Sorry, I meant that it's not rational to leave your keys in your car in places where car theft is a common problem.
I haven't personally encountered (in the last few years) a business or government entity running freely available WiFi that doesn't pass users through a terms-based and protocol-limited proxy.
How does any of your rant dispute the tiny bit of what you quoted?
Dispute? That facts aren't in dispute - I mentioned them directly. I used that quote to highlight what's really salient about your comment: that you've either got classic Bush Derangement Syndrome, which suggests a hate-filled mis-apprehension of reality, or you're deliberately invoking his name in order to lamely deflect from the reality that politicians you appear to like better aren't doing what you want them to do for you.
Are you arguing that because Pelosi and crew haven't disbanded the DHS, the DHS must be ok?
No, I'm pointing out that politicians and their supporters who spent years railing against Bush as being wrong about everything, all the time, and referring to him as distilled evil, a fascist, blah blah blah found themselves - when in complete control over the government and privy to the same sort of intelligence and reality that he was - doing the same things, for the same reasons.
Are you arguing that because the Obama administration hasn't gotten rid of it, that it's now somehow entirely Obama's fault that it still exists?
Who said anything about "fault?" I don't consider it anyone's fault that we do things like check airline passengers for guns and explosives, or allow ourselves to record which foreign cell phones are calling which groups of numbers in the US, etc. If there's a fault, there, it's on the part of the fraud schemers, the bombing planners/financiers, the people with explosives in their clothes, and the like. But sure, let's (for the sake of argument) say that no security operations are necessary, and thus the existence of TSA units that do things like check identity at our borders, or look for explosives in shoes are a thing of the past since nobody will be a problem that way, ever again. Then yes: it is Obama's fault that those activities are still being pursued. Because he can cease those activities, or modify TSA procedures and in-the-field policies with the stroke of a pen. And you know that, but you're pretending that somehow Bush is still dictating day-to-day policies at airport security checkpoints so that you don't have to come to terms with the reality that Obama, also, has come to recognize.
It was created by congress. Of course you know that, and are just hoping that nobody else actually understands how things work.
I'm also curious what magical power you think that The Eeeevil Bush had, after leaving office, that allowed him to prevent a complete lefty/Democrat monopoly of power in the legislative and executive branches from altering the policy and funding of the agency you're whining about. If it was Eeeeevil Bush who controlled congress even though ultra-liberal Nancy Pelosi actually ran that institution from 2006 until just recently, how exactly is it that he was getting his Eeeeevil work done? Really. Please provide the details, which should be fascinating.
And in some places, now, it also turns out that you can no longer just leave your keys in your car overnight, knowing that the only people who might drive it off without talking to you would be your neighbors, who you know will return it with more gas in the tank than they found. Not only that, the days of leaving your home unlocked seem to be fading, too. It's almost like there actually are people out there who are untrustworthy, willing to rip things off, and not at all worried about what the consequences might be (for you) when they do something illegal. Shocking, I know.
The good old days when only techie nerds had wireless networks are long gone. It's population-wide, now, and is thus caught up in everything else that happens population-wide (like fraud, theft, casual abuse, and all the rest). If you're sad about this, then you're actually just sad about civilzation.
And once we've successfully got the size of government down... who exactly do you think it going to stand up to the corporate plutocrats, even in principle?
You've completely missed the point (and history). The only reason that special interests (like people who run companies in a particular industry, or huge labor unions, or identity grievence groups, etc) have any clout within government is because government is so sprawling and so unncecessarily involved in the details of people lives and daily transactions. Reduce government's role in running your daily life, and you have less of a playground for lobbyists to help legislators write laws impacting those areas.
Think of the Roosevelts.
What a fantasitcally un-informed, or (more likely) deliberately misleading thing to say. Regardless, just take one Roosevelt: FDR has done more to create dependency on government by large portions of the population, and slavery to those people by a minority of the population, and juvenile dislike and resentment for those who produce things by those who do nothing than any other person in modern history. Pure poison, and we're facing the inevitable dire financial straights, today, that he set in motion. Thanks Roosevelt. And thank you for being yet another person who thinks the only reason the country is out of money is that it hasn't yet spent (or promised to spend) enough that it doesn't have on FDR-ish entitlements for those that don't actually contribute anything. Yes! If we just expand government a lot more, perhaps adding a few trillion more to the deficit every year, that will fix it, right? Do you people even listen to yourselves?
