A taxpayer who votes for Barack Obama is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.
A citizen who expects a functioning government voting for John McCain is like a passenger on a plane being piloted by Pee Wee Herman.
Or how about this:
A parent who expects their children to grow up in a world in which the United States has good schools, funded social net programs, a functional military capable of defending our country, a thriving economy, clean air, abundant clean power, strong relations with the major powers in the world, an effective plan for reducing terrorism that doesn't involve invading random countries based on lies, that votes for John McCain is an example of an evolutionary dead end.
Whew... that was fun... kind of cleansing, really... but not as much as watching McSame lose in November. Now *that's* going to be delicious!
If you can get past your self-assured "hah, MY guy is so much better than YOUR guy" attitude (while it was a reaction to his similar attitude, being an equal and opposite reaction it is no better) and take a hard look at not just the two candidates but the two parties from which they originate, you'll find that neither of them represent the people. This has been the case for quite some time now.
Both were long ago taken over by statists who realize that inch by inch, tiny increase by tiny increase, they can eventually have a "perfect" police/nanny state (there are serveral terms which would apply) where everyone is told what's good for them, how they should live, what they should and should not want out of life, etc. and of course all of this is "for your safety" or "for your own good" or "to protect the children" or "to fight terrorism" or "for the War on (some) Drugs" and probably more emphasis on a "War on Obesity" and similar is around the corner. Just take a good long look at the history of the 20th century. Look at the size of government (in terms of percentage of GDP) in 1901 and compare that to the size of government in 2000. Look at the number of agencies, laws, law enforcement. Look at the tax burden in terms of average percentage of annual income. Take a good long look at how people used to be expected to plan for their own retirement and now they "need" government programs on which they have become dependent. Look at how people used to routinely purchase and negotiate their own individual health insurance and how the wage freeze of World War II caused people to expect this to come from employers, which effectively made it near-impossible to obtain it on your own since you don't have that kind of bargaining power. Now the government wants to get into the health insurance business -- make no mistake, the current media discussion is not a debate, it's there to get us used to the idea. Look at how much direct interaction the average citizen has with the federal government, then look at whether this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Look at the income tax, the way that it allows politicians to use carrot-and-stick methods to control behavior, the way a larger and larger class of people is being created who have zero federal tax liability and therefore little incentive to care about the financial impact of excessive government spending, and then ask yourself why the Constitution had to be amended to allow for this (the Founding Fathers were not ignorant of the concept of an income tax -- it is not a new invention).
I want you to seriously consider how much this country has changed in the last century alone. This change is not random in the slightest. Every last piece of it points in the same direction: an increasingly larger and more powerful and more centralized government, in which more and more power is in the hands of fewer and fewer people with less and less oversight. All of which is "for your own good", of course. Ask yourself whether either Barack Obama or John McCain would have a snowbal
Get Bruce Willis on the phone, time to go "Armageddon" on Jupiter's ass.
Haha. I don't know about sending Bruce WIllis, but this does make me wonder why we have never (to my knowledge...) sent a probe INTO one of the gas giants. We have done flybys and taken photos etc. but it should prove interesting to send cameras and other instruments directly inside one of them. Maybe we could determine whether there exists a solid surface or core underneath the gases (and if it's something exotic like metallic hydrogen) and get an idea of why some of them radiate more heat than they receive from the sun. and the answers to probably lots of other questions. I wonder if there is a technological/engineering reason (as opposed to a budget reason) why I've never heard of a serious proposal to do something like this.
A penalty is fine, but a 2000% penalty? The percentages aren't that high on anything else...
But, but but this is electronic media! It involves computers and intarwebs and a series of tubes and electrons and stuff, you're supposed to abandon all logic and common sense and instantly enter into Dummy Mode whenever that's the case! Certainly you can't use critical thinking and compare it to the penalties you'd face when dealing with anything else! Why, that might amount to treating IP as though it were like tangible property! Oh, wait...
It's not the government using it's power to prop up a failed buisness model. This is the RIAA using the legal system to try to prop up their diminishing buisness by bullying people who share music.
There are certainly some people in government who are sympathetic to the RIAA because of legal bribes in the form of lobbyists and campaign contributions, but that's not the whole government and in this instance, the biggest government involvement is that the legal system is being used by the RIAA.
What you're talking about would be if the government subsidized the RIAA's DRM attempts or things like that. Maybe they do that already, I don't know, but this isn't that.
The perception occurs because anytime the RIAA/MPAA asks for tougher, more punitive copyright laws, they get what they ask for with little or no opposition. I doubt very strongly that any of the Congresscritters who pass such laws are under the illusion that the RIAA/MPAA have no intention of using them. So, directly like what you describe or indirectly, the government has been their best friend for some time now when it comes to delaying the inevitable. The inevitable, of course, is that eventually there will be little or no need for a middleman like the record companies to control distribution, at which point the RIAA/MPAA's current business model is fully obsolete. What will replace it? I could speculate but I don't really know. I do know that I'd like to find out; I honestly believe that the finest music in the world isn't worth the corruption and the intimidation and the persecution that the *AAs have perpetrated in the name of their financial interests.
Yeah, that is why no one got "shell shock" in WWII, and police officers never get it while protecting innocents. *roll eyes*
And in no case should the soldiers be suffering for the sins of the politicians. PTSD etc generally don't kick in till years later, so are going to have zero effect on present wars. The USAF is just trying to keep VA costs down.
While I understand it, you are reacting emotionally to something I already covered. This is my own text from the original post:
When an enemy attacks and like-it-or-not you are forced to defend yourself, the horrors of conflict are not your fault and they are not what you asked for. They are what you had to do. Despite that, it may still take the defenders a long time to learn to cope with the horrors they have witnessed. Just imagine how much harder that must be when you also know that you are the aggressor.
Nowhere did I say that any of this would be a cakewalk for anyone concerned. I was only saying that a horrible thing can be even worse when you don't have a clear purpose that you really believe in.
You should take a psychology class or two and go learn a few things about where terrorists come from and why they become terrorists. There are many things you fail to understand here.
Actually I made no comment on terrorists, where they come from, why they do what they do. Zero. My commentary was regarding "pre-emptive" war -- that sounds so much better than "offensive war", just like "shock and awe" sounds so much better than "blitzkrieg" even though it's the same thing. So, you're actually responding to statements I never made. Good job.
Now, if you want me to comment on the terrorists themselves, you certainly have a roundabout way of asking but no matter. I can only speculate about this, but here's my take: I would imagine that no matter what the party line might say, the USA's habit of using its intelligence agencies to overthrow foreign governments and install dictators more favorable to our interests would explain their suicidal desperation quite a bit better than "they hate us because of our freedoms".
