They have one significant belief that differs with most of the rest of the world.
that's called insanity you fuckwit!
Apparently that is your definition of insanity. If your definition ended there, I wouldn't have a problem. But you try to draw conclusions about NK's actions that are nothing more than word association.
Tell you what, you find one person with strong academic credentials in the study of korea - not someone playing politics but rather earnest study - who has said that the government there is insane and I'll will take back everything I've said. I will swear that there is no point in attempting to understand NK's motivations or actions because being insane means there is no rationality to either.
i'm not entirely sure why you think these quotes do anything BUT demonstrate their insanity
They have one significant belief that differs with most of the rest of the world. That does not make them insane. Insanity means they behave in an irrational manner - given the basic premise of still being at war, everything they do is rational.
Your basic premise of insanity is the kind of sound-bite crap politicians dole out for rah-rah nationalism, it is both false and actively encourages further conflict. Saddam was a madman too, look how well that turned for us.
presenting the opinion of anyone on BUSH's foreign policy team as intelligence is pretty much a loser's game, don't you think?
"They've been living in this black cave for the last 50-odd years, so that, what they see of the world outside is a little bit like what Plato's people saw of the world outside the cave. But they're not crazy. Within their context, they operate in a rational fashion."
--Stephen Bosworth, US Ambassador to South Korea 1997-2000
"I think it's hard for some people to understand, in fact including me, how fearful North Korea is that they will be attacked by the United States."
Apparently you stopped reading before that, given how you ignored the opinion of Bush's most senior policy advisor on NK.
why is it so important to you to find sanity in the motivations of a regime that forces its people to eat leaves in order to devote more resources to build nuclear weapons?
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories."
that starts with the premise that north korea will only do things that are rational and make sense, and never anything stupid, is a losing argument
citation: the behavior so far of north korea
Victor Cha, former director of asian affairs in the white house security council amd top advisor on north korean affairs for Bush disagrees with you.
Most people who say things like you did don't understand that NK considers itself to still be at war - that everything they do is predicated on that belief. And it isn't wholly irrational to believe that either, we've never signed a peace treaty with them. The USA and, to a lesser extent, South Korea act like the armistice is a full-blown peace treaty, but it ain't and as far as NK is concerned fighting could break out at any time.
It is time to stop appeasing the North Koreans and take action. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed many $100s of billions to our debt, the result of wars of attrition. Our current response to North Korea continues this pattern and actually validates the North Korean threat. This has got to stop.
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, NK is capable of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people today. Seoul has a population of 10 million and is within firing range of plain old ordnance from NK. They don't need nukes, they've already got one of our biggest allies as a hostage.
None of your unilateralist fantasies are going to work given the current situation.
A lot of dorms are made out of cement, and cement is excellent for attenuating sound. But if your door doesn't close tight, then it won't make much difference.
You want to plug up every crack around the door with the most dense material you can find. Look for rubber gasket type stuff you can put in the doorjamb itself to make a tight seal and rubber "lips" you can put on the bottom to seal the crack underneath. Look for the same kind of door-sealing products meant to save energy by stopping cold air from getting in to your house. Also, If your door has a hole in it - like vents - cover them up with somethin thick and dense.
If your door is a light-weight metal or hollow-core wood door, you can try attaching heavy duty rubber sheets to the door itself. There are even some products mostly sold for automotive sound-proofing that are basically asphalt on a roll - Dynamat is one brand although it is expensive. You might just use tar-paper from the hardware store. Either way density is key, forget about fluffy foam, the more dense you can make your door the less sound will get through. Just make sure whatever you use won't out-gas into your room and give you cancer.
It takes a lot of chutzpah for you to accuse me of being misleading and then only partially quote me. What I wrote is true en toto - you can make anyone a liar by selectively quoting them.
3 hours before I need to be at work and go to the gym, and try my damned hardest not to eat the free biscuits or cakes when I get in to the office.
Unfortunately, it seems that is not enough. There have been a bunch of studies over the last decade that suggest that exercising is not good for you - rather it is all the time you spend not exercising that is bad for you.
So, an hour or two at the gym, followed by a day of sitting at a desk is nearly as unhealthy as just skipping the gym and sitting all day at a desk. It isn't the gym that makes a difference, it is the 8 hours sitting at a desk that really makes you unhealthy.
I think the label "freeloader" is a major part of the problem - it is only appropriate for talking about economies of scarcity. Where a freeloader actually consumes resources that other more "deserving" people would otherwise get.
