you realize that terrorists are human beings too right?
OK, so we're the same species. We're not talking about biology, here, we're talking about culture.
they are EXACTLY the same as you
No, they're not. Because if they were, they wouldn't drive cars full of explosives up to groups of children and kill them. That's abhorrent, and I would never do that, so no, they are most definitely not exactly (or even a little) like me.
the differences between you and me and a terrorist is motivation. these are some highly motivated people. you cant fight motivation with laws, or draconian police action. If that worked isreal would never get hit by terrorists right?
Actually, I'm highly motivated to shut these clowns down. To the point that I'm willing to spend considerable shares of our national energy to that end. That means addressing the cause of it (pockets of violent, extremist theo-culture and ideology festering in corrupt, under-educated societies flush with oil money), as well as dealing in practical terms, immediately, with the symptoms (most recently, deluded suburbanites with backpacks full of explosives or out-of-town jihadists using the convenience of neighboring Iraq to show their dislike for what is happening there - specifically, democracy). They're not showing motivation, they're showing desparation. The diminishing of the chances for a pan-continental Taliban-esque regime certainly has them all fired up, that's for sure.
I dont buy the crap that the ordinary terrorist wants to "Send us back to the middle ages".
There are indeed multiple goals involved. But the ones doing the indiscriminate killing are mostly associated with Al Queda, and their objectives are publicly spoken and reinforced over and over. When they were last in a position to influence, and co-exist with a government framework of their choosing, it took the form of the Taliban in Afghanistan. You may not think they're medeival, but that's semantics. Any culture that kills women for holding jobs, refuses to let little girls go to school, tortures people for playing music and flying kites, and turns the town soccer field into a public execution arena run by religious authorities - THAT is medeival enough for me, though obviously you're OK with it. That's Dark Ages, though maybe not dark enough for you. That's indisputably backwards, wretched, and exactly what Bin Laden was propping up. His associates from Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, Yorkshire, England, are preaching more of the same and are pissed off that Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention Lebannon, Egypt - which is why they just got bombed, too - and the Palestinians) are going the opposite direction - towards open, democratic societies. Sure, they're motivated, but not as motivated as the people that stood up to vote in those places despite the suicide bombers. That is motivation.
years of U.S. torture of the middle east
Which years would that be? And who were we torturing? Surely you're not confusing your history with the long European occupation of those lands, or the endless warring (and torture) between the tribal people in that area long before Western countries ever even visited?
its very 19th century to think that you can fight terrorism with more violence
Right - we need better intelligence, and more cooperation from the larger majority of the people in the middle east that want to live in peace (and have things like an economic future for their daughters). But when a guy with a carload of explosives is racing towards a checkpoint full of kids on their way to school, you'd damn well better have the laws of physics working for you - and that means physically stopping that person. And that involves violence. And when you know you have a building sitting just outside the Syrian border, and you've just watched three trucks loaded with old ordinance pull up and start to unload, it's very reasona
China's second manned orbit is scheduled about Oct 1, 2005 (their July 4). At the rate NASA was scrubbing, China could have launched first
Well, unless they're launching a time machine, that would be pretty hard. First, they'd have to beat the Russians, and then all of the other flights we've had up since the 1960's. Being the most recent country to launch something into orbit probably does, though, appeal in an age where most news consumers have an attention span of about 30 minutes.
This is ridiculous. Russia's e-commerce volume is so low that anyone peddling penis enlargement pills is likely to retire with a fortune of 10 dollars US after few years of hard work.
But the spammers aren't spamming on behalf of Russian merchants. They're working mostly through affiliate marketing programs, directing suckers to vendors that give them a cut for steering in the traffic. Those merchants might be in the US, but are often overseas, too. Many, many of the merchants are setting up shop in places like Costa Rica. Online casinos, etc., do a booming business from there, but the spam that attracts at least some of their clientele originates from all over the place - and mostly from places where law enforcement isn't up to shutting them down when they break the rules. Eastern Europe, Russia, and some spots in Asia (Korea and China, mostly) are notorious. But none of them would make a dime without someone paying them commission on the click-throughs. Those are the guys to go after. They'll pay $10-$50 for the right sort of delivered casino customer. You do that 20+ times a day, and you're making OK cash if you live in Russia.
Regardless, they couldn't make it all happen without armies of spam-bots, and those have to be acquired mostly through trojans, and most of those are placed on machines as people open questionable mail, or surf to highly, um, irregular web sites (often run out of Russia, for example, containing content, er, intimately tied to the local organized crime world).