In terms of meddling with the affairs of soverign nations and pissing off a lot of people worldwide, it may please the government of the USA to play the "innocent victim" role but this is simply not the case. If the USA's leaders had any honor whatsoever, they'd take responsibility for the fact that actions taken to ensure that the USA remains a dominant world superpower are not free; they come at the expense of earning ill will and various enemies worldwide. Enemies who realize they don't stand a chance fighting a conventional war. Does this make those enemies any less murderous and cowardly because they have decided to target civilians? No, it doesn't, and the people who would do that are still the scum of the earth. I am most certainly not saying otherwise. What I am saying is that there is a chain of cause-and-effect here that is sorely neglected in the media anytime a purportedly serious discussion of this topic comes up. A chain of cause-and-effect that would make our leaders something less than the honorable men who are acting in our best interests that the party line would have you believe.
It seems to me that if we had a more solid purpose for fighting, then this wouldn't be nearly the concern that is indicated in the summary. Let's say a hostile foreign army invaded US soil. Do you think that people fighting that army, that army which directly threatens their homes and their children and their homeland, would have such concerns about the casualties they have to inflict?
Whether politicians prefer to call it "pre-emptive" or not, what we are doing is fighting an offensive war. In the case of Iraq this is against an enemy which was no real threat to us, which is why the "justification" so quickly changed from "weapons of mass destruction" to "liberation of the Iraqi people". In the back of their minds, in some place that is untouched by denial, our soldiers have to see just how convenient this whole war has been for the expansion of executive power, the passage of legislation like the Patriot Act, the no-bid contracts for companies that our Vice President and others just-coincidentally happens to have ties to. Despite the incredibly bravery and willingness to put their lives on the line that our soldiers have shown (seriously, these guys have balls of brass and guts of steel; they are not the problem), there is very little honor to be had in a war of this type. Don't mistake me for a pacifist just because I think we need a damned good reason before we go and kill a lot of people; a reason that will stand up to questioning and critical thinking; a reason that does not have the taint of political and financial gain everywhere you look.
When an enemy attacks and like-it-or-not you are forced to defend yourself, the horrors of conflict are not your fault and they are not what you asked for. They are what you had to do. Despite that, it may still take the defenders a long time to learn to cope with the horrors they have witnessed. Just imagine how much harder that must be when you also know that you are the aggressor. Like too many things we do, this is a band-aid designed to alleviate a symptom and not a solution to the actual underlying problem.
War is a terrible, hellish, ugly thing. It's supposed to be. That is its nature, and that is what the drone pilots are finding out the hard way. It's not supposed to be something you do for a questionable reason. What an insult to such honorable men that our leadership puts them through this, and for what?
If they did they may actually meet consumer demand, unfortunately they therefore do not suck cock. They may however rape developers and customers metaphorically/anally* (*Delete as appropriate).
Yeah oddly enough the less informed the general public is about a product, in terms of real technical understanding and full awareness of all alternatives, the better companies like Microsoft will do in terms of sales. This is really a commentary on the average "consumer"**; the ony thing it says about Windows is that it's within the threshold of how poor the quality can be before people get so irritated that they will buy something else no matter what. That's not nearly the same as excellence.
** I'm not fond of the word "consumer" and in fact it does not apply here. The term comes from arrangements like free broadcast television: the advertisers are the TV station's customers, the viewers who pay nothing to the TV station are the consumers. A paying customer is emphatically not a "consumer". I can see why marketers like the term -- the ideal consumer eats products and shits dollars and generally takes whatever they're offered. I do not see a good reason for why everyone keeps parroting the term.
If by "lefty" you mean "statist" (they seem to be synonymous since every leftist plan of action I have ever heard of would imply increasing government power and size) then I don't know about that one. Such statists love television and newspapers which are essentially one-to-many media that don't afford much (if any) opportunity to confront them. They usually don't do so well in a forum where anyone can can rebut them. That's not to say that I haven't also noticed such positions being taken more often on Slashdot, just that they don't thrive here the way they do in other media.
When I say that "leftist" and "statist" seem synonymous, I have doubts about whether that's what true leftists really believe in. Many say that they don't, but who knows? In politics the face value of what people say means very little to me. Personally, I think they mean well and the hardcore statists (the ones who would like to see a place like the USA become a dictatorship or a police state) find their ideas to be very convenient excuses for expanding governmental power. This is where people fail to realize, time and time again, that most of the harm done in this world is not done intentionally by people with malicious intentions; most of the harm in this world is done unintentionally by people with good intentions and very little foresight.
It caused her the sort of pain that you probably can't even imagine. I know, because I was the victim of a cheating wife, and it took paxil for me to let her go. I would have been far better off never having met her, but barring that I would have been better off (as well as my children) if I'd never known of her adultery.
Tami is the same way; she's married to a serial adulterer. But love is blind, deaf and dumb. It does, however, smell.
If you've never been the victim of a cheating spouse you can't possiby have a clue, especially if you have never been in love with a cheater.
All I can tell you is that I'd rather be alone than have a sham relationship built on a lie, and that I would definitely want to know because deciding not to know would be tantamount to burying my head in the sand.
If love is blind, deaf and dumb, it's because people become blinded and deafened by their emotions. That's a choice; you can choose not to do it. You can also lose your personal and emotional independence (in fact giving those up to a woman is all too easy) in a relationship which may explain why you had to be dependent for a while on something else as a substitute, in this case an SSRI, Paxil. The single biggest mistake men make is that they completely surrender their allegience and independence to a woman to the point where she starts to feel like a second mother to them. By that, I mean they forget the need to be content with their lives on their own and then share that life with a woman who is also content on her own, which is how two healthy beings relate. While she might love him deeply, no woman, even a non-cheater, can respect a man who makes her feel like she's another mother to him (especially in terms of emotional well-being).
I won't say whether similar things have or have not happened to me. You will need to make up your own mind about that, although you might feel a temptation to take the easy road and say that they haven't and therefore you can dismiss what I say as the musings of a man who doesn't know what he's talking about. If that comforts you, feel welcome to it. But there's no way in hell I would ever call myself a "victim" of a cheating spouse. I would call myself a poor judge of character who saw what he wanted to see when he was overcome with emotions and allowed himself to think that he knew a woman and what she was about when he really did not (don't confuse what I am saying here -- emotions are fine; being at their mercy is not). I would take responsibility for my choice of being with her and I would learn everything I could about what I wasn't paying attention to, what I missed, what I disregarded or rationalized away, that could have let me see it coming. The first step to doing that (learning to see these things coming) is to stop telling yourself that it's impossible to do that.
I hate to break it to you, but adultery is illegal in several states in the USA. For example, a very quick search on Google reveals http://www.vanwagnerwood.com/CM/Custom/Adultery.asp that it is illegal in Wisconson.
I am not condoning the troll's actions.
Yes, yes. And oral sex, or sex in any position other than the missionary position, is "sodomy" and punishable by law. Except those laws are generally never enforced.
