's control and end the massive corruption, then corporations and banks, etc would also be brought under control, once you have a government that will actually prosecute corporations/banks/financial institutions and their heads who violate the law, and without any favoritism.
I believe that two of the things that *must* be included in any proposed solution for it to have any credibility whatsoever are term limits for all in Congress to end "career politicians" and strict rules with criminal penalties for going from a government post/office/position into a private sector job/position for any entity over which/whom you had power/influence, in order to stop the revolving-door corruption in D.C.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason." - Mark Twain
I bet some police officers are mighty pissed off about this ruling, but as someone who frequently drives with the lights on to warn fellow motorists of speed traps, I am pleased.
I was amazed because I thought this issue had been settled long ago as a free speech issue (warning others of a speed trap, etc) back in the 1970s when practically everyone who drove and many who never drove had CB radios, and "bear" warnings were standard road etiquette.
I remember it went through almost the same thing when officers actually entrapped a few CB'ers by getting on the radio and asking for a "bear report", and attempting to locate & arrest whoever responded. That shit didn't fly with folks of any political stripe back then.
Do we have to keep re-deciding every civil right for every single medium and situation? You have freedom of speech on foot, but we have to go through crap to decide that you also do when driving as well? WTF?
Sounds more like a way to attack civil rights by retrying and retrying the same rights and their principles under every situation possible until something sticks, and that can then be used to disassemble the rest of that right, and then on to others, rinse & repeat.
And now there are secret courts and secret rulings, mass domestic surveillance and data-mining, "Halt! Ihre papiere, bitte! Vhere are you goingk, vhere haf you been?" ICE/BP roadblock checkpoints 80 miles from a border, and nobody has 4A rights anymore? Again, WTF??
The US doesn't have a Left/Right, (R)/(D) problem as much as it simply has grave, ongoing, massive and broad civil rights violations being committed by the government against the entire population under both major political parties.
If the government can be reined-in and brought back under the people's control and end the massive corruption, then corporations and banks, etc would also be brought under control, once you have a government that will actually prosecute corporations/banks/financial institutions and their heads who violate the law, and without any favoritism.
I believe that two of the things that *must* be included in any proposed solution for it to have any credibility whatsoever are term limits for all in Congress to end "career politicians" and strict rules with criminal penalties for going from a government post/office/position into a private sector job/position for any entity over which/whom you had power/influence, in order to stop the revolving-door corruption in D.C.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason." - Mark Twain
But again, even if all of the above weren't true, voting for evil is in itself intolerable, unacceptable, and evil.
That is a rather immature (and pitifully black-and-white) description then you describe someone else as
evil
There is a lot to politics. Someone else is not automatically evil just because you disagree with something they do.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Look, regardless of what you might believe, there is evil and there are countless evil, sociopathic people in the world, particularly in places of power like governments. If someone makes the decisions, takes the actions, and promotes the policies and attitudes that an evil person would, then they too are evil.
Pointing this out is not immature nor is it black and white, as their are degrees of evil, just as there are degrees of good.
That kind of mentality has brought us to - and some times beyond - the brink of war on more than one occasion.
Of course it has, as people must take action to defend themselves when attacked/threatened by others with evil intent.
Not every disagreement can be resolved through non-violent political debate and negotiation. If you believe that evil can be negotiated with, I suggest you read up on Neville Chamberlain and the part he played just prior to WW2 as an example that's repeated over and over through history when people delude themselves that evil can be negotiated with.
It seems like the world has to keep re-learning that lesson every 50 to 100 years. It's too bad that so many will die and so much blood and suffering will flow simply because people refuse to remember and avoid the same mistakes and the same old lies.
I wonder how many people here are aware that the US Congress passed a law that rolled back prohibitions against the US government using the same propaganda tools and programs they use against foreign governments, groups, and militaries?
The whole concept of propaganda as a tool of mass influence & control came from the Progressive Woodrow Wilson administration, specifically Edward Bernays in Wilson's "Committee On Public Information" which promoted Wilson's desire to enter WW1. People who voiced opposition to Wilson's policies and actions were investigated, harassed by government agencies, targeted for ridicule and hate in the press, and more. Sound familiar?
Evil doesn't always attack with ships, planes, and tanks. Evils' most ultimately-deadly attacks don't involve firing a single shot, yet millions die.
I'd also guess that the head of the FBI has around the clock armed security, a home that has been hardened against attack & panic room, on-site fully automatic weapons, and an FBI tactical team on standby.
None of which will stop a smart, motivated, and willing-and/or-planning-to-die individual with even modest resources.
All government officials are only alive because nobody who is reasonably sane, intelligent, and resourceful has decided to set out to methodically plan and carry out an assassination. Killing someone in government is not that hard. It's the escaping and eluding capture and prosecution while not being killed afterwards that's the difficult bit.
If one is not worried about escaping or even surviving, tactical operational planning and resource/logistic requirements get a whole lot less complicated, and the chances for success increase sharply.
Typical Slashdot. An accurate and technically correct comment about sloppy reporting gets modded "troll".
Looks like I offended somebody's religion again.
Watching you try to debate these/. worshippers at the Altar of The Algore and Masters of Low Information and Reality Distortion reminds me of this clip from Family Guy.
