If Manning leaked the data and WikiLeaks published it, there is a strong precedent for the actions of WikiLeaks to be protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom.
IF however, the prosecution can "prove" that Julian Assange or whomever encouraged or participated in the leak, they could be prosecuted as an accessory.
This is why the US government has been subjecting Manning to cruel and inhumane conditions for so long. I wonder if he has held fast, or if they have finally broken his resolve and coerced him into implicating WikiLeaks as being party to the theft?
Got up about 5:30, took a shower, shaved, made coffee, ate breakfast. Got to the polls shortly after 7:00 AM when they opened. Voted in absolutely meaningless Presidential, Congressional and Senatorial election. Took about 40 minutes, including the wait, and the time I had to spend driving out of my way to get to the polls.
Got delayed by unusually heavy traffic, both because of the polls and because I'm usually on the roads much earlier.
Thank $deity this will be over soon and we can eradicate people's hopes of any positive change through the electoral process.
The cops were not "already in the house", they did not have a warrant, nor were they invited it. They walked fido past the door, said that he detected drugs, and then kicked down the door claiming that they had "probable cause".
If they had evidence to indicate that this person was a drug dealer, they should have gone to the courts and gotten a warrant.
This was not a public place, it was the guy's home.
"Marking is typically done either by the dog freezing and pointing with the nose, or sitting down."
Behavior that could be taught as a trained response to any number of stimuli, including a voice command. The point being that officer friendly could trigger that same response with or without drugs being present.
"it's not just a matter of a 'trained' officer having an 'opinion' about if the dog found something."
You can't cross-examine the dog, so it is entirely a matter of the officer interpreting the dog's response.
"In the rest of the world, justice comes before anything else"
Cops kicking in someone's door with guns drawn, traumatizing everyone inside and then putting the residents in a jail cell because someone burned a plant in the privacy of their own home isn't my idea of "justice".
"I don't understand this protection of people where there is evidence that they are criminals."
That's not really the point. Evidence gets tossed out to dissuade the practice of violating people's rights in the collection process.
These dogs are trained to fined drugs, but they're also trained with commands that can make them give a false positive anytime the cop feels like screwing around with you. If the signal for "There are some drugs in here" is a bark and a slap of the paw, the dog can easily be trained to exhibit that behavior with a simple verbal command of the handler. Allowing this BS to stand is effectively the same as allowing arbitrary search.
If French publishers are going to get a cut, everyone else will start demanding a piece too. How do you divide up the revenue from the ads shown on the google news site?
I just took a look and I see headline + snippets from stories in NYT, CNET, HuffPo, Reuters, CSM, Haaretz, and The Guardian to name a few, and headlines from half a dozen more.
Who gets the revenue from my viewing a few ads on the page?
The black and white solution seems like the most workable one. France can let google use the snippets (not the stories) for free or they can opt out of the system entirely.
I'm not an "ignorant atheist" I'm an intelligent atheist, but I'll answer anyway.
I don't "know" that $deity doesn't exist. I'm reasonably confident that the earth is more than 6000 years old however. I also think there's good evidence to convince me that the first life forms on earth were single celled organisms and that higher organisms evolved from a common ancestor. If $deity does exist, I'd also like to believe that it expects us to use our brains and draw our own conclusions rather than blindly adhere to the simplistic dogma in thousand-year-old books.
"Like the printing press, government is both a benefit and a hazard."
I think the benefit/hazard ratios of those two things are WAY out of balance.
For the printing press, I'd put the benefit/hazard ratio at about 99.999. For government, it's about 7.15e-04.
The printing press might have caused a few lost fingers in its day, but that's completely insignificant compared to the damage caused by government. Tens of millions of people tortured, murdered and imprisoned, trillions of dollars in property and environmental destruction and the theft of further trillions. We can put a few welfare programs and some scientific research into the benefit/hazard numerator however, so the ratio is non-zero.
I wish they'd ignore some of the script kiddies vandalizing web pages and focus some of their resources on the "Epidemic of Fraud"(2003 FBI report) in the mortgage and financial markets. Maybe they could initiate some RICO investigations of the big banks due to the banks' well reported practice of forging and improperly notarizing thousands of lost note affidavits.
