Unless those people are in communication with people outside the country, in which case they (the domestic phone users) are one half of the call and tracking that is precisely what they're supposed to be doing.
What will be more interesting to me will be watching all of the poeple who say that groups like the Taliban are understandable because they're just people who don't want their culture to be impacted by outside influences, blah blah blah. That they're only violent because outside cultures have made them angry, etc. Essentially, this clown in Norway is exactly the same. But I guarantee he'll be held to a different standard, which shows how the lefties who excuse away the crazy Jihaddies are actually the worst sort of condescending snots ("those" people can be forgiven for becoming massively violent towards their own people in the face of their own xenophobia... because they're... what? not white?). The hypocrisy will know no bounds.
My only emoitonal reaction to that was a sense of disappointment that you couldn't come up with some more original, and less repetitive imagery. Not only that, all I could hear was Westley doing his "To The Pain" scene, which further eroded any chance that - however fleetingly - you might touch a nerve on the way to making your point.
So, really, that lame attempt just helped me to make my point. One doesn't need to say, "I'm joking," because unless you are so fantastically self-obsessed and unfamiliar with actual humans, culture, humor, satire, and grown-up interaction (including self-deprecation, which can include making comments which would make the speaker seem offensive, but which are calculated to make the speaker the actual butt of the joke - but only for an audience that isn't so excrutiatingly pedantic and simultaneously oblivious as those who are too unsophisticated to grasp the nuances), the joke is self-evident and thus benign. With regard to those for whom it's not self-evident - those who insist on taking umbrage over everything from the weather to the existence of other people and perhaps gravity and usually the fact that they were even born - there's really no point fretting. They are beyond redemption, and just want to watch the world burn, metaphorically or otherwise.
What the fuck is it with slashdotters and this endlessly sexist shit?
Well, there's two ways to look at it: stuff's funny when it has an element of truth to it... and like it or not, that observation simply does.
Secondly, what is it with overly sensitive people who can't take a damn joke? It's weariness with precisely that sort of pouting, unctuous, faux gender-issues piety that makes people even more inclined to toss out jokes like that.
Because you think that the numerous suicide-bomb teenagers that are flocking to their doom around the world are motivated any differently?
What?
Some kid in suburbia who follows a link to a script kiddie package and signs up his parents' pipe for use in juvenile DDoS attacks so that he can dip his toe in rebellious waters and brag to his friends isn't really the same as a kid who's been raised in a mind-numbing atmosphere of militant, retrograde medievalism and convinced that it's best for his family if he kills a bunch of people standing outside a police station because they believe in the wrong flavor of Islam or support the idea of girls being allowed to read and write.
Sure, peer pressure plays a role in both cases, but the level of engagement (and depths of intellectual damage) are profoundly different.
Your silliness stems in part from the idea that money as you are thinking of it is real
No, "money," per se, doesn't have anything to do with it. The government's ability to print it at will shows that it - in and of itself - is not real, in terms of value. But it's a mechanism. a lubricant, by which real value (effort, wares, etc) is transferred. The actual value in play doesn't change unless someone actually produces something or does something constructive. Printing money to build infrastructure is just an indirect way of transferring another part of one person's daily effort into some other bucket. It's a tax. An appropriation of effort and time, shifting that from one place to another.
And by that very act, devalue that which is already out there. Instantly. Thus they're not really printing money, they're just taxing the rest of the economy by that much. So why not just leave the currency alone, and levy normal taxes to build that bridge? Because then people would have to actually decide if that's what they want in exchange for taking home less pay.
you could successfully argue that the KKK were a political movement
They were. Creepy, crazy idealogical foundation for those politics, but essentially, yes: political. All about who has the power and authority. They, just like Anonymous does today, wanted to use force, destruction, extortion, subversion, and threats - rather than rational, civil discourse and persuasion on merits - to get their way.
