mass surveillance of the entire population is logically plausible if NSA's domestic spying is not looking for terrorists, but looking for something else, something that is not so rare as terrorists. For example, the May 19 Fox News opinion poll of 900 registered voters found that 30% dislike the Bush administration so much they want him impeached. If NSA were monitoring email and phone calls to identify pro-impeachment people, and if the accuracy rate were.90 and the error rate were.01, then the probability that people are pro-impeachment given that NSA surveillance system identified them as such, would be p=.98, which is coming close to certainty (p_1.00). Mass surveillance by NSA of all Americans' phone calls and emails would be very effective for domestic political intelligence.
Just to find people who want Bush impeached? I could probably pick them out of the Whole Foods parking lot with at least 80% accuracy just while walking back to my car with my groceries. But I do live in Massachusetts.
Seriously, though, there are ca. 63 million registered Democrats out of ca. 204 million eligible voters. That's 31 per cent right there, and that's all a matter of public record. There are more effective and simpler methods of gathering domestic political intelligence.
Besides, who cares which inconsequential individuals want the president impeached? There are only 435 people whose opinions matter in that case, and then 100 more if it goes to trial.
All 3 countries spied heavily on their citizens in a means to control them. In each case, the countries used human spies/traitors as well as listening in private conversation. This is well documented on all 3 groups. And yes, there are other examples of countries that do the same. But not in free societies.
Indeed that was the case. But I have heard little of American citizens disappearing from their homes in the dead of night only to undergo later show trials on trumped-up charges followed by public executions. The only situation remotely approaching the kind of actions described by Solzhenitsyn and others is the treatment of terror suspects captured abroad, and I'd say Gitmo's got a ways to go before approaching "gulag" status, regardless of what Amnesty International or the UN Human Rights Commission says. A prison riot, for example, in any of these totalitarian societies would have resulted in mass executions. The only mass executions in Cuba, AFAIK, have been on the other side of the fence, as it were.
Isn't it a bit foolish to ignore what is happening today and offer simple spin and FUDon everything? But we seem to revel in that these days. If nothing else, examine the case of Sibel Edmunds and/or Valerie Plame.
I don't want to open that particular can of worms any farther than to simply say that it saddens me that the focus on Plame has shifted from her and her husband's actions to undermine her employer (which would have gotten her fired had she worked outside of the government) to the leak of her name by Libby/Novak. Suffice it to say that the government, regardless of party affiliation, is full of small people with smaller personalities.
Nazi German[y], old USSR, and current China had/have numerous programs in place that we are now putting into place.
I don't suppose you have specific examples you'd care to name beyond just yelling: "Bush is a totalitarian" and running away?
The first similarity between the contemporary US and Nazi Germany that comes to mind is the ban on public smoking and restriction on tobacco advertising. Of course, those were enacted mostly by state and local governments, starting more than a decade ago.
The second similarity is that Hitler succesfully turned around an economic recession, although Bush certainly isn't the only US president to have done that (recently, both Reagan and Clinton come to mind).
The third is probably the Interstate Highway System, which Eisenhower freely admitted was inspired by the Autobahn, another of Hitler's programs.
The only "bad" similarity that comes to mind is Japanese internment camps, which were a loooong way from being similar to anything of Hitler's, and supported by all three branches of government.
...you can install traffic monitors on a network and I'm pretty sure any weird traffic going out wouldn't be too hard to pick up on.
Surely that's possible, but in order for it to work, the weird traffic will have to have already left, right? It's kind of like watching the open barn door to see if any cows leave before deciding to close it.
NaCN is so toxic that, literally, a sniff can kill you.
Especially since NaCN is a nonvolatile solid that boils at 1500 degrees. A sniff of anything at that temperature will kill you. Hit it with a little acid, then you've got HCN, which is gaseous. What I've always wondered is how they determine the detectable odor threshold for toxic gases (1-5 ppm for HCN) without killing people.
Industrial facilities that use cyanides on large scale take every imaginable precaution, including "dead man" drills, in which one employee will pick a quiet spot, play dead, and see how long it takes for someone to notice.
On the other hand, consider a mildly toxic substance, lead. Expose a million rabbits to lead and they will have seemingly normal lives. The aqueduct that supplied water to the French city of Nimes had parts made of lead.