"communist/socialist/soon-to-be-failed states and we're no where near seeing that in the U.S. of A."
Don't be so certain. Communist/socialist states fail because they attempt to adopt a "central planning" economic model, with an authoritarian government to enforce conformity to this model. The USA government has been going more and more in this direction. In fact, the USA is largely "there" already because the Federal Reserve is the "central planner" of interest rates and monetary policy. The USA economy is still mired in recession because the central planners refuse to allow free market forces to cure the illness of badly misallocated capital. This will end badly. The longer the government and the Fed try to fight the market with deficits and monetary inflation, the worse it's going to get until they bring about a collapse of the currency. The people with the gold may make the rules, but if they didn't have the apparatus of a massive government at their disposal, their rules wouldn't have such a pernicious effect on society.
I don't believe a one dimensional political continuum is adequate to describe the diverse spectrum of political beliefs out there. I'm libertarian-leaning, which some would characterize as "far right", but that's a half truth at best.
I would consider both parties to be generally left leaning to the extent that they are both obsessed with the use of government power as the basis for society. All the Republican talk about limited and non intrusive government is just rhetoric and Democrats openly advocate bigger government.
Where does individual liberty vs. authoritarianism fit in the left/right dichotomy? If libertarians are "far right" then the Republican ideology of big government, erosion of civil liberties and perpetual war has to be center-left or far left.
What do you call Obama's advocacy for massive government intervention in the healthcare system if not "socialist"?
I think what we're seeing is a government in Washington DC where neither party represents the people to any great extent. You're "far left" and think the government is center-right, giving you no representation. I'm "far right"(or whatever) and think the government is center left, giving me no representation. Basically the federal government doesn't represent us. That's why we should all agree to dismantle large parts of the federal bureaucracy and transfer revenue and power back to the states and local communities.
"if you kill on you'll just anger more" bullshit the fighting overseas has actually worked..."
Are the lives of U.S. military personnel worth less than the lives of U.S. civilians? Are their deaths "acceptable" because they knowingly accepted additional risk to their persons when they volunteered for military service? If you consider the lives of all U.S. citizens to be equally valuable and your foreign and domestic policy goals are to protect the lives of these citizens, the wars have been a total disaster. Far more Americans have been killed and wounded in stupid foreign wars than have been killed by Muslim terrorists attacking targets in the USA. Not to mention the waste of trillions of dollars. The BS is that the evil jihadis are intent on attacking the U.S. due to an irrational hatred of our society. That hatred may exist, but the USA's long history of military interventionism has created the motive to engage in actual warfare against U.S. targets. The idea that people from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia would travel thousands of miles and give up their lives to kill U.S. citizens simply because they hate our lifestyle and religions is ludicrous. If you ask the question "Why do people from Muslim countries engage in violence against the USA?", is the true answer going to come from U.S. government officials ("they hate our freedom") or directly from the attackers? Why would these attackers lie about their motives? OBL said that his motives were: -U.S. military occupation of the Muslim holy land. -Sanctions against Iraq which resulted in untold suffering and death amongst the civilian populace. -U.S. military support for Israel.
He didn't read The Constitution, get angry because "There's too much freedom in America" and then decide to attack.
"I would personally prefer this "humiliation" to losing one of my family members"
That's your personal decision. Why should we all be forced to live with it? Airlines should be responsible for their own security. If you want to use an airline that requires all passengers to be strip-searched with full body-cavity examinations to ensure 100% safety, you should be able to make that choice. I'll take my chances with an airline that scans the bags, questions the passengers and maybe uses metal detectors.
"Uncomfortable, yes. Bothersome - heck yeah. But we live."
Obviously if the choice is "get groped or DIE" I'd probably take the groping. That's not the choice however. We're talking about enduring humiliation in the name of risk mitigation, and the effectiveness of these techniques is highly questionable. We haven't had a hijacking, but these so-called "security measures" have been circumvented on multiple occasions.
