So tired of people excusing our government's behavior just because others do it. Others include Pol Pot, Idi Amin, 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, and Joseph Stalin. (No point in invoking Godwin here).
If the US is like those, where are the piles of bodies, the mass graves? What made them infamous was ultimately slaughter, cruelty, and oppression, not simply surveillance.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't that government surveillance can't be misused, but I have yet to see evidence of actual meaningful intentional abuse by the NSA. One person per year spying on a girlfriend and getting fired doesn't really make the grade. The potential is there, but not the actuality. I think it is easy to make the case for more oversight since the potential is real, and intelligence agencies are a potential source of danger in a democracy. But don't confuse the NSA for the Stasi, KGB, or what have you. It clearly isn't true, and I think I'd trod that ground enough times.
If you want to worry about demonstrated, admitted government oppression, then you need to look to the IRS and its handling of conservative political groups around the time of the last election. That is a demonstrable danger to democracy, and may have even tipped the election. That nonsense has to be rooted out now before the rot spreads.
As to the Constitution, there is no pretending about the US having a constitution. The US has one, and it seems to be working even if the results baffle some people. Much of the controversy involves people being confused about exactly how it works, particularly when there is interplay between Article II, a state of war,* the 4th Amendment, and criminal law versus national security / the law of war. People here that wouldn't fill out their own tax form regularly make sweeping statements about questions of constitutional law that they really know little about, and often get it wrong.
For further aid in disentangling the US from those examples, I suggest watching at least this trailer if not the entirety of this film - available on Amazon. It tends to be clarifying.
* Yes, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force is legally equivalent to a declaration of war. It is against al Qaida and its allies.
How bad was his first day of work at the tech-support line?
I think the worst moment must have been when they explained to him that due to a translation error he had misunderstood the job title. The job wasn't to be a "bastard operator from hell," but to be a "poor bastard operator in hell." Nooooooooo!!
On the plus side he does have Anna Chapman teasing him about marriage on Twitter, and probably has as many vodka rage fueled tech support requests as a man could ever want.
The interesting property of some of the haystacks is that they are indexed, and you have an external value to match against.
I'll also point out that since one of the major trends in industry is "big data," you might think that there are both tools to deal with it, and some useful reasons for doing so. I hear data mining was all the rage in the Obama campaign, maybe some other places as well.
Snowden seeks to set himself above the law. His actions have said all that needs to be said on his behalf outside of court. The massive document theft and leak he engaged in isn't going to be considered "dissent." He should have gone to Congress instead of fleeing. He would likely still be a free man in the US had he done so, and Congress would still be alerted to his concerns, and have an opportunity to debate them. But so far it looks like Congress still backs the intelligence agencies overall even if there may be some new restrictions in the future.
What must be worse for him is that his actions are coming back to bite him on multiple levels. Like a twilight zone episode, he managed to create in his new home what he supposedly fled from and warned about. Now it will spread.
Implementing The Snowden Open Source Intelligence Agency Architecture Toolkit
"Practically all the attention to Snowden's leaks via the Guardian have focused on the leaks through either the lens of transparency and accountability, or the lens of betrayal and danger. But there is another way to view the leaks, and that is as an Open Source milestone. Snowden's leaks have revealed the product of uncounted millions of dollars of experience and research by the governments of the US and UK into effective intelligence agency architecture, infrastructure, and methods. Now that the documents describing them are publicly available, those documents form an intelligence agency architecture toolkit that can be used to analyze and improve the intelligence operations of any group or nation that wants to use them. So far there has been at least one public announcement of a country implementing elements of the Snowden Open Source Intelligence Agency Architecture Toolkit (Snowden OSIAAT): Russia. The Russian Communications Ministry and FSB security service have paired up to produce a regulation to begin upgrading the existing SORM internal electronic intelligence system to the Snowden style standard revealed in the leaks. Previously both Germany and Finland expressed interest in upgrading and expanding their internet surveillance capabilities. Snowden OSIAAT is likely to become a widely used means to increase the power and efficiency of intelligence services world wide. By the usual measures, Snowden OSIAAT appears to be another success story in the making for open source use in government."