For an economy of plenty - like free software - we need a more appropriate, more positive term to better describe what happens and to denote the positive values. The first thing that comes to my mind is "cheerleader" but there are probably better names - any suggestions?
Legal insanity is a very narrowly defined state. There are all kinds of things the lay person would consider insane that don't automatically qualify as legal insanity.
I think that is the root of the problem with this case - definition of legal insanity is so technical that enough people in the legal profession in colorado have assumed that it is mechanical -- press a 'button' in his brain and get an aswer, same way every time.
If any actual psychiatric doctors have signed off for this plan, I would expect them to be far from mainstream in their field.
'I like the assumption that employees will do the right thing,'
Does this guy actually believe that bullshit? All they've done is increase the monitoring (insert obligatory facebook derogatory tracking comment) - there is less assumption of doing the right thing in this system than there is a with a human IT department.
With a human from the IT department in the loop that human has discretion in accounting for the costs of the hardware. If he knows a group has a tight budget but really needs a replacement doohickey, he can fudge the reporting - push it to the next quarter or put on another group that's got a budget surplus. This system removes all slack.
Maybe right now while facebook is flush with cash it ain't economical to bother looking at the reports from these vending machines beyond crazy outliers that would indicate fraud. But when budgets get tight, this system has the potential to be be far more rigid than one with that extra layer of humans in it.
This way may be a good thing, but lying about its strengths is not a good sign. Don't roofie me and call it romance...
I note I was down-nodded for an honest statement of opinion. It looks like a lot of people on/. approve of Big Brother.
I don't think they necessarily approve of big brother, but rather they have a mechanistic view of the universe and have picked a certain set of nerd-attractive rules to define their view of the universe. Those rules tend to have big brother as an end-game.
I say that because I used to have that sort of viewpoint myself, but the end result convinced me that maybe I should re-evaluate my opinion of the universe. Took me 15+ years to get to that conclusion, so I am not surprised that many of my fellow slashdotters have not (yet) made a similar conclusion.
It ain't all that different from having their likeness carved as a statue or even naming an airport or highway after the person. It is the same instinct at work. I think they are all excessive though.
It's hard to believe that he could really be that oblivious to how the real world works. The messages he sent from Bolivia where he talks about the value of cocaine, and evading authorities, don't help his case, either.
My impression of the story the author was telling is that the guy really was catfished, but he knew he was a drug mule. He just thought that muling was something he needed to do for the woman, to prove his love or to provide a comfortable life for her, something along those lines. He also thought that he was smarter than the cops and that if he got caught, he would be able to get off by pretending to have been fooled.
The guy probably never dealt with the legal system before, much less criminal legal system in a 3rd world country, and had the typical nerd belief that it was all just a system of rules, like theoretical physics or computer programming, and if he could just set up the 'equations' the right way the result would be the outcome he expected (I think the author hinted at that when she focused on his statements about how great it would be to have his theoretical predictions validated by a real experiment.)
Now, that is the story I think the author was telling, who knows how true that is to what really happened.
So, on the matter of using passive IR to examine somebody's home from off of their property,
So your example is the opposite of what you've been claiming. It is legal for a private citizen to use thermal imaging on a house, but it ain't for the cops. I understand you think it should be illegal, but it ain't. And the reason is that the 4th amendment, like the constitution in general, is about defining (and restricting) the government's powers not the people's.
It's my contention that things which require a warrant for law enforcement to do should not be legal for *ANYONE* to do without appropriate authorization.
The place we are now is that you think what is legal for private citizens to do should be defined by what the police are allowed to do. That belief is completely at odds with the design of the american legal system where there are two separate approaches:
for citizens - everything not explicitly forbidden is permitted for the state - everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden
Tying one to the other violates those basic principles.
I read everything you wrote five times and I do not see a distinction, although I do see a couple of massive run on sentences that gave me headaches trying to parse.
To readdress the church example, I have never meant to suggest that the government tracking attendance at a church is not necessarily a big deal. I *AM*, however, suggesting that it should be considered exactly as big a deal when a private person does it who is completely unknown to the church.
Yes, I know you are saying they are the same thing, They aren't the same thing. You asked for me to show how the government doing it "poses a greater danger" than a private citizen and I pointed out how COINTELPRO was something that a mere group of private citizens could not pull off.
But you seem to keep thinking that I am somehow suggesting that the government should be able to do absolutely anything a private citizen can, and vice versa, when that's never been anything remotely like what I'm saying.
