This tactic can be quite entertaining if, for example, an impatient bozo in a SUV comes up behind you while you're coasting, honks, pulls around you and speeds ahead only to stop at the light, and then you smoke him as you coast through the light just as it turns green.
Oh, please. I drive a large, heavy SUV (when I drive, that is - I don't have to commute, unless there's actual smoke coming out of something in the rack at the datacenter). I'm the guy coasting to red lights (which REALLY makes a difference in mileage, since my vehicle seems to be able to coast for about a mile)... and the impatient jackasses riding my ass, honking, and accelerating past me to the red light are almost always 21-year-old arrested-development twits in 1-inch-tire Hondas with stick-on ground effects and kazoo exhaust systems. They just can't wait to get that red light where they can sit and goose their kazoo noise makers, using more gas making musical exhaust sounds than my SUV does simply idling. And then when the light turns, they dig out as fast as possible so that they can angrily wait at the next light, too. That's OK, I'm the villain, right?
That is not net neutrality! Argh! Net neutrality means Comcast can't treat Google packets differently than Yahoo packets
Actually, I don't make any distinction between packets of a given protocol (say, VoIP or torrents) and packets to/from a given destination (say, YouTube). If network provider says that part of how they arrive at the price they charge involves throttling the bandwidth used to communicate with certain other networks, then so be it. That's part of the product they're selling. They'll either win with that scenario because it allows them to be more competitive, or they'll lose people because customers will opt to pay more for services that weigh the traffic differently.
In my market, I've got my choice of four broadband providers, not including anything related to satellites or coming down the road (who knows - WiMax, or some meshy thing... whatever's next). If one of those carriers makes watching YouTube too unpleasant, I'll make sure they know it, and take my business elsewhere. And I'll make sure that the next contender knows why I'm picking them. Competition is the key to this, not government involvement in network peering relationships, load balancing decisions, and routing priorities.
See, there's your problem. You're confusing freedom of speech with some sort of entitlement that forces private companies to provide some specific grade of tool to other people so that they can communicate in an easy way. You can walk right up to me and exchange all the information you want. Or you could build (or lease or buy, etc) any number of technologies that allow you to do it from across the street, or around the world. Practicality suggests taking advantage of a third party's infrastructure in order to make that more efficient. But it's not like they are obliged to give you access to their network, or to make their network available in any particular way to other networks (a la the internet). Of course they are obliged to do that if you've entered into a contract with them that says they have to as long as you pay your bill.
But there's the rub. They're trying to serve a wide range of customers, and not many people are in the mood for nit-picky metering of use. So they have to target typical use - both in terms of price, and in terms of performance. A very small number of users can have a huge impact on performance. If those users aren't in the mood to purchase a super-duper flavor of service (or hunt down or wait for a provider that offers one at a price they like), they can't complain and shouldn't be using political pressure to use the government to force the market to look like what they think it should look like.
Clamboring for more government involvement in what sort of packets a private network should favor is exactly the wrong thing to do when the government is using my credit card to get farther into the banking and insurance business for the next few years.
I suppose that might be a real question, if you're the sort of person that actually can't rememnber the first half of the sentence (that mentions the part about cracking into someone's e-mail account). If you're so anxious to parse even that one sentence completely out of context, I can see how you're able to view this idiot's actions completely out of context, as well. Breaking into someone's personal data while fraudulently asserting a false identity is illegal. The fact that it was (as is obvious by, again, the context of the actions and by the twit's own online bragging) done for political reasons helps simply to push aside any possible lame other explanation about... oh, I don't know, getting confused and logging into the wrong account, etc. Of course you know all of that. I'm genuinely curious, though, what your actual point is. Is it that you're not terribly fond of the politician in question, and so you're looking for a weasle-ish way to explain away account cracking as some sort of benign activism? Would you waive your own rights to privacy if someone else thought they were beign the good guy by cracking your personal mailbox?
In other words, police have to pick and choose, so all else being equal they should choose the more important person to protect? Is that about right?
The important person in this case isn't Sarah Palin, it's the criminal seeking to influence the national election by breaking into someone's account. He made himself more important to prosecute.
Yeah, that's all it was. It wasn't, say, a deliberate crack as part of an attempt to look for ways to influence an important national election while poking around in the private communications of someone who happens to be a state governor... and then going online to publicly talk about it.
but what good reason is there for the police to treat one more seriously than the other
How about: because resources are limited, and it might seem worth looking into when someone does it in an apparent attempt to mess with one of 50 state governors, and to influence a national election. And, of course, when the person who does it goes out of the way to make it a highly public event.
But I flat-out don't believe him that he can't use a keyboard. If he can hold a pad (at keyboard height, I might add) and has the fine motor control to sign his name, then he can at-least do two-finger typing or use a mouse.