I have been saying for the longest time, terrorists don't need to get on the plane. Now they just need to blow them selves up getting into the security line. What then is TSA going to do? It's a cat and mouse game and unfortunately the TSA isn't going to win
Attacking a security line at an airport is a much lower value target for terrorists than being able to hijack a plane, or blow it out of the sky. If they just want to kill people, there are plenty of other places to do that at lower risk. Things like that have happened from time to time, but it's not common. It might be done as part of a hijack attempt, but otherwise attacking an airport doesn't really add much value for them.
Airport = "gun free zone," just the same as schools and malls tend to be, which is where these "events" tend to happen.
Since it was a so called "gun free zone," pretty much the only lawfully armed people there would be the police. (There are some very limited exceptions.) For some reason criminals seem to ignore both social convention and signs forbidding the bringing weapons into areas so marked. The law abiding, assuming they didn't overlook it, would disarm before entering such a place. I'm sure that someone as sharp as you can see the potential for asymmetric outcomes there.
From the Slashdot fortune on the bottom of the page: When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly. -- Donald Douglas
A defense contractor, a tea partier, and a teacher sit down to a plate of 10 cookies. The defense contractor takes 9, leans over to the tea partier, and says "psst, the teacher is trying to steal your cookie"
That joke isn't so much funny as it is weird. The goal of the Tea Party is for there to be less spending, so there would be fewer cookies to begin with. It even fails as a "guns versus butter" joke given the actual the realities of the budget.
Second thing that comes to mind is that the surge didn't work, it just happened to coincide with a change of local Iraqi politics (locals got sick of extremists killing locals instead of just americans so they started outing the extremists so the americans finally knew who to kill).
I realize that given your politics you just about have to say that, but it really isn't true. The AC that replied to you is more or less correct.
If a have a few minutes you might read this recent article from Foreign Policy.
The surge in Iraq didn't work in much the same way as the Normandy invasion didn't work in 1944, and the Germans just coincidentally decided they no longer liked beachfront properties.
Altering the location of military forces, what they do, and how they do it can have a substantial impact on outcomes.
It's worse than that. Many people thought President Obama's first election was the Second Coming. Certainly the promises were messianic. But only now after President Obama's actual 2nd coming with his reelection are some people beginning to experience their first second thoughts. Now that the media is growing far less inclined to carry water for the administration, I doubt as many people will believe that President Obama walks on water. For some, the revelations are only beginning. Turn with me now to youtube page 5yaxVYNGaUU for a stirring rendition of Jerusalem.
Taxes may very well be the price of civilization, but what those taxes are spent on may be efficient and valuable, or destructive and wasteful. They can build bridges that are needed, and in a useful place, or expensive bridges to nowhere. The ACA is proving to be badly thought out, badly implemented, justified by lies, and seems to be headed towards being a train wreck for the American people, the economy, the healthcare industry, and even the Democratic party. It is already driving many jobs out of the medical devices industry. There are other ways this 15% shortfall could have been addressed, but the party with the power decided they wanted to build another "bridge to nowhere" and now are forcing the American people over the bridge.
The article isn't full of "contradictory statements," if it was I'm sure you could quote some. The insurance companies aren't changing coverage because they want to, but because the law is forcing them to. If anyone is contradicting themselves, it is you. On one hand you want to claim that large numbers of people won't be able to stay uninsured, but your last paragraph reflects the minor penalty for noncompliance which means it will be far cheaper to stay out of insurance than sign up. The kicker is that the only way for the IRS to force you to pay the penalty tax is if they owe you a refund. Noncompliance is likely to be a huge issue since the people needed to make the numbers work are the young and healthy that often don't have insurance now - by choice. Given the low and barely enforceable penalty they are unlikely to sign up in the numbers that are needed to make the Obamacare redistribution scheme work. Planned failure?
