Is time worth a life? Can you wait a minute, potentially diffuse a situation, and save someone from dying?
Or is it: fuck it. Taser the sucker. I don't care if he/she croaks.
I know what kind of peace officer I'm willing to pay for: a little patience in the face of hostility. Tough to do. Might take a little patience and/or courage.
It's disingenuous to cite Sharpton and Jackson's views when *white* people like Caroline Kennedy Schossberg have written large and long about the indiscriminate violence and hazing by, let's take her example: the Chicago Police Department. Citation after citation after citation find that there are REAL victims of police brutality and violence.
And there are no doubt officers that this evening will also take a lot of abuse. You distract the argument by specious and anecdotal citation.
The issue is that the UN says that tasers are torture. They didn't pull this out of their butts. They have good cause, just as Jackson, and Sharpton, and others have been willing to do-- cite the obvious, based on facts.
The reasons for difficult relations between blacks and police officers is far more complex, and it doesn't get any better by "shooting the messengers" of Sharpton and Jackson.
It doesn't matter if it's on YouTube or LiveLeak or wherever. The citations that can be made for improper use of tasers are many. They've become an unfortunate and easy and deadly choice.
I understand that police officers are confronted with hell and tough choices, but they have to make the proper ones, and tasers ought to be a very last resort, not one that simply allows a cheap way out of a potentially hostile situation. I feel for peace officers, but tasers remove the peace from the officer at the increasing cost of lives that shouldn't have been taken under the circumstances. That poor Polish immigrant in Vancouver-- he didn't deserve to die. It granted judge-jury-executioner status to the mounties at Vancouver Airport. They are none of those. It's abhorrent.
Stupefying=stunning, as in so strong as to render the understanding as making one stupid with disbelief.
They still dominate in DE. Handys aren't as strong as in situ landlines and services, but they're still #1. I have a Vodaphone, T-Mobile, and O2 SIM for my phone when I'm in DE. The O2 SIM use is least expensive, although their method of recharging them (go to the store, pay in cash for Americans) stinks. Deutsche Telekom, the parent, is dominant, too... and so Vodaphone has nexus to litigate the matter, it would seem.
T-Mobile still has a commanding share of the market in DE. They have a huge share in tip-and-ring and ISDN. They dominate-- barely-- handies. So is it ok for Vodophone to pre-emptively take them to task for what's seen as a consumer problem in the US? I think so.
T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom were the PTT in Germany for years. Only recently has the EU cracked down on the mind-boggling roaming and int'l pricing-- hitting T-Mobile especially hard. No one's accusing anyone of anything right now, but getting a hearing when it looks like there might be some problems is perhaps healthier than going into post-agreement activation litigation.
T-Mobile has stupefying marketshare in Germany. Not total, but stupefying. And it's not just in mobiles (called a 'handy' in Germany) but in WiFi, hotel systems, hotspots, xDSL, and pay-by-packet schemes.
The point was that excitement over a service pack is an indicator that quality in this industry is horrible:
Part of the quality process is what the developer does at the behest of a system architect. A QA observation can and should be done by anyone in the process.
To get hot and bothered by an SP release is truly sad. Inside an SP shouldn't be new features or new behaviors, unless the SP is also now teaseware-- designed to distract from all of what should be embarrassing bug fixes. Instead, many service packs and releases are put into users hands without a single apology!
Defy the collective, they're driven by PR, rather than peer pressure.
It's the never ending fix-ware that we live with today, along with bloatware, teaseware, and anythingbutworksware.
We can't spank them, only bend down in fealty when they throw us bones. They should have fixed this long ago. Advancing features shouldn't have to come at the price of architectural instability, stated compatibilities, and so on. Good QA should catch this. Microsoft and Apple have both failed on this recently. And so a service pack should be considered punishment for abusing clients. Shameful-- shouldn't be needed because there should be ZERO defects. But we're trained now to accept most and move on.
It's so odd how business has become the new 'war'.
Strategies that must be millennia old foisted with seeming deadly precision against upstart enemies.