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
You did indeed write convoluted statements like "I'm suggesting that anything that any private person can freely do which the state *CAN* also potentially legally do should not somehow require the state to obtain a warrant first." Which, all denials notwithstanding, if it doesn't mean the state can do anything a private citizen can do, then I sure don't know what it means. Maybe you could provide a straight-forward example. Bet you can't, emphasis on the straight-forward part.
I addressed the example you gave of the government collecting church records without a warrant, suggesting it was just as concerning if a private person who had no affiliation with a church doing it without any previous authorization as it would be someone from the state.
And that was an utterly ridiculous rebuttal as COINTELPRO was a freaking HUGE deal, enormously destructive to american civil rights. No mere group of private citizens could have pulled that off.
It's like you have no concept of the state's ability to abuse power. Either that or you really are stuck on "its assinine" and everything else you say is just rationalization.
In either case, you obviously can't hold them accountable for the action until they try to utilize the data so gathered, unless you endorse 24/7 monitoring of the entire population.
God, there are so many things wrong with that. Just for starters:
(1) I am not in anyway suggesting that regular citizens should be monitored 24x7 - my entire argument is basically the opposite of that. Trying to put such random bogosity into my mouth suggests that you don't have a coherent understanding of the issues, that you are just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something will stick.
(2) "You can't hold them accountable until they use it" is no less true for pretty much anything covert which already requires a warrant. When a covert police action is illegal, it is crystal clear to anyone within the organization that the law is being broken, that means either 100% corruption in the force or the bad actors have much less access to state resources to pull off their abuse because they can't just be open about it. This is because warrants are about oversight, not permission.
It really makes no sense since the state could just as easily collect such information from anybody who was willing to volunteer it.
Even with an example that was widespread and not correctedable by the courts, an example that you can't articulate a response to, you are hung up on this irrelevant point. I guess that means there is no point.
Slashdot Mirror
They have one significant belief that differs with most of the rest of the world.
that's called insanity you fuckwit!
Apparently that is your definition of insanity. If your definition ended there, I wouldn't have a problem. But you try to draw conclusions about NK's actions that are nothing more than word association.
Tell you what, you find one person with strong academic credentials in the study of korea - not someone playing politics but rather earnest study - who has said that the government there is insane and I'll will take back everything I've said. I will swear that there is no point in attempting to understand NK's motivations or actions because being insane means there is no rationality to either.
Go ahead punk, make my day.
i'm not entirely sure why you think these quotes do anything BUT demonstrate their insanity
They have one significant belief that differs with most of the rest of the world. That does not make them insane. Insanity means they behave in an irrational manner - given the basic premise of still being at war, everything they do is rational.
Your basic premise of insanity is the kind of sound-bite crap politicians dole out for rah-rah nationalism, it is both false and actively encourages further conflict. Saddam was a madman too, look how well that turned for us.
presenting the opinion of anyone on BUSH's foreign policy team as intelligence is pretty much a loser's game, don't you think?
"They've been living in this black cave for the last 50-odd years, so that, what they see of the world outside is a little bit like what Plato's people saw of the world outside the cave. But they're not crazy. Within their context, they operate in a rational fashion."
--Stephen Bosworth, US Ambassador to South Korea 1997-2000
"I think it's hard for some people to understand, in fact including me, how fearful North Korea is that they will be attacked by the United States."
--Jimmy Carter
Many of the companies went bankrupt quickly after getting the federal money and none of them produced anything usable.
Err, no. The DOE loan program is actually performing better than congress expected when they created it in 2005. I'm willing to bet that you don't even know the name of one other company that received a DOE loan besides the three you've mentioned. As usual, reality is more complicated than sound-bites.
i stopped reading there
Apparently you stopped reading before that, given how you ignored the opinion of Bush's most senior policy advisor on NK.
why is it so important to you to find sanity in the motivations of a regime that forces its people to eat leaves in order to devote more resources to build nuclear weapons?
"Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories."
that starts with the premise that north korea will only do things that are rational and make sense, and never anything stupid, is a losing argument
citation: the behavior so far of north korea
Victor Cha, former director of asian affairs in the white house security council amd top advisor on north korean affairs for Bush disagrees with you.
Most people who say things like you did don't understand that NK considers itself to still be at war - that everything they do is predicated on that belief. And it isn't wholly irrational to believe that either, we've never signed a peace treaty with them. The USA and, to a lesser extent, South Korea act like the armistice is a full-blown peace treaty, but it ain't and as far as NK is concerned fighting could break out at any time.
It is time to stop appeasing the North Koreans and take action. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed many $100s of billions to our debt, the result of wars of attrition. Our current response to North Korea continues this pattern and actually validates the North Korean threat. This has got to stop.