There's also the one about a man not being allowed to beat his wife with a stick that is bigger around than his thumb. Or the one about women drivers (presumably of horse-and-buggy) needing to have a guy walk out in front of them with a lantern to warn everyone else. You can find lots of stupid laws on the books that are never enforced. Bringing them up in this discussion comes across like clutching at straws, though.
if someone thinks something is wrong and seeks justice on an issue, they are being a vigilante. doesn't matter what is actually legal or illegal, what matters is what they think is right and wrong
That just isn't the case when you're talking about something like a wife leaving her husband. No one is forced to be in a relationship that they don't want to stay in. You always have the right to leave at any time. You are merely exercising a right that you had all along when you decide that you don't want to stay with someone who will cheat on you. That just means that choices have consequences; every instance of this fact is not "vigilante justice".
if you start shooting people who do a poor job at parallel parking, you are a "vigilante" in search of "justice" in your mind, regardless of the fact that poor parallel parking skills are not illegal
Yes, but shooting people who do not pose a physical threat to you is most certainly illegal. That's why it's vigilante justice. The legal, non-vigilante method would be to call the police and ask them to enforce the law in the case of any parking violations that have occurred.
which is one of the reasons why vigilante justice is wrong: it is determined by the vigiliante, which, as you note, often delineates sharply from society-wide definitions and laws about right and wrong
so i don't know why you think it is valid to point out that someone is not a vigilante because they aren't dutifully following actual laws on the books. as if such a consideration ever had anything to do with what motivates any vigilante, ever, or has anything to do with the criteria for labelling someone a vigilante
Like I said, choices have consequences. If you cheat on your wife, you do so knowing that she will almost certainly leave you if she finds out. There is nothing vigilante about that. You seem like you either want to complicate a very simple issue or like you're just too proud to admit that you didn't understand this term. As others have pointed out, it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
but if you understand the number of reasons why vigilante justice is wrong, then you understand how the manner in which he got his commeuppance is wrong
condemning fortuny is not standing up for the cheater. its standing against vigiliante justice
Your argument is not valid. This is not vigilante justice because cheating on your wife is not against the law, and her finding out about this and leaving you is also not against the law. So, you have a consequence that is legal that follows a behavior that is legal. That is not part of the definition of vigilante justice, no more than your boss is a "vigilante" if you get fired for telling him to fuck off.
I mentioned free speech at all only as an analogy. I said that saying "you have the right to free speech... oh, unless you say something we don't like" is hypocritical, which is true. I likened that to an ISP that has a user agreement which does not forbid any protocols or any forms of traffic,
Hmmm, let's call them Strawman Data ISP Inc. I've never seen an ISP that doesn't forbid some protocols or forms of traffic.
I never made the claim that there was something wrong with forbitting some protocols or forms of traffic. I said that if the ISP is going to do this, let them do it openly. If they are going to do this openly, there is no need to forge anything. Forging packets to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack to reset connections covertly, when the user agreement does not mention this, is what I have a problem with. So, pointing out that an ISP might forbid traffic is silly and proves nothing; the entire discussion is about the method by which this is done and why more honest methods aren't being used.
Whether I enjoy it or not, and I don't, I am forced to conclude that either you're dense and you sincerely believe that I was claiming that this is a free speech issue or you are deliberately using a straw man argument.
Me using a strawman? I wasn't the one drawing the analogy.
Using an analogy does not automatically make something a straw man; in fact that's not even part of the definition. Misunderstanding my use of an analogy so that you can misrepresent my argument makes it a straw man. Continuing to do so after I have clarified my meaning only strenghtens my conclusion that either you're dense or you're doing this deliberately. It's not like my original analogy was ambiguous to begin with.
Wait, I called you dense. I suppose now you're going to respond to me and say "but ratio of mass to volume has NOTHING to do with Internet service providers!" It would make about as much sense as the way you interpreted my analogy.
Thank you for such a well thought-out, real answer. I suppose our only difference is that, within the very narrow scope of "is this the truth?" (not nearly the same question as "do I want to date this person"!) I am not concerned with being confident of anyone's goodwill. I simply don't believe what people say unless I can independently verify it or it's consistent with what I already know to be true, so for me, worrying about their intentions is an unproductive trap I try pretty hard to never fall into. I say that knowing that you probably weren't describing yourself but rather the folks who react badly to anyone who tells them they are not really victims, so I am really explaining why I think they need not concern themselves with that. Anyway, I call it a trap because it takes you out of a potential "discernment" mode and places you into a "do I like this person" mode which tends to make everything a popularity contest. There are plenty of people who may not like you, may in fact hate your guts or may be completely indifferent to you from whom you can still learn something if only you can get past your personal feelings long enough to listen. We limit ourselves in so many arbitrary ways that just don't have to be the case. Having likes and dislikes is fine but letting them rule your life and filter your knowledge for you is neither desirable nor necessary.
I also feel that adults should not call themselves mature (although many will falsely do so, because it sounds good) until they can deal with something without allowing their judgment to become clouded by an emotional response. That is, have your emotions but don't be a slave to them. Beyond that, I understand rather well the thought processes behind trying to protect that precious little ego and worrying about self-respect and apportioning blame, I just don't consider them to be valid. To me they are aberrations and most people have the misfortune of believing that only relatively rare phenomena can possibly be aberrant, that if most human beings participate in something then it can't possibly be a disease (dis-ease) state.
So, I say what I believe to be true. If it upsets someone, no one forced them to react that way to something they could have chosen not to listen to. If a contrary opinion is really such an irritant, consider that with over 6.5 billion people in the world, that's a lot of convincing to do before the easily offended can finally relax. So let them get offended; perhaps someone else will hear their tantrums and indulge them even if I personally don't wish to do them such a disservice. In spite of all of this, yes I still think it's unfortunate that the victim mentality is in no danger of extinction. I still think that we, collectively, waste a lot of energy on things which are beneath us. I also think that no effort is ever wasted despite all appearances, and that there is an increasing number of people like you who generally seem to understand these things.
Now, I believe that the above are largely matters of opinion or personal style. You have to decide for yourself how you want to feel about it; this is not where I can use a mathematical proof to decisively declare that one of us is right and the other is wrong. Not at all. So, please don't think that anything I am saying here is intended to argue with you. In this instance, that is not my place. The purpose was more to explain how I feel about it, since you were kind enough to do the same (and it didn't start out being this long-winded, I swear!). I am not being sarcastic or facetious in the slightest when I tell you that I am thankful for your response. I wish there were more like it.
You agreed to your AUP. If that says you can't do that, and you do, you've got to accept the consequences[1]. It doesn't have *anything* to do with free speech. BitTorrent shouldn't try and download that copy of BayWatch you absolutely *must* have using all of the ISP that it can grab. It should accept that it is low priority that this download happens.