Peace seems so elusive sometimes, when by rule, those in business must be wary of the competition (in so many forms), supply chain, the ambiguity and vaguery of patent laws and outcomes of litigation, then coupled to a seemingly benign government, employment law, and a the whims of the stock market.
The reason that pharma patents do so well, is because a resultant cost of goods is low and somewhat predictable, and the supply/demand is health and/or death..... two very strong motivators. Yet I question the enormous retail costs of needed pharmaceuticals for the third world, especially the HIV victims in subsaharan Africa.. or the chemo regimen for various kinds of cancer..... at what cost, and pain.... and what restraint of trade (if quality of manufacture can be the same?).
Sadly, Vonage was big enough to be on the radar screen and was easily nuked. Smaller companies fly under the radar and don't get sued because it's not really worth it for Verizon to do so-- or AT&T or Lucent (ex of AT&T), or the other visible and invisible VoIP patent 'trolls'.
Just because you haven't seen more litigation doesn't mean that there won't be a lot of it soon, now that the game is over in this litigation-- successfully for Verizon and a death knell to Vonage. It puts up barriers to entry, and keeps other companies that haven't signed agreements (or who can't raise sufficient floor capital) to enter into the market. The FCC is plainly too stupid to understand the dynamics, and the Congress is too bribed by campaign contributions and armies of lobbying lawyers (I've seen these guys in Congressional offices-- they're an awesome and muscular presence in a freshman congressman's office). Much muscle is put in by the carriers towards getting their shareholder goals. Please don't mistake this effort for being less than what it really is: control.
Verizon and AT&T have high-profile fiber investments that depend on VoIP to get their numbers. Less competitors, less attrition, more retention, less service, bigger profits. We've been here before. The barriers to entry won't be as easy as the Tarriff 12 ILECs had. If it were, anyone with some decent coders and Digium/Asterisk could become virtual providers, and the telcos DON'T WANT THAT-- it's TOO EASY.
I understand patent protection, and understand misuse.
I also understand monopolies, and the Sherman Anti-trust Act, The 1996 TCA Act, and other legislation.
What I'm alluding to is that if a sufficient number of patent protections amounts to monopolization of an industry-- once a former public trust-- then there's some thing wrong here.
Vonage is a victim, just as many technology companies are victims, of the patent process. Vonage had a chance,but doesn't now. Yesterday on/. was the story of how AT&T might filter video content. The trend is onerous. Muni-WiFi is dead. As PCs become mobiles/cell phones, the telco monopolies dictate business, not technological advances. It's onerous.
Judge Greene's breakup of AT&T into the RBOCs mean we now have less RBOCs, and if they have patents, they can stifle any competition they want. Is this a new way around the Sherman Anti-Trust Act???
All that's left are a handful of tiny regionals, and Verizon, AT&T, and QWest. MCI is dead and gone... and buying up patents (or even 'cleanly' filing them) means that these companies can effectively shutout the competition.
You're entitled to your opinion, but not your facts.
In the 1900s-1930s, utilities were of a public benefit and received numerous breaks. AT&T is not the AT&T of yesteryear. Through the US TCA of 1996, and subsequent legislation, the breakup of the 'Bell' companies then reformed into the morass we face today in the US. That infrastructure was supposed to be a public, not private, asset base. Now it's to be a return on investment for the telcos-- especially AT&T. AT&T is a combination of SW Bell, Ameritech, assets of AT&T Wireless, AT&T Long Lines, and other property grabs. Their anti-competitive stance, and long failure to invest in infrastructure instead of lobbying every congressional office in Washington DC with a bevy of lawyers, is what got them the advantage they currently have. Now they want to filter content, to their advantage likely (they intend to distribute video themselves) is a violation of public trust in my opinion.
The FCC plays into their hands. AT&T gives up private information readily to the US government in an onerous way.
You otherwise know nothing about me, and your anonymity prevents you from standing up to be suitably addressed. And you call me a coward. Fie.
Ok, following that logic, free yourself from the oil companies. And while you're at it, the food distribution monopolies. Tired yet? How about freeing yourself from the power company?