You're being attacked because you're speaking Heresy before True Believers, not because of factual errors. As with all fanatics, debate or negotiation is useless. They simply must be defeated and relegated to the trash heap of history with all the other failed ideologies like progressivism/collectivism/authoritarianism.
The FAA web site has a really nice page [faa.gov] describing the incident. There are some good quality images on that page showing the missing window both from the exterior and interior. Note that there is no fuselage damage in the immediate vicinity of the window. Yes, there is other fuselage damage elsewhere.
Ah, then I stand corrected. Nice detective work, btw.
Regardless (and to further digress), I hadn't thought about your premise that the passenger may have been struck by a piece of debris. I suppose it'll never be known for sure. Ugh. Makes one want to think twice about sitting in line with a jet's fan blade or a propeller's plane of rotation. I can think of two other incidents where passengers were gruesomely killed by flying engine parts.
Yeah, knowing what we know, sitting in a passenger seat that's in the rotation plane of a jet compressor turbine or standard propeller would be nervous-making. Whenever I've been out on the tarmac where a jet or prop aircraft was starting up and/or performing full-throttle power checks, I've always tried to remain situationally-aware enough to stay out of those hazard areas. Definitely not the way I want to go out.
Makes one wonder if that unfortunate passenger we were discussing was able to be sucked out of that window-sized hole because he got chopped in two by the compressor blade fragment.
A window being shot out would not suck out a passenger.
While I would agree that a hole in the window wouldn't be a major problem, if the entire window is removed suddenly, yes, a passenger can be sucked out. It happened on National Airlines Flight 27 in November 1973 after an engine had an uncontained failure of the fan disk which threw engine debris into the fuselage and caused at least one window to entirely fail.
Granted, the passenger wasn't "sucked across the cabin...." He was sitting right next to the window that failed. His body was found two years later.
If I'm recalling the photos I saw many years ago correctly, to be fair, there was a good bit more fuselage missing in that location than just the window and bezel/seal assembly. It was more like an oblong gash that included the window location. This is from a 3 decades old-plus memory so I may well not be recalling it entirely accurately, but I think it's more likely than not that I'm recalling it fairly accurately.
I've seen the damage a piece of jet engine compressor blade can do when a compressor turbine shatters at speed. If that unfortunate passenger sitting in that seat was struck, he was likely killed instantly before he was aware of anything wrong and before he was sucked from the cabin.
Even if he was conscious when he left the cabin, the very thin air at ~30K feet and up combined with the extreme cold at such altitudes would render even a young, strong, healthy, and uninjured man unconscious within seconds. It was quite likely he did not suffer at all, or for more than a few seconds at most.
When you say movies aren't reality, I call bullshit. Peoples opinions are shaped by movies. Laws are shaped by opinions. People are labeled as criminals or heros based on the prevailing plot lines of movies, TV shows, and news reports. To say that movies dont represent and indeed create reality is evidence of a seriously deranged mind.
Better jump into your trusty Tardis and tell those people that sailed on the "unsinkable" Titanic.
Whatever anybody thinks or believes doesn't change physical reality, which was my point. I'm still not entirely sure what point you were attempting to make with your non-sequitur.
Airliner environmental control systems move literally tons of air.
Spot on.
Airliner cabin seals are nowhere near 100% even when the airliner is paint-still-drying new. Cabin air pressurization systems and their pumps are designed with many times the capacity they would normally need. They are beasts. That's why even dozens of bullet holes wouldn't cause a dangerous cabin pressure problem.
Most people would be shocked at how poor the cabin seals actually are on the aircraft they fly on, and how much cabin pressure depends on the pumps keeping up with cabin seal losses.
Oh, and a related set of facts I thought I should mention, just for safety and the odd chance's sake.
Discharging a firearm in an aircraft may not be likely to cause dangerous and immediate cabin depressurization, but there's still a ton of vital stuff that keeps you flying (and landing minus large fireball and crater!) that doesn't play well with getting shot up.
It's a bad idea, period. Unless lives are at stake, don't do it.
That being said, if you're on an aircraft and some surreal turn of events happens to cause you or someone else you have influence over to absolutely *have to* discharge a firearm while flying in an airliner, try to avoid lines of fire that intersect the wings/engines (and the fuel tanks they contain, although a small-caliber round is unlikely to cause a fire/explosion/sudden fuel loss), the cockpit area (obviously), directly aft through the tail (avionics/autopilot/comms/cabin air pressure pumps/etc) and down through the deck you're standing on (more avionics/flight control/comm/nav/etc, fuel tanks, and landing gear).
Avoid the instinct to consider "down" (cabin deck) a safe default direction for discharging a firearm purposefully or accidentally in an aircraft cabin. If anything, "up" (cabin ceiling) would be preferable.
Of course, avoid windows. Easy one to remember for most Slashdotters.:)
Exact locations will vary by aircraft make/model/etc, but that's a pretty good general rule-of-thumb layout.
Again, if there's any choice, do not discharge any firearm in an aircraft in flight. Too easy to fall down go BOO000OOM!
uhh...a hole to the outside, suddenly depressurizing the plane while at 30k feet, would be a really, really bad thing. What we should "try" is metal detectors and dogs - you know, the stuff we were using/before/ all this, and which worked substantially better.
