I can't understand why you would think that generating the 250,000th dollar or the millionth dollar would take a higher percentage of those "vast array of government resources" than the first dollar or the 20,000th dollar.
Because most of those resources aren't even used by the poor. For example, the poor have practically no usage for corporate law or international trade delegations or even interstate highways. At the very least there is a step function with a very high step.
Unless they are an idiot, being "rich" doesn't mean simply sitting on a pile of depreciating money. It means generating an income - after all this is about income tax isn't it? And the income streams of the rich are essentially all dependent on a vast array of government services.
Just to be clear here... "Fair" does not mean more. The rich are already paying a higher percentage of their income (28-35%) than the poor
Fair does indeed mean more. The rich use significantly more government resources than the poor. Their income is dependent on massive federal infrastructure and subsidies like interstate roads, civil courts, "small" business loans (currently totally 84 billion dollars) and enormous indirect oil subsidies, mortgage deductions, state department promotion of international business, etc, etc.
Everyone wants to believe in some Us vs. Them fantasy world, where Them is fully cognizant, aware and intentionally driving Us in some direction against Our will, unbeknownst to Us, except for You and your favorite radio/TV Host.
How ironic that you would over-simply the very people you accuse of over-simplifying. Dismissing public oversight because some people insist on seeing the world as black and white is itself black and white thinking.
It isn't always about nefarious plots and people who are deliberately evil. It's about the creeping corruption that occurs in the shadows. It's human nature to push the limits and the fewer people who know about it, the more likely the people involved will go to far.
Besides, Wikileaks isn't an american organisation. They are global. Exposing all that two-facedness about Iran in middle-eastern politics is exactly what those countries need to become more democratic.
Is there any case law supporting your position that how many people are surveilled is somehow relevant? A very big part of U.S. law is the idea of precedent.
I don't know any other way to say this - circumstances have changed, the law has not caught up yet. Even Katz broke new ground because circumstances had changed, much of the judge's opinion was him explaining that precedent didn't cut it.
I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all "environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs".
I'm as big a proponent of IFR technology as anyone, but it is head-in-the-sand thinking to expect that waste from this program is going to be recycled any better than we've done for the last 30 years. Practically nobody is doing it today, ain't no way third world countries are going to be the ones that start doing it even half right.
The specific rule I'm talking about was laid out in Katz v. United Sates. I'm not sure how much more specific I can be. The court found that when the defendant closed the phone booth, he had a reasonable expectation that no one would hear his conversation. In an open public space, where you don't take any precautions from being seen or heard, you have no such expectation.
Yes, I am fully aware of Katz and frankly its not particularly relevant because it does not deal with mass surveillance, only targeted surveillance.
Your argument boils down to "because they can do mass surveillance, they should do it" and I am saying that is not true because mass surveillance has an enormous cost to society. Drawing on Katz to rationalize mass surveillance is a bad extrapolation because katz doesn't even try to address any of the relevant issues.
Dude: Chicks can TELL when you're wearing a "Jimmy Hat" or not. I asked many (of 1000's I have been with sexually in my lifetime, which is why I am posting as anonymous here) if they liked sex better with condoms or not, and they all told me "it feels much better when men do not wear one" so, in other words? They know!
Starting out without a condom is one thing, but breaking it in the middle is entirely different. If she's having any fun at all, no way she will notice.
We have that reasonable belief because the only way you're going to hear a phone conversation (assuming you're not physically in earshot) is to tap the line.
You've picked one arbitrary reason and said that it matters while other reasons don't. You aren't analyzing how it is that the courts arrived at that distinction in the first place.
You're missing a key point: Phone conversations have been declared private.
"Private" means you have a reasonable belief that you won't have any unwanted spectators. "In public" means out in the open?
You seem to be oblivious to your own words.
Why do we have a reasonable belief that we don't have any "unwanted spectators" to a phone conversation? It can easily travel across hundreds of miles of wire, even broadcast over the air - none of which we have personal control over, all of which leave plenty of opportunity for "unwanted spectators" to listen in. By your own logic, we shouldn't have any expectation of privacy for phone calls. Yet we do. Just as we have a reasonable belief that not everything anyone does outside and off their own property should be recorded and cataloged indefinitely.
