The guy held dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship. He had been under investigation by the Mounties for years for his friendship with a guy allegedly tight with senior al Qaeda leadership. To put it more succinctly, a friend of a friend. He was detained and deported because he was at worst the friend of a friend. The alleged #1 guy himself was never convicted, or even charged. What he did was set up charities and orphanages in Afghanistan as part of his work at a canadian NGO. While
Wise people are careful. They don't flip off cops. They're polite and cooperative and don't make sudden moves at traffic stops. They say "Your Honor" to the judge in the courtroom. And, in this guy's case, maybe he should have thought more carefully about (1) his associations with certain folks from the old country, or (2) visiting (or stopping over in) the United States. That may not be what we should expect to be possible in a perfect world, but we don't live in such a world. Damn that is pathetic. This is the fucking united states. Land of the free and home of the Brave. We aren't supposed to have to worry about living that way. We aren't supposed to kowtow to authoritae. Its not about a "perfect world" its about the fundamental egalitarianism this country was founded on "... all men are created equal..." To so blithely accept those requirements as "just the way it is" is BS.
I decided not to investigate further when I realized what I was doing.:V Indeed, we've developed quite a "kill the messenger" attitude when it comes to government security nowadays. Better to let the chinese hackers figure it out and keep it to themselves...
Well, all those little fragments ended up doing no good. So, in response, we've spent billions and billions of dollars and lots of and lots of street cred gathering up MORE little fragments. While two hackers in the basement of the Farm put together a wiki for practically nothing.
Those guys ARE traitors, it's not that they might get someone killed - they cut the military-industrial-complex out of the loop, preventing them from making more profits than the oil industry...
Any costs caused by the corporation are borne by the corporation in the same manner as a sole proprietorship or partnership.... Costs that are not borne by a business entity are called externalities. No, I'm not talking about externalities, per se. Although corps sure seem to push as hard as possible to externalize costs.
To restate, a sole proprietorship/partnership/corporation all have the same amount of liability for actions imposed. What I'm talking about is more along the lines of proportion for criminal acts. A hypothetical example being that through indirect action a corp causes a man to die. If the corp were an actual person, he'd be guilty of manslaughter and most likely jailed. There is no such thing as jailtime for a corp. At worse some sort of fine is levied - a fine that rarely costs the corp proportionally as much as jailtime for a person would cost that individual.
Even worse, say through direct action, one of the officers of the corp causes someone to die such that it benefits the corp. The officer is guilty of murder, but the corp is largely blameless. A person who hires a hitman is just as guilty as the hitman himself. Yet corps are never given the equivalent of the death penalty (completely dissolution with all assests liquidated and the proceeds NOT going to shareholders).
I really don't know where the supporting statement is! That was my point--he never claimed to vote against his principles, Oh pishaw. Do you mean to say that you honestly believe that, "Wow....people like you are why I vote Republican. And there's much that I don't like about that party," is at all a meaningful statement? You think that was a useful and worthwhile post that added to the discussion? A legitimate response to a logical argument with reasoned support? SERIOUSLY?
It's clear to me that you don't believe that, that's why you keep arguing around the edges of it. Making up BS like the 100% baloney (with which you betrayed your understanding and then realized your claim was quite weak so you had to bolster it with a strawman argument). His post was pure tripe and I called him on it.
I think that you are the one who is overly sensitive to the 'republican' thing, I never said a word about it. Its you who seems to think that "republican" == "voting illogically" despite the context of the rest of the sentence -- "people who can make a logical argument with supporting statements are the reason you vote illogically?"
All my posts will be properly cited in the future, consider me chastised, I won't even THINK of referring to a blog by name without explicitly linking!;-) The point is that if you are going to come in and essentially call someone names, you better have your ducks in a row. Just like the first guy's post was pure invective with nothing meaningful to say, so too was yours. You just tried to cover it up by pinning it all on an obscure reference.
If you had sincerely wanted to contribute to the discussion, you would have left all that crap out and simply said - "There have been some interesting discussion about this stuff with actual numbers at the Volokh Conspiracy website. You guys ought to take a look." Instead you tried to slyly "armchair quarterback" while denying it at the same time.
The difference is intent. You get slack for good intentions, you don't get slack for being a jerk.
