So in the best case scenario, you'd still shoot a thief on the off-chance you might get killed yourself? The guy is just a thief, yet you'd shoot him dead because you're scared you may be kidnapped or raped or murdered?
So if people who would break into your home and threaten your family self-select and remove themselves from the gene pool, you consider that a bad thing?
Breaking into someone's home should be as risky and as dangerous as possible. The result: fewer people will try it.
Seriously, I have no sympathy for anyone who gets hurt, maimed, or killed while performing unprovoked violence or posing an unprovoked threat against others. And an unknown assailant who forcibly breaks into your home while you are inside is certainly posing an unprovoked threat against you. At that point it's far too late to reason with them. They have abandoned reason, for breaking into a stranger's home is not a reasonable act.
Jimmy Carter saying it on Larry King should be enough, but I'm sure you wave that one off. The NAACP wrote a report calling them racists, but I'm sure you'll find some reason not to count that one. Hell, just type "tea party called racist" in the Google search bar. I'm sure one of the 1,600,000 results will stick to the wall.
If they wanted to see if there was any validity to what I was talking about, the info is out there. A Google search like what you mention would take less than a minute. They don't want to find it. They want to talk about something they've not looked into because that comforts them.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Of course you do, because you're the type of person who already despises cops. Of course you could only believe that the cop murdered an innocent person even though a court of law says otherwise, you know better than everyone else and The Man will be out to get YOU soon.
Here's a little hint and it's really fucking simple that even a paranoid 10 year-old hippie like yourself could understand it:
-If on average 10 people a year commit a murder and 100% are caught, punishment is _relatively_ low for the severity of the crime because it takes less public resources to convict and there is no need to deter others since you're pretty much guaranteed to be caught.
-If on average 1 million people a year hack a computer or say, illegally download music, but only 1 of those criminals is caught and even when they admit to being wrong certain disassociative groups of society are outraged at even that, then the punishment is much higher because it's harder to get a conviction and you need to deter others from doing it.
See believe it or not there are actually multiple goals when deciding on a punishment, and I'm sorry to say, "What paranoid schizophrenic liberal uneducated fuckwits believe should be the punishment" isn't one of them.
I'm not fond of what cops are becoming, especially since I have an idea of what they used to be. Very simply, if I am a cop and I have someone restrained and in my custody, I am responsible for what happens to them. That's because the nature of being restrained and detained means they are helpless to safeguard themselves. If I don't like that, my option is to pick a job that doesn't involve rendering people physically helpless.
Take a breath, calm down a bit, and re-read your own post. See and feel the venom dripping from it. Then realize one thing: you are only demonstrating how emotional and unreasonable your position is. You have to treat me like I'm some kind of evil person merely because we disagree about this case. If you had truth on your side, do you think that would be necessary?
No, you need to be that way and you need to talk about irrelevant things like downloading music because you have no ability to argue against me. You choose to hate me for that. Too bad for you. You could choose to solidify your position and reinforce your beliefs, but apparently that path is beyond your reach.
From what I remember hearing about the case on NPR a few months ago, the officer claimed that he was going for the taser but pulled the pistol instead. Apparently they have the wire-based tasers which are more or less gun shaped as well.
Two things.
One, what is the legitimate purpose of tazing a suspect who has already been restrained? I can understand tazing them to get them to stop struggling so that restraints (i.e. handcuffs) can be applied. But once they are already restrained? That's pretty damned fishy.
Two, do other officers in that same department have difficulty distinguishing a tazer from a firearm? If you chose a number of them at random and subjected them to a test where they had to quickly draw one or the other, would they have difficulty? If not, what was this officer's excuse?
However, back on topic, this "student activist" is still a jackass who has performed an unreasonable act and made reasonable people who might agree with his motives susceptible for being painted with the same brush. Ann Coulter may be a stone-cold bitch, but that's not excuse for being a dumb ass.
I find it funny that we as a society are so selective about when we like to be prejudiced. If a person is arrested for a crime who happens to be black, most people would never dream of assuming that all black people are also criminals. They would understand that this is wrong. Yet if a person is arrested for a crime who happens to be protesting, they feel free to assume that all protesters must also be some kind of undesirable. Both forms of prejudice are equally wrong and invalid.
What good is logic and critical thinking if the information available to you is half-truths and sometimes outright lies.
Logic and critical thinking is how you identify that they are half-truths, lies, and distortions. It's how you recognize the emotional appeals that would manipulate you into thinking that they were otherwise.
Likewise, what good is critical thinking if every debate starts so far right as a fact-less mess of lies and half-truths, that even arguing and fighting your way to the middle still leaves you with a bad result.
Debate with whom? Arguing and fighting with whom? If it's not the truth and you can see that, why would you entertain a debate or argument about it? Debates and arguments are for situations when there are equally valid viewpoints.
I wouldn't debate someone who tried to tell me that 2 plus 2 equals five. I might laugh at them but I wouldn't debate them. The problem people have is with the true believers who think that 2 plus 2 equals five with such sincerity that they make you doubt what you know is true. That's an internal matter of self-doubt that you can't resolve with them.
The overton window has been shifted so far towards corporatism/facism/far-right that any compromise still leaves you with corporatism/un-favorable to the working class.
And that works because average people are not capable of seeing through it. Obviously the masters behind the scenes are very much afraid of tough-minded citizens who can perform logic and critical thinking. That's why they are so careful not to promote those things. They don't want critical thinkers. They want childish, emotional, reactive, knee-jerk, narcissistic, obedient workers with short attention spans and even shorter memories who are incapable of looking too deeply at anything.
I don't believe you realize it but you are actually arguing for the effectiveness of critical thinking. Don't listen to what the elite say. Look hard at what they do. Their actions will tell you that they fear independent critical thinking.