You're (deliberately, I think) missing the point: briefly holding a pad and pen to sign something or jot something down is NOT the same as taking on the long-term habit of communicating through typed messages, or spending hours delicately pointing a mouse at things. Even people who haven't had their bones shattered in torture sessions can find regular computer use tiring and painful. Why would you expect someone who doesn't have to type his way through his daily communications (because he has cheerful help from someone who's willing to do it for him) to take on considerable pain just so he can get keyboard street cred with you? I suppose you think Steven Hawking should have to pick out every letter in everything he writes because using software that can help him by predicting the words he's likely to be typing is... lazy?
if he truly thinks Iraq is the place to win whatever it is we're doing at the moment
The point is that it was like that. Since Obama's crew keeps swearing that the fight was lost or unwinnable, etc., it's been important for his opponents to point out that something important was accomplished in diminishing the influence of AQ in Iraq. Security in Iraq is being handed over, town by town and province by province, to Iraq's own maturing law enforcement and military. Coalition forces are now doing exactly what you suggest they should. The crazies have failed to gain a Taliban-in-Afghanistan-type foothold in Iraq, and won't. So, it's all about Pakistan, now, and them coming to terms with the fact that their borderlands - if they won't deal with who has set up shop there - are going to be the new hot zone.
Arguments over whether or not AQ thought Iraq was an important place to set up shop aren't about what's going on now - it's about whether people who said it wasn't real having their judgement rightfully questioned.
I would believe Petraeus and the leader of al Qaeda
Which, of course, was in the context of discussing whether or not Iraq was or is a key front in the war with jihaddism/terrorism. Which, of course, it has been, and continues to be. Al Queda's own internal communications, as the insurgency there was on earlier on the rise, made a big point of talking about how important Iraq was to them as a movement. And of course, Petraeus said the same thing... because, it's true.
So, your point is that it's... not true? Or that even though it is true, the fact that an enemy talks among themselves about how important it is to destablize a Iraq, and the military leader in charge of putting that destabilization effort down says the same thing... these are things that you're going to elect to treat as false because it makes it easier for you to try to ridicule the person who mentions those facts out loud?
How about this, instead: Obama's buddy Harry Reid, who runs the Senate majority, proclaimed the conflict in Iraq as "lost." Obama, who assured us all that the surge strategy pushed by McCain would never work and wanted nothing to do with it, now says that it "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," (the "we" part is really funny - he had no dreams of its success, he was positive about its failure). So... someone who "says stuff like" an accurate description of the importance of stabilizing Iraq against the jihaddi insurgency gets your scorn, but the guys who said the fight was lost when it wasn't, and who said that the strategy that worked really well never would... that's the level of understanding you prefer?
If we just hire 750,000 copyright czars, well there ya go. That would be mavericky, you betcha
No, no, no. It's Change. You know, Change We Can Believe In. Well, no, actually. That's FAR too specific. I keep forgetting that Change We Can Believe In only works when you avoid ever saying what it actually is supposed to do, to whom, and at what cost. If you just change the "750,000 copyright czars" to some sort of class-baiting equivalent, you'll get some traction. Let's see... "We need to take back America's Copyright Czar jobs from the Eeevil Corporations that have hired Eeevil Overseas People to do that work (um, please don't listen to this part you overseas workers, OK, since I want to maintain my status as World Candidate and I know I can't have it both ways), and put those Czar jobs back here, where we can raise taxes on them, especially when they die, which is patriotic. Middle class!"
Unfortunately they really seem to have lost their way from the fiscally responsible party they were decades ago.
And not only that, they are now working with a legislature that is entirely run by Democrats. You know, the legislature that is the only body that can appropriate funds and vote on a budget? It doesn't matter who is in the White House, since all that person can do is propose a budget. Congress then has at it, and either writes their own, or modifies it. They say how much is spent, and they say how much is raised, and who is taxed to get it.
Incidentally, if you ever wonder why a guy like Lieberman isn't terribly worried about the sentiments of the lefty kooks in the Democrat base, it's because most of them come across exactly like you: a shrill, childish, tantrum-having ingrate of a buffoon that can't actually understand why screaming at them, or smashing their car windows during a protest won't make them suddently abandom their principles and see the world the way you do, there in your mom's basement.
How is a wedding, presumably taking place on private property like a church, equivalent to a political protest taking place in public?
Because the event that protesters said they were planning to disrupt was also on private property. And access to that property via public streets is one of the things that the host city provides to the people using the facility. Obviously, the citizens of the city also have a more general interest in being able to actually use the streets that these twits were planning to make unavailable.
Of course, there's more to it, isn't there? As of this evening, groups who showed up in St. Paul are - as they said they would doing things like smashing windows, slashing tires, starting fires, and otherwise trying to keep the emergency services people expensively busy. That's their idea of free speech. And the group that got raided? You know, the one with the warrant issued because of information demonstrating their plans to destroy property and whatnot? Weapons (including firearms) were siezed. The presense of those non-MN-residents with firearms, and written-down plans about "striking hard on the first day to keep the police strained to the limit"... that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. To you, that's just warm and friendly free speech, I know.