How do databases, CCTV systems, or facial recognition software in any way impact whether what you do in public is subject to privacy?
Because they change the nature of events in public from what was local and ephemeral to world-wide and permanent. Current laws were written under the expectation of the former, not the later.
Actions being ephemeral has nothing to do with it. Photography has been around since at least the Civil War
Actions being ephemeral has everything to do with it. Arguing that basic assumptions about mass surveillance in public haven't changed because we had photographic capabilities during the civil war is like arguing that we don't need speed limits on roads because the Benz Motorwagon had a top speed of 10mph.
If you don't want someone to see you doing something, do it privately, where you have some expectation that people aren't able to see it. If you can't be bothered to take that minimum precaution, whose fault is it?
If you want to have a private conversation, don't use the telephone. If you can't be bothered to take that minimum precaution, whose fault is it?
Ain't no philosophical difference between what you wrote and what I wrote.
If your actions are in public, they're in public. You might be able to claim the police are harassing you by following you around, but they wouldn't be violating your privacy rights.
The idea that actions in public are public information is too binary. The concept of not having a right to privacy while in public was formulated under different conditions than we now live with. There were no databases. No cctv systems. No facial recognition software. None of that. At that time the basic assumption was that actions, even in public, were ephemeral, only witnessed by the people in the near vicinity and frequently anonymous. None of those are necessarily true anymore.
It's time for a re-evaluation of what rights organizations, especially the government, have with respect to mass surveillance of the public.
why would anyone think they would be less cooperative with govt requests than they are with private company requests.
We know the issuing banks and the credit card networks are privacy sluts. But we expect the government to be restricted in what it does. It isn't that the banks give the government the information, it's that the government is asking for it with minimal oversight.
Or use multiple profiles with the same browser, for example start firefox with:
-no-remote -ProfileManager
and then create different profiles for different websites.
You will have completely different sets of plugins, bookmarks, histories, settings, etc. Some plugins, like flash, will share common settings because they store stuff outside of the firefox directories (~/.macromedia/ for example).
I know MS has got WinCE in a variety of cars like some BMWs. If Dodge starts to use Android, and they put it in any of their cars with high performance engines then will they call it "hemiroid?"
I dont think I've ever seen such happen in any such case brought on by the BSA, ESA, RIAA or MPAA before. Sure, there've been ones where the judge used common sense and was stern... but this judge truly went all out to put the ESA and the prosecutors in their places.
Makes one wonder if they've pulled other shenanigans in his court before or on the cynical side, if they didn't contribute to his last reelection campaign.
No, they don't. They cache things locally to reduce round trips and therefore cut down on latency.
Bingo! Remote X11 doesn't suck because of excessive overhead, it sucks because it is extremely latency sensitive. Lots of round-trips coupled with blocking on responses kills throughput. They actual bandwidth required is relatively low.
Dude, you deserve a +6 insightful for that. I think your post qualifies as the single most successful wooosh-inducer yet. Just look at how many oblivious counter-rants have been upmodded. Genius!
Say what you want about Assange, but if his goal was to draw attention to factual info leaked into the wild by US government employees, then he succeeded beyond even his own wildest dreams.
Other than the narrow focus on the US government, that is precisely what his goal has been. He even said so about a year ago:
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives. Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
Totally agree, but the image search is now just as bloated.;(
Over the last couple of months they have been fucking around with the non-javascript interface (seemed to be leak-through from the new stuff), but last time I used it, it was pretty much the same as it ever was.
The ad was for IE9. Now, considering the fact that IE9 only works on Windows, and I visited it from a Mac (something quite apparent from the user agent string that my browser sent to Google), you'd have thought that it would be pretty obvious that I was not in the target market.
That wasn't an ad for IE9 (MS doesn't sell IE9 per se) it was an ad for windows. You are in the target market for that.
I started to post this as a joke and then I realized it was probably true.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't understand why you would think that generating the 250,000th dollar or the millionth dollar would take a higher percentage of those "vast array of government resources" than the first dollar or the 20,000th dollar.
Because most of those resources aren't even used by the poor.
For example, the poor have practically no usage for corporate law or international trade delegations or even interstate highways.
At the very least there is a step function with a very high step.
Unless they are an idiot, being "rich" doesn't mean simply sitting on a pile of depreciating money.