I could empty an AR-15 w/30 rounds from inside an airliner flying at 30K feet, reload, do it again, and still not depressurize the cabin to any serious extent as long as no windows were blown out. I serviced/repaired aircraft for a living. (note: this assumes one doesn't carefully aim to enlarge a single hole.) You'd need a hole at least a foot or more across to be in any immediate danger.
An airliner is not a spaceship, and movies are not reality.
[1]: Ironic that Venezuela had their violent crime rate drop by a factor of a thousand by removing guns from the citizenry.
Chavez forbid citizens from owning/possessing firearms, meanwhile putting most of the former criminals and criminal gangs to work for him as enforcers and arming them. Citizens aren't shooting each other, they're too busy just trying to survive and avoid being shot (or much worse, especially for females) by Chavez' goons.
People are still dying, it's simply not reported as such (if noted/recorded at all) when it's Chavez' own thugs doing the killing. Do you also believe the various Utopian stats the N. Korean and Chinese governments release?
Your typical peacetime violent civilian-on-civilian crime generally trends downward among a population when there's an extremely authoritarian, oppressive, violent, and cruel regime in charge. The more extreme, the lower the numbers down to a point. It's interesting to note, however, when smaller groups are isolated and forced together, the opposite happens (see US and many other nations' prisons).
Filming the police from a distance without interfering is treated as a crime.
SCOTUS has said, very explicitly, that this is legal.
That has not stopped LEOs from harassing & arresting citizens video recording them. YouTube is filled with videos of this still occurring widely with very little in the way of serious consequences for those LEOs, despite SCOTUS' ruling.
"Google plans to offer more than $2.7 million in potential rewards"...
Yeah and you can get guaranteed rewards selling them on the free/underground market.
Yeah, but a lot of people also like not having to keep looking over their shoulder and would be happy with much less, if both the hack they accomplish and the money they receive is all legal and above-board.
You can't exactly put your little IRC 0-day transaction on a normal job resume, either. Well, strike that, you *can*...however, you'll more than likely become "long-term employed" by a correctional facility. I don't think you'll be working in the IT Dept, however. Just a guess.
But the private companies did not go there because of pure capitalism but because of government spending and social will
Wrong on it's face.
Here's why. The private sector industries & businesses sold their products and services to the government. They could provide those products and services because they had invested private capital into the necessary land, facilities, machines, labor, etc, etc with which to perform such tasks and provide such products The government was and is simply another customer.
The government does not have capital nor wealth, nor can it create or grow them. All government ever has is what it takes from the labor of the people trying to make a life and from the very industries and businesses it turns around with the other hand and pays for products and services from.
All government can do is take wealth from some to give to others, at a cost for the bureaucracy and a hit to liberty to enable monitoring, detection & enforcement. Do that enough, and the "some" stop or vastly reduce their generation of wealth, if they cannot flee or otherwise escape. If you want less of something, tax it. If you want fewer small players, regulate it.
It's a fine example of socialism. Other idealogies do not put people second to the state any more than democracy (pure majority rule).
Are we still talking about the US or about some hypothetical "pure democracy"? Pure democracy is tyranny of the majority. It's two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. There is no nation that is a pure democracy. A "pure democracy" only works for very small and homogeneous groups of individuals.
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816
Socialism kills people's spirit and hope. They can never rise above their station. They can never use genius, hard work, and innovative ideas to build a business out of a garage, and get rich and fund charities, etc while opening whole new technology horizons for millions.
It's that spirit, that drive to achieve your dreams that socialism kills. Where exceeding expectations only raises the expected quotas without any meaningful increased benefit in return.
Ronald Reagan understood this.
"Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you're ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don't understand that we also dream."
Yeah, sort of like how all those private job creators got to the Moon in 1969! Yeah! Fuck that Fox News chicken you retard!
"Those private jobs creators" *were* the ones who got us to the moon. It certainly wasn't NASA bean-counters and administrative wonks. I know, I was there and worked for some of those companies. Don't try to rewrite history.
NASA would put out a contract for a launch system/rocket engine/capsule/etc to accomplish "X" goals with certain requirements, private companies and their engineers and scientists went to work to research, design, test, and build it. Engineers and scientists who likely would have gone to school for something else if there was little demand for private sector science and engineering jobs.
Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty and made more people self-sufficient than any other system ever devised, as well as spurred and funded the greatest and most rapid advances in science and technology the human race has ever known.
It's not perfect. It's messy. Individual freedom and the individual responsibilities that come with it are likewise messy. People will disagree and argue. But capitalism and the individual freedom & self-sufficiency it empowers has through history, and still does, the most good for the largest number of the poorest people compared to anything else ever tried on a national or global scale, by orders of magnitude.
There's simply no other system that's even in the same league when it comes to empowering the poor and raising their standard of living.
Socialism, fascism, communism, and nearly all other ideologies/political systems put the individual secondary to a sovereign State/Collective. The US Constitution is unique in being the first time a nation was built on the basis of the State being secondary to the citizen.
Most people haven't realized that the left is inherently authoritarian. Every single one of their "solutions" requires heavy handed enforcement and must be imposed. I think people maybe are starting to realize this, but not nearly fast enough to prevent massive damage. Even more appalling is that the core of the left does realize this and are entirely ok with it.
This right here is what my/. sig refers to.