Come on, say what you mean... "Why must other people be animals?" Because you clearly don't consider this behavior you'd personally do, right? I'm always a little perplexed when someone makes a judgement about someone else's behavior, and then says "we" when talking about it. If you're sure of your convictions, don't pussy-foot around with this "we" stuff. It's "them" of which you disapprove, and you should say so.
Any chance there's some sort of Russian Spam mob going on?
There's zero chance that there's not a relationship between Russian-based spam and their thriving organized crime culture. Those guys are completely in bed with each other, which also means that when you make a mis-step, you get your skull beaten with whatever is the Russian equivalent of a baseball bat. Do they play cricket, there, or what? Probably a hockey stick.
... since most have, in a Faustian bargain allowing them to be certified in router programming, have sacrificed all upper body strength. If there was a way to kill someone with those thumb muscles you use to hit the space bar, then maybe.
More likely it was as Russian mafia relationship gone bad. When you hang in those circles, doing illegal things all day, you're bound to strike up some questionable business connections. That, or some mobster finally had seen enough viagra ads in his own inbox, and decided to go all Bayesian on his ass.
I don't understand why they wait such a long time to put ads in audio CDs and books though...
I've seen order forms and other material tucked in with some CDs for years, and publishers of, for example, Sci-Fi paperbacks have been including pages (and order forms) talking about other titles for... decades.
But is a new, rather onerous law really necessary?
I'm no expert on the UK's criminal investigative process, but I'm guessing there must already be processes in place for dealing with the contents of bank safety deposit boxes and other privately secured containers. Surely something can be adapted. As usual, the issue here is timeliness. We're not talking about prosecuting bank fraud after the fact - we're dealing with the need, on uncovering a lead, to immediately get into a bad guy's communications before one of his associates kills a bunch of people. It's got to be hell being in law enforcement knowing that being a little slow on reading some clown's e-mail after you've got a court order could leave you with a bus full of dead people. I wouldn't want that job.
Locked away in your brain isn't so far removed from locked away on your harddrive. Getting to both requires destroying your civil liberties that someone died to make sure you have.
I think a better analogy would be that of law enforcement holding one of, say, the London bombers, and doing the usual backwards networking research. Networking as in, who does he know, where does he bank, etc. Then you find out he's got a safe deposit box that he accessed yesterday. So, the bank's got a key, and he's got a key. Getting a court order that says he's got to give up access to that box (or that the bank says he has to) isn't really any different than gaining access to any other secured information or storage. Dumping his phone logs, for example. Or listening to his voicemail.
None of those things should be trotted out against anyone without a highly accountable authority demonstrating why it's appropriate. In some cases, that means a court order. In life-or-death cases (like when you know there are some guys who tried to blowthemselves up, failed, and are still running around with backpacks on, probably using their cell phones to call Detonator Tech Support back in Iran), actual people involved in the investigation sometimes have to move very, very quickly. It's almost like those guys need a judge on some IM device, willing to help them out in the field if it comes down to that.
That scenario is actually very similar to some naval engagements. Skippers on some vessels, under certain circumstances, actually have legal teams on board to help figure out the rules of engagement on the fly - so that boarding another ship, or responding to an attack, etc., can be conducted within the right framework.
I'm as guarded about my civil liberties as most any libertarian. But I also know that many cases involving cells of extremist associates are very straightforward once things start to unravel, and when some idiot tries to blow himself up, fails, and leaves a ton of evidence for the police to follow - it's very reasonable to say that you're past the threshold at which that person's privacy can be poked at. Judges should make that call, or better yet panels of them. They just have to be very available and quick about it these days - much like they have to be when we're dealing with abducted kids and the like.
Getting to both requires destroying your civil liberties that someone died to make sure you have.
I'm going to say that there are circumstances where one's conduct or activities clearly reach the level of waiving your civil liberties. Open contempt for my liberties (or life) on the part of another person mean that I no longer have to respect his. Of course, I can't handle all the policing myself, so I'm going to have to elect people to empower other people to do it for me... and then continually re-evaluate their performance and changing threat landscape in which we live (and they have to thanklessly operate) in order to see if the guidance we're giving them, and the impact of their work, is rational and correctly protecting those of us who are not trying to blow up mass transit vehicles.
Because once you inform him the law says he has to tell you his encryption key, he'll apologize immediately and turn it over, right?