And, Egypt? The "riots" were fueled by the dictator's supporters. By and large, the peaceful assembers weren't carrying on destructively, the way that, say, rabid anti-war and isolationist protesters at a gathering in Seattle might.
able to out wit "security professionals", "government agencies" & "corrupt regimes"
Yes, and 12 year old girls who shoplift mascara outwit security profressionals, too. I'm sure the Anonymous members arrested today aren't feeling especially more clever than the government agencies that now have them in custody.
Twisted? What's twisted about rule of law? Twisted is your preference for laws that you think only apply to other people, and reserving law-breaking for your own axe grinding and political agenda. How about you apply system cracking laws uniformly, and leave your Thought Police stuff back where it belongs?
You've just made my point for me, thank you very much. A political "movement" with which you seem to be intimately familiar and whose crimes you want to legitimize, but whose purpose you are unable to even articulate, is just what it actually appears to be: a witless flash mob that validates its own illegal activities by pointing their angsty self-hate at whatever is most likely to gin up some friendly, apologistic press from the only wing of the press that ever (and so reliably) applauds destruction, chaos, and delberately corrisive flailing about in order to avoid having to actually think, act, or (especially) produce anything.
Really. So: please summarize their basic manifesto, would you? Other than "Julian Assange's politics are our politics this week because he seems so cool and rebelious and stuff, and seems to know how to make cold hard cash and hip celebrity friends while running a Stick It To The Man web site." and "Amazon sucks because they hold their customers to the terms of the contracts they sign" and "Banks suck because they won't agree to process electronic payments to groups that collaborate with people who steal hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents." Or does that about cover their "politics?"
You've got it precisely backwards. It's Anonymous that fancies themselves the self-described law and who are deployed by interested parties to interfere with someone else's daily lives. It's angry lefties that egg Anonymous on to virtually lynch people with whom they disagree. Get it straight. The FBI are the historical marshals or the military, and Anonymous/Lulzsec are playing the role of self-appointed posse/executioners doing the bidding of their idealogical masters. They get paid in the currency they actually value: bragging rights within their own insular culture. Good as cash.
You are making the fundamental mistake of assuming that bored teenage fashionista script kiddies represent, or are even able to meaningfully describe any sort of "cause" other than "it's cool to be part of a group that causes some shit to happen that makes it on the news."
There's no there there. It's not a political movement, except for the possibility of the idiots who have been arrested being classical "useful idiots" in the service of someone else who has preyed upon their boring existence and broadband connection to use them as weak-willed meatbots who make the mistake of thinking they're being cool. You are way over analyzing things. It really is for the lulz, as it turns out. These are just your basic punks. Vandals who think they're impacting The Man, or at least say so, because that babelicious Goth girl in their algebra class seems to nod her head when she hears tales of angsty rebellion from nerds using Mom's FiOS pipe as meat puppets for lefty activists.
I buy from Amazon every week, at least. I gleefully use their Prime shipping scheme, and the UPS guy knows my dogs by name. But I also walk out of the book store with physical objects several times a month. And not a single vampire romance, ever.
the other did it to expose the truth and corruption in government
No, they cherry-pick their targets in order to support their own agenda. They are anything but universal or unbiased in their witch hunts, cracking, and playing with sensitive information. You are complaining about people working at some layer in a media business doing something, and then pretending that other people with their own specific agenda should be allowed to determine the applicability of the law when it comes to their own cracking. Hypocrites don't make for good saints, you know?
Still not getting the point. In the case of Simpson, we're talking about the leaking of non-public information (coroner's reports, DNA info, etc). Still a bad analogy, regardless. In the case of the News of the World situation, we're talking about the actual content of internal communcations. You don't need to know who Anonymous or Lulzsec are (or care) in order to have seen news coverage of the content of stolen e-mails.
You're still missing the point. It's not about how many people knew or didn't know about Simpson, or even about the murders. It's about how much of the specific, detailed evidence in the case was hacked off of servers and made public by an agenda-driven group before a trial even started. Apples and oranges, here, conceptually.