I think we're done here? Take it easy! Yeah, yeah. Your smarmy and conceited apologies have been soo authentic.
What kitchen? That would be the one that is too hot for you and is in the house made out of glass.
Ok, to attempt to avoid selective quoting.... 100%... 100%... 100% Better than selective quoting, you are making up quotes now. I never said "100% against his principles" I said, "vote against his principles with nothing more than an unsupported statement as his justification." Again WHERE IS THE SUPPORTING STATEMENT? Where is the justification?
If I offended you You offended me with the "touchy touchy" shit, you offended me with your trivializing accusation that I was criticizing the guy for claiming to vote republican rather than for just spouting off a meaningless flame. You offended me with your smug assertion that, "there's a lot [I] could learn" if I would just go off and google something I've never heard of and dig through a bunch of crap to get some point that you only felt was worth hinting at up front.
Your original post was little better than noise, it took two more posts and a lot of brow-beating before you actually bothered to make a minimal contribution to the discussion. That was fucking rude of you. You should not have been surprised that your rudeness was returned. Don't fool yourself into thinking that being blunt is any worse than being smug and trivializing.
And Ad Hominems! Well done:-) Touchy, touchy you were first. Why are you in the kitchen?
Except he didn't say any such thing! What part of, "Wow....people like you are why I vote Republican. And there's much that I don't like about that party." Is supporting substantiation? Eh? That's ALL he wrote.
I don't have a thesis, I'm not by any means an expert on crime and imprisonment, and I'm not going to armchair quarterback it here. Ah, so you are posting just to see your words on the screen. I guess I was right about that mental masturbation.
I'd be delighted to help you out. Apparently not since a website is not a link to a specific discussion on that website. Again, if you wanted to do more than crap in public you would actually post a link to the specific discussion on the website. Why do you bother posting, TWICE now, if you can't be bothered to actually say something useful? Do you get off on playing the, "I know something you have to dig through google to find out" card?
I provided a link to a resource of further information. You bviously didn't feel it necessary to check it out, Jeesuz chreeist! You posted a couple of words with no meaningful content, no explanation of why anyone should make the effort to check it out. Extremely solipsistic of you.
If you actually cared about posting coherently there is a lot you could learn. There's a guest blogger over on the Asimbonanga right now who has published extensively in the field (and not just as as slashdot armchair quarterback). I'd recommend you take a look.
No need to be so hyper aggressive, No need to be so smug and passive aggressive.
Common sense and personal experience. You may have a misunderstanding of the alternative form of collaborative business structure that does not limit liability. This misunderstanding is evidenced by your response to my statement: I'd have to say that your response is the one that doesn't get it. You made a statement about being liable for the actions of millions of shareholders, I asked you to explain that, you went off on a tangent about partners, not millions of shareholders.
As for common sense and personal experience, sorry just because you have experienced the current system doesn't mean understand it. Hundreds of millions of people drive cars but don't understand the internal combustion engine.
I claim that limiting liability is simply a form of government subsidy, transferring the cost of the actions of corp to the people that suffer damages due to those actions. Such a subsidy is unnecessary in a free market.
"Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January 1995"... "The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid." Wikipedia is misleading, and you took the bait.
The part the article left out is that the nitro was soaked into cotton balls. It did not look at all like a liquid, it looked like wet cotton stuffed in a white plastic bottle. The reason it was soaked into the cotton balls was to stabilize it because liquid nitro is highly unstable, one sudden shock and it blows on its own. He would have been lucky to make it to the airport, much less get in the air, with unstablized nitro in a bottle.
Suffice to say, the liquid ban is still total bullshit. In fact the TSA even said so themselves in their own blog:
In fact, in recent tests, a National Lab was asked to formulate a test mixture and it took several tries using the best equipment and best scientists for it to even ignite. That was with a bomb prepared in advance in a lab setting. A less skilled person attempting to put it together inside a secure area or a plane is not a good bet. TSA blog Those are the TSA's own words explaining how the bogeyman of binary liquid explosives is essentially impossible. Which is what anyone with a clue has been saying since day one.