The Spanish site has never worked, and I doubt anyone knows when it will work. Spanish speaking people in the US are one of the key underinsured groups. What can you say when a major ethnic group is essentially left out of a major government plan that is supposedly critical, that can't be delayed to make it actually work? If the administration in power was Republican, I have little doubt the epithet "racist" would get quite a workout.
It is hard to believe that just a few short weeks ago the Democrats were fighting tooth and nail to prevent any additional waivers or delays for Obamacare despite the fact that it was well known by those involved that the key IT systems weren't ready. Now they are in a panic to get delays or extensions in place to try get it working in some fashion.
As it is now, probably millions more people have been informed that their insurance policies are being canceled than have been able to sign up for Obamacare. That problem is only going to get worse as the article shows. Much, much worse in fact. Many people that were advocates of it are getting hit with sticker shock when they do sign up. This won't be pretty.
I'm happy for you that you claim to have worked your way up from poverty, that you benefited from the various safety nets, and that you have elder members of your family. But none of that is a guide to knowing if any particular plan by the government is sound and will have the intended effect. There has been more than one government program in US history that had unfortunate consequences. The ACA, aka Obamacare, seems to be heading in that direction. Will you support it regardless of how bad a train wreck it becomes when there are alternatives?
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if you do support it regardless of it becoming a massive train wreck. The one bright spot is this is for once someone in Washington clearly owns the disaster, and might see some consequences for it.
No, it was deliberate. (I double checked to make sure I was misusing it as intended.)
The AC stated, " Goddammit, we care about spelling and grammar."
So, there was an element of tweaking (as opposed to "twerking"*) in the misuse (hence the emoticon), but a slightly more serious side as well. It is entirely conventional to speak of literary allusions, but skilled authors enable us to see things not present with the mind's eye, a literary illusion, if you will. (With an allusion sometimes adding to the illusion, so to speak.) Sometimes it can be inadvertent. The story header was no doubt intended to say "cavalry," but it said "calvary." (That is unless the intent was to show they were appealing to the All Mighty to get the website fixed.) The world would be better off if more people saw Calvary rather than cavalry, so I won't condemn the usage even if it would be fun.
It reminds me of 10 years ago when the microprocessor companies finally stopped the GHz war. For several years, clock speed was a poor proxy for microprocessor performance, and Mac fans used to scream loudly (and rightly) how the IBM chips beat Intel on real-world benchmarks while Intel touted their higher speed.
Unfortunately good marketing and mindshare tends to beat technical merit in the mass market. Even dealing with experienced engineers can be a challenge if they aren't familiar with the critical aspects for performance with the work being done. In the past I've seen repeated, somewhat heated arguments that "Linux" was faster than RISC workstations. For the work being done at the time it wasn't, not even close. The PCs running Linux didn't have the memory bandwidth, and wouldn't for a couple of years. When the cost of the workstation / server is a minor fraction of the software license cost it pays to go with the faster platform. And just because you're right doesn't mean everybody is happy. Vi or emacs, mac vs PC, Linux vs BSD, RISC vs CISC, and on, and on, and on.
Slashdot Mirror
So tired of people excusing our government's behavior just because others do it.
Others include Pol Pot, Idi Amin, 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, and Joseph Stalin. (No point in invoking Godwin here).
If the US is like those, where are the piles of bodies, the mass graves? What made them infamous was ultimately slaughter, cruelty, and oppression, not simply surveillance.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't that government surveillance can't be misused, but I have yet to see evidence of actual meaningful intentional abuse by the NSA. One person per year spying on a girlfriend and getting fired doesn't really make the grade. The potential is there, but not the actuality. I think it is easy to make the case for more oversight since the potential is real, and intelligence agencies are a potential source of danger in a democracy. But don't confuse the NSA for the Stasi, KGB, or what have you. It clearly isn't true, and I think I'd trod that ground enough times.