I mentioned free speech at all only as an analogy. I said that saying "you have the right to free speech... oh, unless you say something we don't like" is hypocritical, which is true. I likened that to an ISP that has a user agreement which does not forbid any protocols or any forms of traffic, and then having that ISP covertly forge packets in order to forbid protocols or forms of traffic that they don't like, which is also hypocritical. The correct, non-hypocritical way for an ISP to proceed is either to keep the user agreement the same and never screw with users' traffic, or, openly spell out in the user agreement what they will and will not allow and follow it to the letter.
Whether I enjoy it or not, and I don't, I am forced to conclude that either you're dense and you sincerely believe that I was claiming that this is a free speech issue or you are deliberately using a straw man argument. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anyone in this thread try to contend against my reasoning who can do so without either misrepresenting what I say or succumbing to straw man-type fallacies. That's too bad.
This is not only a non-technical argument, but a fallacious one. No ISP offers "unlimited" bandwidth or throughput, and all have terms of service which limit what you can do with it. And this is a good thing.
I said it was unmetered. That's not the same thing as unlimited bandwidth/throughput, which is why I don't get 10,000,000 gigabytes per second. There is a reason why I put "unlimited" in quote marks in my previous post; the term has a well-known meaning within this industry (particularly for someone who has worked in it as you alluded to in your discussion of Slirp), and trying to act right now like you didn't/couldn't have known my meaning is a sorry excuse for a real line of reasoning. There are indeed terms of service; this allows my ISP to cut my connection if I ever became a spammer or any crap like that which I have no intention of ever doing. Nowhere in the ToS does it say I cannot use BitTorrent or any other protocols for that matter. That's what I mean when I say that if they want to throttle or forbid certain traffic types, let them do so openly and not covertly by forging packets. Doing it covertly says to me that they know it's not a perfectly valid practice, that they are afraid of everyone knowing that they do it.
You shouldn't be allowed to degrade others' service or hog bandwidth.
I have a certain amount of bandwidth. Let's say it's 10 mbit/sec downstream, 2 mbit/sec upstream. Those aren't the actual numbers, but they'll work for our purposes here. That means my ISP has agreed to let me use up to 10 mbit/sec to download data. Guess what? I'm going to use it. If using the 10 mbit/sec they have agreed to provide to me can possibly degrade the server of another, unrelated user, that would mean that my ISP has oversold their capacity, or that they need to upgrade their equipment, or have otherwise failed to do a good job. None of these things are my fault, so resolving them by screwing with my connection is unjust. The particular zeroes and ones I am receiving at the 10 mbit/sec I paid for are completely irrelevant and I suspect that you know this. This is all so childishly simple I really can't understand the basis of your argument. You seem like you have decided to be an ISP apologist first and to worry about the actual facts and reasoning second. You'd do well in the PR arena, but trying to distract me from a very simple principle by bringing up irrelevant details is simply not going to work, whether you yourself actually believe what you are saying or not.
You could say that it is stupid to have such conversations over email, but this was hardly "just looking over your shoulder."
Sometimes shit just happens. Really. But most of the time that I see anything bad happen to anyone, they were doing something stupid. Something stupid that either directly caused the situation, or made it much worse than it had to be. That includes me, by the way -- if I have an advantage over others it's that I can admit this and see these things as lessons to learn from instead of treating everything as though it's random chance, as though my choices have no impact on what happens to me. Poor decision-making remains the number one cause of most peoples' problems, which is a good thing in a way because it's preventable.
Try explaining this to most people, though, and see how far you get. Instead of saying "the power to change things for the better is in my hands" they say "so you're trying to blame this all on me?!" and they completely miss the point. Even if you don't directly cause things that happen to you, there is such a thing as making yourself available and allowing room for things to happen. It's disheartening because the way most people respond to anyone who says this leads me to believe that most of them want to be victims. When that's the case, they tend to get what they want.
Don't think that people are not furious at the big dumb companies and government officials who have violated them. Your cube mate is just less able to defend himself from your anger and is an easy scape goat for hypocritical government that wants to look like it is doing something right.
I can't believe you actually made one post without once mentioning Windows or Microsoft. So, who the hell are you and what have you done with the real Twitter?
At what point does a privacy breach demand punishment?
Wasn't privacy declared dead some time ago? So, no punishment, I guess...
It certainly is dead if we don't stand up and demand it and if we choose not to punish those who violate it. We do have a choice in the matter, you know. We don't have to just sit back and do nothing and watch it slowly erode.
Of course the other angle is that there is plenty you can do to make your communications and your systems much more difficult to compromise. You can use encryption, you can refuse to use free services like Hotmail and Gmail for sensitive data, you can follow good security practices for how you administer your computer. You can also assume that someone somewhere really might target you, which that co-worker mentioned in the summary almost certainly did not do until it became evident that this was the case. Privacy is very much like freedom; the price is vigilance.
I don't really subscribe to a major religion, but I have studied most of them and I can probably clear that up for you (the GP's joke, that is). The whole point of a priest is to act as an intermediary between yourself and God, usually with the implication that you could not speak to God yourself. That's what makes a priest different from a preacher, who is merely a teacher of what he believes to be true while the actual interaction with God is up to you. The basis of rejecting the concept is the idea that God is equally available to everyone and therefore, priests are not special and do not deserve any extra status.
I won't comment on whether either or both ideas are valid. That's something each person needs to make up their own mind about and you seem to have taken your stance on it. I was just explaining the GP's reasoning when he made a joke about not letting a priest learn about your encryption.
OK, this is somewhat of a network techie/geeky thing, but you can hog the network even if your bandwidth is capped. This is due to a flaw in TCP, which does very weak, per-flow congestion avoidance. Suppose one user is running a single download at X bits per second. A second has 100 streams going, each with 1/100th of the bandwidth (or X/100). Which one gets priority if the network gets congested? The second -- by a factor of 100! BitTorrent, which is used for downloads that are not time critical, seizes priority over other traffic such as VoIP, which really needs real time performance. What's more, the streams for which it seizes priority use large packets because they are downloads. The large packets, in turn, create jitter, which really messes up VoIP. The same is true for gaming. So, ISPs are doing the right thing when they throttle BitTorrent and keep it from opening up too many streams. And if they recognize that the thing that's hogging the bandwidth is BitTorrent, they can do so gracefully. They can undo the attempt to seize priority and mete out the bandwidth appropriately. If they are forced to be "protocol agnostic" (the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge;" in other words, their bandwidth limiter is not able to recognize exactly what's causing the problem), they can't use a strategy that's carefully tailored to the problem. So, the networking management can't be as good, and all users suffer. That's what the Sandvine appliance does. It "prunes" the number of streams started by BitTorrent down to a manageable level. It doesn't stop it altogether, but it keeps it from interfering with others by exploiting a vulnerability in the protocol.