I can see how such a rule came about. Most likely many police would arrive at a house and the beaten spouse would refuse to talk or press charges. It makes sense in that situation to take the husband away regardless of what the wife wants. But it does lead to charges being applied when previously the police many have not bothered, as the incident was very minor.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As long as we are talking about adults here, if a woman wants to remain with a proven abuser and doesn't want to use the legal remedies available to her, she has that right. It's foolish and self-destructive and it's bad decision-making, but she has that right. It is her life.
Besides, change the law so that applying charges is mandatory and it will only have one effect: the woman who doesn't want to press charges just won't call the police in the first place. If neighbors call, she'll refuse to cooperate. You can't help people who don't want to help themselves. The only thing that can be reasonably done is to make sure that when she realizes that being attracted to abusers ("bad boys" etc) and staying with them is pathological, the police work to ensure her physical safety and punish crimes against her while she works to get out of that situation.
It is not the proper role of the state and its police power to make sure that adults exercise good decision-making. Not only do I want them out of that business, they never should have entered into it in the first place.
Our definitions of pranks must be different, a DDOS attack sounds as much like a prank as breaking into a jewelry shop and breaking all the glass display cases.
Sure, you may not have stolen anything, but it's hardly a prank.
If you would appreciate a different perspective, find some older (i.e. elderly) people and ask them about how police officers used to be.
In most places, the local cops acted more like neighbors. People knew who they were and it was okay to walk up to them and talk to them like any other human being doing any other job. They could lean on you really, really hard if you showed true maliciousness. Yet, most things that you'd call "childish pranks" were not dealt with so harshly.
For example, I have an older relative who grew up in the 50s. When they were teenagers and up to mischief, sometimes they'd actually throw eggs at police cars and do things like that. When they finally got caught, they were chewed out by the officer and were forced to clean up the car until it looked better than brand-new (maybe even with a toothbrush). They were then driven to their parents' and the parents were told what happened. Then they were in real trouble. It worked because after that they didn't do it again.
What happened was that growing up, they actually respected the police officers who served their community. They realized that they were given a break and allowed to grow out of their childishness. The cops were human beings, neighbors, maybe even friends. They were not trying to nail you as much as possible for every little thing. They were not thugs. Regular law-abiding people weren't afraid of them and in fact were generally glad to have them around.
These days, if some teenage kid threw eggs at a cop car I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he was tazed, arrested, charged with assaulting a police officer, tried as an adult, and given a criminal record that would haunt him the rest of his life. Some people really wonder why young adults today have little or no respect for authority. Somewhere along the lines the human element disappeared and now it's all about screwing you as hard as possible and with as little lube as possible. It's lost most of its respectability. I think this began in the 80s with a movement called "proactive policing" but its roots likely go deeper than that.
One way or another, we lost something valuable and irreplacable.
It pains ME to see an ideologue debase a basic free speech issue iinto another stupid liberal/conservative diatribe..
Those MORONS think the whole world revolves around their artificial bullshit dichotomy.
Reduce the world to liberal/conservative and you reduce choices. Reduce choices and you reduce freedom.
It is ALL about the power of Big Capital. It frames the dialog, and the lemmings folllow.
Well, Big Capital is one half of it. The other half of it is a public school system that takes great pains to never teach the basic logic, rhetoric, and critical thinking necessary to see that for yourself. Without that, many people would divest from the various sources of Big Capital and it wouldn't be Big Capital anymore.
Here's how it works. There are three classes of people in American society. The first class is the people who run the large institutions: the politicians in government, and the executives of corporations. The second class is the people who protect these institutions: police, lawyers, the media, etc. The third class is everyone else. To calculate a criminal sentence, just use the following formula:
adjusted sentence = original sentence * 10^(class of perpetrator - class of victim)
If you kill someone of your own class, you might get 20 years in prison. But since the BART cop was in the second class, while Grant was in the third, this was dropped down to 2 years. Here, it's the reverse: the student targeted conservative pundits (second class) so instead of 3 months he gets 30.
I wish I could put this on a billboard in every major city.
Yes. A man who was already restrained and presented no threat was shot and killed.
The law should be asking one question: if a police officer has restrained a suspect and that suspect no longer presents any threat to the officer's safety, why was the officer's hand anywhere near his gun? Why was that gun not in its holster with the safety on? If that does not indicate intent to murder the suspect, then what would? Are we to believe that a trained police officer who is regularly evaluated on marksmanship does not understand the basic gun safety rules known to any redneck? At some point the whole idea that this was an "accident" loses all credibility. I find it much easier to believe that cops simply have an easier time getting away with murder.
Punishment should be based on intent as well, not simply the result.
Yes, and the assumption should be that a trained police officer understands basic firearm safety. Paperwork showing at least a single session at the shooting range should be the only proof required to demonstrate that. They want the power, let them have the responsibility that goes with it. Those are two things that should never be separated for any reason.
Furthermore, when any government official in a position of power commits a crime that has a victim, they should receive triple the sentence a regular citizen would have received. It's worse when they do it because they have sworn to uphold the law and are relied upon to enforce the law. That adds an element of betrayal in addition to the crime itself and also adds the threat that such crimes may become institutionalized or covered up.
Rule of law has been threatened in this country ever since assaulting a police officer carried a heavier penalty than assaulting a regular citizen. They're both equally wrong and the USA was not founded on the basis of special protected elites.
That's seriously warped. Yes, what he did was wrong, but it's not like he permanently shut down the Internet.
30 months? Two and a half years?
Well... the American justice system is famous for draconian punishments. Is anybody surprised?
We gave up on trying to rehabilitate anyone a long time ago. Concidentally this happened right about when private prison contractors became a big business and used their money and influence to lobby for harsher mandatory minimum sentences. They especially like to do this for victimless crimes involving only consenting adults, such as drug offenses.