They are living their ethics to the best of their abilities
Perhaps they are, and thus it's real piety. If so, then what it is instead is a case of faux ethics (in the sense that they are built on internally inconsistent, hypocritical, irrational standards applied capriciously and in a fair-weather, fashion-minded way that highlights the mixed premises and deliberately obtuse, purposefully selective perception of reality that underlies their professed world view).
Do you have any idea how many perfectly nice earthworms are killed by plow blades on organic farms as fields are being tilled to plant soybeans so that vegans can smugly pretend they're not bothering any non-plant life forms? Do you know how many scrupulous gardeners use chickens to control insects and weeds, and notice that no hens seem particularly distraught about laying eggs on a regular basis? Do you realize how absurd vegans make themselves sound over matters like this? It's just faux piety, and it's embarassing, really. Please stop it.
I'm not going to waste my time with someone who's pretending to be informed on this subject, in order to rail about it, but who hasn't read a single bit of the analysis, or (obviously) any of the leaked documents related to Iranian resistance organizers, covert action in Yemen, etc. I'm not bothering to post links because you already know this stuff. Just like everyone else. Don't like my take on it? Read the NYT, or the BBC, or anyone else that doesn't alarm your sensibilities by failing to pander to you. What, did you just hear about these hundreds of thousands of leaked documents yesterday, but only from one blogger on Kos or something?
Grow up, and read the news. Even the lefty, we-hate-the-country, we-love-Manning news. Fragile diplomatic arrangements around the country have been damaged. People working covertly under very ugly circumstances (in Iran, for example) have been outed, and now get to wonder when their families' lives will be used as leverage. Covert operators in places like the Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and throughout the 'stans have had to walk away from when and how they were working with people who can no longer freely talk to them about their awful governments and local thugs.
Of course, you know all of this, and are just hoping that other readers here will be as ignorant of those things as you're piously pretending to be.
Is there any research into what turns affinity for a product into to the need to be a dick about it?
Correlation, not causation, etc. Some people are just dicks, period. They're dicks about everything. And when they happen to be communicating in a fanboy-ish context, they of course come across like dicks there, too.
Bradley Manning, on the other hand, has been suffering a character assassination from day one.
That's because, from "day one," he deliberately acted with outside parties to copy and distribute hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, without any thought about consequences he couldn't possibly foresee. He lied, violated his oath, endangered people, programs, and processes that involve untold thousands of man-hours to mop up, and he did it all because he was "in a bad place," emotionally. There's no character assassination involved here, there's only character suicide.
I'm not sure why you'd equate dumping hundreds of thousands of randomly chosen, blindy-forwarded sensitive documents into storage set up by Wikileaks for the express purpose of facilitating that illegal act... with reporters covering the specific illegal act (as indicated by an insider who was describing acts and not spilling classified documents). Unless you're just trying to deflect. If the Washington Post helped Manning to illegally transfer documents, they'd be just as guilty of breaking the law as Assange and company are. No double standards necessary.
So, when someone issues communications through technology, that is the press protected by the 1st Amendement.
What nonsense. Is fraud (which happens to be "issued through technology") protected speech? How about libel? How about good old fashioned treason? Do you really find yourself claiming that all communication is equally protected?
None of what you're mumbling has anything, whatsoever, to do with copying thousands of classified documents and working with a politcally motivated outside group and their vain, publicity-hound master to get them into the wrong hands. The very founders who valued and expressly defended the freedom of the press in the country's founding documents also saw fit to put a rope around the necks of people who spied and betrayed the necessarily covert actions of the people defending the country. Excellent complete lack of perspective, there.
No, all of the replies would have been put-downs, and they'd all have been written by Europeans, except for one or two from the US who would be whining about how someone, somewhere, might make eeeeevil money while doing this.