Two of the above were supposed to be public-serving municipal utilities. They were granted breaks to serve the public. This concept is now abstracted by the FCC, which no longer needs to recognize utilities in this way, rather, based on recent telecommunications law and the whims of the NTIA are what govern what AT&T does.
Go ahead; try to escape them. We no longer have the constructs to do this. These are also the same companies that are willing to, without a warrant, give up your calls, your Internet usage data, and anything else the current administration asks for. Do you think that they're going to listen to YOU-- especially when you might have nexus to sue them? I hardly think so.
Volunteer policing? What do you think they're doing NOW?
Like Pirsig might have said, it's a question of values.
False positives, extortion, all possibilities. Five fatalities from police chases this year in the 750K pop. city that I live in this year that could have been avoided, and these were innocents. The ones that also died were an additional six. That's eleven, just in my 'town'. Logon with an authentication that's held in the car's flash (for forensics purposes). Remove power in a sequence that tells the driver-- game over. Let the onboard ECU remove power a bit at a time until the vehicle comes to a halt.
What's better than that? A.40 slug? Running cars off the road, creating more property damage, or worse, injury to bystanders, unwitting passengers in the pursued vehicle, the officers doing the chase, etc?
Yes, it scares me as an idea, but it's less fraught with unintended results than cold-stopping a car-- and gets documented for forensic purposes by defendent's counsel. In a disorderly world, it's an orderly take-down. Would it be misused in other jurisdictions? One mountain at a time.....
The same shunts that are used to protect home electronics will work here just fine. However, few will have the forethought to implement VDRs, beads, and other tricks to dissipate the load that this thing produces. Microwaves, of course, don't operate at 100hz, but the pulses are designed to deliver big bangs of electrons. This means that all of the components in the chase car have to be protected, too; this is also fairly inexpensive to do, but requires creating classes of chase cars with protected integral electronics-- many items of which will not be the circuits running the car, rather the notebook, 4.7ghz, and other electronics that public safety people use... radios, and so on. While the antenna for this can be highly directional, you're still looking at lots of jumping electrons to dance around devices that don't like that.
In all: bad idea. Instead, put unique RFIDs in cars, and simply logon and turn them off. Cleaner.
Show stoppers get immediate attention; whatever it takes. People are losing money because they're DOWN. Fix it now.
Criticals get next attention when show stoppers are out. 48 hours, depending on interdependencies and QA needed to make it work; it's not part of an official stable code tree until later.
Minors are in the next stable branch release; every whatever you can handle.
Nigglies are changed when the stable branch releases.
Don't deviate from your policy, and make sure the sales people KNOW AND UNDERSTAND what this indicates and implies. No exceptions; see above.
There's truth to that, but it's the law of the land in the USA, a metric by which all other laws, in toto, are held.
There is no specific constitutional right to privacy per se. It's implied in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 14th, and other theories of law that have been held to by judges from the top down. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe Americans should be naturally suspicious of the intentions of government intrusions into personal lives, conversations, and the rest of what we do on a legitimate day to day basis. Idealisms be damned, intrusions into privacy are unwarranted. It's the first step towards tyranny.
You can try and co-opt and rationalize ideas in any way you want in the same way you're entitled to your opinions, and not your facts. No one claims we're all saints, or conversely, sinners. Instead, we're just human.
In that humanity, we can strive for ideals. Some are more practically achieved than others. Some need the privacy, and even the veil of anonymity.
Consider that the Federalist Papers were written anonymously. And some of the 'founding fathers' were clearly stinkers.
Consider that the right to freely assemble is a good one, and to do so with anonymity is all the better. No one needs to feel as though there's someone breathing down their neck or looking over their shoulder. We shouldn't have to justify our actions to anyone but civility and those of OUR choice.
People have fought and died for these principles, some foolishly, and others with laudable zeal. The questionable actions of a few aren't justification for the damnation of the ideals many people follow. The logic doesn't really apply.