Most Americans are of the "it can never happen here" mindset when it comes to fascism & totalitarianism. They forget (or never learned about) how Mussolini and even Hitler were quite popular and much admired in the US prior to WW2. The US is already well down the road to fascism, popularly described as "crony capitalism".
Who cares what the FISA judges think about the reforms? I mean, they're not the boss of the government.
This notion that there is some widespread fear in the government of how agencies and entities will react to changes in he surveillance regime are starting to get a little alarming. If you look at the NYTimes story here: http://t.co/lSEb6vWXSi [t.co], you will see the phrase, "backlash from national security agencies" in regard to reforms to surveillance. Who are they that now elected officials, who are charged with oversight over these agencies, have to worry about intelligence agencies' "backlash"? There have been several other stories recently that have mentioned similar "consequences" from the agencies if the scope or powers of those agencies were to be limited in any way.
I guess that tells us who's really in charge.
I'm telling you, unless we can figure out a way to chop this surveillance regime down to size, and quick, there is absolutely no chance that any other national problem can ever be fixed in any significant way. Not the economy, not security, not social problems, not anything. When Americans finally internalize the fact that they are always being watched and that our own security agencies view them as a threat, there will be a sickness over the American people like none we have ever seen before.
To this day, people from places like East Germany and other surveillance states have it in the back of their heads that there is always someone watching. As the husband of a woman from Eastern Europe, I know this to be true from my experience with family and friends. Once you have Big Brother in your head, he never goes away, maybe not for generations.
I would absolutely rather take my chances with the terrorists than see the US go on this way much longer.
Spot on.
You and I have had heated disagreements in the past, but on this we agree fully.
This is not a Conservative/Liberal, Left/Right, (R)/(D) issue of a political nature at all.
This is a matter of basic human rights, both as the rights of nature's law and the laws of man as set forth in the US Constitution. They are our most basic civil rights.
There was a struggle in the 1960s for civil rights for minorities of US citizens against government bullying, infringements of rights & liberties, and racial discrimination.
This time the government bullying, infringements of rights & liberties, and discrimination is aimed at the whole population. The response from we the people should scale accordingly.
In the '60s, everyone railed against infringements of civil rights by "the Man". These days, it seems many people have it reversed and are railing against people's civil rights in support of giving "the Man" more and more power and control over people's lives.
We need to realize that regardless of whether you vote (R) or (D), like or hate guns, support Obamacare or not, whether Christian, Atheist, or Muslim, gay or straight, etc etc, *individual civil rights* are something that almost everyone agrees is a good thing and government violating them a bad thing.
We can fight about global warming and a national high-speed rail system, etc etc, *after* we shut down this massive and un-Constitutional domestic spying apparatus and toss out all these corrupt fascist bums in government that don't actually keep even a fraction of their promises to any of us anyway, no matter which political or ideological side you happen to be on.
I don't care who you are. I'd take my white, male, heterosexual, pro-life, (small-L) libertarian-leaning, non-"living"-Constitution-advocating ass to a protest against these violations of all our civil rights, and march right beside almost anyone else regardless of Party, ideology, race/ethnicity, sexuality, or income class, that favors defending everybody's basic civil rights & liberties against government violation and infringement.
Daniel Ellsberg avoided going to prison on a technicality, because of the government's gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering.
This is false.
He didn't go to jail because the US judicial branch at the time generally frowned on government infringements on the 1A freedom of the press, despite protestations to the contrary by the Federal government, by impeding the functioning of a free press and essentially turning the press into agents of the State by denying the press the ability to have confidential sources when what those sources are saying is inconvenient for government.
"The protection of sources, sometimes also referred to as the confidentiality of sources or in the U.S. as the reporter's privilege, is a right accorded to journalists under the laws of many countries, as well as under international law. Simply put, it means that the authorities, including the courts, cannot compel a journalist to reveal the identity of an anonymous source for a story. The right is based on a recognition that without a strong guarantee of anonymity, many people would be deterred from coming forward and sharing information of public interests with journalists. As a result, problems such as corruption or crime might go undetected and unchallenged, to the ultimate detriment of society as a whole. In spite of any such legal protections, the pervasive use of traceable electronic communications by journalists and their sources provides governments with a tool to determine the origin of information.[1] In the United States, the federal government legally contends that no such protection exists for journalists."
The extremely political US judicial branch these days? They'll probably rule however it's most politically expedient, COTUS and a free press be damned. Hell, the NSA probably provides all the blackmail the Federal government needs to persuade "stubborn" judges, if the Feds think it's important enough.
That's one of the big problems with sweeping large-scale domestic surveillance; it reduces trust in institutions that are supposed to protect against government infringements of individual rights and provide oversight, since they are all now potential blackmail victims at the whim of government.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets just trust that the Feds would never abuse our help. That this isn't an effort on their part to examine malware in order to build better malware, or an effort to see what malware that we are able to detect to better help them build malware that we can't detect. After all, have they ever abused our trust in the past?
I already sent them mine. Heck, it's already on a good 2/3rds of their computers. How much more do they want, anyways?
And Agent Robinson, get your feet off of your desk and get to work, slacker!
Strat
Until corporations are muzzled, nothing will change.
I'll copy-paste a section from another of my comments in another thread and article that addresses this point.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The US doesn't have a Left/Right, (R)/(D) problem as much as it simply has grave, ongoing, massive and broad civil rights violations being committed by the government against the entire population under both major political parties.