If you want to worry about demonstrated, admitted government oppression, then you need to look to the IRS and its handling of conservative political groups around the time of the last election. That is a demonstrable danger to democracy, and may have even tipped the election. That nonsense has to be rooted out now before the rot spreads.
As to the Constitution, there is no pretending about the US having a constitution. The US has one, and it seems to be working even if the results baffle some people. Much of the controversy involves people being confused about exactly how it works, particularly when there is interplay between Article II, a state of war,* the 4th Amendment, and criminal law versus national security / the law of war. People here that wouldn't fill out their own tax form regularly make sweeping statements about questions of constitutional law that they really know little about, and often get it wrong.
For further aid in disentangling the US from those examples, I suggest watching at least this trailer if not the entirety of this film - available on Amazon. It tends to be clarifying.
* Yes, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force is legally equivalent to a declaration of war. It is against al Qaida and its allies.
You mean "lexically challenged."
The military is well into a new era of political correctness:
Pentagon’s Chief Personnel and Readiness Officer: Diversity and Inclusion Critical to Mission Success
How bad was his first day of work at the tech-support line?
I think the worst moment must have been when they explained to him that due to a translation error he had misunderstood the job title. The job wasn't to be a "bastard operator from hell," but to be a "poor bastard operator in hell." Nooooooooo!!
On the plus side he does have Anna Chapman teasing him about marriage on Twitter, and probably has as many vodka rage fueled tech support requests as a man could ever want.
The interesting property of some of the haystacks is that they are indexed, and you have an external value to match against.
I'll also point out that since one of the major trends in industry is "big data," you might think that there are both tools to deal with it, and some useful reasons for doing so. I hear data mining was all the rage in the Obama campaign, maybe some other places as well.
Snowden has a better chance of being elected President of the European Parliament than he does President of the United States.
You go, girl!
The topic is Snowden, not Manning.
Snowden seeks to set himself above the law. His actions have said all that needs to be said on his behalf outside of court. The massive document theft and leak he engaged in isn't going to be considered "dissent." He should have gone to Congress instead of fleeing. He would likely still be a free man in the US had he done so, and Congress would still be alerted to his concerns, and have an opportunity to debate them. But so far it looks like Congress still backs the intelligence agencies overall even if there may be some new restrictions in the future.
What must be worse for him is that his actions are coming back to bite him on multiple levels. Like a twilight zone episode, he managed to create in his new home what he supposedly fled from and warned about. Now it will spread.
Implementing The Snowden Open Source Intelligence Agency Architecture Toolkit
"Practically all the attention to Snowden's leaks via the Guardian have focused on the leaks through either the lens of transparency and accountability, or the lens of betrayal and danger. But there is another way to view the leaks, and that is as an Open Source milestone. Snowden's leaks have revealed the product of uncounted millions of dollars of experience and research by the governments of the US and UK into effective intelligence agency architecture, infrastructure, and methods. Now that the documents describing them are publicly available, those documents form an intelligence agency architecture toolkit that can be used to analyze and improve the intelligence operations of any group or nation that wants to use them. So far there has been at least one public announcement of a country implementing elements of the Snowden Open Source Intelligence Agency Architecture Toolkit (Snowden OSIAAT): Russia. The Russian Communications Ministry and FSB security service have paired up to produce a regulation to begin upgrading the existing SORM internal electronic intelligence system to the Snowden style standard revealed in the leaks. Previously both Germany and Finland expressed interest in upgrading and expanding their internet surveillance capabilities. Snowden OSIAAT is likely to become a widely used means to increase the power and efficiency of intelligence services world wide. By the usual measures, Snowden OSIAAT appears to be another success story in the making for open source use in government."
Nobody really cares what you do with your hair, just so long as nobody dyes - suicide blondes are right out.