No, I didn't say that (read my comment). Obviously a guy willing to die while taking out innocents isn't going to cough up his key (or, where it's written down, anyway). This is more about following the usual trail that these guys leave, and getting the info that inevitably will be found on the drives of his associates, or the wack jobs that twist them into wanting to kill people in the first place.
...explain the deaths of over 25,000... they probably would have stuck with Hussein
Right. Because he was a more familiar problem, and only killed people in the hundreds of thousands. Definately a superior situation. I'm sure they'd also like to give back the 1,500 new independent newspapers and media sources they've started in the last two years, the improving electrical and water systems (producing more than when Saddam was running it into the ground), the actual relations with other countries. No, better to go back to a guy that killed that many on purpose some months, let his sons put parents through industrial chippers while their kids had to watch, and tortured their soccer teams for losing games. No question, that's a better scenario. Definitely morally better.
Why not ask the families of the people dying there (at the hands of Islamic extremists) what they think about the Syrian, Jordanian, Iranian and Saudi sponsorship of that slaughter. Your 25k number includes people killed in combat zones, certainly, but also includes huge numbers of people killed by fellow Muslims looking to prop up a mysoginistic, medieval theocratic way of life that most Iraqis are showing they don't want. Ask the average Iraqi if they're ready for their own military and police to entirely deal with the foreign insurgents, or if they'd like US and British troops to continue to do the hard stuff while the locals learn the ropes and flesh out their constitution.
He must decide on going to jail for something he is completely innocent of, or releasing potentially incriminating evidence on his friend
Because there's no friend like a friend who talks you into criminal complicity, I always say. I mean, what are friends for, if not to help you launder money or hide assets? And what ever happened to the bad guys just writing down the key, laminating, and burying it in a coffee can three paces south of the big oak tree on old man Smith's back forty? You know, where you used to go and smoke pot and dream of the days when you'd have enough ill-gotten assets to have to hide them from the court? Ah, those were the days.
Incidentally, what would you have the cops do while they're sitting there looking at the hard drive from a guy they just arrested, who yesterday was having some trouble blowing himself up? Ask him ever so nicely? OK, so he was willing to die in order to kill you and your kids, so he's probably not going to be big on cooperating, but the owner of the cyber cafe where he often runs chats with his equally inept fellow bombers - is it worth being able to crack his encrypted leavings so that maybe we can stop his buddies from smearing more innocent people all over the inside of a tunnel? You are aware that actual people are actually spending their days actually thinking up and acting on ways to kill people that run yogurt stores, work at rehab clinics, build web servers, teach grade school, and have families that depend on them... right? This isn't a game, it's actually happening. And as the prime minister of Autstralia put it so eloquently yesterday, we're using 19th century approaches to dealing with bad guys happy to use 21st century technologies (um, even as these twits condemn modernity - always a telling little bit of confusion on their part).
Absent the trend in placing new and more onerous restrictions on where, when and how many people are allowed to peaceably assemble, I might agree with you.
Absent the trend of protest groups running web forums and broadcasting e-mails actually saying where they will gather in order to break down fences, vandalize certain storefronts, block certain roads from public and emergency use, etc... absent that trend, you'd find an absence of the police acting specificallly to stop the threatened (indeed, advertised) illegal activities. The best thing for rational, peaceable protesters to do is shame the violent jackasses into not polluting the protestsphere and essentially demanding pre-emptive enforcement or venue restrictions.
It will be quite sweet if they turn out to be the forces that ultimately restore the Internet to its proper function.
You mean, peer-to-peer systems connectivity between people working on Cold War defense research contracts? I'm curious - what role are you playing in that arena?
Hmmm....much like the internet was back when I got on it...sometime about 1993?
But that's my whole point. It wasn't free then, either. It was just other people paying for your use of their systems. That was before the huge audiences started costing content providers so much money that they couldn't run their sites without some cashflow. Even modest sites were being run off of other budgets, and it took a while for the people who owned the servers and the bandwidth to realize that being charitable was eating into the money they had for daily operations. There are still plenty of ad-free sites - most reflect the owner's willingness to pay your way through your visit. I run many sites - some with not an ad to be seen, and some that exist solely for that purpose.