There is a very simple, non-technical argument against all of this. I pay my ISP for a certain amount of bandwidth. This connection is not metered in any way, other than having a limit to the total amount of bandwidth available at any one time. It is an "unlimited" plan. It suited my ISP to offer this deal, and it suited my needs to accept and purchase it. Other users of this ISP have similar if not identitcal arrangements. Whether it's BitTorrent, running an FTP server, real-time video, or whatever, the principle here is that if anything that another unrelated user does can reduce the quality of my connection, then my ISP has failed because they have oversold their capacity. Everything you said about how multiple BitTorrent streams greatly increase the latency of applications like VoIP is quite reasonable, if you are talking about MY bittorrent client causing latency for MY VoIP client, but that is not what we were discussing.
Now, if ISPs decide they want to meter their connections (say, by the megabyte or gigabyte), or that they won't carry certain types of traffic, then let them announce this to their customers. If their customers decide they want to continue paying for this, great. If they don't, too bad. But what is happening right now, where ISPs want to sell "unlimited" connections and then surreptitiously place limits on them and screw around with my traffic to conceal the fact that they are overselling their capacity (and/or refuse to upgrade their equipment) is unacceptable. This is unacceptable whether TCP fails to manage this type of network congestion, whether BitTorrent really is a bandwidth hog, whether an RST is a good way to deal with that, blah blah -- you're getting caught up in minutia and missing the real point. Saying "you're free to use this connection as you please... oh, unless you use an application we don't like, then we'll sanction you" is hypocritical the same way that saying "you have the right to free speech... oh, unless you say something we don't like" is hypocritical.
It's a sad truth, but there just isn't time to re-evaluate every rule and law. Much as it might be tempting to say it's needed - and new advances could be applied to testing old results - it's not likely to happen until emergant results contradict specific arguments enough to make people sit up and notice.
Re-evaluating every rule and law for the hell of it, no there is not time for that. Doing so when the problems with our exisitng rules and laws have flaws that are getting worse, that's the only reasonable way to proceed and only inertia and unwillingness to change and inability to admit we may have it all wrong would get in our way. These are not valid excuses; they are side-effects of too much misplaced trust in establishments and institutions. That's the difference.
What you're complaining about is a reaction to the fact that our elected officials care nothing for our opinions. That they don't care and prefer to represent lobbyists and monied interests occurred first. That the people subsequently lost all respect for them, both as officials and as human beings, occurred second. Even if this weren't the case, they are ourservants and they knew that when they signed up for the job, so either way they are utterly failing to represent us. That's true even if you don't like a crude joke about Jenna.
Slashdot Mirror
A taxpayer who votes for Barack Obama is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.
A citizen who expects a functioning government voting for John McCain is like a passenger on a plane being piloted by Pee Wee Herman.
Or how about this:
A parent who expects their children to grow up in a world in which the United States has good schools, funded social net programs, a functional military capable of defending our country, a thriving economy, clean air, abundant clean power, strong relations with the major powers in the world, an effective plan for reducing terrorism that doesn't involve invading random countries based on lies, that votes for John McCain is an example of an evolutionary dead end.
Whew... that was fun... kind of cleansing, really... but not as much as watching McSame lose in November. Now *that's* going to be delicious!
http://views.tgrigsby.com/
If you can get past your self-assured "hah, MY guy is so much better than YOUR guy" attitude (while it was a reaction to his similar attitude, being an equal and opposite reaction it is no better) and take a hard look at not just the two candidates but the two parties from which they originate, you'll find that neither of them represent the people. This has been the case for quite some time now.
Both were long ago taken over by statists who realize that inch by inch, tiny increase by tiny increase, they can eventually have a "perfect" police/nanny state (there are serveral terms which would apply) where everyone is told what's good for them, how they should live, what they should and should not want out of life, etc. and of course all of this is "for your safety" or "for your own good" or "to protect the children" or "to fight terrorism" or "for the War on (some) Drugs" and probably more emphasis on a "War on Obesity" and similar is around the corner. Just take a good long look at the history of the 20th century. Look at the size of government (in terms of percentage of GDP) in 1901 and compare that to the size of government in 2000. Look at the number of agencies, laws, law enforcement. Look at the tax burden in terms of average percentage of annual income. Take a good long look at how people used to be expected to plan for their own retirement and now they "need" government programs on which they have become dependent. Look at how people used to routinely purchase and negotiate their own individual health insurance and how the wage freeze of World War II caused people to expect this to come from employers, which effectively made it near-impossible to obtain it on your own since you don't have that kind of bargaining power. Now the government wants to get into the health insurance business -- make no mistake, the current media discussion is not a debate, it's there to get us used to the idea. Look at how much direct interaction the average citizen has with the federal government, then look at whether this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Look at the income tax, the way that it allows politicians to use carrot-and-stick methods to control behavior, the way a larger and larger class of people is being created who have zero federal tax liability and therefore little incentive to care about the financial impact of excessive government spending, and then ask yourself why the Constitution had to be amended to allow for this (the Founding Fathers were not ignorant of the concept of an income tax -- it is not a new invention).
I want you to seriously consider how much this country has changed in the last century alone. This change is not random in the slightest. Every last piece of it points in the same direction: an increasingly larger and more powerful and more centralized government, in which more and more power is in the hands of fewer and fewer people with less and less oversight. All of which is "for your own good", of course. Ask yourself whether either Barack Obama or John McCain would have a snowbal
Get Bruce Willis on the phone, time to go "Armageddon" on Jupiter's ass.
Haha. I don't know about sending Bruce WIllis, but this does make me wonder why we have never (to my knowledge...) sent a probe INTO one of the gas giants. We have done flybys and taken photos etc. but it should prove interesting to send cameras and other instruments directly inside one of them. Maybe we could determine whether there exists a solid surface or core underneath the gases (and if it's something exotic like metallic hydrogen) and get an idea of why some of them radiate more heat than they receive from the sun. and the answers to probably lots of other questions. I wonder if there is a technological/engineering reason (as opposed to a budget reason) why I've never heard of a serious proposal to do something like this.
A penalty is fine, but a 2000% penalty? The percentages aren't that high on anything else...
But, but but this is electronic media! It involves computers and intarwebs and a series of tubes and electrons and stuff, you're supposed to abandon all logic and common sense and instantly enter into Dummy Mode whenever that's the case! Certainly you can't use critical thinking and compare it to the penalties you'd face when dealing with anything else! Why, that might amount to treating IP as though it were like tangible property! Oh, wait...
The perception occurs because anytime the RIAA/MPAA asks for tougher, more punitive copyright laws, they get what they ask for with little or no opposition. I doubt very strongly that any of the Congresscritters who pass such laws are under the illusion that the RIAA/MPAA have no intention of using them. So, directly like what you describe or indirectly, the government has been their best friend for some time now when it comes to delaying the inevitable. The inevitable, of course, is that eventually there will be little or no need for a middleman like the record companies to control distribution, at which point the RIAA/MPAA's current business model is fully obsolete. What will replace it? I could speculate but I don't really know. I do know that I'd like to find out; I honestly believe that the finest music in the world isn't worth the corruption and the intimidation and the persecution that the *AAs have perpetrated in the name of their financial interests.