If you examine the legislation and executive decisions responsible for the civil liberties abuses of the past 12 years, you will find strong bi-partisan consensus for these measures. You mention Romney, but when it comes to the expansion and abuse of executive power, President Obama has been even worse than Bush. Ask Obama about his secret kill list and "disposition matrix". I'm not voting for Romney or Obama.
Oh, come on. With all the bad and otherwise depressing news stories around these days, we need a sci-fi break every now and again. Sure, the story wasn't a big deal, but the comments were interesting.
Doesn't this produce the wrong incentives? If a person can purchase "advance tickets" and the possible outcomes are:
If the show doesn't happen, you get a refund If the show happens you get a refund and a free ticket
Wouldn't this just result in thousands of people purchasing "advance tickets"? Seems like that would be useless as an indicator of whether there is enough real demand to make the show cost-effective.
"I'd also like to know if Jupiter's core is really metallic hydrogen"
Wouldn't helium and/or some of the other, heavier, elements sink to the core?
"The core of Jupiter is a diamond as large as the earth." -Arthur C. Clarke, from '2010 Odyssey Two"
Not sure if the presence of carbon has ever been verified on Jupiter, but the meteorites that have fallen to earth have often been carbon rich. It seems probable that Jupiter would have attracted lots of space rocks over time.
"So still you have nothing to counter, except that you ACCEPT the USA limitations on Free Speech, but not anybody else's."
Except that some of the things you're talking about are not limitations on "speech". You're talking about using the "act" of communication to break other laws.
Banning Mein Kampf is a limitation on free speech. Prohibitions on creating a disturbance in a theater and laws creating punishment for the leaking of classified data are not.
"...like every other country there are limits to free speech (ie in the US you can't yell fire in a crowded theater,"
We need something like a Godwin's law for people who pull out this ridiculous "limit" every time the question of "free speech" comes up. Let's call it "Hugo's Law" after Justice Hugo Black who tore this argument to shreds.
Black's eloquent and brilliant argument is grounded in the idea of property rights. You have a right to free speech that is inviolable, but NOT a right to make a speech wherever and whenever you want, like inside someone else's home. You didn't rent the theater from the owner for a specified time for the purpose of delivering a speech, you paid to attend a show. If you stood up in the middle of a movie and began loudly reciting the "I Have a Dream" speech and refused to leave, you'd probably be arrested for that as well. Even if you said nothing and just paced back and forth in front of the screen (you have a right to "walk" don't you?) you'd be asked to leave. The theater scenario does not define a limit on "speech" as in content, it's a limit on creating ANY disturbance in a theater.
As a signatory to the NNPT, Iran has every right to develop nuclear power, enrich uranium and have access the full nuclear fuel cycle. Israel and the USA are attempting to deny this capability to Iran because they *might* build a nuclear weapon. Despite the fact that U.S. National Intelligence assessments concluded that Iran had abandoned its weapons program 10+ years ago.
Iran has bent over backwards to accommodate UN (i.e. USA) demands for access to its facilities, but EVERY TIME Iran has compromised, the USA and Israel create another hoop for them to jump through.
Demands of "the world"? LOL Demands of Israel and the USA.
This whole idea of co-existing with other cultures in a "multicultural" society has been sold to us a universally beneficial thing, I think it's just a bunch of feel-good nonsense with no empirical evidence as justification. Until the peddlers of this BS can come up with EVIDENCE that multiculturalism is a good thing, I think it should be totally rejected.
There are many things to appreciate about other cultures. Food, clothing, architecture, artwork, music, poetry, etc. Even philosophy and religion when examined from a purely academic standpoint. When it comes to differences in fundamental values, behavioral norms and societal expectations however, you cannot have harmonious coexistence of multiple unique cultures living in close spatial proximity.
This is a recipe for disaster and it's playing out all over Europe and North America. We should not be expected to welcome people into our society when they openly refuse to accept our basic societal 'norms' or even our language and instead seek to impose their beliefs on us.
Slashdot Mirror
If Manning leaked the data and WikiLeaks published it, there is a strong precedent for the actions of WikiLeaks to be protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom.
IF however, the prosecution can "prove" that Julian Assange or whomever encouraged or participated in the leak, they could be prosecuted as an accessory.