In my example of a typical Google session, I was trying to convey that much of the world works in the way I'm describing - hopping from site to site, many of which one has never encountered before. The huge productivity gained by being able to plow through information (yes, and much disinformation) withou thaving to have your credit card handy - that's definately the sort of thing that allows our economy, no matter which part of the up/down cycle it's in, to really thrive. It's that speed of information and integration of it into the things that we all do (work, social activities, etc). Those companies that embrace that quick access to information are the ones that will increasingly please their audience and attract new business. I think that to the extent that advertising helps speed that up, it's on the lube side of the ledger. To the extent that we have to waste time learning tools to block particularly obnoxious ads, it's corrosive. But this is all so young that it's no surprise we haven't developed a sensible, well-balanced culture around it yet.
[oops - cont'd]:...no eyeballs or actions on the ads. You don't work for the audience, nothing works.
This is a disturbing business model, not because it doesn't work but because it allows people to get the idea that things are free.
Then it should have been disturbing for a couple hundred years or so. You may pay a quarter for some newspapers, but no one thinks in only costs a quarter to produce it (or shouldn't). Regardless, the problem here isn't the bloggers (or whoever is running the ads), it's the larger society that emphasizes the "free-ness" of everything (free public schools, free roads, free room and board for kids) - none of which are free. Kids should be shown early and often that everything has a cost, and that you're either paying it directly, or indirectly, or someone else is.
It would be far more economically efficient to simply pay the [content provider] in the first place and cut out the middle man.
I have to disagree. One Google session on a given topic, and I'll probably visit a dozen web sites. Do I really want to have to perform financial transactions at the rate of one or two per minute in order to scout for information?
So, in reality, these [content providers] are simply subcontracted advertisers, using [content] to get people to view ads.
No, in reality, they're choosing one of several revenue options. It's more appropriate to say that the publishers are working for their audience, and finding a way to fund the publishing of the material the audience wants to see. If they don't produce content the audience wants, there is no opportunity for revenue (because there are no eye
They're not going to allow you to select only the ads with the hot chicks, or turn ads off after 9pm
Sure they are (they don't really have a choice)! Just don't patronize blogs or other free resources that support ad models you don't like (like overpowering Pepsi placement, or similar). There - they're turned off. The ol' invisible hand will find the sweet spot, and feedback to content providers telling them that they're 10% more ads away from losing their audience will definately alter their cost/benefit analysis of which ads they run, what they charge the advertisers, and so on.
Has anybody successfully blocked ads with Thunderbird using a plugin?
Right, because for God's sake, we wouldn't want the people producing the material you're consuming to actually cover their overhead or (gasp!) see their pursuit as a way of actually improving their lifestyle or anything Evil like that. It's completely reasonable for a distributor of free (to you) material to look to inline ads as way of offsetting their costs. Yeah, it's text. But bandwidth still isn't free (nor is office space, employee health insurance, etc).
keep advertising to a minimum? I think not. The best we can hope for is far more targetted ads...
You say that with resignation, like it's a bad thing. Would you rather that the people who actually produce all of the content that everyone wants have no way to cover the costs of their efforts, obtain health insurance, or go on a vacation once in a while? Everyone seems to want some ad-free, subscription-free paradise where they get all in the info and entertainment they could ever want, packaged up just for them, at no cost. It's not just that it's unrealistic, it's that it suggests a serious disconnect between the people that consume things and the realities of producing/distributing what they consume, and what it takes to allow talented, dedicated people to dedicate their waking hours to creating it. Targeted ads are probably one of the very best approaches to keeping the content producers happily producing without everything being subscription-based and/or DRMed past some threshold of pain. And the more targeted, the more likely it is to be the ideal mix for everyone involved.
After all, the same sort of superstition/gullibility/tin-foil-hatism has large swaths of western Europe thinking that the CIA flew the planes in the World Trade Center (or the Israelis, etc. - take your pick), or that every resident of Kentucky suffering from sleep disorders is actually a repeat victim of alien kidnapping, or that dancing in a circle while wearing the correct outfit makes it rain. There are thousands of click-optimized web sites set up specifically to resonate with each and every crackpot world view. There was a time when we associated a total lack of any critical thinking skills with people living in small rural towns. But now it's the MTV-saturated, broadband-connected kids of wealthy suburbanites that are learning to never learn, and being spoon-fed a diet of irrational, feel-good, magical-thinking empty solutions to their problems. And since we live in a surplus-rich, leaning-socialist world, people don't really have to be connected with reality to still eat, have a roof over their heads, attract a similarly vapid mate and hatch out another brood of witless ninnies. And Google AdSense is complicit, I tell you!
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you realize that terrorists are human beings too right?