Yeah, that is why no one got "shell shock" in WWII, and police officers never get it while protecting innocents. *roll eyes*
And in no case should the soldiers be suffering for the sins of the politicians. PTSD etc generally don't kick in till years later, so are going to have zero effect on present wars. The USAF is just trying to keep VA costs down.
While I understand it, you are reacting emotionally to something I already covered. This is my own text from the original post:
When an enemy attacks and like-it-or-not you are forced to defend yourself, the horrors of conflict are not your fault and they are not what you asked for. They are what you had to do. Despite that, it may still take the defenders a long time to learn to cope with the horrors they have witnessed. Just imagine how much harder that must be when you also know that you are the aggressor.
Nowhere did I say that any of this would be a cakewalk for anyone concerned. I was only saying that a horrible thing can be even worse when you don't have a clear purpose that you really believe in.
You should take a psychology class or two and go learn a few things about where terrorists come from and why they become terrorists. There are many things you fail to understand here.
Actually I made no comment on terrorists, where they come from, why they do what they do. Zero. My commentary was regarding "pre-emptive" war -- that sounds so much better than "offensive war", just like "shock and awe" sounds so much better than "blitzkrieg" even though it's the same thing. So, you're actually responding to statements I never made. Good job.
Now, if you want me to comment on the terrorists themselves, you certainly have a roundabout way of asking but no matter. I can only speculate about this, but here's my take: I would imagine that no matter what the party line might say, the USA's habit of using its intelligence agencies to overthrow foreign governments and install dictators more favorable to our interests would explain their suicidal desperation quite a bit better than "they hate us because of our freedoms".
In terms of meddling with the affairs of soverign nations and pissing off a lot of people worldwide, it may please the government of the USA to play the "innocent victim" role but this is simply not the case. If the USA's leaders had any honor whatsoever, they'd take responsibility for the fact that actions taken to ensure that the USA remains a dominant world superpower are not free; they come at the expense of earning ill will and various enemies worldwide. Enemies who realize they don't stand a chance fighting a conventional war. Does this make those enemies any less murderous and cowardly because they have decided to target civilians? No, it doesn't, and the people who would do that are still the scum of the earth. I am most certainly not saying otherwise. What I am saying is that there is a chain of cause-and-effect here that is sorely neglected in the media anytime a purportedly serious discussion of this topic comes up. A chain of cause-and-effect that would make our leaders something less than the honorable men who are acting in our best interests that the party line would have you believe.
It seems to me that if we had a more solid purpose for fighting, then this wouldn't be nearly the concern that is indicated in the summary. Let's say a hostile foreign army invaded US soil. Do you think that people fighting that army, that army which directly threatens their homes and their children and their homeland, would have such concerns about the casualties they have to inflict?
Whether politicians prefer to call it "pre-emptive" or not, what we are doing is fighting an offensive war. In the case of Iraq this is against an enemy which was no real threat to us, which is why the "justification" so quickly changed from "weapons of mass destruction" to "liberation of the Iraqi people". In the back of their minds, in some place that is untouched by denial, our soldiers have to see just how convenient this whole war has been for the expansion of executive power, the passage of legislation like the Patriot Act, the no-bid contracts for companies that our Vice President and others just-coincidentally happens to have ties to. Despite the incredibly bravery and willingness to put their lives on the line that our soldiers have shown (seriously, these guys have balls of brass and guts of steel; they are not the problem), there is very little honor to be had in a war of this type. Don't mistake me for a pacifist just because I think we need a damned good reason before we go and kill a lot of people; a reason that will stand up to questioning and critical thinking; a reason that does not have the taint of political and financial gain everywhere you look.
When an enemy attacks and like-it-or-not you are forced to defend yourself, the horrors of conflict are not your fault and they are not what you asked for. They are what you had to do. Despite that, it may still take the defenders a long time to learn to cope with the horrors they have witnessed. Just imagine how much harder that must be when you also know that you are the aggressor. Like too many things we do, this is a band-aid designed to alleviate a symptom and not a solution to the actual underlying problem.
War is a terrible, hellish, ugly thing. It's supposed to be. That is its nature, and that is what the drone pilots are finding out the hard way. It's not supposed to be something you do for a questionable reason. What an insult to such honorable men that our leadership puts them through this, and for what?
Yeah oddly enough the less informed the general public is about a product, in terms of real technical understanding and full awareness of all alternatives, the better companies like Microsoft will do in terms of sales. This is really a commentary on the average "consumer"**; the ony thing it says about Windows is that it's within the threshold of how poor the quality can be before people get so irritated that they will buy something else no matter what. That's not nearly the same as excellence.
** I'm not fond of the word "consumer" and in fact it does not apply here. The term comes from arrangements like free broadcast television: the advertisers are the TV station's customers, the viewers who pay nothing to the TV station are the consumers. A paying customer is emphatically not a "consumer". I can see why marketers like the term -- the ideal consumer eats products and shits dollars and generally takes whatever they're offered. I do not see a good reason for why everyone keeps parroting the term.
If by "lefty" you mean "statist" (they seem to be synonymous since every leftist plan of action I have ever heard of would imply increasing government power and size) then I don't know about that one. Such statists love television and newspapers which are essentially one-to-many media that don't afford much (if any) opportunity to confront them. They usually don't do so well in a forum where anyone can can rebut them. That's not to say that I haven't also noticed such positions being taken more often on Slashdot, just that they don't thrive here the way they do in other media.
When I say that "leftist" and "statist" seem synonymous, I have doubts about whether that's what true leftists really believe in. Many say that they don't, but who knows? In politics the face value of what people say means very little to me. Personally, I think they mean well and the hardcore statists (the ones who would like to see a place like the USA become a dictatorship or a police state) find their ideas to be very convenient excuses for expanding governmental power. This is where people fail to realize, time and time again, that most of the harm done in this world is not done intentionally by people with malicious intentions; most of the harm in this world is done unintentionally by people with good intentions and very little foresight.
The prank actually did a wife a favor.
It caused her the sort of pain that you probably can't even imagine. I know, because I was the victim of a cheating wife, and it took paxil for me to let her go. I would have been far better off never having met her, but barring that I would have been better off (as well as my children) if I'd never known of her adultery.
Tami is the same way; she's married to a serial adulterer. But love is blind, deaf and dumb. It does, however, smell.
If you've never been the victim of a cheating spouse you can't possiby have a clue, especially if you have never been in love with a cheater.
All I can tell you is that I'd rather be alone than have a sham relationship built on a lie, and that I would definitely want to know because deciding not to know would be tantamount to burying my head in the sand.
If love is blind, deaf and dumb, it's because people become blinded and deafened by their emotions. That's a choice; you can choose not to do it. You can also lose your personal and emotional independence (in fact giving those up to a woman is all too easy) in a relationship which may explain why you had to be dependent for a while on something else as a substitute, in this case an SSRI, Paxil. The single biggest mistake men make is that they completely surrender their allegience and independence to a woman to the point where she starts to feel like a second mother to them. By that, I mean they forget the need to be content with their lives on their own and then share that life with a woman who is also content on her own, which is how two healthy beings relate. While she might love him deeply, no woman, even a non-cheater, can respect a man who makes her feel like she's another mother to him (especially in terms of emotional well-being).