Nowadays we take nonviolent criminals, mostly drug offenders, and throw them in the same facilities as those that house robbers, rapists, and murderers so they can learn how to be hardened criminals. Oh, we also have extensive criminal records so that even after release, former convicts can continue to pay a debt to society, for life, in the form of being denied most or all non-menial jobs. We know that poverty and crime go together, and if this entices them to turn again to crime to make ends meet it just means more job security for private prison contractors, lawyers, politicians, and more justification for increasingly paramilitary police forces.
br.
No doubt that the new area of expansion for this brand of fascism is computer crime. That should also help to "justify" all the network surveillance powers it would take to make those laws more enforcable. After all, you don't want to be soft on crime. You especially don't want to think that maybe all of those politicians don't really have your best interests at heart, do you?
Of course right-wingers *NEVER* do anything like this. Newsflash: Some people are assholes, and some just hide behind AC status.
They should start saying things like this in the summary, that way we don't have to see this come up like clockwork every single time the word "Liberal/Progressive" or the word "Conservative" is mentioned. Really it could save a lot of bandwidth.
Good. Don't justify their fears by acting like a thug.
That's two and a half years. Yes, he deserves to be punished, but it strikes me that he's not the one acting like a thug here, and I don't give a damn whether he's a rabid lefty, righty, or indy. If I heard that someone had gotten two and half years for taking down Reid'a, Pelosi's, and Michael Moore's sites, I still boggle in disbelief that someone got two and a half years.
Seriously. Damn!
Independent of any damage that was or was not done, there are two big factors that work against him on that.
One, he chose some high-profile targets. It's not precisely a secret that this gets the attention of authorities and that the legal system works a bit harder for such victims. The authorities were all over this one in a way they probably wouldn't have been if the same thing happened to you or me. It's not exactly comforting to think that this would be the case, but denial would be the only reason not to.
Two, most people who perform DDoS attacks, propagate malware, and run botnets don't get caught. When a law is difficult to enforce, the authoritarian law-and-order mentality never views that as a reason to question whether law is the best solution. That kind of basic questioning and introspection isn't a part of their worldview. Instead, it decides that we need to make an example of those few who do get caught as an attempt to deter the rest. That can often become more important than any notion of letting the punishment fit the crime. For this particular factor, there is no better example than the ridiculous statutory and punitive damages awareded in many RIAA copyright cases.
Good. Don't justify their fears by acting like a thug.
Indeed. Usually folks like him try to accomplish the same thing by calling it "hate speech" or the old standby "racism" and seeking to have it censored. Remember how many people have been called "racist" for disagreeing with Obama's politics? Regarding censorship, it's pretty hard to get the government to do that in the USA, so instead they put pressure on the sponsors of a site or of a broadcast to try and make that happen. That's still underhanded as hell but perhaps not quite thuggish.
Of course if folks like him want to really show how non-thug they are, they could always explain why their viewpoint is superior using old antiquated things like facts and reasoning. That's something thugs and criminals are not known for doing.
...If inalienable, fundamental human rights can have reasonable limitations, why not the practice of tracking people who did not ask to be tracked?
I'm sorry, I think you must be confused. You see, there actually ARE laws about stalking, but they only apply to the lower form of human life: individuals.
By definition, limitations on human rights only apply to humans. Corporations now have human rights, but limits don't apply to them because they were born without original sin.
My sarcasm/irony detector is running at full capacity, so I know you were being facetious. It's a shame I have to claim that explicitly but these days, you're some kind of moron if you respond to the awareness behind the sarcasm and not the sarcasm itself.
Still, anyone with an understanding of Original Sin knows that it is something that tainted the entire world. That means corporations are not exempt from it and can embody it. If nothing else there is the common sense to ask: "Of what are corporations made?" The short answer to that is "people." If people have Original Sin then so do the corporations they create.
What corporations were born without is the inability to get what they want through the political process. They may acquire that inability by never becoming large and taking on a life of their own, but they are not born with it.
One problem is that the phone makers insist on idiotic customizations of the android interface, so updates can take a long time because they have to update the customizations as well as the OS.
Emphasis added.
I don't think this is as trivial a problem as some of the commenters would suggest.
It's trivial because those customizations that hinder updates are idiotic. If they were important and non-essential then it would be non-trivial. As it stands, the problem is very easy to solve.
By posting to these kinds of social sites these people have indicated that they want to be heard. I wouldn't call it stalking if you are doing exactly what the "target" is asking you to do.
Asking to be heard is not the same thing as asking to be rigorously recorded, classified, categorized, and persistently contacted. You might be posting to Slashdot, a public Web site, but that doesn't mean you want every reader of your post to visit your home and knock on your door so they can hear you some more. Or at least, the assumption should be that you don't want that until and unless you say otherwise. So there are degrees to this, which also means there are reasonable levels and then there are extremes.
As an analogy, think of free speech. It has certain limitations. Within reason, you can say whatever you want in the USA because of the First Amendment. However, you may not just shout "FIRE!" in a theater when there is no fire, for example, because the harm this can cause outweighs your right to do it.
I think your rationale should also have reasonable limitations. Yes, you're posting in public to a social networking site. So does that mean anything goes? Any possible use or abuse of said postings are perfectly okay and should occur without any limitations whatsoever? Or is the right to access public information a right that should also have a few limits placed on how it is exercised?
I will say that if everyone understood the full power of tracking, monitoring, and database technology and knew with 100% certainty that it was going to be used against them every time they posted anything to any Web site, it would definitely have a chilling effect. Is the convenience of a few corporations worth a chilling effect on the general population? I don't believe so, not even when the chilling effect is merely a possibility.
For software and practices like what Cisco is promoting here, would it really be so unreasonable to legally require that they occur only with the fully informed consent of their targets and only on an opt-in basis? After all, if people really want this to happen then getting them to opt-in should be no problem. If inalienable, fundamental human rights can have reasonable limitations, why not the practice of tracking people who did not ask to be tracked?