OK, so we're the same species. We're not talking about biology, here, we're talking about culture.
they are EXACTLY the same as you
No, they're not. Because if they were, they wouldn't drive cars full of explosives up to groups of children and kill them. That's abhorrent, and I would never do that, so no, they are most definitely not exactly (or even a little) like me.
the differences between you and me and a terrorist is motivation. these are some highly motivated people. you cant fight motivation with laws, or draconian police action. If that worked isreal would never get hit by terrorists right?
Actually, I'm highly motivated to shut these clowns down. To the point that I'm willing to spend considerable shares of our national energy to that end. That means addressing the cause of it (pockets of violent, extremist theo-culture and ideology festering in corrupt, under-educated societies flush with oil money), as well as dealing in practical terms, immediately, with the symptoms (most recently, deluded suburbanites with backpacks full of explosives or out-of-town jihadists using the convenience of neighboring Iraq to show their dislike for what is happening there - specifically, democracy). They're not showing motivation, they're showing desparation. The diminishing of the chances for a pan-continental Taliban-esque regime certainly has them all fired up, that's for sure.
I dont buy the crap that the ordinary terrorist wants to "Send us back to the middle ages".
There are indeed multiple goals involved. But the ones doing the indiscriminate killing are mostly associated with Al Queda, and their objectives are publicly spoken and reinforced over and over. When they were last in a position to influence, and co-exist with a government framework of their choosing, it took the form of the Taliban in Afghanistan. You may not think they're medeival, but that's semantics. Any culture that kills women for holding jobs, refuses to let little girls go to school, tortures people for playing music and flying kites, and turns the town soccer field into a public execution arena run by religious authorities - THAT is medeival enough for me, though obviously you're OK with it. That's Dark Ages, though maybe not dark enough for you. That's indisputably backwards, wretched, and exactly what Bin Laden was propping up. His associates from Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, Yorkshire, England, are preaching more of the same and are pissed off that Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention Lebannon, Egypt - which is why they just got bombed, too - and the Palestinians) are going the opposite direction - towards open, democratic societies. Sure, they're motivated, but not as motivated as the people that stood up to vote in those places despite the suicide bombers. That is motivation.
years of U.S. torture of the middle east
Which years would that be? And who were we torturing? Surely you're not confusing your history with the long European occupation of those lands, or the endless warring (and torture) between the tribal people in that area long before Western countries ever even visited?
its very 19th century to think that you can fight terrorism with more violence
Right - we need better intelligence, and more cooperation from the larger majority of the people in the middle east that want to live in peace (and have things like an economic future for their daughters). But when a guy with a carload of explosives is racing towards a checkpoint full of kids on their way to school, you'd damn well better have the laws of physics working for you - and that means physically stopping that person. And that involves violence. And when you know you have a building sitting just outside the Syrian border, and you've just watched three trucks loaded with old ordinance pull up and start to unload, it's very reasona
China's second manned orbit is scheduled about Oct 1, 2005 (their July 4). At the rate NASA was scrubbing, China could have launched first
Well, unless they're launching a time machine, that would be pretty hard. First, they'd have to beat the Russians, and then all of the other flights we've had up since the 1960's. Being the most recent country to launch something into orbit probably does, though, appeal in an age where most news consumers have an attention span of about 30 minutes.
Hey, remember that Cantennas don't step on neighborhood networks, people step on neighborood networks.
This is ridiculous. Russia's e-commerce volume is so low that anyone peddling penis enlargement pills is likely to retire with a fortune of 10 dollars US after few years of hard work.
But the spammers aren't spamming on behalf of Russian merchants. They're working mostly through affiliate marketing programs, directing suckers to vendors that give them a cut for steering in the traffic. Those merchants might be in the US, but are often overseas, too. Many, many of the merchants are setting up shop in places like Costa Rica. Online casinos, etc., do a booming business from there, but the spam that attracts at least some of their clientele originates from all over the place - and mostly from places where law enforcement isn't up to shutting them down when they break the rules. Eastern Europe, Russia, and some spots in Asia (Korea and China, mostly) are notorious. But none of them would make a dime without someone paying them commission on the click-throughs. Those are the guys to go after. They'll pay $10-$50 for the right sort of delivered casino customer. You do that 20+ times a day, and you're making OK cash if you live in Russia.
Regardless, they couldn't make it all happen without armies of spam-bots, and those have to be acquired mostly through trojans, and most of those are placed on machines as people open questionable mail, or surf to highly, um, irregular web sites (often run out of Russia, for example, containing content, er, intimately tied to the local organized crime world).
