Ah, so you are one of those self-serving christians who thinks that lawyering around the rules to suit your purposes is perfectly fine. Like "thou shalt not kill" only means "thou shalt not murder" or "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" was really just referring to a little door in the gates to jerusalem called an "eye of the needle."
If it is somehow a violation of civil rights for law enforcement to do it without a warrant, then it follows that it should be an equal violation of civil rights if some other private person
As a general principle that is completely false. There are multitudes of things that private citizens can do which would be a violation of civil rights of the state did it. I've already given you the example of firing employees for speech.
Enforcement of such an issue would come into play if or whenever such information ever gets used.... ust as it would if or when law enforcement obtains information that they ordinarily could not without a warrant... where usually the evidence is simply inadmissible in a court case
That's just terribly naive. Harassment by law enforcement does not need to end up in court, in fact they probably prefer it doesn't so that they don't have to worry about accountability. Watch lists are the modern version. The FBI implemented COINTELPRO precisely because they knew that no court would convict the people they were targeting, so they took it into their own hands by abusing the power of the state. The fact that so much of the ground-work for that abuse was completely legal made it all that much easier.
You act as if warrants are something intended to stop police from doing specific things. They are not. The purpose of a warrant is to inject oversight of the process, to put a disinterested party in the chain to prevent the abuse of power.
I can't begin to see how any extra power that the state has would give them any particular advantage in that matter, nor how it would negatively impact citizenry in any more significant way,
Your phrasing is interesting - "give them any particularl advantage" - it isn't about giving the state an advantage because they already have one by virtue of being the state. It is about preventing abuse of that advantage.
As for an example - warrantless infiltration of church meetings and civil-rights groups was SOP for COINTELPRO. A practice that was officially banned until the PATRIOT act. After which they started doing it again, putting 100% inncocent people on terrorist watch lists as a result.
As you said, law enforcement would be unreasonable to do that, yet they have a long history of doing it.
YOU: Since regular people can do it, it is stupid for government agents not to be allowed to do it.
ME: That is irrelevant. The government is far more powerful than a regular person and therefore requires far more oversight than a regular person.
As for examples, now that you are demanding one for the first time, does that mean if I give it to you, you will acquiesce? Or will you try to lawyer it away no matter what the example is?
Everything else you wrote is just circular reasoning to avoid the issue that the state is exceptionally more powerful than private citizensn and thus must be regulated more heavily than private citizens.
I will agree with you on one thing - if the cops can do it without a warrant then anyone should be free to do it. But on the other side of that range - when operating under the color of authority the police can and should be more highly regulated than the average citizen.
Cops being citizens makes no difference as to regulations that apply to them when on the job. Just like a private employer can fire employees for legal speech, but government employees can not be so fired.
Do you really think it need to be referer free? I can't imagine anyone reading this story, and then thinking: Hey I need to buy this game now:}
Amazon referrals are a lot more tricky than that. When you load an amazon page with a referral code it sets a cookie on your system that lasts for something like 24 hours. Any purchases you make while that referral cookie is active send cash to the original referrer (and amazon also gives them a report on what you bought, but not your identity, at least not directly) -- even if you never actually purchase the original item.
That's why some websites will do annoying things like make every image clickable as a referral link to amazon, making it much easier to accidentally click a link so that if 12 hours later you buy something unrelated at Amazon, the referrer still gets the cash.
then that private person could just as easily submit what they happened to discover as evidence to law enforcement of something they believe to be suspicious,
The difference is that if it is a person deciding to do it, as a person they do not have the force of the state behind them.
For example, when the state decides to do something like secretly record the identies of people attending church they do it because they already have an agenda and they have power to follow through with that agenda. If a group of private citizens decides to secretly record the identies of people attending church and then hands that information over to the state, the state will ignore it because it ain't a crime to attend church.
I hope your immediate response is not to say "but the state wouldn't record the identities of people attending church either" because that would mean there are a lot more dimensions to this issue than you have considered.
It makes absolutely no sense to me to allow private citizens to legally do something without restriction that law enforcement can't do without a warrant.
It should make sense - the state is not a person, just like corps are not people and should not necessarily have equal rights. The state serves the people and thus shoudl be constrained as the people see fit. If the people decided that the state can't do some things that normal people could do, then that's fine because the state only exists as the whim of the people.
The murderer went to prison for his crime, yet you still judge him. Sad.
You are the one who defined him by his crime. I think you need to re-evaluate who is doing the judging here. The only person I judged was a murderer, for being a murderer. You on the other hand summarized this person you claim to know and be friends with as nothing more than a murderer.
Don't try and pull that false sanctimony shit. It is always the holier than thou types who are the lowest. And yeah, I'm judging you for hypocrisy.