This is why the US government has been subjecting Manning to cruel and inhumane conditions for so long. I wonder if he has held fast, or if they have finally broken his resolve and coerced him into implicating WikiLeaks as being party to the theft?
Got up about 5:30, took a shower, shaved, made coffee, ate breakfast. Got to the polls shortly after 7:00 AM when they opened. Voted in absolutely meaningless Presidential, Congressional and Senatorial election. Took about 40 minutes, including the wait, and the time I had to spend driving out of my way to get to the polls.
Got delayed by unusually heavy traffic, both because of the polls and because I'm usually on the roads much earlier.
Thank $deity this will be over soon and we can eradicate people's hopes of any positive change through the electoral process.
A basilisk or a Medusa would make the tests difficult to repeat.
The cops were not "already in the house", they did not have a warrant, nor were they invited it. They walked fido past the door, said that he detected drugs, and then kicked down the door claiming that they had "probable cause".
If they had evidence to indicate that this person was a drug dealer, they should have gone to the courts and gotten a warrant.
This was not a public place, it was the guy's home.
"Marking is typically done either by the dog freezing and pointing with the nose, or sitting down."
Behavior that could be taught as a trained response to any number of stimuli, including a voice command. The point being that officer friendly could trigger that same response with or without drugs being present.
"it's not just a matter of a 'trained' officer having an 'opinion' about if the dog found something."
You can't cross-examine the dog, so it is entirely a matter of the officer interpreting the dog's response.
"In the rest of the world, justice comes before anything else"
Cops kicking in someone's door with guns drawn, traumatizing everyone inside and then putting the residents in a jail cell because someone burned a plant in the privacy of their own home isn't my idea of "justice".
"I don't understand this protection of people where there is evidence that they are criminals."
That's not really the point. Evidence gets tossed out to dissuade the practice of violating people's rights in the collection process.
These dogs are trained to fined drugs, but they're also trained with commands that can make them give a false positive anytime the cop feels like screwing around with you. If the signal for "There are some drugs in here" is a bark and a slap of the paw, the dog can easily be trained to exhibit that behavior with a simple verbal command of the handler.
Allowing this BS to stand is effectively the same as allowing arbitrary search.
If French publishers are going to get a cut, everyone else will start demanding a piece too. How do you divide up the revenue from the ads shown on the google news site?
I just took a look and I see headline + snippets from stories in NYT, CNET, HuffPo, Reuters, CSM, Haaretz, and The Guardian to name a few, and headlines from half a dozen more.
Who gets the revenue from my viewing a few ads on the page?
The black and white solution seems like the most workable one. France can let google use the snippets (not the stories) for free or they can opt out of the system entirely.
I'm not an "ignorant atheist" I'm an intelligent atheist, but I'll answer anyway.
I don't "know" that $deity doesn't exist. I'm reasonably confident that the earth is more than 6000 years old however. I also think there's good evidence to convince me that the first life forms on earth were single celled organisms and that higher organisms evolved from a common ancestor.
If $deity does exist, I'd also like to believe that it expects us to use our brains and draw our own conclusions rather than blindly adhere to the simplistic dogma in thousand-year-old books.
"Like the printing press, government is both a benefit and a hazard."
I think the benefit/hazard ratios of those two things are WAY out of balance.
For the printing press, I'd put the benefit/hazard ratio at about 99.999. For government, it's about 7.15e-04.
The printing press might have caused a few lost fingers in its day, but that's completely insignificant compared to the damage caused by government. Tens of millions of people tortured, murdered and imprisoned, trillions of dollars in property and environmental destruction and the theft of further trillions. We can put a few welfare programs and some scientific research into the benefit/hazard numerator however, so the ratio is non-zero.
I wish they'd ignore some of the script kiddies vandalizing web pages and focus some of their resources on the "Epidemic of Fraud"(2003 FBI report) in the mortgage and financial markets. Maybe they could initiate some RICO investigations of the big banks due to the banks' well reported practice of forging and improperly notarizing thousands of lost note affidavits.
"communist/socialist/soon-to-be-failed states and we're no where near seeing that in the U.S. of A."