Of course, after realizing just how stupid they were to admit that, they've come up with a new story leaving out the whole 'mixing it up in the bathroom' part. Now its all about some super-secret concoction that does not need to be mixed up. Now its just a regular explosive liquid that somehow must be stored in a big jug and can't be in a bunch of smaller bottles put together. Wonder why they won't tell us what it is - after all apparently the terrorists already know all about it since it was their plan in the first place...
Look - if you had ever held a security clearance and worked for some part of the military, you wouldn't be making ignorant statements like that. It's just *not* *true*. Yes, there are actual people, with actual faces and names, that actually plan to harm people for reasons that are largely religious in nature. Ok mr security clearance (lol!) how many of these so-called terrorists actually exist?
Declaring "it ain't so" doesn't make it true. Conversely, declaring, "it just is so" doesn't make it true either. Especially when the details aren't available to anyone without need to know.
Touchy, touchy--never understand why merely saying that one is a republican can warrant such scorn and hate--"voting illogically?" Stupid, stupid. My response has nothing to do with him claiming to vote republican. My response is all about him claiming to vote against his own principles with nothing more than an unsupported statement as his justification. In essence he made the idiot's response to a reasoned argument and I called him an idiot for doing so.
If you or the GGGP actually cared about crime stats, there's a lot you could read and learn. There's a guest blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy right now who has published extensively in the field (and not just as as slashdot armchair quarterback). I'd recommend you take a look. If you gave a shat you'd at least state your thesis - i.e. what do you think these 'crime stats' mean, furthermore you'd actually post a link to the specific discussion instead of just wave your hands in the air. BUT, considering your total lack of insight into this thread so far I think you are just committing an act of mental masturbation in public simply because it gets you off.
some limitation of liability is necessary to encourage people to collaborate. You state that as a given. And we've all heard it a million times before. But why do you believe it to be true?
it would be ridiculous to expect me to answer for any wrongs of the millions of owners in a multinational corporation simply because I invested a grand or so. That's a non-sequitur - what wrongs can a mere shareholder commit in the first place?
So you think I am going to get excited about my "privacy" if I have to show an ID? So, basically you think you've already slid so far down the slippery slope that another few feet won't matter?
Maybe you ought to be getting excited about your freedom. Unless of course your definition of freedom means being free to jump through random useless hoops put in front of you by people who have no responsibility to answer to you.
It is my company, my pencil, and I can do with it what I will. You are liable for the results of what you do with your pencil. Corporations exist primarily as a means to shield owners from the liability that results from actions performed in the service of the corporation. They aren't anywhere near the same thing.
I didn't see being kinder and gentler to murderers as being a logical argument. That's because it's not. But that's not what he wrote, it must be all that you understood though, else you would not have cited it, right?
Nobody is expecting you to cry for the thousands of people that die every day. You can't grieve for all of them. But it's quite another thing to crack jokes about it, isn't it? You fail to understand humor. All jokes are about someone's misfortune. Its only the unfunny ones like knock-knock jokes that aren't necessarily about laughing at someone else's problems. Since we all die sooner or later it would be inhumane to make jokes about death verboten.
Would a crazy schoolteacher send me to prison for life because he didn't like the look in my eyes? Yes. With the above normal rate of high-functioning autism among geeks it would seem very possible as one of the most common traits is a reluctance to meet other people's eyes which is often interpreted as being 'shifty eyed' and a sign of guilt.
Wow....people like you are why I vote Republican. And there's much that I don't like about that party. So, people who can make a logical argument with supporting statements are the reason you vote illogically?
I guess that actually makes sense in a twisted way.
In the case in question, it was the *PARENT* that was doing it. No it was not. And the way you wrote it totally misrepresents what happened.
It was *A* parent, but NOT THE PARENT OF THE CHILD WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE.
Obviously this lady is fucked in the head to torment a kid like that. But obviously too the girl who killed herself had more problems than just being manipulated by someone on the net.
It may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but anyone who commits suicide because someone played an elaborate and humiliating practical joke on them over the internet is already in severe need of help. Help that apparently her own parents failed to provide.