It's almost too bad this information has been released. On the plus side there could be many people that could grab some information, now that it's public, before it gets blocked. On the other hand, if they don't already know about this workaround they might not ever find out since the normal access to the internet is censored.
Censorship is the least of their problems. Information that is blocked because it is censored can also have attempts to access it logged. That's more than feasible with such a powerful state. Then those who attempt to access it can be located, interrogated, "re-educated", "disappeared", etc. A message stating "this has been blocked" or an artificial error accessing a perfectly functional site is pretty damned tame by comparison to what could happen.
Tor still exists, Slashdot didn't ruin the interwebs in China. Keep posting on stories you don't understand.
I'm not so sure how secure Tor would be against a state government large and powerful enough to monitor large portions of the Internet at once. Its real-time nature leaves it open to timing attacks among other things like compromised (primarily exit) nodes.
And yet just last week, a friend told me he couldn't make a filing with the Georgia Department of Revenue because "his browser was insecure." Nevermind that he was using the latest version of Safari, which is likely more secure than any version of IE.
What they actually meant was "we are too lazy to program for anything but IE... but that's OK, because 99% of the world uses IE... right?"
Now that's interesting because they are making a positive claim about browser security. They are not merely saying "at this time we only support Internet Explorer," which would be completely different.
Since we like to solve problems with litigation in this country, to the point that there are often few or no effective alternatives, I have an idea. Why don't the makers of Safari and other browsers sue the State of Georgia for libel? They are making a claim of insecurity. As evidence, save the snippet of code/markup that checks the user-agent string and produces the message stating "your browser is insecure". Claim that the message is libel because it is based on merely not being IE, not on any rigorous study of browser security, and therefore cannot use "truth" as a defense. In fact it would not be hard to come up with evidence contradicting it. Therefore, intentional or not, it amounts to an attempt to coerce users to use IE and therefore Windows for no good reason.
The point is to make it more expensive to defend such a suit than it would have been to make a standard, browser-agnostic site. A government agency in particular has no excuse for not making their sites as accessible as possible. They are not like private companies where you can just go to a competitor if a given company refuses to be reasonable.
Google changes your results in that regular use of Google will filter out and make things have higher rank depending on your search history.
For example, searching a lot about Linux and their distributions will make Wine the software the top result instead of the beverage.
Yet another reason not to accept JS or cookies from Google. The feature itself may not be so terrible. It's pretty bad though that this would be turned on by default, which is the same problem with lots of features that try to be "helpful" without clearly explaining up-front what they are doing and why. It goes counter to the common-sense expectation that a give set of search results is based on only the keywords entered. It really sounds like a way to put a pleasant spin on all of that data collection and retention: "See, it's just so that we can better serve you, honest! No, we won't delete it upon request."
There's much truth to what you say. Yet talk of populist uprisings are met with sounds of derision by the Birchers (the Glenn Beck set) as well as the religiousiters. Phrases like "workers of the world unite" are viewed dimly by most governments.
So what does one do? I'm asking this question in all earnestness.
The sheep need shepherds, but egads, what shepherds?
Without secondary shepherds the choice is very simple: become your own shepherd or fail to prosper. It so happens that being your own shepherd is the very best way to influence others by your example, while trying to coerce them only encourages defiance. The best implementation of this known to me is the minimal government that can protect civil rights but does not ever isolate anyone from the results of their decisions. It's fertile ground for what could be called enlightened self-interest.
Properly understood, it's an attempt to benefit the whole by doing what is best for the individual. The real problem with even the well-meaning political ideologies of today is that they put the cart before the horse. They amount to a variety of spectrums and schemes that try to benefit the individual by doing what is best for the collective. What are called Liberalism and Conservatism share this flaw. Though it isn't called that, any such collective or group identity is like a corporation in that it takes on a life of its own and seeks to justify and perpetuate its existence. That life it takes on is larger-than-life and tends to overshadow any individual voice.
Improperly understood, it's every-man-for-himself manifested by ruthless competition. This caused the terrible working conditions, exploitation, child labor, etc. of the early Industrial Revolution and causes the same in sweatshops today. It's all about the bottom line because that competition is first and foremost.
All the debates about "regulations vs. free-market" are tainted by the many who incorrectly view that as two opposing sides seeking to settle this question. There is no opposition or contradiction and the reason is simple. Any regulation or lack of regulation comes from an understanding of how it really should be. The concept of how it should be is not derived from the regulations, what the letter of them states and what loopholes one can get away with. Rather, any regulations are kept as simple as possible and come from an enlightened self-interest view of how things should be.
An understanding of this would reveal that the sheep should transcend the need to remain sheep instead of trying to find the ideal shepherd. Without that understanding, the whole world is divided into two opposing factions. It's Left vs. Right, Democrat vs. Republican, Regulation vs. Free-market, etc. None of them ever have a complete and completely sustainable solution. That's how you recognize a flawed understanding.
I am all for buying from free nations but that alone will not do much to solve the problem. Until China cares about the Chinese nothing will change. The rest is just unrelated.
Unfortunately the situation in China is the same as the situation everywhere. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. The problem the Chinese have is that they fear their government, and with very good reason. So long as their political elites are an "untouchable" group who can stomp on their own citizens with no fear for their own personal safety, that will remain the case. It's sad that it comes down to that. What you'd like to believe is that human beings with political power would help other human beings to prosper, that government can be your friend and your buddy who looks out for you. This is absolutely not the reality and never has been.
Right now Chinese people fear their government and justifiably so. Until and unless this changes, the government of China cares only for the numbers such as its GDP and does not care about the human cost necessary to achieve it. It has no incentive to sacrifice economic gain in order to safeguard things like good working conditions and basic human rights. If it did that, the numbers would not look as good to it.