There ARE laws against assault, vandalism, property destruction, and the rest - as well as for conspiracy along any of those lines. What do you propose, exactly, when a group of people announces their plans to perform those acts on their arrival at someone else's event, and then meet in a place where the tools of that mayhem are being stored, along with their carefully jotted down To Do lists of exactly those sorts of actions? Heck, they're just freedom loving kids, right? Only smashed windows, arson, and slashed tires will help the world to understand the need for peace and for peaceful assembly, right?
So, if you have solid information that someone is planning a murder, and a judge agrees, and issues a warrant... that's too much prior restraint for you, because despite the conspiracy to commit a crime, it hasn't happened yet? How about something simpler, like a theft? How about an assault? How about vandalism, say, of your car? Which crimes, in the planning stages, and with evidence of that planning in hand, do you consider only worth doing something about after the crime has been committed?
If you are staging a political meeting of your own, and a group is allowed to shut down your event - and it cannot in practical terms me held again - you're OK with that? Your idea of freedom of assembly is that private parties should be left to screaming matches on the grounds that one of those parties has rented in order to hold the event? Other parties should be allowed to used force and disruption and assault - even when they've said in advance that that's exactly what they're going to do - to disrupt a one-time event, because nobody should ever prevent a crime in progress or one being carefully planned?
So, if some nutjob group had a good plan to cut the power to the DNC's event just when Al Gore was going to talk, and you knew it, well... it's no crime until they actually do it, right? And since it's not the government doing it, there are no protections that can be invoked?
Just wanted you to clarify your position: that no assembly should be free from any action that anyone wants to take to stop it. Say, if your sister or daughter was getting married, and someone thinks that it's in bad taste because she's marrying someone who doesn't look right... well, it's fine to trash that event? Fine, even if the police have evidence that someone's planning on throwing buckets of urine on the bride, to allow that to happen, since it's not assault until the assault actually occurs?
You're obviously OK with the notion of a private assembly being fair game to anyone who wants to stop it, but how are you on the issue of criminal conspiracy? Some people don't care what happens to them, as long as they get to do the crime. That's true of tantrum-having idiot protesters, and for suicide bombers. When you know you've got either one of them sitting in a room passing each other notes about what they're about to do, stockpiling the wares they'll use to do it, and gearing up for the act... oh well, huh? No? Or is it only a bad thing if the private assembly being disrupted is one that you personally like?
You really have a backwards view of things. A political convention is a private event held by the party that pays for it, organizes it, and invites the people it invites to participate in it. They make arrangements with a facility to host it. The city in which that facility sits usually gets a lot of money to cover the costs of the extra burden that the private entity in question is placing on them - just like they do when they host a sporting event, a trade show, etc.
The gathering of an organization is protected by the First Amendment. You know - freedom to assemble? It's a big one. The protesters planning on blocking the streets - so as to prevent the peaceful assembly of the people going to the convention, and the supporting services required to make it safely happen - are specifically seeking to deny that group of people their right to assemble and talk.
Hell, they already have that right.
No, they have the right to have their own convention or assembly. And they can do exactly what the DNC and the RNC do when they make arrangements to have a large meeting and convention: they talk to the city hosting the event to make sure everyone knows what's going on. They don't (as the group in question here did) jot down their plans to specifically strain the local law enforcement and safety people "to the limit" so that they'd be unable to function. They don't prep large collections of urine-filled buckets with which they plan to assault other people.
Civil disobedience? How about if someone in that group of people, meeeting in their urine-stocking event warehouse, had a heart attack, and a couple thousand people from the DNC or the RNC thought it was civilly disobedient to form a large crowd on every street that would allow EMTs to reach the address in question, and stop them? How about if they explicitly planned to do that in advance?
Free speech zones? The idiots in question can have their OWN private event, just like the political parties do, and can expect exactly the same protection if they also make arrangements for it. Is your idea of civil discourse simply the right to use force and disruption to physically impede and shout down anyone that's gathering to have their own private event? If the RNC could have gathered enough people in Denver to physically block all of the streets leading to Obama's Temple On The Mount speech, and prevent the crowd from being able to attend that little bit of theater, would you consider that to be protected activity, or appropriate? Would it be simply "disobedient" to keep those 80,000 from crying in person at The One?
Physically stopping a group from assembling and carrying on with a private event isn't civil disobedience. It's not debate. It's childish BS, and you know it. We're not talking about the government, here. It could have been a quarterly meeting of the Sierra Club, or a trade show. Should a group of rabid real estate developers be allowed to prevent them from having a meeting in a space they've rented? Prevent the city that hosts that venue from being able to ensure that emergency services can get to that venue? How is THAT free speech? It's the opposite. It's the angry group being too lazy to ever hold an event of their own that's in any way interesting or persuasive to some audience they want to reach, and settling instead for attempting to deny other people the right to do the same.