I find it odd that comcast has doubled my connection recently while sending RST packets because their network can't handle traffic. Perhaps these companies should advertise and sell what their networks can handle instead of claiming rediculous speeds that they can't provide. It sounds a lot like the mad rush to provide more and more tv channels. All the providers are doing, cable and satellite, where they have a constant amount of bandwidth but keep adding channels so each channel gets less and less bandwidth allocated. The net effect is that all the channels look like shite - Comcast has 50+HDTV channels but at ~10Mbps each they often look worse than DVD.
Same thing here with the internet side - faster and faster 'connections' but it still the same size pipes, so they have to degrade the quality of service in order to make up for it.
There's no way you can know that. Learning from the past is the only reasonable thing to do now; planes were hijacked, the loss of life and damage was significant, so we work to stop it happening again. Anything else would be reckless. No, what is reckless is to "work to stop it happening again" without regard to either the effectiveness or the cost of such work - both monetary and opportunity costs.
These body-scanning machines have a very high cost and as long as checked luggage is not 100% screened, nor is service access to the airplane 100% screened (hell, its barely controlled at all as is) then these machines produce an ineffective increase in security. This isn't layered security, this a finger in a dike where the dike has already been completely washed away.
New alignment system: Lawful Good, Good, Unaligned, Evil, Chaotic Evil. Sounds like all those cameras and metal-detectors in high-school have been having the intended effect. Or maybe its just all that Ritalin.
Saddam had very little problem killing the curds. It's a numbers game, but don't think Iraqis would've been all fine and dandy if Saddam had stayed in power. Don't put words in my mouth and then knock them down again. There is absolutely no question that the number of Iraqis killed would be far, far less. I did not say zero. I did not say fine and dandy, I said far less.
That's simply Irans current excuse. Really? Can you quote Amenjibadwhatishisname or any other Iranian official making that claim? Did not think so. That claim is the analysis of anyone who saw Iraq invaded and N Korea stay sovereign.
You also have/had Pakistan (a neighbor) and India playing with nukes. In the end Iran would be trying to get nukes regardless of whether or not the US invaded Iraq. You seem to think its all or nothing. That either they are motivated or not. Your analysis lacks allowance for urgency.
There are lots of reason to oppose the war without bringing in questionable opinions into the debate. Show me an opinion that is not questionable. There is a reason we call them opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
Better to let the chinese hackers figure it out and keep it to themselves...
While two hackers in the basement of the Farm put together a wiki for practically nothing.
Those guys ARE traitors, it's not that they might get someone killed - they cut the military-industrial-complex out of the loop, preventing them from making more profits than the oil industry...
Even worse, say through direct action, one of the officers of the corp causes someone to die such that it benefits the corp. The officer is guilty of murder, but the corp is largely blameless. A person who hires a hitman is just as guilty as the hitman himself. Yet corps are never given the equivalent of the death penalty (completely dissolution with all assests liquidated and the proceeds NOT going to shareholders).
SERIOUSLY?
It's clear to me that you don't believe that, that's why you keep arguing around the edges of it. Making up BS like the 100% baloney (with which you betrayed your understanding and then realized your claim was quite weak so you had to bolster it with a strawman argument). His post was pure tripe and I called him on it.
I think that you are the one who is overly sensitive to the 'republican' thing, I never said a word about it. Its you who seems to think that "republican" == "voting illogically" despite the context of the rest of the sentence -- "people who can make a logical argument with supporting statements are the reason you vote illogically?" All my posts will be properly cited in the future, consider me chastised, I won't even THINK of referring to a blog by name without explicitly linking!
If you had sincerely wanted to contribute to the discussion, you would have left all that crap out and simply said - "There have been some interesting discussion about this stuff with actual numbers at the Volokh Conspiracy website. You guys ought to take a look." Instead you tried to slyly "armchair quarterback" while denying it at the same time.
The difference is intent. You get slack for good intentions, you don't get slack for being a jerk. I think we're done here? Take it easy! Yeah, yeah. Your smarmy and conceited apologies have been soo authentic.
Your original post was little better than noise, it took two more posts and a lot of brow-beating before you actually bothered to make a minimal contribution to the discussion. That was fucking rude of you. You should not have been surprised that your rudeness was returned. Don't fool yourself into thinking that being blunt is any worse than being smug and trivializing.