The problem everywhere is that people don't understand a basic fact: government represents force and "might makes right" and seeks to maintain a monopoly on the use of force. That is the ONLY THING that makes government different from any other entity. You can dress it up in terms of polls and party affiliation and such, but ultimately government derives its existence from the point of a gun, from superior brute force or threat of force and not from superior wisdom or reason. It is therefore fundamentally untrustworthy and thuggish. More government equals more force and thus, more care that must be taken to ensure that such force is used within strict boundaries. Advocating more government to solve problems that don't require force to solve leads to more subjugation and less freedom.
The USA's Founding Fathers understood this reality. They knew that the only difference between a tyrannical government and a "good" government was size, managebility, and accountability. These three things are one as they are all related. As size of government goes up, managebility and accountability of government goes down. Eventually it has no purpose other than to perpetuate its own existence. The Chinese are finding this out the hard way, in the form of a government that will happily let them ingest poison so long as the money keeps flowing.
Slashdot Mirror
So if people who would break into your home and threaten your family self-select and remove themselves from the gene pool, you consider that a bad thing?
Breaking into someone's home should be as risky and as dangerous as possible. The result: fewer people will try it.
Seriously, I have no sympathy for anyone who gets hurt, maimed, or killed while performing unprovoked violence or posing an unprovoked threat against others. And an unknown assailant who forcibly breaks into your home while you are inside is certainly posing an unprovoked threat against you. At that point it's far too late to reason with them. They have abandoned reason, for breaking into a stranger's home is not a reasonable act.
This horribly racist tea party has elected the following politicians:
Racists and bigots throughout the world are well known for supporting Hispanics, blacks, Indians, Cubans, and women, dontcha know.
Don't believe all the hype.
Jimmy Carter saying it on Larry King should be enough, but I'm sure you wave that one off. The NAACP wrote a report calling them racists, but I'm sure you'll find some reason not to count that one. Hell, just type "tea party called racist" in the Google search bar. I'm sure one of the 1,600,000 results will stick to the wall.
If they wanted to see if there was any validity to what I was talking about, the info is out there. A Google search like what you mention would take less than a minute. They don't want to find it. They want to talk about something they've not looked into because that comforts them.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Of course you do, because you're the type of person who already despises cops. Of course you could only believe that the cop murdered an innocent person even though a court of law says otherwise, you know better than everyone else and The Man will be out to get YOU soon. Here's a little hint and it's really fucking simple that even a paranoid 10 year-old hippie like yourself could understand it: -If on average 10 people a year commit a murder and 100% are caught, punishment is _relatively_ low for the severity of the crime because it takes less public resources to convict and there is no need to deter others since you're pretty much guaranteed to be caught. -If on average 1 million people a year hack a computer or say, illegally download music, but only 1 of those criminals is caught and even when they admit to being wrong certain disassociative groups of society are outraged at even that, then the punishment is much higher because it's harder to get a conviction and you need to deter others from doing it.
See believe it or not there are actually multiple goals when deciding on a punishment, and I'm sorry to say, "What paranoid schizophrenic liberal uneducated fuckwits believe should be the punishment" isn't one of them.
I'm not fond of what cops are becoming, especially since I have an idea of what they used to be. Very simply, if I am a cop and I have someone restrained and in my custody, I am responsible for what happens to them. That's because the nature of being restrained and detained means they are helpless to safeguard themselves. If I don't like that, my option is to pick a job that doesn't involve rendering people physically helpless.
Take a breath, calm down a bit, and re-read your own post. See and feel the venom dripping from it. Then realize one thing: you are only demonstrating how emotional and unreasonable your position is. You have to treat me like I'm some kind of evil person merely because we disagree about this case. If you had truth on your side, do you think that would be necessary?
No, you need to be that way and you need to talk about irrelevant things like downloading music because you have no ability to argue against me. You choose to hate me for that. Too bad for you. You could choose to solidify your position and reinforce your beliefs, but apparently that path is beyond your reach.
Two things.
One, what is the legitimate purpose of tazing a suspect who has already been restrained? I can understand tazing them to get them to stop struggling so that restraints (i.e. handcuffs) can be applied. But once they are already restrained? That's pretty damned fishy.
Two, do other officers in that same department have difficulty distinguishing a tazer from a firearm? If you chose a number of them at random and subjected them to a test where they had to quickly draw one or the other, would they have difficulty? If not, what was this officer's excuse?
I find it funny that we as a society are so selective about when we like to be prejudiced. If a person is arrested for a crime who happens to be black, most people would never dream of assuming that all black people are also criminals. They would understand that this is wrong. Yet if a person is arrested for a crime who happens to be protesting, they feel free to assume that all protesters must also be some kind of undesirable. Both forms of prejudice are equally wrong and invalid.
Logic and critical thinking is how you identify that they are half-truths, lies, and distortions. It's how you recognize the emotional appeals that would manipulate you into thinking that they were otherwise.
Debate with whom? Arguing and fighting with whom? If it's not the truth and you can see that, why would you entertain a debate or argument about it? Debates and arguments are for situations when there are equally valid viewpoints.
I wouldn't debate someone who tried to tell me that 2 plus 2 equals five. I might laugh at them but I wouldn't debate them. The problem people have is with the true believers who think that 2 plus 2 equals five with such sincerity that they make you doubt what you know is true. That's an internal matter of self-doubt that you can't resolve with them.
And that works because average people are not capable of seeing through it. Obviously the masters behind the scenes are very much afraid of tough-minded citizens who can perform logic and critical thinking. That's why they are so careful not to promote those things. They don't want critical thinkers. They want childish, emotional, reactive, knee-jerk, narcissistic, obedient workers with short attention spans and even shorter memories who are incapable of looking too deeply at anything.
I don't believe you realize it but you are actually arguing for the effectiveness of critical thinking. Don't listen to what the elite say. Look hard at what they do. Their actions will tell you that they fear independent critical thinking.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As long as we are talking about adults here, if a woman wants to remain with a proven abuser and doesn't want to use the legal remedies available to her, she has that right. It's foolish and self-destructive and it's bad decision-making, but she has that right. It is her life.