I have been saying for the longest time, terrorists don't need to get on the plane. Now they just need to blow them selves up getting into the security line. What then is TSA going to do? It's a cat and mouse game and unfortunately the TSA isn't going to win
Attacking a security line at an airport is a much lower value target for terrorists than being able to hijack a plane, or blow it out of the sky. If they just want to kill people, there are plenty of other places to do that at lower risk. Things like that have happened from time to time, but it's not common. It might be done as part of a hijack attempt, but otherwise attacking an airport doesn't really add much value for them.
Airport = "gun free zone," just the same as schools and malls tend to be, which is where these "events" tend to happen.
Since it was a so called "gun free zone," pretty much the only lawfully armed people there would be the police. (There are some very limited exceptions.) For some reason criminals seem to ignore both social convention and signs forbidding the bringing weapons into areas so marked. The law abiding, assuming they didn't overlook it, would disarm before entering such a place. I'm sure that someone as sharp as you can see the potential for asymmetric outcomes there.
You may find this instructive: Clackamas mall shooter faced man with concealed weapon
From the Slashdot fortune on the bottom of the page: When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly. -- Donald Douglas
I guess the magazine articles are a good start.
incompitence
oh, the ironing is delicious!
That is too crewl.
A defense contractor, a tea partier, and a teacher sit down to a plate of 10 cookies. The defense contractor takes 9, leans over to the tea partier, and says "psst, the teacher is trying to steal your cookie"
That joke isn't so much funny as it is weird. The goal of the Tea Party is for there to be less spending, so there would be fewer cookies to begin with. It even fails as a "guns versus butter" joke given the actual the realities of the budget.
It doesn't look like it to me. It's a pity.
Second thing that comes to mind is that the surge didn't work, it just happened to coincide with a change of local Iraqi politics (locals got sick of extremists killing locals instead of just americans so they started outing the extremists so the americans finally knew who to kill).
I realize that given your politics you just about have to say that, but it really isn't true. The AC that replied to you is more or less correct.
If a have a few minutes you might read this recent article from Foreign Policy.
How We Won in Iraq - And why all the hard-won gains of the surge are in grave danger of being lost today.
The surge in Iraq didn't work in much the same way as the Normandy invasion didn't work in 1944, and the Germans just coincidentally decided they no longer liked beachfront properties.
Altering the location of military forces, what they do, and how they do it can have a substantial impact on outcomes.
Control.
It's worse than that. Many people thought President Obama's first election was the Second Coming. Certainly the promises were messianic. But only now after President Obama's actual 2nd coming with his reelection are some people beginning to experience their first second thoughts. Now that the media is growing far less inclined to carry water for the administration, I doubt as many people will believe that President Obama walks on water. For some, the revelations are only beginning. Turn with me now to youtube page 5yaxVYNGaUU for a stirring rendition of Jerusalem.
Obama speech oceans receding, planet healing
Obama came up with ObamaCare because he needed a throwaway applause line in a campaign speech
Taxes may very well be the price of civilization, but what those taxes are spent on may be efficient and valuable, or destructive and wasteful. They can build bridges that are needed, and in a useful place, or expensive bridges to nowhere. The ACA is proving to be badly thought out, badly implemented, justified by lies, and seems to be headed towards being a train wreck for the American people, the economy, the healthcare industry, and even the Democratic party. It is already driving many jobs out of the medical devices industry. There are other ways this 15% shortfall could have been addressed, but the party with the power decided they wanted to build another "bridge to nowhere" and now are forcing the American people over the bridge.
The article isn't full of "contradictory statements," if it was I'm sure you could quote some. The insurance companies aren't changing coverage because they want to, but because the law is forcing them to. If anyone is contradicting themselves, it is you. On one hand you want to claim that large numbers of people won't be able to stay uninsured, but your last paragraph reflects the minor penalty for noncompliance which means it will be far cheaper to stay out of insurance than sign up. The kicker is that the only way for the IRS to force you to pay the penalty tax is if they owe you a refund. Noncompliance is likely to be a huge issue since the people needed to make the numbers work are the young and healthy that often don't have insurance now - by choice. Given the low and barely enforceable penalty they are unlikely to sign up in the numbers that are needed to make the Obamacare redistribution scheme work. Planned failure?