If you actually cared about posting coherently there is a lot you could learn. There's a guest blogger over on the Asimbonanga right now who has published extensively in the field (and not just as as slashdot armchair quarterback). I'd recommend you take a look. No need to be so hyper aggressive, No need to be so smug and passive aggressive.
As for common sense and personal experience, sorry just because you have experienced the current system doesn't mean understand it. Hundreds of millions of people drive cars but don't understand the internal combustion engine.
I claim that limiting liability is simply a form of government subsidy, transferring the cost of the actions of corp to the people that suffer damages due to those actions. Such a subsidy is unnecessary in a free market.
"Yousef used one tenth of the explosive power he planned to use on eleven U.S. airliners in January 1995"
"The explosive used was liquid nitroglycerin, which was disguised as a bottle of contact lens fluid." Wikipedia is misleading, and you took the bait.
The part the article left out is that the nitro was soaked into cotton balls. It did not look at all like a liquid, it looked like wet cotton stuffed in a white plastic bottle. The reason it was soaked into the cotton balls was to stabilize it because liquid nitro is highly unstable, one sudden shock and it blows on its own. He would have been lucky to make it to the airport, much less get in the air, with unstablized nitro in a bottle.
Don't believe me - just google for the hundreds of websites discussing the details.
Suffice to say, the liquid ban is still total bullshit.
In fact the TSA even said so themselves in their own blog: In fact, in recent tests, a National Lab was asked to formulate a test mixture and it took several tries using the best equipment and best scientists for it to even ignite. That was with a bomb prepared in advance in a lab setting. A less skilled person attempting to put it together inside a secure area or a plane is not a good bet.
TSA blog Those are the TSA's own words explaining how the bogeyman of binary liquid explosives is essentially impossible. Which is what anyone with a clue has been saying since day one.
Of course, after realizing just how stupid they were to admit that, they've come up with a new story leaving out the whole 'mixing it up in the bathroom' part. Now its all about some super-secret concoction that does not need to be mixed up. Now its just a regular explosive liquid that somehow must be stored in a big jug and can't be in a bunch of smaller bottles put together. Wonder why they won't tell us what it is - after all apparently the terrorists already know all about it since it was their plan in the first place...
But why do you believe it to be true? it would be ridiculous to expect me to answer for any wrongs of the millions of owners in a multinational corporation simply because I invested a grand or so. That's a non-sequitur - what wrongs can a mere shareholder commit in the first place?
Maybe you ought to be getting excited about your freedom. Unless of course your definition of freedom means being free to jump through random useless hoops put in front of you by people who have no responsibility to answer to you.
Corporations exist primarily as a means to shield owners from the liability that results from actions performed in the service of the corporation.
They aren't anywhere near the same thing.
All jokes are about someone's misfortune. Its only the unfunny ones like knock-knock jokes that aren't necessarily about laughing at someone else's problems. Since we all die sooner or later it would be inhumane to make jokes about death verboten.
I guess that actually makes sense in a twisted way.
It was *A* parent, but NOT THE PARENT OF THE CHILD WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE.
Obviously this lady is fucked in the head to torment a kid like that.
But obviously too the girl who killed herself had more problems than just being manipulated by someone on the net.
It may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but anyone who commits suicide because someone played an elaborate and humiliating practical joke on them over the internet is already in severe need of help. Help that apparently her own parents failed to provide.
Sticks and stones...
Same thing here with the internet side - faster and faster 'connections' but it still the same size pipes, so they have to degrade the quality of service in order to make up for it.
These body-scanning machines have a very high cost and as long as checked luggage is not 100% screened, nor is service access to the airplane 100% screened (hell, its barely controlled at all as is) then these machines produce an ineffective increase in security. This isn't layered security, this a finger in a dike where the dike has already been completely washed away.
Or maybe its just all that Ritalin.
Did not think so.
That claim is the analysis of anyone who saw Iraq invaded and N Korea stay sovereign. You also have/had Pakistan (a neighbor) and India playing with nukes. In the end Iran would be trying to get nukes regardless of whether or not the US invaded Iraq. You seem to think its all or nothing. That either they are motivated or not. Your analysis lacks allowance for urgency. There are lots of reason to oppose the war without bringing in questionable opinions into the debate. Show me an opinion that is not questionable. There is a reason we call them opinions.