Besides, change the law so that applying charges is mandatory and it will only have one effect: the woman who doesn't want to press charges just won't call the police in the first place. If neighbors call, she'll refuse to cooperate. You can't help people who don't want to help themselves. The only thing that can be reasonably done is to make sure that when she realizes that being attracted to abusers ("bad boys" etc) and staying with them is pathological, the police work to ensure her physical safety and punish crimes against her while she works to get out of that situation.
It is not the proper role of the state and its police power to make sure that adults exercise good decision-making. Not only do I want them out of that business, they never should have entered into it in the first place.
Our definitions of pranks must be different, a DDOS attack sounds as much like a prank as breaking into a jewelry shop and breaking all the glass display cases.
Sure, you may not have stolen anything, but it's hardly a prank.
If you would appreciate a different perspective, find some older (i.e. elderly) people and ask them about how police officers used to be.
In most places, the local cops acted more like neighbors. People knew who they were and it was okay to walk up to them and talk to them like any other human being doing any other job. They could lean on you really, really hard if you showed true maliciousness. Yet, most things that you'd call "childish pranks" were not dealt with so harshly.
For example, I have an older relative who grew up in the 50s. When they were teenagers and up to mischief, sometimes they'd actually throw eggs at police cars and do things like that. When they finally got caught, they were chewed out by the officer and were forced to clean up the car until it looked better than brand-new (maybe even with a toothbrush). They were then driven to their parents' and the parents were told what happened. Then they were in real trouble. It worked because after that they didn't do it again.
What happened was that growing up, they actually respected the police officers who served their community. They realized that they were given a break and allowed to grow out of their childishness. The cops were human beings, neighbors, maybe even friends. They were not trying to nail you as much as possible for every little thing. They were not thugs. Regular law-abiding people weren't afraid of them and in fact were generally glad to have them around.
These days, if some teenage kid threw eggs at a cop car I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he was tazed, arrested, charged with assaulting a police officer, tried as an adult, and given a criminal record that would haunt him the rest of his life. Some people really wonder why young adults today have little or no respect for authority. Somewhere along the lines the human element disappeared and now it's all about screwing you as hard as possible and with as little lube as possible. It's lost most of its respectability. I think this began in the 80s with a movement called "proactive policing" but its roots likely go deeper than that.
One way or another, we lost something valuable and irreplacable.
It pains ME to see an ideologue debase a basic free speech issue iinto another stupid liberal/conservative diatribe..
Those MORONS think the whole world revolves around their artificial bullshit dichotomy.
Reduce the world to liberal/conservative and you reduce choices. Reduce choices and you reduce freedom.
It is ALL about the power of Big Capital. It frames the dialog, and the lemmings folllow.
Well, Big Capital is one half of it. The other half of it is a public school system that takes great pains to never teach the basic logic, rhetoric, and critical thinking necessary to see that for yourself. Without that, many people would divest from the various sources of Big Capital and it wouldn't be Big Capital anymore.
Here's how it works. There are three classes of people in American society. The first class is the people who run the large institutions: the politicians in government, and the executives of corporations. The second class is the people who protect these institutions: police, lawyers, the media, etc. The third class is everyone else. To calculate a criminal sentence, just use the following formula:
adjusted sentence = original sentence * 10^(class of perpetrator - class of victim)
If you kill someone of your own class, you might get 20 years in prison. But since the BART cop was in the second class, while Grant was in the third, this was dropped down to 2 years. Here, it's the reverse: the student targeted conservative pundits (second class) so instead of 3 months he gets 30.
I wish I could put this on a billboard in every major city.
This isn't physics, it's law.
Yes. A man who was already restrained and presented no threat was shot and killed.
The law should be asking one question: if a police officer has restrained a suspect and that suspect no longer presents any threat to the officer's safety, why was the officer's hand anywhere near his gun? Why was that gun not in its holster with the safety on? If that does not indicate intent to murder the suspect, then what would? Are we to believe that a trained police officer who is regularly evaluated on marksmanship does not understand the basic gun safety rules known to any redneck? At some point the whole idea that this was an "accident" loses all credibility. I find it much easier to believe that cops simply have an easier time getting away with murder.
Punishment should be based on intent as well, not simply the result.
Yes, and the assumption should be that a trained police officer understands basic firearm safety. Paperwork showing at least a single session at the shooting range should be the only proof required to demonstrate that. They want the power, let them have the responsibility that goes with it. Those are two things that should never be separated for any reason.
Furthermore, when any government official in a position of power commits a crime that has a victim, they should receive triple the sentence a regular citizen would have received. It's worse when they do it because they have sworn to uphold the law and are relied upon to enforce the law. That adds an element of betrayal in addition to the crime itself and also adds the threat that such crimes may become institutionalized or covered up.
Rule of law has been threatened in this country ever since assaulting a police officer carried a heavier penalty than assaulting a regular citizen. They're both equally wrong and the USA was not founded on the basis of special protected elites.
That's seriously warped. Yes, what he did was wrong, but it's not like he permanently shut down the Internet.
30 months? Two and a half years?
Well... the American justice system is famous for draconian punishments. Is anybody surprised?
We gave up on trying to rehabilitate anyone a long time ago. Concidentally this happened right about when private prison contractors became a big business and used their money and influence to lobby for harsher mandatory minimum sentences. They especially like to do this for victimless crimes involving only consenting adults, such as drug offenses.
Nowadays we take nonviolent criminals, mostly drug offenders, and throw them in the same facilities as those that house robbers, rapists, and murderers so they can learn how to be hardened criminals. Oh, we also have extensive criminal records so that even after release, former convicts can continue to pay a debt to society, for life, in the form of being denied most or all non-menial jobs. We know that poverty and crime go together, and if this entices them to turn again to crime to make ends meet it just means more job security for private prison contractors, lawyers, politicians, and more justification for increasingly paramilitary police forces.
br. No doubt that the new area of expansion for this brand of fascism is computer crime. That should also help to "justify" all the network surveillance powers it would take to make those laws more enforcable. After all, you don't want to be soft on crime. You especially don't want to think that maybe all of those politicians don't really have your best interests at heart, do you?