Come on, say what you mean... "Why must other people be animals?" Because you clearly don't consider this behavior you'd personally do, right? I'm always a little perplexed when someone makes a judgement about someone else's behavior, and then says "we" when talking about it. If you're sure of your convictions, don't pussy-foot around with this "we" stuff. It's "them" of which you disapprove, and you should say so.
Any chance there's some sort of Russian Spam mob going on?
There's zero chance that there's not a relationship between Russian-based spam and their thriving organized crime culture. Those guys are completely in bed with each other, which also means that when you make a mis-step, you get your skull beaten with whatever is the Russian equivalent of a baseball bat. Do they play cricket, there, or what? Probably a hockey stick.
... since most have, in a Faustian bargain allowing them to be certified in router programming, have sacrificed all upper body strength. If there was a way to kill someone with those thumb muscles you use to hit the space bar, then maybe.
More likely it was as Russian mafia relationship gone bad. When you hang in those circles, doing illegal things all day, you're bound to strike up some questionable business connections. That, or some mobster finally had seen enough viagra ads in his own inbox, and decided to go all Bayesian on his ass.
I don't understand why they wait such a long time to put ads in audio CDs and books though...
I've seen order forms and other material tucked in with some CDs for years, and publishers of, for example, Sci-Fi paperbacks have been including pages (and order forms) talking about other titles for... decades.
But is a new, rather onerous law really necessary?
I'm no expert on the UK's criminal investigative process, but I'm guessing there must already be processes in place for dealing with the contents of bank safety deposit boxes and other privately secured containers. Surely something can be adapted. As usual, the issue here is timeliness. We're not talking about prosecuting bank fraud after the fact - we're dealing with the need, on uncovering a lead, to immediately get into a bad guy's communications before one of his associates kills a bunch of people. It's got to be hell being in law enforcement knowing that being a little slow on reading some clown's e-mail after you've got a court order could leave you with a bus full of dead people. I wouldn't want that job.
Locked away in your brain isn't so far removed from locked away on your harddrive. Getting to both requires destroying your civil liberties that someone died to make sure you have.
I think a better analogy would be that of law enforcement holding one of, say, the London bombers, and doing the usual backwards networking research. Networking as in, who does he know, where does he bank, etc. Then you find out he's got a safe deposit box that he accessed yesterday. So, the bank's got a key, and he's got a key. Getting a court order that says he's got to give up access to that box (or that the bank says he has to) isn't really any different than gaining access to any other secured information or storage. Dumping his phone logs, for example. Or listening to his voicemail.
None of those things should be trotted out against anyone without a highly accountable authority demonstrating why it's appropriate. In some cases, that means a court order. In life-or-death cases (like when you know there are some guys who tried to blowthemselves up, failed, and are still running around with backpacks on, probably using their cell phones to call Detonator Tech Support back in Iran), actual people involved in the investigation sometimes have to move very, very quickly. It's almost like those guys need a judge on some IM device, willing to help them out in the field if it comes down to that.
That scenario is actually very similar to some naval engagements. Skippers on some vessels, under certain circumstances, actually have legal teams on board to help figure out the rules of engagement on the fly - so that boarding another ship, or responding to an attack, etc., can be conducted within the right framework.
I'm as guarded about my civil liberties as most any libertarian. But I also know that many cases involving cells of extremist associates are very straightforward once things start to unravel, and when some idiot tries to blow himself up, fails, and leaves a ton of evidence for the police to follow - it's very reasonable to say that you're past the threshold at which that person's privacy can be poked at. Judges should make that call, or better yet panels of them. They just have to be very available and quick about it these days - much like they have to be when we're dealing with abducted kids and the like.
Getting to both requires destroying your civil liberties that someone died to make sure you have.
I'm going to say that there are circumstances where one's conduct or activities clearly reach the level of waiving your civil liberties. Open contempt for my liberties (or life) on the part of another person mean that I no longer have to respect his. Of course, I can't handle all the policing myself, so I'm going to have to elect people to empower other people to do it for me... and then continually re-evaluate their performance and changing threat landscape in which we live (and they have to thanklessly operate) in order to see if the guidance we're giving them, and the impact of their work, is rational and correctly protecting those of us who are not trying to blow up mass transit vehicles.
Because once you inform him the law says he has to tell you his encryption key, he'll apologize immediately and turn it over, right?