I won't say whether similar things have or have not happened to me. You will need to make up your own mind about that, although you might feel a temptation to take the easy road and say that they haven't and therefore you can dismiss what I say as the musings of a man who doesn't know what he's talking about. If that comforts you, feel welcome to it. But there's no way in hell I would ever call myself a "victim" of a cheating spouse. I would call myself a poor judge of character who saw what he wanted to see when he was overcome with emotions and allowed himself to think that he knew a woman and what she was about when he really did not (don't confuse what I am saying here -- emotions are fine; being at their mercy is not). I would take responsibility for my choice of being with her and I would learn everything I could about what I wasn't paying attention to, what I missed, what I disregarded or rationalized away, that could have let me see it coming. The first step to doing that (learning to see these things coming) is to stop telling yourself that it's impossible to do that.
I hate to break it to you, but adultery is illegal in several states in the USA. For example, a very quick search on Google reveals http://www.vanwagnerwood.com/CM/Custom/Adultery.asp that it is illegal in Wisconson.
I am not condoning the troll's actions.
Yes, yes. And oral sex, or sex in any position other than the missionary position, is "sodomy" and punishable by law. Except those laws are generally never enforced.
There's also the one about a man not being allowed to beat his wife with a stick that is bigger around than his thumb. Or the one about women drivers (presumably of horse-and-buggy) needing to have a guy walk out in front of them with a lantern to warn everyone else. You can find lots of stupid laws on the books that are never enforced. Bringing them up in this discussion comes across like clutching at straws, though.
That just isn't the case when you're talking about something like a wife leaving her husband. No one is forced to be in a relationship that they don't want to stay in. You always have the right to leave at any time. You are merely exercising a right that you had all along when you decide that you don't want to stay with someone who will cheat on you. That just means that choices have consequences; every instance of this fact is not "vigilante justice".
Yes, but shooting people who do not pose a physical threat to you is most certainly illegal. That's why it's vigilante justice. The legal, non-vigilante method would be to call the police and ask them to enforce the law in the case of any parking violations that have occurred.
Like I said, choices have consequences. If you cheat on your wife, you do so knowing that she will almost certainly leave you if she finds out. There is nothing vigilante about that. You seem like you either want to complicate a very simple issue or like you're just too proud to admit that you didn't understand this term. As others have pointed out, it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Your argument is not valid. This is not vigilante justice because cheating on your wife is not against the law, and her finding out about this and leaving you is also not against the law. So, you have a consequence that is legal that follows a behavior that is legal. That is not part of the definition of vigilante justice, no more than your boss is a "vigilante" if you get fired for telling him to fuck off.
I never made the claim that there was something wrong with forbitting some protocols or forms of traffic. I said that if the ISP is going to do this, let them do it openly. If they are going to do this openly, there is no need to forge anything. Forging packets to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack to reset connections covertly, when the user agreement does not mention this, is what I have a problem with. So, pointing out that an ISP might forbid traffic is silly and proves nothing; the entire discussion is about the method by which this is done and why more honest methods aren't being used.
Using an analogy does not automatically make something a straw man; in fact that's not even part of the definition. Misunderstanding my use of an analogy so that you can misrepresent my argument makes it a straw man. Continuing to do so after I have clarified my meaning only strenghtens my conclusion that either you're dense or you're doing this deliberately. It's not like my original analogy was ambiguous to begin with.
Wait, I called you dense. I suppose now you're going to respond to me and say "but ratio of mass to volume has NOTHING to do with Internet service providers!" It would make about as much sense as the way you interpreted my analogy.
Thank you for such a well thought-out, real answer. I suppose our only difference is that, within the very narrow scope of "is this the truth?" (not nearly the same question as "do I want to date this person"!) I am not concerned with being confident of anyone's goodwill. I simply don't believe what people say unless I can independently verify it or it's consistent with what I already know to be true, so for me, worrying about their intentions is an unproductive trap I try pretty hard to never fall into. I say that knowing that you probably weren't describing yourself but rather the folks who react badly to anyone who tells them they are not really victims, so I am really explaining why I think they need not concern themselves with that. Anyway, I call it a trap because it takes you out of a potential "discernment" mode and places you into a "do I like this person" mode which tends to make everything a popularity contest. There are plenty of people who may not like you, may in fact hate your guts or may be completely indifferent to you from whom you can still learn something if only you can get past your personal feelings long enough to listen. We limit ourselves in so many arbitrary ways that just don't have to be the case. Having likes and dislikes is fine but letting them rule your life and filter your knowledge for you is neither desirable nor necessary.
I also feel that adults should not call themselves mature (although many will falsely do so, because it sounds good) until they can deal with something without allowing their judgment to become clouded by an emotional response. That is, have your emotions but don't be a slave to them. Beyond that, I understand rather well the thought processes behind trying to protect that precious little ego and worrying about self-respect and apportioning blame, I just don't consider them to be valid. To me they are aberrations and most people have the misfortune of believing that only relatively rare phenomena can possibly be aberrant, that if most human beings participate in something then it can't possibly be a disease (dis-ease) state.
So, I say what I believe to be true. If it upsets someone, no one forced them to react that way to something they could have chosen not to listen to. If a contrary opinion is really such an irritant, consider that with over 6.5 billion people in the world, that's a lot of convincing to do before the easily offended can finally relax. So let them get offended; perhaps someone else will hear their tantrums and indulge them even if I personally don't wish to do them such a disservice. In spite of all of this, yes I still think it's unfortunate that the victim mentality is in no danger of extinction. I still think that we, collectively, waste a lot of energy on things which are beneath us. I also think that no effort is ever wasted despite all appearances, and that there is an increasing number of people like you who generally seem to understand these things.
Now, I believe that the above are largely matters of opinion or personal style. You have to decide for yourself how you want to feel about it; this is not where I can use a mathematical proof to decisively declare that one of us is right and the other is wrong. Not at all. So, please don't think that anything I am saying here is intended to argue with you. In this instance, that is not my place. The purpose was more to explain how I feel about it, since you were kind enough to do the same (and it didn't start out being this long-winded, I swear!). I am not being sarcastic or facetious in the slightest when I tell you that I am thankful for your response. I wish there were more like it.
I mentioned free speech at all only as an analogy. I said that saying "you have the right to free speech ... oh, unless you say something we don't like" is hypocritical, which is true. I likened that to an ISP that has a user agreement which does not forbid any protocols or any forms of traffic, and then having that ISP covertly forge packets in order to forbid protocols or forms of traffic that they don't like, which is also hypocritical. The correct, non-hypocritical way for an ISP to proceed is either to keep the user agreement the same and never screw with users' traffic, or, openly spell out in the user agreement what they will and will not allow and follow it to the letter.