I'm not sure how your example applies. Did the burglars make all of that information widely public before the creepy guy was prosecuted? Because that's the issue, here.
the 30% discounted books where still more expensive than Amazon
So? Could Amazon deliver it to you in ten minutes? Could they do so at no charge for shipping, unless you paid for their Prime service? Could you touch the book in advance, and decide if, say, a particular paperback version was going to be as satisfying as a hard-bound version? A retail store charges for the convenience of given you a place you can walk into, and a physical object you can walk out with. That they have to charge you for that service isn't actually a surprise to you, is it?
Jurors who have been previously exposed to evidence, and who have encountered it in a context that isn't up to the non-prejudicial standards of the court, wouldn't be considered reasonably neutral. If certain messages are widely spread around in the public because Anonymous thinks their priorities and standards are more important than the prosecutors', then that could indeed make such evidence essentially unusable in court.
I'm not suggesting that it's the customer's responsibility. I'm saying it's the GP's responsibility to reconsider his juvenile characterization of the stores, their customers, and how pricing actually works in a walk-up retail evironment. He sounds like the classic, clueless person who has no idea what it costs to run lemonade stand, let alone a store that employees dozens of people and which will be sued for millions if one of them slips on their own piss in the restroom that's been made available to them.
Your complaint, your characterizaiton of them and their customers, your odd notion of what is and what isn't "gouging" and everything else about the tone of your comment suggests that you need to get out more and meet more people. Possibly even some that wear turtlenecks. And it wouldn't hurt for you to spend some time running a retail store, so that your sense of "overpriced on everything" can get connected back to the reality of what it costs to rent, insure, maintain, staff, and market a walk-up book store in the age of Kindles and iPads.
The mom-and-pop book stores you long for were dying out harder and faster than Borders did, and the ones that survive do so because they've found things beyond the collections of books you mention to sell (mostly, they're transitioning to hybrid coffee shops, galleries, meeting places, lecture venues, etc). Barnes and Noble survives because they squeeked by with the Nook just in time to not get completely eaten by Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
which is NOT what they're supposed to be doing
Unless those people are in communication with people outside the country, in which case they (the domestic phone users) are one half of the call and tracking that is precisely what they're supposed to be doing.
What will be more interesting to me will be watching all of the poeple who say that groups like the Taliban are understandable because they're just people who don't want their culture to be impacted by outside influences, blah blah blah. That they're only violent because outside cultures have made them angry, etc. Essentially, this clown in Norway is exactly the same. But I guarantee he'll be held to a different standard, which shows how the lefties who excuse away the crazy Jihaddies are actually the worst sort of condescending snots ("those" people can be forgiven for becoming massively violent towards their own people in the face of their own xenophobia ... because they're ... what? not white?). The hypocrisy will know no bounds.
My only emoitonal reaction to that was a sense of disappointment that you couldn't come up with some more original, and less repetitive imagery. Not only that, all I could hear was Westley doing his "To The Pain" scene, which further eroded any chance that - however fleetingly - you might touch a nerve on the way to making your point.
So, really, that lame attempt just helped me to make my point. One doesn't need to say, "I'm joking," because unless you are so fantastically self-obsessed and unfamiliar with actual humans, culture, humor, satire, and grown-up interaction (including self-deprecation, which can include making comments which would make the speaker seem offensive, but which are calculated to make the speaker the actual butt of the joke - but only for an audience that isn't so excrutiatingly pedantic and simultaneously oblivious as those who are too unsophisticated to grasp the nuances), the joke is self-evident and thus benign. With regard to those for whom it's not self-evident - those who insist on taking umbrage over everything from the weather to the existence of other people and perhaps gravity and usually the fact that they were even born - there's really no point fretting. They are beyond redemption, and just want to watch the world burn, metaphorically or otherwise.
What the fuck is it with slashdotters and this endlessly sexist shit?
Well, there's two ways to look at it: stuff's funny when it has an element of truth to it ... and like it or not, that observation simply does.
Secondly, what is it with overly sensitive people who can't take a damn joke? It's weariness with precisely that sort of pouting, unctuous, faux gender-issues piety that makes people even more inclined to toss out jokes like that.
Because you think that the numerous suicide-bomb teenagers that are flocking to their doom around the world are motivated any differently?
What?