Show me where it says they were planning on blocking emergency service vehicles
They said they were planning on blocking the major roads and bridges in and out, and doing it simultaneously, specifically to tie up the police in those spots. I'm sorry you have trouble grasping how those two things relate. That explains a lot, actually. Even without their specific call to occupy emergency services and police on the first day, to strain those services to the limit, all you have to do is look at the simple consequences of shutting down streets. I know, it's an advanced concept.
This is a perfectly fair, if not particularly effective, way to protest
Never mind how effective it is (it's not - pissing off the people you're trying to make listen to you rarely works). But fair? How is it fair for a group of idiots to block off the bridges and roads that their fellow taxpayers are paying to make available? How is it fair to do what you can to physically intefere with other peoples rights to free assembly as they hold a political event? They can stand there and chant all they want. But the group in question had stockpiled buckets of urine to throw on people, were planning on blocking streets in a way that would prevent emergency services from being able to respond, and so on. Are you actually asking about 'fair,' here?
... I use an above-sea-level datacenter, conspicuously located at a comfortable distance from major tornado, earthquake, forst fire, and locust infestation corridors. That whole "above sea level" part is particularly helpful.
Harm comes even before the data is misused (or if this never occurs) because the people whose data was leaked now must take extra effort to protect and monitor their financial and other records. This has costs in both money and time that could be spent on more enjoyable pursuits. The added stress is also damaging, both to enjoyment of life and to physical health.
But again... is it a crime, or just bad business? If no criminal picks up the data and does crime with it... or even if that does happen, which crime has been committed, and how will you differentiate that from a million other mistakes that any employee might make, and which could then be said to be a crime?
Leaked data, by itself, isn't a crime in this regard. No harm comes to anyone until someone with criminal intent actually does something to it. Not counting, of course, the harm of feeling appropriately uneasy as you wonder if/when someone will do something with it following a leak - but I'm not sure that sort of anxiety rises to the level of crime on the part of the hotel chain... you could have the same anxiety about whether or not someone holding your data will at some point have a leak that hasn't even happened yet, and likely never will.
There's a reason that someone who sues McDonalds over the hot coffee she dumps in her own lap doesn't ask a DA to go after them criminally. Likewise with slipping on a wet restroom floor that doesn't have one of those "caution" signs put up by the maintenance crew. Being bad (or even, unlucky) at your job could well be grounds for a civil suit, but it isn't usually - and shouldn't usually - be considered an actual crime. That's pretty dangerous stuff, there.
When some wackadoo in full-on tinfoil hat mode brings a gun or a knife to work and kills the PHB he's hated for years, and is now convinced is working for Alien Overlords... is the employer who didn't see that coming an accessory to the crime that was committed, for having failed to prevent it?
If data is leaked, and no crime (based on the use of that data) is ever committed, and the laptop gets recovered with no expectation of it having been compromised... did a crime take place, not counting the person who ripped off the laptop from an employee's luggage? Is the employer actually a criminal because that happened? The opportunities for Really Bad Precedents here are vasty.
The GP suggests that the government hired the people who did the deed on 9/11. He then, strangely, suggests that part of the group that were hired included the rich Saudis who were allowed to fly out of the US on a chartered aircraft shortly after the attacks. Leaving aside the fact that we have all sorts of evidence about who did, why they did it, and who paid for it... why would some absurd government conspiracy that orchestrated such a large, complex attack include a ridiculous maneuver like flying some of the participants out of the country AFTER the fact in such a highly visible way?
What role could a handful of rich Saudis play in getting the attackers to crash aircraft into those buildings... and somehow NOT be able to leave the country before it happened? It's obviously a BS notion designed somehow to feed the trolls that are so sure that Bush personally made all of this happen. It would be funny if so many people weren't willing to ignore basic information so that they could harbor such fantasies and maintain their comic-book-villain ideas about someone they dislike personally.
in how the government knew exactly who was responsible, the minute it happened, and flew them the hell out of the country.
Come on, now. It was plain to anyone who'd been studying the situation that Al Queda the culprit. It's not like that was their first time at bat. The question is whether or not you think the Saudi family/ies that were allowed to leave the country were actally Al Queda members or not, or had a hand in it. Do you REALLY think that if the government had hired the suicide attackers that... some other rich people from Saudi Arabia would have been somehow important to the plot, but that the people doing the "hiring" wouldn't have thought to maybe get them out of the way in advance? Please.
Slashdot Mirror
This tactic can be quite entertaining if, for example, an impatient bozo in a SUV comes up behind you while you're coasting, honks, pulls around you and speeds ahead only to stop at the light, and then you smoke him as you coast through the light just as it turns green.