I didn't say Wyoming was doing a bunch of business with New York. I'm saying that if you make this a uniform, federally-run sales tax program, states that internally raise their own revenue in very different ways will have to completely tear down and rebuild all of those mechanisms. Places that rely on property taxes will have to cut those because those people are now paying new taxes (which have to be expensivevly laundered through a new federal bureaucracy, right? wonderful). Places that rely on very low property taxes, and opt instead for high sales taxes will have to now raise property taxes or other fees on their citizens to make up for lower sales taxes forced by the feds. You do see this, right?
I was merely pointing out that plea bargaining precludes fair trials.
But it doesn't, because you can proceed to trial by simply saying that's what you want to do. So you're not saying that plea bargaining precludes a fair trial, you're saying that trials aren't fair.
This is the exact same thing and you know it.
If by "the same" you mean "the opposite," then, sure. Because it is. Going to trial is not a punishment that results in a longer-than-called-for sentence. A trial is the normal procedure that results in the normal sentence. A plea baragain is the exception, and may lighten the punishment as an incentive to proceed quickly and in a less troublesome way. You're characterizing the normal sentence, as a product of a trial, as being somehow excessive. If you are, then what you're saying is that sentences are excessive, period. That has no bearing on plea bargaining.
Because innocent people copping to crimes they didn't commit is a completely foreseeable and unavoidable consequence of plea bargaining.
If that's true, then innocent people getting convicted in court is also a completely foreseeable and unavoidable consequence of prosecution. A truly innocent person isn't going to plea unless they have criminally negligent representation, and that's grounds for an appeals court to step in.
You are approaching this entire subject with a presumption of guilt.
No, I only happen to be talking about guilty people, as in the case from TFA being discussed. You're the one who imagines otherwise.
Then you're also asking all of those states, counties, and cities to completely re-write their tax codes and even re-charter their constitutions because of differences in how they raise state revenues (some have no sales taxes, and opt for higher property or income taxes instead... or some simply have different mixes of those things). You're talking about telling a state like Wyoming that it now must consider its revenue strategy in the same way that New York does. Which is culturally, geographically, seasonally, and otherwise crazy talk.
Amazon won't pay taxes, they'll just collect them from you and me. WE will be the ones paying those taxes.
And then Amazon has to raise their prices to cover the huge administrative costs of policing all of that, debiting/crediting for returned items, complying with what different counties in some states consider to be taxable items (real food vs. snack food? medicine vs. cosmetics?) while other counties within the same state do not, at different times of the year, and on and on. What happens when a particular municipality in a state decides to have a pre-school-season sales tax "holliday" on specific classes of items (clothes, under certain dollar amounts, and books - but only certain kinds of books - and such)? This adds an enormous layer of complexity to an out-of-state company's business accounting, all because California can't get its own citizens to comply with their own laws and pay use taxes on items they've bought from a business in some other state.
No, I see that you're changing what it is that you're complaining about. Before you were complaining about the government not being able to afford to give a fair trial. I pointed out that just because they're offering a shorter solution doesn't mean anyone has to take them up on it, Now you're complaining that trials aren't fair in the first place. Well, which is it?
They don't get a longer sentence if they actually go through a trial. They get the sentence they get. What happens is they get a shorter sentence (or some other consideration) if they opt to save the taxpayers a ton of time and money and precious resources by agreeing to a plea. It's not exactly mysterious or nefarious. It's a compromise by the government aimed at freeing up their resources to do other things.
how they would be tempted to cop to a crime they didn't commit?
Why are you putting words in my mouth? Who said anything about copping to a crime they didn't commit? This is about copping to less than the crime they've committed, in a compromise that spares their fellow citizens a lot of time and cost.
The state is only making an offer. If someone knows they're guilty and that they're going to get creamed in court, they also have an incentive to take the plea deal. If they want that trial, all they have to do is not accept the plea offer. You do understand that part, right?
Sometimes the people without enough money to spend are the taxpayers that fund the cops, the prosecutors, the courts, and the prison/parole system. Most municipal, county, and state governments are effectively bankrupt right now. Plea deals shorten this whole process and save a bunch of taxpayer dollars. Simple as that. If the plea deal results in something that the prosecutor and/or aggrieved parties can still tolerate, then sure - spare the taxpayers from having to go further into debt to deal with a given sociopath.
the solution is radical reform of the legal system
Nah, it's radical reform of the ways in which many cities, states, and counties spend their money that's needed to make the cost component of these plea deals go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Which places are those?