It means generating an income - after all this is about income tax isn't it?
And the income streams of the rich are essentially all dependent on a vast array of government services.
Just to be clear here... "Fair" does not mean more. The rich are already paying a higher percentage of their income (28-35%) than the poor
Fair does indeed mean more. The rich use significantly more government resources than the poor.
Their income is dependent on massive federal infrastructure and subsidies like interstate roads, civil courts, "small" business loans (currently totally 84 billion dollars) and enormous indirect oil subsidies, mortgage deductions, state department promotion of international business, etc, etc.
Everyone wants to believe in some Us vs. Them fantasy world, where Them is fully cognizant, aware and intentionally driving Us in some direction against Our will, unbeknownst to Us, except for You and your favorite radio/TV Host.
How ironic that you would over-simply the very people you accuse of over-simplifying. Dismissing public oversight because some people insist on seeing the world as black and white is itself black and white thinking.
It isn't always about nefarious plots and people who are deliberately evil. It's about the creeping corruption that occurs in the shadows. It's human nature to push the limits and the fewer people who know about it, the more likely the people involved will go to far.
Besides, Wikileaks isn't an american organisation. They are global. Exposing all that two-facedness about Iran in middle-eastern politics is exactly what those countries need to become more democratic.
Is there any case law supporting your position that how many people are surveilled is somehow relevant? A very big part of U.S. law is the idea of precedent.
I don't know any other way to say this - circumstances have changed, the law has not caught up yet.
Even Katz broke new ground because circumstances had changed, much of the judge's opinion was him explaining that precedent didn't cut it.
You're engaging in almost magical thinking.
You are engaging in circular reasoning.
I truly don't believe those new power plants are at all "environment-ruining nuclear-timebombs".
I'm as big a proponent of IFR technology as anyone, but it is head-in-the-sand thinking to expect that waste from this program is going to be recycled any better than we've done for the last 30 years. Practically nobody is doing it today, ain't no way third world countries are going to be the ones that start doing it even half right.
How much surveillance is done is irrelevant (according to any case law I've seen or heard of, anyway)
Again with the civil war mentality. Things have changed, its time for the law to catch up.
The specific rule I'm talking about was laid out in Katz v. United Sates. I'm not sure how much more specific I can be. The court found that when the defendant closed the phone booth, he had a reasonable expectation that no one would hear his conversation. In an open public space, where you don't take any precautions from being seen or heard, you have no such expectation.
Yes, I am fully aware of Katz and frankly its not particularly relevant because it does not deal with mass surveillance, only targeted surveillance.
Your argument boils down to "because they can do mass surveillance, they should do it" and I am saying that is not true because mass surveillance has an enormous cost to society.
Drawing on Katz to rationalize mass surveillance is a bad extrapolation because katz doesn't even try to address any of the relevant issues.
Dude: Chicks can TELL when you're wearing a "Jimmy Hat" or not. I asked many (of 1000's I have been with sexually in my lifetime, which is why I am posting as anonymous here) if they liked sex better with condoms or not, and they all told me "it feels much better when men do not wear one" so, in other words? They know!
Starting out without a condom is one thing, but breaking it in the middle is entirely different.
If she's having any fun at all, no way she will notice.
We have that reasonable belief because the only way you're going to hear a phone conversation (assuming you're not physically in earshot) is to tap the line.
You've picked one arbitrary reason and said that it matters while other reasons don't. You aren't analyzing how it is that the courts arrived at that distinction in the first place.
You're missing a key point: Phone conversations have been declared private.
"Private" means you have a reasonable belief that you won't have any unwanted spectators. "In public" means out in the open?
You seem to be oblivious to your own words.
Why do we have a reasonable belief that we don't have any "unwanted spectators" to a phone conversation?
It can easily travel across hundreds of miles of wire, even broadcast over the air - none of which we have personal control over, all of which leave plenty of opportunity for "unwanted spectators" to listen in. By your own logic, we shouldn't have any expectation of privacy for phone calls. Yet we do. Just as we have a reasonable belief that not everything anyone does outside and off their own property should be recorded and cataloged indefinitely.
How do databases, CCTV systems, or facial recognition software in any way impact whether what you do in public is subject to privacy?