Whether I enjoy it or not, and I don't, I am forced to conclude that either you're dense and you sincerely believe that I was claiming that this is a free speech issue or you are deliberately using a straw man argument. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anyone in this thread try to contend against my reasoning who can do so without either misrepresenting what I say or succumbing to straw man-type fallacies. That's too bad.
I said it was unmetered. That's not the same thing as unlimited bandwidth/throughput, which is why I don't get 10,000,000 gigabytes per second. There is a reason why I put "unlimited" in quote marks in my previous post; the term has a well-known meaning within this industry (particularly for someone who has worked in it as you alluded to in your discussion of Slirp), and trying to act right now like you didn't/couldn't have known my meaning is a sorry excuse for a real line of reasoning. There are indeed terms of service; this allows my ISP to cut my connection if I ever became a spammer or any crap like that which I have no intention of ever doing. Nowhere in the ToS does it say I cannot use BitTorrent or any other protocols for that matter. That's what I mean when I say that if they want to throttle or forbid certain traffic types, let them do so openly and not covertly by forging packets. Doing it covertly says to me that they know it's not a perfectly valid practice, that they are afraid of everyone knowing that they do it.
I have a certain amount of bandwidth. Let's say it's 10 mbit/sec downstream, 2 mbit/sec upstream. Those aren't the actual numbers, but they'll work for our purposes here. That means my ISP has agreed to let me use up to 10 mbit/sec to download data. Guess what? I'm going to use it. If using the 10 mbit/sec they have agreed to provide to me can possibly degrade the server of another, unrelated user, that would mean that my ISP has oversold their capacity, or that they need to upgrade their equipment, or have otherwise failed to do a good job. None of these things are my fault, so resolving them by screwing with my connection is unjust. The particular zeroes and ones I am receiving at the 10 mbit/sec I paid for are completely irrelevant and I suspect that you know this. This is all so childishly simple I really can't understand the basis of your argument. You seem like you have decided to be an ISP apologist first and to worry about the actual facts and reasoning second. You'd do well in the PR arena, but trying to distract me from a very simple principle by bringing up irrelevant details is simply not going to work, whether you yourself actually believe what you are saying or not.
Sometimes shit just happens. Really. But most of the time that I see anything bad happen to anyone, they were doing something stupid. Something stupid that either directly caused the situation, or made it much worse than it had to be. That includes me, by the way -- if I have an advantage over others it's that I can admit this and see these things as lessons to learn from instead of treating everything as though it's random chance, as though my choices have no impact on what happens to me. Poor decision-making remains the number one cause of most peoples' problems, which is a good thing in a way because it's preventable.
Try explaining this to most people, though, and see how far you get. Instead of saying "the power to change things for the better is in my hands" they say "so you're trying to blame this all on me?!" and they completely miss the point. Even if you don't directly cause things that happen to you, there is such a thing as making yourself available and allowing room for things to happen. It's disheartening because the way most people respond to anyone who says this leads me to believe that most of them want to be victims. When that's the case, they tend to get what they want.
I can't believe you actually made one post without once mentioning Windows or Microsoft. So, who the hell are you and what have you done with the real Twitter?
It certainly is dead if we don't stand up and demand it and if we choose not to punish those who violate it. We do have a choice in the matter, you know. We don't have to just sit back and do nothing and watch it slowly erode.
Of course the other angle is that there is plenty you can do to make your communications and your systems much more difficult to compromise. You can use encryption, you can refuse to use free services like Hotmail and Gmail for sensitive data, you can follow good security practices for how you administer your computer. You can also assume that someone somewhere really might target you, which that co-worker mentioned in the summary almost certainly did not do until it became evident that this was the case. Privacy is very much like freedom; the price is vigilance.
I don't really subscribe to a major religion, but I have studied most of them and I can probably clear that up for you (the GP's joke, that is). The whole point of a priest is to act as an intermediary between yourself and God, usually with the implication that you could not speak to God yourself. That's what makes a priest different from a preacher, who is merely a teacher of what he believes to be true while the actual interaction with God is up to you. The basis of rejecting the concept is the idea that God is equally available to everyone and therefore, priests are not special and do not deserve any extra status.
I won't comment on whether either or both ideas are valid. That's something each person needs to make up their own mind about and you seem to have taken your stance on it. I was just explaining the GP's reasoning when he made a joke about not letting a priest learn about your encryption.
There is a very simple, non-technical argument against all of this. I pay my ISP for a certain amount of bandwidth. This connection is not metered in any way, other than having a limit to the total amount of bandwidth available at any one time. It is an "unlimited" plan. It suited my ISP to offer this deal, and it suited my needs to accept and purchase it. Other users of this ISP have similar if not identitcal arrangements. Whether it's BitTorrent, running an FTP server, real-time video, or whatever, the principle here is that if anything that another unrelated user does can reduce the quality of my connection, then my ISP has failed because they have oversold their capacity. Everything you said about how multiple BitTorrent streams greatly increase the latency of applications like VoIP is quite reasonable, if you are talking about MY bittorrent client causing latency for MY VoIP client, but that is not what we were discussing.
... oh, unless you use an application we don't like, then we'll sanction you" is hypocritical the same way that saying "you have the right to free speech ... oh, unless you say something we don't like" is hypocritical.
Now, if ISPs decide they want to meter their connections (say, by the megabyte or gigabyte), or that they won't carry certain types of traffic, then let them announce this to their customers. If their customers decide they want to continue paying for this, great. If they don't, too bad. But what is happening right now, where ISPs want to sell "unlimited" connections and then surreptitiously place limits on them and screw around with my traffic to conceal the fact that they are overselling their capacity (and/or refuse to upgrade their equipment) is unacceptable. This is unacceptable whether TCP fails to manage this type of network congestion, whether BitTorrent really is a bandwidth hog, whether an RST is a good way to deal with that, blah blah -- you're getting caught up in minutia and missing the real point. Saying "you're free to use this connection as you please
Re-evaluating every rule and law for the hell of it, no there is not time for that. Doing so when the problems with our exisitng rules and laws have flaws that are getting worse, that's the only reasonable way to proceed and only inertia and unwillingness to change and inability to admit we may have it all wrong would get in our way. These are not valid excuses; they are side-effects of too much misplaced trust in establishments and institutions. That's the difference.
Credit for that? But why? That it could be viewed as malice is one of the better reasons to keep incompetence in check.
What you're complaining about is a reaction to the fact that our elected officials care nothing for our opinions. That they don't care and prefer to represent lobbyists and monied interests occurred first. That the people subsequently lost all respect for them, both as officials and as human beings, occurred second. Even if this weren't the case, they are our servants and they knew that when they signed up for the job, so either way they are utterly failing to represent us. That's true even if you don't like a crude joke about Jenna.