The Spanish site has never worked, and I doubt anyone knows when it will work. Spanish speaking people in the US are one of the key underinsured groups. What can you say when a major ethnic group is essentially left out of a major government plan that is supposedly critical, that can't be delayed to make it actually work? If the administration in power was Republican, I have little doubt the epithet "racist" would get quite a workout.
It is hard to believe that just a few short weeks ago the Democrats were fighting tooth and nail to prevent any additional waivers or delays for Obamacare despite the fact that it was well known by those involved that the key IT systems weren't ready. Now they are in a panic to get delays or extensions in place to try get it working in some fashion.
As it is now, probably millions more people have been informed that their insurance policies are being canceled than have been able to sign up for Obamacare. That problem is only going to get worse as the article shows. Much, much worse in fact. Many people that were advocates of it are getting hit with sticker shock when they do sign up. This won't be pretty.
I'm happy for you that you claim to have worked your way up from poverty, that you benefited from the various safety nets, and that you have elder members of your family. But none of that is a guide to knowing if any particular plan by the government is sound and will have the intended effect. There has been more than one government program in US history that had unfortunate consequences. The ACA, aka Obamacare, seems to be heading in that direction. Will you support it regardless of how bad a train wreck it becomes when there are alternatives?
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if you do support it regardless of it becoming a massive train wreck. The one bright spot is this is for once someone in Washington clearly owns the disaster, and might see some consequences for it.
Poll Finds Vast Gaps in Basic Views
Touché
No, it was deliberate. (I double checked to make sure I was misusing it as intended.)
The AC stated, " Goddammit, we care about spelling and grammar."
So, there was an element of tweaking (as opposed to "twerking"*) in the misuse (hence the emoticon), but a slightly more serious side as well. It is entirely conventional to speak of literary allusions, but skilled authors enable us to see things not present with the mind's eye, a literary illusion, if you will. (With an allusion sometimes adding to the illusion, so to speak.) Sometimes it can be inadvertent. The story header was no doubt intended to say "cavalry," but it said "calvary." (That is unless the intent was to show they were appealing to the All Mighty to get the website fixed.) The world would be better off if more people saw Calvary rather than cavalry, so I won't condemn the usage even if it would be fun.
* I despise that word.
The same as the airspeed of an unladen swallow ... African ... if you must know.
It reminds me of 10 years ago when the microprocessor companies finally stopped the GHz war. For several years, clock speed was a poor proxy for microprocessor performance, and Mac fans used to scream loudly (and rightly) how the IBM chips beat Intel on real-world benchmarks while Intel touted their higher speed.
Unfortunately good marketing and mindshare tends to beat technical merit in the mass market. Even dealing with experienced engineers can be a challenge if they aren't familiar with the critical aspects for performance with the work being done. In the past I've seen repeated, somewhat heated arguments that "Linux" was faster than RISC workstations. For the work being done at the time it wasn't, not even close. The PCs running Linux didn't have the memory bandwidth, and wouldn't for a couple of years. When the cost of the workstation / server is a minor fraction of the software license cost it pays to go with the faster platform. And just because you're right doesn't mean everybody is happy. Vi or emacs, mac vs PC, Linux vs BSD, RISC vs CISC, and on, and on, and on.
Of course maybe it was a literary illusion. ;D
.... with a vengeance. And this time, its personal .... health insurance that's at stake.
At least the stakes are low. No worries.
Obama Officials In 2010: 93 Million Americans Will Be Unable To Keep Their Health Plans Under Obamacare
It's a Biblical reference -- and at this rate it would take divine intervention.
Minus that it's going to hell in a checkout basket.