Oh, please. I drive a large, heavy SUV (when I drive, that is - I don't have to commute, unless there's actual smoke coming out of something in the rack at the datacenter). I'm the guy coasting to red lights (which REALLY makes a difference in mileage, since my vehicle seems to be able to coast for about a mile)... and the impatient jackasses riding my ass, honking, and accelerating past me to the red light are almost always 21-year-old arrested-development twits in 1-inch-tire Hondas with stick-on ground effects and kazoo exhaust systems. They just can't wait to get that red light where they can sit and goose their kazoo noise makers, using more gas making musical exhaust sounds than my SUV does simply idling. And then when the light turns, they dig out as fast as possible so that they can angrily wait at the next light, too. That's OK, I'm the villain, right?
Preferably one that doesn't like to fear monger about other countries based on political biases.
So, you prefer CNN or NBC or ABC or NPR or CBS, who fear monger about this country based on political biases? I mean, just so we're clear.
That is not net neutrality! Argh! Net neutrality means Comcast can't treat Google packets differently than Yahoo packets
Actually, I don't make any distinction between packets of a given protocol (say, VoIP or torrents) and packets to/from a given destination (say, YouTube). If network provider says that part of how they arrive at the price they charge involves throttling the bandwidth used to communicate with certain other networks, then so be it. That's part of the product they're selling. They'll either win with that scenario because it allows them to be more competitive, or they'll lose people because customers will opt to pay more for services that weigh the traffic differently.
In my market, I've got my choice of four broadband providers, not including anything related to satellites or coming down the road (who knows - WiMax, or some meshy thing... whatever's next). If one of those carriers makes watching YouTube too unpleasant, I'll make sure they know it, and take my business elsewhere. And I'll make sure that the next contender knows why I'm picking them. Competition is the key to this, not government involvement in network peering relationships, load balancing decisions, and routing priorities.
This issue is difficult
Not really.
the freedom of people to exchange information
See, there's your problem. You're confusing freedom of speech with some sort of entitlement that forces private companies to provide some specific grade of tool to other people so that they can communicate in an easy way. You can walk right up to me and exchange all the information you want. Or you could build (or lease or buy, etc) any number of technologies that allow you to do it from across the street, or around the world. Practicality suggests taking advantage of a third party's infrastructure in order to make that more efficient. But it's not like they are obliged to give you access to their network, or to make their network available in any particular way to other networks (a la the internet). Of course they are obliged to do that if you've entered into a contract with them that says they have to as long as you pay your bill.
But there's the rub. They're trying to serve a wide range of customers, and not many people are in the mood for nit-picky metering of use. So they have to target typical use - both in terms of price, and in terms of performance. A very small number of users can have a huge impact on performance. If those users aren't in the mood to purchase a super-duper flavor of service (or hunt down or wait for a provider that offers one at a price they like), they can't complain and shouldn't be using political pressure to use the government to force the market to look like what they think it should look like.
Clamboring for more government involvement in what sort of packets a private network should favor is exactly the wrong thing to do when the government is using my credit card to get farther into the banking and insurance business for the next few years.
That's illegal now?
I suppose that might be a real question, if you're the sort of person that actually can't rememnber the first half of the sentence (that mentions the part about cracking into someone's e-mail account). If you're so anxious to parse even that one sentence completely out of context, I can see how you're able to view this idiot's actions completely out of context, as well. Breaking into someone's personal data while fraudulently asserting a false identity is illegal. The fact that it was (as is obvious by, again, the context of the actions and by the twit's own online bragging) done for political reasons helps simply to push aside any possible lame other explanation about... oh, I don't know, getting confused and logging into the wrong account, etc. Of course you know all of that. I'm genuinely curious, though, what your actual point is. Is it that you're not terribly fond of the politician in question, and so you're looking for a weasle-ish way to explain away account cracking as some sort of benign activism? Would you waive your own rights to privacy if someone else thought they were beign the good guy by cracking your personal mailbox?
In other words, police have to pick and choose, so all else being equal they should choose the more important person to protect? Is that about right?
The important person in this case isn't Sarah Palin, it's the criminal seeking to influence the national election by breaking into someone's account. He made himself more important to prosecute.
for logging into Palin's Yahoo account
Yeah, that's all it was. It wasn't, say, a deliberate crack as part of an attempt to look for ways to influence an important national election while poking around in the private communications of someone who happens to be a state governor... and then going online to publicly talk about it.
but what good reason is there for the police to treat one more seriously than the other
How about: because resources are limited, and it might seem worth looking into when someone does it in an apparent attempt to mess with one of 50 state governors, and to influence a national election. And, of course, when the person who does it goes out of the way to make it a highly public event.
But I flat-out don't believe him that he can't use a keyboard. If he can hold a pad (at keyboard height, I might add) and has the fine motor control to sign his name, then he can at-least do two-finger typing or use a mouse.