Some kid in suburbia who follows a link to a script kiddie package and signs up his parents' pipe for use in juvenile DDoS attacks so that he can dip his toe in rebellious waters and brag to his friends isn't really the same as a kid who's been raised in a mind-numbing atmosphere of militant, retrograde medievalism and convinced that it's best for his family if he kills a bunch of people standing outside a police station because they believe in the wrong flavor of Islam or support the idea of girls being allowed to read and write.
Sure, peer pressure plays a role in both cases, but the level of engagement (and depths of intellectual damage) are profoundly different.
Your silliness stems in part from the idea that money as you are thinking of it is real
No, "money," per se, doesn't have anything to do with it. The government's ability to print it at will shows that it - in and of itself - is not real, in terms of value. But it's a mechanism. a lubricant, by which real value (effort, wares, etc) is transferred. The actual value in play doesn't change unless someone actually produces something or does something constructive. Printing money to build infrastructure is just an indirect way of transferring another part of one person's daily effort into some other bucket. It's a tax. An appropriation of effort and time, shifting that from one place to another.
US government (feds) can print money
And by that very act, devalue that which is already out there. Instantly. Thus they're not really printing money, they're just taxing the rest of the economy by that much. So why not just leave the currency alone, and levy normal taxes to build that bridge? Because then people would have to actually decide if that's what they want in exchange for taking home less pay.
you could successfully argue that the KKK were a political movement
They were. Creepy, crazy idealogical foundation for those politics, but essentially, yes: political. All about who has the power and authority. They, just like Anonymous does today, wanted to use force, destruction, extortion, subversion, and threats - rather than rational, civil discourse and persuasion on merits - to get their way.
And, Egypt? The "riots" were fueled by the dictator's supporters. By and large, the peaceful assembers weren't carrying on destructively, the way that, say, rabid anti-war and isolationist protesters at a gathering in Seattle might.
able to out wit "security professionals", "government agencies" & "corrupt regimes"
Yes, and 12 year old girls who shoplift mascara outwit security profressionals, too. I'm sure the Anonymous members arrested today aren't feeling especially more clever than the government agencies that now have them in custody.
Twisted? What's twisted about rule of law? Twisted is your preference for laws that you think only apply to other people, and reserving law-breaking for your own axe grinding and political agenda. How about you apply system cracking laws uniformly, and leave your Thought Police stuff back where it belongs?
What would be the point?
You've just made my point for me, thank you very much. A political "movement" with which you seem to be intimately familiar and whose crimes you want to legitimize, but whose purpose you are unable to even articulate, is just what it actually appears to be: a witless flash mob that validates its own illegal activities by pointing their angsty self-hate at whatever is most likely to gin up some friendly, apologistic press from the only wing of the press that ever (and so reliably) applauds destruction, chaos, and delberately corrisive flailing about in order to avoid having to actually think, act, or (especially) produce anything.
Really. So: please summarize their basic manifesto, would you? Other than "Julian Assange's politics are our politics this week because he seems so cool and rebelious and stuff, and seems to know how to make cold hard cash and hip celebrity friends while running a Stick It To The Man web site." and "Amazon sucks because they hold their customers to the terms of the contracts they sign" and "Banks suck because they won't agree to process electronic payments to groups that collaborate with people who steal hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents." Or does that about cover their "politics?"
Political Targets + Political Reasons = Political Movement, like it or not.
That's where you're wrong. It's "High Profile In-The-News Targets + Desperate Personal Need To Seem Dangerous And Cool = Oldest Story In The Book"
FBI ... 21st century Pinkertons.
You've got it precisely backwards. It's Anonymous that fancies themselves the self-described law and who are deployed by interested parties to interfere with someone else's daily lives. It's angry lefties that egg Anonymous on to virtually lynch people with whom they disagree. Get it straight. The FBI are the historical marshals or the military, and Anonymous/Lulzsec are playing the role of self-appointed posse/executioners doing the bidding of their idealogical masters. They get paid in the currency they actually value: bragging rights within their own insular culture. Good as cash.