If the government can be reined-in and brought back under the people's control and end the massive corruption, then corporations and banks, etc would also be brought under control, once you have a government that will actually prosecute corporations/banks/financial institutions and their heads who violate the law, and without any favoritism.
I believe that two of the things that *must* be included in any proposed solution for it to have any credibility whatsoever are term limits for all in Congress to end "career politicians" and strict rules with criminal penalties for going from a government post/office/position into a private sector job/position for any entity over which/whom you had power/influence, in order to stop the revolving-door corruption in D.C.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason." - Mark Twain
Strat
I bet some police officers are mighty pissed off about this ruling, but as someone who frequently drives with the lights on to warn fellow motorists of speed traps, I am pleased.
I was amazed because I thought this issue had been settled long ago as a free speech issue (warning others of a speed trap, etc) back in the 1970s when practically everyone who drove and many who never drove had CB radios, and "bear" warnings were standard road etiquette.
I remember it went through almost the same thing when officers actually entrapped a few CB'ers by getting on the radio and asking for a "bear report", and attempting to locate & arrest whoever responded. That shit didn't fly with folks of any political stripe back then.
Do we have to keep re-deciding every civil right for every single medium and situation? You have freedom of speech on foot, but we have to go through crap to decide that you also do when driving as well? WTF?
Sounds more like a way to attack civil rights by retrying and retrying the same rights and their principles under every situation possible until something sticks, and that can then be used to disassemble the rest of that right, and then on to others, rinse & repeat.
And now there are secret courts and secret rulings, mass domestic surveillance and data-mining, "Halt! Ihre papiere, bitte! Vhere are you goingk, vhere haf you been?" ICE/BP roadblock checkpoints 80 miles from a border, and nobody has 4A rights anymore? Again, WTF??
The US doesn't have a Left/Right, (R)/(D) problem as much as it simply has grave, ongoing, massive and broad civil rights violations being committed by the government against the entire population under both major political parties.
If the government can be reined-in and brought back under the people's control and end the massive corruption, then corporations and banks, etc would also be brought under control, once you have a government that will actually prosecute corporations/banks/financial institutions and their heads who violate the law, and without any favoritism.
I believe that two of the things that *must* be included in any proposed solution for it to have any credibility whatsoever are term limits for all in Congress to end "career politicians" and strict rules with criminal penalties for going from a government post/office/position into a private sector job/position for any entity over which/whom you had power/influence, in order to stop the revolving-door corruption in D.C.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason." - Mark Twain
Strat
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Look, regardless of what you might believe, there is evil and there are countless evil, sociopathic people in the world, particularly in places of power like governments. If someone makes the decisions, takes the actions, and promotes the policies and attitudes that an evil person would, then they too are evil.
Pointing this out is not immature nor is it black and white, as their are degrees of evil, just as there are degrees of good.
That kind of mentality has brought us to - and some times beyond - the brink of war on more than one occasion.
Of course it has, as people must take action to defend themselves when attacked/threatened by others with evil intent.
Not every disagreement can be resolved through non-violent political debate and negotiation. If you believe that evil can be negotiated with, I suggest you read up on Neville Chamberlain and the part he played just prior to WW2 as an example that's repeated over and over through history when people delude themselves that evil can be negotiated with.
It seems like the world has to keep re-learning that lesson every 50 to 100 years. It's too bad that so many will die and so much blood and suffering will flow simply because people refuse to remember and avoid the same mistakes and the same old lies.
I wonder how many people here are aware that the US Congress passed a law that rolled back prohibitions against the US government using the same propaganda tools and programs they use against foreign governments, groups, and militaries?
The whole concept of propaganda as a tool of mass influence & control came from the Progressive Woodrow Wilson administration, specifically Edward Bernays in Wilson's "Committee On Public Information" which promoted Wilson's desire to enter WW1. People who voiced opposition to Wilson's policies and actions were investigated, harassed by government agencies, targeted for ridicule and hate in the press, and more. Sound familiar?
Evil doesn't always attack with ships, planes, and tanks. Evils' most ultimately-deadly attacks don't involve firing a single shot, yet millions die.
Strat
I'd also guess that the head of the FBI has around the clock armed security, a home that has been hardened against attack & panic room, on-site fully automatic weapons, and an FBI tactical team on standby.
None of which will stop a smart, motivated, and willing-and/or-planning-to-die individual with even modest resources.
All government officials are only alive because nobody who is reasonably sane, intelligent, and resourceful has decided to set out to methodically plan and carry out an assassination. Killing someone in government is not that hard. It's the escaping and eluding capture and prosecution while not being killed afterwards that's the difficult bit.
If one is not worried about escaping or even surviving, tactical operational planning and resource/logistic requirements get a whole lot less complicated, and the chances for success increase sharply.
Strat
Typical Slashdot. An accurate and technically correct comment about sloppy reporting gets modded "troll".
Looks like I offended somebody's religion again.
Watching you try to debate these /. worshippers at the Altar of The Algore and Masters of Low Information and Reality Distortion reminds me of this clip from Family Guy.
http://youtu.be/Cg_8knBHEyw
You're being attacked because you're speaking Heresy before True Believers, not because of factual errors. As with all fanatics, debate or negotiation is useless. They simply must be defeated and relegated to the trash heap of history with all the other failed ideologies like progressivism/collectivism/authoritarianism.