What the hell, why do I have to worry about this crap? English, which has WAY less defined grammar rules, can still be decently parsed by MS Word and display a squiggly green underline under the sentences that don't work right
It also frequently puts the green squigglies under sentences with no grammatical problems. For some reason, it still has difficulty with "that vs. which" situations, at least as far as Strunk and White is concerned. It also rephrases all attempts at gender-neutral writing in the most obtuse manner possible (I've since turned off *that* particular grammar-check option).
Where is my free, lightweight, W3C editor with a squiggly green underline?
It comes with the next *free* version of MS Word, of course!
Wow, you're really spun beyond belief. Keep defending this administration though, while they perform illegal, catastrophic, life destroying acts. It's cute.
And you're damn near illiterate, if you interpret my failure to rabidly criticize Bush as a defense of any and all of his policies. I never endorsed the outing of Joe Wilson's wife, nor said that there couldn't possibly be adverse consequences of that action. I merely stated that the post to which I originally replied was trivializing a potentially huge security risk in order to let the Valarie Plame canard quack once more.
The only mistake I made was feeding a giant troll, who as of 8:00 this morning had posted at least 26 comments in this story alone.
Nothing wrong with that. Hate can just as easily motivate a person to express cogent and well-reasoned arguments as it can cause incoherent gibbering. The post to which I replied, unfortunately, tended toward the latter.
You may not have noticed that grandparent is responsible for 17 comments out of 627--nearly 3% of everything that's been said--in this story. Yet somehow you think that I'm the Troll? I'm at a loss.
...and by all means, mod this one down, too--I've enough Karma to burn. I prefer "Offtopic," since "Troll" seems unnecessarily racist. Trolls, after all, have feelings, too. I'll even forgo the bonus, to give you a head start!
Which of the following leaks have put exposed field agents and put them at potential risk?
That seems like a pretty narrow question, simply designed to prop up your argument against the current administration. A better question would be:
Which of the following did, or may have, jeapordized current field operations, including, but not limited to Joe Wilson's wife?
Both 1) and 5). If you can't fathom how publicizing possible locations of clandestine detention and interrogation sites is detrimental to national security, then there's really no point in explaining it to you. IMNSHO, jeapordizing an entire operation likely involving dozens of field agents in multiple countries and the cooperation of multiple foreign governments is a bit more severe than outing one individual, who may or may not have been in the field at the time, and may or may not have been running any operations at the moment, regardless of her location. 1) was undoubtedly great investigative reporting, but also undoubtedly damaging to national security. 1) also resulted in terrorist threats against multiple Eastern European nations.
Regardless of whether you think that secret prisons in Eastern Europe are "right," you can't sensibly argue that publicizing them put fewer field agents at risk than outing Mrs. Wilson. Unless, of course, you are a rabid Bush-hater, which, given the forum, is not implausible.
Wether it comes from corn or sugar cane, sugar is sugar (AFAIK its the same fructose either way).
Refined sugar is sucrose, which consists of a molecule of glucose covalently bonded to a molecule of fructose. Corn syrup is simply a mixture of glucose and fructose. "High-fructose" simply means that there's more less glucose than fructose. Now at the most basic metabolic level, that makes very little difference, since the one of the first steps in digestion of glucose is conversion into fructose. The difference is in what happens to sugars that aren't converted to energy, which is why:
Is there some reason to think that sugar from cane is associated with fewer health risks that sugar from corn?
Possibly. In rats and monkeys and such, increased fructose consumption has been shown to lead to blood chemistry associated with increased risks of heart disease and diabetes.
There is at least one domestic soda produced with sugarcane. Kind of hard to get it outside of the Northeast, but not impossible. They don't make cola, but their Root Beer, Birch Beer, and Black Cherry are really quite exceptional.
We're talking snakes. On a plane. Even if it's derived from previous movies (snake in a house, snake in a river, &c.), placing multiple snakes on a plane is an improvement so vast that my words cannot possibly do it justice.
Ha! You show me one plot line Shakespeare didn't steal from somebody else
Well, there is the inventive portrayal of Richard III as a child-killing cripple, although one could easily argue that he stole that particular fiction from Tudor propaganda.
No revolution? Parliament beheaded a fucking king, for crap's sake. Not too long before that, someone tried to blow up Westminster. Then there was that matter with a few rebellious colonies....
mentioned in the lawsuit, according to craigslist's statement on the suit, included the following phrases, which appear to be not even remotely discriminatory:
"near St Gertrude's church."