You are making the fundamental mistake of assuming that bored teenage fashionista script kiddies represent, or are even able to meaningfully describe any sort of "cause" other than "it's cool to be part of a group that causes some shit to happen that makes it on the news."
There's no there there. It's not a political movement, except for the possibility of the idiots who have been arrested being classical "useful idiots" in the service of someone else who has preyed upon their boring existence and broadband connection to use them as weak-willed meatbots who make the mistake of thinking they're being cool. You are way over analyzing things. It really is for the lulz, as it turns out. These are just your basic punks. Vandals who think they're impacting The Man, or at least say so, because that babelicious Goth girl in their algebra class seems to nod her head when she hears tales of angsty rebellion from nerds using Mom's FiOS pipe as meat puppets for lefty activists.
I buy from Amazon every week, at least. I gleefully use their Prime shipping scheme, and the UPS guy knows my dogs by name. But I also walk out of the book store with physical objects several times a month. And not a single vampire romance, ever.
Yes, it is.
the other did it to expose the truth and corruption in government
No, they cherry-pick their targets in order to support their own agenda. They are anything but universal or unbiased in their witch hunts, cracking, and playing with sensitive information. You are complaining about people working at some layer in a media business doing something, and then pretending that other people with their own specific agenda should be allowed to determine the applicability of the law when it comes to their own cracking. Hypocrites don't make for good saints, you know?
Still not getting the point. In the case of Simpson, we're talking about the leaking of non-public information (coroner's reports, DNA info, etc). Still a bad analogy, regardless. In the case of the News of the World situation, we're talking about the actual content of internal communcations. You don't need to know who Anonymous or Lulzsec are (or care) in order to have seen news coverage of the content of stolen e-mails.
You're still missing the point. It's not about how many people knew or didn't know about Simpson, or even about the murders. It's about how much of the specific, detailed evidence in the case was hacked off of servers and made public by an agenda-driven group before a trial even started. Apples and oranges, here, conceptually.
I'm not sure how your example applies. Did the burglars make all of that information widely public before the creepy guy was prosecuted? Because that's the issue, here.
the 30% discounted books where still more expensive than Amazon
So? Could Amazon deliver it to you in ten minutes? Could they do so at no charge for shipping, unless you paid for their Prime service? Could you touch the book in advance, and decide if, say, a particular paperback version was going to be as satisfying as a hard-bound version? A retail store charges for the convenience of given you a place you can walk into, and a physical object you can walk out with. That they have to charge you for that service isn't actually a surprise to you, is it?
Jurors who have been previously exposed to evidence, and who have encountered it in a context that isn't up to the non-prejudicial standards of the court, wouldn't be considered reasonably neutral. If certain messages are widely spread around in the public because Anonymous thinks their priorities and standards are more important than the prosecutors', then that could indeed make such evidence essentially unusable in court.
I hope it does not compromise the criminal investigations that are to follow
You mean, these investigations?
I'm not suggesting that it's the customer's responsibility. I'm saying it's the GP's responsibility to reconsider his juvenile characterization of the stores, their customers, and how pricing actually works in a walk-up retail evironment. He sounds like the classic, clueless person who has no idea what it costs to run lemonade stand, let alone a store that employees dozens of people and which will be sued for millions if one of them slips on their own piss in the restroom that's been made available to them.
Your complaint, your characterizaiton of them and their customers, your odd notion of what is and what isn't "gouging" and everything else about the tone of your comment suggests that you need to get out more and meet more people. Possibly even some that wear turtlenecks. And it wouldn't hurt for you to spend some time running a retail store, so that your sense of "overpriced on everything" can get connected back to the reality of what it costs to rent, insure, maintain, staff, and market a walk-up book store in the age of Kindles and iPads.
The mom-and-pop book stores you long for were dying out harder and faster than Borders did, and the ones that survive do so because they've found things beyond the collections of books you mention to sell (mostly, they're transitioning to hybrid coffee shops, galleries, meeting places, lecture venues, etc). Barnes and Noble survives because they squeeked by with the Nook just in time to not get completely eaten by Amazon.