You're (deliberately, I think) missing the point: briefly holding a pad and pen to sign something or jot something down is NOT the same as taking on the long-term habit of communicating through typed messages, or spending hours delicately pointing a mouse at things. Even people who haven't had their bones shattered in torture sessions can find regular computer use tiring and painful. Why would you expect someone who doesn't have to type his way through his daily communications (because he has cheerful help from someone who's willing to do it for him) to take on considerable pain just so he can get keyboard street cred with you? I suppose you think Steven Hawking should have to pick out every letter in everything he writes because using software that can help him by predicting the words he's likely to be typing is... lazy?
if he truly thinks Iraq is the place to win whatever it is we're doing at the moment
The point is that it was like that. Since Obama's crew keeps swearing that the fight was lost or unwinnable, etc., it's been important for his opponents to point out that something important was accomplished in diminishing the influence of AQ in Iraq. Security in Iraq is being handed over, town by town and province by province, to Iraq's own maturing law enforcement and military. Coalition forces are now doing exactly what you suggest they should. The crazies have failed to gain a Taliban-in-Afghanistan-type foothold in Iraq, and won't. So, it's all about Pakistan, now, and them coming to terms with the fact that their borderlands - if they won't deal with who has set up shop there - are going to be the new hot zone.
Arguments over whether or not AQ thought Iraq was an important place to set up shop aren't about what's going on now - it's about whether people who said it wasn't real having their judgement rightfully questioned.
I would believe Petraeus and the leader of al Qaeda
Which, of course, was in the context of discussing whether or not Iraq was or is a key front in the war with jihaddism/terrorism. Which, of course, it has been, and continues to be. Al Queda's own internal communications, as the insurgency there was on earlier on the rise, made a big point of talking about how important Iraq was to them as a movement. And of course, Petraeus said the same thing... because, it's true.
So, your point is that it's... not true? Or that even though it is true, the fact that an enemy talks among themselves about how important it is to destablize a Iraq, and the military leader in charge of putting that destabilization effort down says the same thing... these are things that you're going to elect to treat as false because it makes it easier for you to try to ridicule the person who mentions those facts out loud?
How about this, instead: Obama's buddy Harry Reid, who runs the Senate majority, proclaimed the conflict in Iraq as "lost." Obama, who assured us all that the surge strategy pushed by McCain would never work and wanted nothing to do with it, now says that it "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," (the "we" part is really funny - he had no dreams of its success, he was positive about its failure). So... someone who "says stuff like" an accurate description of the importance of stabilizing Iraq against the jihaddi insurgency gets your scorn, but the guys who said the fight was lost when it wasn't, and who said that the strategy that worked really well never would... that's the level of understanding you prefer?
If we just hire 750,000 copyright czars, well there ya go. That would be mavericky, you betcha
No, no, no. It's Change. You know, Change We Can Believe In. Well, no, actually. That's FAR too specific. I keep forgetting that Change We Can Believe In only works when you avoid ever saying what it actually is supposed to do, to whom, and at what cost. If you just change the "750,000 copyright czars" to some sort of class-baiting equivalent, you'll get some traction. Let's see... "We need to take back America's Copyright Czar jobs from the Eeevil Corporations that have hired Eeevil Overseas People to do that work (um, please don't listen to this part you overseas workers, OK, since I want to maintain my status as World Candidate and I know I can't have it both ways), and put those Czar jobs back here, where we can raise taxes on them, especially when they die, which is patriotic. Middle class!"
Last I checked the URL it was news.slashdot.org and not obama.slashdot.org or democrats.slashdot.org
That hostname (news.slashdot.org) is now a CNAME entry that points to socialism.slashdot.org
Unfortunately they really seem to have lost their way from the fiscally responsible party they were decades ago.
And not only that, they are now working with a legislature that is entirely run by Democrats. You know, the legislature that is the only body that can appropriate funds and vote on a budget? It doesn't matter who is in the White House, since all that person can do is propose a budget. Congress then has at it, and either writes their own, or modifies it. They say how much is spent, and they say how much is raised, and who is taxed to get it.
hijacking US media
Man, that's funny.
Incidentally, if you ever wonder why a guy like Lieberman isn't terribly worried about the sentiments of the lefty kooks in the Democrat base, it's because most of them come across exactly like you: a shrill, childish, tantrum-having ingrate of a buffoon that can't actually understand why screaming at them, or smashing their car windows during a protest won't make them suddently abandom their principles and see the world the way you do, there in your mom's basement.
How is a wedding, presumably taking place on private property like a church, equivalent to a political protest taking place in public?
... that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. To you, that's just warm and friendly free speech, I know.
Because the event that protesters said they were planning to disrupt was also on private property. And access to that property via public streets is one of the things that the host city provides to the people using the facility. Obviously, the citizens of the city also have a more general interest in being able to actually use the streets that these twits were planning to make unavailable.