"vibrant southwest Hispanic neighborhood offering great classical Mexican culture, restaurants, and businesses"
"Great apartment for graduate students"
"wants one nice quiet person"
This lawsuit stinks of Jesse Jackson-style race-baiting. Is this an election year in Chicago?
So people who search for BMW won't be able to find the official BMW site?
Only if they're brain-dead. It's pretty easy to find BMW's website by typing three particular letters followed by the country code of your choice (.us/.de/.it/.nl/.se/.ch, for example) or, God forbid, dot-freakin-com.
The NSF's budget has increased every year during the Bush administration. From 2001-2003, for example, the NSF granted more money to more researchers every year. Last year's budget proposed by Bush, according to the ACS included similar increases:
The FY05 administration request for NSF is $5.7 billion, a 3-percent increase or $167 million over the FY04 budget.....a 4.7-percent increase for the NSF Research & Related Activities account......The biggest increase in NSF's FY05 budget goes to its Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction account, which receives a 37.6-percent increase, bringing its funding level to $213.2 million in 2004. The FY05 NSF increases would bring the average annual research grant award size to approximately $142,000, up $3,000 over FY04. Average annual grant duration would continue to be 3 years.
Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president.
What we need is a way for judges to penalize plaintiffs if they are clearly attempting to infringe on the rights of others for their own gain, as the case would appear here.
In jurisdictions where barratry is an criminal offense, there is just that.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
American "propaganda" intended for foreign audiences and re-reported in the US should provide a nice balance for the anti-American slant found in most foreign journalism.
Slashdot Mirror
Because you can't sue the fucking government unless they let you.
mass surveillance of the entire population is logically plausible if NSA's domestic spying is not looking for terrorists, but looking for something else, something that is not so rare as terrorists. For example, the May 19 Fox News opinion poll of 900 registered voters found that 30% dislike the Bush administration so much they want him impeached. If NSA were monitoring email and phone calls to identify pro-impeachment people, and if the accuracy rate were .90 and the error rate were .01, then the probability that people are pro-impeachment given that NSA surveillance system identified them as such, would be p=.98, which is coming close to certainty (p_1.00). Mass surveillance by NSA of all Americans' phone calls and emails would be very effective for domestic political intelligence.
Just to find people who want Bush impeached? I could probably pick them out of the Whole Foods parking lot with at least 80% accuracy just while walking back to my car with my groceries. But I do live in Massachusetts.
Seriously, though, there are ca. 63 million registered Democrats out of ca. 204 million eligible voters. That's 31 per cent right there, and that's all a matter of public record. There are more effective and simpler methods of gathering domestic political intelligence.
Besides, who cares which inconsequential individuals want the president impeached? There are only 435 people whose opinions matter in that case, and then 100 more if it goes to trial.
All 3 countries spied heavily on their citizens in a means to control them. In each case, the countries used human spies/traitors as well as listening in private conversation. This is well documented on all 3 groups. And yes, there are other examples of countries that do the same. But not in free societies.
Indeed that was the case. But I have heard little of American citizens disappearing from their homes in the dead of night only to undergo later show trials on trumped-up charges followed by public executions. The only situation remotely approaching the kind of actions described by Solzhenitsyn and others is the treatment of terror suspects captured abroad, and I'd say Gitmo's got a ways to go before approaching "gulag" status, regardless of what Amnesty International or the UN Human Rights Commission says. A prison riot, for example, in any of these totalitarian societies would have resulted in mass executions. The only mass executions in Cuba, AFAIK, have been on the other side of the fence, as it were.
Isn't it a bit foolish to ignore what is happening today and offer simple spin and FUDon everything? But we seem to revel in that these days. If nothing else, examine the case of Sibel Edmunds and/or Valerie Plame.
I don't want to open that particular can of worms any farther than to simply say that it saddens me that the focus on Plame has shifted from her and her husband's actions to undermine her employer (which would have gotten her fired had she worked outside of the government) to the leak of her name by Libby/Novak. Suffice it to say that the government, regardless of party affiliation, is full of small people with smaller personalities.
Nazi German[y], old USSR, and current China had/have numerous programs in place that we are now putting into place.
I don't suppose you have specific examples you'd care to name beyond just yelling: "Bush is a totalitarian" and running away?