Today is November 11, the traditional Veteran's Day. Let me tell you of my ancestors, who didn't capitulate, and were POWs, were killed, shot down over Europe or the Pacific; these ancestors understanood what they were fighting for- going all the way back to 1779 in Pennsylvania, fighting Tories. Or let me tell you about the regiments that went south of the Ohio to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps my late grandfather, who was an adjutant in WWI could've told you about liberty, or an uncle that went to Europe in WWII, despite his debilitating polio. Or an other uncle that had most of his stomach blown away with ack-ack flak. Both of them savor(ed) their liberty, and both were willing to without hesitation, and die for it. Another uncle did.
Let me tell you about the other heros that also protested the Viet Nam War for the travesty it had become as others were conscripted (and enslaved) to fight. Or perhaps those that looked with incredulity at the hoaxed evidence of 'WMD' in Iraq-- knowing that many thousands of soldier lives would be lost in vain, not to mention Afgani and Iraqi lives-- and the lives of US allies.
Let me tell you about having principles, not a squishy bowl of jelly for guts in the face of those that would compromise liberty, civil rights, and freedom with responsibility for these.
Many people have, and will understand the value of liberty, once lost. Should you wish subjugation, sit still and don't do anything.
On the New Hampshire auto license plates reads one of my favorite sayings: Live Free, or Die. This man would rather capitulate, and is therefore lost.
We will struggle, those that believe in liberty and freedom, against the tides that would try to drown us with rationalisms, excuses, and the madness of fealty to the corrupt and mindless sycophants of government.
There was a reason the founding fathers worded their documents they way that they did-- there was another King George that tried to shove fealty down our throats. This minor duke in his administration would have us believe that liberty and freedom != anonymity. He is wrong.
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Is time worth a life? Can you wait a minute, potentially diffuse a situation, and save someone from dying?
Or is it: fuck it. Taser the sucker. I don't care if he/she croaks.
I know what kind of peace officer I'm willing to pay for: a little patience in the face of hostility. Tough to do. Might take a little patience and/or courage.
It's disingenuous to cite Sharpton and Jackson's views when *white* people like Caroline Kennedy Schossberg have written large and long about the indiscriminate violence and hazing by, let's take her example: the Chicago Police Department. Citation after citation after citation find that there are REAL victims of police brutality and violence.
And there are no doubt officers that this evening will also take a lot of abuse. You distract the argument by specious and anecdotal citation.
The issue is that the UN says that tasers are torture. They didn't pull this out of their butts. They have good cause, just as Jackson, and Sharpton, and others have been willing to do-- cite the obvious, based on facts.
The reasons for difficult relations between blacks and police officers is far more complex, and it doesn't get any better by "shooting the messengers" of Sharpton and Jackson.
It doesn't matter if it's on YouTube or LiveLeak or wherever. The citations that can be made for improper use of tasers are many. They've become an unfortunate and easy and deadly choice.
I understand that police officers are confronted with hell and tough choices, but they have to make the proper ones, and tasers ought to be a very last resort, not one that simply allows a cheap way out of a potentially hostile situation. I feel for peace officers, but tasers remove the peace from the officer at the increasing cost of lives that shouldn't have been taken under the circumstances. That poor Polish immigrant in Vancouver-- he didn't deserve to die. It granted judge-jury-executioner status to the mounties at Vancouver Airport. They are none of those. It's abhorrent.
How many liters would have to be put into Capitol Hill each year to offset the methane there.... the mind boggles!
Stupefying=stunning, as in so strong as to render the understanding as making one stupid with disbelief.
They still dominate in DE. Handys aren't as strong as in situ landlines and services, but they're still #1. I have a Vodaphone, T-Mobile, and O2 SIM for my phone when I'm in DE. The O2 SIM use is least expensive, although their method of recharging them (go to the store, pay in cash for Americans) stinks. Deutsche Telekom, the parent, is dominant, too... and so Vodaphone has nexus to litigate the matter, it would seem.