Strat
The FAA web site has a really nice page [faa.gov] describing the incident. There are some good quality images on that page showing the missing window both from the exterior and interior. Note that there is no fuselage damage in the immediate vicinity of the window. Yes, there is other fuselage damage elsewhere.
Ah, then I stand corrected. Nice detective work, btw.
Regardless (and to further digress), I hadn't thought about your premise that the passenger may have been struck by a piece of debris. I suppose it'll never be known for sure. Ugh. Makes one want to think twice about sitting in line with a jet's fan blade or a propeller's plane of rotation. I can think of two other incidents where passengers were gruesomely killed by flying engine parts.
Yeah, knowing what we know, sitting in a passenger seat that's in the rotation plane of a jet compressor turbine or standard propeller would be nervous-making. Whenever I've been out on the tarmac where a jet or prop aircraft was starting up and/or performing full-throttle power checks, I've always tried to remain situationally-aware enough to stay out of those hazard areas. Definitely not the way I want to go out.
Makes one wonder if that unfortunate passenger we were discussing was able to be sucked out of that window-sized hole because he got chopped in two by the compressor blade fragment.
OK, now who wants sushi? LOL!
Strat
If I'm recalling the photos I saw many years ago correctly, to be fair, there was a good bit more fuselage missing in that location than just the window and bezel/seal assembly. It was more like an oblong gash that included the window location. This is from a 3 decades old-plus memory so I may well not be recalling it entirely accurately, but I think it's more likely than not that I'm recalling it fairly accurately.
I've seen the damage a piece of jet engine compressor blade can do when a compressor turbine shatters at speed. If that unfortunate passenger sitting in that seat was struck, he was likely killed instantly before he was aware of anything wrong and before he was sucked from the cabin.
Even if he was conscious when he left the cabin, the very thin air at ~30K feet and up combined with the extreme cold at such altitudes would render even a young, strong, healthy, and uninjured man unconscious within seconds. It was quite likely he did not suffer at all, or for more than a few seconds at most.
Strat
A "laugh track".
Just sayin'...
Strat
Who can stop them?
Me.
You.
All of us together.
If they kill all of us, they won't have anyone to make their tea.
Strat
When you say movies aren't reality, I call bullshit. Peoples opinions are shaped by movies. Laws are shaped by opinions. People are labeled as criminals or heros based on the prevailing plot lines of movies, TV shows, and news reports. To say that movies dont represent and indeed create reality is evidence of a seriously deranged mind.
Better jump into your trusty Tardis and tell those people that sailed on the "unsinkable" Titanic.
Whatever anybody thinks or believes doesn't change physical reality, which was my point. I'm still not entirely sure what point you were attempting to make with your non-sequitur.
Strat
Airliner environmental control systems move literally tons of air.
Spot on.
Airliner cabin seals are nowhere near 100% even when the airliner is paint-still-drying new. Cabin air pressurization systems and their pumps are designed with many times the capacity they would normally need. They are beasts. That's why even dozens of bullet holes wouldn't cause a dangerous cabin pressure problem.
Most people would be shocked at how poor the cabin seals actually are on the aircraft they fly on, and how much cabin pressure depends on the pumps keeping up with cabin seal losses.
Strat
Oh, and a related set of facts I thought I should mention, just for safety and the odd chance's sake.
Discharging a firearm in an aircraft may not be likely to cause dangerous and immediate cabin depressurization, but there's still a ton of vital stuff that keeps you flying (and landing minus large fireball and crater!) that doesn't play well with getting shot up.
It's a bad idea, period. Unless lives are at stake, don't do it.
That being said, if you're on an aircraft and some surreal turn of events happens to cause you or someone else you have influence over to absolutely *have to* discharge a firearm while flying in an airliner, try to avoid lines of fire that intersect the wings/engines (and the fuel tanks they contain, although a small-caliber round is unlikely to cause a fire/explosion/sudden fuel loss), the cockpit area (obviously), directly aft through the tail (avionics/autopilot/comms/cabin air pressure pumps/etc) and down through the deck you're standing on (more avionics/flight control/comm/nav/etc, fuel tanks, and landing gear).
Avoid the instinct to consider "down" (cabin deck) a safe default direction for discharging a firearm purposefully or accidentally in an aircraft cabin. If anything, "up" (cabin ceiling) would be preferable.
Of course, avoid windows. Easy one to remember for most Slashdotters. :)
Exact locations will vary by aircraft make/model/etc, but that's a pretty good general rule-of-thumb layout.
Again, if there's any choice, do not discharge any firearm in an aircraft in flight. Too easy to fall down go BOO000OOM!
Strat
uhh...a hole to the outside, suddenly depressurizing the plane while at 30k feet, would be a really, really bad thing. What we should "try" is metal detectors and dogs - you know, the stuff we were using /before/ all this, and which worked substantially better.
I could empty an AR-15 w/30 rounds from inside an airliner flying at 30K feet, reload, do it again, and still not depressurize the cabin to any serious extent as long as no windows were blown out. I serviced/repaired aircraft for a living. (note: this assumes one doesn't carefully aim to enlarge a single hole.) You'd need a hole at least a foot or more across to be in any immediate danger.