This is actually an interesting phenomenon. On first impression it seems to indicate a growing acceptance of homosexuality among scriptwriters, producers, and sponsors, but then you notice that the gay dude is always provide for comic relief.
In a sitcom, everybody is there to provide comic relief.
Putting your peepee in somebody's but is kind of weird.
Not really, the human butt has a very high density of nerve-endings probably top 2 or 3 in body - on par with the vagina. Unless you think those nerves are there just to feel the burn when you eat spicy food, it seems like god made butts for sex too.
I don't know Minnesota's local laws, but if they are like California (also a at-will) state, the company has to pay extra unemployment taxes for every person that makes a unemployment claim. If the employee quits, the company doesn't have to pay those extra taxes.
Correct, un-employment insurance has a federal component that is the same everywhere. There are state components but they tend to vary in the taxation percentage not the reasons for collecting it.
Also, every state in the union is "at-will" with only minor differences in the details. OP probably confused at-will with right-to-work which is the legal principle that an employer can not force an employee to join a union as a prerequisite for being hired. Right-to-work doesn't really apply here either, but it is really common for people to mix up at-will and right-to-work.
Later in the story, Anton has *gasp* married. No, not to a man, but to a woman. In fact he is going to be a father. He is happy, talkative, and engaging. He mentions in passing that his homosexual tendancies have made his marriage harder but that with work they are able to get through it and live a full and happy life.
That is actually mainstream thought within religion-based anti-gay groups. It is their implementation of "hate the sin, love the sinner" - it is OK to be gay as long as you never act on it. Kind of like staying celibate until marriage except you never get married.
There are a lot of religious people trying to live that way - it comes down to a choice for them, they can repress their sexuality and live in a supportive community or they can accept their sexuality and be cast out all alone. For them they do not perceive it as a bunch of sanctimonious jerks repressing them, instead it is a choice between keeping the life they've spent decades building or giving that up for what may or may not turn out to be a life with more inner peace. It is not an easy choice - both options have major pros and cons.
I haven't read much, if any, of Card's books in the last two decades, so I don't really know any of the context of this Anton character. But I have to wonder if he is at least a little bit autobiographical - expressing an ideal that Card is trying to live up to himself.
I would like to believe that the police can always be trusted, but they are no more or less trustworthy than the general public.
I don't think that is true. Police are a self-selected group, it would be very unlikely that they would have the same distribution of trustworthiness as the general public, although I think reasonable arguments can be made for why police as a group would be biased in either direction.
All it looks like to me is a $100M SQL Server project for Microsoft, secured by the former CEO for his friends back at the home office.
Which is one of many reasons why the team-up between Gates and Buffet to create the largest charitable organization in the world (I believe it is an order of magnitude better funded than the second runner up) is a dangerous thing. Not just because it is a way to funnel money into Microsoft, but mainly because it puts so much control of so much charitable work into the hands of such a small group of people. Even if you like how Gates thinks, it still means that the blindspots of those people become blindspots that will dominate the field of charitable work.
WRT lessons learned: Don't deal with wikileaks. Deal with proper news outlets carefully. Don't deal with shady 3rd parties over IRC. Do everything you can to stay "on the level", lest you become the story, instead of what you're trying to report.
Which is exactly the lesson the government wants you to take away from this situation. Do not go against the establishment or the establishment will make an example of you.
Steve Biko, Victoria Mxenge, Neil Agget and tens of thousands more all paid an even higher price for going against the establishment.
I think he does get it, he even acknowledged that the IT group has a limited budget. I think he's just too much of a sociopath to care about anything beyond his own priorities, it must suck to have to work with him.
Right now it's brand new and much-hyped, we could easily be dealing with a case of regression to the mean. Let's see how the numbers looks 6 months down the road.
I see. You object to people using the tool that they know how to use, and insist they use your preferred tool instead. That's pretty typical of IT Admin types.
No, I don't think you really do see. He told a story about some people at a university who wanted the IT department to support a unique one-off system, the IT department said no. I guess they could have said yes and handed them a bill for all of the extra overhead involved, but the result would probably have been the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, so you are one of those self-serving christians who thinks that lawyering around the rules to suit your purposes is perfectly fine. Like "thou shalt not kill" only means "thou shalt not murder" or "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" was really just referring to a little door in the gates to jerusalem called an "eye of the needle."
If it is somehow a violation of civil rights for law enforcement to do it without a warrant, then it follows that it should be an equal violation of civil rights if some other private person
As a general principle that is completely false. There are multitudes of things that private citizens can do which would be a violation of civil rights of the state did it. I've already given you the example of firing employees for speech.