T-Mobile still has a commanding share of the market in DE. They have a huge share in tip-and-ring and ISDN. They dominate-- barely-- handies. So is it ok for Vodophone to pre-emptively take them to task for what's seen as a consumer problem in the US? I think so.
T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom were the PTT in Germany for years. Only recently has the EU cracked down on the mind-boggling roaming and int'l pricing-- hitting T-Mobile especially hard. No one's accusing anyone of anything right now, but getting a hearing when it looks like there might be some problems is perhaps healthier than going into post-agreement activation litigation.
T-Mobile has stupefying marketshare in Germany. Not total, but stupefying. And it's not just in mobiles (called a 'handy' in Germany) but in WiFi, hotel systems, hotspots, xDSL, and pay-by-packet schemes.
The point was that excitement over a service pack is an indicator that quality in this industry is horrible:
Part of the quality process is what the developer does at the behest of a system architect. A QA observation can and should be done by anyone in the process.
To get hot and bothered by an SP release is truly sad. Inside an SP shouldn't be new features or new behaviors, unless the SP is also now teaseware-- designed to distract from all of what should be embarrassing bug fixes. Instead, many service packs and releases are put into users hands without a single apology!
Very good! You're starting to see the point.
Defy the collective, they're driven by PR, rather than peer pressure.
It's the never ending fix-ware that we live with today, along with bloatware, teaseware, and anythingbutworksware.
We can't spank them, only bend down in fealty when they throw us bones. They should have fixed this long ago. Advancing features shouldn't have to come at the price of architectural instability, stated compatibilities, and so on. Good QA should catch this. Microsoft and Apple have both failed on this recently. And so a service pack should be considered punishment for abusing clients. Shameful-- shouldn't be needed because there should be ZERO defects. But we're trained now to accept most and move on.
Mod parent up.
When you guys get excited about a pre-release of a service pack, you're in enormous need of fresh air.
Parent wasn't a troll. Parent has healthy sarcasm.... on what must be the most enormous news dead night of the year, or perhaps decade.
Nothing fixes Vista because XP wasn't broken. Lipstick on that pig won't get on your collar. Trust me on this.
It's so odd how business has become the new 'war'.
Strategies that must be millennia old foisted with seeming deadly precision against upstart enemies.
Peace seems so elusive sometimes, when by rule, those in business must be wary of the competition (in so many forms), supply chain, the ambiguity and vaguery of patent laws and outcomes of litigation, then coupled to a seemingly benign government, employment law, and a the whims of the stock market.
The reason that pharma patents do so well, is because a resultant cost of goods is low and somewhat predictable, and the supply/demand is health and/or death..... two very strong motivators. Yet I question the enormous retail costs of needed pharmaceuticals for the third world, especially the HIV victims in subsaharan Africa.. or the chemo regimen for various kinds of cancer..... at what cost, and pain.... and what restraint of trade (if quality of manufacture can be the same?).
The err seems perpetually imbalanced.
Sadly, Vonage was big enough to be on the radar screen and was easily nuked. Smaller companies fly under the radar and don't get sued because it's not really worth it for Verizon to do so-- or AT&T or Lucent (ex of AT&T), or the other visible and invisible VoIP patent 'trolls'.
Just because you haven't seen more litigation doesn't mean that there won't be a lot of it soon, now that the game is over in this litigation-- successfully for Verizon and a death knell to Vonage. It puts up barriers to entry, and keeps other companies that haven't signed agreements (or who can't raise sufficient floor capital) to enter into the market. The FCC is plainly too stupid to understand the dynamics, and the Congress is too bribed by campaign contributions and armies of lobbying lawyers (I've seen these guys in Congressional offices-- they're an awesome and muscular presence in a freshman congressman's office). Much muscle is put in by the carriers towards getting their shareholder goals. Please don't mistake this effort for being less than what it really is: control.
Verizon and AT&T have high-profile fiber investments that depend on VoIP to get their numbers. Less competitors, less attrition, more retention, less service, bigger profits. We've been here before. The barriers to entry won't be as easy as the Tarriff 12 ILECs had. If it were, anyone with some decent coders and Digium/Asterisk could become virtual providers, and the telcos DON'T WANT THAT-- it's TOO EASY.