Sorry, I meant that it's not rational to leave your keys in your car in places where car theft is a common problem.
I haven't personally encountered (in the last few years) a business or government entity running freely available WiFi that doesn't pass users through a terms-based and protocol-limited proxy.
How does any of your rant dispute the tiny bit of what you quoted?
Dispute? That facts aren't in dispute - I mentioned them directly. I used that quote to highlight what's really salient about your comment: that you've either got classic Bush Derangement Syndrome, which suggests a hate-filled mis-apprehension of reality, or you're deliberately invoking his name in order to lamely deflect from the reality that politicians you appear to like better aren't doing what you want them to do for you.
Are you arguing that because Pelosi and crew haven't disbanded the DHS, the DHS must be ok?
No, I'm pointing out that politicians and their supporters who spent years railing against Bush as being wrong about everything, all the time, and referring to him as distilled evil, a fascist, blah blah blah found themselves - when in complete control over the government and privy to the same sort of intelligence and reality that he was - doing the same things, for the same reasons.
Are you arguing that because the Obama administration hasn't gotten rid of it, that it's now somehow entirely Obama's fault that it still exists?
Who said anything about "fault?" I don't consider it anyone's fault that we do things like check airline passengers for guns and explosives, or allow ourselves to record which foreign cell phones are calling which groups of numbers in the US, etc. If there's a fault, there, it's on the part of the fraud schemers, the bombing planners/financiers, the people with explosives in their clothes, and the like. But sure, let's (for the sake of argument) say that no security operations are necessary, and thus the existence of TSA units that do things like check identity at our borders, or look for explosives in shoes are a thing of the past since nobody will be a problem that way, ever again. Then yes: it is Obama's fault that those activities are still being pursued. Because he can cease those activities, or modify TSA procedures and in-the-field policies with the stroke of a pen. And you know that, but you're pretending that somehow Bush is still dictating day-to-day policies at airport security checkpoints so that you don't have to come to terms with the reality that Obama, also, has come to recognize.
was created in the Bush era
It was created by congress. Of course you know that, and are just hoping that nobody else actually understands how things work.
I'm also curious what magical power you think that The Eeeevil Bush had, after leaving office, that allowed him to prevent a complete lefty/Democrat monopoly of power in the legislative and executive branches from altering the policy and funding of the agency you're whining about. If it was Eeeeevil Bush who controlled congress even though ultra-liberal Nancy Pelosi actually ran that institution from 2006 until just recently, how exactly is it that he was getting his Eeeeevil work done? Really. Please provide the details, which should be fascinating.
Now, those times are gone forever.
And in some places, now, it also turns out that you can no longer just leave your keys in your car overnight, knowing that the only people who might drive it off without talking to you would be your neighbors, who you know will return it with more gas in the tank than they found. Not only that, the days of leaving your home unlocked seem to be fading, too. It's almost like there actually are people out there who are untrustworthy, willing to rip things off, and not at all worried about what the consequences might be (for you) when they do something illegal. Shocking, I know.
The good old days when only techie nerds had wireless networks are long gone. It's population-wide, now, and is thus caught up in everything else that happens population-wide (like fraud, theft, casual abuse, and all the rest). If you're sad about this, then you're actually just sad about civilzation.
And once we've successfully got the size of government down ... who exactly do you think it going to stand up to the corporate plutocrats, even in principle?
You've completely missed the point (and history). The only reason that special interests (like people who run companies in a particular industry, or huge labor unions, or identity grievence groups, etc) have any clout within government is because government is so sprawling and so unncecessarily involved in the details of people lives and daily transactions. Reduce government's role in running your daily life, and you have less of a playground for lobbyists to help legislators write laws impacting those areas.
Think of the Roosevelts.
What a fantasitcally un-informed, or (more likely) deliberately misleading thing to say. Regardless, just take one Roosevelt: FDR has done more to create dependency on government by large portions of the population, and slavery to those people by a minority of the population, and juvenile dislike and resentment for those who produce things by those who do nothing than any other person in modern history. Pure poison, and we're facing the inevitable dire financial straights, today, that he set in motion. Thanks Roosevelt. And thank you for being yet another person who thinks the only reason the country is out of money is that it hasn't yet spent (or promised to spend) enough that it doesn't have on FDR-ish entitlements for those that don't actually contribute anything. Yes! If we just expand government a lot more, perhaps adding a few trillion more to the deficit every year, that will fix it, right? Do you people even listen to yourselves?