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, NK is capable of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people today. Seoul has a population of 10 million and is within firing range of plain old ordnance from NK. They don't need nukes, they've already got one of our biggest allies as a hostage.
None of your unilateralist fantasies are going to work given the current situation.
A lot of dorms are made out of cement, and cement is excellent for attenuating sound. But if your door doesn't close tight, then it won't make much difference.
You want to plug up every crack around the door with the most dense material you can find. Look for rubber gasket type stuff you can put in the doorjamb itself to make a tight seal and rubber "lips" you can put on the bottom to seal the crack underneath. Look for the same kind of door-sealing products meant to save energy by stopping cold air from getting in to your house. Also, If your door has a hole in it - like vents - cover them up with somethin thick and dense.
If your door is a light-weight metal or hollow-core wood door, you can try attaching heavy duty rubber sheets to the door itself. There are even some products mostly sold for automotive sound-proofing that are basically asphalt on a roll - Dynamat is one brand although it is expensive. You might just use tar-paper from the hardware store. Either way density is key, forget about fluffy foam, the more dense you can make your door the less sound will get through. Just make sure whatever you use won't out-gas into your room and give you cancer.
It takes a lot of chutzpah for you to accuse me of being misleading and then only partially quote me. What I wrote is true en toto - you can make anyone a liar by selectively quoting them.
There is no contradiction. I chose my wording to be alarming to the casual reader but still technically true so that people would take notice.
3 hours before I need to be at work and go to the gym, and try my damned hardest not to eat the free biscuits or cakes when I get in to the office.
Unfortunately, it seems that is not enough. There have been a bunch of studies over the last decade that suggest that exercising is not good for you - rather it is all the time you spend not exercising that is bad for you.
So, an hour or two at the gym, followed by a day of sitting at a desk is nearly as unhealthy as just skipping the gym and sitting all day at a desk. It isn't the gym that makes a difference, it is the 8 hours sitting at a desk that really makes you unhealthy.
Here's info on one such study, there are tons more.
http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/09/16431050-obesity-expert-says-daily-workouts-cant-undo-damage-done-from-sitting-all-day
I think the label "freeloader" is a major part of the problem - it is only appropriate for talking about economies of scarcity. Where a freeloader actually consumes resources that other more "deserving" people would otherwise get.
For an economy of plenty - like free software - we need a more appropriate, more positive term to better describe what happens and to denote the positive values. The first thing that comes to my mind is "cheerleader" but there are probably better names - any suggestions?
> He obviously has to be insane
Legal insanity is a very narrowly defined state. There are all kinds of things the lay person would consider insane that don't automatically qualify as legal insanity.
I think that is the root of the problem with this case - definition of legal insanity is so technical that enough people in the legal profession in colorado have assumed that it is mechanical -- press a 'button' in his brain and get an aswer, same way every time.
If any actual psychiatric doctors have signed off for this plan, I would expect them to be far from mainstream in their field.
'I like the assumption that employees will do the right thing,'
Does this guy actually believe that bullshit? All they've done is increase the monitoring (insert obligatory facebook derogatory tracking comment) - there is less assumption of doing the right thing in this system than there is a with a human IT department.
With a human from the IT department in the loop that human has discretion in accounting for the costs of the hardware. If he knows a group has a tight budget but really needs a replacement doohickey, he can fudge the reporting - push it to the next quarter or put on another group that's got a budget surplus. This system removes all slack.
Maybe right now while facebook is flush with cash it ain't economical to bother looking at the reports from these vending machines beyond crazy outliers that would indicate fraud. But when budgets get tight, this system has the potential to be be far more rigid than one with that extra layer of humans in it.
This way may be a good thing, but lying about its strengths is not a good sign. Don't roofie me and call it romance...
there is nothing bigotry about it,
Sure... What, do you think that bigots ever admit to being bigoted?
Of course you believe your own bullshit, that's why you are a bigot.
Bigot fight, woo-hoo!
So, we are going to handle the physical sanctions and the Iranian government is going to handle the internet sanctions. Sounds like a great plan!
I note I was down-nodded for an honest statement of opinion. It looks like a lot of people on /. approve of Big Brother.
I don't think they necessarily approve of big brother, but rather they have a mechanistic view of the universe and have picked a certain set of nerd-attractive rules to define their view of the universe. Those rules tend to have big brother as an end-game.