Of course, there's more to it, isn't there? As of this evening, groups who showed up in St. Paul are - as they said they would doing things like smashing windows, slashing tires, starting fires, and otherwise trying to keep the emergency services people expensively busy. That's their idea of free speech. And the group that got raided? You know, the one with the warrant issued because of information demonstrating their plans to destroy property and whatnot? Weapons (including firearms) were siezed. The presense of those non-MN-residents with firearms, and written-down plans about "striking hard on the first day to keep the police strained to the limit"
There ARE laws against assault, vandalism, property destruction, and the rest - as well as for conspiracy along any of those lines. What do you propose, exactly, when a group of people announces their plans to perform those acts on their arrival at someone else's event, and then meet in a place where the tools of that mayhem are being stored, along with their carefully jotted down To Do lists of exactly those sorts of actions? Heck, they're just freedom loving kids, right? Only smashed windows, arson, and slashed tires will help the world to understand the need for peace and for peaceful assembly, right?
So, if you have solid information that someone is planning a murder, and a judge agrees, and issues a warrant... that's too much prior restraint for you, because despite the conspiracy to commit a crime, it hasn't happened yet? How about something simpler, like a theft? How about an assault? How about vandalism, say, of your car? Which crimes, in the planning stages, and with evidence of that planning in hand, do you consider only worth doing something about after the crime has been committed?
If you are staging a political meeting of your own, and a group is allowed to shut down your event - and it cannot in practical terms me held again - you're OK with that? Your idea of freedom of assembly is that private parties should be left to screaming matches on the grounds that one of those parties has rented in order to hold the event? Other parties should be allowed to used force and disruption and assault - even when they've said in advance that that's exactly what they're going to do - to disrupt a one-time event, because nobody should ever prevent a crime in progress or one being carefully planned?
So, if some nutjob group had a good plan to cut the power to the DNC's event just when Al Gore was going to talk, and you knew it, well... it's no crime until they actually do it, right? And since it's not the government doing it, there are no protections that can be invoked?
Just wanted you to clarify your position: that no assembly should be free from any action that anyone wants to take to stop it. Say, if your sister or daughter was getting married, and someone thinks that it's in bad taste because she's marrying someone who doesn't look right... well, it's fine to trash that event? Fine, even if the police have evidence that someone's planning on throwing buckets of urine on the bride, to allow that to happen, since it's not assault until the assault actually occurs?
You're obviously OK with the notion of a private assembly being fair game to anyone who wants to stop it, but how are you on the issue of criminal conspiracy? Some people don't care what happens to them, as long as they get to do the crime. That's true of tantrum-having idiot protesters, and for suicide bombers. When you know you've got either one of them sitting in a room passing each other notes about what they're about to do, stockpiling the wares they'll use to do it, and gearing up for the act... oh well, huh? No? Or is it only a bad thing if the private assembly being disrupted is one that you personally like?
You really have a backwards view of things. A political convention is a private event held by the party that pays for it, organizes it, and invites the people it invites to participate in it. They make arrangements with a facility to host it. The city in which that facility sits usually gets a lot of money to cover the costs of the extra burden that the private entity in question is placing on them - just like they do when they host a sporting event, a trade show, etc.
The gathering of an organization is protected by the First Amendment. You know - freedom to assemble? It's a big one. The protesters planning on blocking the streets - so as to prevent the peaceful assembly of the people going to the convention, and the supporting services required to make it safely happen - are specifically seeking to deny that group of people their right to assemble and talk.
Hell, they already have that right.
No, they have the right to have their own convention or assembly. And they can do exactly what the DNC and the RNC do when they make arrangements to have a large meeting and convention: they talk to the city hosting the event to make sure everyone knows what's going on. They don't (as the group in question here did) jot down their plans to specifically strain the local law enforcement and safety people "to the limit" so that they'd be unable to function. They don't prep large collections of urine-filled buckets with which they plan to assault other people.
Civil disobedience? How about if someone in that group of people, meeeting in their urine-stocking event warehouse, had a heart attack, and a couple thousand people from the DNC or the RNC thought it was civilly disobedient to form a large crowd on every street that would allow EMTs to reach the address in question, and stop them? How about if they explicitly planned to do that in advance?
Free speech zones? The idiots in question can have their OWN private event, just like the political parties do, and can expect exactly the same protection if they also make arrangements for it. Is your idea of civil discourse simply the right to use force and disruption to physically impede and shout down anyone that's gathering to have their own private event? If the RNC could have gathered enough people in Denver to physically block all of the streets leading to Obama's Temple On The Mount speech, and prevent the crowd from being able to attend that little bit of theater, would you consider that to be protected activity, or appropriate? Would it be simply "disobedient" to keep those 80,000 from crying in person at The One?