They are living their ethics to the best of their abilities
Perhaps they are, and thus it's real piety. If so, then what it is instead is a case of faux ethics (in the sense that they are built on internally inconsistent, hypocritical, irrational standards applied capriciously and in a fair-weather, fashion-minded way that highlights the mixed premises and deliberately obtuse, purposefully selective perception of reality that underlies their professed world view).
scrupulous in avoiding animal products
Do you have any idea how many perfectly nice earthworms are killed by plow blades on organic farms as fields are being tilled to plant soybeans so that vegans can smugly pretend they're not bothering any non-plant life forms? Do you know how many scrupulous gardeners use chickens to control insects and weeds, and notice that no hens seem particularly distraught about laying eggs on a regular basis? Do you realize how absurd vegans make themselves sound over matters like this? It's just faux piety, and it's embarassing, really. Please stop it.
A lot of vegans won't drink beer, as it is sometimes clarified with egg protein
Further clarifying everything we need to know about their cognitive difficulties.
I'm not going to waste my time with someone who's pretending to be informed on this subject, in order to rail about it, but who hasn't read a single bit of the analysis, or (obviously) any of the leaked documents related to Iranian resistance organizers, covert action in Yemen, etc. I'm not bothering to post links because you already know this stuff. Just like everyone else. Don't like my take on it? Read the NYT, or the BBC, or anyone else that doesn't alarm your sensibilities by failing to pander to you. What, did you just hear about these hundreds of thousands of leaked documents yesterday, but only from one blogger on Kos or something?
Grow up, and read the news. Even the lefty, we-hate-the-country, we-love-Manning news. Fragile diplomatic arrangements around the country have been damaged. People working covertly under very ugly circumstances (in Iran, for example) have been outed, and now get to wonder when their families' lives will be used as leverage. Covert operators in places like the Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and throughout the 'stans have had to walk away from when and how they were working with people who can no longer freely talk to them about their awful governments and local thugs.
Of course, you know all of this, and are just hoping that other readers here will be as ignorant of those things as you're piously pretending to be.
Is there any research into what turns affinity for a product into to the need to be a dick about it?
Correlation, not causation, etc. Some people are just dicks, period. They're dicks about everything. And when they happen to be communicating in a fanboy-ish context, they of course come across like dicks there, too.
Bradley Manning, on the other hand, has been suffering a character assassination from day one.
That's because, from "day one," he deliberately acted with outside parties to copy and distribute hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, without any thought about consequences he couldn't possibly foresee. He lied, violated his oath, endangered people, programs, and processes that involve untold thousands of man-hours to mop up, and he did it all because he was "in a bad place," emotionally. There's no character assassination involved here, there's only character suicide.
I'm not sure why you'd equate dumping hundreds of thousands of randomly chosen, blindy-forwarded sensitive documents into storage set up by Wikileaks for the express purpose of facilitating that illegal act ... with reporters covering the specific illegal act (as indicated by an insider who was describing acts and not spilling classified documents). Unless you're just trying to deflect. If the Washington Post helped Manning to illegally transfer documents, they'd be just as guilty of breaking the law as Assange and company are. No double standards necessary.
What? The first amendment does not protect treason, does not protect libel, does not protect fraud, etc. I'm not sure where you're getting that idea.
So, when someone issues communications through technology, that is the press protected by the 1st Amendement.
What nonsense. Is fraud (which happens to be "issued through technology") protected speech? How about libel? How about good old fashioned treason? Do you really find yourself claiming that all communication is equally protected?
None of what you're mumbling has anything, whatsoever, to do with copying thousands of classified documents and working with a politcally motivated outside group and their vain, publicity-hound master to get them into the wrong hands. The very founders who valued and expressly defended the freedom of the press in the country's founding documents also saw fit to put a rope around the necks of people who spied and betrayed the necessarily covert actions of the people defending the country. Excellent complete lack of perspective, there.