Don't be so certain. Communist/socialist states fail because they attempt to adopt a "central planning" economic model, with an authoritarian government to enforce conformity to this model. The USA government has been going more and more in this direction. In fact, the USA is largely "there" already because the Federal Reserve is the "central planner" of interest rates and monetary policy.
The USA economy is still mired in recession because the central planners refuse to allow free market forces to cure the illness of badly misallocated capital. This will end badly. The longer the government and the Fed try to fight the market with deficits and monetary inflation, the worse it's going to get until they bring about a collapse of the currency.
The people with the gold may make the rules, but if they didn't have the apparatus of a massive government at their disposal, their rules wouldn't have such a pernicious effect on society.
I don't believe a one dimensional political continuum is adequate to describe the diverse spectrum of political beliefs out there. I'm libertarian-leaning, which some would characterize as "far right", but that's a half truth at best.
I would consider both parties to be generally left leaning to the extent that they are both obsessed with the use of government power as the basis for society. All the Republican talk about limited and non intrusive government is just rhetoric and Democrats openly advocate bigger government.
Where does individual liberty vs. authoritarianism fit in the left/right dichotomy? If libertarians are "far right" then the Republican ideology of big government, erosion of civil liberties and perpetual war has to be center-left or far left.
What do you call Obama's advocacy for massive government intervention in the healthcare system if not "socialist"?
I think what we're seeing is a government in Washington DC where neither party represents the people to any great extent. You're "far left" and think the government is center-right, giving you no representation. I'm "far right"(or whatever) and think the government is center left, giving me no representation. Basically the federal government doesn't represent us. That's why we should all agree to dismantle large parts of the federal bureaucracy and transfer revenue and power back to the states and local communities.
"if you kill on you'll just anger more" bullshit the fighting overseas has actually worked ..."
Are the lives of U.S. military personnel worth less than the lives of U.S. civilians? Are their deaths "acceptable" because they knowingly accepted additional risk to their persons when they volunteered for military service?
If you consider the lives of all U.S. citizens to be equally valuable and your foreign and domestic policy goals are to protect the lives of these citizens, the wars have been a total disaster. Far more Americans have been killed and wounded in stupid foreign wars than have been killed by Muslim terrorists attacking targets in the USA. Not to mention the waste of trillions of dollars.
The BS is that the evil jihadis are intent on attacking the U.S. due to an irrational hatred of our society. That hatred may exist, but the USA's long history of military interventionism has created the motive to engage in actual warfare against U.S. targets. The idea that people from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia would travel thousands of miles and give up their lives to kill U.S. citizens simply because they hate our lifestyle and religions is ludicrous.
If you ask the question "Why do people from Muslim countries engage in violence against the USA?", is the true answer going to come from U.S. government officials ("they hate our freedom") or directly from the attackers? Why would these attackers lie about their motives? OBL said that his motives were:
-U.S. military occupation of the Muslim holy land.
-Sanctions against Iraq which resulted in untold suffering and death amongst the civilian populace.
-U.S. military support for Israel.
He didn't read The Constitution, get angry because "There's too much freedom in America" and then decide to attack.
To hell with the wars AND the police state.
"I would personally prefer this "humiliation" to losing one of my family members"
That's your personal decision. Why should we all be forced to live with it? Airlines should be responsible for their own security. If you want to use an airline that requires all passengers to be strip-searched with full body-cavity examinations to ensure 100% safety, you should be able to make that choice. I'll take my chances with an airline that scans the bags, questions the passengers and maybe uses metal detectors.
"Uncomfortable, yes. Bothersome - heck yeah. But we live."
Obviously if the choice is "get groped or DIE" I'd probably take the groping. That's not the choice however. We're talking about enduring humiliation in the name of risk mitigation, and the effectiveness of these techniques is highly questionable. We haven't had a hijacking, but these so-called "security measures" have been circumvented on multiple occasions.
As of now, I am boycotting U.S. air travel.
If you examine the legislation and executive decisions responsible for the civil liberties abuses of the past 12 years, you will find strong bi-partisan consensus for these measures. You mention Romney, but when it comes to the expansion and abuse of executive power, President Obama has been even worse than Bush. Ask Obama about his secret kill list and "disposition matrix".