I say that because I used to have that sort of viewpoint myself, but the end result convinced me that maybe I should re-evaluate my opinion of the universe. Took me 15+ years to get to that conclusion, so I am not surprised that many of my fellow slashdotters have not (yet) made a similar conclusion.
It ain't all that different from having their likeness carved as a statue or even naming an airport or highway after the person. It is the same instinct at work. I think they are all excessive though.
It's hard to believe that he could really be that oblivious to how the real world works. The messages he sent from Bolivia where he talks about the value of cocaine, and evading authorities, don't help his case, either.
My impression of the story the author was telling is that the guy really was catfished, but he knew he was a drug mule. He just thought that muling was something he needed to do for the woman, to prove his love or to provide a comfortable life for her, something along those lines. He also thought that he was smarter than the cops and that if he got caught, he would be able to get off by pretending to have been fooled.
The guy probably never dealt with the legal system before, much less criminal legal system in a 3rd world country, and had the typical nerd belief that it was all just a system of rules, like theoretical physics or computer programming, and if he could just set up the 'equations' the right way the result would be the outcome he expected (I think the author hinted at that when she focused on his statements about how great it would be to have his theoretical predictions validated by a real experiment.)
Now, that is the story I think the author was telling, who knows how true that is to what really happened.
So, on the matter of using passive IR to examine somebody's home from off of their property,
So your example is the opposite of what you've been claiming. It is legal for a private citizen to use thermal imaging on a house, but it ain't for the cops. I understand you think it should be illegal, but it ain't. And the reason is that the 4th amendment, like the constitution in general, is about defining (and restricting) the government's powers not the people's.
It's my contention that things which require a warrant for law enforcement to do should not be legal for *ANYONE* to do without appropriate authorization.
The place we are now is that you think what is legal for private citizens to do should be defined by what the police are allowed to do. That belief is completely at odds with the design of the american legal system where there are two separate approaches:
for citizens - everything not explicitly forbidden is permitted
for the state - everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden
Tying one to the other violates those basic principles.
I read everything you wrote five times and I do not see a distinction, although I do see a couple of massive run on sentences that gave me headaches trying to parse.
Again, I ask for a straight-forward example.
To readdress the church example, I have never meant to suggest that the government tracking attendance at a church is not necessarily a big deal. I *AM*, however, suggesting that it should be considered exactly as big a deal when a private person does it who is completely unknown to the church.
Yes, I know you are saying they are the same thing, They aren't the same thing. You asked for me to show how the government doing it "poses a greater danger" than a private citizen and I pointed out how COINTELPRO was something that a mere group of private citizens could not pull off.
But you seem to keep thinking that I am somehow suggesting that the government should be able to do absolutely anything a private citizen can, and vice versa, when that's never been anything remotely like what I'm saying.
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
You did indeed write convoluted statements like "I'm suggesting that anything that any private person can freely do which the state *CAN* also potentially legally do should not somehow require the state to obtain a warrant first." Which, all denials notwithstanding, if it doesn't mean the state can do anything a private citizen can do, then I sure don't know what it means. Maybe you could provide a straight-forward example. Bet you can't, emphasis on the straight-forward part.
I addressed the example you gave of the government collecting church records without a warrant, suggesting it was just as concerning if a private person who had no affiliation with a church doing it without any previous authorization as it would be someone from the state.
And that was an utterly ridiculous rebuttal as COINTELPRO was a freaking HUGE deal, enormously destructive to american civil rights. No mere group of private citizens could have pulled that off.
It's like you have no concept of the state's ability to abuse power. Either that or you really are stuck on "its assinine" and everything else you say is just rationalization.
In either case, you obviously can't hold them accountable for the action until they try to utilize the data so gathered, unless you endorse 24/7 monitoring of the entire population.
God, there are so many things wrong with that. Just for starters:
(1) I am not in anyway suggesting that regular citizens should be monitored 24x7 - my entire argument is basically the opposite of that. Trying to put such random bogosity into my mouth suggests that you don't have a coherent understanding of the issues, that you are just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something will stick.
(2) "You can't hold them accountable until they use it" is no less true for pretty much anything covert which already requires a warrant. When a covert police action is illegal, it is crystal clear to anyone within the organization that the law is being broken, that means either 100% corruption in the force or the bad actors have much less access to state resources to pull off their abuse because they can't just be open about it. This is because warrants are about oversight, not permission.
It really makes no sense since the state could just as easily collect such information from anybody who was willing to volunteer it.
Even with an example that was widespread and not correctedable by the courts, an example that you can't articulate a response to, you are hung up on this irrelevant point. I guess that means there is no point.