Physically stopping a group from assembling and carrying on with a private event isn't civil disobedience. It's not debate. It's childish BS, and you know it. We're not talking about the government, here. It could have been a quarterly meeting of the Sierra Club, or a trade show. Should a group of rabid real estate developers be allowed to prevent them from having a meeting in a space they've rented? Prevent the city that hosts that venue from being able to ensure that emergency services can get to that venue? How is THAT free speech? It's the opposite. It's the angry group being too lazy to ever hold an event of their own that's in any way interesting or persuasive to some audience they want to reach, and settling instead for attempting to deny other people the right to do the same.
Show me where it says they were planning on blocking emergency service vehicles
They said they were planning on blocking the major roads and bridges in and out, and doing it simultaneously, specifically to tie up the police in those spots. I'm sorry you have trouble grasping how those two things relate. That explains a lot, actually. Even without their specific call to occupy emergency services and police on the first day, to strain those services to the limit, all you have to do is look at the simple consequences of shutting down streets. I know, it's an advanced concept.
This is a perfectly fair, if not particularly effective, way to protest
Never mind how effective it is (it's not - pissing off the people you're trying to make listen to you rarely works). But fair? How is it fair for a group of idiots to block off the bridges and roads that their fellow taxpayers are paying to make available? How is it fair to do what you can to physically intefere with other peoples rights to free assembly as they hold a political event? They can stand there and chant all they want. But the group in question had stockpiled buckets of urine to throw on people, were planning on blocking streets in a way that would prevent emergency services from being able to respond, and so on. Are you actually asking about 'fair,' here?
... I use an above-sea-level datacenter, conspicuously located at a comfortable distance from major tornado, earthquake, forst fire, and locust infestation corridors. That whole "above sea level" part is particularly helpful.
Harm comes even before the data is misused (or if this never occurs) because the people whose data was leaked now must take extra effort to protect and monitor their financial and other records. This has costs in both money and time that could be spent on more enjoyable pursuits. The added stress is also damaging, both to enjoyment of life and to physical health.
... or even if that does happen, which crime has been committed, and how will you differentiate that from a million other mistakes that any employee might make, and which could then be said to be a crime?
But again... is it a crime, or just bad business? If no criminal picks up the data and does crime with it
Where does the food come from?
You know those people that live on the bottom floor? They're soylentalicious! Now that's thinking green.
Leaked data, by itself, isn't a crime in this regard. No harm comes to anyone until someone with criminal intent actually does something to it. Not counting, of course, the harm of feeling appropriately uneasy as you wonder if/when someone will do something with it following a leak - but I'm not sure that sort of anxiety rises to the level of crime on the part of the hotel chain... you could have the same anxiety about whether or not someone holding your data will at some point have a leak that hasn't even happened yet, and likely never will.
There's a reason that someone who sues McDonalds over the hot coffee she dumps in her own lap doesn't ask a DA to go after them criminally. Likewise with slipping on a wet restroom floor that doesn't have one of those "caution" signs put up by the maintenance crew. Being bad (or even, unlucky) at your job could well be grounds for a civil suit, but it isn't usually - and shouldn't usually - be considered an actual crime. That's pretty dangerous stuff, there.
When some wackadoo in full-on tinfoil hat mode brings a gun or a knife to work and kills the PHB he's hated for years, and is now convinced is working for Alien Overlords... is the employer who didn't see that coming an accessory to the crime that was committed, for having failed to prevent it?
If data is leaked, and no crime (based on the use of that data) is ever committed, and the laptop gets recovered with no expectation of it having been compromised... did a crime take place, not counting the person who ripped off the laptop from an employee's luggage? Is the employer actually a criminal because that happened? The opportunities for Really Bad Precedents here are vasty.
Can someone explain the above post for me?
The GP suggests that the government hired the people who did the deed on 9/11. He then, strangely, suggests that part of the group that were hired included the rich Saudis who were allowed to fly out of the US on a chartered aircraft shortly after the attacks. Leaving aside the fact that we have all sorts of evidence about who did, why they did it, and who paid for it... why would some absurd government conspiracy that orchestrated such a large, complex attack include a ridiculous maneuver like flying some of the participants out of the country AFTER the fact in such a highly visible way?
What role could a handful of rich Saudis play in getting the attackers to crash aircraft into those buildings... and somehow NOT be able to leave the country before it happened? It's obviously a BS notion designed somehow to feed the trolls that are so sure that Bush personally made all of this happen. It would be funny if so many people weren't willing to ignore basic information so that they could harbor such fantasies and maintain their comic-book-villain ideas about someone they dislike personally.
in how the government knew exactly who was responsible, the minute it happened, and flew them the hell out of the country.
Come on, now. It was plain to anyone who'd been studying the situation that Al Queda the culprit. It's not like that was their first time at bat. The question is whether or not you think the Saudi family/ies that were allowed to leave the country were actally Al Queda members or not, or had a hand in it. Do you REALLY think that if the government had hired the suicide attackers that... some other rich people from Saudi Arabia would have been somehow important to the plot, but that the people doing the "hiring" wouldn't have thought to maybe get them out of the way in advance? Please.