I understand patent protection, and understand misuse.
/. was the story of how AT&T might filter video content. The trend is onerous. Muni-WiFi is dead. As PCs become mobiles/cell phones, the telco monopolies dictate business, not technological advances. It's onerous.
I also understand monopolies, and the Sherman Anti-trust Act, The 1996 TCA Act, and other legislation.
What I'm alluding to is that if a sufficient number of patent protections amounts to monopolization of an industry-- once a former public trust-- then there's some thing wrong here.
Vonage is a victim, just as many technology companies are victims, of the patent process. Vonage had a chance,but doesn't now. Yesterday on
Judge Greene's breakup of AT&T into the RBOCs mean we now have less RBOCs, and if they have patents, they can stifle any competition they want. Is this a new way around the Sherman Anti-Trust Act???
All that's left are a handful of tiny regionals, and Verizon, AT&T, and QWest. MCI is dead and gone... and buying up patents (or even 'cleanly' filing them) means that these companies can effectively shutout the competition.
Not good.
You're entitled to your opinion, but not your facts.
In the 1900s-1930s, utilities were of a public benefit and received numerous breaks. AT&T is not the AT&T of yesteryear. Through the US TCA of 1996, and subsequent legislation, the breakup of the 'Bell' companies then reformed into the morass we face today in the US. That infrastructure was supposed to be a public, not private, asset base. Now it's to be a return on investment for the telcos-- especially AT&T. AT&T is a combination of SW Bell, Ameritech, assets of AT&T Wireless, AT&T Long Lines, and other property grabs. Their anti-competitive stance, and long failure to invest in infrastructure instead of lobbying every congressional office in Washington DC with a bevy of lawyers, is what got them the advantage they currently have. Now they want to filter content, to their advantage likely (they intend to distribute video themselves) is a violation of public trust in my opinion.
The FCC plays into their hands. AT&T gives up private information readily to the US government in an onerous way.
You otherwise know nothing about me, and your anonymity prevents you from standing up to be suitably addressed. And you call me a coward. Fie.
Add water.. sure, you could get a cistern or well.
Ok, following that logic, free yourself from the oil companies. And while you're at it, the food distribution monopolies. Tired yet? How about freeing yourself from the power company?
Two of the above were supposed to be public-serving municipal utilities. They were granted breaks to serve the public. This concept is now abstracted by the FCC, which no longer needs to recognize utilities in this way, rather, based on recent telecommunications law and the whims of the NTIA are what govern what AT&T does.
Go ahead; try to escape them. We no longer have the constructs to do this. These are also the same companies that are willing to, without a warrant, give up your calls, your Internet usage data, and anything else the current administration asks for. Do you think that they're going to listen to YOU-- especially when you might have nexus to sue them? I hardly think so.
Volunteer policing? What do you think they're doing NOW?
Like Pirsig might have said, it's a question of values.
.40 slug? Running cars off the road, creating more property damage, or worse, injury to bystanders, unwitting passengers in the pursued vehicle, the officers doing the chase, etc?
False positives, extortion, all possibilities. Five fatalities from police chases this year in the 750K pop. city that I live in this year that could have been avoided, and these were innocents. The ones that also died were an additional six. That's eleven, just in my 'town'. Logon with an authentication that's held in the car's flash (for forensics purposes). Remove power in a sequence that tells the driver-- game over. Let the onboard ECU remove power a bit at a time until the vehicle comes to a halt.
What's better than that? A
Yes, it scares me as an idea, but it's less fraught with unintended results than cold-stopping a car-- and gets documented for forensic purposes by defendent's counsel. In a disorderly world, it's an orderly take-down. Would it be misused in other jurisdictions? One mountain at a time.....