The first similarity between the contemporary US and Nazi Germany that comes to mind is the ban on public smoking and restriction on tobacco advertising. Of course, those were enacted mostly by state and local governments, starting more than a decade ago.
The second similarity is that Hitler succesfully turned around an economic recession, although Bush certainly isn't the only US president to have done that (recently, both Reagan and Clinton come to mind).
The third is probably the Interstate Highway System, which Eisenhower freely admitted was inspired by the Autobahn, another of Hitler's programs.
The only "bad" similarity that comes to mind is Japanese internment camps, which were a loooong way from being similar to anything of Hitler's, and supported by all three branches of government.
Unless, of course, you're referring to that time when Bush though his Jewish doctors were trying to kill him, had his political opponents executed, or caused widespread famine by rounding up the peasants and having them shot. If you'll excuse me now, it's time to go check on my backyard steel furnace.
Besides, isn't it a bit presumptuous for a politician elected to four-year terms to start issuing Five Year Plans?
...you can install traffic monitors on a network and I'm pretty sure any weird traffic going out wouldn't be too hard to pick up on.
Surely that's possible, but in order for it to work, the weird traffic will have to have already left, right? It's kind of like watching the open barn door to see if any cows leave before deciding to close it.
NaCN is so toxic that, literally, a sniff can kill you.
Especially since NaCN is a nonvolatile solid that boils at 1500 degrees. A sniff of anything at that temperature will kill you. Hit it with a little acid, then you've got HCN, which is gaseous. What I've always wondered is how they determine the detectable odor threshold for toxic gases (1-5 ppm for HCN) without killing people.
Industrial facilities that use cyanides on large scale take every imaginable precaution, including "dead man" drills, in which one employee will pick a quiet spot, play dead, and see how long it takes for someone to notice.
On the other hand, consider a mildly toxic substance, lead. Expose a million rabbits to lead and they will have seemingly normal lives. The aqueduct that supplied water to the French city of Nimes had parts made of lead.
Let's not forget the Washington, DC water service lines.
Exactly. People can be easily mass-produced with unskilled labor; airplanes cannot. (With apologies to Wernher von Braun)
What the hell, why do I have to worry about this crap? English, which has WAY less defined grammar rules, can still be decently parsed by MS Word and display a squiggly green underline under the sentences that don't work right
It also frequently puts the green squigglies under sentences with no grammatical problems. For some reason, it still has difficulty with "that vs. which" situations, at least as far as Strunk and White is concerned. It also rephrases all attempts at gender-neutral writing in the most obtuse manner possible (I've since turned off *that* particular grammar-check option).
Where is my free, lightweight, W3C editor with a squiggly green underline?
It comes with the next *free* version of MS Word, of course!
Wow, you're really spun beyond belief. Keep defending this administration though, while they perform illegal, catastrophic, life destroying acts. It's cute.
And you're damn near illiterate, if you interpret my failure to rabidly criticize Bush as a defense of any and all of his policies. I never endorsed the outing of Joe Wilson's wife, nor said that there couldn't possibly be adverse consequences of that action. I merely stated that the post to which I originally replied was trivializing a potentially huge security risk in order to let the Valarie Plame canard quack once more.
The only mistake I made was feeding a giant troll, who as of 8:00 this morning had posted at least 26 comments in this story alone.
Nothing wrong with that. Hate can just as easily motivate a person to express cogent and well-reasoned arguments as it can cause incoherent gibbering. The post to which I replied, unfortunately, tended toward the latter.
You may not have noticed that grandparent is responsible for 17 comments out of 627--nearly 3% of everything that's been said--in this story. Yet somehow you think that I'm the Troll? I'm at a loss.
...and by all means, mod this one down, too--I've enough Karma to burn. I prefer "Offtopic," since "Troll" seems unnecessarily racist. Trolls, after all, have feelings, too. I'll even forgo the bonus, to give you a head start!
Asswipe.
Which of the following leaks have put exposed field agents and put them at potential risk?
That seems like a pretty narrow question, simply designed to prop up your argument against the current administration. A better question would be:
Which of the following did, or may have, jeapordized current field operations, including, but not limited to Joe Wilson's wife?