Because they change the nature of events in public from what was local and ephemeral to world-wide and permanent.
Current laws were written under the expectation of the former, not the later.
Actions being ephemeral has nothing to do with it. Photography has been around since at least the Civil War
Actions being ephemeral has everything to do with it. Arguing that basic assumptions about mass surveillance in public haven't changed because we had photographic capabilities during the civil war is like arguing that we don't need speed limits on roads because the Benz Motorwagon had a top speed of 10mph.
If you don't want someone to see you doing something, do it privately, where you have some expectation that people aren't able to see it. If you can't be bothered to take that minimum precaution, whose fault is it?
If you want to have a private conversation, don't use the telephone.
If you can't be bothered to take that minimum precaution, whose fault is it?
Ain't no philosophical difference between what you wrote and what I wrote.
(Are there any fanboys I haven't offended with this? I'm trying to be thorough.)
I'm still waiting for a 1760 node cluster of these.
but don't depend upon the government... to protect you from the government. that's absurd.
Absurd as the constitution, eh?
If your actions are in public, they're in public. You might be able to claim the police are harassing you by following you around, but they wouldn't be violating your privacy rights.
The idea that actions in public are public information is too binary.
The concept of not having a right to privacy while in public was formulated under different conditions than we now live with.
There were no databases. No cctv systems. No facial recognition software. None of that.
At that time the basic assumption was that actions, even in public, were ephemeral, only witnessed by the people in the near vicinity and frequently anonymous.
None of those are necessarily true anymore.
It's time for a re-evaluation of what rights organizations, especially the government, have with respect to mass surveillance of the public.
why would anyone think they would be less cooperative with govt requests than they are with private company requests.
We know the issuing banks and the credit card networks are privacy sluts.
But we expect the government to be restricted in what it does.
It isn't that the banks give the government the information, it's that the government is asking for it with minimal oversight.
Or use multiple profiles with the same browser, for example start firefox with:
-no-remote -ProfileManager
and then create different profiles for different websites.
You will have completely different sets of plugins, bookmarks, histories, settings, etc.
Some plugins, like flash, will share common settings because they store stuff outside of the firefox directories (~/.macromedia/ for example).
I know MS has got WinCE in a variety of cars like some BMWs.
If Dodge starts to use Android, and they put it in any of their cars with high performance engines then will they call it "hemiroid?"
Why are you speculating on something you are clearly completely ignorant of? Federal judges do not have reelection campaigns.
Because I thought it was a california district court judge who do have reelection campaigns.
I dont think I've ever seen such happen in any such case brought on by the BSA, ESA, RIAA or MPAA before. Sure, there've been ones where the judge used common sense and was stern... but this judge truly went all out to put the ESA and the prosecutors in their places.
Makes one wonder if they've pulled other shenanigans in his court before or on the cynical side, if they didn't contribute to his last reelection campaign.
No, they don't. They cache things locally to reduce round trips and therefore cut down on latency.
Bingo! Remote X11 doesn't suck because of excessive overhead, it sucks because it is extremely latency sensitive.
Lots of round-trips coupled with blocking on responses kills throughput. They actual bandwidth required is relatively low.
You can't handle the truth!
Dude, you deserve a +6 insightful for that.
I think your post qualifies as the single most successful wooosh-inducer yet.
Just look at how many oblivious counter-rants have been upmodded.
Genius!
Say what you want about Assange, but if his goal was to draw attention to factual info leaked into the wild by US government employees, then he succeeded beyond even his own wildest dreams.
Other than the narrow focus on the US government, that is precisely what his goal has been. He even said so about a year ago:
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives. Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."---Bank Of America Sets Up Swat Team To Combat Wikileaks
Totally agree, but the image search is now just as bloated. ;(
Over the last couple of months they have been fucking around with the non-javascript interface (seemed to be leak-through from the new stuff), but last time I used it, it was pretty much the same as it ever was.
The ad was for IE9. Now, considering the fact that IE9 only works on Windows, and I visited it from a Mac (something quite apparent from the user agent string that my browser sent to Google), you'd have thought that it would be pretty obvious that I was not in the target market.
That wasn't an ad for IE9 (MS doesn't sell IE9 per se) it was an ad for windows.
You are in the target market for that.
I started to post this as a joke and then I realized it was probably true.