An airliner is not a spaceship, and movies are not reality.
Strat
I'll just leave this here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Strat
[1]: Ironic that Venezuela had their violent crime rate drop by a factor of a thousand by removing guns from the citizenry.
Chavez forbid citizens from owning/possessing firearms, meanwhile putting most of the former criminals and criminal gangs to work for him as enforcers and arming them. Citizens aren't shooting each other, they're too busy just trying to survive and avoid being shot (or much worse, especially for females) by Chavez' goons.
People are still dying, it's simply not reported as such (if noted/recorded at all) when it's Chavez' own thugs doing the killing. Do you also believe the various Utopian stats the N. Korean and Chinese governments release?
Your typical peacetime violent civilian-on-civilian crime generally trends downward among a population when there's an extremely authoritarian, oppressive, violent, and cruel regime in charge. The more extreme, the lower the numbers down to a point. It's interesting to note, however, when smaller groups are isolated and forced together, the opposite happens (see US and many other nations' prisons).
Strat
Filming the police from a distance without interfering is treated as a crime.
SCOTUS has said, very explicitly, that this is legal.
That has not stopped LEOs from harassing & arresting citizens video recording them. YouTube is filled with videos of this still occurring widely with very little in the way of serious consequences for those LEOs, despite SCOTUS' ruling.
Strat
"Google plans to offer more than $2.7 million in potential rewards"...
Yeah and you can get guaranteed rewards selling them on the free/underground market.
Yeah, but a lot of people also like not having to keep looking over their shoulder and would be happy with much less, if both the hack they accomplish and the money they receive is all legal and above-board.
You can't exactly put your little IRC 0-day transaction on a normal job resume, either. Well, strike that, you *can*...however, you'll more than likely become "long-term employed" by a correctional facility. I don't think you'll be working in the IT Dept, however. Just a guess.
Strat
But the private companies did not go there because of pure capitalism but because of government spending and social will
Wrong on it's face.
Here's why. The private sector industries & businesses sold their products and services to the government. They could provide those products and services because they had invested private capital into the necessary land, facilities, machines, labor, etc, etc with which to perform such tasks and provide such products The government was and is simply another customer.
The government does not have capital nor wealth, nor can it create or grow them. All government ever has is what it takes from the labor of the people trying to make a life and from the very industries and businesses it turns around with the other hand and pays for products and services from.
All government can do is take wealth from some to give to others, at a cost for the bureaucracy and a hit to liberty to enable monitoring, detection & enforcement. Do that enough, and the "some" stop or vastly reduce their generation of wealth, if they cannot flee or otherwise escape. If you want less of something, tax it. If you want fewer small players, regulate it.
It's a fine example of socialism. Other idealogies do not put people second to the state any more than democracy (pure majority rule).
Are we still talking about the US or about some hypothetical "pure democracy"? Pure democracy is tyranny of the majority. It's two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. There is no nation that is a pure democracy. A "pure democracy" only works for very small and homogeneous groups of individuals.
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816
Socialism kills people's spirit and hope. They can never rise above their station. They can never use genius, hard work, and innovative ideas to build a business out of a garage, and get rich and fund charities, etc while opening whole new technology horizons for millions.
It's that spirit, that drive to achieve your dreams that socialism kills. Where exceeding expectations only raises the expected quotas without any meaningful increased benefit in return.
Ronald Reagan understood this.
"Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you're ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don't understand that we also dream."
Strat
In NYC rats make great couriers.
Possible I suppose, but I think the bigger question here is; "Why do they keep electing them to office?"
Strat
Yeah, sort of like how all those private job creators got to the Moon in 1969! Yeah! Fuck that Fox News chicken you retard!
"Those private jobs creators" *were* the ones who got us to the moon. It certainly wasn't NASA bean-counters and administrative wonks. I know, I was there and worked for some of those companies. Don't try to rewrite history.
NASA would put out a contract for a launch system/rocket engine/capsule/etc to accomplish "X" goals with certain requirements, private companies and their engineers and scientists went to work to research, design, test, and build it. Engineers and scientists who likely would have gone to school for something else if there was little demand for private sector science and engineering jobs.
Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty and made more people self-sufficient than any other system ever devised, as well as spurred and funded the greatest and most rapid advances in science and technology the human race has ever known.
It's not perfect. It's messy. Individual freedom and the individual responsibilities that come with it are likewise messy. People will disagree and argue. But capitalism and the individual freedom & self-sufficiency it empowers has through history, and still does, the most good for the largest number of the poorest people compared to anything else ever tried on a national or global scale, by orders of magnitude.
There's simply no other system that's even in the same league when it comes to empowering the poor and raising their standard of living.
Socialism, fascism, communism, and nearly all other ideologies/political systems put the individual secondary to a sovereign State/Collective. The US Constitution is unique in being the first time a nation was built on the basis of the State being secondary to the citizen.
Strat
It was never meant to actually work.
It was meant to fail spectacularly in order to clear the way for British-NIH-style single-payer healthcare.
"Jacob Hacker, The Architect of ObamaCare and the Public Option in making his case, admits that this idea is a covert route to a Single Payer System."
http://youtu.be/3sTfZJBYo1I
Just watch. After sufficient public frustration, desperation, & outrage have developed, single-payer will be rolled out as the "fix".