The only reason you can refer to something as a stereotype is because of its broad, underlying truth. So, thanks.
No, all of the replies would have been put-downs, and they'd all have been written by Europeans, except for one or two from the US who would be whining about how someone, somewhere, might make eeeeevil money while doing this.
I didn't say Wyoming was doing a bunch of business with New York. I'm saying that if you make this a uniform, federally-run sales tax program, states that internally raise their own revenue in very different ways will have to completely tear down and rebuild all of those mechanisms. Places that rely on property taxes will have to cut those because those people are now paying new taxes (which have to be expensivevly laundered through a new federal bureaucracy, right? wonderful). Places that rely on very low property taxes, and opt instead for high sales taxes will have to now raise property taxes or other fees on their citizens to make up for lower sales taxes forced by the feds. You do see this, right?
I was merely pointing out that plea bargaining precludes fair trials.
But it doesn't, because you can proceed to trial by simply saying that's what you want to do. So you're not saying that plea bargaining precludes a fair trial, you're saying that trials aren't fair.
This is the exact same thing and you know it.
If by "the same" you mean "the opposite," then, sure. Because it is. Going to trial is not a punishment that results in a longer-than-called-for sentence. A trial is the normal procedure that results in the normal sentence. A plea baragain is the exception, and may lighten the punishment as an incentive to proceed quickly and in a less troublesome way. You're characterizing the normal sentence, as a product of a trial, as being somehow excessive. If you are, then what you're saying is that sentences are excessive, period. That has no bearing on plea bargaining.
Because innocent people copping to crimes they didn't commit is a completely foreseeable and unavoidable consequence of plea bargaining.
If that's true, then innocent people getting convicted in court is also a completely foreseeable and unavoidable consequence of prosecution. A truly innocent person isn't going to plea unless they have criminally negligent representation, and that's grounds for an appeals court to step in.
You are approaching this entire subject with a presumption of guilt.
No, I only happen to be talking about guilty people, as in the case from TFA being discussed. You're the one who imagines otherwise.
Then you're also asking all of those states, counties, and cities to completely re-write their tax codes and even re-charter their constitutions because of differences in how they raise state revenues (some have no sales taxes, and opt for higher property or income taxes instead ... or some simply have different mixes of those things). You're talking about telling a state like Wyoming that it now must consider its revenue strategy in the same way that New York does. Which is culturally, geographically, seasonally, and otherwise crazy talk.
No. Sears has been collecting and remitting sales taxes all along, because it has stores physically in those states. That's the difference.
Amazon won't pay taxes, they'll just collect them from you and me. WE will be the ones paying those taxes.
And then Amazon has to raise their prices to cover the huge administrative costs of policing all of that, debiting/crediting for returned items, complying with what different counties in some states consider to be taxable items (real food vs. snack food? medicine vs. cosmetics?) while other counties within the same state do not, at different times of the year, and on and on. What happens when a particular municipality in a state decides to have a pre-school-season sales tax "holliday" on specific classes of items (clothes, under certain dollar amounts, and books - but only certain kinds of books - and such)? This adds an enormous layer of complexity to an out-of-state company's business accounting, all because California can't get its own citizens to comply with their own laws and pay use taxes on items they've bought from a business in some other state.
They don't get a longer sentence if they actually go through a trial. They get the sentence they get. What happens is they get a shorter sentence (or some other consideration) if they opt to save the taxpayers a ton of time and money and precious resources by agreeing to a plea. It's not exactly mysterious or nefarious. It's a compromise by the government aimed at freeing up their resources to do other things.
how they would be tempted to cop to a crime they didn't commit?
Why are you putting words in my mouth? Who said anything about copping to a crime they didn't commit? This is about copping to less than the crime they've committed, in a compromise that spares their fellow citizens a lot of time and cost.
And you think that's OK?
The state is only making an offer. If someone knows they're guilty and that they're going to get creamed in court, they also have an incentive to take the plea deal. If they want that trial, all they have to do is not accept the plea offer. You do understand that part, right?
the solution is radical reform of the legal system
Nah, it's radical reform of the ways in which many cities, states, and counties spend their money that's needed to make the cost component of these plea deals go away.