I'm not voting for Romney or Obama.
Keith Devlin's books "The Math Gene" and "The Millennium Problems" were both fascinating.
A book called "Prime Obsession" about the Riemann Hypothesis was also a good read.
Oh, come on. With all the bad and otherwise depressing news stories around these days, we need a sci-fi break every now and again.
Sure, the story wasn't a big deal, but the comments were interesting.
Doesn't this produce the wrong incentives? If a person can purchase "advance tickets" and the possible outcomes are:
If the show doesn't happen, you get a refund
If the show happens you get a refund and a free ticket
Wouldn't this just result in thousands of people purchasing "advance tickets"? Seems like that would be useless as an indicator of whether there is enough real demand to make the show cost-effective.
"I'd also like to know if Jupiter's core is really metallic hydrogen"
Wouldn't helium and/or some of the other, heavier, elements sink to the core?
"The core of Jupiter is a diamond as large as the earth."
-Arthur C. Clarke, from '2010 Odyssey Two"
Not sure if the presence of carbon has ever been verified on Jupiter, but the meteorites that have fallen to earth have often been carbon rich. It seems probable that Jupiter would have attracted lots of space rocks over time.
"So still you have nothing to counter, except that you ACCEPT the USA limitations on Free Speech, but not anybody else's."
Except that some of the things you're talking about are not limitations on "speech". You're talking about using the "act" of communication to break other laws.
Banning Mein Kampf is a limitation on free speech. Prohibitions on creating a disturbance in a theater and laws creating punishment for the leaking of classified data are not.
"...like every other country there are limits to free speech (ie in the US you can't yell fire in a crowded theater,"
We need something like a Godwin's law for people who pull out this ridiculous "limit" every time the question of "free speech" comes up. Let's call it "Hugo's Law" after Justice Hugo Black who tore this argument to shreds.
Black's eloquent and brilliant argument is grounded in the idea of property rights. You have a right to free speech that is inviolable, but NOT a right to make a speech wherever and whenever you want, like inside someone else's home. You didn't rent the theater from the owner for a specified time for the purpose of delivering a speech, you paid to attend a show. If you stood up in the middle of a movie and began loudly reciting the "I Have a Dream" speech and refused to leave, you'd probably be arrested for that as well. Even if you said nothing and just paced back and forth in front of the screen (you have a right to "walk" don't you?) you'd be asked to leave.
The theater scenario does not define a limit on "speech" as in content, it's a limit on creating ANY disturbance in a theater.
"It's all a conspiracy by the jews and crusaders! "
Are you really trying to suggest that the Israeli/USA sanctions regime has nothing to do with Iran's currency problems?
As a signatory to the NNPT, Iran has every right to develop nuclear power, enrich uranium and have access the full nuclear fuel cycle. Israel and the USA are attempting to deny this capability to Iran because they *might* build a nuclear weapon. Despite the fact that U.S. National Intelligence assessments concluded that Iran had abandoned its weapons program 10+ years ago.
Iran has bent over backwards to accommodate UN (i.e. USA) demands for access to its facilities, but EVERY TIME Iran has compromised, the USA and Israel create another hoop for them to jump through.
Demands of "the world"? LOL Demands of Israel and the USA.
This whole idea of co-existing with other cultures in a "multicultural" society has been sold to us a universally beneficial thing, I think it's just a bunch of feel-good nonsense with no empirical evidence as justification. Until the peddlers of this BS can come up with EVIDENCE that multiculturalism is a good thing, I think it should be totally rejected.
There are many things to appreciate about other cultures. Food, clothing, architecture, artwork, music, poetry, etc. Even philosophy and religion when examined from a purely academic standpoint. When it comes to differences in fundamental values, behavioral norms and societal expectations however, you cannot have harmonious coexistence of multiple unique cultures living in close spatial proximity.
This is a recipe for disaster and it's playing out all over Europe and North America. We should not be expected to welcome people into our society when they openly refuse to accept our basic societal 'norms' or even our language and instead seek to impose their beliefs on us.