No, I didn't say that (read my comment). Obviously a guy willing to die while taking out innocents isn't going to cough up his key (or, where it's written down, anyway). This is more about following the usual trail that these guys leave, and getting the info that inevitably will be found on the drives of his associates, or the wack jobs that twist them into wanting to kill people in the first place.
...explain the deaths of over 25,000 ... they probably would have stuck with Hussein
Right. Because he was a more familiar problem, and only killed people in the hundreds of thousands. Definately a superior situation. I'm sure they'd also like to give back the 1,500 new independent newspapers and media sources they've started in the last two years, the improving electrical and water systems (producing more than when Saddam was running it into the ground), the actual relations with other countries. No, better to go back to a guy that killed that many on purpose some months, let his sons put parents through industrial chippers while their kids had to watch, and tortured their soccer teams for losing games. No question, that's a better scenario. Definitely morally better.
Why not ask the families of the people dying there (at the hands of Islamic extremists) what they think about the Syrian, Jordanian, Iranian and Saudi sponsorship of that slaughter. Your 25k number includes people killed in combat zones, certainly, but also includes huge numbers of people killed by fellow Muslims looking to prop up a mysoginistic, medieval theocratic way of life that most Iraqis are showing they don't want. Ask the average Iraqi if they're ready for their own military and police to entirely deal with the foreign insurgents, or if they'd like US and British troops to continue to do the hard stuff while the locals learn the ropes and flesh out their constitution.
He must decide on going to jail for something he is completely innocent of, or releasing potentially incriminating evidence on his friend
Because there's no friend like a friend who talks you into criminal complicity, I always say. I mean, what are friends for, if not to help you launder money or hide assets? And what ever happened to the bad guys just writing down the key, laminating, and burying it in a coffee can three paces south of the big oak tree on old man Smith's back forty? You know, where you used to go and smoke pot and dream of the days when you'd have enough ill-gotten assets to have to hide them from the court? Ah, those were the days.
Incidentally, what would you have the cops do while they're sitting there looking at the hard drive from a guy they just arrested, who yesterday was having some trouble blowing himself up? Ask him ever so nicely? OK, so he was willing to die in order to kill you and your kids, so he's probably not going to be big on cooperating, but the owner of the cyber cafe where he often runs chats with his equally inept fellow bombers - is it worth being able to crack his encrypted leavings so that maybe we can stop his buddies from smearing more innocent people all over the inside of a tunnel? You are aware that actual people are actually spending their days actually thinking up and acting on ways to kill people that run yogurt stores, work at rehab clinics, build web servers, teach grade school, and have families that depend on them... right? This isn't a game, it's actually happening. And as the prime minister of Autstralia put it so eloquently yesterday, we're using 19th century approaches to dealing with bad guys happy to use 21st century technologies (um, even as these twits condemn modernity - always a telling little bit of confusion on their part).
Absent the trend in placing new and more onerous restrictions on where, when and how many people are allowed to peaceably assemble, I might agree with you.
Absent the trend of protest groups running web forums and broadcasting e-mails actually saying where they will gather in order to break down fences, vandalize certain storefronts, block certain roads from public and emergency use, etc... absent that trend, you'd find an absence of the police acting specificallly to stop the threatened (indeed, advertised) illegal activities. The best thing for rational, peaceable protesters to do is shame the violent jackasses into not polluting the protestsphere and essentially demanding pre-emptive enforcement or venue restrictions.
It will be quite sweet if they turn out to be the forces that ultimately restore the Internet to its proper function.
You mean, peer-to-peer systems connectivity between people working on Cold War defense research contracts? I'm curious - what role are you playing in that arena?
Hmmm....much like the internet was back when I got on it...sometime about 1993?
But that's my whole point. It wasn't free then, either. It was just other people paying for your use of their systems. That was before the huge audiences started costing content providers so much money that they couldn't run their sites without some cashflow. Even modest sites were being run off of other budgets, and it took a while for the people who owned the servers and the bandwidth to realize that being charitable was eating into the money they had for daily operations. There are still plenty of ad-free sites - most reflect the owner's willingness to pay your way through your visit. I run many sites - some with not an ad to be seen, and some that exist solely for that purpose.
In my example of a typical Google session, I was trying to convey that much of the world works in the way I'm describing - hopping from site to site, many of which one has never encountered before. The huge productivity gained by being able to plow through information (yes, and much disinformation) withou thaving to have your credit card handy - that's definately the sort of thing that allows our economy, no matter which part of the up/down cycle it's in, to really thrive. It's that speed of information and integration of it into the things that we all do (work, social activities, etc). Those companies that embrace that quick access to information are the ones that will increasingly please their audience and attract new business. I think that to the extent that advertising helps speed that up, it's on the lube side of the ledger. To the extent that we have to waste time learning tools to block particularly obnoxious ads, it's corrosive. But this is all so young that it's no surprise we haven't developed a sensible, well-balanced culture around it yet.