Of course right-wingers *NEVER* do anything like this. Newsflash: Some people are assholes, and some just hide behind AC status.
They should start saying things like this in the summary, that way we don't have to see this come up like clockwork every single time the word "Liberal/Progressive" or the word "Conservative" is mentioned. Really it could save a lot of bandwidth.
Good. Don't justify their fears by acting like a thug.
That's two and a half years. Yes, he deserves to be punished, but it strikes me that he's not the one acting like a thug here, and I don't give a damn whether he's a rabid lefty, righty, or indy. If I heard that someone had gotten two and half years for taking down Reid'a, Pelosi's, and Michael Moore's sites, I still boggle in disbelief that someone got two and a half years.
Seriously. Damn!
Independent of any damage that was or was not done, there are two big factors that work against him on that.
One, he chose some high-profile targets. It's not precisely a secret that this gets the attention of authorities and that the legal system works a bit harder for such victims. The authorities were all over this one in a way they probably wouldn't have been if the same thing happened to you or me. It's not exactly comforting to think that this would be the case, but denial would be the only reason not to.
Two, most people who perform DDoS attacks, propagate malware, and run botnets don't get caught. When a law is difficult to enforce, the authoritarian law-and-order mentality never views that as a reason to question whether law is the best solution. That kind of basic questioning and introspection isn't a part of their worldview. Instead, it decides that we need to make an example of those few who do get caught as an attempt to deter the rest. That can often become more important than any notion of letting the punishment fit the crime. For this particular factor, there is no better example than the ridiculous statutory and punitive damages awareded in many RIAA copyright cases.
Good. Don't justify their fears by acting like a thug.
Indeed. Usually folks like him try to accomplish the same thing by calling it "hate speech" or the old standby "racism" and seeking to have it censored. Remember how many people have been called "racist" for disagreeing with Obama's politics? Regarding censorship, it's pretty hard to get the government to do that in the USA, so instead they put pressure on the sponsors of a site or of a broadcast to try and make that happen. That's still underhanded as hell but perhaps not quite thuggish.
Of course if folks like him want to really show how non-thug they are, they could always explain why their viewpoint is superior using old antiquated things like facts and reasoning. That's something thugs and criminals are not known for doing.
...If inalienable, fundamental human rights can have reasonable limitations, why not the practice of tracking people who did not ask to be tracked?
I'm sorry, I think you must be confused. You see, there actually ARE laws about stalking, but they only apply to the lower form of human life: individuals.
By definition, limitations on human rights only apply to humans. Corporations now have human rights, but limits don't apply to them because they were born without original sin.
My sarcasm/irony detector is running at full capacity, so I know you were being facetious. It's a shame I have to claim that explicitly but these days, you're some kind of moron if you respond to the awareness behind the sarcasm and not the sarcasm itself.
Still, anyone with an understanding of Original Sin knows that it is something that tainted the entire world. That means corporations are not exempt from it and can embody it. If nothing else there is the common sense to ask: "Of what are corporations made?" The short answer to that is "people." If people have Original Sin then so do the corporations they create.
What corporations were born without is the inability to get what they want through the political process. They may acquire that inability by never becoming large and taking on a life of their own, but they are not born with it.
Emphasis added.
It's trivial because those customizations that hinder updates are idiotic. If they were important and non-essential then it would be non-trivial. As it stands, the problem is very easy to solve.
By posting to these kinds of social sites these people have indicated that they want to be heard. I wouldn't call it stalking if you are doing exactly what the "target" is asking you to do.
Asking to be heard is not the same thing as asking to be rigorously recorded, classified, categorized, and persistently contacted. You might be posting to Slashdot, a public Web site, but that doesn't mean you want every reader of your post to visit your home and knock on your door so they can hear you some more. Or at least, the assumption should be that you don't want that until and unless you say otherwise. So there are degrees to this, which also means there are reasonable levels and then there are extremes.
As an analogy, think of free speech. It has certain limitations. Within reason, you can say whatever you want in the USA because of the First Amendment. However, you may not just shout "FIRE!" in a theater when there is no fire, for example, because the harm this can cause outweighs your right to do it.
I think your rationale should also have reasonable limitations. Yes, you're posting in public to a social networking site. So does that mean anything goes? Any possible use or abuse of said postings are perfectly okay and should occur without any limitations whatsoever? Or is the right to access public information a right that should also have a few limits placed on how it is exercised?
I will say that if everyone understood the full power of tracking, monitoring, and database technology and knew with 100% certainty that it was going to be used against them every time they posted anything to any Web site, it would definitely have a chilling effect. Is the convenience of a few corporations worth a chilling effect on the general population? I don't believe so, not even when the chilling effect is merely a possibility.
For software and practices like what Cisco is promoting here, would it really be so unreasonable to legally require that they occur only with the fully informed consent of their targets and only on an opt-in basis? After all, if people really want this to happen then getting them to opt-in should be no problem. If inalienable, fundamental human rights can have reasonable limitations, why not the practice of tracking people who did not ask to be tracked?
Censorship is the least of their problems. Information that is blocked because it is censored can also have attempts to access it logged. That's more than feasible with such a powerful state. Then those who attempt to access it can be located, interrogated, "re-educated", "disappeared", etc. A message stating "this has been blocked" or an artificial error accessing a perfectly functional site is pretty damned tame by comparison to what could happen.
Tor still exists, Slashdot didn't ruin the interwebs in China. Keep posting on stories you don't understand.