Enforcement of such an issue would come into play if or whenever such information ever gets used.... ust as it would if or when law enforcement obtains information that they ordinarily could not without a warrant... where usually the evidence is simply inadmissible in a court case
That's just terribly naive. Harassment by law enforcement does not need to end up in court, in fact they probably prefer it doesn't so that they don't have to worry about accountability. Watch lists are the modern version. The FBI implemented COINTELPRO precisely because they knew that no court would convict the people they were targeting, so they took it into their own hands by abusing the power of the state. The fact that so much of the ground-work for that abuse was completely legal made it all that much easier.
You act as if warrants are something intended to stop police from doing specific things. They are not. The purpose of a warrant is to inject oversight of the process, to put a disinterested party in the chain to prevent the abuse of power.
I can't begin to see how any extra power that the state has would give them any particular advantage in that matter, nor how it would negatively impact citizenry in any more significant way,
Your phrasing is interesting - "give them any particularl advantage" - it isn't about giving the state an advantage because they already have one by virtue of being the state. It is about preventing abuse of that advantage.
As for an example - warrantless infiltration of church meetings and civil-rights groups was SOP for COINTELPRO. A practice that was officially banned until the PATRIOT act. After which they started doing it again, putting 100% inncocent people on terrorist watch lists as a result.
As you said, law enforcement would be unreasonable to do that, yet they have a long history of doing it.
YOU: Since regular people can do it, it is stupid for government agents not to be allowed to do it.
ME: That is irrelevant. The government is far more powerful than a regular person and therefore requires far more oversight than a regular person.
As for examples, now that you are demanding one for the first time, does that mean if I give it to you, you will acquiesce? Or will you try to lawyer it away no matter what the example is?
Reasonably, neither would law enforcement...
That is precisely response I warned about.
Everything else you wrote is just circular reasoning to avoid the issue that the state is exceptionally more powerful than private citizensn and thus must be regulated more heavily than private citizens.
I will agree with you on one thing - if the cops can do it without a warrant then anyone should be free to do it. But on the other side of that range - when operating under the color of authority the police can and should be more highly regulated than the average citizen.
Cops being citizens makes no difference as to regulations that apply to them when on the job. Just like a private employer can fire employees for legal speech, but government employees can not be so fired.
Do you really think it need to be referer free? I can't imagine anyone reading this story, and then thinking: Hey I need to buy this game now :}
Amazon referrals are a lot more tricky than that. When you load an amazon page with a referral code it sets a cookie on your system that lasts for something like 24 hours. Any purchases you make while that referral cookie is active send cash to the original referrer (and amazon also gives them a report on what you bought, but not your identity, at least not directly) -- even if you never actually purchase the original item.
That's why some websites will do annoying things like make every image clickable as a referral link to amazon, making it much easier to accidentally click a link so that if 12 hours later you buy something unrelated at Amazon, the referrer still gets the cash.
then that private person could just as easily submit what they happened to discover as evidence to law enforcement of something they believe to be suspicious,
The difference is that if it is a person deciding to do it, as a person they do not have the force of the state behind them.
For example, when the state decides to do something like secretly record the identies of people attending church they do it because they already have an agenda and they have power to follow through with that agenda. If a group of private citizens decides to secretly record the identies of people attending church and then hands that information over to the state, the state will ignore it because it ain't a crime to attend church.
I hope your immediate response is not to say "but the state wouldn't record the identities of people attending church either" because that would mean there are a lot more dimensions to this issue than you have considered.
It makes absolutely no sense to me to allow private citizens to legally do something without restriction that law enforcement can't do without a warrant.
It should make sense - the state is not a person, just like corps are not people and should not necessarily have equal rights. The state serves the people and thus shoudl be constrained as the people see fit. If the people decided that the state can't do some things that normal people could do, then that's fine because the state only exists as the whim of the people.
LOL, nice try, buddy, all I judged was your words. You judged ME.
Do you really believe that "judging words" is not the same as judging the person for speaking those words? That is a convenient hypocrisy.
The murderer went to prison for his crime, yet you still judge him. Sad.
You are the one who defined him by his crime. I think you need to re-evaluate who is doing the judging here. The only person I judged was a murderer, for being a murderer. You on the other hand summarized this person you claim to know and be friends with as nothing more than a murderer.
Don't try and pull that false sanctimony shit. It is always the holier than thou types who are the lowest. And yeah, I'm judging you for hypocrisy.
another its a random gay dude in every sitcom
This is actually an interesting phenomenon. On first impression it seems to indicate a growing acceptance of homosexuality among scriptwriters, producers, and sponsors, but then you notice that the gay dude is always provide for comic relief.
In a sitcom, everybody is there to provide comic relief.