[oops - cont'd]: ...no eyeballs or actions on the ads. You don't work for the audience, nothing works.
This is a disturbing business model, not because it doesn't work but because it allows people to get the idea that things are free.
Then it should have been disturbing for a couple hundred years or so. You may pay a quarter for some newspapers, but no one thinks in only costs a quarter to produce it (or shouldn't). Regardless, the problem here isn't the bloggers (or whoever is running the ads), it's the larger society that emphasizes the "free-ness" of everything (free public schools, free roads, free room and board for kids) - none of which are free. Kids should be shown early and often that everything has a cost, and that you're either paying it directly, or indirectly, or someone else is.
It would be far more economically efficient to simply pay the [content provider] in the first place and cut out the middle man.
I have to disagree. One Google session on a given topic, and I'll probably visit a dozen web sites. Do I really want to have to perform financial transactions at the rate of one or two per minute in order to scout for information?
So, in reality, these [content providers] are simply subcontracted advertisers, using [content] to get people to view ads.
No, in reality, they're choosing one of several revenue options. It's more appropriate to say that the publishers are working for their audience, and finding a way to fund the publishing of the material the audience wants to see. If they don't produce content the audience wants, there is no opportunity for revenue (because there are no eye
They're not going to allow you to select only the ads with the hot chicks, or turn ads off after 9pm
Sure they are (they don't really have a choice)! Just don't patronize blogs or other free resources that support ad models you don't like (like overpowering Pepsi placement, or similar). There - they're turned off. The ol' invisible hand will find the sweet spot, and feedback to content providers telling them that they're 10% more ads away from losing their audience will definately alter their cost/benefit analysis of which ads they run, what they charge the advertisers, and so on.
Has anybody successfully blocked ads with Thunderbird using a plugin?
Right, because for God's sake, we wouldn't want the people producing the material you're consuming to actually cover their overhead or (gasp!) see their pursuit as a way of actually improving their lifestyle or anything Evil like that. It's completely reasonable for a distributor of free (to you) material to look to inline ads as way of offsetting their costs. Yeah, it's text. But bandwidth still isn't free (nor is office space, employee health insurance, etc).
keep advertising to a minimum? I think not. The best we can hope for is far more targetted ads...
You say that with resignation, like it's a bad thing. Would you rather that the people who actually produce all of the content that everyone wants have no way to cover the costs of their efforts, obtain health insurance, or go on a vacation once in a while? Everyone seems to want some ad-free, subscription-free paradise where they get all in the info and entertainment they could ever want, packaged up just for them, at no cost. It's not just that it's unrealistic, it's that it suggests a serious disconnect between the people that consume things and the realities of producing/distributing what they consume, and what it takes to allow talented, dedicated people to dedicate their waking hours to creating it. Targeted ads are probably one of the very best approaches to keeping the content producers happily producing without everything being subscription-based and/or DRMed past some threshold of pain. And the more targeted, the more likely it is to be the ideal mix for everyone involved.
are going to produce some vulnerabilities along with the gee-whiz plugins of the moment. That's pretty spectacular, though.
After all, the same sort of superstition/gullibility/tin-foil-hatism has large swaths of western Europe thinking that the CIA flew the planes in the World Trade Center (or the Israelis, etc. - take your pick), or that every resident of Kentucky suffering from sleep disorders is actually a repeat victim of alien kidnapping, or that dancing in a circle while wearing the correct outfit makes it rain. There are thousands of click-optimized web sites set up specifically to resonate with each and every crackpot world view. There was a time when we associated a total lack of any critical thinking skills with people living in small rural towns. But now it's the MTV-saturated, broadband-connected kids of wealthy suburbanites that are learning to never learn, and being spoon-fed a diet of irrational, feel-good, magical-thinking empty solutions to their problems. And since we live in a surplus-rich, leaning-socialist world, people don't really have to be connected with reality to still eat, have a roof over their heads, attract a similarly vapid mate and hatch out another brood of witless ninnies. And Google AdSense is complicit, I tell you!
Yeah, I mean, we got away with going into Iraq
For the very same (and numerous, right) reasons.