I'm not so sure how secure Tor would be against a state government large and powerful enough to monitor large portions of the Internet at once. Its real-time nature leaves it open to timing attacks among other things like compromised (primarily exit) nodes.
And yet just last week, a friend told me he couldn't make a filing with the Georgia Department of Revenue because "his browser was insecure." Nevermind that he was using the latest version of Safari, which is likely more secure than any version of IE.
What they actually meant was "we are too lazy to program for anything but IE... but that's OK, because 99% of the world uses IE... right?"
Now that's interesting because they are making a positive claim about browser security. They are not merely saying "at this time we only support Internet Explorer," which would be completely different.
Since we like to solve problems with litigation in this country, to the point that there are often few or no effective alternatives, I have an idea. Why don't the makers of Safari and other browsers sue the State of Georgia for libel? They are making a claim of insecurity. As evidence, save the snippet of code/markup that checks the user-agent string and produces the message stating "your browser is insecure". Claim that the message is libel because it is based on merely not being IE, not on any rigorous study of browser security, and therefore cannot use "truth" as a defense. In fact it would not be hard to come up with evidence contradicting it. Therefore, intentional or not, it amounts to an attempt to coerce users to use IE and therefore Windows for no good reason.
The point is to make it more expensive to defend such a suit than it would have been to make a standard, browser-agnostic site. A government agency in particular has no excuse for not making their sites as accessible as possible. They are not like private companies where you can just go to a competitor if a given company refuses to be reasonable.
Google changes your results in that regular use of Google will filter out and make things have higher rank depending on your search history.
For example, searching a lot about Linux and their distributions will make Wine the software the top result instead of the beverage.
Yet another reason not to accept JS or cookies from Google. The feature itself may not be so terrible. It's pretty bad though that this would be turned on by default, which is the same problem with lots of features that try to be "helpful" without clearly explaining up-front what they are doing and why. It goes counter to the common-sense expectation that a give set of search results is based on only the keywords entered. It really sounds like a way to put a pleasant spin on all of that data collection and retention: "See, it's just so that we can better serve you, honest! No, we won't delete it upon request."
There's much truth to what you say. Yet talk of populist uprisings are met with sounds of derision by the Birchers (the Glenn Beck set) as well as the religiousiters. Phrases like "workers of the world unite" are viewed dimly by most governments.
So what does one do? I'm asking this question in all earnestness.
The sheep need shepherds, but egads, what shepherds?
Without secondary shepherds the choice is very simple: become your own shepherd or fail to prosper. It so happens that being your own shepherd is the very best way to influence others by your example, while trying to coerce them only encourages defiance. The best implementation of this known to me is the minimal government that can protect civil rights but does not ever isolate anyone from the results of their decisions. It's fertile ground for what could be called enlightened self-interest.
Properly understood, it's an attempt to benefit the whole by doing what is best for the individual. The real problem with even the well-meaning political ideologies of today is that they put the cart before the horse. They amount to a variety of spectrums and schemes that try to benefit the individual by doing what is best for the collective. What are called Liberalism and Conservatism share this flaw. Though it isn't called that, any such collective or group identity is like a corporation in that it takes on a life of its own and seeks to justify and perpetuate its existence. That life it takes on is larger-than-life and tends to overshadow any individual voice.
Improperly understood, it's every-man-for-himself manifested by ruthless competition. This caused the terrible working conditions, exploitation, child labor, etc. of the early Industrial Revolution and causes the same in sweatshops today. It's all about the bottom line because that competition is first and foremost.
All the debates about "regulations vs. free-market" are tainted by the many who incorrectly view that as two opposing sides seeking to settle this question. There is no opposition or contradiction and the reason is simple. Any regulation or lack of regulation comes from an understanding of how it really should be. The concept of how it should be is not derived from the regulations, what the letter of them states and what loopholes one can get away with. Rather, any regulations are kept as simple as possible and come from an enlightened self-interest view of how things should be.
An understanding of this would reveal that the sheep should transcend the need to remain sheep instead of trying to find the ideal shepherd. Without that understanding, the whole world is divided into two opposing factions. It's Left vs. Right, Democrat vs. Republican, Regulation vs. Free-market, etc. None of them ever have a complete and completely sustainable solution. That's how you recognize a flawed understanding.
Unfortunately the situation in China is the same as the situation everywhere. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. The problem the Chinese have is that they fear their government, and with very good reason. So long as their political elites are an "untouchable" group who can stomp on their own citizens with no fear for their own personal safety, that will remain the case. It's sad that it comes down to that. What you'd like to believe is that human beings with political power would help other human beings to prosper, that government can be your friend and your buddy who looks out for you. This is absolutely not the reality and never has been.
Right now Chinese people fear their government and justifiably so. Until and unless this changes, the government of China cares only for the numbers such as its GDP and does not care about the human cost necessary to achieve it. It has no incentive to sacrifice economic gain in order to safeguard things like good working conditions and basic human rights. If it did that, the numbers would not look as good to it.
The problem everywhere is that people don't understand a basic fact: government represents force and "might makes right" and seeks to maintain a monopoly on the use of force. That is the ONLY THING that makes government different from any other entity. You can dress it up in terms of polls and party affiliation and such, but ultimately government derives its existence from the point of a gun, from superior brute force or threat of force and not from superior wisdom or reason. It is therefore fundamentally untrustworthy and thuggish. More government equals more force and thus, more care that must be taken to ensure that such force is used within strict boundaries. Advocating more government to solve problems that don't require force to solve leads to more subjugation and less freedom.
The USA's Founding Fathers understood this reality. They knew that the only difference between a tyrannical government and a "good" government was size, managebility, and accountability. These three things are one as they are all related. As size of government goes up, managebility and accountability of government goes down. Eventually it has no purpose other than to perpetuate its own existence. The Chinese are finding this out the hard way, in the form of a government that will happily let them ingest poison so long as the money keeps flowing.