Putting your peepee in somebody's but is kind of weird.
Not really, the human butt has a very high density of nerve-endings probably top 2 or 3 in body - on par with the vagina. Unless you think those nerves are there just to feel the burn when you eat spicy food, it seems like god made butts for sex too.
I don't know Minnesota's local laws, but if they are like California (also a at-will) state, the company has to pay extra unemployment taxes for every person that makes a unemployment claim. If the employee quits, the company doesn't have to pay those extra taxes.
Correct, un-employment insurance has a federal component that is the same everywhere. There are state components but they tend to vary in the taxation percentage not the reasons for collecting it.
Also, every state in the union is "at-will" with only minor differences in the details. OP probably confused at-will with right-to-work which is the legal principle that an employer can not force an employee to join a union as a prerequisite for being hired. Right-to-work doesn't really apply here either, but it is really common for people to mix up at-will and right-to-work.
Hell, I'm a fan of Queen. I'm friends with gays, atheists, hell, at least one murderer.
One of these is not like the others.
Later in the story, Anton has *gasp* married. No, not to a man, but to a woman. In fact he is going to be a father. He is happy, talkative, and engaging. He mentions in passing that his homosexual tendancies have made his marriage harder but that with work they are able to get through it and live a full and happy life.
That is actually mainstream thought within religion-based anti-gay groups. It is their implementation of "hate the sin, love the sinner" - it is OK to be gay as long as you never act on it. Kind of like staying celibate until marriage except you never get married.
There are a lot of religious people trying to live that way - it comes down to a choice for them, they can repress their sexuality and live in a supportive community or they can accept their sexuality and be cast out all alone. For them they do not perceive it as a bunch of sanctimonious jerks repressing them, instead it is a choice between keeping the life they've spent decades building or giving that up for what may or may not turn out to be a life with more inner peace. It is not an easy choice - both options have major pros and cons.
I haven't read much, if any, of Card's books in the last two decades, so I don't really know any of the context of this Anton character. But I have to wonder if he is at least a little bit autobiographical - expressing an ideal that Card is trying to live up to himself.
I would like to believe that the police can always be trusted, but they are no more or less trustworthy than the general public.
I don't think that is true. Police are a self-selected group, it would be very unlikely that they would have the same distribution of trustworthiness as the general public, although I think reasonable arguments can be made for why police as a group would be biased in either direction.
All it looks like to me is a $100M SQL Server project for Microsoft, secured by the former CEO for his friends back at the home office.
Which is one of many reasons why the team-up between Gates and Buffet to create the largest charitable organization in the world (I believe it is an order of magnitude better funded than the second runner up) is a dangerous thing. Not just because it is a way to funnel money into Microsoft, but mainly because it puts so much control of so much charitable work into the hands of such a small group of people. Even if you like how Gates thinks, it still means that the blindspots of those people become blindspots that will dominate the field of charitable work.
Or, being forced to be interrogated by a woman who refuses to cover her head is torture, right?
So that's what they at SERE training. Who would have guessed?
It's so they can see that it doesn't actually result in harm, that it's not actual going to kill them, scar them, or anything like that.
So, it isn't torture for any definition of torture that only includes permanent physical damage. Got it.
WRT lessons learned: Don't deal with wikileaks. Deal with proper news outlets carefully. Don't deal with shady 3rd parties over IRC. Do everything you can to stay "on the level", lest you become the story, instead of what you're trying to report.
Which is exactly the lesson the government wants you to take away from this situation.
Do not go against the establishment or the establishment will make an example of you.
Steve Biko, Victoria Mxenge, Neil Agget and tens of thousands more all paid an even higher price for going against the establishment.
What a relief, then, that the same waterboarding that thousands of US troops voluntarily go through so they see that it's not torture
Yes, those troops volunteer to be waterboarded so that they will see that waterboarding is not torture. That's totally why they do it.
I think he does get it, he even acknowledged that the IT group has a limited budget. I think he's just too much of a sociopath to care about anything beyond his own priorities, it must suck to have to work with him.
Right now it's brand new and much-hyped, we could easily be dealing with a case of regression to the mean.
Let's see how the numbers looks 6 months down the road.
I'm happy to see the old business models die. its a bit of cosmic justice or pay-back, if you will.
If only it were - at 90% gross margin and nearly zero capital investment in the future it is the cablecos turned ISPs that are getting even richer on the new business models.
I see. You object to people using the tool that they know how to use, and insist they use your preferred tool instead. That's pretty typical of IT Admin types.
No, I don't think you really do see. He told a story about some people at a university who wanted the IT department to support a unique one-off system, the IT department said no. I guess they could have said yes and handed them a bill for all of the extra overhead involved, but the result would probably have been the same.