The same shunts that are used to protect home electronics will work here just fine. However, few will have the forethought to implement VDRs, beads, and other tricks to dissipate the load that this thing produces. Microwaves, of course, don't operate at 100hz, but the pulses are designed to deliver big bangs of electrons. This means that all of the components in the chase car have to be protected, too; this is also fairly inexpensive to do, but requires creating classes of chase cars with protected integral electronics-- many items of which will not be the circuits running the car, rather the notebook, 4.7ghz, and other electronics that public safety people use... radios, and so on. While the antenna for this can be highly directional, you're still looking at lots of jumping electrons to dance around devices that don't like that.
In all: bad idea. Instead, put unique RFIDs in cars, and simply logon and turn them off. Cleaner.
Show stoppers get immediate attention; whatever it takes. People are losing money because they're DOWN. Fix it now.
Criticals get next attention when show stoppers are out. 48 hours, depending on interdependencies and QA needed to make it work; it's not part of an official stable code tree until later.
Minors are in the next stable branch release; every whatever you can handle.
Nigglies are changed when the stable branch releases.
Don't deviate from your policy, and make sure the sales people KNOW AND UNDERSTAND what this indicates and implies. No exceptions; see above.
There's truth to that, but it's the law of the land in the USA, a metric by which all other laws, in toto, are held.
There is no specific constitutional right to privacy per se. It's implied in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 14th, and other theories of law that have been held to by judges from the top down. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe Americans should be naturally suspicious of the intentions of government intrusions into personal lives, conversations, and the rest of what we do on a legitimate day to day basis. Idealisms be damned, intrusions into privacy are unwarranted. It's the first step towards tyranny.
You can try and co-opt and rationalize ideas in any way you want in the same way you're entitled to your opinions, and not your facts. No one claims we're all saints, or conversely, sinners. Instead, we're just human.
In that humanity, we can strive for ideals. Some are more practically achieved than others. Some need the privacy, and even the veil of anonymity.
Consider that the Federalist Papers were written anonymously. And some of the 'founding fathers' were clearly stinkers.
Consider that the right to freely assemble is a good one, and to do so with anonymity is all the better. No one needs to feel as though there's someone breathing down their neck or looking over their shoulder. We shouldn't have to justify our actions to anyone but civility and those of OUR choice.
People have fought and died for these principles, some foolishly, and others with laudable zeal. The questionable actions of a few aren't justification for the damnation of the ideals many people follow. The logic doesn't really apply.
Today is November 11, the traditional Veteran's Day. Let me tell you of my ancestors, who didn't capitulate, and were POWs, were killed, shot down over Europe or the Pacific; these ancestors understanood what they were fighting for- going all the way back to 1779 in Pennsylvania, fighting Tories. Or let me tell you about the regiments that went south of the Ohio to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps my late grandfather, who was an adjutant in WWI could've told you about liberty, or an uncle that went to Europe in WWII, despite his debilitating polio. Or an other uncle that had most of his stomach blown away with ack-ack flak. Both of them savor(ed) their liberty, and both were willing to without hesitation, and die for it. Another uncle did.
Let me tell you about the other heros that also protested the Viet Nam War for the travesty it had become as others were conscripted (and enslaved) to fight. Or perhaps those that looked with incredulity at the hoaxed evidence of 'WMD' in Iraq-- knowing that many thousands of soldier lives would be lost in vain, not to mention Afgani and Iraqi lives-- and the lives of US allies.
Let me tell you about having principles, not a squishy bowl of jelly for guts in the face of those that would compromise liberty, civil rights, and freedom with responsibility for these.
Many people have, and will understand the value of liberty, once lost. Should you wish subjugation, sit still and don't do anything.
On the New Hampshire auto license plates reads one of my favorite sayings: Live Free, or Die. This man would rather capitulate, and is therefore lost.
We will struggle, those that believe in liberty and freedom, against the tides that would try to drown us with rationalisms, excuses, and the madness of fealty to the corrupt and mindless sycophants of government.
There was a reason the founding fathers worded their documents they way that they did-- there was another King George that tried to shove fealty down our throats. This minor duke in his administration would have us believe that liberty and freedom != anonymity. He is wrong.
into Alicia Key's website. We might not have gotten them into our electoral botnet in time otherwise.