There's a "fix" alright, just that it was "in" before this crapfest was even passed.
Of course, those in Congress and friends of the administration like labor unions won't have to deal with any of this. It's good to be the king, eh?
Strat
Most people haven't realized that the left is inherently authoritarian. Every single one of their "solutions" requires heavy handed enforcement and must be imposed. I think people maybe are starting to realize this, but not nearly fast enough to prevent massive damage. Even more appalling is that the core of the left does realize this and are entirely ok with it.
This right here is what my /. sig refers to.
Most Americans are of the "it can never happen here" mindset when it comes to fascism & totalitarianism. They forget (or never learned about) how Mussolini and even Hitler were quite popular and much admired in the US prior to WW2. The US is already well down the road to fascism, popularly described as "crony capitalism".
Strat
Who cares what the FISA judges think about the reforms? I mean, they're not the boss of the government.
This notion that there is some widespread fear in the government of how agencies and entities will react to changes in he surveillance regime are starting to get a little alarming. If you look at the NYTimes story here: http://t.co/lSEb6vWXSi [t.co], you will see the phrase, "backlash from national security agencies" in regard to reforms to surveillance. Who are they that now elected officials, who are charged with oversight over these agencies, have to worry about intelligence agencies' "backlash"? There have been several other stories recently that have mentioned similar "consequences" from the agencies if the scope or powers of those agencies were to be limited in any way.
I guess that tells us who's really in charge.
I'm telling you, unless we can figure out a way to chop this surveillance regime down to size, and quick, there is absolutely no chance that any other national problem can ever be fixed in any significant way. Not the economy, not security, not social problems, not anything. When Americans finally internalize the fact that they are always being watched and that our own security agencies view them as a threat, there will be a sickness over the American people like none we have ever seen before.
To this day, people from places like East Germany and other surveillance states have it in the back of their heads that there is always someone watching. As the husband of a woman from Eastern Europe, I know this to be true from my experience with family and friends. Once you have Big Brother in your head, he never goes away, maybe not for generations.
I would absolutely rather take my chances with the terrorists than see the US go on this way much longer.
Spot on.
You and I have had heated disagreements in the past, but on this we agree fully.
This is not a Conservative/Liberal, Left/Right, (R)/(D) issue of a political nature at all.
This is a matter of basic human rights, both as the rights of nature's law and the laws of man as set forth in the US Constitution. They are our most basic civil rights.
There was a struggle in the 1960s for civil rights for minorities of US citizens against government bullying, infringements of rights & liberties, and racial discrimination.
This time the government bullying, infringements of rights & liberties, and discrimination is aimed at the whole population. The response from we the people should scale accordingly.
In the '60s, everyone railed against infringements of civil rights by "the Man". These days, it seems many people have it reversed and are railing against people's civil rights in support of giving "the Man" more and more power and control over people's lives.
We need to realize that regardless of whether you vote (R) or (D), like or hate guns, support Obamacare or not, whether Christian, Atheist, or Muslim, gay or straight, etc etc, *individual civil rights* are something that almost everyone agrees is a good thing and government violating them a bad thing.
We can fight about global warming and a national high-speed rail system, etc etc, *after* we shut down this massive and un-Constitutional domestic spying apparatus and toss out all these corrupt fascist bums in government that don't actually keep even a fraction of their promises to any of us anyway, no matter which political or ideological side you happen to be on.
I don't care who you are. I'd take my white, male, heterosexual, pro-life, (small-L) libertarian-leaning, non-"living"-Constitution-advocating ass to a protest against these violations of all our civil rights, and march right beside almost anyone else regardless of Party, ideology, race/ethnicity, sexuality, or income class, that favors defending everybody's basic civil rights & liberties against government violation and infringement.
I sometimes wonder what they
Daniel Ellsberg avoided going to prison on a technicality, because of the government's gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering.
This is false.
He didn't go to jail because the US judicial branch at the time generally frowned on government infringements on the 1A freedom of the press, despite protestations to the contrary by the Federal government, by impeding the functioning of a free press and essentially turning the press into agents of the State by denying the press the ability to have confidential sources when what those sources are saying is inconvenient for government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_sources
"The protection of sources, sometimes also referred to as the confidentiality of sources or in the U.S. as the reporter's privilege, is a right accorded to journalists under the laws of many countries, as well as under international law. Simply put, it means that the authorities, including the courts, cannot compel a journalist to reveal the identity of an anonymous source for a story. The right is based on a recognition that without a strong guarantee of anonymity, many people would be deterred from coming forward and sharing information of public interests with journalists. As a result, problems such as corruption or crime might go undetected and unchallenged, to the ultimate detriment of society as a whole. In spite of any such legal protections, the pervasive use of traceable electronic communications by journalists and their sources provides governments with a tool to determine the origin of information.[1] In the United States, the federal government legally contends that no such protection exists for journalists."
The extremely political US judicial branch these days? They'll probably rule however it's most politically expedient, COTUS and a free press be damned. Hell, the NSA probably provides all the blackmail the Federal government needs to persuade "stubborn" judges, if the Feds think it's important enough.
That's one of the big problems with sweeping large-scale domestic surveillance; it reduces trust in institutions that are supposed to protect against government infringements of individual rights and provide oversight, since they are all now potential blackmail victims at the whim of government.
Strat