Both 1) and 5). If you can't fathom how publicizing possible locations of clandestine detention and interrogation sites is detrimental to national security, then there's really no point in explaining it to you. IMNSHO, jeapordizing an entire operation likely involving dozens of field agents in multiple countries and the cooperation of multiple foreign governments is a bit more severe than outing one individual, who may or may not have been in the field at the time, and may or may not have been running any operations at the moment, regardless of her location. 1) was undoubtedly great investigative reporting, but also undoubtedly damaging to national security. 1) also resulted in terrorist threats against multiple Eastern European nations.
Regardless of whether you think that secret prisons in Eastern Europe are "right," you can't sensibly argue that publicizing them put fewer field agents at risk than outing Mrs. Wilson. Unless, of course, you are a rabid Bush-hater, which, given the forum, is not implausible.
The USSR had three parties. Guess what happened to the other two?
Wether it comes from corn or sugar cane, sugar is sugar (AFAIK its the same fructose either way).
Refined sugar is sucrose, which consists of a molecule of glucose covalently bonded to a molecule of fructose. Corn syrup is simply a mixture of glucose and fructose. "High-fructose" simply means that there's more less glucose than fructose. Now at the most basic metabolic level, that makes very little difference, since the one of the first steps in digestion of glucose is conversion into fructose. The difference is in what happens to sugars that aren't converted to energy, which is why:
Is there some reason to think that sugar from cane is associated with fewer health risks that sugar from corn?
Possibly. In rats and monkeys and such, increased fructose consumption has been shown to lead to blood chemistry associated with increased risks of heart disease and diabetes.
There is at least one domestic soda produced with sugarcane. Kind of hard to get it outside of the Northeast, but not impossible. They don't make cola, but their Root Beer, Birch Beer, and Black Cherry are really quite exceptional.
No, that's one snake. In a house.
We're talking snakes. On a plane. Even if it's derived from previous movies (snake in a house, snake in a river, &c.), placing multiple snakes on a plane is an improvement so vast that my words cannot possibly do it justice.
there's nothing new since Odysseus, the Old Testament, the Satyricon, and Shakespeare's body of work.
You clearly are unaware of a movie about "Snakes, on a motherfuckin' plane!"
Only problem is that for every "Snakes on a Plane" there are 10 remakes of crap from the '70s that wasn't even that good the first time.
Ha! You show me one plot line Shakespeare didn't steal from somebody else
Well, there is the inventive portrayal of Richard III as a child-killing cripple, although one could easily argue that he stole that particular fiction from Tudor propaganda.
No revolution? Parliament beheaded a fucking king, for crap's sake. Not too long before that, someone tried to blow up Westminster. Then there was that matter with a few rebellious colonies....
mentioned in the lawsuit, according to craigslist's statement on the suit, included the following phrases, which appear to be not even remotely discriminatory:
"near St Gertrude's church."
"vibrant southwest Hispanic neighborhood offering great classical Mexican culture, restaurants, and businesses"
"Great apartment for graduate students"
"wants one nice quiet person"
This lawsuit stinks of Jesse Jackson-style race-baiting. Is this an election year in Chicago?
So people who search for BMW won't be able to find the official BMW site?
Only if they're brain-dead. It's pretty easy to find BMW's website by typing three particular letters followed by the country code of your choice (.us/.de/.it/.nl/.se/.ch, for example) or, God forbid, dot-freakin-com.
Here's another one: Money Talks.
.....The biggest increase in NSF's FY05 budget goes to its Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction account, which receives a 37.6-percent increase, bringing its funding level to $213.2 million in 2004.
The NSF's budget has increased every year during the Bush administration. From 2001-2003, for example, the NSF granted more money to more researchers every year. Last year's budget proposed by Bush, according to the ACS included similar increases:
The FY05 administration request for NSF is $5.7 billion, a 3-percent increase or $167 million over the FY04 budget.....a 4.7-percent increase for the NSF Research & Related Activities account.
The FY05 NSF increases would bring the average annual research grant award size to approximately $142,000, up $3,000 over FY04. Average annual grant duration would continue to be 3 years.
Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president.
Its like working for GM and driving your new Toyota to work: dumb.
Not if you work here.
What we need is a way for judges to penalize plaintiffs if they are clearly attempting to infringe on the rights of others for their own gain, as the case would appear here.
In jurisdictions where barratry is an criminal offense, there is just that.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.
"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
American "propaganda" intended for foreign audiences and re-reported in the US should provide a nice balance for the anti-American slant found in most foreign journalism.